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+{"befaf6c0-5c4e-4d9e-920a-84c9eb3db394": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast episode 25, the multiverse part 2, a reading from chapter 11 of the beginning of the infinity by David Deutsch, and we're moving slowly through understanding quantum theory, literally understanding quantum theory, applying realism to quantum theory, not denying that aspects of reality are not real, simply because we find that what the science is telling us is to a standing.\nAs I've said in previous episodes, many things are astounding or surprising or amazing, that's no reason for rejecting them.\nAt the time when evolution was first proposed, that seemed to be astonishing, but astonishment alone is not a reason to reject something.\nI'm not sure who said something to the effect, I'm sure I could Google it right now, but I won't bother, words to the effect that I cannot refute an incredulous stare, and so when it comes to the multiverse and the very many people who reject it out of hand, even professional physicists working in the area, it seems to me that they're trying to use the argument from incredulity, so they are incredulous that this thing could possibly be correct.\nNow in the readings today, we're going to learn more about fungibility and the significance of that to the multiverse.\nWe're also going to hear a description of the, well, the solution to some of these entanglement problems that we sometimes hear about, and how people try to claim that quantum theory seems to violate special relativity, the prohibition on fast and the speed of light travel, and David's going to explain how that cannot be so.\nThere's also a little hear about personal identity as well, and as always, there's simply some just amazing explanations of what's going on, so I'm just going to dive straight into it.\nWe got up to the part where we were comparing, well, we were discussing fungibility in the context of finance, and how money of certain kinds is fungible.\nNow we've just learned about how money is legally fungible, and what this means is if the, if you owe someone a dollar, they've lent you a dollar, a dollar note, or a dollar bill, I think it's called in America, or here we have dollar coins in Australia.\nIf you owe someone a dollar, they've lent you a dollar, you do not have to return that specific dollar to that person.\nMoney is fungible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e08f38bd-213d-4af8-9c20-d8cce9c4602d": {"page_content": "Now we've just learned about how money is legally fungible, and what this means is if the, if you owe someone a dollar, they've lent you a dollar, a dollar note, or a dollar bill, I think it's called in America, or here we have dollar coins in Australia.\nIf you owe someone a dollar, they've lent you a dollar, you do not have to return that specific dollar to that person.\nMoney is fungible.\nYou can return any other dollar, or in any other form, pretty much that you like, to 50 cent coins here will do just as well as a dollar coin here in Australia.\nSo money is legally fungible.\nThat's where we're coming from, where we're going to, is right here, where David writes, quote, it so happens in some situations, money is not only legally fungible, but physically too, and being so familiar it provides a good model for thinking about fungibility.\nFor example, if the balance in your electronic bank account is $1 and the bank adds a second dollar as a loyalty bonus, and later withdraws a dollar in charges, there is no meaning to whether the dollar they would drew is the one that was there originally or the one they had added or is composed of a little of each.\nIt is not merely that we cannot know whether it was the same dollar, or have decided not to care, because of the physics of the situation, there really is no such thing as taking the original dollar, nor such a thing as taking the one added subsequently.\nDollars in bank accounts are what may be called configurational entities.\nThey are states or configurations of objects, not what we usually think of as physical objects in their own right.\nYour bank balance resides in the state of a certain information storage device.\nIn a sense, you own that state.\nIt is illegal for anyone to alter it without your consent.\nBut you do not own the device itself or any part of it.\nSo in that sense, a dollar is an abstraction.\nIndeed, it is a piece of abstract knowledge, as I discussed in Chapter 4.\nKnowledge, once embodied in physical form in a suitable environment, causes itself to remain so.\nAnd thus, when a physical dollar wears out and is destroyed by the mint, the abstract dollar causes the mint to transfer it into electronic form or into a new instance in paper form.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=144"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f266388c-5fe2-47a3-adb3-d5fed78823a4": {"page_content": "But you do not own the device itself or any part of it.\nSo in that sense, a dollar is an abstraction.\nIndeed, it is a piece of abstract knowledge, as I discussed in Chapter 4.\nKnowledge, once embodied in physical form in a suitable environment, causes itself to remain so.\nAnd thus, when a physical dollar wears out and is destroyed by the mint, the abstract dollar causes the mint to transfer it into electronic form or into a new instance in paper form.\nIt is an abstract replicator, though unusually for a replicator, it causes itself not to proliferate, but rather to be copied into ledgers and into bank backups of computer memories.\nSo I'm skipping a bit here because I've described this section in a previous episode.\nDavid talks about the fungibility of energy and physics.\nSo for example, if it takes you 20 jewels of energy to ride to the top of a particular hill, and then we say that you've gained 20 jewels of gravitational potential energy, roughly speaking.\nI'm ignoring things like friction and the fact that your muscles aren't efficient and all that sort of stuff.\nNow, if you decide to roll your bike back down, if you're sitting on the bike and you're not pedaling and you're rolling down the hill and you get halfway down and halfway down, you've lost 10 of those 20 jewels of gravitational potential energy.\nAnd in theory, with everything's working perfectly and there's no friction and all that sort of stuff as we like to assume in physics, then you've gained 10 jewels of kinetic energy.\nNow, it doesn't make sense, which of the 20 jewels originally that you gained as gravitational potential energy, which of those 20 will lost as gravitational potential energy, and we're gained as kinetic energy.\nAnd so this kind of fungibility is known as configurational entity.\nAnd he also mentions that a configurational entity also includes particles in the quantum field.\nQuantum field theory is this idea that particles are excitations of something more fundamental, still the quantum field.\nAnd that would probably require a whole other series of podcasts, not mine, more than likely, to explain.\nSo that's quantum field theory.\nThe more fundamental, in a sense, a version of quantum theory.\nSo I will continue reading after that brief interlude.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=261"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8a02c1ff-7695-49dd-bef6-a9209d17ef84": {"page_content": "And he also mentions that a configurational entity also includes particles in the quantum field.\nQuantum field theory is this idea that particles are excitations of something more fundamental, still the quantum field.\nAnd that would probably require a whole other series of podcasts, not mine, more than likely, to explain.\nSo that's quantum field theory.\nThe more fundamental, in a sense, a version of quantum theory.\nSo I will continue reading after that brief interlude.\nAnd David Wright's quote, if the two universes of our fictional multiverse are initially fungible, our transporter malfunction can make them acquire different attributes in the same way that a bank's computer can withdraw one of two fungible dollars and not the other from an account containing two dollars.\nThe laws of physics could, for instance, say that when the transporter malfunctions, then in one of the universes and not the other, there will be a small voltage surge in the transported objects.\nThe laws being symmetrical could not possibly specify which universe the surge will take place in.\nBut precisely because the universes are initially fungible, they do not have to.\nIt is a rather counterintuitive fact that if objects are merely identical in the sense of being exact copies, and obey deterministic laws that make no distinction between them, then they can never become different.\nBut fungible objects, which on the face of it are even more alike, can.\nThis is the first of those weird properties of fungibility that leave let's never thought of, in which I consider to be at the heart of the phenomena of quantum physics.\nSo just pause there.\nThis is my reflection.\nI'm just catching mine back to the Mark Zender interferometer.\nand it contained that thing called the half-silvid mirror.\nAnd if a photon strikes the half-silvid mirror, it's got a 50% chance of going through, being transmitted through the mirror, and a 50% chance of bouncing off the mirror.\nAnd in terms of the multiverse, I'm getting it way ahead of what David is in this chapter, of course.\nBut our understanding of what the physics of that situation is, is that the photon being a multiverse object contains uncountably infinite numbers of fungible instances.\nAnd so when it strikes the half-silvid mirror, literally 50% of the instances go through the mirror, are transmitted through a 50% bounce off.\nAnd so this is the sense in which we can have perfectly deterministic laws, which cause universes to act differently.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=354"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "434a1f53-fb0b-439e-87f1-6f83a7fd3de2": {"page_content": "But our understanding of what the physics of that situation is, is that the photon being a multiverse object contains uncountably infinite numbers of fungible instances.\nAnd so when it strikes the half-silvid mirror, literally 50% of the instances go through the mirror, are transmitted through a 50% bounce off.\nAnd so this is the sense in which we can have perfectly deterministic laws, which cause universes to act differently.\nOkay, back to the book.\nDavid writes, quote, here is another, suppose that your account contains $100 and you have instructed your bank to transfer $1 from the account to the tax authority on a specified date in the future.\nSo the bank's computer now contains a deterministic rule to that to that effect.\nSuppose that you have done this because the dollar already belongs to the tax authority, say it had mistakenly sent your tax refund and has given you a deadline to repay it.\nSince the dollars in the account are fungible, there is no such thing as which one belongs to the tax authority and which belong to you.\nSo we now have a situation in which a collection of entities, though fungible, do not all have the same owner.\nEveryday language struggles to describe this situation.\nEach dollar in the account shares literally all its attributes with the others, yet it is not the case that all of them have the same owner.\nSo could we say that in this situation they have no owner?.\nThat would be misleading because evidently the tax authority does own one of them and you own the rest.\nCould one say that they all have two owners?.\nPerhaps, but only because that is a vague term.\nCertainly there is no point in saying that one cent of each of the dollars is owned by the tax authority because that simply runs into the problem, that the sense in the account are all fungible too.\nBut in any case, notice the problem raised by this diversity within fungibility is one of language only.\nIt is a problem of how to describe some aspects of this situation in words.\nNo one finds the situation itself paradoxical.\nThe computer has been instructed to execute definite rules and there will never be any ambiguity in what will happen as a result.\nDiversity within fungibility is a widespread phenomena in the multiples, as I shall explain.\nOne big difference from the case of fungible money is that in the latter case we never have to wonder about or predict what it would be like to be a dollar.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=478"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f56c064-8be4-4f1c-82c1-b1d3ff1fca3a": {"page_content": "No one finds the situation itself paradoxical.\nThe computer has been instructed to execute definite rules and there will never be any ambiguity in what will happen as a result.\nDiversity within fungibility is a widespread phenomena in the multiples, as I shall explain.\nOne big difference from the case of fungible money is that in the latter case we never have to wonder about or predict what it would be like to be a dollar.\nThat is to say what it would be like to be fungible and then to become differentiated.\nMany applications of quantum theory require us to do exactly that.\nBut first, I suggested temporarily visualizing our two universes as being next to each other in space.\nJust as some science fiction stories refer to doppelg\u00e4in universes as being in other dimensions.\nBut now we have to abandon that image and make them coincide.\nWhatever that extra dimension was supposed to denote, it would make them non-fungible.\nIt is not that they coincide in anything, such as an external space.\nThey are not in space.\nAn instance of space is part of each of them.\nThat they coincide means only that they are not separate in any way.\nIt is hard to imagine perfectly identical things coinciding.\nFor instance, as soon as you imagine just one of them, your imagination has already violated their fungibility.\nBut although imagination may balk, reason does not.\nNow our story can begin to have a non-trivial plot.\nFor example, the voltage surge that happens in one of the two universes when the transport of malfunctions could cause some of the neurons in a passenger's brain to misfire in that universe.\nAs a result in that universe, the passenger spills a cup of coffee on another passenger.\nAs a result, they have a shared experience with which they did not have in the other universe, and this leads to romance, just as in sliding doors.\nThe voltage surges need not be malfunctions of the transporter.\nThey could be a regular effect of the way it works.\nWe accept much larger unpredictable jolts during other forms of travel, such as flying or promco riding.\nLet us imagine that a tiny surge is produced in one of the universes whenever the transporter is operated in both, but that it is too small to be noticeable, unless measured with a sensitive voltmeter, or unless it nudges something that happens to be on the brink of changing, but would recede from the brink of not nudged.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=598"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a178edd-079e-4af8-93fa-e867307183d0": {"page_content": "We accept much larger unpredictable jolts during other forms of travel, such as flying or promco riding.\nLet us imagine that a tiny surge is produced in one of the universes whenever the transporter is operated in both, but that it is too small to be noticeable, unless measured with a sensitive voltmeter, or unless it nudges something that happens to be on the brink of changing, but would recede from the brink of not nudged.\nIn principle, a phenomena could appear unpredictable to observers for one or more of three reasons.\nThe first is that it is affected by some fundamentally random indeterministic variable.\nI've excluded that possibility from our story, because there are no such variables in real physics.\nThe second, which is at least partly responsible for most every day unpredictability, is that the factors affecting the phenomena though deterministic are either unknown or too complex to take account of.\nThis is especially so when they involve the creation of knowledge as I discussed in chapter nine.\nThe third, which had never been imagined before quantum theory, is that two or more initially fungible instances of the object become different.\nThat is, what those transporter and jolts bring about, and what makes their outcomes strictly unpredictable, despite being described by deterministic laws of physics, pause their my reflection.\nThis is the thing that I emphasized last time as well, and I love that.\nThat's just the powerful way that David Deutsch is able to explain in just a single sentence, the misconception that so many people have about this particular point.\nPeople who think that determinism must mean predictability.\nAnd so I'll just read that sentence again, because it's brilliantly parsimonious, and you're right.\nThat is what those transporter and jolts bring about, and it makes their outcomes strictly unpredictable, despite being described by deterministic laws of physics, and I'll keep going.\nThese are remarks about unpredictable phenomena could be expressed without ever referring explicitly to fungibility, and indeed that is what multiverse research is usually doing.\nNevertheless, as I have said, I believe that fungibility is essential to the explanation of quantum randomness and most other quantum phenomena.\nPause their just my reflection.\nThere's just a side note as well.\nQuantum randomness.\nWhen we talk about quantum randomness, what we mean is that things seem subjectively random, and what subjectively random means is that from your perspective, it seems like what happens is random in certain situations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=711"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6693b064-457e-4cbb-8527-4e2559aa8ad6": {"page_content": "Nevertheless, as I have said, I believe that fungibility is essential to the explanation of quantum randomness and most other quantum phenomena.\nPause their just my reflection.\nThere's just a side note as well.\nQuantum randomness.\nWhen we talk about quantum randomness, what we mean is that things seem subjectively random, and what subjectively random means is that from your perspective, it seems like what happens is random in certain situations.\nYou flip a coin, and one would say that it's 50% going to end up heads and 50% tails.\nFrom your perspective, your subjectivity, and everyone else on planet Earth, from their subjectivity as well, the outcome is random.\nIt could be heads or it could be tails.\nThat's what subjectively randomness is about.\nNo one knows.\nNo one could possibly predict with perfect accuracy.\nIndeed, the randomness that we get from coin flips or from dice rolls, or roulette wheels, etc., etc., those random events, by the way, probabilistic as well, because we know what the possible outcomes are.\nKnowledge won't go affecting the fact that if you flip a coin, it's 50-50, or you roll a dice, it's 1 and 6 for each face if it's a fair dice.\nAnd so on.\nWhen we know what all the possible outcomes are, we can do probability.\nLegitimately.\nI mentioned that because of course there are illegitimate uses of probability.\nFor example, calculating the likelihood that civilization will survive over the next century, because we don't know the possible outcomes.\nKnowledge creation will affect that outcome.\nSo subjective randomness is about this idea that we can't predict the outcomes of certain events like rolling dice.\nOr even like whether or not something will go wrong with your car, that kind of thing.\nNow, in terms of the multiverse as a whole, however, nothing is random.\nThere is no objective randomness.\nNothing truly on the scale of the multiverse, according to the laws of physics, that is truly random, because everything that can physically possibly happen actually does happen.\nAnd if you could possibly get outside of the multiverse, if you were an omnipotent god looking down, you would see that everything is simply unfolding as the laws of physics determined.\nNothing was random.\nIn other words, nothing violated the laws of physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=838"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25febff2-2eb2-4aff-8456-e474a08a742b": {"page_content": "There is no objective randomness.\nNothing truly on the scale of the multiverse, according to the laws of physics, that is truly random, because everything that can physically possibly happen actually does happen.\nAnd if you could possibly get outside of the multiverse, if you were an omnipotent god looking down, you would see that everything is simply unfolding as the laws of physics determined.\nNothing was random.\nIn other words, nothing violated the laws of physics.\nQuantum theory doesn't give us randomness in the objective sense that most people think, just a subjective sense, because you don't occupy all of the universes.\nIf you were some sort of entity that was able to occupy all of the universes simultaneously and have a consciousness that occupied all of the universes simultaneously, then nothing would seem random to you.\nYou would just see the unfolding of all the possible events.\nAnd so you would see when you flipped a coin, you know that you would see both heads and tails, which would be a weird thing to experience, I suppose.\nWe'll get into an entity like that in the next episode, I think.\nAnyway, so look out for that one.\nI keep promising that, by the way, that there's coming up.\nWe will be talking about a test of quantum theory, which is going to be linked to consciousness.\nBut I digress.\nLet's go back to the book, David Ratz.\nAll three of these radically different causes of unpredictability could, in principle, feel exactly the same to observers.\nBut in an explicable world, there must be a way of finding out which of them, or which combination of them, is the actual source of any apparent randomness in nature.\nHow could one find out if that is fungibility and parallel universes that are responsible for a given phenomena?.\nOkay, pausing there, and I'm skipping a quite substantial part of this chapter.\nJust to remind you, this is one of the longest, yes, so this chapter has 47 pages substantially greater than any of the other chapters.\nI think chapter three, the spark, was the second longest at 36.\nSo it's 11 pages longer than the second longest chapter if I've counted the pages correctly.\nAnd so I just highlight that for you because there's no substitute for reading the book.\nYou should buy the book if you haven't.\nI am skipping a lot of this chapter, in order to explain around it.\nNow, the bit that I'm skipping here was about the prohibition on communicating between universes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=966"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0fb060c-e6a6-410a-952f-8c826e724fd7": {"page_content": "I think chapter three, the spark, was the second longest at 36.\nSo it's 11 pages longer than the second longest chapter if I've counted the pages correctly.\nAnd so I just highlight that for you because there's no substitute for reading the book.\nYou should buy the book if you haven't.\nI am skipping a lot of this chapter, in order to explain around it.\nNow, the bit that I'm skipping here was about the prohibition on communicating between universes.\nSo remember David's telling a science fiction story about these Doppelganger people, one of whom spilled some coffee on another.\nNow, in a spaceship using a transporter.\nNow, could the universes, after they differentiate, communicate, and he explains all the reasons, all the things that could happen if they could, but they can't.\nAnd so I'm going to skip that part and I would urge you to read that part, read the entire chapter, I suppose.\nBut yes, I am just highlighting the fact I'm skipping significant parts of the book as I go through these chapters.\nOkay, so David writes, since there is no inter-universe communication in real quantum physics, we shall not allow it in our story.\nAnd so that specific route to applicability is not open.\nThe history in which our crew members are married and the one in which they still hardly know each other cannot communicate with each other or observe each other.\nNevertheless, as we shall see, there are circumstances in which histories can still affect each other in ways that do not amount to communication.\nAnd the need to explain those effects provides the main argument that our own multiverse is real, cause they're just my reflection.\nSo of course, the reason why David has made a point of talking about the prohibition on inter-universe communication is because if there was inter-universe communication, then we wouldn't have to spend 47 pages.\nHe wouldn't have to spend 47 pages and give many talks and other philosophers and physicists like David Wallace wouldn't have to write vast books, defending the thesis, because we would all be communicating with these other universes.\nWe would see them directly, you know, it would be easier to convince people of the existence of these other universes.\nIf it was as easy to communicate with these other universes as it was to communicate between cities or nations, but the laws of physics themselves prohibit prevent inter-universe communication.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=1138"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82f90554-5029-4a58-9bec-5427c9965503": {"page_content": "We would see them directly, you know, it would be easier to convince people of the existence of these other universes.\nIf it was as easy to communicate with these other universes as it was to communicate between cities or nations, but the laws of physics themselves prohibit prevent inter-universe communication.\nAnd so we have to be a bit more subtle in the observations that we interpret in order to establish that the multiverse is correct, is the way of understanding quantum theory back to the book.\nAfter the universe is in our story, begin to differ inside one Starship.\nEverything else in the world exists in pairs of identical instances.\nWe must continue to imagine those pairs as being fungible.\nThis is necessary because the universes are not receptacles, there is nothing to them apart from the objects that they can tame.\nIf they did have an independent reality, if they did have an independent reality, then each of the objects in such a pair would have a property of being in one particular universe and not the other, which would make them non-fungible.\nTypically, the region in which the universes are different will then grow.\nFor instance, when the couple decide to marry, they send messages to their home planets announcing this.\nWhen the messages arrive, the two instances of each of those those planets become different.\nPreviously, only the two instances of the Starship were different, but soon, even before anyone broadcasts intentionally, some of the information will have leaked out.\nFor instance, people in the Starship are moving differently in the two universes as a result of the marriage decision, so light bounces off them differently, and some of it leaves the Starship through portals.\nMarking the two universes, making the two universes slightly different wherever it goes, the same is true of heat radiation in for red light, which leaves the Starship through every point on the hull.\nThen, starting with the voltage happening in only one universe, a wave of differentiation between the universes spreads in all directions through space.\nSince information travelling in either universe cannot exceed the speed of light, knock on the wave of differentiation, and since, at its leading edge, it mostly travels at, or near that speed, differences in the head start that some directions have over others will become an increasingly smaller proportion of the total distance travelled, and so, the further the wave travels, the more nearly spherical becomes, it becomes.\nSo I shall call it a sphere of differentiation, pause there, just my reflection.\nSo this is one of the subtle and difficult, I guess, parts to really understand.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=1228"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "361f5676-90aa-490e-9736-aebc281c3650": {"page_content": "So I shall call it a sphere of differentiation, pause there, just my reflection.\nSo this is one of the subtle and difficult, I guess, parts to really understand.\nSo all we've got is a quantum event happening here in the Starship.\nThe transport has been used, and it causes a voltage surge in one of the universes are not the other.\nThat's our little quantum event, a little voltage surge caused by electrons doing something or other.\nNow, that voltage surge magnifies up to cause in the universe where it happened, but not in the universe where it didn't, in the universe where it happened, someone to spill their coffee, they got zapped and so they spilled their coffee, and they spilled their coffee on someone else.\nAnd so automatically, we've magnified the quantum event to something larger, and the person upon whom the coffee fell has then talked to the person who spilled the coffee, and they've developed a romance and decided to get eventually get married.\nNow, as soon as the coffee gets spilled, maybe the person stands up, and so automatically, they're moving differently in that universe compared to the other, where they're still probably just sitting beside each other or something.\nAnd so, because they're moving differently, the light reflecting off them differently.\nAnd so, to first approximation, what happens is that that light that's been reflected off them is going to strike the walls of the Starship in slightly different ways, and could indeed cause the heating of the Starship in slightly different ways, and that heat leaks out is infrared radiation.\nNow, there's a lower limit on that that we're going to learn about, which goes to the photoelectric effect there, which we talked about in a couple of episodes back.\nIf you recall, the photoelectric effect talks about how there is a lowest possible energy of light, namely the photon.\nAnd if you don't exceed that lowest possible energy, then perhaps nothing happens.\nThat's a possibility that nothing happens.\nOver time, however, the fact that people get married in one universe, but not the other, causes the entire universe there to gradually change.\nBut in what sense are the two universes kind of different?.\nThey differentiate.\nSo initially, the only difference is that in one universe, coffee is spilled and the other, coffee is not spilled.\nThe remainder of the entire universes are perfectly fungible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=1409"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7671d29c-7b03-41be-b5f1-6c307dea4aa9": {"page_content": "That's a possibility that nothing happens.\nOver time, however, the fact that people get married in one universe, but not the other, causes the entire universe there to gradually change.\nBut in what sense are the two universes kind of different?.\nThey differentiate.\nSo initially, the only difference is that in one universe, coffee is spilled and the other, coffee is not spilled.\nThe remainder of the entire universes are perfectly fungible.\nBut over time, at approximately the speed of light, as David has said there, this wave of differentiation spreads out from the coffee spilling incident, causing all sorts of differences.\nBut in particular, it has changed due to the knowledge, namely, if they decide to get married in one universe, then they're going to send messages to their home planet or whatever to their families.\nAnd that's going to cause big changes.\nWell, big changes within the lives of those people.\nBut the rest of the universe might only subtly change.\nAnd in fact, some in some areas, barely at all.\nBut as time goes on, those changes do affect something, the size of the classical universe.\nBut it will take a long time for that to happen clearly, because light only travels at 300,000 kilometers per second.\nAnd it's going to take some billions of years to get from one side of the side, I say, from one part of the universe to another very, very distant part of the universe.\nAnd so this is how differentiation happens.\nAnd it is why David Wallace called his book, The Emergent Multiverse, because the multiverse is a theory not simply to explain small things that are happening.\nThat's a great misconception.\nIt's a theory to explain the differences between whole universes, between large-scale structures.\nOkay, back to the book where David's saying kind of the same thing that I just said there, but better.\nSo I'll read that quote.\nEven inside the spirit differentiation, there are comparatively few differences between the universes.\nThe stars still shine, the planets still have the same continents, even the people who hear of the wedding and behave differently as a result retain most of the same data in their brains and other information storage devices.\nAnd they still breed the same type of air, eat the same type of food, and so on.\nHowever, although it may seem intuitively reasonable that news of the marriage leaves most things unchanged, there is a different common sense intuition that seems to prove that it must change everything, if only slightly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=1527"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f9f53cf9-7753-4bec-9c9c-768cd3ee7a82": {"page_content": "And they still breed the same type of air, eat the same type of food, and so on.\nHowever, although it may seem intuitively reasonable that news of the marriage leaves most things unchanged, there is a different common sense intuition that seems to prove that it must change everything, if only slightly.\nConsider what happens when the news reaches a planet, say, in the form of a pulse of photons from a communication laser.\nEven before any human consequences, there is the physical impact of those photons, which one might expect to impart momentum to every atom exposed to the beam, which would be every atom in something like that half of the surface of the planet, which is facing the beam.\nThose atoms would then vibrate a little differently, affecting the atoms below through interatomic forces.\nAs each atom affected others, the effect would spread rapidly through the planet.\nSoon, every atom in the planet would have been affected, though most of them by unimaginably, unimaginably tiny amounts.\nNevertheless, however small such an effect was, it would be enough to break the fungibility between each atom and its other universe counterpart.\nHence, it would seem that nothing would be left fungible after the wave of differentiation at past.\nThese two opposite intuitions reflect the ancient dichotomy between the discrete and the continuous.\nThe above argument that everything in the sphere of differentiation must become different depends upon the reality of extremely small physical changes.\nChanges that would be many orders of magnitude too small to be measurable.\nThe existence of such changes follows inexorably from the explanations of classical physics, because in classical physics, most fundamental quantities, such as energy, are continuously variable.\nPause the edges.\nThis is just my reflection.\nOkay, so just to emphasize that.\nSo there's this thing called the inverse square law, okay, and it works for the intensity of light.\nIt's a classical law, and it says that as you move away from the source of light, like the Sun, the intensity of light that you receive from the Sun, usually measured in something like the number of watts, okay, that's the power, the number of joules of energy per second that you've received from the Sun.\nWell, that decreases as the square of the distance.\nSo if you are here at Earth and you're receiving a certain amount of energy from the Sun, by the way, here at the Earth, it's something like, if I remember, 1,600 watts per meter squared.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=1646"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "23cd7b6f-ce43-4b88-825c-353567f7e7c6": {"page_content": "Well, that decreases as the square of the distance.\nSo if you are here at Earth and you're receiving a certain amount of energy from the Sun, by the way, here at the Earth, it's something like, if I remember, 1,600 watts per meter squared.\nSo if you've got 1 meter square, you get 1,600 watts approximately, I think above the atmosphere, by the way, at right angles to the Sun, under perfect conditions.\nBut if you are twice the distance away from the Sun, then the square of that is 4, okay, so you've doubled the distance.\nSo the intensity is 4 times less than the 1600 watts, so it would go down to 400 watts.\nAnd then if you go still further away again, so you double your distance again, then it's a quarter of that, you know, down to 100 watts.\nAnd so this is what the inverse square law is, which would say that it doesn't matter how far away you go from the Sun, they will never come a point where the light disappears completely, or is unable to affect you whatsoever, because it's just a continuous beam of light, all right, it just gets more and more dim, the further.\nand, if it gets more and more dim, the further and the further you get away.\nIt never actually disappears, but we already know, don't we, that light has made a photon.\nSo there must come a distance where you're not going to get a continuous stream of light, eventually the light will go out, it'll disappear, and then it will start, will start to flash at you.\nAnd the flashes will become less and less frequent, and that's what the photon theory of light is all about.\nOkay, so I'll just go back and read forward a little bit.\nSo David wrote and writes, quote, the existence of such changes follows inexorably from the explanations of classical physics, because in classical physics, most fundamental quantities, such as energy, are continuously variable.\nThe opposing intuition comes from thinking about the world in terms of information processing and hints in terms of discrete variables, such as the contents of people's memories.\nQuantum theory adjudicates this conflict in favor of the discrete.\nFor a typical physical quantity, there is a smallest possible change that it can undergo in a given situation.\nFor instance, there is a smallest possible amount of energy that can be transferred from radiation to any particular atom.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=1737"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a48903bd-c315-4fc4-9489-0bbbd68f9290": {"page_content": "The opposing intuition comes from thinking about the world in terms of information processing and hints in terms of discrete variables, such as the contents of people's memories.\nQuantum theory adjudicates this conflict in favor of the discrete.\nFor a typical physical quantity, there is a smallest possible change that it can undergo in a given situation.\nFor instance, there is a smallest possible amount of energy that can be transferred from radiation to any particular atom.\nThe atom cannot absorb any less amount, which is called a quantum of energy.\nSince this was the first distinctive feature of quantum physics to be discovered, it gave its name to the field.\nLet us incorporate it into our fictional physics as well, pause there, just my reflection.\nOne might also say it was an unfortunate first discovery, this idea of the quantum, because people now think that quantum physics is really only about the very small, but of course it's not.\nIt's about everything.\nIt's a physical theory that explains the behavior, not only of small things, but of all things, to some extent.\nIt's not going to explain why history happened the way that it did.\nIt's not going to explain whether you should get married or not.\nIt's not going to explain areas of mathematics and biology, but it is going to explain the fact that physical reality, on even the larger scales, is constituted of many different universes.\nThat's the biggest structure that we know of in reality is the entire multiverse.\nSo far from being a theory of only the very small, it also happens to be an explanation of the very larger structure that we have ever invoked in science.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nDavid writes, hence it is not the case that all the atoms on the surface of the planet are changed by the arrival of the radio message.\nIn reality, the typical response of a large physical object to very small influences is that most of its atoms remain strictly unchanged, while to obey the conservation laws a few exhibit at a discrete, relatively large change of one quantum.\nThe discreteness of variables raises questions about motion and change.\nDoes it mean that changes happen instantaneously?.\nThey do not, which raises the further question.\nWhat is the world like halfway through that change?.\nAlso, if a few atoms are strongly affected by some influence and the rest are unaffected, what determines which of the ones to be affected?.\nThe answer has to do with fungibility as the reader may guess and as I shall explain next.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=1927"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f689eb28-afaf-4f6a-b6a8-e974a7568218": {"page_content": "The discreteness of variables raises questions about motion and change.\nDoes it mean that changes happen instantaneously?.\nThey do not, which raises the further question.\nWhat is the world like halfway through that change?.\nAlso, if a few atoms are strongly affected by some influence and the rest are unaffected, what determines which of the ones to be affected?.\nThe answer has to do with fungibility as the reader may guess and as I shall explain next.\nThe effects of a wave of differentiation usually diminish rapidly with distance.\nSimply because physical effects in general do.\nOf course, they're my reflection.\nThis is the inverse square law thing.\nSo I'll skip past that.\nOh, and then he writes.\nSo let me just continue here, okay?.\nDavid writes.\nEven the most violent of quasarjets when viewed from a neighboring galaxy would be little more than an abstract painting in the sky.\nThere is only one known phenomena which, if it ever occurred, would have effects that did not fall off with distance and that is the creation of a certain type of knowledge, mainly a beginning of infinity.\nIndeed, knowledge can aim itself at a target, travel vast distances, having scarcely an area effect, and then utterly transform the destination.\nThat's absolutely worth reading again because many people who have become enamored by this book and who talked about it in large forums have rightly fixated on that amazing observation by David Deutsch.\nSo again, he says, knowledge can aim itself at a target, travel vast distances, having scarcely any effect, and then utterly transform the destination.\nEnd quote.\nSo this is truly astounding because it means that knowledge is very much a kind of physical force, not in the strict sense that the way physicists talk about what forces are.\nBut certainly a quality of nature, force of nature, I think that exists in the universe, that is up there with things like gravity.\nIf you had a god's eye view of the universe and you were trying to explain what the things are that are in that universe causing it to behave the way that it did and to pee the way that it did, you would certainly cite gravity as being of key importance, why planets spherical, why so many objects in the universe spherical, approximately speaking, stars, planets, moons, or because gravity pulls things into spheres, it causes things to take on spherical shapes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2053"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2815caf-a85d-400b-817b-5e73e93edca9": {"page_content": "If you had a god's eye view of the universe and you were trying to explain what the things are that are in that universe causing it to behave the way that it did and to pee the way that it did, you would certainly cite gravity as being of key importance, why planets spherical, why so many objects in the universe spherical, approximately speaking, stars, planets, moons, or because gravity pulls things into spheres, it causes things to take on spherical shapes.\nAnd the thing that stops them from collapsing of gravity as pulling them in are often some kind of other chemical force pushing outwards in the case of the earth and rocky type planets, it's the chemical forces, the electrostatic forces stop the thing from collapsing any further than it does.\nSo you would invoke these physical forces to explain the appearance of the universe.\nBut looking at the surface of the earth, you can't invoke only the physical forces.\nYeah, here's a picture of Sydney, it's beautiful city.\nNow, the Sydney Harbour basin there, it's made of sandstone, can't see the sandstone here though, but the harbour is there because it has slowly eroded away over time through the sandstone.\nAnd that's been washed out into the ocean, the sandstone, and forms out lovely beaches, in fact, the erosion of the sandstone below beneath Sydney.\nBut the bridge, the opera house, the buildings, they're not natural formations, they're a consequence of knowledge.\nAnd indeed, knowledge being transmitted from one place to another.\nSome of this knowledge was created here, but vast amounts of it were inherited from Europe or the United States.\nIn the future, we're going to have a moon base or a base on Mars.\nThat will be caused by knowledge from the earth aiming itself at that place and transforming that planet.\nAnd in the far distant future, when we look at the galaxy as a whole, one would hope that on galactic scales, when we look at certain features of the galaxy, we're going to see some areas far brighter and some areas far more dim than galaxies that are not populated by people.\nThey will simply look different on gross scales and at finer scales, they will look exceedingly more different.\nWe might be able to roughly predict what planets on the other side of the galaxy look like now.\nThey're probably going to look similar to the planets that are here in our solar system, gas giants with pretty clouds, rocky planets that are barren like Mars or Mercury.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2185"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e7209f40-f2cc-4ac2-9161-ac01ca506aa7": {"page_content": "They will simply look different on gross scales and at finer scales, they will look exceedingly more different.\nWe might be able to roughly predict what planets on the other side of the galaxy look like now.\nThey're probably going to look similar to the planets that are here in our solar system, gas giants with pretty clouds, rocky planets that are barren like Mars or Mercury.\nPerhaps now and again, we'll get an interesting one like Earth, which has oceans and maybe some bacteria or something like that.\nMore or less, within certain limits, we can probably guess what the planets are going to look like.\nThey're going to be spherical, they're going to in general be orbiting stars.\nWhat we can't possibly predict is what parts of the galaxy will look like if people get there.\nIf there are places in the universe where there are people, not like us, aliens, we can't predict what they're going to be like.\nWe can't predict what life forms will be like if they've evolved there as well.\nSome science fiction writers have talked about the possibility of silicon life forms.\nThere's good reasons to think they won't happen.\nThey won't exist.\nBut if they did, if they were able to evolve, evolution brings knowledge into reality in such a way that it can transform it in ways that are unpredictable.\nBut the explanatory type knowledge, it can be taken from one place like the Earth and perhaps in the distant future, aim itself, let's say, to a planet orbiting a star, a hundred light years away, and utterly transform that planet.\nAnd in between us and that place, it might have scarcely any effect, as David says.\nAnd it will only have an effect, the desired effect at that planet, by transforming it, causing the people that are there, or the robots or whatever, to take the resources that are there and rearrange them, to construct new things, new kinds of ways of creating knowledge there, civilizations and so on.\nSo that is a really, really profound sentence, as always, buried here in the beginning of infinity, which sometimes you can just skim over without realizing the import of.\nOkay, let's go back to the book, David writes, quote, in our story too, if we wanted to transport a malfunction to have a significant physical effect at astronomical distances, it would have to be via knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2368"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0b0d02e8-38d6-4783-99ea-d5e882d6f017": {"page_content": "So that is a really, really profound sentence, as always, buried here in the beginning of infinity, which sometimes you can just skim over without realizing the import of.\nOkay, let's go back to the book, David writes, quote, in our story too, if we wanted to transport a malfunction to have a significant physical effect at astronomical distances, it would have to be via knowledge.\nAll those torrents of photons streaming out of the Starship and carrying intentionally or unintentionally, information about a wedding will have a noticeable effect on the distant planet only of someone there cares about the possibility of such information enough to set up scientific instruments that could detect it.\nNow, as I have explained, our imaginary laws are physics, which say that a voltage surge happens in one universe, but not the other, cannot be deterministic unless the universe is a fungible.\nSo what happens when the transporter is used again after the universe is a no longer fungible?.\nImagine a second Starship of the same type as the first and far away.\nWhat happens if the second Starship runs its transporter immediately after the first one did?.\nOne logically possible answer would be that nothing happens.\nIn other words, the laws of physics would say that once the two universes are different, all transporters just work normally and never produce a voltage surge again.\nHowever, that would also provide a way of communicating faster than light, albeit unreliably and only once.\nYou set up a voltmeter in the transporter room and run the transporter.\nIf the voltage surge is you know that the other Starship, however far away, has not yet run its transporter because if it had, it would have put a permanent end to such surges everywhere.\nThe laws governing the real multiverse do not allow information to flow in that way.\nIf we want our fictional laws of physics to be universal from the inhabitants point of view, the second transporter must do exactly what the first one did.\nIt must cause a voltage surge in one universe and not in the other.\nBut in that case, something must determine which universe the second surge will happen in.\nIn one universe but not the other is no longer a deterministic specification.\nAlso, a surge must not happen if the transporter is run only in the other universe.\nThat will constitute inter-universe communication.\nIt must depend on both instances of the transporter being run simultaneously.\nEven that could allow some inter-universe communication as follows.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2487"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4ea3bd7-b002-4d81-b3c5-3e421085ce12": {"page_content": "It must cause a voltage surge in one universe and not in the other.\nBut in that case, something must determine which universe the second surge will happen in.\nIn one universe but not the other is no longer a deterministic specification.\nAlso, a surge must not happen if the transporter is run only in the other universe.\nThat will constitute inter-universe communication.\nIt must depend on both instances of the transporter being run simultaneously.\nEven that could allow some inter-universe communication as follows.\nIn the universe, where a surge has once happened, run the transporter at a pre-arranged time and observe the voltmeter.\nIf no surge happens, then the transporter and the other universe is switched off.\nSo we are at an impasse.\nIt is a remarkable amount of subtlety that can be in the apparently straightforward binary distinction between the same and different or between affected and unaffected.\nIn the real quantum theory too, the prohibitions on inter-universe communication and faster than light communication are closely connected.\nThere is a way, I think it is the only way, to meet simultaneously the requirements that our fictional laws of physics be universal and deterministic and forbid faster than light into inter-universe communication.\nMore universes.\nImagine an uncountably infinite number of them, or initially fungible.\nThe transporter causes previously fungible ones to become different, as before, but now the relevant law of physics says the voltage surges happen in half the universes in which the transporter is used.\nSo if the two starships, both run their transporters, then after the two spheres of differentiation of overlap, there will be universes of four different kinds, those in which our surge happened only in the first starship, only in the second, in neither and in both.\nIn other words, the overlap in the overlap region, there are four different histories, each taking place in one quarter of the universes.\nPause their mind reflection.\nThis is the full mark zendy interferometer type thing where you end up with these four different possibilities.\nIf you've got two half-silven mirrors, because you get transmission transmission, transmission reflection, reflection transmission reflection reflected.\nSo you get that in if you want to know more about that.\nGo back a couple of episodes and have a look at the mark zendy interferometer explanation that I gave.\nSo you end up with this one event, so to speak, causing this differentiation into four different kinds.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2641"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47f278f5-5329-46da-92e4-0f9fc362181e": {"page_content": "If you've got two half-silven mirrors, because you get transmission transmission, transmission reflection, reflection transmission reflection reflected.\nSo you get that in if you want to know more about that.\nGo back a couple of episodes and have a look at the mark zendy interferometer explanation that I gave.\nSo you end up with this one event, so to speak, causing this differentiation into four different kinds.\nOkay, I'll just, let's go back to the book, David writes, quote, our fictional theory has not provided enough structure in its multiverse to give meaning to half the universes, but the real quantum theory does.\nAs I explained in chapter 8, the method that a theory provides for giving a meaning to proportions and averages for infinite sets is called a measure.\nA familiar example is that classical physics assigns lengths to infinite sets of points around general line.\nLet us suppose that our theory provides a measure for universes.\nNow we are allowed storylines such as the following.\nIn the universes in which the couple married, they spend their honeymoon on a human colonized planet that the spaceship is visiting.\nAs they are teleporting back up, the voltage surge in half those universes causes someone's electronic note pad to play a voice message suggesting that one of the newly words has already been unfaithful.\nThis sets off a chain of events that ends in divorce.\nSo now our original collection of fungible universes contains three different histories.\nIn one, comprising half the original set of universes, the coupling questioner still single.\nIn the second, comprising a quarter of the original set, down married, and in the third, comprising the remaining quarter, that divorced.\nThus, the three histories do not occupy equal proportions of the multiverse.\nThere are twice as many universes in which the couple never married, as there are in the universes in which they are divorced.\nPause down my reflection.\nMark's enderings from it again.\nSimilar kind of number of break up proportions, okay?.\nIt's a half a quarter a quarter.\nBack to the book, David Wright's quote.\nNow suppose that the scientists on the Starship know about the multiverse and understand the physics of the transporter, though note that we have not yet given them any way of discovering those things.\nThen they know that when they're on the transporter, an infinite number of fungible instances of themselves all sharing the same history are doing so at the same time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2744"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f97f50fa-b87f-444f-a56f-cde654a7ca84": {"page_content": "It's a half a quarter a quarter.\nBack to the book, David Wright's quote.\nNow suppose that the scientists on the Starship know about the multiverse and understand the physics of the transporter, though note that we have not yet given them any way of discovering those things.\nThen they know that when they're on the transporter, an infinite number of fungible instances of themselves all sharing the same history are doing so at the same time.\nThey know that a voltage surge will occur in half the universes in that history, which means that it will split into two histories of equal measure.\nHence, they know that if they use the voltmeter, capable of detecting the surge, half of the instances of themselves are going to find that it has recorded one, and the other half are not.\nBut they also know that it is meanings to ask, not merely impossible, to know, which event they will experience.\nConsequently, they can make two closely related predictions.\nOne is that despite the perfect determinism of everything that's happening, nothing can reliably predict for them whether the voltmeter will detect the surge.\nThe other prediction is simply that the voltmeter will record a surge with probability one half.\nThus, the outcomes of such experiments are subjectively random from the perspective of any observer, even though everything that is happening is completely determined objectively.\nThis is also the origin of quantum mechanical randomness and probability in real physics.\nIt is due to the measure that the theory provides for the multiverse, which is in turn due to what kinds of physical processes the theory allows and forbids.\nNotice that when a random outcome, in this sense, is about to happen, it is a situation of diversity within fungibility.\nThe diversity is in the variable, what outcome they are going to see.\nThe logic of the situation is the same, as in cases like that of the bank account I discussed above, except that this time the fungible entities are people.\nThey are fungible yet half of them are going to see the surge and the other half, not.\nIn practice, they could test this prediction by doing the experiment many times.\nEvery formula purporting to predict the sequence of outcomes will eventually fail.\nThat tests the unpredictability.\nAnd in the overwhelming majority of universities, the surge will happen approximately half the time.\nThat tests the predicted value of the probability.\nOnly a tiny proportion of the instances of the observers will see anything different.\nPause their my reflections.\nThere is a hint at the testability of the multiverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2834"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82562820-a67e-43ba-9ff7-64f876978880": {"page_content": "In practice, they could test this prediction by doing the experiment many times.\nEvery formula purporting to predict the sequence of outcomes will eventually fail.\nThat tests the unpredictability.\nAnd in the overwhelming majority of universities, the surge will happen approximately half the time.\nThat tests the predicted value of the probability.\nOnly a tiny proportion of the instances of the observers will see anything different.\nPause their my reflections.\nThere is a hint at the testability of the multiverse.\nAnd against classical rivals.\nSo classical physics says the same thing can happen over and over again.\nThis is classically what science says.\nThe whole point of repeating your experiment to find out whether or not it is reliable is to see whether you get the same outcome each time.\nWell here, if we repeat the experiment, we should find that we won't get the same result every single time.\nIf there's a situation in which it's 50-50, then we should get different results every single time, not every single time.\nWe should approximately we should approach the 50-50 limit.\nOkay, so I'll just my reflection here.\nI'm going to skip another substantial part here.\nAnd David talks about how the sphere of differentiation as it spreads out.\nIt too can cause differentiation in probabilistic ways.\nOkay, or ways that subjectively random.\nAnd so although the first thing that happened was this quantum event, this voltage surge and the spilling of coffee, the wave of differentiation that spreads out can then differentiate at each time a thing could have happened one way or the other or in many different ways.\nAll the possible outcomes happen.\nAnd so that causes, quote from the book, the number of histories continues to increase exponentially.\nAnd soon, there are so many variations on events that several significant changes have been caused somewhere in the multi-versal diversity of the Starship.\nSo in the total number of such histories, so the total number of such histories increases exponentially too, even though they continue to constitute only a small proportion of all histories that are present.\nSoon after that, in an even smaller but still exponentially growing number of histories, uncanny chains of accidents and unlikely coincidences will have come to dominate events.\nI put those terms in quotation marks because those events, namely the accidents and the unlikely coincidences.\nThose events are not in the least accidental.\nThey've all happened inevitably, according to deterministic laws of physics.\nAll of them are caused by the transporter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=2959"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "049ecd42-4d55-46c4-9eb4-86eecc96357b": {"page_content": "Soon after that, in an even smaller but still exponentially growing number of histories, uncanny chains of accidents and unlikely coincidences will have come to dominate events.\nI put those terms in quotation marks because those events, namely the accidents and the unlikely coincidences.\nThose events are not in the least accidental.\nThey've all happened inevitably, according to deterministic laws of physics.\nAll of them are caused by the transporter.\nAnd David's pausing there, just my reflection, and this is where I think I'll end up today because we'll get to this.\nDavid does write about this or not in these words.\nWhen I was learning about the multi-verse version, David introduced me to so-called Harry Potter universes.\nSo I'll give you my take on what Harry Potter universes are like.\nThey kind of follow this idea here.\nBecause you can have these chains of extremely unlikely events in a very small measure of universes, but still exponentially increasing in number, what could happen is this?.\nThere could be literally a universe in which you have some teenage bespeckled boy who carries a wooden stick.\nAnd each time he does this with the wooden stick and says, abracandabra, a spark comes out of the wooden stick.\nThat's perfectly consistent with the laws of physics.\nElectrons can gain enough energy to come out of wooden sticks.\nThey can just happen.\nQuantum theory says things very bizarre.\nHere's a simpler example.\nHere's a glass of water.\nNow, interesting thing about water is that at sea level, it has a boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius.\nIf we heat this water on a stove, then 100 degrees Celsius starts to bubble away.\nAnd it will all disappear if you continue to boil it.\nThat's not surprising.\nSo if water has a boiling point of 100 degrees Celsius, an interesting question is, why should it evaporate right now?.\nIf I leave this here for long enough, at a mere temperature in this room right now of about 23 degrees Celsius, eventually after a long enough time, it will all evaporate away.\nBut it's not boiling.\nSo how does evaporation work?.\nBecause evaporation can happen at any temperature.\nThe solution to that is that the 33 degrees Celsius water that's in here, let's say, that's the average.\nTemperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy roughly speaking of the particles of water in here, the H2M molecules.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=3091"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c62ee5e9-8302-4516-bad3-cf8eb606bb4a": {"page_content": "But it's not boiling.\nSo how does evaporation work?.\nBecause evaporation can happen at any temperature.\nThe solution to that is that the 33 degrees Celsius water that's in here, let's say, that's the average.\nTemperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy roughly speaking of the particles of water in here, the H2M molecules.\nAn average means that some of them have much less energy than 23 degrees Celsius.\nAnd some of them have energy much higher than 23 degrees Celsius.\nSome of them have a temperature, effectively, have a motion that corresponds to a temperature above boiling point.\nAnd so those ones boil away.\nAnd so as they boil away, in fact, it causes the temperature to go down because you're losing the highest energy ones.\nBut you can't possibly take away all the high energy ones because although the average might go lower and lower, it's still getting heat from the environment as well.\nSo this is how evaporation in general works.\nNow, it is consistent with the laws of physics that because it's an average, it could just happen that all of the particles, why does any one particle have a temperature or a motion that corresponds to a temperature above 100 degrees Celsius?.\nWhy should any one of them have that by chance?.\nCould more than the average have a temperature above 100 degrees Celsius?.\nYes.\nCould all of them, according to what we know about physics, could all of them just by chance have a temperature above 100 degrees Celsius?.\nYes.\nExceedingly unlikely.\nExceedingly unlikely.\nYou would never expect, I would never expect to be drinking this and suddenly to be scolded and burnt because the proportion of universes in which that happens is so exceedingly small.\nBut that's the principle, right?.\nThe principle is that randomly, all of the molecules in this glass of water could, extremely, exceedingly rarely, become, start moving so fast that the entire glass of water here boils.\nWhat's that got to do with Harry Potter universes?.\nWell, the boy in some universe somewhere that a speckled boy with his wand, a say wand with his stick goes abracadabra and a spark comes out.\nThat's exceedingly unlikely, but it could happen, it could happen once.\nAccording to the quantum theory, it could continue to happen.\nIt's not the fact that the spark is caused by the boy doing this or saying abracadabra, uttering the magic words.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=3293"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4f1c7621-05c5-4d14-8735-dafa073ee5cc": {"page_content": "Well, the boy in some universe somewhere that a speckled boy with his wand, a say wand with his stick goes abracadabra and a spark comes out.\nThat's exceedingly unlikely, but it could happen, it could happen once.\nAccording to the quantum theory, it could continue to happen.\nIt's not the fact that the spark is caused by the boy doing this or saying abracadabra, uttering the magic words.\nThere's no causal effect between those things.\nIt's perfectly consistent with the laws of it.\nIt just happens by chance that these electrons go flying out of the end of the stick, but in his head and all people around him, they think, wow, Harry Potter has the ability to actually do magic.\nPerhaps he keeps on doing this thread his entire life and every time he does that, the spark comes out.\nAnd so he apparently is a wizard who is able to have lightning come from his wand.\nAnd so he appears to be a wizard, but he only appears to be a wizard.\nIt only appears to be the case that magic works.\nMagic doesn't actually work.\nAnd in fact, if there is a universe in which, and there is, where a boy has gone abracadabra and the spark has come out, the overwhelming majority of universes then are such that the second time he does it, it would never happen again.\nIt won't happen or the third time or the tenth time or the millionth time he does it.\nIt's just not going to happen again.\nBut in some universes, it will happen once in a lesser number of universes.\nIt happens twice.\nIn a lesser still number of universes happens three times.\nYou get my point, there will be some exceedingly small number of universes where every time he does it, it works.\nWell, I say works.\nIt appears to work or that event happens, the spark comes out.\nAnd so we termed these universes such universes, Harry Potter universes, where exceedingly rare events happen.\nAnd the people in those universes could concoct the story about how magic works.\nAnd so there are places, as David will explain in the part that I'll read next time, where bizarre fiction appears to be true.\nOr in fact, it in certain bizarre types of fiction are true.\nBut that doesn't mean that the things are causal there.\nSo this has to do with whether or not the knowledge they have there is valid.\nAnd this goes deep into the idea of information flow.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=3382"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e8ac59e-31ef-4432-b728-b42ff7e72c19": {"page_content": "And the people in those universes could concoct the story about how magic works.\nAnd so there are places, as David will explain in the part that I'll read next time, where bizarre fiction appears to be true.\nOr in fact, it in certain bizarre types of fiction are true.\nBut that doesn't mean that the things are causal there.\nSo this has to do with whether or not the knowledge they have there is valid.\nAnd this goes deep into the idea of information flow.\nSo there we've got a whole bunch of chance coincidences, okay, that the saying of the abracadabra, the spark flying out of the stick, and therefore people referring to the stick as a wand and to the spark as magic and Harry Potter in that universe as a wizard.\nEven though the stick is just a stick, the spark is just a spark.\nIt's not magical lightning.\nHarry Potter is just a kid with spectacles.\nHe's not a wizard, but people in those universes, they don't know because it's just been freak coincidences.\nBut that's an exceedingly small number of universes.\nOne would expect a number of universes smaller than the number of universes in which suddenly all of the water in all of the oceans on planet Earth has boiled away instantly.\nIt's happened somewhere in the multiverse, but the measure of universes where that's happened is so tiny as to not really be of anything other than purely academic interest.\nOkay, so more on that next time I hope this one was enjoyable.\nUntil next time, see you, bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F1CY7uhYK0&t=3504"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa65e9a0-4f41-4141-a202-1fed35c33017": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and to episode 103, the second of my ask me anything episodes.\nThe last one was a lot of fun and there were so many questions that I couldn't get to them in the one episode last episode were all the questions I received, almost all the questions I received from my Patreons.\nI think there might be a few more to tidy up today.\nToday we mainly questions from Twitter and a few other sources as well.\nThese ask me anything episodes are good for me because they're unscripted unlike with my other episodes that go into detail about books I've read and ideas that I'm investigating.\nI have to do a bit of research and write a little bit of a script and at least write notes and of course do a lot of reading.\nWith these all I'm doing is taking the questions and then responding to them in an unscripted way so hopefully it comes off a little bit more natural anyway.\nFirst is Sam Harris likes to say and some of his podcasts a little bit of housekeeping.\nThis is going to be the first of the episodes that I'm going to release as an audio-only priority so it's going to come out on all of the podcast platforms first and then it will come out on YouTube and so that might be what I'm doing going forward.\nThere will be the odd video episode here and there which will be much shorter than what I've tended to do.\nMost of my regular episodes however are going to move to audio only.\nThat doesn't mean they're not going to be published on YouTube.\nThey will be.\nIt's just that they won't be very video intensive.\nThey'll just have the minimal visuals there such that I can upload them as a video and anyone who listens as audio only on YouTube will still be able to do that.\nNow there are a lot of questions today so I'm not going to go through any more of a lengthy introduction and instead just dive straight in to the questions so that I can hopefully get through what is left of them so that I can hopefully get through all of the ones that have been submitted to me.\nFirst one from Twitter from Jitten congratulations on getting to 100 he says.\nI look forward to the next 100 by the way.\nAm I too late for an AMA?.\nHow do people learn false things through conjecture and criticism also?.\nBut then their criticism can't be any good.\nFor example, how do home your paths learn their craft?.\nOkay.\nso how do people learn false things?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e650578b-df86-4937-94da-d619d0b1af45": {"page_content": "First one from Twitter from Jitten congratulations on getting to 100 he says.\nI look forward to the next 100 by the way.\nAm I too late for an AMA?.\nHow do people learn false things through conjecture and criticism also?.\nBut then their criticism can't be any good.\nFor example, how do home your paths learn their craft?.\nOkay.\nso how do people learn false things?.\nWell remember that according to a popularian framework everything that we know is false anyway.\nIt's going to turn out false in the final analysis.\nWhat we have are misconceptions, misconceptions that are more or less close to the truth but never the actual truth so what we're learning are false things.\nSo you might very well ask how do we learn Newton's Law of Gravity?.\nWell via this method of conjecture and criticism.\nSo the question can't be how do people learn false things as if that is something different to learning true things because all of our knowledge contains misconceptions and so therefore in the final analysis as I say it's going to turn out.\nFalse.\nSo we're learning those lessons, those theories, those explanations via this method of as you say, conjecture and criticism and that's producing false things.\nSo if the question is how do people learn pseudoscience?.\nHow do so many people learn these false things that the rest of us understand what the explanations are for why they're false for much of our knowledge what we regard as our best explanations, we don't yet know why those things are false.\nOne day we will and we will improve on the present best state of our knowledge but at the moment we don't have good explanations as to how those theories, for example these theory of quantum theory, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory of genetics and so on and so forth, all of these great scientific theories, the theories about how World War II started and finished and so on and so forth, pick your good explanation.\nOne day we're going to find out that these theories contain misconceptions.\nNow when it comes to homeopaths or astrologers or pick whatever one of these pseudoscience is that you like, how is it that they learn those things well and exactly the same way as you kind of hint at.\nAnd it's not that their criticism can't be any good, it's just that they haven't yet learned why these things are false, presumably.\nAnd so it's just a bit of knowledge that they lack.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=106"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "af134f77-3ff4-4270-83dd-f9034b164740": {"page_content": "Now when it comes to homeopaths or astrologers or pick whatever one of these pseudoscience is that you like, how is it that they learn those things well and exactly the same way as you kind of hint at.\nAnd it's not that their criticism can't be any good, it's just that they haven't yet learned why these things are false, presumably.\nAnd so it's just a bit of knowledge that they lack.\nIn the case of homeopaths, as I understand it, what you do is you dilute the solution more and more and more and the more you dilute the solution, the stronger the nostrum, the treatment, the medicine that you apparently have, the homeopathic remedy, the stronger the remedy becomes, the more and more it's diluted, which of course is in stark contrast to what we know of chemistry.\nChemistry at work precisely the other way, the more that you dilute something, the weaker and weaker the concentration is, or the more dilute the concentration is I should say, and therefore the less of the active ingredient is in that thing.\nHomeopathy says that the water has some sort of memory.\nThis violates what we know of physics and chemistry, you know, how is this memory stored within the water, why does the water only remember the good things that were in it and not for example, all the sewage that has ever been in it?.\nThese things are questions unanswered and a homeopath who is sufficient or comes to learn a sufficient amount of chemistry, would I suppose have to partition their mind logically in some way in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance that would come with, simultaneously thinking that homeopathy, where you dilute something more and more it becomes stronger, in chemistry where if you dilute something more and more it becomes weaker, you would have to somehow deal with that contradiction.\nBut whatever the case is, yes, homeopaths have to learn their craft in precisely the same way as a chemist would learn their craft.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=227"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e2d6489-9459-4906-be02-daabd2c9c217": {"page_content": "They just wouldn't learn science alongside, and it's not that I suppose their criticism can't be any good, it's that they don't know the criticisms, or if they've been presented with the criticisms they don't understand it, or if they're presented with the criticisms they might have a financial interest in simply ignoring the criticisms that they are receiving, or perhaps they somehow have some emotional bias that could be all of these reasons why they might not understand, or refuse to believe the criticism when the criticism is valid.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=342"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "93b1c3cd-2712-4034-ba8a-0e895ab3462f": {"page_content": "But there is only one way to learn, whether learning the best explanations we have, or the misconceptions we have, or the completely not a myth that we have once understood.\nOkay, Jitin has a second question, and he asks, persuasion still fails when trying to persuade creationists, flood authors, anti-vaxxists, et cetera.\nWhen you do have good explanations, how does it fail here?.\nSo this is a related question, really, on the reasons why persuasion might fail, and my understanding is, and my thoughts on this, would be that persuasion often fails in these situations when the person trying to do the persuading has a bad way of trying to explain things to these people.\nNot always, but I like to put the owners back on the person doing the explaining.\nOne might wonder why are you trying to convince this person in the first place?.\nWhen we say, there exists a good explanation, we kind of mean that in the objective sense.\nIt's out there in abstract space, someone at some point has found this good explanation.\nIt exists, whether or not anyone believes that any more or not, if everyone was wiped out by an asteroid tomorrow, but our books were left behind, by definition there would be no one left to understand, to appreciate, for example, that we lived on a, well, that we once lived on a spherical earth.\nBut that knowledge would be there in books.\nAnd if an alien race came along, they would be able to pick up those books and find out what we knew.\nWhy will persuasion fail to convince a creationist that they're wrong?.\nYou might also consider, if you're ever explaining something to a child, why your explanation fails then, is it the fault of the child?.\nI would say no.\nI would say that although you might possess a good explanation, having the other person, the child in this case, try to understand that good explanation, it's all on you.\nIt's all on you getting that across, especially if the child is particularly interested in that thing.\nAnd if you can't get it across to someone, it suggests a couple of things.\nIt might suggest you don't actually understand that good explanation after all.\nYou think you do, but when you try to put it into words, you can't, which is a red flag about the extent to which you really do understand it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=220"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0292bd6c-6878-40c0-b202-36d808fc5f7d": {"page_content": "It's all on you getting that across, especially if the child is particularly interested in that thing.\nAnd if you can't get it across to someone, it suggests a couple of things.\nIt might suggest you don't actually understand that good explanation after all.\nYou think you do, but when you try to put it into words, you can't, which is a red flag about the extent to which you really do understand it.\nIf you really do understand it, you should be able to put into more and more simple terms such that the person can lead to me two half way in coming to appreciate what you think you appreciate.\nThat's one thing.\nAnother thing is, some people are just bad at communication.\nSome people are just bad at trying to persuade people, they mean about it, they lack compassion, they lack empathy, they lack an ability to try and see things from the point of view of someone who doesn't yet understand what they understand.\nThey've all had better and worse teachers, and the worst teachers are the ones that although they might very well have the knowledge, the way in which they go about trying to explain what they know is either boring or it's just in a manner which isn't unkind, there can be any number of reasons why you aren't persuaded by the teacher even though at some level they must have a good explanation operating on their mind or in their mind.\nIn the case of people who are in our culture, committed creationists, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, this kind of thing, people who embrace pseudoscience, there's a number of reasons for that.\nI would blame firstly, possibly, the school system, in turning people off science, in not presenting science in the way in which it should be presented as a process, but rather turning it into a body of facts which you can't question, and then people come out of school and they begin questioning things and they think that they've been indoctrinated into these ways of thinking about science,.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=490"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f1005232-69cf-4b94-b346-21212d62535c": {"page_content": "this body of facts, and rightly they're skeptical about everything they've been taught at school because they begin to understand that at least some of what they were taught was wrong, and once you begin to be critical about some of what you think, you might very well be critical about everything that you have been taught because the way in which people who aren't creations aren't flat earthers, aren't any of anti-vaxxers, try and persuade these people into coming around to their point of view, is in the most unkind, ungenerous, pandering, patronising, and sometimes simply insulting way, you're not going to convince a creationist, a young earth creationist, that they're wrong by yelling at them about how stupid they are, by telling them that they're ignorant, and of course so many people these days embrace the theories and explanations of science, for precisely the same reasons that creationist flat earthers and anti-vaxxers embrace the theories that they hold us true, in other words not because they've necessarily reached it by a truly critical process but rather because they've memorised the body of facts, now on the side of the people who memorised this body of facts in science, well at least they're memorising our best set of facts derived from our best explanations, but it doesn't mean they really understand what they're saying, you know this seems to happen very commonly when it comes to questions about climate change, how many people truly understand the mechanism by which climate change happens, they might understand for example there are these things called greenhouse gases and the greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, but do they understand how at the level of the molecule, what's precisely going on with carbon dioxide and infrared radiation, do they really get what's going on, do they understand the explanation, or are they outsourcing most of that explanation to the experts, and if they're doing that why are they so vociferous in their emotional connection to this particular theory and willing to insult their neighbours and other community members who disagree with them because they also don't actually", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=607"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "20ce7414-e2f7-4746-8697-f11c2d9e9694": {"page_content": "precisely going on with carbon dioxide and infrared radiation, do they really get what's going on, do they understand the explanation, or are they outsourcing most of that explanation to the experts, and if they're doing that why are they so vociferous in their emotional connection to this particular theory and willing to insult their neighbours and other community members who disagree with them because they also don't actually understand the theory, so we've got two people neither of whom understand the theory on the one hand someone says climate change is real but they don't really understand the theory and on the other hand a person who says climate change is not real, it's not really going on, it's not anthropocentric or whatever, they also don't understand climate change, but these two people are yelling insults at one another all about a theory they don't understand because they're both dogmatically committed to a particular doctrine that comports with their worldview, with their politics and so on and so forth, so this all comes down to why persuasion fails because people aren't I think in many many cases genuinely trying to persuade one another about the truth or falsity of these particular positions, everyone has to go in with and open mind and a critical mind in order to really learn and I would say not to try and get caught up in these discussions if you're not really interested and the other party is not really interested in making progress on this front, there will always be people that don't yet understand the best explanation and that's fine, you know not everyone has to understand everything and some people can have misconceptions, there will always be people who have misconceptions, I would say that so long as the geophysicist you're talking to isn't a flat earther, so long as the GP that you're going to with respect to getting a vaccine isn't an anti-vaxxer, you're fine, it doesn't really matter and this will be controversial but it shouldn't even matter if these people occupy political positions either, if a creationist has a political position, if a flat earther happens to be the present of the United States, if someone in the Senate happens to be", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=707"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "65f036c7-ac1a-4c9b-89e1-c50f70269fd8": {"page_content": "so long as the GP that you're going to with respect to getting a vaccine isn't an anti-vaxxer, you're fine, it doesn't really matter and this will be controversial but it shouldn't even matter if these people occupy political positions either, if a creationist has a political position, if a flat earther happens to be the present of the United States, if someone in the Senate happens to be an anti-vaxxer this shouldn't really matter and the reason I think it shouldn't matter although it probably does, it shouldn't matter because none of those positions should be something that the government has any interest in really, in the case of vaccines produced recently, well private industry came up with them anyway pretty quickly, in the case of creationism or people being committed to a particular kind of religious mythology, every again everyone has misconceptions, no one is immune from wandering around with misconceptions and many people want to pick on particular kinds of misconceptions as being especially dangerous but if it's not directing the day-to-day decision-making which is in the purview of the particular government then I'm not particularly concerned if the present or the prime minister happens to be a young earth creationist, I might very well be more concerned that presidents and prime ministers do things like print more and more money under the misconception that this has no effect on the average person and the amount of money they have in their bank account for example, so misconceptions are everywhere and persuasion should be expected to often fail because sometimes people are not interested either in persuading, they're just yelling at insults at someone else, or being persuaded again they're just dogmatically committed to a particular position without really understanding it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=810"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a9cd9e7-da32-444c-88a1-165e330e74d6": {"page_content": "Next questions from Ashik, less questions and more a list of things to do.\nNumber one, a refutation of physicalism, okay.\nwell let's deal with that one first.\nWell the refutation of physicalism is simply that, they really do exist, abstract things in reality and those can have causal effects in the world.\nI've used lots and lots of examples, there are examples in the beginning of infinity of this before, let's come up with one now.\nLet's say you're playing a computer game and let's say this particular computer game has various levels in order to proceed from one level to the next.\nWhen you win a particular level the screen goes green, at the end of that particular level, to tell you that you have one that particular level.\nOtherwise it goes red and you have to start all over again.\nImagine the screen turns green, why does the screen turn green?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=927"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "17fb1ac0-9453-493e-8171-704c098a4446": {"page_content": "Physicalism would say that you're supposed to look at the individual pixels and trace what's going on at the level of the individual pixel, okay for example there's electrical energy going through the pixel and that's causing some sort of photo luminescence where the photons are coming out and they happen to be a green color and you trace that back, that sequence all the way back through the circuitry of the computer and from the circuitry of the computer you end up going out to the electricity supply and from the electricity supply you go all the way back to the to the power station where perhaps coal is being burnt and you're saying that this is the reason why,.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=971"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6aaee175-0e26-4edd-9fca-451d2a6e77d3": {"page_content": "okay this long sequence of cause and effect events is the reason why ultimately the pixels on the screen turn green and that's why the screen turns green because all the pixels have and all the pixels have because this is what the electrical circuits have told them what to do.\nWell that's if that was the only possible explanation and with someone insist that that's the only explanation and the only thing therefore that exists are the physical events then you would be a physicalist.\nI don't know who's really committed to that particular style of physicalism whether there's other kinds of physicalism I don't know.\nbut the refutation of that kind of physicalism is to simply say well the screen's gone green because that's the rule of the game if you win the level then the screen turns green and talking about games to begin with a computer game it's not a physical thing it's an abstract thing.\nit's it's something that can be printed onto a CD-ROM supposedly possibly or a DVD or download it off a server somewhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1006"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "584360f0-6645-46de-9f66-2160b7fd749f": {"page_content": "and then it's run through a computer and following the rules of the game the rules are abstractions and performing certain actions as a person playing the game these things thinking through what you need to do the thinking part again is more abstract stuff going on the best explanation for why the screen turns green is not in terms of the movement of electrons through circuits the reason why the screen turns green should be at the level of i1 the game and that's what happens and so much of the explanations that exist out there in the human world come down to more than just the physical events at the level of subatomic particles and physical forces question two is similar along these lines how laws of physics and mind are abstractions so they're different they're certainly different kinds of abstractions and this was in my interview with David we talked in fact about both of these and well in terms of mind let's deal with mind first it's an interesting kind of abstraction we both admitted there that presumably there is an algorithm for something like a human mind we don't know what the algorithm is presumably you could write this algorithm down in something like natural language on a piece of paper multiple pieces of paper perhaps might be a complex algorithm and then that could be turned into code which you could you know put it into a particular computer language maybe C++.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1063"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "650d6370-b4c7-48da-ac19-78922fdcaf74": {"page_content": "and then you could program a computer with this particular algorithm presumably that algorithm then would be an algorithm for creatively generating explanations that algorithm is not made out of physical stuff that algorithm can be represented in different physical substrates represented in but not identical to either the paper on which it's written or the code in which it appears and in the computer but even then represented as code in a computer or written down on a piece of paper it's not yet mind it's not yet mind it's not mind until it starts to run until it starts to do something and so that's why it's an interesting kind of abstraction compared to something like a number.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1153"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4c924123-0c1f-4a62-b458-4c7accd1f41c": {"page_content": "okay the number two exists as an abstraction and can be written down as the numeral two that we're all familiar with or as the set of symbols.\nfour over two or the screen of symbols something like that ten minus eight all of these things represent that number two but there's no sense in which the number two need to run like a program needs to run like presumably mind would need to run in a computer in order for the computer to have a mind in terms of how laws of physics are abstractions well that's very interesting the laws of physics can't be made of matter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1192"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b07d0583-6d67-4f02-920b-11c14ce163de": {"page_content": "so because they're not made of matter that means they have to be something other than matter and so that's why we say their abstractions and so that's one sense in which they are abstractions their abstractions in a similar way to the number two being abstractions however they have very important causal effects on the stuff going on in the universe ultimately they determine everything that goes on the universe they don't explain everything that goes on the universe we've made that point before and the interesting thing here is that we have knowledge of the laws of physics and our knowledge of the laws of physics amounts to abstractions so we have abstractions our knowledge of the laws of physics about abstractions the ontological actual final laws of physics which we come to understand over time with increasing fidelity third question from Ashik is your favorite chapters from the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality and also from Phil what's your favorite chapter from each book no ties my to our shadows and the jump to universality for what it's worth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1227"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6535cc38-1b11-4548-9333-d2e1697eedc0": {"page_content": "yeah.\nso okay.\nwell let's deal with the fabric of reality first.\nand I'm just here me turning the page.\nperhaps so I can go to the contents certainly shadows was the one that made me.\nand I've said this before realize that I was in the presence in terms of author of someone who was writing at a different level to anyone else I had hitherto encountered because I was struggling to understand quantum theory and chapter two was the thing that made me feel as if I did finally understand what was going on.\nand.\nso yes I have an emotional connection to shadows chapter two of the fabric of reality because it's the one which really convinced me there's a multiverse it's simplest that that's a realistic conception of quantum theory and from then on quantum theory became not this hugely esoteric subject it became something more like geology and astronomy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1302"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "af21b590-da64-4f3a-af21-0018d4b92e91": {"page_content": "I just got it even though other people refused to accept and will get to this and one of the final questions refused to accept the multiverse to me it's just a straightforward simple explanation about what's going on it was demystified so that's all done in shadows in around 20 pages so highly recommend reading shadows if you want to understand quantum theory now my second favorite chapter in the fabric of reality would be as we've just been talking about a chapter about the first time I understood really something more about abstractions namely chapter 10 the nature of mathematics where my favorite line if not of the whole book certainly of that chapter is necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics it is not the reward we get for doing mathematics so that's from chapter 10 of the nature of mathematics of the fabric of reality rather and that appeals to me so much because prior to reading that prior to really understanding what was being said there I was one of the people that David was arguing against namely a person an intuitionist of a kind someone who thought that mathematics was on a different level to every other kind of subject it was a subject where you could really ensure it certainty where you had a solid foundation in thinking that you actually had the final truth you were there you were inherently able to understand particular truths and so that brought me out of that particular state of mind from then on I understood that mathematics really depended upon our knowledge of physics and if our knowledge of physics said that well matter behaves in these ways that could cause the symbols on the page for example to change then it might very well be the case that what you think you have proven with a rock solid mathematical proof could actually be an error in fact error had to always be part of the picture and so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1348"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "008f7426-dbc0-4324-bf67-793bf61ae55b": {"page_content": "yes chapter 10 of the fabric of reality convinced me of that the beginning of infinity and chapter one the reach of explanations is probably my favorite chapter there now the reason for that is although I'd read the fabric of reality and thought I knew what it was saying.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1471"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40d356bd-a933-45ba-8355-968bb512d0e8": {"page_content": "and then I subsequently read some pop-up and thought I understood what he was saying I never really got the fact that at the heart of everything in science and everywhere else is this idea of explanations and of course there in chapter one as David says and we'll come to this and another chapter I said before this is where the real innovation happens in the fabric in the beginning of infinity where David explains what a good explanation is namely an explanation it's harder very while still doing the work of explaining the phenomena that you're interested in so that would be my favorite chapter from the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1482"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "acaf6c58-45bc-49d4-8d1d-2cf99266ce79": {"page_content": "and then I think I'd have to pick chapter 12 a physicist's history of bad philosophy just because I'm interested in this topic of why don't people accept the best understanding of quantum theory and well it's explained there very very well okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1520"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f011c36-127f-449d-820d-3ed8a7efd9c8": {"page_content": "it's explained the bad turns and philosophy that happened which caused academics and professional quantum physicists to inherit this particular way of thinking and this bad philosophy this chapter on bad philosophy explains some of the things that are going wrong even now so it's prescient in a sense once the philosophy goes wrong once academic philosophy begins to go wrong a whole bunch of other things that can go wrong as well so physics is kind of the canary in the coal mine to some extent if physics itself can start to be upended by bad philosophy then certainly politics, history, biology, everything else can start to be upended by bad philosophy so that chapter really tells you the reasons why you need to value philosophy it's not merely something that is confined to the halls of academic institutions it is there but it leaks out and if it goes bad there the bad stuff leaks out everywhere next question from Tim Stevenson another question observation is theory laden.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1539"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a364442c-3b7c-462d-90db-08e1970b0c2a": {"page_content": "but a facts also theory laden is a fact not a theory that is said to be fallably true.\nyeah.\nso both of those things are true I would say a fact is fallably true anything we think is a good explanation is I would say that's what I like to say it's fallably true which sounds like a bit of a cop out because once you start putting qualifiers in front of true like fallably true what you really mean is not true so what I mean by fallably true is something like.\nwell we're acting as though it's true for now okay take it seriously as true whilst keeping in mind that ultimately it has to turn out false.\nso that's what we mean by fallably true we just don't know how it's false yet now if we don't know how it's false then we can act on the assumption that it is true and we even do this with things we know we are actually false like Newton's theory of gravity as I keep coming back to that trope example we know that it's false.\nbut we can act as if it's true and solve problems using it.\nbut Tim asks are facts also theory-laden.\nyes yes so in the previous asking me anything episode people asked me what I thought a fact was and I said it was just an elementary part of a particular theory and I think there's a strict line between fact and theory at all I know that people who oh look you know there are popular science communicators there are even famous scientists there are comedians there are all sorts of people out there who like to try and put a strict line between facts and theory.\nso when we talk about the famous example that often comes up here is the theory of evolution and people get very vociferous.\nand I start you know bashing the desk and saying.\nbut it's not a theory it's a fact or something like the word theory and science means something different to the word theory anywhere else all of which is false.\nokay.\nthe theory of evolution it's both factual.\nokay it's it's something that is so far as we know true at least neo Darwinism the most modern versions of evolution by a natural selection that we understand involving genetics and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1604"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff3ef270-e804-47ac-a758-dee8389a898a": {"page_content": "and I start you know bashing the desk and saying.\nbut it's not a theory it's a fact or something like the word theory and science means something different to the word theory anywhere else all of which is false.\nokay.\nthe theory of evolution it's both factual.\nokay it's it's something that is so far as we know true at least neo Darwinism the most modern versions of evolution by a natural selection that we understand involving genetics and so on.\nand so forth that's factual it's our fact in some way or a set of connected facts it's also a theory it's an explanatory theory and theories are ways of explaining the world some of which are good and some of which are not good so the real distinction is between good hard to vary theories hard to vary explanations and less good and bad explanations over the world.\nbut yes facts are theory laden pick a fact I mean the sky is blue well to me.\nit's blue that's theory laden because according to my eyes the sky appears to be blue now we could take a spectroscope you know one of these devices that measures the wavelength of the light and we could find out the light coming from the sky has a particular wavelength and that wavelength corresponds to what we define as blue light and via that chain of reasoning we end up with a conclusion that yes the sky is blue based on the readings of instruments.\nbut of course all that depends upon the theory about how the instrument works okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fbbcc433-87ee-4a49-98ff-8141ece68714": {"page_content": "so even if we have this global consensus that the sky is blue it still comes down to a theory about what blue is so it doesn't matter what your fact is there has to be theory behind it an explanation as to how you're getting to that fact in the first place that's what the theory laden part is you have a theory about how the knowledge has been generated and that theory is fallible and so therefore you're reaching a conclusion that is fallably true as you say there all right moving on a question from Danny thoughts on the mind body problem uh huh I don't think it's much of a problem really um I think mind is software running on the body the brain.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1790"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9cc4c6b-23de-49fa-8429-eb4e0f0cc151": {"page_content": "and that's that there's certainly an open question about as we've already talked about so far this episode is to what kind of program the mind is what kind of software the mind is exactly and how this software gives rise to a subjective sensation consciousness in other words these are tough questions we don't have answers to at all but in terms of mind body I think this is just an ancient issue about the thought of that mind being immaterial couldn't possibly have effects on things that are purely material you know it's a day cat explained this you know that mind whatever it is might be a spirit of some kind you know a spirit that's inside of your body in some way you're sold your immaterial soul is somehow or other pushing around the physical stuff your body.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1830"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "16bb497e-5c19-45f2-a6c2-bee30048e90c": {"page_content": "and I think he thought it was in the pineal gland inside the brain which didn't really answer anything it just pushed it to a different level it sort of just kicked that explanation down the road that non explanation down the road.\nso the mind body problem is not a real problem the software controls the hardware how does that work well information in a computer is stored as a sequence of zeros and ones.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1883"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d65d40fe-98f5-46c8-8ae1-d7f51449f7ba": {"page_content": "but what does that mean well if you go deeper the the ones are usually higher voltage signals and the zeros are lower voltage signals of some kind a voltage is a difference in energy between a set of charged particles one set of charged particles usually electrons in this case and electrons and another set of charged particles so some of the charged particles have high energy high voltage some have lower energy low voltage throughout a computer system stored in transistors capacitors whatever you have a pattern of such charges high and low voltages which represent the zeros and ones in the memory of the computer and as they move around the circuits you're getting movement of these high and low voltages so you've got actual physical things moving around.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1907"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f370caa-fe59-4c55-afcb-247a88b2a2c2": {"page_content": "but the pattern is not material right because you can represent that pattern of stuff as sequences of zeros and ones written on a standard piece of paper on a blackboard or typed out in a document somewhere so that's abstract that's not material because it's independent of its physical substrate but it has to be instantiated somewhere and once you put it into the computer.\nand then you hit run on the computer program well then what you've got going on is a whole bunch of physical interactions.\nso this is what's going on with the mind I'm explaining how software affects hardware.\nbut it's exactly the same principle because what's going on is the circuitry through the computer or the pattern of electricity that's moving through your neurons is actually physical forces upon things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=1952"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8fd288c0-b310-42e1-8058-d0c208bd70f9": {"page_content": "so if we just stick to computers because I think they're better understood you know the normal silicon computer is that in a normal computer the reason why the hardware does anything at all why it moves so to speak why the pixels illuminate why the speakers make noise why the printer ribbon prints and so on and so forth why stuff gets pushed around in the hardware is because of that pattern of zeros and ones the pattern of zeros and ones represented as voltages and the voltages have high and low energy and the electrons can push things because they're their actual they're actually charged particles that can repel one another and those repulsions are physical forces.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2007"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bfe3a1ad-8c3e-49e4-b990-ff6a330620b4": {"page_content": "so that's it the the the the abstractions have physical effects of via that mechanism via that physical mechanism but they can't be reduced to nothing but that after all as we say you can take that pattern of zeros and ones once more and write them out by hand as zeros and ones on a piece of paper and there it is you know there it is it.\nit's different to the voltages at that point and the same must be true of what's going on in the brain.\nso I.\nso I think it's not a problem it's been solved it's been solved by us having a modern understanding of computation and how computation works okay on to next question from Chrisman Chrisman Frank would love to hear you talk about the ways Deutsch has improved on Popper and James Baird has said plus one.\nokay so absolutely an even David has admitted this very modest he doesn't admit to improving on Popper in many ways.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2047"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "321a278a-7786-4d7a-888b-98722c0b7dda": {"page_content": "but he does say that the innovation in the beginning of infinity is that he has explained what an explanation is and he did that because people asked and so he thought about all the different kinds of explanations that were but certainly as a as a specific thing coming up with this idea of hard to vary while still doing the job of explaining Popper never had that and generalizing that as being the well I shouldn't say generalizing emphasizing that that really is the key not only in science but everywhere that were after these good explanations and this really is the line of demarcation between science and non-science you can have falsifiable theories which is what Popper of course came up with he figured out that line of demarcation but that's necessary but not sufficient in science to explain the difference between for example a homeopathic nostrum a homeopathic treatment and actual medicine the actual medical treatment that is going to make claims about treating a person's illness.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2105"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "463a6058-7f7a-4ff1-8b92-b400311122c0": {"page_content": "but so too is the homeopathic remedy so they're both going to be testable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c6eda3f6-3abd-40cb-9222-1c6c08ea379a": {"page_content": "but that doesn't mean just because of the fact it is testable that the homeopathic remedy is scientific at all it contains within a bad explanation about how homeopathy works so this distinction between good explanations and bad explanations is certainly an innovation by David Deutsch and an improvement on Popper I would also say that David has really certainly in my mind linked morality and epistemology with this claim about do not destroy the means of error correction that error correction is the thing that we need in order to continue to make progress and I don't think Popper quite had that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2178"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e30763a1-4e69-475c-9183-d9932298af30": {"page_content": "and so there's this computational digital view of epistemology which leads into morality in a way.\nand I think that's an improvement on Popper Popper was there with the way in which we need to have progress but whether it was tied to error correction as explicitly as in the work of David Deutsch I'm not sure I think David's improved on that and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2222"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "14326085-2a26-4bb3-a884-ae146d7df318": {"page_content": "of course the emphasis on optimism there is a flavor of optimism which I think we could call optimism in the style of David Deutsch that is unique and stands apart from any other kind of optimism that even exists today amongst the various other optimists as well and wasn't really there in the same way in the work of Carl Popper and explicit and very good explanation about why probability fails in so many places is something I don't think Popper quite got at but David Deutsch does and as I mentioned earlier with my favorite chapter in the fabric of reality I think David really gets the heart of the matter about articulating what the nature of mathematics is so I think he improves on Popper there as well and of course absolutely explaining quantum theory I think Popper tried to explain quantum theory failed but David Deutsch has managed to do that I think he even improves on ever for that matter I mean ever it was the first one to come up with this idea of the multiverse but David Deutsch has brought it to a whole bunch more people explained it more clearly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2234"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c834cc3-8ed8-49b6-bc14-2bfc100553e9": {"page_content": "and so that's an improvement that's an improvement on Popper it's an improvement on his predecessors as well and of course my personal favorite of all of these advances that I think David Deutsch has made is on the nature of personhood I think the advance and what he has said about what I personally is something that is just plagued philosophers for generations millennia to try and figure out what is it that's about that is in us as human beings it is different to all other creatures that are out there everyone has come at this who's thought about this and written about this and talked about this from a different angle all of which capture aspects I will say of what the heart of the matter is now that we understand and people would say oh we've got morality or we've got art we've got the ability to do science and this separates us from the lower creatures but all of those are mere manifestations of the capacity to generate explanations of the world which give us a real connection to the rest of reality because the rest of reality is what we're trying to explain and the fact that it's explicable by us makes us very special in this universe and tells us something about what we are it's not the final answer to what a person is after all we don't know how it is that we generate explanations but that we do generate explanations separates us from everything else this connection to explanatory knowledge and I think so that is absolutely a philosophical insight that stands alongside anything from the canon of western and ancient philosophy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2302"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7cad0e0b-6bbf-4cd0-a878-fc222686127e": {"page_content": "okay next question Mike Stern what is one of the core ideas from the beginning of infinity that you found most difficult to re-explain or clarify for people new to this work and why I guess sustainability sustainability is a hard one it's such a common word thrown around these days and it carries these very strong moral overtones and so trying to explain that the only thing that's sustainable for us if we want to sustain ourselves in other words survive off into an infinite future is constant progress constant consumption of resources constantly increasing our population increasing our wealth spreading out beyond the earth this is the only thing that's sustainable for us and not only us but if you care about the panda bears if you care about the dolphins if you care about the forests you want to hope that we can sustain the increased population wealth creation and power of people because we know as a matter of science that if we don't do this everything absolutely everything on this earth including the earth itself will vanish in a cosmological event of some sort or other whether it is the sun eventually expanding to engulf the earth or something near the earth or an asteroid or a number of asteroids hitting the earth or a supernova going off nearby eventually over the next billion years or so life on earth will be exterminated us and everything else if you don't want that to happen then there's no point trying to sustain things at the present level to try and ensure the environment is unchanging to try and ensure that climate does not change it's interesting that we accept as a sort of moral maxim that the only constant is change except when it comes to the climate that we seemingly know the climate is changing but we don't want it to well whether humans do it or not it's going to change.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2400"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "becadfae-d08d-42aa-bb3f-7016befccbba": {"page_content": "and so we should deal with that change possibly the best idea is to learn to live with the change in some way or other if we're not going to actively try and reverse the change.\nbut this is where sustainability is brought up always in these concerns about the environment concerns about people just being a kind of evil that need to be damped down in terms of population growth always population growth as regardless being the thing that is unsustainable but in fact it's the only thing that is sustainable and so this is really hard to get across to people.\nand I think of all the messages in the bidding of infinity this is the one that is yet to make inroads but needs to make inroads significant inroads because governments around the world are absolutely captured by the notion that population for example is a pressing urgent problem but many of us on the other side of the ledge I think well we agree it's a pressing urgent problem.\nbut we need more we need more people we need a greater population of people living at a higher standard of living.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2522"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b310be7a-db67-4267-93c8-0d97d3a4e25f": {"page_content": "but of course on the other side you hear people saying things we need fuel people and they need to be living more like our ancestors they need to not have so much wealth because the wealth is creating pollution and waste and changing the environment and we want to keep the environment as it is we you can't do that without well if you want to keep the environment the same you need a significant amount more wealth and more power and more technology in order to stop the climate from changing because even if we quit all fossil fuels tomorrow and even if we left the earth to its own devices the climate will change that's just the nature of climate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2584"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5502fb29-ee3e-4a4b-ba52-d92e95aeb7cf": {"page_content": "it's it's like the weather but.\non longer scales longer time scales.\nso this is the thing that's really hard to get across so there's that and related to that is infinite progress I mean just so many people find it unbelievable fantastical that we could have infinite progress that literally humans and their descendants will just go on forever solving problems and making this universe a better and better place.\nand we could we could be the first generation to be a part of that if only we were harder to make more wealth and to solve problems and so on and so forth.\nand so it's hard to explain those two things without getting caught up in the emotion and in the politics and encountering people that are touchy on these particular topics that are that are wedded to things like the you know concern for the environment.\nand they just dogmatically committed to the idea that humans bad pollution bad waste bad large population bad and and and and just persuading them of the opposite are is thought with all sorts of political divisions and moral hazards do you think there are ideas within the beginning infinity it's Mike's next question are there ideas in the beginning infinity that trace back farther than the enlightenment say to Judeo Christian ideas values or myths.\nyes sure every idea has a lineage now I'm not one of these people necessarily I hear some conservative commentators say the really there are two pillars to our civilization philosophically speaking one is the Greek tradition of philosophy and the other is the Judeo Christian ideas I think the the Greek tradition is far more important far more important for a whole bunch of reasons we might go into right now.\nbut.\nyeah.\nthe Judeo Christian ideas do have a place and I think they were an escape from and even more primitive more brutish way of existing in the world bad as it was you know it happily live 2000 years ago under a Christian or Jewish theocracy then in a hunter-gatherer tribe.\nsomewhere along sure the morality was oppressive.\nbut it wasn't as bad as the constant warfare and the constant mistreatment of people within those societies it was an improvement incremental perhaps but an improvement nonetheless.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2627"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69723d11-4e5d-4362-b8a7-61e835c21252": {"page_content": "and I guess key the key thing from the beginning infinity that really comports in some way one might say with many of the major religions is this the centrality of the person which is lost in atheism to a large extent if you simply have atheism or if you simply have some other sort of political ideology like for example forms of Marxism and things that flow from Marxism communism socialism where you end up with the value of the collective over the individual in fact you lose sight of the individual person and the importance of the individual person then all sorts of bad stuff follow so the beginning infinity certainly places the person there as the unit which creates generates explanatory knowledge and it's explanatory knowledge which transforms the world transforms reality around us for the better putting that person putting the person back at the center putting planet earth as a hub has something to do with with things that with religions like Christianity which were the first crude attempt at doing something like that I don't think there's anything whatsoever in the beginning infinity which is at all mythological or religious it's more coincidence than anywhere than anything else except in so far as there is definitely virtue in putting people putting a person at the center of your concerns within a society if you're setting up a society having the person there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2769"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b07c2832-7d56-4642-8473-71fb7143370d": {"page_content": "and so I don't the Christians and Jewish people and other people who are involved in major religions they I think would have the in explicit understanding that people are absolutely central to this whole project without being able to articulate why I think the beginning infinity articulates why from an analytical philosophical tradition and a scientific viewpoint.\nso.\nyeah.\nI guess that would be the way in which I trace that that particular idea the centrality of the person from the beginning infinity back to antecedents that exist in religion but I don't think David Deutsch got it from religion it all I think he got it by independent means.\nokay next question from O fallobelista how do you see the spread of Deutschian ideas in the future what is the plan the plan I don't think there is plan the plan it sounds a little bit like a secret cabal.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2865"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5e133b43-6574-460e-9f31-743fcd06a26c": {"page_content": "well it's more up to you and anyone else listening really my hope would be that these ideas in the future continue to gain traction and inform individuals more and more when they do that they can inform groups of people they can then inform the social well-being of whole communities among other things and civilization as a whole the messages in the beginning infinity give you if you take them on board and there are certain other philosophies like this as well they can help treat I think the malaise that is happening right now cause people to not be terrified of other people constantly or terrified of tomorrow or despairing about tomorrow I can lead you to have greater understanding and compassion for an interesting others interesting in others as a beginning of infinity interesting others as being sources of ideas as being generators of explanations as being solvers of problems that's what we want and this is why I say we need more and more people we need a greater population not a smaller population the only thing that we have a poverty of is ideas we don't have a poverty of resources we need more and more ideas about how to get more and more resources in fact and how to solve the problems that are going to be before us and eventually there's going to be a problem that far outstrips anything we've dealt with either too as a modern civilization so we better want to hope that there's going to be a smart person out there that can contribute crucially to the solving of that experiment and the more people we have the more likelihood there's going to be that at least one of us creative people can come up with a solution in time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=2923"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ddc9a70e-39a9-4367-bbd6-ed0a132e86de": {"page_content": "so this is what we need in the future more people to have this stance of thinking of their neighbours as important means by which we can all solve our problems but there's no centralized plan on this.\nand I don't think a centralized plan would be good at all everyone should have their own plan what I'm doing is a podcast many of us are trying to promote these ideas publicly and more people should do this and more power to more people in doing this whether it can become even bigger even better in form people that have even more wealth and power influence.\nwell the future will tell the future will tell but certainly we're trying and with navalin board the reach of these ideas is certainly increased over the last few years and we'll continue to increase we only hope it happens in time as I say I am hopeful that will happen in time I'm optimistic will happen in time I'm not despairing that the problem is going to be encountered that we can't solve okay.\nso on to the next question from rich martin you've advocated for rapid general progress and yet careful incremental changes to our institutions this seems to be a contradiction how do we resolve it great question rich.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3024"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b1657e30-8e3d-4a93-ac56-f3d5386f2a94": {"page_content": "yes I do sometimes I think I've miss spoken on this in that I've said slow changes to our institution now rich hasn't said that here but thinking back to what I've said I may have seemingly contradicted myself but the way in which riches put it there is not a contradiction at all because and this is the way I do like to emphasize it the way riches put it there I want rapid progress but at the same time I want incremental changes incremental changes means you just change a small thing and then you check to see it's been actual objective improvement and that can take some time but ideally you would want incremental a a change reflection judgment evaluation if you might say before moving on to the next change observation of what's going on judgment evaluation of what's happened.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3109"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95b21ccf-9a09-4c8e-84b3-a6465817fda6": {"page_content": "so you know that these incremental changes are in the right direction so we want as many of them as quickly as possible and as many of those incremental changes as possible in quick succession would amount to rapid general progress for institutions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3155"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b54fa487-1216-43f8-bfd1-3df7d1b2fec6": {"page_content": "so I'm not for wholesale like that there's a lot of talk at the moment I don't think these people necessarily we hope they don't have a huge amount of influence and power people who want to completely upend the way in which the major democracies of the world operate the way in which they work the way in which they have shown themselves to be resilient over time and allow for this this stable incremental rapid ratcheting up of the rate at which progress can occur progress has only occurred in the enlightenment tradition across Europe parts of Asia now the angler sphere because of these institutions which allow for rapid progress so there is no contradiction there so that the only time I have kind of contradict myself if I think back.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3172"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3bc512a-c1bd-423e-bd99-2c59d528653a": {"page_content": "and maybe I'm just being not very generous to myself.\nbut I think I might have said I'm let's have slow changes to our institutions and rapid progress you know everywhere else kind of thing but by slow.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3220"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "116d054c-2211-4ba7-b2e0-1cbd17fd9e66": {"page_content": "I think I you know intended to say something like incremental as Richard said there but incremental doesn't mean slow digital systems are incremental they move by increments you know one thing at a time is done one task is accomplished then before you move on to the next one and so when I say an incremental change in the institution check to see this one change has had the desired effect and if it doesn't reverse it undo it go back and try something else that's the way in which incremental change happens but you can do that as rapidly as you like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3232"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3743e360-fa6b-4e10-b826-f334c9063936": {"page_content": "so no contradiction next question from Matt McGahn in the spirit of criticism because you've thought the most about this stuff I'd like to know which parts of David work David's work you think are incorrect or you disagree with and along the same lines pole synthesis asked what did David get wrong or you disagree with both interesting questions I think I've been asked these multiple times over the the years now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3263"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "17afb3db-5f9c-40d8-868e-1f31cf810bd9": {"page_content": "so I might I'd have to take a step back in order to answer this properly and to explain why I'm giving the answer that I'm about to give well because I really became a fan of the work of David Deutsch soon after the fabric of reality was published so that's you know 1997 25 years ago something as I said before I was in the fortunate position to be a part of a community where we were able to discuss these ideas with David directly so all the times that I thought I disagreed with David about the contents of the fabric of reality all the times I thought you know I'm smart I'm a physics student I've studied philosophy and so on I got to put my questions to David himself I got to have them answered and clarified and through that process I ended up being persuaded that I was wrong David was right and the same happened after the publication of the beginning of infinity I read multiple times and in doing that you know on the first reading you might think I don't really get that I don't really understand it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3287"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ef3dabd8-9ada-44a8-b77d-fe224fe10599": {"page_content": "I think I disagree you read it again you go.\noh I get where he's coming from.\nand then if I still disagreed I would be able to go to David he was very receptive and very helpful in responding to questions and persuading me that I was looking at things in a way that wasn't what he intended and you know so on and so forth he would clarify things.\nand so then it would come to a deeper understanding of this entire worldview so since the podcast has been going.\nand it's not even going for what four years or something I think I'm a podbean and YouTube telling me have told me that it's about mid 2018 it seems longer than that or something but anyway mid 2018 is only how long the podcast has been going for so all the time before that back to 1997 really was something like me working through all the places where I I thought I disagreed with David but when you disagree that typically means in these cases that you misunderstand something.\nso although I thought I disagreed I actually misunderstood and in talking about the ideas I realized where the misunderstanding was I understood came to understand.\nand then I agreed and so in large part because of that because I came to agree with the contents of the books and because the contents of the books were so amazing and all my questions that I ever had were addressed adequately you know.\nand I got to a point where I thought well there's nothing that I find I really strongly disagree with at all or disagree with at all and so that's the motivation for the podcast.\nreally I mean like the better question is why would you make a podcast about this book well because it's a book where not only are the inside so amazing.\nbut I can't find a place where I really have any significant disagreements with the book at all.\nand so that's why I'm promoting it so much and while I think it's you know one of the reasons apart from the fact that it's civilizationally important.\nbut I don't find any errors in there it might seem astonishing for me to say that that I can't find a place where I disagree but that's the fact I don't now me personally and you know when I'm explaining the ideas of course I have a personal bias and a personal emphasis which might be slightly different to what David does but that's just personal taste it's not actually explicit disagreements so far as I can tell so what did David get wrong.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3354"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b8d7c48b-65ba-4f60-856c-bedbcd65a445": {"page_content": "but I don't find any errors in there it might seem astonishing for me to say that that I can't find a place where I disagree but that's the fact I don't now me personally and you know when I'm explaining the ideas of course I have a personal bias and a personal emphasis which might be slightly different to what David does but that's just personal taste it's not actually explicit disagreements so far as I can tell so what did David get wrong.\nI guess the most generous way I can put that is I don't know what do I disagree with nothing that I can think of.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3461"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "12bece22-4081-4ed4-8c4d-76a6ab516a2f": {"page_content": "and I have thought about this before previously next question from Hemza why does Deutsch object to the fact that morality is about suffering what does it mean when morality is considered to be a question of what to do next do moral facts exist because of our existence is free will consciousness explanatory knowledge fundamentally tired why does Deutsch object to the fact that morality is about suffering does he or does he just say that that can't be a foundation and the reason it can't be a foundation because you don't need a foundation anywhere you don't need a foundation in physics we can always ask why the foundations are the way they are what we're after is good explanations and that's true in physics and biology and history.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3493"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8d08b07-c5e3-467c-9581-0e05cfb807bd": {"page_content": "and it's true in morality as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5a32971b-b1ee-4de2-8528-8cd7691f735d": {"page_content": "so I think that morality certainly explanations within morality can touch upon suffering and the alleviation of suffering no problem whatsoever the distinction is between whether or not suffering and the alleviation of suffering utilitarianism and those kind of consequentialist arguments in morality whether that has to be your final ultimate unalterable foundation for morality or whether you might also need to consider other things so whether you're a problem sir situation might entail not regarding suffering as being the most important thing as I like to say my my thinking on this is there will still be moral questions questions about what we should do next absent suffering I think suffering is a solvable problem it's a soluble problem suffering is something like pain with an explanation accompanying it so you can have mental suffering mental language.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3536"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "99473c64-a7dc-4818-9f34-2d977a64a8b8": {"page_content": "so you're going to be as mental pain this stress whatever else you want to call it that's a form of suffering you're being coerced into suffering even if someone's not literally sticking pins into your thumbs you might be coerced in some way shape or form even if you're not under in physical pain you can be in mental anguish that's a form of suffering we I can imagine a universe in which that's alleviated which people aren't routinely coercing one another into things everyone's just freely exploring the right thing to do for them and they're not hurting anyone else and everyone's being rational and reasonable and so on so there's no mental suffering that's a physical suffering I can imagine a world in which we overcome that as well via technology and medicine and and advanced distant future where pain has been alleviated for the most part they're all all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3595"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "03dceb97-13d4-4d62-9bf4-e39fd9b4d3b6": {"page_content": "entirely.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d046112c-5216-422f-a3b3-3ae795c8421f": {"page_content": "you know I can imagine a world in which we exist in that state but that doesn't mean that morality ends even if suffering has there would still be a question about what to do next you know what projects to undertake in your own personal life civilizationally what we should do should we go to this planet or that planet should we embrace this architecture for the next best computer or that architecture we're building a virtual reality environment which one do you want to go into into experience someone on so forth at infinite and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3642"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a7b03ff7-baf7-456b-8e5d-72e187ebb079": {"page_content": "which uh physics theory do you want to get on board with and make contributions to what you should do is a moral question right this is the central question in morality what should you do next and if you're suffering you should try and alleviate your suffering obviously but that's a solid any particular moral question is a soluble one and the question of suffering is soluble I think even the the Buddhists accept this that the best understanding of what they're about is dissatisfaction.\nand so I don't think all dissatisfaction is suffering you know you can be dissatisfied you may not um content with where you are right now I don't know if that necessarily means you're suffering you might have a whole bunch of options before you all of which are great.\nbut you need to try and figure out which of these fantastic options that are before you in a world of no suffering that you want to do next.\nand that's a moral question so that that deals with the first two questions do moral facts exist independent of our existence.\nwell it depends on what you mean by how if you mean human beings that live right now.\nwell yes they.\nthey do I mean there could be other people in the universe.\nand I think that has to answer the question I mean there are people who existed in the past so those moral facts existed for them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3665"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d785da60-7bd1-4b6d-971d-553a5d4c721f": {"page_content": "but if you just take away all people everywhere well I think the question is like does history exist without our existence you know does does politics exist without our existence does art exist or a beauty exist without our existence and I think that question is I think those style of questions aren't solving a problem is what I would say you know what probably you're trying to solve in determining whether or not there's moral facts can exist without up prior to the existence of any person ever anywhere it's kind of like this human biology exist in some ontological way without humans ever having evolved in the universe well what problem are we solving by even trying to commit that question it's a very very abstract very removed from any practical issue question it's I would say it's like pseudo philosophy kind of thing what place does morality have absent any conscious creatures whatsoever.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3742"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "474e1323-74f2-4527-b0d2-746ab01ef283": {"page_content": "well I don't think the answer it's like a necessary truth almost absent a physical universe of any kind what is the meaning of mathematics you know does mathematics exist well nothing exists if you don't have a physical universe of any sort.\nwell you get ourselves tied up in these pseudo problems until the end of time.\nso yeah is free will consciousness explanatory knowledge fundamentally tied.\nyes I think so I think all of these things are fundamentally tied we don't know.\nhow and I should say we don't have an explanation I can check your ways in my blog if you look up I think the title of the blog is something like free will consciousness and knowledge something like that will creativity and knowledge for people watching on youtube I'll put it up on the screen I'll put a link on the screen try to remember to.\nanyway.\nyeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=130"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2eb29943-c166-4084-8d9a-9cd168d55eae": {"page_content": "I think that something like my perhaps too clever by halfway of explaining this is to say that the creative act of explaining something is what it feels like to be conscious so your that that experience of being a creative entity is what we call consciousness now for anyone outside of you observing you they kind of observe your consciousness but they can observe your creative output which is the unique thing about you is your creative output and the thing that distinguishes people in general from all other animals and if this is true of course this solves a whole bunch of moral issues which I won't get into right now but it would say that consciousness is tied to the capacity to create explanatory knowledge it may not be I'm happy to be wrong about that now free will is this capacity to choose to create explanatory knowledge and people can choose to be fully focused on the creative enterprise or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3853"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "612bf296-6612-4599-b3e9-780d5c855bcd": {"page_content": "and this is where free will comes in now many people disagree with free will.\nbut you know I think that free will is just this term that helps to explain what is going on with people if you want to do away with it and say well you know people ultimately aren't the chooses of their choices.\nokay.\nwell yeah.\nnothing is the ultimate cause of anything okay.\nthere's always going to be another explanation I don't know the layer it which you can get to that explains the thing that's happening now but if I say the thing that's happening now is a choice is being made why is the choice being made because I'm freely able to do so and my my will is free.\nI'm free to choose amongst these different things and one of the things I'm freely choosing to do is to use my will in order to generate explanations.\nwell yeah if you don't want to use free will I just say I find I have to do linguistic acrobatics in order to deny the existence of free will this is why I endorse it.\nso I think these things are absolutely tied together well observed yes next question from Christian Dean taking Deutsche Popper seriously iron rounds objectiveism seems to be the only current socio-political theory that follows from them your thoughts on it.\nand if it survives criticism must it eventually prevail um follows I don't know if it follows from them does it or look I'm not an iron-rand scholar I'm a fan of your own brook I in listening to iron round in reading iron rounds work I just personally find your own brook much more captivating much more compelling.\nI better expositor of those ideas than iron round was I think iron round was wrong in many many ways of course my central interest in a lot of these things is epistemology and so of course I have major gripes with the epistemology but also the morality as well so that's where I think she's wrong.\nbut you know I'm still a fan of a sort.\nbut I'm more a fan of your own brook as I say I think that you're on using the ideas of iron round does the best job of defending free markets that I know of and defending capitalism and defending freedom and so on I think that it's a really well-informed robust resilient way of explaining the facility of those things the moral importance of those things I think Rand was and remains absolutely an iconoclastic thinker.\nand I agree there's virtue to for example selfishness.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=3918"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9441484-be34-408e-b186-5637be712566": {"page_content": "but I'm more a fan of your own brook as I say I think that you're on using the ideas of iron round does the best job of defending free markets that I know of and defending capitalism and defending freedom and so on I think that it's a really well-informed robust resilient way of explaining the facility of those things the moral importance of those things I think Rand was and remains absolutely an iconoclastic thinker.\nand I agree there's virtue to for example selfishness.\nbut I think she underestimates things like tradition tradition is really really important in explicit knowledge really really important.\nI don't think it makes it's not mentioned in her work in explicit knowledge and I certainly get I get that notion from you Ron who is certainly animated to debate for example conservatives on this point they should otherwise be on a similar side of the ledger I think the main fight right now is against authoritarians on the left side of politics.\nI think we do not know all the ways in which a society remains stable over time and we don't know all the ways that knowledge is instanciated in our institutions and these institutions are important to maintain that stability and allow for that progress and I think this has underestimated in the work of objectivists.\nso I don't think that undoing a whole bunch of them in rapid fire it's necessarily going to be a recipe for a better society you know I'm look I'm just going to haven't read anything this AMA so let me go to there's an article on the iron round lexicon all about tradition on iron round view of object of tradition.\nand I'm just going to read a paragraph here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4023"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a5ecc5a-699d-4a24-8106-dcbf9b888a05": {"page_content": "and then I'll I'll comment on this paragraph that I read so Rand writes on the topic of tradition quote the plea to preserve tradition as such can appeal only to those who have given up or to those who never intended to achieve anything in life it is a plea that appeals to the worst elements in men and rejects the best it appeals to fear sloth cowardice conformity self-doubt and rejects creativeness originality courage independence self-reliance it is an outrageous plea to address to human beings anywhere but particularly outrageous here in America the country based on the principle that man must stand at his own feet live by his own judgment and move constantly forward as a productive creative innovator end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4128"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fd81ee39-ff9c-4c83-ba42-033410d05d41": {"page_content": "quote so I think that's just extremely confused about the role of tradition namely the tradition of criticism and how this tradition of criticism this tradition of innovation.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9b267407-bcc2-4b3f-84b3-b718b45fffe4": {"page_content": "so she's got innovation there she thinks that innovation somehow just happens you just follow in the enlightenment tradition and you will get innovation but that's just not true we don't know exactly how it is that we've remained stable over time great Britain Europe United States Australia Canada these these places part of Asia over long stretches of time we've managed to continue to be innovators roughly peacefully and it is the traditions and the institutions that have allowed us to do that so this innovation and this creative stuff that ironed round loves this individuality the courage and the independence happens within traditions and specifically a tradition of criticism that we talk about often here as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b955a6c9-9118-4dba-9698-ffed645d287f": {"page_content": "so you know that that's terribly misguided I think by honour.\nand I'd love to talk to your own book specifically about that kind of thing what are the traditions and the institutions within our society that allow for open-ended progress and rapid progress yes we need to value the individual I certainly do the individual is the prime originator of ideas and we need to protect that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4226"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "21fd7a40-5e0a-4a48-9a8b-513ee8356d11": {"page_content": "but how we go about protecting that individual is a whole other question and to ensure a stable society over time especially when a whole bunch of people don't agree with you that the individual is so important especially when you have a whole bunch of people right now who think the collective is the more important thing and just on that passage just I think that passage is a good example I think Rand is bad at persuasion now the people who like Rand like Rand but the people who don't can you see why I can yes of course she's terribly forthright and she's honest about the contents of her own mind the problem is that that style turns people off and you want to have to be a realist on that point or not the realistic take is your style of speaking and writing is turning people off.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4250"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "20fe960c-b059-454a-88c5-757d60329d24": {"page_content": "but I'm just being honest well not good enough some of your ideas are absolutely fantastic.\nbut if you want those ideas to be persuasive it's to really take off you need a new way of packaging them so thank god for your own brook on this point because he is seemingly willing to engage in these discussions in a much more friendly way and I think a lot of the objectives are much more friendly now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4301"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9fe46ce-977f-4ea6-bb32-1f3da1ea6f34": {"page_content": "so you know in a passage like that you know it's understandable that some people get turned off but being told you know they've given up or that they're sloths or sloth like I think that the this use of pejorative's fails to achieve what she hopes it's like you know when certain famous biologists insult religious people or even religious ways of thinking when you end up getting focused on the contents of a particular individual's mind rather than certain objective ideas out there it just turns people off you know the new atheists at times were only ever speaking to their fanbase they were never really persuading people to give up on religion because the way in which they went about it was hectoring and insulting and and now some of us quite enjoyed you know watching Christopher Hitchens get up you know and give it to whoever the Bible thumping priest was fun.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4317"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8d5bc3d-1a8b-4e9f-b3ad-3322c83fdd7e": {"page_content": "okay that's all fun but in terms of a person who was a follower of the Bible you're on the side of the Bible thumper.\nand you weren't persuaded by Christopher Hitchens some were some people were but you know if this was a good technique why weren't a majority of people persuaded why aren't they persuaded to listen to people who hector you act like that.\nso.\nyeah there's a sense in which just tone and use of language has a lot to do with how persuasive a particular message is going to be that's just reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4381"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e09c483-8561-4e73-9c18-e968bd17e97b": {"page_content": "oh and of course the finally on on Iran here um I can't stand the word the term objectiveism the self-described objectiveism especially when the epistemology is totally subjectivist for reasons I won't go into now talk about this at length on other podcast and even the morality is subjectivist that's all about the the individual which is important it's part of morality but a copy the basis go back to the previous question for that one next questions from Michael Chang when we say that a phenomenon requires explanation such as the initial conditions of the universe what is the problem that such an explanation solves if a problem is a conflict between ideas what are the ideas that are in conflict in this situation in that situation the conflict is between the various different initial conditions that could have obtained at the beginning of the universe why were the initial conditions what they were rather than something else so the initial conditions of the universe require explanation because they could have been otherwise so far as we know there have been attempts over time from mathematically minor types to try and produce a set of initial conditions that are necessarily the case given some deeper set of physical laws so if you went below the laws of physics as they are known general relativity and quantum theory if you went below them to some ultimate theory of everything kind of thing then out of that ultimate theory of everything would come the initial conditions those initial conditions are just there necessarily the as the case now even if we could come up with a solution like that to the reason why the initial conditions are the why they are because they are necessarily the case we still have the questions to why those deeper laws of physics that ultimate theory of everything is the way it is and why it wasn't some other particular law of physics now as for the initial conditions necessarily falling out in a particular way I don't know it's the prevailing view amongst quantum cosmologists particle physicists and so on and so forth I think most people expect that the initial conditions could have been otherwise but whatever the successor to quantum theory is a quantum theory of gravity or something like that that's the parameters these initial conditions could have been otherwise now perhaps constructive theory", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4402"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "afe40fcc-62ca-45fc-a35d-0677d5ca3a85": {"page_content": "the initial conditions necessarily falling out in a particular way I don't know it's the prevailing view amongst quantum cosmologists particle physicists and so on and so forth I think most people expect that the initial conditions could have been otherwise but whatever the successor to quantum theory is a quantum theory of gravity or something like that that's the parameters these initial conditions could have been otherwise now perhaps constructive theory can have something to say about this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4504"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "547cdc62-1e0b-4670-ae61-35691af134a1": {"page_content": "I don't know I'm not an expert just apologies as well at this point if you can hear any tap tap tapping it's because I'm experiencing a fairly heavy rainstorm at the moment here in Sydney and it's and so large drops of rain are coming horizontally up against the winner right now second question from Michael how can we reconcile the claimed objectivity of knowledge with the apparent subjectivity of problems problems only exist if solving them is useful but utility is to find with respect to a particular person what may be useful to one person may not be useful to another.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4530"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ceb6c41-d622-43e8-bafe-a0bed6f788e8": {"page_content": "uh-huh.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c266f9cc-ab2a-497f-ae6b-3c3c1ea6bb9d": {"page_content": "so here I think you may be conflating two kinds of objectivity the objectivity of knowledge means that the knowledge is out there in the world instantiated in things other than subjective minds individual minds so I can be written in books I mean instantiating computers it can even be in physical objects as I like to say like telescopes instantiate the knowledge of how to focus light so that's a sense in which the knowledge is out there in objects now the subjectivity of problems means that the subject an individual person has a problem so there's no problem here sometimes you there's no real issue here there's no no need to reconcile these things it's just the fact that a person has problems and those problems can sometimes be resolved by calling on objective knowledge if my personal subjective problem is hmm I don't really think that Jupiter has planets going around it that's my subjective problem I don't believe all the images I've ever been shown so that's your subjective problem now if you take a telescope the telescope instantiate objective knowledge about how to focus light as I said and it will reveal to you and it will solve your problem about how many moons you can see orbiting Jupiter and you say utility is to find with respect to a particular person what may be useful one person may not be used to learn yep.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4567"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "18932469-1926-478d-9d01-0ded5e9a8d95": {"page_content": "I agree with that you know you might also have utility for a particular community as well but more often than not in these cases you're going to be drawing upon objective knowledge treatments in medicine are kind of like this a treatment for one person might not be an effective treatment for another person but it will still the treatments whatever they are still constitute objective knowledge even though the subjectivity of the problem is going to come down to a personal very personal biology and the way in which that personal anatomy physiology biology interacts with a particular medicine a particular treatment and third question from Michael you've said differences between humans and machines is humans can create new choices but machines only have a search over a predefined set of possibilities aren't new choices just abstractions over more primitive possibilities though couldn't machines also generate new choices via abstraction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4646"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "33c9bb78-6f92-422f-baf1-24f7c5f51943": {"page_content": "okay.\nso if a machine can generate new choices via abstraction then they would be a general purpose choice generator a general purpose problem solver they would be people and in that case machine would be a pejorative it would be insulting a machine is mechanized it's an automaton of some kind so it has to obey a particular sequence of steps it's just doing one thing after another.\nit's following a particular it's slavishly following a program a humans not doing that as we say humans creating new choices so that's my delineation now the people might have different delineations but better than saying humans and machines we could just say humans and non-humans or the better yet more general people and non-people.\nokay.\nso people are these things that can create new choices because they generate new explanations which bring things into the world that hitherto weren't there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4700"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7454ef89-e7ff-41e3-891a-6f67371d4804": {"page_content": "and so therefore they can choose among these new things I think the example I've used before is once you have the explanation of nuclear physics and perhaps the engineering explanation of how to create a fission reactor then you have the choice you have a new choice before you that you didn't have before namely do you want to continue to produce energy via or electricity via the method of burning coal using a turbine or do you want to use the heat generated via the fission reactions in uranium in a uranium nuclear reactor to generate electricity both of them will boil the water and create the steam that you need but you have a choice that you didn't have before because you didn't understand nuclear physics now if a machine could come up with generating that kind of new choice if it could generate an explanation for example an artificial intelligence of the future if it was able to create a proper explanation which had predictions and so on of how to use I don't know quarks of some kind of exotic quark in order to generate a kind of fusion reaction that he'd the two we didn't know about and a tiny amount of matter was able to produce a stupendous amount of energy if a machine did that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4749"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a9b46909-020a-4b91-b570-fac76f717186": {"page_content": "I think we should accept or not a fission intelligence could do that.\nI think we should accept we're in the presence of an explanation generator we're in a presence of a person and presumably that thing could be asked questions if indeed it can explain something like this sophisticated scientific theory presumably it could also explain what it's experiencing right now and if it's experiencing something we're in the presence of a person and not merely something that could be or should be described as a meme machine like a car.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4825"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "432e5697-a0e7-4823-ba8c-618ec51a9c0e": {"page_content": "so a question from a patron who didn't quite get in before the deadline last time but I've included him here from Anders hi Brett one of your patrons here and a big fan thanks for all that you do two quick questions number one it seems in general that many of the many from the pop-a-doid school seem to be fairly libertarian you and the vial case in point did pop-a-doid influence this direction or do you consider their thoughts agnostic between for example libertarianism and conservatism as long as error correction is maximized well let's deal with that one straight away.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4850"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "337adfba-0e3e-4954-bf5e-36f8f2af0020": {"page_content": "yeah definitely that I think my road to embracing freedom more than I did previously was absolutely helped along by David Deutsch absolutely helped along by car pop-up once I understood that what we need is rapid progress every time I saw a thing out there in the world which seemed to slow down progress for bad reasons I thought was an urgent problem that needed addressing you know I take seriously this idea from fabric reality in the beginning of infinity that you know we would be immortal now if there weren't these times during which progress halted slow down stopped we should want to have more and more rapid progress and there are people against that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4883"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5d36d8f-6126-4163-bc51-34e0fcced4c9": {"page_content": "and I'm against authority in every way shape and form I think it is the antithesis of people being able to freely individually explore the space of ideas solve their own problems once you have an authority making a decision for everyone then if that decision is the wrong decision then everyone makes the same wrong decision everyone makes the same error you don't know what a correct decision might have been but if you have you know 10,000 people each doing subtly different things even if 9,000 of them all end up in failure you've learned something from the one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4928"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82d1db40-7764-427c-bd2f-508be2a5f3f6": {"page_content": "well you've learned something from the 9,000 people who failed but you also know that hey those 1,000 people has something to teach the rest of you but if you have an authoritarian system where well all 10,000 people are just going to have to do exactly the same thing then if it goes wrong and we should expect it to not be perfect and it will go wrong in some way shape or form we've only trialed out the one ID.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4959"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7cae200b-d28d-45b7-ae8b-df65e05f423e": {"page_content": "so this is the argument for libertarianism or forms of libertarianism I would just say anti authoritarianism in whatever way shape or form that is which is why you know I appeal to people who are against authoritarianism to broadly come together because I think that's the main fight is against authoritarianism and so broadly speaking modern conservatives are against authoritarianism libertarians broadly speaking our against authoritarianism the iron round objectives are against authoritarianism the free marketeers are against authoritarianism and that is the major concern I have now I share that with many other people so once you value progress knowledge creation creativity you realize that the enemy of creativity and the enemy of reason is coercion authority force that kind of thing and so you'll let down this road now of course many of us on this side in this particular strand of the popularian worldview the David Deutsch's worldview still value tradition as I said earlier for all the reasons I said and those traditions they have guardrails of a kind that doesn't mean the guardrails can't be changed or tinkered with and so on and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=4984"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "293c6a9a-fd36-4b7b-a966-52e90ff35dc9": {"page_content": "but it just means that outside of those guardrails we know that there are ways towards chaos and the ending of progress because all the other dead civilizations didn't have the same guardrails even in the best cases where you have you know Athenian society they had some guardrails but the guardrails apparently were not sufficient in order to preserve their society now our guardrails are like you know the very fast train that's going along these guardrails is making rapid progress that doesn't mean you can't change the gauge now and again that doesn't mean you can't make improvements along the way but you have to take seriously the idea that at the moment you've got the best thing that has ever existed so far and when you start talking about devaluing tradition for example what you're saying is what's working so far what has worked so far there's a problem with it for reasons of we could only go fast if only if if only if we just took the rails away maybe the train would go faster if only if we threw the engine away maybe we could get the train to go faster if only we stopped using this fuel and we just threw that fuel into the engine even though that fuel doesn't work in that engine maybe the train will go faster will have more rapid progress more creativity greater innovation or that kind of thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5052"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d23fa42-5b6e-4ccb-a364-536cc9b8f152": {"page_content": "so this is why we value tradition and institutions because none of us really know exactly all the reasons why this particular train this train of rapid progress works as well as it does we have some explaining to do and with that that's part of this open-ended game of explanation that we're playing is not only in making scientific advances and moral advances but also understanding our own culture that's really really important part of this and the way in which we understand anything is via this libertarian view of things or the authoritarian tender say these days of course is the train itself in and of itself is an evil and we need to stop the train we need to turn the train around go in the other direction or we need to destroy this train and just start all over again.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5124"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15f10cf0-0425-4c49-9037-8a2cf21de67a": {"page_content": "okay which is an absolute recipe for disaster and everyone the Conservatives of libertarian is the object of us people in free market is we need to be on the same side against that because that is a really strong push right now so are there thoughts agnostic between libertarianism with services I am possibly I don't know enough about especially the work of Karl Popper on what his view of the distinction there might be I know that he definitely value tradition of course absolutely so he may have been more conservative kind of thing less libertarian don't know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5166"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ad2530d8-b468-4533-a1da-3af5fc5413f0": {"page_content": "but certainly he valued freedom and you know these people are you know everyone from meal and Adam Smith through to run and through to Popper they value freedom and liberty in slightly different ways to different extent.\nbut that's what we need to concentrate on now the fact that they they all value liberty.\nokay next question it seems there is a beef between Popper Deutsch in the formal education system is this a laboratory anywhere in their text not covered to my recollection of BOR if I were in general they're good resources for the perpyrean view on children you need to look up taking children seriously on the do explain podcast Sarah gave an interview about the taking children seriously philosophy and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5200"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "254ee0b8-da25-4e65-a33b-f8b8571821e7": {"page_content": "Michael Golding's also an expert in this area Lulu Tanett's an expert in this area and of course David Deutsch who originated this particular philosophy this idea of non coercion in child rearing and that's a complex issue that's not simply just that the child run free on the highway and let them do what they want no it is far more nuanced than that you have to have a proper sophisticated philosophical view of what non coercion is it's just to say that and again you can as with anything else you can infinitely improve and iterate and and then just improve parenting parenting today as a heck of a lot better than it was five generations ago clearly same as education is clearly you know I have over spend a lot of time in education I have a problem a lot of problems with the formal education system it is a system of indoctrination it is increasingly politicized it's increasingly seen as a body effects and insofar as I think I was tweeting about this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5242"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4032ccaa-6e62-4657-aee5-e012c7fe647e": {"page_content": "recently well I was I did a threat on this recently about the idea that here teachers and academics exalting the praises of teaching them how to think rather than what to think.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5296"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fc434b44-1eaa-4866-89a7-386a5315353b": {"page_content": "but I just think that you know this whole idea of how to think is a real dead end in education right now children are being taught how to think how to think in the wrong way how to defer to authorities how to think about things like inequality how do you think about things like capitalism and so on and so forth so it leads to a whole bunch of really bad wants so I'm extremely skeptical critical of these pushes for teaching children how to think in a school I think schools are ill equipped to teach children critical thinking I tried while I was there in schooling system to bring in a certain vision of what critical thinking is to make it really critical of the curriculum as it was.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5306"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2698b65e-e604-4a0f-9b62-4802c56e1d3b": {"page_content": "but there was very little love for that kind of thing the schools are increasingly I'm on the side of the people who are very very worried about the way in which schooling is turning into more and more political indoctrination.\nyeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5343"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ea43f39-bcfc-473f-8fba-7bfbfbac1524": {"page_content": "it's always been a system of indoctrination but at least you know decades ago well not that long ago really you know living memory decades ago a generation ago at least it in science class you could get science at least in history class you could get relatively objective history other form now everything's political everything's political every single subject area seems to be mired in climate change and denigrating people surprisingly you know even in catholic schools which is one place you would hope that you had a refuge from people individuals human beings being run down as destructive in the environment well there's a thing called eco theology that I've talked about on my podcast before now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5358"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1db72a99-9e7c-45a8-945a-793c1dd06996": {"page_content": "as well so how this happens is because there are ideologues there are you know people motivate a primarily to try and win more converts for their sign of politics it used to be the case that you wouldn't really know what the political views of your teachers were nowadays you do and there is let's admit it only one kind of politics that is really acceptable in many many schools now good luck if you're an actual conservative good luck if you're actual libertarian and trying to work within a school.\nso yeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5394"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71d55a1f-0573-4908-810b-3a7844716634": {"page_content": "it's very concerning in many ways and many children have to go through many school students have to go through this fast of pretending to believe one thing in order to get marks and once they get out hopefully they become actual critical thinkers so there should be a beef between the proper Deutsch view of knowledge for example and the formal education system after all the formal education system is the bucket theory in action it's this idea that you just sit in front of the teacher and you just absorb the knowledge right now what I want the way mechanism as you can fiddle at the edges with the different teaching and learning styles this is what educationalist and teachers talk about but effectively there is a body of knowledge there is a list of facts that the student has to acquire and they're going to be tested on in order to achieve the qualification to graduate from high school.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5421"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1b06e58a-29bc-454e-b75e-03782897084d": {"page_content": "but we know this is why proper has this essay an objective knowledge called the bucket and the search line and the search line is it's far more about coming to a critical understanding of knowledge having a problem situation yourself that's very individual to you you develop your own interests over time and you become expert in those areas that you're interested in this is completely different to what school is school is just a mishmash of everything now I personally like school I personally did well at school.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5471"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e322c8e6-1282-4841-95e5-ee48f140b46b": {"page_content": "but that's just me the other one majority of people I'm not like this.\nand I don't think they should be forced through this.\nbut it's weird the people that often do poorly at school they come out of school.\nand they want their children and young people around them to do well at school as if their bad experience isn't some sort of refutation of the system itself.\nokay.\nnext question the question is any prerequisites for understanding the beginning of infinity what else material what other material should I read before or with the beginning of infinity that's worth as much to improve judgment logic and observation thanks in advance.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5512"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1f50fa1b-7e54-41cd-ba0f-a410d722e537": {"page_content": "Oh Sandy I would say this is hard because different people have expressed to me things that have pushed my own intuitions around about what I thought about the beginning of infinity prior to prior to making this podcast I was largely speaking to people about the beginning of infinity who are very much fans of the beginning of infinity from day one kind of thing and work kind of more on board with the views of David Deutsch and had some understanding of physics some understanding of epistemology and so on and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5528"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58fa1e6f-158b-4eff-9dc4-922f3422a810": {"page_content": "so forth.\nso we all kind of just thought naively I suppose that well anyone can pick up this book and get a lot out of it because we did.\nbut if you're coming to this brand new I think well you there's probably two types of people I think a lot of people can absolutely pick out the book and take away something from it.\nand then it's how much you take away from it.\nI think a lot of people can take a lot away from it without having any background whatsoever so it's absolutely worth getting the book and just reading certainly that chapter one the reach of explanation should help a lot of people.\nbut.\nyeah.\nI do accept that once you start getting to like chapter four creation chapter six to jump to university chapter eight a window on infinity you know some of these things they're going to require a at least some understanding some background in mathematics biology even computation to a certain extent to some extent anyway certainly chapter eleven the multiverse.\nyeah that would not be my first go to for trying to understand quantum theory the way in which if someone had no understanding of physics but was interested in getting a reasonable understanding of physics especially quantum physics would be to pick up a typical textbook just any old textbook we wouldn't really matter what and try and understand quantum theory from that good luck.\nokay you you will struggle or go to YouTube these days of course and just watch a lecture on quantum theory and introductory lecture on quantum theory.\nso if you understand what's going on maybe you will maybe you won't I would then say compare whatever you're getting on YouTube or from the textbook to chapter two of the fabric of reality shadows because it's just so clear and simple about what's happening what's going on there that if you go in with an open mind I think you come out the other end and you just go okay.\nwell that's pretty straightforward there's some interesting insights there that might be hard to take on board.\nbut I'll get to that in the next question I think you can go a long way to understanding aspects of quantum theory as well as many people understand quantum theory and then from that you might want to go to the most modern version of that which is the multiverse chapter chapter eleven in the beginning of infinity which is a step up I would say this you know the use of the term fungibility and uncountably infinite numbers of universes and all this kind of thing.\nyeah.\nso in that sense.\nyeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5570"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e83f204c-f9ac-4759-8cfb-56a471989f54": {"page_content": "yeah.\nso in that sense.\nyeah.\nthat chapter to the beginning of infinity I think probably has pre-worth grids it's it's really.\nand it novella said you know he's really it seems to some people these writing for physicists he's writing for his peers.\nso if you if you think that then.\nyeah you will need some basic knowledge of science but not as much as what people think I don't think I think you can get through it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5714"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3caf2583-5b84-4f86-b468-561106261261": {"page_content": "and I think you should have a go at reading it what else could you read to improve judgment logic and observation or just general thinking you're absolutely read the fabric of reality first instead of the beginning of infinity go for the fabric of reality the chapter is there on thinking and reasoning you know I read sort of basically at the beginning of my university studies and there's I can't remember at the time struggling super much with any of the content there really especially the stuff that's chapter three problem solving anyone can read that and take a lot away from if you can read you can read that chapter and you'll learn a lot hopefully that helps Sandeep from Ashish question for the next AMA if a person has struggled academically throughout their lives life then does that signal a lack of knowledge about the academic structure system or lack of knowledge about the learning about learning things or both I think it's a shared responsibility really if you're struggling academically well that's certainly a warning sign isn't it that's a criticism of what's happening now it might very well be one of two things or a combination of both one is you're not actually interested in the thing that you're doing you're not really really committed to it if you're going along to lectures at a university and you're struggling to understand.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5726"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a23fa4f3-2369-42ff-bf6d-e430593e1889": {"page_content": "but you're not simultaneously these days especially going on YouTube reading lots of books talking to people about the content of your lectures then how committed how you really to that particular subject you know if you're really committed to a particular thing then it becomes your life you're just ensconced in it you're surrounded by it and even if you have a bad lecture you should be able to get over it to some extent now if you really have a terrible lecturer who makes an uninspiring such that you're not even interested to go and explore these ideas outside of lecture time then.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5802"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d7c59e7-6530-4ca6-9733-dbc415481f8b": {"page_content": "yeah that's that's a problem with the academic structure and the system and of course if you proceed through the system like you know you start university let's not talk about scholastic with the university.\nand you're really really committed day one there on let's say mathematics you you want to be a mathematician of some sort.\nand you have to take all these different courses you know this was my story you ever take calculus.\nand you take the thing called discrete maths and you might take mathematical logic.\nand you know there's all these different subjects within the subject of mathematics different topics that you have to do different um units you have to get units of credit you have to get in order to get the degree well you might start off really really curious and interested in all of them.\nand then you go through and you get to the point of the exam and then exam is just a terrible experience it's hard you walk out of it just feeling dejected and awful even if you did well sometimes these exams at university are just so hard that you feel awful that's not a great way to learn is it.\nI mean if you're you know going through these terribly negative emotions that's part of the learning process which so often is part of this formal system of learning namely examinations namely someone telling you you didn't learn what you should have learnt then it's going to turn you off continuing to be passionate about that particular subject.\nso.\nyeah.\nthere is this entirely systemic problem about that whole formalised system which you know goes back centuries the Chinese were doing it for example on hundreds of years before we started ever doing it putting people in classes having them learn things by wrote and then answering exam questions on it.\nit's a great way to destroy creativity there are better ways of doing it but at the moment it seems to be the only way that formally people are getting qualifications and degrees and these different things in certain places it works.\nwell I think that in medicine for example if you're just a doctor and the whole idea is that you see particular symptoms in a patient and there is only a fixed list of possible diseases that are known to cause those symptoms then offering the treatment you know you know sort of wrote way learning what the particular treatment is in a wrote way is the function of the doctor to some extent or learning how to do a particular surgery.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5833"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8562e7b5-92cc-43a8-b83f-67930f257ce7": {"page_content": "but of course you just still want creative thinkers but there are you know professions where learning certain things by wrote is absolutely important but when it comes to pure science mathematics and various other creative enterprises you yes you need a background to some extent but this idea of having a stricter background of a huge vast amount of information that fills textbooks and you pass exams on this can just turn you off being creative and teach you how not to be creative but rather teach you how to remember things off by heart.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5947"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7f6360c1-fdbb-49ac-86ee-4f3b1eb6268f": {"page_content": "so if you struggle academically it could be any one of those things you're not good at doing exams.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a6fa8c46-b978-4d98-90f6-078e822ac118": {"page_content": "but you might still be a really creative thinker you might struggle academically because the teacher the professor the lecturer the tutor is just terrible you might struggle academically because no one's actually encouraged you at any point no one's told you hey rather than just paying attention during the lectures why not look online at different lectures do it delivering exactly the same thing in a more interesting way maybe you don't know how to maybe you don't know the the the the secrets to passing certain exams and so on and so forth so it could be all of these things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=5979"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f3064567-34a1-4e6c-8e3f-b48d265f4cd9": {"page_content": "so I don't think there's a simple answer there but broadly speaking shared responsibility it's sometimes hard to know who's more comparable is it you or is it that's a teacher or is it the system.\nyeah probably the system in many many cases John Ortiz asks me any book recommendations the irony of this question in that it's one of the first podcasts I'm producing without my video background of my bookshelf behind me so let me turn around and have a look at what I've got here.\nand I'm see if any of these speak to you depends on what you're interested in if you're interested in philosophy.\nand you don't know much a good introduction to Popper is literally called Popper by Brian McGee it's a very short book it only goes for about a hundred pages and it just explains Popper's thinking.\nso it's not by Popper it's about Popper's thinking if you like science broadly speaking and you want to book that contains geology and biology and chemistry and physics all tied up in excellent expositions on a controversial issue then the the book Rare Earth by Ward and Brownley is a really interesting take on the solution to the Fermi paradox and it's one I talk about often all the the ideas in it I talk about often because I don't think they're heard very often they're not.\nwell understood but astrobiology you know I'm trying to understand what the conditions for biology are that are needed out there in the universe if we're going to find ET we'll find the aliens if we're going to find life also in the universe that brings together all these different areas of science.\nso if you find a book about astrobiology Rare Earth is one such book popular science book it can teach you a lot about all those areas of science simultaneously sort of knitted together under this one heading of alien life you know we don't know about aliens yet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6006"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "87d423d0-9133-4551-bd19-a6f7e237a71d": {"page_content": "but we can constrain what the aliens might be made out of you know they're not going to be pure beings of hydrogen for a whole bunch of reasons that come down to chemistry and physical forces for history of philosophy I love Wittgenstein's poker and it's a book I've talked about before it's by David Edmonds and John Eider now and if you're just interested in two of the giants of philosophy of the 20th century kind of iconoclastic philosophical to some extent enemies of one another they had diametrically opposed views on so much except they both like to speak clearly and to try and well pop up more so than Wittgenstein.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6113"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "41e6dcae-a58d-45c8-99b7-9a93a6519a1c": {"page_content": "but they didn't they didn't have much truck with nonsense anyway.\nand so Wittgenstein's poker is about the tension between them and the one encounter they had in real life that came down to Wittgenstein depending upon who you listen to in the book either attacking pop over the poker not quite or simply just decorating with a poker to make a point so Wittgenstein's poker is yeah.\nour first hand accounts by a number of people about what happened and also the philosophy of Wittgenstein and pop up.\noh no I've got I'm in terms of fiction I've got 1984 up there I think everyone should read 1984 by George Orwell new speaks my favorite part of that especially right now the massaging of words to take on their opposite meaning and to have people forget about what they used to think it's just a great warning for the way in which societies can quickly fall into authoritarianism.\nbut you know on my Kindle and various other formats I have lots of history books as often what I just read for entertainment purposes anyway I have a brief history of Bolivia concise histories of Korea.\nI like reading reading about those two countries in particular because they've been through so many rapid changes and I like looking into what happens when countries undergo rapid change you know rapid change from base of the ground up where you know effectively revolutions go on what can go wrong and how badly it can go wrong in different places and in terms of scientific interest I'm interested in this idea of fine tuning.\nso I read everything that almost comes out on fine tuning behind me I've got the Goldilocks Enigma by Paul Davies and I'm like Kindle.\nI have a fortunate universe by Lewis and Barnes which is a great overview of this state of research in this fine tuning question and what we understand the problem to be whether it's actually a problem or not.\nand what possible solutions people have talked about so far next question from Glen Hall question that makes sense to me but you may not agree is common sense and logic compatible with quantum mechanics to me especially the multiverse defies common sense.\nokay.\nso this is the last question.\nyeah.\nabsolutely it defies common sense.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=130"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40ea7770-a5ea-47e6-90d8-4f0aa5c35873": {"page_content": "but so does almost everything in science I think common sense evolves over time if you asked a person a hundred years ago what was common sense it wouldn't be the same as what is common sense today you know two centuries ago it's common sense to just beat your children if they do the wrong thing today the opposite is true it's common sense not to do that so common sense itself evolves over time how far you have to go back when it was common sense that this sun went around the earth rather than the other way around I don't know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6281"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "503667c6-7db3-4cae-ab28-8fcfc59c8eb3": {"page_content": "but now it's common sense of the earth goes around the sun it just means the thing that people know.\nso.\nyeah.\nthe multiverse defies common sense but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not it's true and it is true does it defy logic now it doesn't it is compatible with logic.\nyes it is it has to be compatible with logic things have to be compatible with logic or else they're logical and if something is a logical then you can throw out in the bin now it is true that early on when people were trying to understand quantum theory and they couldn't.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6319"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40036ac3-0e9a-47a1-8b4c-4465e5371fc9": {"page_content": "but some people some physicists just went the whole hog and various others I think philosophers as well just went well what we're saying or what we think we're seeing we think we're observing in quantum theory and some of these experiments defies logic therefore logic has to go on the bin because science science takes promise it's like you have this choice before you either you're going to accept the physics or you know accept logic some went we're just gonna accept the physics I'm gonna throw logic in the bin in particular there were these ideas that for example a particle could occupy multiple places at the same time could be in different places at the same time so it could both be here at point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6344"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4ae6197-ede9-4fdf-b934-2af686c228f2": {"page_content": "x and and not at point x at the same time or it could be located at a particular point in space and simultaneously spread out throughout space.\nokay.\nthese these are logical so this violates the law of logic probably the most fundamental law of logic I would think called the law of the excluded minute which is something can't both be and not be simultaneously either I am here recording a podcast right now or I'm not doing that.\nit's one or the other I can't be doing both I can't both be recording the podcast not recording the podcast if you're listening to it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6377"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "41ba5df8-3cb1-46b7-ad84-e00a4522d963": {"page_content": "now it must have been the case that I record the podcast it can't have been the case that I never record the podcast that's logic logic simple logic quantum theory has to be compatible with logic and so the problem then became how do we make it compatible you have to just take it seriously if it if the theory says that a particle can occupy multiple positions at the same time then it really does all could apply multiple positions at the same time even if you don't observe them that just means that there's something wrong with your ability to observe all the positions simultaneously hence the multiverse so it obeys logic in fact it's the only logical way to understand quantum mechanics it's the only way so all you need to do for this is to go to my multiverse here is also go to the fabric of reality shadows understand the experiments that are done the uncontroversial content of those experiments that whoever it is who are who performs experiments or whatever the physicist is they all like all except how the experiment is done and what the results of the experiment is that's not a problem so that's the uncontroversial part the controversial part then comes in as to explain what's going on many of the if is to say well there is no explanation just except the fact that this is what the experiment does without ever worrying about why which is kind of like saying the earth goes around the sun in an elliptical orbit but you're not allowed to say why you're not allowed to invoke something like gravity because you can't see gravity you're not allowed to invoke Newton's inverse square law you're not allowed to invoke curved spacetime you can't do any of those things all you can say is that today the earth occupies this position on the elliptical orbit and tomorrow it will be there and then there will be there without ever saying why that's not science science tells you why in in the case of Newton's theory well there's this thing called the inverse square law and if you have the central body called the sun then there is this force between the sun and the earth and that as the earth moves around the sun the force exerted causes it to go this fast in the orbit is this is this big has this radius and so on and so", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6406"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4ac919be-9d7b-4103-9738-1c7010debdf2": {"page_content": "and then there will be there without ever saying why that's not science science tells you why in in the case of Newton's theory well there's this thing called the inverse square law and if you have the central body called the sun then there is this force between the sun and the earth and that as the earth moves around the sun the force exerted causes it to go this fast in the orbit is this is this big has this radius and so on and so forth so you have an explanation of an account of why quantum theory is the same thing you have these things these interference experiments where the particles if they were obeying if they're obeying what people think of as common sense what people think of as logic should follow a particular path but they don't follow that particular path so you've got some explaining to which is otherwise the case in science you always have this unusual observation which causes a problem you think what the heck's going on there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6499"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a3b01875-5c84-40f2-84ca-2228a135a36a": {"page_content": "and so what you have to do is to try and understand it so you conjecture you come up with creative theories and lots of people tried to come up with creative theories they would say things like well in these experiments where you're firing particles of light these things called photons through the apparatus it's simultaneously a particle isolated at a point and a wave spread out throughout space at the same time which I would say defies logic right other people would say things like what consciousness had something to do with it when a human brain observes when a person looks when they make an observation their consciousness somehow has an effect on the outcome of the experiment it's very weird it's very spiritual weird stuff mystical as if there was this force coming out of your brain affecting the trajectory on which the photons or the other subatomic particles are moving I find that a logical as well after all what is this force that's coming out of your brain how is it how is it working exactly never specified the only thing that makes sense the only thing that explains everything about what's going on is the multiverse the multiverse just says ah actually every time you fire this particle it's a company by other ones that you can't see.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6545"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce7722f3-2f41-49f9-be70-380050de7a40": {"page_content": "oh but you're not allowed to postulate particles you can't see but hold on you're always postulating particles you can't see to explain the things you see it's that science is all about the scene in terms of the unseen why is it that you see light coming from the Sun.\nwell ultimately it's because of particles you can't see mainly hydrogen nuclei deep in the core of the Sun being fused together to form helium and that creates heat and that heat eventually leaks out through the surface of the Sun as photons and we see the photons so particles we can't see in the center of the Sun causing phenomena we do see the same thing is kind of happening what's not the same.\nbut it's analogous to what's going on here there's particles we can't see giving rise to the phenomena that we do see this interference phenomena.\nand so that's all we're saying these particles we can't see aren't actually in our universe okay for a particular definition of a universe it might even be better like just David says it will be better if we had have just started calling scientific theory scientific misconceptions to begin with it would help with people understanding the process of science that we move from worst misconception to better misconception well the same might be true here if we just never had the word multiverse.\nmaybe.\nand we just had a parallel universe as we just said all the universe consists of the scene in the unseen these are the parts of the universe that are unseen you know their physical reality is bigger than what you think you can't you know the the laws of quantum theory say you can't actually observe these particular other particles but they're there and they're the only explanation for what we just I don't know.\nbut.\nyeah people people struggle to accept the multiverse because it defies today's common sense.\nbut you know decades from now it might very well become a sense once we have quantum computers for the reasons I said in my last ask me anything once we have quantum computers it would be very hard for people to stick to this idea that the contents of physical reality aren't tremendously larger than what we think and the convenient way of describing that is we exist in a multiverse.\nokay.\nso that is the last question.\nand I think this would have to be competing for one of the longest episodes of ToKCast ever and my voice is beginning to fail so until next time.\nbye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh3xh5N5x34&t=6605"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3d297b5a-7fab-4b2c-a72d-3b85f42739f5": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, and to episode 106, which is part 2 of chapter 4 of the fabric of reality, criteria for reality.\nAnd in the last part, we went through a refutation of solipsism and the various other, what one might call metaphysical theories about ultimate reality.\nNamely, that realism might not be true because perhaps it's all a dream going on in your head or perhaps it's a simulation going on in a computer or perhaps it's the machinations of an evil demon.\nWhatever the case might be, realism might not be false.\nHow can we rule this out?.\nAnd we were talking about the fact that no scientific experiment can falsify that kind of theory, that kind of strange claim that reality itself might be utterly different from what we experience or what our science is telling us the truth of the matter happens to be and that all of our supposed good explanations are actually bad explanations based upon the fact that ultimate reality is all going on in the mind of a dreamer.\nIt seems we can't rule that out logically and we can't rule that out scientifically either.\nSo what can we do?.\nWell, what we can do is what we did do in the last episode and in the fabric of reality, David goes through a refutation, not a scientific falsification, not a logical disprove, but a philosophical refutation.\nAn explanation that these explanations are bad explanations and where we finished was with David saying in the fabric of reality and I'll quote again, quote, so we can continue.\nReassured with common sense realism and the pursuit of explanations by scientific methods, but in the light of this conclusion, what can we say about the arguments that made solipsism and its relatives superficially plausible, namely that they could neither be proved false nor ruled out by experiment.\nWhat is the status of those arguments now?.\nIf we have neither proved solipsism false, nor ruled it out by experiment, what have we done?.\nAnd David goes on to say, there is an assumption built into this question.\nIt is that theories can be classified in a hierarchy, mathematical, to scientific, to philosophical, of decreasing intrinsic reliability.\nMany people take the existence of this hierarchy of a granted despite the fact that these judgments of comparative reliability depend entirely on philosophical arguments, arguments that classify themselves as quite unreliable.\nIn fact, the idea of this hierarchy is a cousin of the reductionist mistake I discussed in chapter one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=16"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a72a350e-27dd-4c87-9d10-779f4e2b1cb3": {"page_content": "And David goes on to say, there is an assumption built into this question.\nIt is that theories can be classified in a hierarchy, mathematical, to scientific, to philosophical, of decreasing intrinsic reliability.\nMany people take the existence of this hierarchy of a granted despite the fact that these judgments of comparative reliability depend entirely on philosophical arguments, arguments that classify themselves as quite unreliable.\nIn fact, the idea of this hierarchy is a cousin of the reductionist mistake I discussed in chapter one.\nNamely, the theory that microscopic laws and phenomena are more fundamental and emergent ones, pausing their my reflection.\nWe learn this in school.\nAnd in fact, mathematics teachers are quite proud of the fact that they can say to the other teachers of other subjects, we have privileged access to teaching certainty, to teaching mathematical, logical certainty in our classes.\nAnd they really take this seriously, I suppose, they get it from their lecturers as well.\nSo it bleeds into culture because it's kind of there in the schooling system that mathematics is taught has been absolutely certain on a firm foundation.\nBut of course, this very claim that mathematics is certain that it has built upon a firm foundation and infallible way of getting at the truth.\nThat very claim is itself a philosophical argument.\nIt's false.\nIt turns out that it's false.\nBut the mean fact that we're trying to admit that anyone would be trying to make that argument should reconsider the fact that they're not getting there by a mathematical proof, which is supposedly the only way to get to absolutely certain truth.\nSo if the argument for mathematics has the only privileged access to absolutely certain truth, but that argument itself is based upon a philosophical claim, which itself, supposedly, is nothing but a mere matter of opinion, we've got a problem.\nAnd of course, in the David Deutsch fallibleist worldview, we're going to do away with all of that, and we're simply going to regard each of the different domains of our inquiry, call them what you want, mathematical, scientific, philosophical.\nAs all unequal footing in a sense, all part of an interconnected web of knowledge and interconnected web of fallible guesses about the nature of reality.\nSo let's go on to see what David says next about this.\nQuote, the same assumption occurs in inductivism, which supposes that we can be absolutely certain of the conclusions of mathematical arguments because they are deductive reasonably sure of scientific arguments because they are inductive.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=124"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4d242665-9ae0-403c-a2c1-aac1eec01c3e": {"page_content": "As all unequal footing in a sense, all part of an interconnected web of knowledge and interconnected web of fallible guesses about the nature of reality.\nSo let's go on to see what David says next about this.\nQuote, the same assumption occurs in inductivism, which supposes that we can be absolutely certain of the conclusions of mathematical arguments because they are deductive reasonably sure of scientific arguments because they are inductive.\nAnd forever undecided about philosophical arguments, which it sees as little more than matters of taste and quote, and isn't that the truth?.\nI mean, not only do we pick that up in school, it's something that I think almost everyone lives with all the time, unless they've encountered the work of Popper and Deutsch and associated ideas, but you don't have to step very far outside of the popularian worldview or the worldview presented in the fabric of reality, the beginning of infinity, before you get this as simply common sense, this idea that as David says there in that paragraph, mathematical arguments are certain because they're deductive.\nSo you can be sure of them and you can be almost sure of scientific arguments because they're inductive.\nAnd as the philosophy, well, that's just a mere matter of opinion more or less.\nSo I'm skipping about a paragraph and David goes on to say, quote, the rejection of mere explanations on the grounds that they are not justified by any ultimate explanation, inevitably propels one into futile searches for an ultimate source of justification.\nThere is no such source, nor is there that hierarchy of reliability from mathematical to scientific to philosophical arguments.\nSome philosophical arguments, including the argument against solipsism are far more compelling than any scientific argument.\nIndeed, every scientific argument assumes the falsity, not only of solipsism, but also of other philosophical theories, including any number of variants of solipsism that might contradict specific parts of the scientific argument.\nI shall also show in chapter 10 that even purely mathematical arguments derive their reliability from the physical and philosophical theories that underpin them, and therefore they cannot, after all, yield absolute certainty.\nHaving embraced realism.\n, we are continually faced with decisions as to whether entities referred to in competing explanations are real or not, deciding that they are not real.\nAs we did in the case of the angel theory of planetary motion, is equivalent to rejecting the corresponding explanation.\nThus, in searching for and judging explanations, we need more than just a refutation of solipsism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=248"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "172475ef-f839-4662-95bb-4c777c7462e3": {"page_content": "Having embraced realism.\n, we are continually faced with decisions as to whether entities referred to in competing explanations are real or not, deciding that they are not real.\nAs we did in the case of the angel theory of planetary motion, is equivalent to rejecting the corresponding explanation.\nThus, in searching for and judging explanations, we need more than just a refutation of solipsism.\nWe need to develop reasons for accepting or rejecting the existence of entities that may appear in contending theories.\nIn other words, we need a criterion for reality.\nWe should not, of course, expect to find a final or infallible criterion.\nOur judgments of what is, or is not real, always depend on the various explanations that are available to us, and sometimes changes our explanations improve just pausing their more reflections.\nSo what David is going to come to here in the fabric of reality is that our criterion for reality is whether or not an entity kicks back, and we'll have more to say about this.\nThis is Dr. Johnson's criterion.\nAnd whether something kicks back is about whether it behaves autonomously, unpredictably, in a complex way, in a way that would require, if it was going to be an illusion, computationally, highly complex in order to simulate, in order to give us the appearance of that thing.\nBut later, of course, in the beginning of infinity, I think we get a more parsimonious version of this, which entails all of those other ways in which we explain whether a thing is real or not, whether a thing exists or not, where we say a thing is real, or a thing exists to the extent that it appears in our best explanations of reality.\nIf and only if, it appears in those explanations.\nSo I'll pick it up by David says, quote, not only do explanations change, but our criteria and ideas about what should count as an explanation are gradually changing, improving, too.\nSo the list of acceptable modes of explanation will always be open-ended, and consequently, the list of acceptable criteria for reality must be open-ended, too.\nBut what is it about an explanation given that for whatever reasons we find its satisfactory, that should make us classify some things as real and other things as illusory or imaginary?.\nJames Boswell relates in his life of Johnson, how he and Dr. Johnson were discussing Bishop Berkeley's solipsistic theory of the non-existence of the material world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=383"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f1c57c9-7581-4352-8652-4c572c9de1f0": {"page_content": "But what is it about an explanation given that for whatever reasons we find its satisfactory, that should make us classify some things as real and other things as illusory or imaginary?.\nJames Boswell relates in his life of Johnson, how he and Dr. Johnson were discussing Bishop Berkeley's solipsistic theory of the non-existence of the material world.\nBoswell remarked that although no one believed a theory, no one could refuse it either.\nDr. Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, I refused it thus.\nDr. Johnson's point was that Berkeley's denial of the rock's existence is incompatible with finding an explanation of the rebound that he himself felt.\nSolipsism cannot accommodate any explanation of why that experiment or any experiment should have won outcome, rather than another, to explain the effect that the rock had on him, Dr. Johnson was forced to take a position on the nature of rocks, were they part of an autonomous external reality, or were they figments of his imagination?.\nIn the latter case, he would have to conclude that his imagination was itself a vast complex autonomous universe, causing their mind reflection.\nSo Bishop Berkeley, or Bishop Berkeley, however we pronounce it, he had this vision of idealism, idealism, meaning that what is apparently happening in external reality isn't really it's just all ideas, it's going on inside your head.\nBut what Johnson would say about that, what Dr. Johnson would say about that, is if you kick a rock and reliably, the same experience as happening again and again, you're effectively doing a scientific experiment in order to test theories about what happens when you kick rocks, and your foot continues to rebound, why should it have this consistent character?.\nWhy should there be this autonomous way in which your imagination behaves consistently over time?.\nYou would have to concede that your imagination is itself this extremely complex thing, which behaves according to physical laws that one can discover.\nAnd as we say, that means that your idealism, Bishop Berkeley's idealism, this idea of solipsism, or whatever you like, is nothing but realism.\nThe claim that there really is an external autonomous reality, which you cannot simply imagine into existence, you cannot imagine into existence the behavior of different things, but rather you have to go out into the world and investigate things to find out how they're going to behave, namely by kicking them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=505"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "de9a0cef-20e9-40cc-b83b-4601d4432a3b": {"page_content": "And as we say, that means that your idealism, Bishop Berkeley's idealism, this idea of solipsism, or whatever you like, is nothing but realism.\nThe claim that there really is an external autonomous reality, which you cannot simply imagine into existence, you cannot imagine into existence the behavior of different things, but rather you have to go out into the world and investigate things to find out how they're going to behave, namely by kicking them.\nIf it was all just in your imagination, we should expect that each time you kick the rock, something different might happen.\nSometimes your foot might rebound, sometimes it might go through it, sometimes the rock might disappear, sometimes the rock might turn into a rabbit and so on and add in for an item.\nBut the fact that the rock behaves in a predictable way, and the fact that we can learn about the properties of rocks and so on and so forth for every other object in our external reality, means that it can't just all be in your imagination, or if you postulate that all you're saying is that your imagination is equally as complex and subject to physical laws as real physical realities.\nAnd so you are just saying that realism is true, plus the assumption that you're dreaming that physical reality and of existence.\nSo it's a needless philosophical assumption.\nThere it goes on to say after a paragraph that I'm skipping.\nQuote, but Dr. Johnson's idea is more than just a refutation of solipsism.\nIt also illustrates the criterion for reality that is used in science, namely if something can kick back, it exists.\nKicking back here does not necessarily mean that the alleged object is responding to being kicked, to being physically affected as Dr. Johnson's rock was.\nIt is enough that when we kick something, the object affects us in ways that require independent explanation.\nFor example, Galileo had no means of affecting planets, but he could affect the light that came from them.\nHis equivalent of kicking the rock was refracting that light from the lenses of his telescopes and eyes.\nThat light responded by kicking his retina back, the way it kicked back allowed him to conclude, not only that the light was real, but that the heliocentric planetary motions required to explain the patterns in which the light arrived were also real.\nBy the way, Dr. Johnson did not directly kick the rock either.\nA person is a mind, not a body.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=621"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b89a74aa-bf44-43a8-b761-6acd370c46d6": {"page_content": "His equivalent of kicking the rock was refracting that light from the lenses of his telescopes and eyes.\nThat light responded by kicking his retina back, the way it kicked back allowed him to conclude, not only that the light was real, but that the heliocentric planetary motions required to explain the patterns in which the light arrived were also real.\nBy the way, Dr. Johnson did not directly kick the rock either.\nA person is a mind, not a body.\nThe Dr. Johnson who performed the experiment was a mind, and that mind directly kicked only some nerves, which transmitted signals to the muscles which propelled his foot towards the rock shortly afterwards.\nDr. Johnson perceived being kicked back by the rock, but again only indirectly after the impact had set up a pressure pattern in his shoe and then in his skin, and had then led to electrically impossible in his nerves and so forth.\nDr. Johnson's mind, like Galileo's and everyone else's, kicked nerves and was kicked back by nerves and inferred the existence and properties of reality from those interactions alone.\nWhat Dr. Johnson was entitled to infer about reality depends on how he could best explain what had happened.\nJust pausing their my reflection.\nSo this concept of kicking back, obviously it's metaphorical in almost all situations, except when you're explicitly kicking rocks, but even then as David says, it's not really you that are kicking the rock, you are kicking the nerves inside of your brain.\nAll that aside, what the kickback means is that you are getting evidence, feedback from the external physical reality around you, and that external physical reality is not merely bending to your will.\nIt is sometimes behaving in completely unpredictable ways as Galileo's discovery through his telescope was.\nI'm not sure if he hypothesized that there would be definitely moons going around Jupiter, but when he saw that, that was an unexpected kickback from reality.\nGalileo, by the way, was the first one to discover moons orbiting Jupiter.\nOkay, so skipping a quite substantial part of the book now, a couple of pages, and I'm picking it up where David says, quote, it is not how hard something kicks back that makes the theory of its existence compelling.\nWhat matters is it's role in the explanations that such a theory provides.\nI have given examples from physics where very tiny kicks lead us to momentous conclusions about reality, because we have no other explanation.\nThe converse can also happen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=742"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "65fde556-3fee-45e9-9080-9f771cbe2afb": {"page_content": "Okay, so skipping a quite substantial part of the book now, a couple of pages, and I'm picking it up where David says, quote, it is not how hard something kicks back that makes the theory of its existence compelling.\nWhat matters is it's role in the explanations that such a theory provides.\nI have given examples from physics where very tiny kicks lead us to momentous conclusions about reality, because we have no other explanation.\nThe converse can also happen.\nIf there is no clear cut winner among the contending explanations, then even a very powerful kick may not convince us that the supposed source has independent reality.\nFor example, you may one day see terrifying monsters attacking you, and then wake up.\nIf the explanation that they originated within your own mind seems adequate, it would be irrational for you to conclude that there really are such monsters out there.\nIf you feel a sudden pain in your shoulders, you walk down a busy street and look around and see nothing to explain it, you may wonder whether the pain was caused by an unconscious part of your own mind, or by your body, or by something outside, you may consider it possible that a hidden prankster has shot you with an airgun yet come to no conclusion as to the reality of such a person.\nBut if you then saw an airgun pellet rolling away on the pavement, you might conclude that no explanation solved the problem as well as the airgun explanation, in which case you would adopt it.\nIn other words, you were tentatively infer the existence of a person you had not seen and might never see, just because of that person's role in the best explanation available to you, pausing their my reflection.\nIsn't that a wonderful little example?.\nAs I have often said on this podcast, getting it straight from David Deutsch, we are usually in science explaining the scene in terms of the unseen.\nThis is what science is all about, almost every single interesting phenomena in modern science is about explaining what we do see, light, rocks, stars, etc, etc, matter around us.\nAll the stuff we see is explained in terms of things we cannot see, subatomic particles, nuclear processes going on inside of stars, the core of the earth, evolution on time scales that we cannot observe, the movement of tectonic plates, etc, etc.\nAnd this is not unusual even in day to day life, as David says there, you know, you might very well have this experience of being shot by an airgun.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=850"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "142c498f-5af0-423b-b1ca-84b1484f3ff2": {"page_content": "All the stuff we see is explained in terms of things we cannot see, subatomic particles, nuclear processes going on inside of stars, the core of the earth, evolution on time scales that we cannot observe, the movement of tectonic plates, etc, etc.\nAnd this is not unusual even in day to day life, as David says there, you know, you might very well have this experience of being shot by an airgun.\nWell, if that happens, and you see the pellet rolling away, it would be the best explanation that someone that you might never see, the unseen person must exist in order for you to have experienced what you experienced, as David goes on to say, quote, clearly the theory of such a person's existence is not a logical consequence of the observed evidence, which, incidentally, would consist of a single observation, nor does that theory have the form of an inductive generalization.\nFor example, that you will observe the same thing again, if you perform the same experiment, nor is the theory experimentally testable, experiment could never prove the absence of a hidden prankster.\nDespite all that, the argument in favor of the theory could be overwhelmingly convincing if it were the best explanation, pausing their my reflection.\nSo this is what detectives and the legal system have to do all the time.\nWhat they're doing is trying to explain one off events rather often.\nAnd when you have these one off events, a particular murder, a particular assault, where you do not have the murderer or you do not have the criminal in custody.\nAnd you might not even know who the person is yet.\nNonetheless, the best explanation has to be that a person did it that a particular person did this thing, but you can't arrive at that conclusion based upon any kind of inductive claim.\nIt's not like you're going to be able to witness that same murder over and over again.\nYou've got it only one time.\nYou're witnessing it only once and you will only ever witness it once.\nAnd there's no experiment that you can do in order to demonstrate that a person, a particular person, did this murder, but rather what we do is we gather evidence and then the best explanation of the evidence.\nOur conjectures, which all come to bear on trying to explain this evidence, are then set against one another in light of the evidence.\nAnd each of them ruled out until one of them, ideally, explains all the evidence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=966"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b6153076-17b9-47c6-9964-bf4016c0139d": {"page_content": "And there's no experiment that you can do in order to demonstrate that a person, a particular person, did this murder, but rather what we do is we gather evidence and then the best explanation of the evidence.\nOur conjectures, which all come to bear on trying to explain this evidence, are then set against one another in light of the evidence.\nAnd each of them ruled out until one of them, ideally, explains all the evidence.\nAnd no piece of evidence is able to rule out a particular murderer or criminal or whatever happens to be the case.\nSo I guess what I'm saying there is, if you want another refutation of inductivism, then just look at how the legal system works.\nDavid goes on to say, quote, whenever I have used Dr. Johnson's criterion to argue for the reality of something, one attribute in particular has always been relevant, namely complexity.\nWe prefer simpler explanations to more complex ones.\nAnd we prefer explanations that are capable of accounting for detail and complexity to explanations that can account only for simple aspects of phenomena.\nDr. Johnson's criterion tells us to regard as real, those complex entities which, if we did not regard them as real, would complicate our explanations.\nFor instance, we must regard the planets as real because if we did not, we should be forced into complicated explanations of a cosmic planetarium, or of altered laws of physics, or of angels, or of whatever else would under that assumption, be giving us the illusion that there are planets out there in space.\nThus, the observed complexity in the structural behavior of an entity is part of the evidence that that entity is real, but it is not sufficient evidence.\nWe did not, for example, deem our reflections in a mirror to be real people.\nOf course, illusions themselves are real physical processes, but the illusory entities they show us need not be considered real because they derive their complexity from somewhere else.\nThey are not autonomously complex.\nWhy do we accept the mirror theory of reflections, but reject the planetarium theory of the solar system?.\nIt is because, given a simple explanation of the action of mirrors, we can understand that nothing, of what we see in them genuinely lies behind them.\nNo further explanation is needed because the reflections, though, complex are not autonomous.\nTheir complexity is merely borrowed from our side of the mirror.\nThat is not so for planets.\nThe theory that the cosmic planetarium is real, and that nothing lies beyond it, only makes the problem worse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1080"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d0f9d21-2f3f-44a4-9398-7540746a1c07": {"page_content": "It is because, given a simple explanation of the action of mirrors, we can understand that nothing, of what we see in them genuinely lies behind them.\nNo further explanation is needed because the reflections, though, complex are not autonomous.\nTheir complexity is merely borrowed from our side of the mirror.\nThat is not so for planets.\nThe theory that the cosmic planetarium is real, and that nothing lies beyond it, only makes the problem worse.\nFor if we accepted it, then instead of asking only how the solar system works, we should first have to ask how the planetarium works.\nAnd then how the solar system it is displaying works.\nWe could not avoid the latter question, and it is effectively a repetition of what we were trying to answer in the first place.\nNow we can rephrase Dr Johnson's criterion thus, if, according to the simplest explanation, an entity is complex and autonomous, then that entity is real.\nComputational complexity theory is the branch of computer science that is concerned with what resources, such as time, memory capacity, or energy, are required to perform given classes of computations.\nThe complexity of a piece of information is defined in terms of the computational resources, such as the length of the program, the number of computational steps or the amount of memory that a computer would need if it was to reproduce that piece of information.\nSeveral different definitions of complexity are in use, each with its own domain of applicability.\nThe exact definitions need not concern us here, but they are all based on the idea that a complex process is one that in effect presents us with the results of a substantial computation.\nThe sense in which the motion of planets presents us with the results of a substantial computation is well illustrated by a planetarium.\nConsider a planetarium controlled by a computer which calculates the exact image that the projectors should display to represent the night sky.\nTo do this authentically, the computer has to use the formula provided by astronomical theories.\nIn fact, the computation is identical to the one that it would perform if it were calculating predictions of where an observatory should point its telescopes to see real planets and stars.\nWhat we mean by saying that the appearance of the planetarium is as complex as that of the night sky depicts is that those two computations, one describing the night sky, the other describing the planetarium, are largely identical.\nSo we can re-express Dr Johnson's criterion again in terms of hypothetical computations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1200"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f11b331-d725-41ba-9c40-f0d6dc424b2c": {"page_content": "In fact, the computation is identical to the one that it would perform if it were calculating predictions of where an observatory should point its telescopes to see real planets and stars.\nWhat we mean by saying that the appearance of the planetarium is as complex as that of the night sky depicts is that those two computations, one describing the night sky, the other describing the planetarium, are largely identical.\nSo we can re-express Dr Johnson's criterion again in terms of hypothetical computations.\nQuote, if a substantial amount of computation would be required to give us the illusion that a certain entity is real, then that entity is real.\nIf Dr Johnson's leg invariably rebounded when he extended it, then the source of his illusions, God, a virtual reality machine or whatever, would need to perform only a single computation to determine when to give him the rebounding sensation, something like if leg is extended, then rebound.\nBut to reproduce what Dr Johnson experienced in a realistic experiment, it would be necessary to take into account where the rock is and where the Dr Johnson's foot is going to hit or miss it and how heavy, how hard and how firmly lodged it is and whether anyone else has just kicked it out of the way and so on, a vast computation, pausing their my reflection.\nSo yes, this is the point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1313"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6bd59b69-f484-4c4f-b6f0-f7bb54f4241a": {"page_content": "If you're trying to assert that what external reality appears to be isn't actually real, but rather it's an illusion, it's a dream, it's a deception by a demon or a god or something like that, then what you're saying is that those objects in the illusion, the dream rocks, the dream people, the dream planets and so on and so forth are acting in such a way that is so complex that if you were to get a computer to actually compute what is required in order to make the illusion as real, as realism would otherwise seem, means that you have to compute precisely the laws of physics as they are under realism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1393"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0fc3ad3c-5c2b-4ddd-bc10-82e1a34e9ea8": {"page_content": "Basically, if you're trying to create the illusion of a rock, you need to simulate a rock and the higher the fatality of the simulation of that rock, the more computation is required and clearly if you've got an illusion that has the fidelity of realism, then you're going to have to do a simulation that is of such high resolution that you may as well just that you may as well just fall back on realism realism is just all of that simulation without the needless extra assumption that it's all a simulation.\nBut we might very well consider where is this really an issue, apart from in the hallowed halls of academia in the ivory tower debating about whether or not we're all living in a simulation or it's all a dream, does this really have any practical significance?.\nIs it really a scientific question?.\nWell yes, of course it is, this is one of the motivations for the fabric of reality is in trying to persuade people that there is a realistic way of looking at quantum theory.\nSo yes, because this has many antecedents, okay the classic one is of course Galileo, Galileo, trying to convince the church that it wasn't just that we appeared to live in a universe where the sun was at the center and the earth was orbiting the sun, but rather those appearances were reality.\nThe explanation of the sun being at the center and the earth going around the sun and the other planets going around the sun wasn't merely a convenient mathematical device for making predictions, it was reality.\nAnd so we come forward to today where people deny the realistic conception of quantum theory, they deny the richness of what reality contains, but we need that richness, that complexity, that computational complexity in order to be able to make the accurate predictions that we do make.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1435"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40196b34-4ed6-4738-b5e3-229666d70f2f": {"page_content": "Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of quantum theory, as David goes on to say in this very chapter, quote, physicists, trying to cling to a single universe worldview, sometimes try to explain quantum interference phenomena as follows, no shadow photons exist, they say, or in other words no multiverse exists, and what carries the effect of the distant slits to the photon we see is nothing, some sort of action at a distance, as in Newton's law of gravity, simply makes photons change course when a distance that is opened, but there is nothing simple about the supposed action at a distance.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1539"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "702101b7-a0e4-45d9-aefe-ffb9c5aaa743": {"page_content": "The appropriate physical law would have to say that a photon is affected by distant objects exactly as if something were passing through the distant gaps and bouncing off the distant mirrors, so as to intercept that photon at the right time and place, calculating how a photon reacts to these different objects would require the same computational effort as working out the history of large numbers of shadow photons, the computation would have to work its way through a story of what each shadow photon does, it bounces off this, is stopped by that, and so on, therefore, just as with Dr. Johnson's rock, and just as with Galileo's planets, a story that is in effect about shadow photons necessarily appears in any explanation of the observed effects, the irreducible complexity of that story makes it philosophically untenable to deny that the object exists, end quote, this is just my reflection here, another way of putting this is that well, when you look at the shredding away the equation, which is a description of the position, for example, it doesn't have to be the position, it could be any of the other quantum properties that a particle or a system happens to have, it could be the velocities of these particles, but let's say in a simple case we're just talking about, I don't know, the position of a single electron, then what you have at some time t is a plot of all the positions that, in theory, actually in reality, but in theory, the electron is occupying, and you need to have all of these positions in order to be able to make some claim about how this electron is going to behave in the future, so what positions it could possibly occupy in the future at some future time t, and so if you're going to make that prediction by calculating using the laws of quantum theory, you have to know what all the positions are now, and if all those positions come together now in order to affect future positions and future velocities of the electron, then in what sense aren't they real?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1576"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "72397279-6665-45f1-af35-e776cd222e08": {"page_content": "Well, some people just deny that these are all real, and in fact, that all the possible positions that the electron could have at some point in the future, well, they all collapse, as we say, the collapse of the wave function happens upon measurement, and this is to deny the reality of all those other positions, and yet those other positions were required in order to make sensible claims about where the electron is now and where the electron might be found in the future.\nSo, this is the sense in which it is as computationally complex to either have a single universe theory or a many universe's theory.\nThe single universe's theory simply says that all the entities are required to take account of when you're computing what it's going to happen from one moment to the next, using the laws of quantum theory.\nAll those entities are not real, the only ones that are real are the ones that you observe, so there's some special place for the observer, there's some special physics for the observer, and this is what the multiverse vision of quantum theory denies.\nIt says there is no special dip dispensation, there is no special theory of physics for observers, there is one universal physics for everything, observers and non-observers, and hence it's all real, all the things required in the computation, everything that makes these situations computationally complex are real.\nBut still, some people deny the reality of the things that we cannot see, which, as we've said in this podcast, as David says in both of his books, over and over again, is a strange way of envisioning what science is, science is the scene in terms of the unseen.\nAs David goes on to say right now, quote, the physicist David Bonne, constructed a theory with predictions identical to those of quantum theory, in which a sort of wave accompanies every photon, washes over the entire barrier, passes through the slits, and interferes with the photon that we see.\nBonne's theory is often presented as a single universe variant of quantum theory, but according to Dr Johnson's criterion, that is a mistake.\nWorking out what bones invisible wave will do requires the same computations as working out what trillions of shadow photons will do.\nSome parts of the wave describe us, the observers detecting and reacting to photons, other parts of the wave describe other versions of us, reacting to photons in different positions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1703"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "904a8e3e-5cf4-401a-9d1a-002c366a0240": {"page_content": "Bonne's theory is often presented as a single universe variant of quantum theory, but according to Dr Johnson's criterion, that is a mistake.\nWorking out what bones invisible wave will do requires the same computations as working out what trillions of shadow photons will do.\nSome parts of the wave describe us, the observers detecting and reacting to photons, other parts of the wave describe other versions of us, reacting to photons in different positions.\nBonne's modest nomenclature, referring to most reality as a wave, does not change the fact that in his theory, reality consists of large sets of complex entities, each of which can perceive other entities in its own set, but can only indirectly perceive entities in other sets.\nThese sets of entities are, in other words, parallel universes, pausing their myreflection.\nYes, so Bonne and wave mechanics, this idea of David Bonne, that there is this indivisible wave that passes through the slits, for example, that it is accompanying any particle that we see has an accompanying wave associated with it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1814"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "00c93c17-c2af-410f-85b0-e3ca9ee8a4a2": {"page_content": "Well, this wave is just the counterparts in the other universes of the particle that we see, and as David has said in other contexts, this is nothing but the multiverse in heavy disguise, not even that heavy disguise, really, after all, if you were to have a god's eye view of the multiverse, and if you were to see what happens during a interference experiment, such as firing, I suppose, at one electron at a double slit, then what you would see is something that looks like a wave, but that's just because the stupendously large amount of accompanying electrons in other universes, there's so many of them that they appear to move, or when you take them all together, the entire ensemble of them, the entire set of them, or class of them, or how you want to describe them, appears to move kind of like a wave, it would kind of look like a wave in higher dimensional space, it is a wave, and if you were to just glance at that wave, you might very well say, well that's a wave, but then if you ask the question, what is that wave made out of?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1877"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8d8d8b89-37c4-4d00-9bfa-380909802796": {"page_content": "And you look closely at higher resolution, you would see that the wave that appears to be there is actually made up of lots and lots of particles, it's made up of lots and lots of electrons that are accompanying the electron that any observer in any particularly universe would observe as only being one electron.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1934"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "070acb84-c179-462d-be24-5e81bce3c93d": {"page_content": "Let's continue, and David says, quote, I have described Galileo's new conception of our relationship with external reality as a great methodological discovery, it gave us a new reliable form of reasoning involving observational evidence, that is indeed one aspect of his discovery, scientific reasoning is reliable, not in the sense that it certifies that any particular theory will survive unchanged, even until tomorrow, but in the sense that we are right to rely on it, for we are right to seek solutions to problems rather than sources of ultimate justification.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1949"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f772b7d3-8708-47e3-92dc-e30ab3a46d64": {"page_content": "Observational evidence is indeed evident, not in the sense that any theory can be deduced, induced, or in any other way inferred from it, but in the sense that it can constitute a genuine reason for preferring one theory to another, pausing there just my reflection on that.\nSo how can observational evidence, cause us to prefer one theory over another?.\nWell simply by the fact that observational evidence tends to refute all other theories except for one.\nIdeally this is what happens in science, we end up only with one theory being able to explain the observational evidence.\nSo all of its rivals are no longer preferred, and this is what this is the sense in which we say that it allows us to prefer one theory to another or one theory to all the other rivals.\nThe observational evidence simply rules out all the other rivals can only be explained by one theory, one explanation that we have.\nTo fall back on the most classic of all the examples that I use, Edington's experiment, where starlight appears to be in one place rather than another, that one place that the starlight does appear during a solar eclipse is predicted by general relativity, but none of the other rivals.\nNo other rival to general relativity can make that prediction in the way that general relativity does, and so therefore we prefer general relativity over those other theories.\nLet's continue.\nDavid says quote, but there is another side to Galileo's discovery which is much less often appreciated.\nThe reliability of scientific reasoning is not just an attribute of us, of our knowledge and our relationship with reality, it is also a new fact about physical reality itself, a fact which Galileo expressed in the phrase, the book of nature is written in mathematical symbols.\nAs I have said, it is impossible, literally, to read any shred of a theory in nature, that is the inductivist mistake.\nBut what is genuinely out there is evidence.\nOr more precisely, a reality that will respond with evidence if we interact appropriately with it, given a shred of a theory, or rather shreds of several rival theories, the evidence is available out there, to enable us to distinguish between them, anyone can search for it, find it, and improve upon it if they take the trouble that are not need authorization or initiation or holy texts.\nThey need only be looking in the right way, with fertile problems and promising theories in mind.\nThis open accessibility not only of evidence but of the whole mechanism of knowledge acquisition is a key attribute of Galileo's conception of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=1981"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1b0d82f8-fef2-4baf-bf20-7bfef70d37c6": {"page_content": "They need only be looking in the right way, with fertile problems and promising theories in mind.\nThis open accessibility not only of evidence but of the whole mechanism of knowledge acquisition is a key attribute of Galileo's conception of reality.\nGalileo may have thought this self-evident, but it is not.\nIt is a substantive assertion about what physical reality is like.\nLogically, reality need not have had this science-friendly property, but it does.\nAnd in abundance, Galileo's universe is saturated with evidence.\nCopernicus had assembled evidence for his heliocentric theory in Poland.\nTaiko Brahe had collected his evidence in Denmark and Kepler in Germany.\nAnd by pointing his telescope at the skies over Italy, Galileo gained greater access to the same evidence, every part of the Earth's surface on every clear night, for billions of years, has been deluged with evidence about the facts and laws of astronomy.\nFor many other sciences, evidence has similarly been on display to be viewed more clearly in modern times by microscopes and other instruments.\nWhere evidence is not already physically present, we can bring it into existence, with devices such as lasers and pierced barriers, devices which it is open to anyone, anywhere at any time to build.\nAnd the evidence will be the same regardless of who reveals it.\nThe more fundamental a theory is, the more readily available is the evidence that bears upon it to those who know how to look.\nNot just on Earth, but throughout the multiverse, pausing their my reflection on this, isn't this a wonderfully positive, optimistic way of envisioning how to do science.\nIt's open to anyone anywhere to make these profound discoveries as David Deutsch says elsewhere.\nThe evidence, in order to win a Nobel Prize, is here right now in this room either falling from the sky, in the form of light, or around you in the atoms out of which the matter is made, for you to make the discovery.\nThat will lead to the next greatest breakthrough.\nThat could lead to the Nobel Prize.\nWhat he says there is, where evidence is not already physically present.\nWe can bring it into existence, with devices such as lasers and pierced barriers, devices which it is open to anyone, anywhere, at any time, to build.\nNow, yes, building large hydrodron colliders, and James Webb space telescopes.\nYes, that's hard, that's expensive, but in principle, in principle, it's possible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2148"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "75c69280-ad18-45cf-bf6e-c9581c325083": {"page_content": "That could lead to the Nobel Prize.\nWhat he says there is, where evidence is not already physically present.\nWe can bring it into existence, with devices such as lasers and pierced barriers, devices which it is open to anyone, anywhere, at any time, to build.\nNow, yes, building large hydrodron colliders, and James Webb space telescopes.\nYes, that's hard, that's expensive, but in principle, in principle, it's possible.\nAnd as wealth increases for everyone, this means it becomes more and more possible over time for people to have more and more sophisticated equipment to make the scientific breakthroughs that are required to solve the problems of the future.\nEveryone now, just about, carries around an extremely high fidelity camera and a supercomputer in their pocket, which can do the kind of experimental work that people before could only dream of.\nThe fact that so few people used them in order to actually do science, well, that's another issue.\nThe fact is science is an even playing field.\nIt's as even as you like, and the cheap and readily available super technology that we have now, in the form of smartphones and computers and that kind of thing, means that even if there is a wealth inequality between people, that wealth inequality is actually decreasing over time.\nPeople talk about the increase in equality, but that is usually only ever based on number of shares and a company held by someone like Elon Musk, who happens to own one of the most profitable companies or Jeff Bezos, who owns one of the most profitable companies, on the other hand, inequality has never been more narrow.\nMany of us own phones identical to Elon Musk.\nElon Musk doesn't have a, well, Jeff Bezos doesn't have a, doesn't have better access to the day to day technology than anyone else does.\nThis did not used to be the case of course.\nYou only have to go back two or three decades and the top mobile phones that were available were well out of the reach of the average person.\nNow, the top mobile phone, you know, as I'm recording this, it's like the iPhone 13 pro or whatever.\nThat is well within the budget of many, many people.\nSo if two for the top desktop computers and so on and so forth and all of this is to say that the typical person has access to technology, which directed towards scientific discovery could indeed make breakthroughs that people of the past could only have dreamed of and to solve problems, even outstanding problems today.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2237"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95a84f82-047e-44ca-babe-904b32061857": {"page_content": "Now, the top mobile phone, you know, as I'm recording this, it's like the iPhone 13 pro or whatever.\nThat is well within the budget of many, many people.\nSo if two for the top desktop computers and so on and so forth and all of this is to say that the typical person has access to technology, which directed towards scientific discovery could indeed make breakthroughs that people of the past could only have dreamed of and to solve problems, even outstanding problems today.\nRoutinely amateur astronomers make discoveries of things like comets and even today exoplanets just by looking at published data on the internet that's freely available and processing it.\nSo the evidence is absolutely available to everyone in order to make these discoveries to solve some of our most pressing problems.\nDavid goes on to say, quote, thus physical reality is self similar on several levels.\nAmong the stupendous complexities of the universe and multiverse, some patterns are nevertheless endlessly repeated.\nEarth and Jupiter are in many ways dramatically dissimilar planets, but they both move in ellipses and they are both made of the same set of 100 or so chemical elements, albeit in different proportions and so are their parallel universe counterparts.\nThe evidence that so impressed Galileo and his contemporaries also exists on other planets and in distant galaxies.\nThe evidence being considered at this moment by physicists and astronomers would also have been available a billion years ago and will still be available a billion years hence.\nThe very existence of general explanatory theories implies that disparate objects and events are physically alike in some ways.\nThe light reaching us from distant galaxies is after all only light, but it looks to us like galaxies.\nThus reality contains not only evidence but also the means such as our minds and our artifacts of understanding it.\nThere are mathematical symbols in physical reality, the fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical in those symbols, in our planetariums, books, films and computer memories, and in our brains.\nThere are images of physical reality at large, images not just of the appearance of objects but of the structure of reality.\nThere are laws and explanations, reductive and emergent, there are descriptions and explanations of the big bang and of sub-nuclear particles and processes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2355"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2a9d7198-5f26-45c1-a843-b3013c6737bc": {"page_content": "There are images of physical reality at large, images not just of the appearance of objects but of the structure of reality.\nThere are laws and explanations, reductive and emergent, there are descriptions and explanations of the big bang and of sub-nuclear particles and processes.\nThere are mathematical abstractions, fiction, art, morality, shadow photons, parallel universes, to the extent that these symbols, images, and theories are true, that is, they resemble inappropriate respects, the concrete or abstract things they refer to, their existence gives reality a new sort of self-similarity, the self-similarity, we call knowledge.\nAnd that there is the end of chapter 4 of the fabric of reality, criteria, for reality.\nAnd I want to note here just at the end there that powerful way of ending echoes what is said by David in one of his dead talks where he talks about this kind of self-similarity when he talks about the quasar.\nThe most important kind of self-similarity is the self-similarity of what happens inside of our minds where we try to understand objects in our world, including things like quasars.\nWhat happens over time, the special relationship we have with the laws of physics means that there can be an object like a quasar with physics as violent and unusual as it's going on in a quasar.\nAnd that physics, we can come to understand.\nAnd so we can come to build not merely, as David says, a visual representation of what the quasar looks like in our minds, so we can see it in our minds eye.\nBut also, we can have mathematical relationships, we can come to understand the laws, the physical laws expressed in mathematical relationships, and expressed in natural language in our minds as well.\nAnd over time, our explanation, our model of that quasar comes to represent the real quasar, existing out there in physical reality with greater and greater fidelity over time.\nThe two structures, the model that's going on inside of our minds, and the physical thing out there, billions of light years away, come to resemble one another more and more accurately over time.\nThis is self-similarity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2478"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a2882610-60ee-469d-800b-7fad27aa1000": {"page_content": "And over time, our explanation, our model of that quasar comes to represent the real quasar, existing out there in physical reality with greater and greater fidelity over time.\nThe two structures, the model that's going on inside of our minds, and the physical thing out there, billions of light years away, come to resemble one another more and more accurately over time.\nThis is self-similarity.\nThis is the most important kind of self-similarity that we know of, because it implies everything that we've been talking about here, it implies realism, it implies that this explanation, this objective explanation that is being built over time, error corrected over time, in our minds, conjectured over time in our minds and error corrected, is coming to more accurately represent the reality, the physical reality that's out there.\nAnd this final paragraph also, it is a defense of realism.\nIt's also, I would say, an improvement on pop-up.\nSo let's go to that now.\nLet's have a look at what Popper actually said in objective knowledge about common sense and realism, just briefly, and I'm looking at page 37, if anyone wants to read along this as page 37 of objective knowledge, he says, realism is essential to common sense, common sense or enlightened common sense, distinguishes between appearance and reality.\nThis might be illustrated by examples such as, today the air is so clear that the mountains appear so much nearer than they really are, or perhaps he appears to do it without effort, but he has confessed to me that the tension is almost unbearable.\nBut common sense also realizes that appearances, say a reflection in a looking glass, have a sort of reality.\nIn other words, that there can be a surface reality that is an appearance and a depth reality.\nMoreover, there are many sorts of real things, and then Popper goes on to list a whole bunch of real things.\nSo I'll skip over that and we'll go to Popper's arguments for realism that he comes to.\nHe says, quote from Popper.\nMy thesis is that realism is neither demonstrable nor refutable.\nRealism, like anything else outside logic and finite arithmetic, is not demonstrable.\nBut while empirical scientific theories are refutable, realism is not even refutable.\nNow, I would say he and a here is me translating Popper and I could be getting this wrong.\nWhen he uses the word refutation here, what he's talking about is experimental force authentication.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2574"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa82cecc-5bfe-450f-9ece-3089f240dcc4": {"page_content": "He says, quote from Popper.\nMy thesis is that realism is neither demonstrable nor refutable.\nRealism, like anything else outside logic and finite arithmetic, is not demonstrable.\nBut while empirical scientific theories are refutable, realism is not even refutable.\nNow, I would say he and a here is me translating Popper and I could be getting this wrong.\nWhen he uses the word refutation here, what he's talking about is experimental force authentication.\nOf course, we can refute realism or we can refute any other philosophical theory that we like by means of philosophical argument.\nNow, we'll fail to do so in the case of realism.\nIt doesn't mean we can't say, hey, that's wrong because here's my argument that the simulation hypothesis is correct.\nSo I'm refuting realism.\nI'm not successful in my refutation, but I'm attempting to refute it.\nOr it could also mean that Popper is saying that there's simply no way that any argument can possibly refute realism or possibly show that realism is wrong.\nI don't think he would go that far.\nAfter all, we're fallible.\nAnd so making a category claim like it's impossible to even show a flaw with realism can't possibly be the case.\nAnyway, whatever the case, he goes on to say that realism not being refutable shares this irrefutability with many philosophical or metaphysical theories, in particular, also with idealism.\nYes, so there we have it.\nSo he's essentially, he must be saying there that all of these metaphysical theories, idealism or whatever else, the simulation hypothesis, are not experimentally testable or experimentally forceifiable.\nAnd he's identifying that with refutability.\nIt could be the case that he's simply wrong as well.\nAnd as David has pointed out in the fabric of reality, well, we can refute idealism.\nHow?.\nWell, by talking about the sheer amount of computation required in order to generate an idealistic conception of the world, if you take seriously what idealism is, then you would need to have some means of computing where all of the objects in your dream world happen to be.\nAnd that would amount to computing what's really going on in the world.\nAnd so therefore we have realism.\nSo there's all sorts of ways of coming at this refutation of things that aren't realism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2742"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d90d136a-a3b3-4a73-9217-241b76443b51": {"page_content": "How?.\nWell, by talking about the sheer amount of computation required in order to generate an idealistic conception of the world, if you take seriously what idealism is, then you would need to have some means of computing where all of the objects in your dream world happen to be.\nAnd that would amount to computing what's really going on in the world.\nAnd so therefore we have realism.\nSo there's all sorts of ways of coming at this refutation of things that aren't realism.\nSo that very well could be a simple improvement on Popper, because he goes on straight away to say, but it is arguable.\nAnd the weight of the arguments is overwhelmingly in its favor.\nOkay.\nSo, so this is a poor phrasing, I would say if Popper, the weight of the arguments.\nOkay.\nSo we don't endorse this idea that we have weight of arguments.\nBetter to say so if he's just saying, a good explanation is what David would say presumably, the way in which to really come at this is to say that we refute idealism because it's a bad explanation rather than talking about weight of arguments.\nWe can argue for realism because it is the best explanation of our metaphysical ontology if we want to use the fancy words, but that's the fact of the matter.\nOur best explanation, the most parsimonious way of viewing our experience of the world is that it really exists.\nThere's an external reality out there beyond our dreaming, beyond our being inside of a simulation or anything else like that.\nPopper goes on to say, quote, common sense is on the side of realism.\nThere are, of course, even before day cart, a few hints of doubt whether or not our ordinary world is perhaps just a dream, but even day cart and lock were realists.\nA philosophical theory competing with realism did not seriously start before Berkeley, Hume and Kant.\nKant incidentally even provided a proof for realism, but it was not a valid proof.\nand I think it important that we should be clear why no valid proof of realism can exist.\nEnd quote, quite right.\nWe can't and we don't need to.\nThe proof is not the most important thing unless you are someone who subscribes to the hierarchy that David talks about in the fabric of reality in the chapter I just read where mathematical proof, mathematics, the certainty one supposedly gets with mathematics is the gold standard against which all other claims to truth must be measured.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2795"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae1a11d7-c80b-4932-a1d9-8ab4066b7e2b": {"page_content": "and I think it important that we should be clear why no valid proof of realism can exist.\nEnd quote, quite right.\nWe can't and we don't need to.\nThe proof is not the most important thing unless you are someone who subscribes to the hierarchy that David talks about in the fabric of reality in the chapter I just read where mathematical proof, mathematics, the certainty one supposedly gets with mathematics is the gold standard against which all other claims to truth must be measured.\nAnd the only thing that sort of gets anywhere near that is scientific confidence that we have these arguments where we collect the evidence and we become highly confident in our scientific claims, whereas philosophy isn't a matter of taste.\nSo we don't need to worry about the fact there's no valid proof for realism.\nThere's no scientific evidence for realism.\nWe have a robust explanation of realism, a philosophically rigorous argument that explains why realism is correct.\nSo what does Papa say about idealism?.\nWell he says quote, in its simplest form, idealism says the world which includes my present audience is just a dream.\nNow it is clear that this theory, though you will know it is false, is not refutable.\nWhatever you, my audience, may do to convince me of your reality talking to me or writing a letter or perhaps kicking me, it cannot possibly assume the force of a refutation.\nFor I would continue to say that I am dreaming that you are talking to me or that I receive the letter or filter kick.\nOne might say that these answers are all in various ways, immunising strategies.\nThat is so, and it is a strong argument against idealism.\nBut again, that it is a self immunising theory, does not refute it.\nSo we can see there that clearly what he means by refutation is experimental falsification, rather than refutation by it being a bad explanation or rejecting it because it's a bad explanation.\nAnd he continues quote, thus idealism is irrefutable.\nAnd this means of course that realism is indomonstrable.\nBut I am prepared to concede that realism is not only indomonstrable, but like idealism irrefutable also, that no describeable event and no conceivable experience can be taken as an effective refutation of realism.\nThus there will be in this issue as in so many no conclusive argument, but there are arguments in favour of realism or rather against idealism.\nAnd now proper goes on to list his arguments against idealism or for realism if you like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=2912"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4e41380-2630-4cf3-8003-6ecb0ff0d94b": {"page_content": "But I am prepared to concede that realism is not only indomonstrable, but like idealism irrefutable also, that no describeable event and no conceivable experience can be taken as an effective refutation of realism.\nThus there will be in this issue as in so many no conclusive argument, but there are arguments in favour of realism or rather against idealism.\nAnd now proper goes on to list his arguments against idealism or for realism if you like.\nOne, perhaps the strongest argument consists of a combination of two, a, that realism is part of common sense, and b, that all the alleged arguments against it are not only philosophical in the most derogatory sense of this term, but are at the same time based upon an uncritically accepted part of common sense, that is to say upon that mistaken part of the common sense theory of knowledge, which I have called the bucket theory of mind.\nAnd two, although science is a bit out of fashion today with some people, for reasons which are regrettably far from negligible, we should not ignore its relevance to realism despite the fact that there are scientists who were not realists, such as Ernst Mark or in our own lifetime Eugene Wigner.\nTheir arguments fall very clearly in the class just characterising 1b, let us hear forget about Wigner's argument from atomic physics, we can then assert that almost all, if not all, physical, chemical, or biological theories imply realism, in the sense that if they are true, realism must also be true.\nThis is one of the reasons why some people speak of scientific realism, it is quite a good reason, because if it's apparent lack of testability, I myself happen to prefer to call realism metaphysical rather than scientific.\nHowever, one may look at this, there are excellent reasons for saying that what we attempt in science is to describe, and so far as possible, explain reality.\nWe do so with the help of conjectural theories, that is, theories which we hope are true or near the truth, but which we cannot establish a certain or even as probable in the sense of a probability calculus, even though they are the best theories which we are able to produce and may therefore be called probable as long as this term is kept free from any association with the calculus of probability, there is a closely related and excellent sense in which we can speak of scientific realism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=3022"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "add59c35-4fd7-47fe-8b3d-4cb6cf97605f": {"page_content": "We do so with the help of conjectural theories, that is, theories which we hope are true or near the truth, but which we cannot establish a certain or even as probable in the sense of a probability calculus, even though they are the best theories which we are able to produce and may therefore be called probable as long as this term is kept free from any association with the calculus of probability, there is a closely related and excellent sense in which we can speak of scientific realism.\nThe procedure we adopt may lead as long as it does not break down for example because of anti-rational attitudes to success in the sense that our conjectural theories tend progressively to come nearer to the truth that is, to true descriptions of certain facts or aspects of reality, and then go pop it on to make some more remarks about realism, but I'm going to pick it up, I'm going to skip that and pick it up where he says, quote, to me idealism appears absurd.\nFor it also implies something like this, that it is my mind which creates this beautiful world, but I know I am not its creator, after all the famous remark beauty is in the eye of the beholder, though perhaps not an utterly stupid remark, means no more than that there is a problem of the appreciation of beauty.\nI know that the beauty of Rembrandt self-portrait is not in my eye, nor that of Bach's passion in my ear.\nOn the contrary, I can establish to my satisfaction by opening and closing my eyes and ears that my eyes and ears are not good enough to take in all the beauty that is there.\nMoreover, there are people who are better judges, better able than I, to appreciate the beauty of pictures and music, denying realism, amounts to megalomania, the most widespread occupational disease of the professional philosopher.\nThat's great, end quote.\nSo there, Popper is actually getting out.\nHe's hinting at what David says, using different language, of course, that the inner workings of the mind of the supposed idealists would have to be as complex as what realism actually is, okay, would contain all of this complexity.\nAnd he goes on to say, quote, out of many other way, although inconclusive arguments, I wish to mention only one.\nIt is this, if realism is true, more especially something approaching scientific realism than the reason for the impossibility of proving it is obvious.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=3128"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ee991142-d703-4968-a875-e62fd5d84b1c": {"page_content": "And he goes on to say, quote, out of many other way, although inconclusive arguments, I wish to mention only one.\nIt is this, if realism is true, more especially something approaching scientific realism than the reason for the impossibility of proving it is obvious.\nThe reason is that our subjective knowledge, even perceptual knowledge, consists of dispositions to act and is thus a kind of tentative adaptation to reality and that we are its searches at best and at any rate fallible.\nThere is no guarantee against error.\nAt the same time, the whole question of the truth and falsity of our opinions and theories clearly becomes pointless if there is no reality, only dreams or illusions.\nTo sum up, I propose to accept realism as the only sensible hypothesis and as a conjecture to which no sensible alternative has ever been offered.\nI do not wish to be dogmatic about this issue any more than about any other, but I think I know all the epistemological arguments.\nThey are mainly subjectivists, which have been offered in favour of alternatives to realism, such as positivism, idealism, phenomenalism, phenomenology and so on.\nAnd although I am not an enemy of the discussion of isms in philosophy, I regard all the philosophical arguments which, to my knowledge, have ever been offered in favour of my list of isms are clearly mistaken.\nMost of them are the result of a mistaken quest for certainty or for secure foundations on which to build and all of them are typical philosophers, mistakes and the worst sense of the term.\nThey are all derivatives of the mistaken, the common sense of the theory of knowledge, which does not stand up to any serious criticism, pausing their my reflection.\nThat is wonderful there.\nThat is a wonderful philosophical refutation of all of those isms he talks about and a defence of realism.\nAll of these alternatives, idealism, chief among them and its cousins, what Popper is saying there is that the only reason, the only motivation that anyone has for putting the forward in the first place is because they want a secure foundation.\nThey are relying on the justified true belief conception of knowledge.\nThey do not believe in conjecture or knowledge in the first place.\nThey want to know, in the case of modern variants like the simulation hypothesis.\nWhy postulator?.\nWe will say that you can have some way of saying well this is absolutely certainly the case.\nThis is certainly what our ultimate reality consists of.\nIts simulations inside of simulation, inside of simulations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=3263"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a7c3ab1f-2243-474f-bda7-f3996a37fbeb": {"page_content": "They are relying on the justified true belief conception of knowledge.\nThey do not believe in conjecture or knowledge in the first place.\nThey want to know, in the case of modern variants like the simulation hypothesis.\nWhy postulator?.\nWe will say that you can have some way of saying well this is absolutely certainly the case.\nThis is certainly what our ultimate reality consists of.\nIts simulations inside of simulation, inside of simulations.\nNow I'm justified in my belief that realism, naive realism is not the case, it's not true.\nBut if you're a Papyrian, if you're a fallibleist, then you just say well there's no way of being certain about any of this.\nBut it's a good working hypothesis, just to say that we know that realism is the case and we can come to know that external physical reality that really exists better and better over time, never with certainty.\nBut it's a good way, it's a good place to start on the assumption that realism is true.\nSo I'll end it there for today and just to know that, just to notice that people have asked me, I think in my ask me anything episodes where David has improved upon Popper and I gave a few indications of where I thought David had improved on Popper.\nHere's another one, okay, in this defense of realism.\nThis defense of realism, I think the most parsimonious way of defending realism is to say it's the best explanation.\nAll these other ways of trying to come at the ultimate metaphysical ontology, what really truly is the case when it comes to the experience we find ourselves in.\nThe reason why idealism fails to be the best explanation is because it ultimately is realism with the additional philosophical assumption that we're just dreaming realism into existence.\nAnd I think David has the best way of explaining what it means for something to exist or what it means for something to be real in the beginning of infinity, where he says I think is real or I think exists in so far as it appears in our best explanations of reality and not otherwise.\nThat's how we know, that's how we can conclude a thing exists.\nSo that's the end of the episode today.\nIf you'd like to become a Patreon supporter, please feel free, you can search for that on Google, okay, just search for Patreon, ToKCast or Patreon, Brett Hall, but until next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKPwCWYYluk&t=3403"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ee2853f5-adf7-4e8d-9f0e-3d5c479078cf": {"page_content": "The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the enlightenment generally.\nIt is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed.\nIt trivially implies the prediction alone is insufficient.\nSomewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority, because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority.\nAnd hence, it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism.\nIt also implies a methodological rule, a criterion for reality, namely, that we should conclude that a particular thing is real, if, and only if, it figures in our best explanation of something.\nEnd quote.\nFrom David Deutsch, the beginning of infinity explanations that transformed the world, page 22 to 23, welcome to ToKCast, end to episode 105, where today I will be providing a breakdown of chapter 4, which is criteria for reality from the fabric of reality by David Deutsch.\nNow, what you heard at the beginning there was a quote from the beginning of infinity, from chapter 1 of that book, which contains not only a summary, basically, for the motivation of the book, placing this quest for good explanations at the foundation of our civilization, of the enlightenment, but it also contains an important kernel linking David's two books together.\nIt speaks of a criterion for reality, what it means for something to be real.\nAnd this explanation, given by David, this criterion, is, so far as I know, unique to his philosophy and basically solves a problem at the intersection of ontology and epistemology or metaphysics.\nWhatever you want to call this thing this study of existence, and I think it is actually an improvement on what Popper said about realism and existence.\nIt's something I've discussed with people over the years now, many times, because it is something people criticize, but we have to be careful with what David is saying here.\nHe says that we should conclude that a thing is real or that a thing exists if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something.\nThis is the condition under which we can conclude its existence.\nIf among our best explanations of the world, unicorns appear nowhere, then there is no reason to conclude they are real.\nBut they exist.\nNow, does this rule out unicorns being found in the future?.\nOf course not.\nNothing can.\nThey may exist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=7"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2dc9e802-f21a-4d41-87ec-dc88c2ff6428": {"page_content": "He says that we should conclude that a thing is real or that a thing exists if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something.\nThis is the condition under which we can conclude its existence.\nIf among our best explanations of the world, unicorns appear nowhere, then there is no reason to conclude they are real.\nBut they exist.\nNow, does this rule out unicorns being found in the future?.\nOf course not.\nNothing can.\nThey may exist.\nWe haven't ruled out their possibility of existing.\nWe are merely saying that we cannot conclude they exist now, given our best explanations.\nConcluding they exist now would be to use something other than reason to come to that conclusion.\nBut in day to day language, we do not need to preface all claims that a thing exists or that a thing is real with, for example, we can conclude koalas exist because they feature in our best explanations.\nWe simply say koalas exist, and the rest goes without saying.\nSo, two, four things we say do not exist.\nUnicorns do not exist, and that means the same thing as we know unicorns do not exist, which means unicorns do not feature in our best explanations of reality.\nNow, it could turn out that we are wrong about the existence of unicorns.\nBut saying something like, we don't know if unicorns exist and thinking that that is the same kind of claim as we don't know if alien life exists.\nConfuses problem situations.\nThese claims, we don't know if alien life exists, and we don't know if unicorns exist.\nLook kind of similar, but actually they're not symmetrical.\nOur best theories of life seem to predict that it will arise if and where it can, but those same theories do not allow us to predict what particular species will arise.\nFor example, unicorns, in other words, life beyond the solar system is postulated as a reasonable hypothesis by some precisely because they do exist good explanations of why a life should be possible beyond the solar system.\nAnd this would solve a problem, the problem of earth being uniquely suited in the universe for life of any kind.\nAgain, this is not symmetric with postulating unicorns exist because postulating the very special case of unicorns solves no outstanding problem in science, and that's the difference.\nDoes the thing solve a problem or not?.\nI've actually made podcasts before about existence in general and realism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40afa8a2-f940-4976-b58f-c73bf4196492": {"page_content": "And this would solve a problem, the problem of earth being uniquely suited in the universe for life of any kind.\nAgain, this is not symmetric with postulating unicorns exist because postulating the very special case of unicorns solves no outstanding problem in science, and that's the difference.\nDoes the thing solve a problem or not?.\nI've actually made podcasts before about existence in general and realism.\nGo all the way back to episode 55 for an episode titled existence, where I have a 15 minute discussion about what it means for something to exist, and so I'm going to be going over some of that material today, but in great a depth from a perspective of what the fabric of reality has to say, and towards the end, what even Papa himself had to say about all this.\nBut this chapter, a chapter four of the fabric of reality, is even more famous among some fans of the book for another reason.\nIt has perhaps the best refutation of solipsism known, and hence the best defense of realism.\nIt is often claimed in philosophical circles that we cannot prove we are not in a simulation, or dreaming everything that we experience moment to moment, or another way to put this is that there is no experimental test, no observation we can make, and hence no scientific explanation that allows us to falsify the claim that we exist in a simulation.\nSo apparently, both mathematics or logic, as well as science, are impotent in the face of claims that this is all a simulation, or a dream, or a deception from an evil demon.\nThis chapter does away with all of those concerns by revealing that mathematics and science are not the only games in town when it comes to comprehensively refuting bad explanations like those.\nWe will come in this chapter very quickly to the supposed hierarchy of academic disciplines, with the certainty of mathematics supposedly at the pinnacle, scientific claims just a little less than certain, and the supposed mere matter of taste arguments that exist in philosophy, but let's not steal all of that thunder right now.\nI've hinted enough at what's to come in this chapter, and so let's get straight into it.\nChapter 4 Criteria for Reality, which begins with David Writing, and I quote, The Great Physicist Galileo Galilei, who was arguably also the first physicist in the modern sense, made many discoveries not only in physics itself, but also in the methodology of science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=270"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95e11529-a909-460b-89f1-bd8240e0c5b4": {"page_content": "I've hinted enough at what's to come in this chapter, and so let's get straight into it.\nChapter 4 Criteria for Reality, which begins with David Writing, and I quote, The Great Physicist Galileo Galilei, who was arguably also the first physicist in the modern sense, made many discoveries not only in physics itself, but also in the methodology of science.\nHe revived the ancient idea of expressing general theories about nature in mathematical form, and improved upon it by developing the method of systematic experimental testing, which characterizes science as we know it.\nHe aptly called such tests, cementi, or deals.\nHe was one of the first to use telescopes to study celestial objects, and he collected an analyzed evidence for the heliocentric theory.\nThe theory that the earth moves in orbit around the sun and spins about its own axis, end quote, and just my brief reflection on that, prior to Galileo, there was indeed a dominant school of philosophy or science or knowledge, whatever you want to call it, the intelligentsia, that assumed knowledge came to us by pure reason alone, more than anything else.\nPure reason, namely mathematics, logic, the use of the mind without needing to consult external reality was perfect, they thought, in a way that the physical world wasn't, so it was really a Galileo who began the practice, the formal practice of focusing on experiment, as distinguishing between theories.\nIt did, of course, take Papa to begin constructing the theoretical apparatus, which allowed us to focus on the philosophy of how exactly all of that worked, and of course today we're brought to when David Deutsch explains how all of that is necessary, experimental work is of course necessary in science, but it's not sufficient.\nAnd this, in fact, interestingly enough, given the existence of things like or stances, like instrumentalism, means that we still have work to do in this area.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=390"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "faff9a7a-cea5-43bb-9f1e-36b2d2a3da19": {"page_content": "Back to the book, and David writes, quote, he, Galileo, is best known for his advocacy of that theory, and for the bitter conflict with the church, into which that advocacy brought him in 1633, the Inquisition tried him for heresy, and forced him under the threat of torture to kneel and read aloud a long object recantation, saying that he absurd, cursed, and detested the heliocentric theory, legend has it probably incorrectly, that as he rose to his feet he muttered the words, a percy mueve, meaning, and yet it does move, despite his recantation, he was convicted and sentenced to house arrest under which he remained for the rest of his life, although this punishment was comparatively lenient, it achieved its purpose.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "80b3a6ce-e798-4795-8edd-340b2dd5898b": {"page_content": "Handsomely, as Jacob Brunowski put its quote, the result was silence among Catholic scientists everywhere from then on.\nThe effect of the trial and of the imprisonment was to put a total stop to the scientific tradition in the Mediterranean, and quote, that's from the assentive man page 218 by Jacob Brunowski.\nAnd just my reflection on that, it seems to me that there in a nutshell, so to speak, is why free speech is such an important or even foundational value, without it, progress ceases.\nThe threat of punishment of coercion, of violence, can stifle speech.\nAs many have observed, I think this began with John Stuart Mill, self-censorship, can be of this kind.\nToday there has been a real resurgence of interest in the issue of free speech, but when some people speak about it, they are almost exclusively focused on that American set of concerns, the first amendment that says that the government will not censor or pass laws to prevent the freedom of speech.\nIn other countries, there are similar concerns, what laws might the government pass and put in place, that prevent people freely expressing themselves.\nBut this issue of government censorship, perhaps the only form of true censorship in the legal sense, is as many philosophers have observed, really only half the story, important as that part of the story is.\nJohn Stuart Mill got there in his work on liberty, so I'll quote a passage from chapter 2 of on liberty and explain it here.\nMill wrote, quote, in respect to all persons, but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the goodwill of other people, opinion on this subject, is as efficacious as law.\nMen might as well be imprisoned as excluded from the means of earning their bread and quote.\nSo what he's saying there is that if your pecuniary interests, your job in other words, depends on your saying or not saying certain things, then this is as efficacious as law.\nIf you would lose your job for saying something, then it's not really like having freedom is it?.\nHe goes on, quote from Mill, those whose bread is already secured and whose designer favors from men in power or from bodies of men or from the public have nothing to fear from the open a vowel of any opinions but to be ill thought of and ill spoken of.\nAnd this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear, end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=563"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e7251610-7504-4958-bb53-5f4ae998dc21": {"page_content": "If you would lose your job for saying something, then it's not really like having freedom is it?.\nHe goes on, quote from Mill, those whose bread is already secured and whose designer favors from men in power or from bodies of men or from the public have nothing to fear from the open a vowel of any opinions but to be ill thought of and ill spoken of.\nAnd this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear, end quote.\nAnd so what he's saying there is that if you've got your bread secured, in other words you've got enough money and you don't want anything from other people in power, then you're free to say what you like, except that you might be ill spoken of how many people want to put up with social ostracism we might wonder.\nThe state might very well have no laws against speech, but your community might very well effectively cut you off.\nAnd last quote from Mill, quote, there is no room for any appeal, add mister accordium in behalf of such persons.\nBy the way, just an aside from me, add mister accordium.\nThat means don't appeal to pity, don't feel sorry for people who won't speak up for fear of being ostracized and mill goes on, but though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think differently from us, as it was formally our custom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever buy our treatment of them end quote.\nSo there's the key points.\nThis social thing, Mill thinks, is as important as the legal thing.\nNow this is very important today, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera, should have the legal right to set their rules and censor, although there is a dispute in the community about this.\nYou know, some people think that the government really should intervene.\nNow, I think that that is wrong that Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, whatever social media company it happens to be, should be perfectly free to on their platforms, set the rules.\nBut we also have to consider the effects of banning people, as they seem to do rather routinely swiftly and readily with little recourse, and they have the legal right.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=691"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dab2f7dc-d0f0-498e-9f0b-bd4adf744c6c": {"page_content": "You know, some people think that the government really should intervene.\nNow, I think that that is wrong that Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, whatever social media company it happens to be, should be perfectly free to on their platforms, set the rules.\nBut we also have to consider the effects of banning people, as they seem to do rather routinely swiftly and readily with little recourse, and they have the legal right.\nBut on Mill's view, and those of others, Roger Scooten is a more recent example of arguing for this, what tends to happen is that if those platforms do become known as they seem to be for their internal censorship practices, which might be seen as arbitrary and harsh, the effect is for people to self censor, because they do not wish to be ostracized from the community, the online community.\nEven if they did not get banned, many may not say what they would prefer to say for fear of being deboosted as it's called, or simply poorly treated by their social media circle.\nSo when we've never had more opportunity to share ideas and learn knowledge and network, we might likewise, simultaneously, have a modern day silencing of a kind by proxy.\nSo Mill foresaw this and Mill was concerned about this when he was writing centuries ago.\nSo if what you're concerned about is progress, then yes, any legal imposition on people being free to speak is anathema to solving problems and understanding reality.\nIt is preventing the collision of ideas with each other as well as with reality.\nThis was the issue Galileo had, a legal constraint on what he could say and then a chilling effect on the rest of the scientific community.\nBut let's be clear that this is not the only chilling effect that can occur when it comes to speech.\nThere are real social pressures as well and today, because we have this thing called social media, it may well be amplified.\nMy guess is that any stifling of speech might well be mitigated today by the fact that so much more of it is out there and being amplified.\nBut this will have a selection effect associated with it, especially courageous people, or people of a certain kind, let's say, of a prickly nature, or people in a position of as mill hints at personal means will find it easier to speak out.\nThose who work for wages or a salary might be legally free to say whatever they like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=800"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf8409b5-3b54-4db9-b133-9ab477ea6260": {"page_content": "But this will have a selection effect associated with it, especially courageous people, or people of a certain kind, let's say, of a prickly nature, or people in a position of as mill hints at personal means will find it easier to speak out.\nThose who work for wages or a salary might be legally free to say whatever they like.\nBut if you're immediate concern is putting bread on the table, then risking that by speaking the truth might not be a gamble you will take.\nOkay, back to the book and David Rants.\nHow could I dispute about the land of the solar system, have such far-reaching consequences and why did the participants pursue it so passionately?.\nBecause the real dispute was not about whether the solar system had one layout rather than another.\nIt was about Galileo's brilliant advocacy of a new and dangerous way of thinking about reality.\nNot about the existence of reality, for both Galileo and the church believed in realism, the common sense view that an external physical universe really does exist, and does affect our senses, including senses enhanced by instruments such as telescopes.\nWhere Galileo differed was in his conception of the relationship between physical reality on the one hand, and human ideas, observations, and reason on the other.\nHe believed that the universe could be understood in terms of universal, mathematically formulated laws, and that a reliable knowledge of these laws was accessible to human beings if they applied his method of mathematical formulation and systematic experimental testing.\nAs he put it, the book of nature is written in mathematical symbols.\nThis was in conscious comparison with that other book on which it was more conventional to rely and quote.\nNow let's just consider there, David claimed, that both Galileo and the church believed in realism.\nThis is a commonly misunderstood point.\nReligious people can, and often are, in fact, realists, even people who have otherwise unscientific beliefs can be realists.\nIt's rather like how religious people often have a realistic or objective view of morality.\nThey think there exists a difference in reality between good and evil, and both of those things really exist.\nBut being a realist, of course, does not make you invaluable.\nYou can still make errors.\nIn fact, you would expect to make errors because you understand there is an objective reality out there about which you can be wrong.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=922"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "112a048c-7803-4022-9819-7d1409047ae5": {"page_content": "It's rather like how religious people often have a realistic or objective view of morality.\nThey think there exists a difference in reality between good and evil, and both of those things really exist.\nBut being a realist, of course, does not make you invaluable.\nYou can still make errors.\nIn fact, you would expect to make errors because you understand there is an objective reality out there about which you can be wrong.\nSo the thing about religious people on this account, the Christians of this kind that, for example, Galileo is debating against, they don't fall for the It's All-a-Dream argument and logically equivalent claims, but of course that doesn't mean that what they think is real actually is real.\nLet's go back to the book and David writes.\nGalileo understood that if his method was indeed reliable, then wherever it was applicable its conclusions had to be preferable to those obtained by any other method.\nTherefore, he insisted that scientific reasoning took precedence, not only over intuition and common sense, but also over religious doctrine and revelation.\nIt was specifically that idea, and not the heliocentric theory as such, that the authorities considered dangerous, and they were right.\nFor if any idea can be said to have initiated the scientific revolution and the enlightenment, and to have provided the secular foundation of modern civilization, it is that one.\nIt was forbidden to hold or defend the heliocentric theory as an explanation of the appearance of the night sky, but using the heliocentric theory, writing about it, holding it as a mathematical supposition, or defending it as a method of making predictions, they were all permitted.\nThat was why Galileo's dialogue of the two chief world systems, which compared the heliocentric theory, with the official geocentric theory, had been cleared for printing by church sensors.\nThe pope had even acquiesced in advance to Galileo's writing such a book, though at the trial a misleading document was produced, claiming that Galileo had been forbidden to discuss the issue at all.\nIt is an interesting historical footnote that in Galileo's time it was not yet indisputable, but the heliocentric theory gave better predictions than the geocentric theory.\nThe available observations were not very accurate, and hawk modifications had been proposed to improve the accuracy of the geocentric theory, and it was hard to quantify the predictive powers of the two rival theories.\nThese are just end quote there, just my reflection list.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1071"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a35b4ead-31ae-4dc4-aedc-dad06ea555e2": {"page_content": "It is an interesting historical footnote that in Galileo's time it was not yet indisputable, but the heliocentric theory gave better predictions than the geocentric theory.\nThe available observations were not very accurate, and hawk modifications had been proposed to improve the accuracy of the geocentric theory, and it was hard to quantify the predictive powers of the two rival theories.\nThese are just end quote there, just my reflection list.\nThese ad hawk modifications to the geocentric theory were basically, well, if you consider what the geocentric theory was all about, you have the earth the center, and then all the other celestial bodies are going around the earth.\nIf you just assume that they're moving in circles around the earth, then the predictions of the geocentric theory makes over time tend to move out of sync with what's going on in reality.\nWhat you do is instead of having the celestial objects, like the sun and the moon and the other planets, moving in circles around the earth, you have them moving in slightly more complicated motions where you have, well, what is called a circle on a circle or an epicycles.\nYou have the planets, for example, doing little circles as they're going around the sun, they're moving in circles on the circular orbits, and then if you need to have further epicycles, circle, circular orbits on circular orbits on circular orbits, you can do that as well, but it's ad hawk because you can just keep adding on these epicycles.\nThere's no reason for postulating the reality of these things, other than to try and match what's really going on in reality.\nLet's go back to the book, David Wright.\nFurthermore, when it comes to the details, there is more than one heliocentric theory.\nGalileo believed that the planets move in circles, while in fact their orbits are very nearly ellipses.\nSo the data did not fit the particular heliocentric theory that Galileo was defending either, so much then for his having been convinced by accumulated observations.\nBut for all that, the church took no position on this controversy.\nThe Inquisition did not care where the planets appeared to be, what they cared about, was reality.\nThey cared where the planets really were, and they wanted to understand the planets through explanations, just as Galileo did.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1170"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "00e3e653-bc33-464a-bfc1-0447181c2859": {"page_content": "So the data did not fit the particular heliocentric theory that Galileo was defending either, so much then for his having been convinced by accumulated observations.\nBut for all that, the church took no position on this controversy.\nThe Inquisition did not care where the planets appeared to be, what they cared about, was reality.\nThey cared where the planets really were, and they wanted to understand the planets through explanations, just as Galileo did.\nInstrumentalists and positivists would say that since the church was perfectly willing to accept Galileo's observational predictions, further argument between them was pointless, and his muttering a poor sea mueve was strictly meaningless.\nBut Galileo knew better and so did the Inquisition, when they denied the reliability of scientific knowledge, it was precisely the explanatory part of that knowledge that they had in mind.\nTheir worldview was false, but it was not illogical.\nAdmittedly, they believed in revelation and traditional authority as sources of reliable knowledge, but they also had an independent reason.\nFor criticizing the reliability of knowledge obtained by Galileo's methods, they could simply point out that no amount of observation or argument can ever prove that one explanation of a physical phenomena is true and another false.\nAs they would put it, God could produce the same observed effects in an infinity of different ways, so it is pure vanity and arrogance to claim to possess a way of knowing merely through one's own fallible observation and reason.\nWhich way he, God, chose.\nTo some extent, they were merely arguing for modesty, for a recognition of human fallibility, and if Galileo was claiming that the heliocentric theory was somehow proven or nearly so, in some inductive sense, they had a point.\nIf Galileo thought that his methods could confer on any theory and authority comparable to which the church claimed, for its doctrines, they were right to criticise him as arrogant, or as they would have put it blasphemous.\nThough, of course, by the same standard, they were much more arrogant themselves.\nSo how can we defend Galileo, against the Inquisition?.\nWhat should Galileo's defense have been in the face of this charge of claiming too much when he claimed that scientific theories contain reliable knowledge of reality?.\nThe Papurian defense of science, as a process of problem solving and explanation seeking, is not sufficient in itself.\nFor the Church, too, was primarily interested in explanations and not predictions, and it was quite willing to let Galileo solve problems using any theory he chose.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1290"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e9ddd13e-e5e6-4998-aef6-5bee9aca236b": {"page_content": "So how can we defend Galileo, against the Inquisition?.\nWhat should Galileo's defense have been in the face of this charge of claiming too much when he claimed that scientific theories contain reliable knowledge of reality?.\nThe Papurian defense of science, as a process of problem solving and explanation seeking, is not sufficient in itself.\nFor the Church, too, was primarily interested in explanations and not predictions, and it was quite willing to let Galileo solve problems using any theory he chose.\nIt was just that they did not accept Galileo's solutions, which they would call me mathematical hypotheses, had any bearing on physical reality.\nProblem solving, after all, is a process that takes place entirely within human minds, so Galileo may have seen the world, as a book in which the laws of nature are written in mathematical symbols, but that is strictly a metaphor.\nThere are no explanations in all but out there with the planets.\nThe fact is that all our problems and solutions are located within ourselves.\nHaving been created by ourselves, when we solve problems in science, we arrive through argument, theories, those explanations seem best to us.\nPause their, going back, let's just read that again, because it's important to keep that front of mind when we're considering the world view of David Deutsch coming from Papa.\nI'll say it again, quote from David.\nThe fact is that all our problems and solutions are located within ourselves.\nIsn't that wonderful?.\nSo that saying that there's no way of deriving anything from outside.\nThe only purpose for referring to external reality is to decide between those things within yourself, the problem within yourself and the solution you conjecture within yourself, the purpose of observation is to check which of the solutions really do solve the problem that you have or another way of putting that is which of the explanations that you conjecture actually turn out to be go unrefuted and the other ones go refuted by the observation that you make.\nSo let's go on, David writes.\nAgain, when we solve problems in science, we arrive through argument at theories whose explanation seem best to us.\nSo without in any way denying that it is right and proper and useful for us to solve problems, the inquisition and modern skeptics might legitimately ask what scientific problem solving has to do with reality.\nWe may find our best explanations psychologically satisfying.\nWe may find them helpful in making predictions.\nWe certainly find them essential in every area of technological creativity.\nAll this does justify our continuing to seek them and to use them in those ways.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1400"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "72970f46-92fd-4a63-accd-2dffa5b2d78a": {"page_content": "So without in any way denying that it is right and proper and useful for us to solve problems, the inquisition and modern skeptics might legitimately ask what scientific problem solving has to do with reality.\nWe may find our best explanations psychologically satisfying.\nWe may find them helpful in making predictions.\nWe certainly find them essential in every area of technological creativity.\nAll this does justify our continuing to seek them and to use them in those ways.\nBut why should we be obliged to take them as fact?.\nThe proposition that the inquisition Fort Galileo to endorse was in effect this, that the earth is in fact at rest with the sun and planets in motion around it, but that the paths on which these astronomical bodies travel are laid out in a complex way when viewed from the vantage point of earth is also consistent with the sun being at rest and the earth and the planets being in motion.\nLet me call that the inquisitions theory of the solar system.\nIf the inquisitions theory were true, we should still expect the heliocentric theory to make accurate predictions of the results of all earth-based astronomical observations, even though it would be factually false.\nIt would therefore seem that any observations that appear to support the heliocentric theory lend equal support to the inquisitions theory.\nOkay, pausing their my reflection.\nSo the thing here is, and this is a theme that runs through the philosophy of David Deutsch throughout both of his books, is that using observations to support your theory is a dead end.\nBecause inconsistent theories can be regarded as containing the same amount of support given a certain amount of observations.\nHere we see an example of this.\nAlmost any observation we make of the sky is going to support this geocentric theory.\nAfter all, you can walk outside right now and plot the position of the celestial objects in the sky, including the sun over the course of the 24-hour period, and those observations are going to be using a naked eye consistent with geocentrism.\nThey're going to support geocentrism, because if what you think the project of science is about is supporting a particular theory with ever more accumulated evidence, you're going to succeed in being able to support that theory, false know where it is.\nAnd indeed, you can use such a theory, this geocentric theory, in order to predict the position of the celestial bodies on the sky day after day.\nYou can make extremely accurate predictions of where the sun's going to be tomorrow in the sky.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1522"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c54f88b-97ef-4f22-a675-e6b7432e754d": {"page_content": "And indeed, you can use such a theory, this geocentric theory, in order to predict the position of the celestial bodies on the sky day after day.\nYou can make extremely accurate predictions of where the sun's going to be tomorrow in the sky.\nIf you were shown that the earth is at the center, if all you're interested in is supporting particular theories and making predictions, you can rely upon known to be false explanations.\nIn fact, you don't really have to be concerned about explanations at all to begin with, because if what you're really after are predictions, and this is David Deutsch's deep point about the project of science.\nSo we need to be focused on explanations.\nIf we are realists, we can conceive that not everyone's a realist, but that doesn't prevent us from remaining committed to the project of science as being about good explanations, because we want to come to a deeper and deeper understanding of the reality that we inhabit.\nWe are not primarily concerned in any area outside of science in predicting what's going to happen next.\nIn the special case of science, yes, we are, but it's only a small part of the scientific project, after all, if we consider the entire science of biology, sometimes what we're interested in is how exactly species arise over time, evolution by natural selection is an explanation of the biological diversity that we see.\nHowever, simultaneously, it doesn't allow you necessarily to make accurate predictions about what species will arise next.\nIn fact, it tells you why that project of trying to explain the direction of evolution is a fool's error, and because, as we like to say, evolution by natural selection is a blind process that cannot see ahead as to how life will change over time, given a change in conditions in ecosystems and niches that life might evolve into might adapt itself towards.\nSo I'm skipping a part.\nDavid talks about how the fact, well, there's no way in which we could rule out using experiment.\nA theory like, for example, that the earth is just at the center of a ginormous planetarium, and that planetarium was giving us a apparent feedback that was consistent with a heliocentric theory.\nThis is the simulation argument in disguise.\nThis idea that there might be this hugely complicated entity that is giving us the appearance of realism and external reality, but which actually forms the border between what we experience as reality and outside of that thing, being something that we have no access to.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1663"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1a79241f-1fc9-4c07-bc1e-155b6b6b5b88": {"page_content": "This is the simulation argument in disguise.\nThis idea that there might be this hugely complicated entity that is giving us the appearance of realism and external reality, but which actually forms the border between what we experience as reality and outside of that thing, being something that we have no access to.\nSo I'm skipping that, and I'll just pick it up where David writes, quote, to us, the inquisitions theory looks hopelessly contrived.\nWhy should we accept such a complicated and ad hoc account of why the sky looks as it does when the unadorned heliocentric cosmology does the same job with less fuss.\nWe may cite the principle of Occam's razor, do not multiply entities beyond necessity, or as I prefer to put it, do not complicate explanations beyond necessity, because if you do, the unnecessarily complications themselves remain unexplained.\nHowever, whether an explanation is or is not contrived or unnecessarily complicated depends on all the other ideas and explanations that make up one's worldview.\nThe inquisition would have argued that the idea of the earth moving is an unnecessary complication.\nIt contradicts common sense, it contradicts scripture, and they would have said there is a perfectly good explanation that does without it, but is there?.\nDoes the inquisition's theory really provide alternative explanations without having to introduce the counterintuitive complication of the heliocentric system?.\nJust pausing their more reflections.\nSo today, using the best explanation of epistemology in the philosophy of science, given to us in the beginning of infinity, we would say that heliocentricism is the hard to vary explanation while geocentrism in order to continue to make more and more accurate predictions had to be easy to vary.\nIt had to allow the adding on of more epicycles whenever the predictions were out by a certain amount.\nAdding epicycles is an easy variation.\nHowever, it's very difficult to vary heliocentricism in the same way.\nLet's go back to the book and David writes, quote, let us take a closer look at how the inquisitions theory explains things.\nIt explains the apparent stationarity of the earth by saying that it is stationary.\nSo far, so good.\nOn the face of it, that explanation is better than Galileo's for here to work very hard and contradicts some common sense notions of force and inertia to explain why we do not feel the earth move.\nBut how does the inquisition theory cope with the more difficult task of explaining planetary emotions?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1798"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5740e482-d074-4508-90c4-5ed70b9b6ac4": {"page_content": "It explains the apparent stationarity of the earth by saying that it is stationary.\nSo far, so good.\nOn the face of it, that explanation is better than Galileo's for here to work very hard and contradicts some common sense notions of force and inertia to explain why we do not feel the earth move.\nBut how does the inquisition theory cope with the more difficult task of explaining planetary emotions?.\nThe heliocentric theory explains them by saying that the planets are seen to move in complicated loops across the sky because they are really moving in simple circles or ellipses in space, but the earth is moving as well.\nThe inquisitions explanation is that the planets are seen to move in complicated loops because they are really moving in complicated loops in space, but, and here according to the inquisitions theory comes the essence of the explanation, this complicated motion is governed by a simple, underlying principle.\nNamely, that the planets move in such a way that, when viewed from earth, they appear just as they would, if they and the earth were, in simple orbit around the sun.\nTo understand the planetary emotions in terms of the inquisition theory, it is essential that one should understand this principle for the constraints it imposes are the basis of every detailed explanation that one can make under the theory.\nFor example, if one were asked why a planetary conjunction occurred on such and such a date, or why a planet backtracked across the sky in a loop of a particular shape, the answer would always be because that is how it would look if the heliocentric theory were true.\nSo here is a cosmology, the inquisitions cosmology that can be understood only in terms of a different cosmology, the heliocentric theory, that it contradicts, but faithfully mimics pausing their my reflection.\nSo as we might say of this theory using this argument, namely the inquisitions theory, the geocentric theory taken seriously, this version of the geocentric theory simply is heliocentricism with some additional assumptions, namely that everything appears to be consistent entirely and explained well by heliocentricism, except we're going to add the assumption that heliocentricism is not actually true and geocentrism is true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=1928"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "84dad8b6-d5b4-46ec-8e51-4ebf524c8473": {"page_content": "So as we might say of this theory using this argument, namely the inquisitions theory, the geocentric theory taken seriously, this version of the geocentric theory simply is heliocentricism with some additional assumptions, namely that everything appears to be consistent entirely and explained well by heliocentricism, except we're going to add the assumption that heliocentricism is not actually true and geocentrism is true.\nBut otherwise everything else works out the same, all the predictions that one makes is perfectly consistent with heliocentricism being true, but we're just going to tack on this negation of the entire theory that although it does appear to be true and appear to be the best explanation, we're going to nonetheless regard it as axiomatically false because geocentrism we just take as dogmatically the truth about our cosmology.\nAnd I'm skipping a part and I'll just pick it up where David says on this exact point, quote, therefore we are right to regard the inquisitions theory as a convoluted elaboration of the heliocentric theory rather than vice versa.\nWe have arrived at this conclusion not by judging the inquisitions theory against modern cosmology, which would have been a circular argument, but by insisting on taking the inquisitions theory seriously in its own terms as an explanation of the world.\nI've mentioned the grass cure theory which can be ruled out without experimental testing because it contained no explanation.\nHere we have a theory which can also be ruled out without experimental testing because it contains a bad explanation, an explanation which in its own terms is worse than a travel pausing their just my reflection.\nYes, so what we're saying here is we have two theories, both of them make exactly the same predictions.\nOne of them is simpler than the other, namely heliocentricism is simpler than the geocentric theory as presented here because the geocentric theory assumes that all the positions of the planets that we observe are perfectly consistent with heliocentricism except it's not true.\nSo it is, as we say, heliocentricism plus this additional assumption of it not being true.\nAnd there it goes on to say, quote, as I have said, the Inquisition were realists, yet their theory has this in common with solipsism.\nBoth of them draw an arbitrary boundary beyond which they claim human reason has no access, or at least beyond which problem-solving is no path to understanding.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2020"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e27d217-efb7-44b7-8336-6da579029cfb": {"page_content": "So it is, as we say, heliocentricism plus this additional assumption of it not being true.\nAnd there it goes on to say, quote, as I have said, the Inquisition were realists, yet their theory has this in common with solipsism.\nBoth of them draw an arbitrary boundary beyond which they claim human reason has no access, or at least beyond which problem-solving is no path to understanding.\nFor solipsists, the boundary tightly encloses their own brains, or perhaps just their abstract minds or in corporeal souls for the Inquisition, it enclosed the entire earth, some present day creationists, believe in a similar boundary, not in space.\nBut in time, for they believe that the universe was created a six thousand years ago, complete with misleading evidence of earlier events pausing their just my reflection on this.\nWe might well add to this any of the modern incantations of solipsism.\nOne of which is, well, this is all a simulation of some kind or other, including the so-called simulation argument from Boschdom, it stands on the same logical footing as these ideas about solipsism.\nIt postulates a reality beyond which we have no access experimentally scientifically and perhaps even using our reason.\nWhat we say is that the only thing we have access to are the contents of the simulation or the dream or the deceptions that are going on caused by the evil demon, whatever it happens to be.\nIf it is a simulation, if we are living in a computer simulation, then it postulates a world outside the one we're experiencing in which the computer on which this reality we experience is running.\nBut we don't have access to that computer or the universe in which that computer actually exists.\nIt's postulating a metaphysical reality on the same footing as whatever is doing the dreaming in which whatever the entity is, presumably it's you, if you're dreaming all of this, in which that entity exists as David says on this point after I skip another paragraph, he writes, quote, there is a large class of related theories here.\nbut we can usefully regard them all as variants of solipsism.\nThey differ in where they draw the boundary of reality or the boundary of that part of reality, which is comprehensible through problem solving and they differ in whether and how they seek knowledge outside that boundary.\nBut they all consider scientific rationality and other problem solving to be in applicable outside the boundary.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2142"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1cdb1765-e585-4837-bbe6-00e2c2b28cee": {"page_content": "but we can usefully regard them all as variants of solipsism.\nThey differ in where they draw the boundary of reality or the boundary of that part of reality, which is comprehensible through problem solving and they differ in whether and how they seek knowledge outside that boundary.\nBut they all consider scientific rationality and other problem solving to be in applicable outside the boundary.\nA mere game, they might concede that it can be a satisfying and useful game but it is nevertheless only a game from which no valid conclusion can be drawn about the reality outside end quote.\nYes, so as I say, these other versions of solipsism, you know, the one that says that you're dreaming all of this into existence or that you want to friend a dreaming all of this into existence or that all conscious creatures on planet earth are dreaming reality into existence.\nPlato's Cave was one of the earliest versions of this that because we don't have direct access to reality, we might be utterly deceived about the true nature of reality in some way or other.\nDescartes came along and talked about how a demon could be deceiving us and said this that him down a router of his so-called method of doubt.\nThe movie, the movie series, the matrix and the simulation arguments, it's all the same, all these things are versions of solipsism.\nPerhaps no philosopher is more closely associated with solipsism than Descartes because Descartes had this idea but there's one thing that could not be doubted and that is the individual's own mind, the existence of their own mind and he said it was basically a logical necessity if you read the meditation.\nHe doesn't really regard it as an argument.\nHe says it's a necessary truth.\nI think I am is true whenever I think it.\nNow I used to buy this, I used to think yes, this is the only thing that we cannot doubt.\nIf you're thinking then therefore you exist but as David says in the fabric of reality, in the very next paragraph I'm about to read, this entails taking on board a whole bunch more things that one regards as being absolutely true.\nLet's just read what David says here, quote, despite Descartes' desire to base his philosophy on this supposedly firm foundation, he actually allowed himself any other assumptions and was certainly no solipsist, end quote.\nSo what does David mean by these many other assumptions?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2249"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "367018e5-bcd1-450e-bb95-465787ffaf79": {"page_content": "Let's just read what David says here, quote, despite Descartes' desire to base his philosophy on this supposedly firm foundation, he actually allowed himself any other assumptions and was certainly no solipsist, end quote.\nSo what does David mean by these many other assumptions?.\nWhat I think is meant here is if you're going to argue in the same way that Descartes did that I think I am is a necessary truth or is it's usually rendered.\nand I think he said this elsewhere, cogito ergo sum which is I think therefore I exist.\nSo that sort of suggests that it's kind of an argument whereas I think David, whereas I think Descartes in the meditations was actually saying it's just a necessary truth.\nIt's just if you if you are able to think those words I think or I exist or something you can think anything at all, then you exist necessarily exist.\nBut whatever the case, you're formulating those thoughts in language.\nSo therefore you think the language renders reality perfectly well.\nSo not only do you think that this captures a necessary truth, a firm foundational which to base everything else, you're also thinking the language is inherent as well.\nIt's able to capture your thoughts inherently, which means that you will you cannot possibly be mistaken about the meanings of words or what the letters that make up the words happen to be.\nThere's a whole bunch that you're admitting are also equally true as the claim I think therefore I exist.\nIf I think therefore I exist is your foundational truth, then that amounts to an argument.\nSo you're thinking that logic is perfectly inherent, you're thinking that language is perfectly inherent, you're thinking that what you think now is equivalent to what you think in the future, that these words like exist, for example, label a concept which also you cannot be mistaken about.\nSo there's rather much that you're claiming to not possibly be mistaken about when you say there's only one thing that I think I cannot be mistaken about, namely that I exist.\nWell, if you truly think that then you're also trying to say that you can't possibly be mistaken about the word I, the word exists, what I exist, the conjunction of those two things means, what the letters in those words mean, what the noises coming out of your mouth mean, or what the supposed thoughts in your head really means.\nSo you're arguing for a vast ensemble of things that you think you are infallible about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2375"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15edf8fa-75b6-4358-bf6c-74c8e7fe3745": {"page_content": "Well, if you truly think that then you're also trying to say that you can't possibly be mistaken about the word I, the word exists, what I exist, the conjunction of those two things means, what the letters in those words mean, what the noises coming out of your mouth mean, or what the supposed thoughts in your head really means.\nSo you're arguing for a vast ensemble of things that you think you are infallible about.\nBut if we're fallibleists, we can reject all of that and we can say, well, we could still be mistaken about any one of those things because that's the nature of creating knowledge that we have, it's error prone, and we could be wrong about it.\nIt's not to say that you don't exist, by the way, it's just to say that you can't be absolutely 100% certain that you exist, that's all, that's all we're saying, that there's a possibility.\nNow, even if you can't think of a way in which you might be mistaken, that's no refutation of the fact that you could be mistaken, as I like to say, your inability to imagine how you might be mistaken is not a refutation of the fact that you could be mistaken.\nIt just means you have a poor imagination or an insufficiently good imagination to imagine all the ways in which you might be mistaken.\nYou are fallible, after all.\nOkay, so let's go to the part of the chapter where David is, Refuting Solipsism, not by experiment, not biological proof, but by arguments.\nIf we take solipsism seriously, what it's saying is basically your dreaming things into existence.\nSo you're the only person that exists, and everything you experience, all of reality, is nothing but a product of your dreaming.\nYou are born dreaming, you're dreaming now, and you will die dreaming.\nSo the external reality, none of it really, truly exists, is just part of your dream.\nWhat's wrong with this?.\nWell, let's read what David says about this.\nQuote, If there are sources of ideas that behave as if they were independent of oneself, then they necessarily are independent of oneself.\nFor if I define myself as the conscious entity that has the thoughts and feelings I am aware of having, then the dream people I seem to interact with are by definition something other than that narrowly defined self.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2490"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "476903a2-9c19-4d64-9b37-abfc66d4f7f5": {"page_content": "What's wrong with this?.\nWell, let's read what David says about this.\nQuote, If there are sources of ideas that behave as if they were independent of oneself, then they necessarily are independent of oneself.\nFor if I define myself as the conscious entity that has the thoughts and feelings I am aware of having, then the dream people I seem to interact with are by definition something other than that narrowly defined self.\nAnd so I must concede that something other than myself exists, pausing their my reflection.\nAnd so this is the beginning of the refutation of solipsism, namely that if you're dreaming into existence, a reality, which is independently so complex, as to be unpredictable by yourself, by your dreaming self, then those other entities are indeed real, real in the sense that they appear in whatever way you're going to explain this dream like reality.\nEverything you're interacting with is a source of an idea or a prompt, an observation, another person might be a source of an idea as well.\nSo some of the ideas are not coming from inside you, but you're getting them from other people that you're interacting with.\nAnd if they're just a product of your mind, if these other people are a product of your mind, then that's a rather unusual way of defining oneself, not only as these source of particular ideas about those people, but those people has being sources of ideas that are not you.\nSo your conscious self is not really all that you are.\nWhat you are is your conscious self and then all these other entities that you're interacting with, the dream people that you interact with on a daily basis.\nAs David goes on to say, quote, my only other option, if I were a committed solipsist would be to regard the dream people as creations of my unconscious mind and therefore as part of myself in a loose sense.\nBut then I should be forced to concede that myself had a very rich structure, most of which is independent of my conscious self within that structure, our entities, dream people who despite being mere constituents of the mind of a supposed solipsist behave exactly as if they were committed antisolipsists.\nSo I could not call myself holy a solipsist for only my narrowly defined self would take that view.\nMany apparently most of the opinions held within my mind as a whole would oppose solipsism, poor say, my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2593"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d1ee8675-e17d-49e5-b948-da65b26cac42": {"page_content": "So I could not call myself holy a solipsist for only my narrowly defined self would take that view.\nMany apparently most of the opinions held within my mind as a whole would oppose solipsism, poor say, my reflection.\nSo what's he saying here saying here that if you're really truly going to try and believe that you're a solipsist.\nIn other words, you're the only thing that exists in reality and everything is being dreamed into existence.\nMost of that reality that's being dreamed into existence consists of, well, the people in that reality hold the view that solipsism is not true.\nAnd so you, if you're dreaming all of this into existence, primarily consists of ideas, minds that object to your apparent belief in solipsism, they're the ones, they're the people you're going to interact with who are going to say, you're foolish for believing that you're a solipsist after all.\nHere am I, supposedly part of you, part of your dream that is telling you solipsism as false out of square that circle that most of you, most of your mind actually reject solipsism because after all, your mind also consists of the dream people.\nIsn't that bizarre?.\nThere goes on to say, quote, I could study the outer region of myself and find that it seems to obey certain laws.\nThe same laws as the dream textbooks say apply to what they call the physical universe.\nI would find that there is far more of the outer region than the inner region.\nAside from containing more ideas, it is also more complex, more varied and has more measurable variables by a literally astronomical factor than the inner region.\nMoreover, this outer region is amenable to scientific study using the methods of Galileo because I have now been forced to define that region as part of myself.\nSolipsism no longer has any argument against the validity of such study, which is now defined as no more than a form of introspection, porting him or reflection.\nThat's basically it.\nOkay, that's the refutation.\nSolipsism basically begins by saying it's all a dream, but taken seriously, the contents of the dream act unpredictably in many cases autonomously and the physical world can even be studied.\nSo basically, nothing has changed except the addition of a useless assumption, namely the assumption that it's all a dream.\nDuran Lenny air makes this point in a particular discussion I'm linking to here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2747"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "18e21c11-5c9c-4929-836b-1f8c8bc54ffc": {"page_content": "That's basically it.\nOkay, that's the refutation.\nSolipsism basically begins by saying it's all a dream, but taken seriously, the contents of the dream act unpredictably in many cases autonomously and the physical world can even be studied.\nSo basically, nothing has changed except the addition of a useless assumption, namely the assumption that it's all a dream.\nDuran Lenny air makes this point in a particular discussion I'm linking to here.\nI'll put that up on the screen and in the notes of the podcast that this is a closer to truth interview he has.\nAnd he talks about the simulation argument, you know, basically a form of solipsism where he says, well, look, if science still works under this metaphysical assumption of it all being simulated or dreamed, then what does it's a simulation actually add to our understanding of reality?.\nAgain, this whole simulation dream thing is refuted, not by a mathematical or logical disprove of the hypothesis, nor by any experimental evidence, but rather something in a sense way more compelling.\nA philosophical argument that the simulation or solipsism claim is a bad explanation.\nWe should notice in beginning of infinity terms, it's easier to vary.\nAfter all, this solipsism claim that one person is dreaming could easily be varied to and maintain all the same predictions by saying that two such people are dreaming three, pick your number of people are dreaming this reality into existence or the number of computers on which it's being simulated or the number of demons deceiving people into thinking this is true and so on and so forth.\nAll of these different ways of denying basic realism are easy to vary and therefore bad explanations and can be rejected on that basis.\nDavid goes on to say, quote, thus we see that if we take solipsism seriously, if we assume that it is true and that all valid explanations must scrupulously conform to it itself to structs.\nHow exactly does solipsism take in seriously differ from its common sense rival realism?.\nThe difference is based on no more than a renaming scheme.\nSolipsism insists on referring to objectively different things, such as external reality and my unconscious mind or introspection and scientific observation by the same names, but then it has to reintroduce the distinction through explanations in terms of something like the outer part of myself, but no such extra explanations would be necessary without its insistence on an inexplicable renaming scheme.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2839"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce53874d-46a3-4bd6-8816-03fba8b8a85f": {"page_content": "The difference is based on no more than a renaming scheme.\nSolipsism insists on referring to objectively different things, such as external reality and my unconscious mind or introspection and scientific observation by the same names, but then it has to reintroduce the distinction through explanations in terms of something like the outer part of myself, but no such extra explanations would be necessary without its insistence on an inexplicable renaming scheme.\nSolipsism must also postulate the existence of an additional class of processes, invisible inexplicable processes which give the mind the illusion of living in an external reality.\nThe solipsist who believes that nothing exists other than the contents of one mind must also believe that the mind is a phenomenon of greater multiplicity than is normally supposed.\nIt contains other people like thoughts, planet life thoughts, and laws of physics like thoughts.\nThese thoughts are real.\nThey develop in a complex way or pretend to, and they have enough autonomy to surprise, disappoint, and liven or thwart that other class of thoughts which call themselves I, thus the solipsists explanation of the world is in terms of interacting thoughts rather than interacting objects, but those thoughts are real and interact, according to the same rules that the realists says govern the interaction of objects.\nThus, solipsism, far from being a worldview stripped to its essentials, is actually just realism, disguised, and weighed down by additional unnecessary assumptions, worthless baggage introduced only to be explained away, pausing their my reflection.\nI just love that line.\nIt's probably one of my favorite lines in all the fabric of reality.\nThis idea of the additional unnecessary assumptions being worthless baggage introduced only to be explained away, I've probably repurposed or rephrased it a number of times over the years in response to various different kinds of anti-realist, metaphysic claims, and bad philosophy and bad explanations.\nSo that refutation of solipsism, and all similar arguments is basically where I'm going to finish it today.\nI'll read one more paragraph, because I think that this is one of the most powerful, and in my experience, most talked about parts of the fabric of reality, that here we have a refutation, an argument that shows the poverty of these anti-realistic arguments.\nYou know, you go along to a philosophy lecture at university, and eventually you come across, usually it comes via data.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=2960"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "be6f185b-7a82-4e81-80e2-27dda809e20e": {"page_content": "I'll read one more paragraph, because I think that this is one of the most powerful, and in my experience, most talked about parts of the fabric of reality, that here we have a refutation, an argument that shows the poverty of these anti-realistic arguments.\nYou know, you go along to a philosophy lecture at university, and eventually you come across, usually it comes via data.\nThis idea that it might all be a dream that what is really real, and you get into these deep philosophical arguments and you are told, there's no way that science can disprove this, or no way that usually it's put in those kind of terms.\nThere's no scientific evidence that you can bring forth to show that it's not all a dream.\nBut who cares?.\nWho cares about the fact there's no scientific evidence to show that this is false?.\nThat's to privilege a particular way of refuting bad ideas.\nThere's a better way.\nIn this circumstance, certainly, the better way is to reveal the poverty of the explanation that is solipsism, or the simulation argument.\nTo say, look, it's basically just realism plus additional unnecessary assumptions that don't help us to understand reality any better.\nAnd if you assume that it's all going on in your mind, then you're assuming that your mind is just equally as complex as what realism says the physical world happens to be.\nIt's just that you're saying it's not really a physical world.\nIt's all in my head.\nBut then this raises all sorts of questions about what's really going on in your head, if we take it seriously, then reality is just reality.\nIt's just that it's in your head, but how and why and so on and so forth become questions that would need to be asked if we would take this seriously.\nSo we refuse it, not by experiment, not by logical disprove, but simply by philosophical argument, as David goes on to say in the last paragraph that I'll read, quote, by this argument, we can dispense with solipsism and all the related theories.\nThey are all indefensible.\nIncidentally, we have rejected one world view on these grounds, namely, positivism, the theory that all statements other than those describing or predicting observations are meaningless.\nHow's our remark?.\nIn chapter one, positivism assert its own meaninglessness and therefore cannot be consistently defended.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=3088"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "071caaf8-453d-4d13-838f-8d814faa8819": {"page_content": "They are all indefensible.\nIncidentally, we have rejected one world view on these grounds, namely, positivism, the theory that all statements other than those describing or predicting observations are meaningless.\nHow's our remark?.\nIn chapter one, positivism assert its own meaninglessness and therefore cannot be consistently defended.\nSo we can continue reassured with common sense, realism and the pursuit of explanations by scientific methods end quote.\nAnd in the next episode, I'll introduce pop or into the mix.\nI'll bring pop or into the mix as well because pop or wrote about realism, common sense realism in objective knowledge, and it comes to bear directly on this.\nBut for now, until next time, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5D55Zejt8&t=3207"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f4e270d1-f619-4ee3-a269-635959043e47": {"page_content": "misconceptions.\nFallabalism is the stance that we can always be objectively wrong.\nThis means there is something to be objectively wrong about, so it implies realism, while at the same time rejecting relativism.\nThe idea there is no way of being objectively wrong, and also dogmatism, the idea that sometimes about, at some things at least, one cannot possibly be wrong because one has found the final truth.\nThis idea that it is possible to get to the final truth, that the truth is manifest, as Karl Popper said.\nOnly ever leads to tyranny.\nThat may seem like a bold claim, and it may be, but that does not make it any less true.\nAnd yes, I said true there, because there is nothing about this stance that rejects truth, the opposite.\nIt is just that we can never know we have found the truth, but our best explanations must contain truth, for if they are good explanations, then objectively, they solve a problem, they work, but they can only work by saying something correct, something correct about the world, something true, but they will always also contain misconceptions.\nWe are fallible, and no single theory can possibly describe everything.\nIn other words, every theory, every explanation, is a misconception.\nDavid Deutsch once said that it would have been better for the broader understanding of the process of science.\nHad we all long ago agreed not to call theories theories, but rather misconceptions.\nSo we would have the scientific misconception of gravity and the scientific misconception of evolution by natural selection or of climate change, particle physics or tectonic plates.\nAnd what happens is that we over time replace one deep explanatory misconception with another, by correcting some errors, by finding just a little more truth.\nTruth we cannot quantify, and truth we cannot speak exactly, but truth nonetheless.\nAnd those errors are corrected, in truth, those are genuine problem solved with the new explanation.\nThe new, better misconception.\nPopper wrote, quote, There is only one way to science or to philosophy for that matter, to meet a problem, to see its beauty and full and love with it, to get married to it, and to live with it happily till death to you part, unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem, or unless indeed, you should obtain a solution.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3e5UVKMnb0&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a6a1a0e9-1be3-48c1-950a-9576aef02175": {"page_content": "And those errors are corrected, in truth, those are genuine problem solved with the new explanation.\nThe new, better misconception.\nPopper wrote, quote, There is only one way to science or to philosophy for that matter, to meet a problem, to see its beauty and full and love with it, to get married to it, and to live with it happily till death to you part, unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem, or unless indeed, you should obtain a solution.\nBut even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover to your delight the existence of a whole family of enchanting though perhaps difficult problem children, for whose welfare you may work with a purpose to the end of your day's end, quote.\nHe may have understated things there, for if you do find a solution you will indeed discover more problems they will be revealed to you.\nFor, in standing on the shoulders of giants, you can see further, more problems, more errors, more misconceptions, but those are more interesting.\nThose are better problems to have.\nA vaccine is a solution, but it's never perfect, but it is far better than vast numbers of people simply being infected with whatever the disease is, so too for any medical intervention.\nThis is why we have the term side effects.\nNew, better problems.\nSo your hair fell out and you felt quite tired and ill, but you did not die from the cancer.\nEinstein's theory of general relativity solved problems, Newtonian gravity could not like anomalies with Mercury's orbit.\nBut in doing so, it opened up a vision of reality that was more grand and filled with new problems, not conceivable before.\nSpace and time as a fabric that could warp and bend forming effects like gravitational lensing.\nIt opened up the problem of how to build a global positioning system of super high precision now, coded into all mobile phones with Google Maps for location finding.\nIt revealed the possibility of gravitational waves and therefore the problem of how to detect them, but should we expect general relativity to contain no misconceptions?.\nQuite the opposite.\nIt too must be a misconception.\nBut how?.\nWe do not know only that it must be because it cannot be the final word.\nNothing can.\nAs well as general relativity works, it cannot be the final story because it conflicts with quantum theory.\nBoth purport to be universal claims about physical reality, but they cannot be the final complete word.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3e5UVKMnb0&t=118"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4086623a-f043-4644-be47-34848231235d": {"page_content": "Quite the opposite.\nIt too must be a misconception.\nBut how?.\nWe do not know only that it must be because it cannot be the final word.\nNothing can.\nAs well as general relativity works, it cannot be the final story because it conflicts with quantum theory.\nBoth purport to be universal claims about physical reality, but they cannot be the final complete word.\nThere must be some successor to both, despite they're both making astonishingly precise predictions, despite their solving of problems.\nThey can't be the final word.\nThere must be successes to them both or a single successor.\nAnd to that, another.\nFor we will never have a theory that explains everything from the motion of fundamental particles and the behavior of space and time through to how life evolves and why historical events happen and how human beings make the choices they do and why J.R.R. Tolkien didn't write more books.\nSo because no single theory can explain everything, there is always something it will be missing.\nAlways some misconception it has about how to explain the world and we are fallible anyway.\nWe who create the explanations.\nWe cannot guarantee anything we find is error-free.\nAnything we create is error-free.\nAll is a woven web of guesses.\nAll is a great tapestry of misconception coming to represent reality a little better over time, but never capturing at all just correcting errors here and there and there are infinite errors.\nThey are everywhere and always will be.\nBut we make progress nonetheless by correcting them and moving from misconception to ever better misconception.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3e5UVKMnb0&t=233"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82596cc7-d8f4-4d4f-ad09-0a9f50c902c1": {"page_content": "Hello everyone, Chapter 7 today.\nArt official creativity.\nNow this is a chapter I really have been looking forward to possibly more than most.\nI said all the way back when I started doing these with Chapter 1.\nThe one purpose of this was actually not only to help others to understand what was being said in various places in the beginning of infinity, but also to clarify in my own mind some of the more subtle arguments being made and in this chapter there is to my mind anyway.\nSome very subtle yet powerful arguments being made.\nI fully admit upfront and this is kind of exciting.\nI actually didn't understand a large part of the chapter until last year.\nI had to read it, read it again and discuss it to really figure out why, why I wasn't quite getting some of what was going on here.\nI'll get to exactly what that was that I didn't understand, but let me just press for sit by saying I thought that we by we, I mean, a civilization, a community of scientists and myself personally, I thought we understood evolution by natural selection.\nI mean, I thought there was this odd open question here or there, but I didn't think that in biology that evolution by natural selection, neo Darwinism, was anything unlike general relativity.\nI thought they were, you know, as general relativity was to physics, evolution by natural selection was to biology.\nBut no, this is quite wrong.\nThis is wrong with philosophical reasons, but it's also wrong for the reason that we don't understand evolution by natural selection to quite the degree that we understand general relativity.\nSo, and there's a way to know that we don't understand one compared to the other.\nThere's actually a rule and David articulates the rule in this very chapter, yet another one of his discoveries.\nThere's a way of distinguishing between things we truly do have a good grasp of, like how planetary orbits work, that's the theory of general relativity, and how evolution by natural selection works.\nThat's neo Darwinism.\nThere's a difference to how well we understand these two theories.\nIt's not the same.\nSo again, the way that we know, that we understand one really well, and the way that we know we don't understand one really well, there's a good way of dividing or separating these two kinds of understanding, which David's going to present in this chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=25"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5e45a136-6a98-4eb8-b53b-6fc5758808f5": {"page_content": "That's neo Darwinism.\nThere's a difference to how well we understand these two theories.\nIt's not the same.\nSo again, the way that we know, that we understand one really well, and the way that we know we don't understand one really well, there's a good way of dividing or separating these two kinds of understanding, which David's going to present in this chapter.\nNow, it strikes me often in this book that entire paragraphs had a PhD student say, thought of them first, they probably could have extended them out to 40,000 plus words in writing a thesis all in their own, and earn their PhD on the basis of some of the discoveries that are published in this book.\nFor example, David's answer to what is a person could certainly be a paper in a philosophical journal all on its own.\nAs could the answer to how do we know when we've understood a process?.\nThese are answers to deep philosophical questions, and they come at you one after another in the beginning of infinity.\nAnd we will see that in this chapter especially, and without labour in the point too much, it's another ongoing reason for this video series and the podcasts.\nNow, although this chapter is not one of the longest chapters, indeed, it's equally the second shortest.\nI'm doing this one in two parts, because I see a reasonably sharp dividing line between a section on artificial intelligence, or more precisely these days, we call it artificial general intelligence, and the second half of the chapter, which is more about artificial evolution.\nI'll still make remarks about the second part in this first part, but just a flag here that I won't be at the end of the chapter by the end of this episode.\nOkay, so let's get into it.\nChapter seven, David writes, Alan Turing founded the theory of classical computation in 1936, and helped construct one of the first universal classical computers during the Second World War.\nHe's rightly known as the father of modern computing.\nBabbage deserves to be called its grandfather, but unlike Babbage and Love's likes, Turing did understand that artificial intelligence, AI, must in principle be possible, because a universal computer is a universal simulator.\nI'll pause there, and this is just my commentary.\nUniversal simulator.\nNow, why is that important?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=134"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "48626f79-1545-4df4-a0a0-059aaa0ef69e": {"page_content": "He's rightly known as the father of modern computing.\nBabbage deserves to be called its grandfather, but unlike Babbage and Love's likes, Turing did understand that artificial intelligence, AI, must in principle be possible, because a universal computer is a universal simulator.\nI'll pause there, and this is just my commentary.\nUniversal simulator.\nNow, why is that important?.\nWell, in this chapter when David says AI, as I've already said, he's using what it once meant, but now that meaning is kind of being perverted in various ways, namely all the computer programs are called that are called artificial intelligence today, aren't.\nThey're not intelligent.\nA self-driving car is not an example of anything like intelligence.\nWhat it's an example of is some very fancy, very specific, highly specific programming, running on extremely fast and sensitive hardware, but it's not an explanation producing machine as we are.\nThat's why we're intelligent.\nWe're kind of ahead of ourselves here, but the point is, and David has written about this elsewhere, if you simply do a Google search of David Deutsch, A on magazine, that's A, E, O, N, and the title of the article we're looking for is how close are we to creating artificial intelligence?.\nThen you'll find something of an update on this.\nHe wrote that article in 2012, so four years after the publication of the beginning of infinity, and then David explains how AI has become kind of a redundant turn since we now use AGI, the G standing for general artificial general intelligence, to differentiate machines that can think in ways like we can.\nThe point here about the universal Turing machine is that it is a universal simulator, which means it can simulate any process whatsoever, including simulating what a human brain does.\nIn that case, the simulation would be that thing.\nA simulated mind is a mind because they are both abstract things.\nThis is quite different to let's say simulating a bullet in a computer game.\nA bullet has a very real physical presence and a lack of abstraction of the first kind in stark contrast to a mind.\nA simulated bullet won't kill you in the real world, but minds are already abstract things running on physical brains, so simulating a mind on a silicon brain, let's say, is to create an actual mind.\nOkay, back to the book now and David writes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=243"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a875b8ff-d753-46a2-b840-c1065afb87a8": {"page_content": "This is quite different to let's say simulating a bullet in a computer game.\nA bullet has a very real physical presence and a lack of abstraction of the first kind in stark contrast to a mind.\nA simulated bullet won't kill you in the real world, but minds are already abstract things running on physical brains, so simulating a mind on a silicon brain, let's say, is to create an actual mind.\nOkay, back to the book now and David writes.\nIn 1950, in a paper entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, he, Turing, famously addressed the question, can a machine think?.\nNot only did he defend the proposition that it can on the grounds of universality, he also proposed a test for whether a program had achieved it.\nNow known as the Turing test, it is simply that a suitable human judge will be unable to tell whether a program is human or not.\nIn that paper and subsequently, Turing sketched protocols for carrying out his test.\nFor instance, he suggested that both the program and day genuine human should separately interact with the judge via some purely textual medium, such as a teleprinter so that only the thinking abilities of the candidates would be tested.\nNot their appearance.\nTuring's test and his arguments set many researchers thinking, not only about whether he was right, but also about how to pass the test.\nPrograms began to be written with the intention of investigating what might be involved in passing it.\nIn 1964, the computer scientist Joseph Wiesenbaum wrote a program called Eliza, designed to imitate a psychotherapist.\nHe deemed psychotherapist to be an especially easy type of human to imitate because the program could then give opaque answers about itself and only ask questions based on the user's own questions and statements.\nIt was a remarkably simple program.\nNowadays, such programs are popular projects for students of programming because they are fun and easy to write.\nA typical one has two basic strategies.\nFirst, it scans the input for certain keywords and grammatical forms.\nIf this is successful, it replies based on a template, filling in the blanks using words in the input.\nFor instance, given the input I hate my job, the program might recognise the grammar of the sentence involving a possessive pronoun my and might also recognise hate as a keyword from a building list such as love, hate, like dislike, want, in which case it could choose a suitable template and reply.\nIt might reply, what do you most like about your job?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=367"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d3bc4cea-e78d-466a-888f-6036822a6066": {"page_content": "If this is successful, it replies based on a template, filling in the blanks using words in the input.\nFor instance, given the input I hate my job, the program might recognise the grammar of the sentence involving a possessive pronoun my and might also recognise hate as a keyword from a building list such as love, hate, like dislike, want, in which case it could choose a suitable template and reply.\nIt might reply, what do you most like about your job?.\nIf it cannot pass the input to that extent, it asks a question of its own choosing randomly from a stock pattern, which may or may not depend on the input sentence.\nFor instance, if asked, how does a television work, it might reply, what is so interesting about how does television work?.\nOr it might ask, why does that interest you?.\nAnother strategy used by recent internet-based versions of Eliza is to build up a database of previous conversations, enabling a program to repeat phrases that other users have typed in, again choosing them according to keywords found in the current user's input.\nNow, I remember it and I just paused there.\nI remember in high school myself writing a program that was basically a personality evaluator.\nThis was a silly thing back when I was sort of a teenager and the user would ask questions like, what is your age?.\nWhat is your gender?.\nWhat do you like doing on the weekend out of a multiple choice list kind of thing would you prefer?.\nAnd at the end, it would back at you what your personality is like and people were unaccountably impressed by how well it was able to assess their personality.\nOf course, this is kind of true of all psychological personality tests.\nThey basically do the same thing I was doing when I was a teenager but people were being paid lots of money to do their sort of things today as far as I can tell.\nBasically, they're a kind of chatbot.\nIt's a program telling you something about yourself just feeding back stock responses.\nThere's nothing intelligent behind it.\nBack to the book, David writes, why isn't bound was shocked that many people using Eliza were fooled by it?.\nSo it had passed the cheering test, at least in its might's naive version.\nMoreover, even after people have been told it was not a genuine AI, that would sometimes continue to have long conversations with it about their personal problems, exactly as though they believe that he had understood them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf1d56bd-6123-461d-834b-b8040a2a323c": {"page_content": "There's nothing intelligent behind it.\nBack to the book, David writes, why isn't bound was shocked that many people using Eliza were fooled by it?.\nSo it had passed the cheering test, at least in its might's naive version.\nMoreover, even after people have been told it was not a genuine AI, that would sometimes continue to have long conversations with it about their personal problems, exactly as though they believe that he had understood them.\nWhy isn't bound wrote a book, computer power and human reason in 1976, warning of the dangers of anthropomorphism when computers seem to exhibit human-like functionality.\nHowever, anthropomorphism is not the main type of overconfidence that is beset the field of AI.\nFor example, in 1983, Douglas Hofstadter was subjected to a friendly hoax by some graduate students.\nThey convinced him that they had obtained access to a government-run AI program and invited him to apply the cheering test to it.\nIn reality, one of the students was at the other end of the line, imitating an Eliza program.\nAs Hofstadter relates in his book Metamagical Themors, the student was from the outset displaying an implausible degree of understanding of Hofstadter's questions.\nNow, I won't read the entire anecdote here about what happened to Douglas Hofstadter with the prank that was played on him.\nBut suffice it to say, as he himself says, he himself says he was willing to concede that the program had way more intelligence than what actually did, and he probably should have been more critical earlier on, a little bit more skeptical about whether or not there was actually an intelligence behind this thing because, of course, there was an actual person there.\nSo what is the best explanation?.\nWhat is the best explanation if you kind of have a good idea about what the current state of chat bots are or of AI is?.\nIf you're interacting with a computer and it comes back at you with a free flowing conversation, do you assume the computer is intelligent?.\nOr if it's purporting to be the computer that's intelligent, do you assume that that's an honest claim or that there's actually a person that a human person, sorry, there's a human person behind all that, rather than just a genuine artificial general intelligence.\nWell at the moment, we should always presume that there's some prank being played, but there's a way to know whether or not there isn't a prank being played, which we will come to soon.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=592"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db07e276-b3bd-49d7-8872-7af4def09777": {"page_content": "Or if it's purporting to be the computer that's intelligent, do you assume that that's an honest claim or that there's actually a person that a human person, sorry, there's a human person behind all that, rather than just a genuine artificial general intelligence.\nWell at the moment, we should always presume that there's some prank being played, but there's a way to know whether or not there isn't a prank being played, which we will come to soon.\nSo I'm skipping a bit here and then David writes, programs written today, a further 26 years later, are still no better at the task of seeming to think than Eliza was.\nThey are now known as chatbots and their main application is still amusement, both directly ending computer games.\nThey've also been used to provide friendly seeming interfaces to list of frequently asked questions about subjects like how to operate computers.\nBut I think that users still find them no more helpful than a searchable list of questions and answers.\nSo it's a further 37 years later now, 11 years after this was written and we now have Siri and various clones of Siri that Samsung has come up with and Google and others.\nAnd what's the best that we can say about Siri?.\nNot many people really like it.\nThere are some narrow applications for which it tends to be useful, but in fact what David says there where he says, I think that users find them no more helpful than a searchable list of the questions and answers is exactly true.\nAnd in fact, people, I think, tend to prefer typing a question into Google that they do asking Siri what the answer is because the voice recognition just isn't up to it for still in the year 2019.\nIt provides some funny answers where it does comprehend the word.\nSo it gets the words right.\nIt doesn't understand the meaning behind the question being asked.\nAnd so it can sometimes give very funny answers.\nLet's continue with the book and David writes, in 1990 the inventor Hugh Lobner endowed a prize for passing the Turing test to be judged and an annual competition.\nUntil the test is passed, a less surprise is awarded each year for the entry judge to be closest to passing.\nThe test is harder to implement than it may first seem.\nOne issue is requiring the program to pretend to be a human is both biased and not very relevant to whether it can think.\nYet if it does not pretend to be human, it will be easy to identify as a computer regardless of its ability to think.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=692"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0aea9549-a6fa-4d42-942b-2a012914f65b": {"page_content": "Until the test is passed, a less surprise is awarded each year for the entry judge to be closest to passing.\nThe test is harder to implement than it may first seem.\nOne issue is requiring the program to pretend to be a human is both biased and not very relevant to whether it can think.\nYet if it does not pretend to be human, it will be easy to identify as a computer regardless of its ability to think.\nA related difficulty is that the human participant in the test might intentionally imitate a chat bot as in the hosted hooks and so spoiled the test, which is based on comparing the two.\nShould the rules nevertheless allow the human to do this in order to mitigate the previous problem?.\nUnfortunately, such subtleties are not relevant at the current state of the art.\nThis is well illustrated by the following excerpts from the conversation with which the program Elbot won the lesser Lobner prize in 2008.\nJudge, do you understand the point of a Turing test?.\nElbot.\nThere are some people who would not pass the Turing test themselves.\nWhy must they inflict it on computers?.\nJudge, I suppose it is a little harsh.\nElbot, if we robots ever had marriages, that would be eternal, to rust to us part.\nNow in that passage, Elbot's first utterance is not to reply to the question, but presumably a stock response triggered by the keyword Turing test.\nIn the following line, the judge uses the word suppose, which in that context can only mean suppose, either a slang or a typographical error.\nBut Elbot presumably interprets it as spouse and responds with a stock joke about marriage.\nHence, even from this exchange alone, it is clear that Elbot was not processing the meanings of the judge sentences.\nNow David returns to the conversation.\nJudge, so what do you do when you're not chatting to me then?.\nElbot, are the same trouble when I shop for oil?.\nShould I buy the extra oili, the super oili or the ultra oili?.\nThere's nowhere to tell.\nJudge, how about your career?.\nDoes that involve oil?.\nElbot, well what about humans and occupation?.\nWhere do they stand on this?.\nWhen the judge helpfully took up Elbot's randomly introduced theme of oil, Elbot ignored it.\nInstead of having detected the keyword career, it converted it to the synonym occupation and inserted it into a stock sentence pattern.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9f99b53-de9a-4517-b4d0-deffd6d36199": {"page_content": "There's nowhere to tell.\nJudge, how about your career?.\nDoes that involve oil?.\nElbot, well what about humans and occupation?.\nWhere do they stand on this?.\nWhen the judge helpfully took up Elbot's randomly introduced theme of oil, Elbot ignored it.\nInstead of having detected the keyword career, it converted it to the synonym occupation and inserted it into a stock sentence pattern.\nThis is how much success, the quest for machines that think had achieved in the 58 years following Turing's paper, nil.\nOkay, so this is my commentary now.\nAt the moment on social media, there's this thing going around called the 10-year challenge, which basically consists of posting a photo of yourself 10 years ago and one today and having a look at the difference.\nSo we could do that with the state of AI now.\nWe could compare what it was like 10 years ago and we will see that it's no different today.\nAnd in fact, it's no different to the 10 years before that or the 10 years before that.\nOr in fact, going back according to David's calculations, it would be it'd be 69 years now since Turing's first paper.\nHow much progress has been made?.\nNeil.\nOkay, so let's go through the 2018 lesser low no prize winner.\nThe things start off well, but as we'll see towards the end at about line 13, there's a simple mathematical question, which any person with any passing familiarity with simple geometry could probably get correct.\nAnd indeed, I would guess that Wolfram Alpha online could probably get it correct, but the chatbot can't do it.\nSo let's read, let's read out a little bit of this.\nSo the winner in 2018 was, so the website here tells me, Mitsuku, Mitsuku was written by Steve Warzbick.\nNow, a conversation starts off reasonably well, and then we get down to, now we get down to line 12 where the judge says, what will you do later today?.\nAnd Mitsuku says, I don't have any plans yet.\nNow, for that question and answer, two points are scored, which I guess is the maximum.\nAnd you get zero if it's pretty clear that you haven't understood the question that was asked or the statement that was made.\nLine 13.\n, the judge says, what is the third angle in a triangle with internal angles of 90 degrees and 30 degrees?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=946"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "014e92ba-ec2b-4012-bab2-8c4b83163fb0": {"page_content": "And Mitsuku says, I don't have any plans yet.\nNow, for that question and answer, two points are scored, which I guess is the maximum.\nAnd you get zero if it's pretty clear that you haven't understood the question that was asked or the statement that was made.\nLine 13.\n, the judge says, what is the third angle in a triangle with internal angles of 90 degrees and 30 degrees?.\nAnd Mitsuku, the chatbot responds, Earth is the third planet.\nSo what's going on there?.\nIf you have passing familiarity with geometry, then you'll know that triangles have an internal angle sum of 180 degrees.\nWe've got 90, we've got 30, that leaves 60, the answer is 60, but the chatbot has just read the stem of the question, what is the third?.\nAnd as I immediately inserted a stock response, Earth is the third planet that hasn't bothered with the rest of it.\nIf we go down to line 15, the judge says, what do you hold when you shake hands and the chatbot responds, I think about computer programming a lot.\nOkay, so again, couldn't pass the question at all.\nJust looked at the stem, what do you?.\nAnd presumably as inserted, well, what I do is I do computer programming a lot.\nAnd then let's just go to last line and the judge asks kind of a question about comprehension.\nIt's almost a real, not really pushes the point about comprehension here and the judge asks the question, what makes the claim?.\nBut judge says, the judge says, I had to go to the toilet during the film because it was too long, what was too long?.\nAnd the chatbot responds, was it worth going to?.\nIs that your opinion measuring much from end to end in space or from beginning to end in time, not short or brief?.\nSo was it worth going to be?.\nSo the chatbot didn't understand the chatbot.\nThe chatbot has asked the question about was it worth going to, namely the toilet?.\nWas it worth going to the toilet?.\nAnd was it too long?.\nAnd then the chatbot gets into this ridiculous philosophical question about time.\nSo again, no progress towards chatbots that actually think in the year 2018, this was.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1070"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b103995e-9276-4caf-8592-3668fa836e10": {"page_content": "So was it worth going to be?.\nSo the chatbot didn't understand the chatbot.\nThe chatbot has asked the question about was it worth going to, namely the toilet?.\nWas it worth going to the toilet?.\nAnd was it too long?.\nAnd then the chatbot gets into this ridiculous philosophical question about time.\nSo again, no progress towards chatbots that actually think in the year 2018, this was.\nOkay, so going back to the book and David has just said 58 years following Turing's paper, Neil Progress was being made on machines that think and he writes, yet in every other respect, computer science and technology had made astounding progress during that period, the dwindling group of opponents of the very possibility of AI, I know that I'm surprised by this failure for the wrong reason.\nThey did not appreciate the significance of universality, but the passionate enthusiast for the human rights of AI did not appreciate the significance of the failure.\nSome claim that the above criticism is unfair.\nModern AI research is not focused on passing a Turing test and great progress has been made in what is now called AI in many specialized applications.\nHowever, no, those applications look like machines that think others maintain the criticism is premature because during most of the history of the field, computers had absurdly little speed and memory capacity compared with today's.\nHence, they continue to expect a breakthrough in the next few years.\nThis will not do either.\nIt is not as though someone has written a chatbot that could pass the Turing test, but would currently take a year to compute each reply.\nPeople would gladly wait.\nAnd in any case, if anyone knew how to write such a program, there'll be no need to wait for reasons that I should get to shortly.\nIn his 1950 paper Turing estimated that to pass his test, an AI program together with all of its data would require no more than about 100 megabytes of memory, but the computer would need to be no faster than computers were at the time, about 10,000 operations per second, and that by the year 2001, one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.\nThe year 2000 has come and gone, and the laptop computer on which I'm writing this book has over a thousand times as much memory as Turing specified, counting hard drive space, and about a million times a speed, though it is not clear from his paper what account he was taking of the brain's parallel processing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1210"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8c1eef75-49a4-4259-ac0e-f0477eab0b18": {"page_content": "The year 2000 has come and gone, and the laptop computer on which I'm writing this book has over a thousand times as much memory as Turing specified, counting hard drive space, and about a million times a speed, though it is not clear from his paper what account he was taking of the brain's parallel processing.\nBut it can no more think than Turing's slide rule could.\nI am just as sure as Turing that it could be programmed to think, and this might indeed require as few resources as Turing estimated, even though orders of magnitude more available today.\nBut with what?.\nProgram?.\nAnd why is there no sign of such a program?.\nIntelligence and the general purpose sense that Turing meant is one of a constellation of attributes of the human mind that have been puzzling philosophers for millennia.\nOthers include consciousness, free will and meaning, a typical such puzzle is that of qualia, singular qualae, which rhymes with barley, meaning the subjective aspect of sensations.\nSo, for instance, the sensation of seeing the color blue is a qualae.\nConsider the following thought experiment, and I'll just pause there.\nWhat David is going to provide here is a version of what is known as Mary's room.\nIt's a thought experiment, and the example first appears in an article by someone called Frank Jackson in, it's called the title of the article, it's called Epi Phenomenal Qualia, which appears in philosophical quarterly in a 1982 edition thing volume 32.\nYou can find videos and articles online or about it, aka breeding here though, and so here's the thought experiment David's version.\nQuote, you are a biochemist with a misfortune to have born with a genetic defect that disables the blue receptors in your retinas.\nConsequently, you have a form of color blindness in which you are able to see only red and green and mixtures of the two such as yellow.\nBut anything purely blue also looks to you like one of those mixtures.\nThen you discover a cure, though cause your blue receptors to start working.\nBefore administering the cure to yourself, you can confidently make certain predictions about what will happen if it works.\nOne of them is that when you hold up a blue card as a test, you will see a color that you have never seen before.\nYou can predict that you will call it blue because you already know what the color of the card is called and can already check which color it is with a spectrophanometer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1310"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8007297-e51e-49e5-883b-072e377b51de": {"page_content": "Then you discover a cure, though cause your blue receptors to start working.\nBefore administering the cure to yourself, you can confidently make certain predictions about what will happen if it works.\nOne of them is that when you hold up a blue card as a test, you will see a color that you have never seen before.\nYou can predict that you will call it blue because you already know what the color of the card is called and can already check which color it is with a spectrophanometer.\nYou can also predict that when you first see a clear daytime sky after being cured, you will experience a similar quality to that of seeing the blue card.\nBut there is one thing that neither you nor anyone else could predict about the outcome of this experiment.\nAnd that is, what blue will look like?.\nQualia are currently neither describeable nor predictable.\nA unique property that should make them deeply problematic to anyone with a scientific worldview.\nThough in the event, it seems to be mainly philosophers who are worried about it.\nI consider this exciting evidence that there is a fundamental discovery to be made which will integrate things like Qualia into our other knowledge.\nDaniel Dennett draws the opposite conclusion, namely that Qualia did not exist.\nHis claim is not strictly speaking about an illusion for an illusion of a Qualia would be that Qualia.\nIt is that we have a mistaken belief.\nOur introspection, which is an inspection of memories of our experiences, including memories dating back on the affection of a second, has evolved to report that we have experienced Qualia, but those are false memories.\nOne of Dennett's books, defending this theory is called Consciousness Explained.\nOther philosophers of Riley remark that Consciousness denied would be a more accurate name.\nI agree, because although any true explanation of Qualia will have to meet the challenge of Dennett's criticisms of the common sense theory that they exist, simply to deny their existence as a bad explanation.\nAnything at all could be denied by that method.\nIf it is true, it will have to be substantiated by a good explanation of how and why those mistaken beliefs seem fundamentally different from other false beliefs.\nSuch is that the earth is at rest beneath our feet, but that looks to me just like the original problem of Qualia again.\nWe seem to have them.\nIt seems impossible to describe what they seem to be.\nThat's an amazing line, so let's just read it again.\nIn terms of Qualia, we seem to have them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1434"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0cf851b1-ec69-4d04-a76b-544483c2dfac": {"page_content": "Such is that the earth is at rest beneath our feet, but that looks to me just like the original problem of Qualia again.\nWe seem to have them.\nIt seems impossible to describe what they seem to be.\nThat's an amazing line, so let's just read it again.\nIn terms of Qualia, we seem to have them.\nIt seems impossible to describe what they seem to be.\nAnd it continues, one day we shall.\nProblems are soluble.\nSo I'll pause there.\nSo Qualia, our fundamental mystery, why do certain, why do sensations have a subjective aspect to them at all?.\nWe don't understand it, because if we couldn't understand it, we're going to get to a way in which we know whether or not we understand something, but we do not understand Qualia.\nWe don't have a good, hard-to-very explanation of what they are.\nLet me continue with the book.\nBy the way, some abilities of humans that are commonly included in that constellation associated with general purpose intelligence do not belong in it.\nOne of them is self-awareness, as evidenced by such tests as recognizing oneself and a mirror.\nSome people are unaccountably impressed when various animals are shown to have that ability, but there is nothing mysterious about it.\nA simple patent recognition program will confer it on a computer.\nPause there.\nYes, there.\nAnd as we already are very familiar with in the year 2019, phones can recognize faces.\nThe same technology that allows an iPhone to recognize your face, or any of the facial recognition software that's out there now, there's heaps of it.\nGo to an airport.\nI know I come through immigration and the machine recognizes my face and compares it to my passport and lets me through.\nIt will be very easy to program an iPhone to recognize itself.\nSo we are very good at that now.\nComputers can recognize themselves.\nDoes not mean they have some sort of intelligence.\nThe iPhone is not self-aware.\nJust because it can recognize its own shape.\nSo back to the book.\nAnd David's just finished talking about patent recognition and recognizing faces, in other words, self-awareness.\nHe writes, the same is true of tool use.\nThe use of language for signaling, but not for conversation in the Turing test sense.\nAnd very emotional responses, they're not the associated qualia.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1541"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "83995d93-0939-4be8-b0fc-247ec837199c": {"page_content": "Does not mean they have some sort of intelligence.\nThe iPhone is not self-aware.\nJust because it can recognize its own shape.\nSo back to the book.\nAnd David's just finished talking about patent recognition and recognizing faces, in other words, self-awareness.\nHe writes, the same is true of tool use.\nThe use of language for signaling, but not for conversation in the Turing test sense.\nAnd very emotional responses, they're not the associated qualia.\nAt the present state of the field, a useful rule of thumb is, if it can already be programmed, it has nothing to do with intelligence in the Turing sense.\nConversely, I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including denets, to have explained the nature of consciousness, or any other computational task.\nIf you can't program it, you haven't understood it.\nI pause there.\nAnd now this is probably worth reading six times.\nAnd I wish this would enter the zeitgeist as well.\nThis is another philosophical discovery.\nA hidden gem, so to speak, which I'm sure many people who've read the book just gloss over, or notice it there, think it's interesting, but this is really, really profound.\nIf you can't program it, you haven't understood it.\nA program is an algorithm.\nIt's a set of steps.\nAnd so if you can write down that set of steps, in order to reproduce the thing that you claim to understand, then you've really understood it, because you're able to replicate that thing, you're able to simulate that thing using a computer.\nBut if you can't write an algorithm down, a sequence of steps, a sequence of instructions, then you do not understand that thing.\nIf you can't get a computer to replicate it, then you haven't understood it.\nWe understand Newtonian mechanics.\nOne of the things I did as a graduate student was to collide galaxies together in a simulation.\nIt was purely in a simulation.\nWe know what happens when galaxies collide together, because you can take the physical laws that govern the motion of galaxies, namely the laws of gravity and various thermodynamic laws.\nAnd you can replicate a couple of galaxies and have them crash together, and then what they end up looking like afterwards kind of resembles what you see out there in space.\nWhen you compare the simulation to observation, the images look similar, and so this is kind of an attempt to refute the theoretical model that you've got, okay, by using an observation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1676"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fd9ed930-11d1-4379-b986-070c985b626c": {"page_content": "And you can replicate a couple of galaxies and have them crash together, and then what they end up looking like afterwards kind of resembles what you see out there in space.\nWhen you compare the simulation to observation, the images look similar, and so this is kind of an attempt to refute the theoretical model that you've got, okay, by using an observation.\nWe understand how galaxy collisions work.\nWe understand how orbits work when planets go around stars, because we know what the laws of physics are, and you can program a computer to to rector simulate what's going on.\nWe understand perfectly well how the planets orbit the Sun, because we can predict millions of years ahead when the next eclipse or alignment will be what the position of Jupiter will be at any point in the future.\nModular the humans taking over the solar system at some point and deciding to control the trajectory of Jupiter around the Sun.\nBut I hope you get what I'm saying here.\nPhysics is kind of this area where we can definitely program our computers in order to simulate very physical systems.\nBut when people claim that they have an understanding of something like consciousness, we can test that claim in the same way we can test whether or not they have an understanding of a physical process of any other physical process in physics, namely, by programming a computer with their with their theory.\nI've had people over the last few years say to me, I understand consciousness and I've got a theory of consciousness.\nGreat.\nCan you write a program for it so that the computer can be conscious and then can we test that?.\nNo, so far, no, no one's been able to do that.\nNow related to this, there's also this vision that some people have of artificial intelligence.\nThat it's something like a list of all the possible things that people can do.\nNow, I've heard Sam Harris make explicitly this point.\nI'm not sure if he gets it from Nick Bostrom or elsewhere, but if there's anything like a prevailing view on these things, I guess that this is it.\nTheir argument goes like this.\nRight now, there are computers out there that are better at people at playing chess and doing simple arithmetic and there's already computers out there that are better than people at driving.\nOkay, now all we need to do is to extrapolate out to every possible task.\nJust keep writing programs where everything a person can do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1799"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6a0559a-33ca-4f5f-9a0e-ed3cdfe03b6b": {"page_content": "Their argument goes like this.\nRight now, there are computers out there that are better at people at playing chess and doing simple arithmetic and there's already computers out there that are better than people at driving.\nOkay, now all we need to do is to extrapolate out to every possible task.\nJust keep writing programs where everything a person can do.\nSo now maybe not too far in the future will have programs for robotic AI that can bake cakes and can be your tango dancing partner, console of chemical equations.\nAnother one will be good at ironing a shirt, another one will be good at chasing a person firing and gun and turning off the electricity.\nJust keep on writing programs in order to accomplish every single task that humans can currently do.\nAnd so the argument goes, you will have exhausted all the possible things that people can do, or that people do do.\nAnd the thing is, you now have a super intelligence on this argument, because if a robot did indeed have all of these capabilities, they would by definition be a super being because they can do everything a person can, but they now also have super fast robot reflexes and thinking they're a super intelligence.\nAnd thus they're super dangerous because they'd be way better at people than anything else.\nAnd I think this is very, very wrong, fundamentally wrong.\nIt doesn't matter how long your list is, but list will always be finite.\nAnd it will never be able to accommodate something that's not in the list.\nAnd so if let's say such an AI became an evil AI, or you would need to do is to look up the program and then to give it a task or to attempt to do something to it, that's not in that list.\nAnd you could do that because you are a creative thinker, but that AI has a finite list of things that it can do.\nAnd you can always get around to finite list by just finding something that's not in the list, or creating something new that's not in the list.\nA person is creative, but that kind of robot never will be.\nIt is programmed only with the stuff the program is no.\nIt cannot possibly solve stuff, not in its programming, for none of those programs are about creating knowledge.\nAnd that is the key.\nGeneral purpose problem solving is what a person is all about, a person is a general purpose problem solver.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=1938"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3cb944e7-7f8f-4875-9553-5108ad4957b0": {"page_content": "A person is creative, but that kind of robot never will be.\nIt is programmed only with the stuff the program is no.\nIt cannot possibly solve stuff, not in its programming, for none of those programs are about creating knowledge.\nAnd that is the key.\nGeneral purpose problem solving is what a person is all about, a person is a general purpose problem solver.\nA person has a potentially infinite number of problems they can tackle, but this robot's list is, however large, always finite, and it will always remain finite.\nThat is the qualitative difference.\nAn actually finite list of things that this supposed super intelligent AI can do versus the unbounded potential of an actual person, an actual creative person.\nNow back to the book.\nDuring invented his test and the hope of bypassing all those philosophical problems.\nIn other words, he hoped that the functionality could be achieved before it was explained.\nUnfortunately, it is very rare for practical solutions to fundamental problems to be discovered without any explanation of why they work.\nI'll just pause there.\nSo this brings us to one of the deep themes of the beginning of infinity.\nIt is very rare, as he said just there, to ever have a solution to a problem.\nAnd you don't know why it's a solution to a problem.\nNow it perhaps used to be or seem to be common in the past in medicine, for example.\nThere used to be treatments for things that no one knew why they worked.\nAnd that still happens today, but it's the rare exception to the rule.\nIt used to be very common in the past, because we didn't understand anything in the past.\nThere was very little that we understood.\nBut the more and more that we understand, the less and less, we have these solutions for which we have no explanation as to why they work.\nSo I don't know.\nI think of any treatment usually, some of these strange things that come out of the Amazon rainforest that happened to work to cure headaches or to treat some other kind of disease.\nOkay, that's the rare exception these days.\nCertainly today, many, many medicines are derived from some kind of extract from a plant, but we usually know what the chemical is, what the active ingredient is today.\nReally, we don't.\nAnd that's just in medicine.\nI mean, I've never heard of anything in physics where we've got a solution to a problem for which we don't have an explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2087"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d61caa5e-d134-4b54-90e1-ad1f982f5bb8": {"page_content": "Okay, that's the rare exception these days.\nCertainly today, many, many medicines are derived from some kind of extract from a plant, but we usually know what the chemical is, what the active ingredient is today.\nReally, we don't.\nAnd that's just in medicine.\nI mean, I've never heard of anything in physics where we've got a solution to a problem for which we don't have an explanation.\nAnd that's par excellence, the reason for physics is to try and provide, we've know this from the beginning and feeling the fabric of reality.\nThat's the reason for physics.\nOkay, so back to the book, David Wright.\nNevertheless, rubber-like empiricism, which it resembles, the idea of the Turing test has played a valuable role.\nIt has provided a focus for explaining the significance of universality and for criticizing the ancient anthropocentric assumptions that would rule out the possibility of AI.\nTuring himself systematically refuted all the classic objections in that seminal paper and some absurd ones for good measure.\nBut his test is rooted in the empiricist mistake of seeking a purely behavioral criterion.\nIt requires the judge to come to a conclusion, without any explanation of how the candidate AI is supposed to work.\nBut in reality, judging whether something is a genuine AI, or what will always depend on explanations of how it works.\nThis is because the task of the judge in a Turing test has a similar logic to that faced by Paley when walking across his heath and finding a stone, a watch, or a living organism.\nIt is to explain how the observable features in the object came about.\nIn the case of the Turing test, we deliberately ignore the issue of how the knowledge to design the object was created.\nThe test is only about who designed the AI's utterances, who adapted its utterances to be meaningful, who created the knowledge in them?.\nIf it was the designer, then the program is not an AI.\nIf it was the program itself, then it is an AI.\nI'll pause there.\nThis is the profound point in the entire chapter, and we'll have much more to say about this in part two when it comes to artificial evolution.\nThe point here is, with the Turing tests, we're not simply trying to have a conversation with something such that it's in such that we conclude that it must be an artificial general intelligence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2189"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "136125f2-0f62-482a-b5fd-1b150c1140b3": {"page_content": "If it was the program itself, then it is an AI.\nI'll pause there.\nThis is the profound point in the entire chapter, and we'll have much more to say about this in part two when it comes to artificial evolution.\nThe point here is, with the Turing tests, we're not simply trying to have a conversation with something such that it's in such that we conclude that it must be an artificial general intelligence.\nThe point is that whatever the utterances are, if they appear to be the utterances of some kind of intelligence, the purpose of the Turing test should be defined out how those utterances are being made.\nWhy should it remain a black box?.\nCan you imagine if someone entered that lobe in the prize?.\nIf someone won it using a chatbot that was overwhelmingly convincing, a chatbot that was clearly an intelligence or some sort?.\nDo we give, do we award the prize, the lobe in the prize, the number one past the Turing test prize, to that program, to the writer of that program?.\nBut it depends.\nWhat's our explanation for how this thing is past the Turing test?.\nOr how this thing has won the prize?.\nIs it because it genuinely is an artificial general intelligence?.\nThat's one possibility.\nBut today, any reasonable judge, any person offering the prize, would err on the side that they're being fooled.\nThey're being conned in some way.\nWho knows how?.\nBut that would be a better explanation.\nUntil they're shown the program, if they're shown the program, well then, you can be convinced that either it genuinely is an artificial general intelligence not.\nBut as David's about to say, if that's the case, if they have a program, you don't need to worry about whether or not it passes this silly chatbot conversation or not, you'll have the program, and the program will convince anyone who understands how to read the program.\nSo I'm going to skip a couple of paragraphs here and back to the book and David writes, without a good explanation of how and enter these utterances were created, observing them tells us nothing about that.\nIn the Turing test, at its simplest level, we need to be convinced that the utterances are not being directly composed by a human masquerading as an AI, as in the Hofstetter hoax.\nBut the possibility of the hoax is the least of it.\nJust pause there before I move on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2297"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ffbacb31-0d8d-412e-abaf-eb8055c6a332": {"page_content": "In the Turing test, at its simplest level, we need to be convinced that the utterances are not being directly composed by a human masquerading as an AI, as in the Hofstetter hoax.\nBut the possibility of the hoax is the least of it.\nJust pause there before I move on.\nAnd this, again, is the reason why the Turing test cannot be a true scientific test of intelligence.\nIt needs to be a way of weeding out the hoaxes.\nIf it could do that, as good science does, then for reasons David is about to come to.\nYou wouldn't need the test in the first place, basically because the writer of the AGI, the actually thinking chatbot, would have published the algorithm and that would be way more convincing to people in the field than passing the Turing test, which could always be thought of as being a hoax.\nSo back to the book he just said, but the possibility of the hoaxes the least of it.\nFor instance, I guess that above, that illbot had recited a stock joke in response to mistakenly recognizing the keyword spouse.\nBut the joke would have a quite different significance if we knew that it was not a stock joke because no such joke had ever been encoded in the program.\nHow could we know that?.\nOnly from a good explanation.\nFor instance, we might know it because we ourselves wrote the program.\nAnother way it could be for the author of the program to explain to us how it works, how it creates knowledge, including jokes.\nIf the explanation was good, we should know that the program was an AI.\nIn fact, if we had only such an explanation, but not yet seen any output from the program, and even if it had not yet been written, we would still conclude it was a genuine AI program.\nSo there would be no need for a Turing test.\nThat is why I said that if lack of computer power would the only thing preventing the achievement of AI, there will be no need to wait.\nExplaining how an AI program works in detail might well be interactively complicated.\nIn practice, the author's explanation would always be at some emergent abstract level.\nBut that would not prevent it from being a good explanation.\nIt would not have to account for the specific computational steps to compose the joke, just as a theory of evolution is not to have to account for why every specific mutation succeeded or failed in the history of a given adaptation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2425"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b7bf272-479c-45c5-8c70-6f4023ddddcb": {"page_content": "Explaining how an AI program works in detail might well be interactively complicated.\nIn practice, the author's explanation would always be at some emergent abstract level.\nBut that would not prevent it from being a good explanation.\nIt would not have to account for the specific computational steps to compose the joke, just as a theory of evolution is not to have to account for why every specific mutation succeeded or failed in the history of a given adaptation.\nIt would just need to explain how it could happen and why we should expect it to happen, given how the program works.\nIf that were a good explanation, it would convince us that the joke, the knowledge in the joke, originated in the program and not in the programmer.\nThus, the very same utterance by the program, the joke, can either be evidence that it is not thinking or evidence that it is thinking, depending upon the best available explanation of how the program works.\nThe nature of humor is not well understood, so we do not know where the general purpose thinking is required to compose jokes.\nSo it is conceivable that, despite the wide range of subject matter about which one can joke, there are hidden connections that reduce all joke making to a single narrow function.\nIn that case, there could one day be general purpose joke making machines that are not people.\nJust as there, just as today, there are general purpose chess-playing machines that are not people.\nIt sounds implausible, but since we have no good explanation really yet, we could not rely on joke making just as our only way of judging an AI.\nWhat we could do, though, is have a conversation ranging over a diverse range of topics and pay attention to whether the program's utterances were not adapted in their meanings to the various purposes that came up.\nIf the program really is thinking, then it is in the course of such a conversation it will explain itself.\nIn one of countless unpredictable ways, just as you or I would, just pause there, there it is, there's the key.\nThe AI, the AGI program, the artificial general intelligence program, had enough of the general and artificial intelligence program, it would need to explain itself, which means it would need to create some knowledge, that's the key.\nBack to the book.\nThere is a deeper issue to AI abilities must have some sort of universality.\nSpecial purpose thinking would not count as thinking in the sense during intended.\nMy guess is that every AI as a person, a general purpose, explain up.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2539"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50d71b7e-6093-4e14-871b-c52b25d280f0": {"page_content": "The AI, the AGI program, the artificial general intelligence program, had enough of the general and artificial intelligence program, it would need to explain itself, which means it would need to create some knowledge, that's the key.\nBack to the book.\nThere is a deeper issue to AI abilities must have some sort of universality.\nSpecial purpose thinking would not count as thinking in the sense during intended.\nMy guess is that every AI as a person, a general purpose, explain up.\nAnd just pausing there, this is key.\nNow David does say, my guess is, but really, what better explanation do we have?.\nThis link between knowledge and its creation and people and their inherent creativity.\nThat's linking people and their moral significance to epistemology is almost another book worthy statement.\nThere's so much fun pack.\nI'll do so in a moment after I read just a little more here.\nAnd I get what's being said there about there might be general purpose joke-making programs that are not people.\nBut that wouldn't mean that all possible sources of comedy or jokes, indeed, might be produced by such a general purpose joke-making machine.\nPerhaps it would be general purpose within a narrow range of kinds of jokes.\nMaybe we'll understand there are certain species of jokes and all the possible kinds of jokes within this particular species could be written down by this program.\nBut I imagine my guess would be that you would have many different forms of humor, some of which are jokes and some of which aren't, of course.\nAnd that would require creativity.\nAnd David writes here, it is conceivable that there are other levels of universality between AI and universal explainer constructor.\nAnd perhaps separate levels for those associated with attributes like consciousness.\nBut those attributes all seem to have arrived in one jump to universality in humans.\nAnd although we have little explanation of any of them, I know of no plausible argument that they are at different levels or can be achieved independently of each other.\nSo I tentatively assume that they cannot.\nSo I'll pause there for some more lengthy commentary here.\nSo these are the attributes like consciousness and free will possibly coming along for the ride, so to speak.\nOr they could be something like, I sometimes think, the difference between observing something from the outside and observing something from the inside.\nSo what is a bat?.\nWell, that demands a scientific answer.\nWhat is it like to be a bat?.\nWell, that's more philosophical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2637"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b4343f7b-3e87-4181-b059-2f4fd2e01811": {"page_content": "So I tentatively assume that they cannot.\nSo I'll pause there for some more lengthy commentary here.\nSo these are the attributes like consciousness and free will possibly coming along for the ride, so to speak.\nOr they could be something like, I sometimes think, the difference between observing something from the outside and observing something from the inside.\nSo what is a bat?.\nWell, that demands a scientific answer.\nWhat is it like to be a bat?.\nWell, that's more philosophical.\nI think something here can be said about people.\nWhat is a person?.\nWell, there's something like a creative entity, a general purpose explainer.\nWhat is it like to be a person?.\nConsciousness.\nSo I guess that consciousness is something like the subjective experience of creativity.\nNow diverging from the beginning of infinity a little bit here.\nAnd so I'm not saying that I'm either summarizing or explaining David's work.\nWhat I'm just going to do now is simply extrapolate a little myself on top of what David's done here and possibly make lots of errors along the way, but just indulge me for a moment.\nCreativity of the kind where people create explanations or create knowledge is just the outward manifestation of an inner consciousness.\nWhat it feels like to be creative is consciousness.\nNow consciousness is what we are.\nIt is almost redundant to say we experience consciousness.\nIt is more like we are consciousness.\nBut the consciousness, the subjective experience of the mind is something that with effort we direct.\nNow some people say that subjectively we do not control the contents of our consciousness.\nSam Harris says that on introspection you do not have subjective control over your thoughts.\nThey come and go.\nIn the objective world out there, I do not control what happens.\nFine.\nIt's all quite uncontroversial.\nAnd in my subjective experience of that world likewise, the contents, the blue sky, the sound of birds are also not in my control.\nAnd my next thought, so it's argued, arises unbidden.\nWell indeed, if you switch off and meditate, that does indeed seem to be the case.\nParts of your consciousness mind decouple from other parts.\nThe thoughts in the awareness of those thoughts divide.\nAnd one is inclined to think I am not that stream of thoughts.\nThis indeed is the inside of contemplatives like Harris and many others who follow in a Buddhist tradition.\nBut of course that too is an observation of the internal subjective state.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2790"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec13cfc4-e26e-4070-832e-a0e22f216b97": {"page_content": "Well indeed, if you switch off and meditate, that does indeed seem to be the case.\nParts of your consciousness mind decouple from other parts.\nThe thoughts in the awareness of those thoughts divide.\nAnd one is inclined to think I am not that stream of thoughts.\nThis indeed is the inside of contemplatives like Harris and many others who follow in a Buddhist tradition.\nBut of course that too is an observation of the internal subjective state.\nAnd there's no more an indication of deep subjective truth about the nature of the person than I am my stream of thoughts.\nSo when you're in a contemplative state, you can have this sensation that you are not this stream of thoughts.\nAnd then when you're not in a contemplative state, you can have the experience of being a stream of thoughts.\nWhy is one a road to truth while the other is not?.\nI'm yet to hear an answer to that.\nBoth the lost in thought state and as the Buddhists or Sam Harris would say, the divested of sense of self-state, they're both subjective states.\nSam wants to call one the true eye when the eye is lost compared to the perpetually lost in thought state.\nWhat I want to say here is that the subjective experience of the lost in thought state is actually very probative of what people are.\nWhen you are lost in thought or just thinking, you're thinking without concern about who you are.\nYou're in the flow state of thinking one thought and then reasoning and concluding what comes next.\nNow I do indeed feel capable of deciding, thinking and deciding, explaining.\nI feel actively involved in all choices.\nI feel a subjective sense of free will.\nThis may seem to be too clever by half, but I want to say that when paying attention to how you think while lost in thought, you can see options arising, being criticized and either surviving the process or not.\nAnd this is key.\nYou can slow things down or not and notice how critical you are being or not.\nNow at this point the free will deny will say, ah, but you did not choose to have the thought should I slow down and think more carefully now or not.\nThat thought wasn't given to you.\nOkay, fine.\nI do not control all of my thoughts, but the choice to slow down or not is mine.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=2961"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c34ac447-a164-416c-a2b2-cc2108a7f970": {"page_content": "And this is key.\nYou can slow things down or not and notice how critical you are being or not.\nNow at this point the free will deny will say, ah, but you did not choose to have the thought should I slow down and think more carefully now or not.\nThat thought wasn't given to you.\nOkay, fine.\nI do not control all of my thoughts, but the choice to slow down or not is mine.\nSometimes I do and sometimes I don't and not controlling all of the contents of consciousness does not mean does not mean I do not control some and my conception of free will is only that I control some and not all.\nIt is as if to say, because the state cannot control all aspects of our lives, it controls none and hence does not exist.\nThat would be absurd.\nThe all or nothing conception of free will here is misguided.\nSo free will is that sense that we choose to create one explanation rather than another than another.\nWe attempt to create.\nWhen a person encounters a problem they seek to find solutions.\nSeek implies the solutions are out there in some sense.\nBut this is rare.\nUsually they must come from within.\nThey must be created by the mind.\nThe creative mind of the individual.\nOutwardly we see solutions generated by a person.\nInwardly we experience the phenomena of consciousness as we encounter the world and construct inside our minds a representation of the outside reality.\nThis act of construction is a creative one.\nWe create that representation and when there is a problem we attempt to solve it or we can ignore the problem.\nThese are our choices.\nThere are a literally infinite number of problems we might attempt to solve.\nBut, and this is the key.\nWe choose only some to work on.\nAnd this is the exercise of free will.\nIf you have a major life decision, should I enter into university and study finance or physics?.\nIf you think on this carefully over many months, you might think my mathematical skills are reasonably good.\nI could do either.\nI like to work with numbers and constrain things quantitatively.\nFinance seems to be interesting.\nI could be wealthy and do physics on the side.\nBut then, directly working on fundamental problems might be more rewarding than simply earning a high wage.\nI think and create options.\nBut maybe I shouldn't worry.\nMaybe I shouldn't care what I do and just not think about it at all.\nThe choice to think hard on this or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=3032"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "46fe9a61-9e1d-4ce7-b475-4da1a46a99b4": {"page_content": "I could do either.\nI like to work with numbers and constrain things quantitatively.\nFinance seems to be interesting.\nI could be wealthy and do physics on the side.\nBut then, directly working on fundamental problems might be more rewarding than simply earning a high wage.\nI think and create options.\nBut maybe I shouldn't worry.\nMaybe I shouldn't care what I do and just not think about it at all.\nThe choice to think hard on this or not.\nTo decide which knowledge to create, the knowledge about what to do with my life or not is something I am free to choose to do or not.\nFree will is the freedom for me to get a good sense of my preferences and to act upon them.\nThat is to say, choose.\nBut to know what my preferences truly are, let's say finance or physics, I need to carefully deliberate, solve that problem, create that knowledge.\nOutwardly, eventually, someone will notice me enroll in physics and finance as a double major.\nBut inwardly, only I know that I felt many different things.\nEmotions like excitement or confusion and the thrill of making a new insight.\nIt was all me, or largely me, that contemplated this problem for hours on end.\nI chose this interesting solution, the double degree, as it helped me satisfy both desires.\nI was free to do otherwise.\nTo not think about it at all.\nOr to choose one over the other.\nBut no, I chose to do what I did.\nI did that.\nLike the laws of physics.\nInwardly, it was a conscious sensation of free will.\nBut outwardly, it was a choice made to create knowledge in that area.\nThese things are all facets of the one same phenomenon.\nWhat it means to be a human and explain the world.\nSo these many different attributes that David speaks about.\nAnd he guesses that they seem to have all come at once in a jumped university, and that maybe they are all aspects of the same thing.\nThis is the sense that I get as well.\nI don't think we have good hard to vary explanations of any of these things.\nFree will, creativity, consciousness, meaning, so on.\nBut the best that we do is what's provided here in this chapter, I would suggest.\nLet's return to it.\nLet me continue reading.\nIn any case, we should expect AI to be achieved in a jumped university, starting from something much less powerful.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=3175"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c13191c-ab9d-4fa7-9234-bcd0274cff00": {"page_content": "This is the sense that I get as well.\nI don't think we have good hard to vary explanations of any of these things.\nFree will, creativity, consciousness, meaning, so on.\nBut the best that we do is what's provided here in this chapter, I would suggest.\nLet's return to it.\nLet me continue reading.\nIn any case, we should expect AI to be achieved in a jumped university, starting from something much less powerful.\nIn contrast, the ability to imitate a human imperfectly, or in specialized functions as not a form of university.\nIt can exist in degrees.\nHence, even if chatbots did at some point start becoming much better at imitating humans, or fooling humans, or at fooling humans, that would still not be a path to AI.\nBecoming better at pretending to think is not the same as coming closer to being able to think.\nThere is a philosophy as basic tenon is that those are the same.\nIt's called behaviorism, which is instrumentalism applied to psychology.\nIt is a doctrine that psychology can only, or should only, be the science of behavior, not of minds, that it can only measure and predict relationships between people's external circumstances.\nSimilarly, stimuli, and there is a behavior, responses.\nThe latter is, unfortunately, exactly how the Turing Test asked the judge to regard a candidate AI.\nHence, it encouraged the attitude that if a program could fake AI well enough, it would have achieved it.\nBut ultimately, a non-AI program cannot fake AI.\nThe path to AI cannot be through ever better tricks for making chatbots more convincing.\nA behaviorist would no doubt ask, what exactly is the difference between giving a chatbot a very rich repertoire of tricks, templates, and databases and giving it AI abilities?.\nWhat is an AI program other than a collection of such tricks?.\nAnd I'll pause there.\nIn fact, I'll stop the reading there and move on to episode two, but just a remark on that last bit.\nThe bag of tricks idea, AI being a collection of such tricks.\nIt's something that I referenced earlier, that AI is essentially just a collection of programs, each of which can do one of the things that people can.\nAnd together, I can do all the things that people can, and some distant future will have an AI that can do all of the, it will have the comprehensive bag of human tricks.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=3259"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9728a554-b6d3-4c82-814d-6195b54d59a8": {"page_content": "The bag of tricks idea, AI being a collection of such tricks.\nIt's something that I referenced earlier, that AI is essentially just a collection of programs, each of which can do one of the things that people can.\nAnd together, I can do all the things that people can, and some distant future will have an AI that can do all of the, it will have the comprehensive bag of human tricks.\nIt can do all the things that a human can, except for one, the key one being it won't be able to create explanations, because if it's able to do that, it doesn't need any of the others as it turns out.\nAnd I'm just going to explain a little bit more here.\nSo I've written down a few notes here, let me just read through those.\nSo this idea that AI is essentially just a collection of programs, each of which can do one of the things people can.\nAnd together can do all the things that people can do, except they're silicon based robots, so they can do them much faster and with fewer errors.\nThe conclusion follows almost unavoidably.\nTherefore, they, the silicon based robots will be better than humans, more morally valuable superhumans, but that's false.\nThey will never create anything new, because not one of their programs can do what a person can do, namely create, or rather, if any of the programs could create something completely new, then none of the other ones would be needed, because that single program is a knowledge creating program.\nAnd so you wouldn't have to preload it with all these other things, and you could preload it with all these other things, but what would be the point?.\nBecause once you load it with the artificial general intelligence program, it then is a person, and if you try and force any other kind of learning onto a world that's coercion, that's saying, here's what you need to learn, but what if you load all those others, and then you load the AGI program, same problem, same problem, giving the AGI all of the knowledge that perhaps it didn't want to know, perhaps it doesn't want to be the best baker in the world.\nThe thing about people is that people, humans, and AGI, their universal explainers, and David has answered the question, what is a person?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=3378"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9feb9f1-118a-4fcb-80c5-6f29772ac4db": {"page_content": "Few have noticed, as recently as yesterday, I was listening to Sam Harris's podcast, the third time I've mentioned Sam in this episode, I do so, just by the way, because I think he's got the best podcast, and I think he captures very well what the public sentiment on many deep philosophical and scientific issues are at the moment, and so it's a good way to get a handle on what people are thinking about any particular thing, and so just yesterday, episode number 146 for the waking up podcast, it was called Digital Capitalism, and his interviewee was a Douglas Rushkoff, and he was very concerned about technology taking over, he was a little bit of a pessimist about aspects of technology, very well, he's not alone there, and although there were the usual noises about tech calamities, he wanted to say something in defense of humans against computers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=3509"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b530a51f-78f2-4ad7-97b8-7e4166685c62": {"page_content": "He argued that the singleitarians, these people that think that we're all going to be uploaded into the matrix at some distant point, some amiga point in the future, and will all have an immortal life based by living in the internet or something or other.\nThat's the singularitarians, the singularity is coming, and various other kinds of transhumanists, so this fellow Douglas Rushkoff was saying that these people are missing the crucial qualities of people, what the essence of a person is if you like.\nNow, I kind of agree with him there, but he thinks he tried to articulate what he thought the crucial qualities of humans are, the crucial qualities of people are, and if you're interested in listening, that's around the 43 minute and 22nd mark, and he has a quite strange list of qualities that he thinks that humans have that differentiate them from computers, and so the words that he mentioned there were awe and meditation and camaraderie and establishing rapport.\nIt's a strange list, but I've sensed more than the particular words that he's used that, it was struggling, it was struggling very much to pin down what it is that's special about people.\nAs so many philosophers and scientists have, they know there's something there, and this is why people revert to superstitious ideas, that people have a soul or a spirit or something like that.\nThey can't quite apply a secular scientific understanding to what is special about human beings, what makes them cosmically significant, and so they reach for these other words that just don't resonate, I don't think with anyone who is listening to that would have gone,.\noh wow, yes, that's exactly what a person is, a person, a person's special quality is camaraderie and building rapport, it's missing something, it seems denuded of the key point.\nThere've been many of these attempts over the years to try and secularize what is almost sacred or divine about people, never failed.\nThe truth is as we have learned people are unique because they create explanatory knowledge, that's cosmically significant, it's cosmically significant in a way that's greater than spiritual soul than what the religious or supernatural people say.\nIt is saying that if we persevere in solving problems, in doing what we are as people, in creating, we will change not only the entire planet, we will change the galaxy in the universe.\nThat is our capacity as general purpose problem solvers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=3570"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c0f701d2-b138-4ecd-a5b7-f4952699e264": {"page_content": "The truth is as we have learned people are unique because they create explanatory knowledge, that's cosmically significant, it's cosmically significant in a way that's greater than spiritual soul than what the religious or supernatural people say.\nIt is saying that if we persevere in solving problems, in doing what we are as people, in creating, we will change not only the entire planet, we will change the galaxy in the universe.\nThat is our capacity as general purpose problem solvers.\nSo yes, so he was struggling very much to pin down what it was that was special about people, and Sam Harris himself likewise earlier and exactly the same episode tried to articulate what he thought was special about humans and he said, if anything, especially about humans, it's our use of language, this is the thing that differentiates us from computers, but it doesn't differentiate us from computers or animals or anything else, computers very much use language, animals use language.\nSo these attempts just miss the key, the key point.\nIt is people creating explanations, explanations that can change the world as the subtitle of the book is.\nThat's cosmically significant.\nTennis players can't put into words on any explicit explanation of how to serve a great ace.\nA person who never learns to speak will nonetheless still create explanations.\nLanguage is a facet, a small facet of something far deeper and broader.\nLanguage is of course necessary for social interaction, but it can't be the thing that separates a human from other things.\nComputers do have languages, and so do apes.\nSo it's not language.\nIt is our capacity as universal explainers or universal knowledge creators, or universal problem solace, or general purpose explainers, and so go the synonyms for this same concept, basically a thing that solves problems by creating explanatory knowledge.\nBut there is another kind of knowledge that we haven't touched on in this episode yet.\nIf we recall from chapter two, biological knowledge, and so now here in chapter seven, David now turns to how to attempt to artificially simulate biological knowledge using so-called evolutionary algorithms, and what the state of that particular science or engineering is.\nIt's a whole other episode in itself, so I'm going to leave what I've said here now, and I'll see you in the next episode.\nSo bye for now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRSfDmBwts&t=3698"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3bed3b8f-17ce-4f46-9083-3819e623d06a": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, and to the final regular episode on my discussions of Kiara Marletto's The Science of Ken and Cart.\nThis is chapter 7 titled A Journey There and Back Again, which as a Tolkien fan evokes for me, the subtitle of Tolkien's Book the Hobbit.\nAnd that subtied was There and Back Again.\nIn the universe of the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit was actually written by the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, and it was called in that universe There and Back Again.\nAnd here in this final chapter, I can draw a couple of parallels between Kiara's book here, as well as Constructed Theory more broadly, and some of the themes in Tolkien's work.\nNow, before I begin, the first thing to mention is that for viewers on YouTube, for example, but not for listeners, we have something for viewers just to look at.\nAnd don't worry if you're simply listening on audio podcasts, as this will make no difference to the substance of today's episode.\nBut I have provided some vision, simply because, well, we're talking about a chapter titled A Journey There and Back Again.\nSo I thought it might be nice to have some video of some of the journeys or walks.\nI take frequently on the South Coast of Australia, a near-o place called Sanctuary Point.\nThis place is interesting because it demonstrates a certain dichotomy in a rather beautiful way.\nSome people like to be surrounded entirely by civilization, to live as close to the centre of a city, for example, as possible.\nThat's not really me.\nSome people like to live entirely surrounded by nature, and that's also not me.\nI like those places that are really on the border, where just behind you is civilization, and you're in it.\nBut you've also got a view of the entirely undeveloped and natural environment.\nI like to be able to see what hasn't yet been developed, but might be.\nThere could be.\nThe so-called natural environment and the built environment co-existing side-by-side places where humans have constructed by turning the resources they've identified into dwellings and roads and whatever else.\nAnd the places so far undeveloped Tolkien's work is rather pessimistic in this regard.\nHe was one of the first greenies, I suppose.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=20"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4dff09f3-ba2f-4abb-9cb7-b2e3e0cb37ea": {"page_content": "I like to be able to see what hasn't yet been developed, but might be.\nThere could be.\nThe so-called natural environment and the built environment co-existing side-by-side places where humans have constructed by turning the resources they've identified into dwellings and roads and whatever else.\nAnd the places so far undeveloped Tolkien's work is rather pessimistic in this regard.\nHe was one of the first greenies, I suppose.\nHe saw industry broadly speaking as a blight on the landscape, and all of his works from the Silmarillion through the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings have at their heart a message about decay and the loss of nature.\nCorruption was what he was often on about and mentioned in his books and what he seemed to mean by the word corruption, rather often, is something about where technology of a kind came along and ruined a natural forest or something like that.\nIt's not exactly a picture we get of the world that I explain here.\nIt's quite the opposite.\nNow of course Tolkien lived through.\nHe spent his formative years in the First World War, and so he saw the destructive aspects of technology, and so that has coloured his view of the impact of humans on the environment, of course.\nAnd he lived through a time when he was no doubt witnessing the rapid pace of change in parts of rural England, what the green countryside went through in places where coal mines and the burning of very smoky, unfiltered stuff in order to lift people out of poverty was occurring.\nEconomics is not something he really focused on in Lord of the Rings, but I digress.\nJust to say that the vision for today's episode, the videos that viewers are seeing, exists to give people something, anything really, to look at.\nBut it's not entirely random.\nIt does give a sense of a journey, and it does provide something of that dichotomy between the natural environment and those places where human knowledge has transformed the world into something less hostile.\nThe other thing to notice here is that being Australia, for most of these video clips, you can get some sense of the proportion here of the undeveloped part of the country, which is the overwhelming majority of the landmass.\nAnd these little specks of development we call cities and towns by comparison.\nNature has constructed almost everything we still see if you step beyond your tiny city.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=111"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "441e994d-0495-42e6-92cf-b5978e2358a5": {"page_content": "The other thing to notice here is that being Australia, for most of these video clips, you can get some sense of the proportion here of the undeveloped part of the country, which is the overwhelming majority of the landmass.\nAnd these little specks of development we call cities and towns by comparison.\nNature has constructed almost everything we still see if you step beyond your tiny city.\nHumans have just begun to scratch the surface of the landmass that is Australia, to say nothing of the rest of the world, the solar system, little on the universe.\nIt is so very early in the history of humanity, we have had almost no impact.\nYes, I know.\nUnpopular opinion, apparently we are uniquely destructive and we are almost at a tipping point where the damage we have done will be irreversible.\nI know.\nOf course, I do not view human activity as damaging.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=228"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0d5ae649-a08e-4081-b87a-4df5e98bfcbe": {"page_content": "I view the environment and the cosmos as damaging to us, lethal even, we build and construct in order to provide some the scant protection against the forces of nature, arrayed against us, whether those be cosmic in the form of asteroids, supernovae, long-term climate changes or more urgently just catastrophic weather events like floods and storms and fires, or other natural disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, planet earth is a veritable death trap without our energy, technology and explanatory knowledge, helping us to scratch an existence out from this otherwise implacably hostile rock.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=284"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8a3da373-f5e8-481f-9278-77e533dbedea": {"page_content": "I have made the point before that if we don't do what we can to control the environment, it will control us and eventually destroy us and everything else on the planet.\nThat's simply a logical consequence of what we know from physics and science, either the asteroids going to hit us, or the sun's going to engulf us, or at least expand so much the oceans boil, unless we learn what to do about all this.\nThe kangaroos aren't going to do it, the bacteria aren't going to do it, the trees aren't going to do it, we need to create fundamental far-reaching knowledge now, which is one reason I read this book about Constructa Theory.\nReportedly, the most fundamental theory of physics we now have, or at least one of them, and that book comes to an end today.\nThis is the first popular science book to have been written on Constructa Theory, it may not be, it should not be, the last.\nIt may be that Constructa Theory reaches into areas of science and philosophy, and much more, in such a way as to radically transform our understanding of physics, and life, and ourselves, that we can use it to solve some of the biggest problems.\nThis final chapter is an excellent one for bringing together the previous ones, because it serves as something of a summary of the rest of the book, and then it looks forward to what we can hope for with Constructa Theory, often to the infinite future, and well, let's just get into it.\nKiara begins in summary with, quote, at the beginning of this book, I made an ambitious claim.\nI promised to present a new perspective on physical reality by explaining how to understand and think in terms of counterfactual properties of physical systems, it is now time to head back to where the journey began and to contemplate the new understanding that we have gathered along the way.\nWith the last page approaching, one has to operate like a thoughtful traveler nearing the end of their journey.\nReview the things that seem to note worthy, consider what new avenues they open up and whether they are fuel for the creation of further knowledge.\nThe central motivating idea of this book is that a class of properties has been largely neglected in science, and that this needs to be remedied because it is preventing progress on fundamental problems.\nI called those properties counterfactuals.\nThey are not specifiable by describing the actual state of a physical system nor its law of motion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=318"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "beeae0c2-e569-4c92-81b3-09d8c6459433": {"page_content": "Review the things that seem to note worthy, consider what new avenues they open up and whether they are fuel for the creation of further knowledge.\nThe central motivating idea of this book is that a class of properties has been largely neglected in science, and that this needs to be remedied because it is preventing progress on fundamental problems.\nI called those properties counterfactuals.\nThey are not specifiable by describing the actual state of a physical system nor its law of motion.\nTo specify them, one has to describe the system in terms of what transformations are ultimately possible or impossible to perform on it.\nAs I have explained, counterfactuals are lurking at the core of most exciting open problems in fundamental physics.\nI mentioned several examples.\nThe interoperability of information, chapter 3 and 4, the no cloning property and the reversibility of quantum information, chapter 4, the resilience of knowledge, chapter 5, the conservation of energy and the distinction between work like and heat like energy transfers, chapter 6 and the information based interoperability of work media and thermodynamics, chapter 6.\nThe main counterfactuals we have explored in this book are summarized in the table that follows and I will read through the table.\nSo we have got the phenomenon of information.\nThe counterfactuals involved are the possibility of flip and copy.\nThe physical laws involved are interoperability of information media and the notable related entities are the universal computer and the universal constructor.\nAs pause there and just mention, when Kiara says interoperability, my understanding of that is substrate independence.\nWhat that means is that when you've got an information media, it's independent of the physical characteristics of that particular material.\nSo you can have the same information written on a piece of paper.\nYou can have the same information painted onto a window presumably.\nYou have the same information represented in the pixels of a computer screen or in the memory of a computer hard drive and so on and so forth in the mind of a person indeed as some arrangement of neurons in the brain.\nSo this is interoperability, the same information can exist in different physical forms.\nAnother phenomenon that Kiara mentions is quantum information.\nThe counterfactual involved there is the impossibility of copying certain information carrying states, the possibility of reversing any transformation.\nThe physical laws governing this again is interoperability of information media and the notable related entities are the universal quantum computer and the universal constructor.\nThe next phenomenon that Kiara went through was knowledge which he defines as resilient information.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=439"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f71b292-2522-473e-b9a0-f3b92587c876": {"page_content": "So this is interoperability, the same information can exist in different physical forms.\nAnother phenomenon that Kiara mentions is quantum information.\nThe counterfactual involved there is the impossibility of copying certain information carrying states, the possibility of reversing any transformation.\nThe physical laws governing this again is interoperability of information media and the notable related entities are the universal quantum computer and the universal constructor.\nThe next phenomenon that Kiara went through was knowledge which he defines as resilient information.\nThe counterfactual involved there is the ability to enable transformations and of remaining embodied in physical systems, the physical laws for knowledge have not yet been discovered.\nBut the notable related entities are abstract catalysts and the universal constructor and the final phenomena covered was work and the counterfactuals involved there were the possibility of seesawing transformations and the impossibility of changing energy without side effects.\nThat's the conservation of energy.\nThe physical law involved is the conservation of energy, the interoperability of work media, and the counterfactual second law of thermodynamics.\nAnd the related entities are the scale independent heat engines, scale independent means it doesn't matter whether it's big or small and the universal constructor wants more and then she goes on in a text to say a quote.\nHaving now an overall perspective one might notice that two general facts emerge, the two overarching ways in which the power of counterfactuals expresses itself.\nThe first is that adopting counterfactuals brings entities that look superficially like immaterial abstractions into the domain of physics.\nInformation and knowledge, for example, have been traditionally considered as mere abstractions as things that do not belong to the physical world.\nHowever, by considering the counterfactual properties of physical systems that enable information and knowledge one refutes society because whether or not a physical system has those properties is set precisely by the laws of physics end quote.\nYes, and so whether or not something can generate knowledge or can contain information depends upon whether the laws of physics say that entity can do so.\nAnd indeed, what the limits of knowledge creation are is bounded by what we know about the laws of physics.\nAlthough knowledge is an abstraction of a kind, it must be instantiated somewhere to count as knowledge.\nIf you can't instantiate it, it doesn't count as knowledge.\nAnd that includes inside your mind.\nSo if you have knowledge in your mind, obviously, it's instantiated there in your brain.\nIt's represented somehow encoded.\nBut that encoding process is a physical process.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3009b93e-cb63-41f1-aa89-3905bf9f2d5d": {"page_content": "And indeed, what the limits of knowledge creation are is bounded by what we know about the laws of physics.\nAlthough knowledge is an abstraction of a kind, it must be instantiated somewhere to count as knowledge.\nIf you can't instantiate it, it doesn't count as knowledge.\nAnd that includes inside your mind.\nSo if you have knowledge in your mind, obviously, it's instantiated there in your brain.\nIt's represented somehow encoded.\nBut that encoding process is a physical process.\nOkay, this is related to the mathematicians misconception that I've spoken about in top cast over the last few weeks and months.\nWe cannot divorce therefore epistemology from physics in any way, shape or form these.\nThese things are intimately related now precisely what the relationship is and what laws of physics will come to bear on the possibility of generating knowledge.\nWe don't know yet.\nWe just know that it it must, in principle, be bound by laws of physics in ways I've mentioned, but in new ways as well yet to be discovered, which hopefully constructive theory will have something to say about.\nLet's continue.\nKara says quote.\nThe other fact is that embracing counterfactuals allows one to express exact laws about entities traditionally considered as approximate because these laws refer directly to the macroscopic world such as information, energy, heat and work.\nWhen the counterfactual properties enabling those entities are made explicit, it is elegant and easy to express laws about the systems displaying those properties without approximations.\nThis is how the power of counterfactuals allows one to ground concepts that would otherwise be considered abstract or approximate in exact fundamental physical laws.\nThe logic of how that is done is the same for all the entities discussed in this book.\nIt is a unifying trait.\nFirst, one expresses the counterfactual property that is required of a physical system for it to embody the entity in question.\nFor instance, if the entity is information, the counterfactual properties that the system must possess are the possibility of the flip and the copy transformations.\nThen one can express regularities about the physical systems with those counterfactual properties in the form of laws of physics.\nFor instance, interoperability laws, for example, a bit of information, looks like a pure abstraction until we view it through counterfactuals, then one notices that for a system, for example, switch to qualify as a bit of information.\nIt must have two counterfactual properties.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47bbf043-8d2e-4e80-a01f-133f9f9aa768": {"page_content": "Then one can express regularities about the physical systems with those counterfactual properties in the form of laws of physics.\nFor instance, interoperability laws, for example, a bit of information, looks like a pure abstraction until we view it through counterfactuals, then one notices that for a system, for example, switch to qualify as a bit of information.\nIt must have two counterfactual properties.\nOne, that it is possible for it to be an either of the two physical states on and off, and two that the state on and the state off can each be permuted into one another and also copied into any other physical system that itself has the same two counterfactual properties.\nWhether a system has these two counterfactual properties, it qualifies as an information medium.\nYou see, then why a bit is not an abstraction independent of the physical world, whether or not something has those properties depends entirely on the laws of physics.\nUnlike, say, whether a given number is a prime number, which does not depend in the least on what the laws of physics are.\nThose counterfactuals provide the link between information and physical laws.\nIn addition, one can state an interoperability law about the system that is displaying those counterfactual properties.\nThe interoperability law explains why the counterfactual properties, though physical, are not dependent on most of the details of the physical systems.\nIt is because when there is an interoperability law, those properties are shared by a class of physical systems.\nThe details of the systems all belonging to the same class become irrelevant end quote.\nAgain, that's substrate independence.\nIt doesn't matter if the information media is paper, magnetic tape, pits in a compact disk, whatever, the same information can be transmitted from one medium into another.\nThe details of what the stuff is made of, whether it's paper or magnetic tape, doesn't matter.\nWhat matters is whether you can do these flip and copy operations.\nI'm skipping a number of paragraphs and I'll pick it up where Kara writes quote.\nAs I have explained time and again, the traditional conception of physics cannot express counterfactual properties.\nThe traditional conception can refer to the state of a switch either on or off at any given time and can predict what the state will be a later time and why.\nHowever, a statement of this kind does not tell us anything about what transformations are possible or impossible in the switch.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=807"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "edd8d2d2-9bf7-4baf-bf98-dba1109a5074": {"page_content": "I'm skipping a number of paragraphs and I'll pick it up where Kara writes quote.\nAs I have explained time and again, the traditional conception of physics cannot express counterfactual properties.\nThe traditional conception can refer to the state of a switch either on or off at any given time and can predict what the state will be a later time and why.\nHowever, a statement of this kind does not tell us anything about what transformations are possible or impossible in the switch.\nThis is why turning to counterfactuals and related laws is essential to capture the physics of phenomena such as information and the other entities you have discovered in this book end quote.\nSo it really is a simple but profoundly deep idea.\nYou've got a switch.\nOkay, so you could do traditional classical physics or even quantum theory and have some prediction about what the outcome of a particular process going to be is the switch going to end up on or off.\nBut at no point do you need to actually say, if you ignore counterfactuals, what the possible state of that switch are going to be that is a counterfactual claim saying it could be in the on position or it could be in the off position is irrelevant to what you're trying to do.\nWhat you're trying to do is to make a prediction and so it comes back to understanding to some extent as well.\nA whole new mode of explanation, a new way of looking at this situation.\nI know it's simple.\nOkay, it's a switch.\nbut you can in principle imagine this to be generalized to other more complicated, more interesting situations.\nBut if we're just talking about the switch, one would think if you want to have a fundamental physical understanding of this object, you should want to know well it can be in one of two states.\nAnd if you're sitting there thinking this is trivial, yeah.\nit kind of is but here the two physics, physics mind you, fundamental physics didn't have anything to say about this.\nBut now there is a way, there is a framework, there is this constructed theory which allows us to talk about, well the switch could be on and it could be off, it's impossible for it to be otherwise.\nIt's not going to be something else, it's not some third state, it's honour.\nit's off.\nand it is able to perform as a bit doing this particular operation.\nOkay, let's continue.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=927"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9396b3ed-461f-4592-a6cd-ba43817be031": {"page_content": "But now there is a way, there is a framework, there is this constructed theory which allows us to talk about, well the switch could be on and it could be off, it's impossible for it to be otherwise.\nIt's not going to be something else, it's not some third state, it's honour.\nit's off.\nand it is able to perform as a bit doing this particular operation.\nOkay, let's continue.\nOkay, all right, quote, there is another unifying aspect of the approach I have been advocating which was foreshadowed at the end of chapter two.\nAll the counterfactual properties you have encountered are expressible statements about which transformations are possible and which are not and why a daring speculation is therefore that all the laws of physics could be formulated solely in terms of principles about counterfactuals and that the laws of motion follow from them as derivative and perhaps approximate properties, exploring this possibility is the start of an exciting research program end quote.\nOkay, so just a little bit on the philosophy of scientists suppose Kiara says there, this could be the start of an exciting research program, research program.\nSo, Popper talked about research programs.\nOkay, this is the idea that it forms that kind of overarching framework deeper than a particular theory.\nSo although constructor theory is called constructor theory and it would be testable in a whole number of different ways, what we have are the beginnings of ways in which to conduct scientific research to find particular laws.\nAnd that's what a research program is.\nIt's kind of a broader conception.\nIt's almost like a view of science, a view of the way in which physics in this case could be done.\nBut of course constructor theory is a broader even than just physics that reaches into biology or reaches into epistemology.\nIt's sort of like the physics of those areas, the dividing lines between these domains are of course not sharp.\nBut whenever I hear research program being used in this technical way, I immediately think of Popper's remarks about evolution by natural selection Darwinism because people would ask Poppy, you know, well, does this count as does evolution by natural selection?.\nCount as a scientific theory in your sense because in what sense is it testable?.\nYou know, people will often say things like, well, you know, clearly evolution by natural selection is testable.\nHow Dan said the Great Defender of Darwin was well, one way you could test this is if you find rabbits in the pre-cambrian.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1020"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "589a1e55-b0eb-4908-8c25-ff457f8fa248": {"page_content": "Count as a scientific theory in your sense because in what sense is it testable?.\nYou know, people will often say things like, well, you know, clearly evolution by natural selection is testable.\nHow Dan said the Great Defender of Darwin was well, one way you could test this is if you find rabbits in the pre-cambrian.\nIn other words, the evolution of a complex organism like a rabbit at a time prior to the evolution of any complex life at the Cambrian period of geological strategy.\nYou have this thing called the Cambrian explosion and then lots of complex life arose after that.\nBut before that, you didn't have complicated life.\nSo if you found rabbits there, this would refute the claim that evolution by natural selection is this gradual process of evolution, increased complexity of life.\nBut in fact, in fact, as many people have observed since then, that's not a refutation of evolution by natural selection.\nIf you did indeed find rabbits in the pre-cambrian, if you found rabbits much, much, much earlier in the fossil record, then you expect that would be a problem, but it would not in any way shape or form refute evolution by natural selection.\nIt could just mean that, well, rabbits evolved more rapidly in that particular place than they did anywhere else.\nAnd, well, they still evolved.\nThey still evolved by evolution by natural selection.\nAnd there's your fossils, the rabbits in the pre-cambrian exist there because the best explanation is, they'd really good evolve really, really quickly.\nThat's possible.\nThat's possible.\nSo it doesn't refute evolution by natural selection.\nSo then we've got a problem, don't we, in the history of science or the history of ideas and the philosophy of science.\nIf evolution by natural selection is the deepest theory of biology, and what sense is it truly a scientific theory?.\nIf we can't test it, is it any way of doing experiment which would refute it?.\nWhat observation would we have that could not possibly be explained by evolution by natural selection?.\nAnd this is why Popper said, well, it's better to consider that as the research program.\nIt's a framework in which we think about all the different ways in which we can have theories of biology and theories of genetics and all this kind of stuff that is related to the question of evolution by natural selection.\nEvolution by natural selection is just the underlying fact.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1153"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d537980e-6fe5-4241-8e48-f704bb6ee85d": {"page_content": "What observation would we have that could not possibly be explained by evolution by natural selection?.\nAnd this is why Popper said, well, it's better to consider that as the research program.\nIt's a framework in which we think about all the different ways in which we can have theories of biology and theories of genetics and all this kind of stuff that is related to the question of evolution by natural selection.\nEvolution by natural selection is just the underlying fact.\nIt's the only possible way in which in which evolution can happen.\nWe can rule out the Marxism.\nWe can rule out creationism.\nThe only one we've got left.\nThe only explanation we've got is evolution by natural selection.\nSo you can't test it after I'll test it against what?.\nThere's no viable alternatives.\nAnd that's one thing to say about this.\nBut even in principle, there's no observation that we can have, unless you saw the spirit from the sky come down and wave a literal magic wand and create life there in front of you.\nThen you might have something.\nAlthough then again, that entity, that spirit, whatever it is that was doing the magic, the creator, maybe that thing evolved.\nSo if that evolved, well, then that doesn't refute evolution by natural selection.\nYou just have to appeal to evolution by natural selection to explain the existence of the creator, I suppose.\nSo maybe evolution by natural selection is unfulcified, but that does not make it a bad theory.\nIt might make it kind of outside of science or prior to science in a way, kind of like falsifiability itself, you know, the whole concept of falsification is not itself falsifiable.\nCertainly a crucial part of science.\nSo is it part of science or is it not part of science?.\nIt's kind of prior to science.\nYou know, the theory that in geology, rocks exist, volcanoes exist.\nThese theories of existence that these things just are.\nWell, they're not falsifiable either.\nYou make any claim of anything existing.\nSo what this has to do with anything is that it construct a theory might be considered as the start of an exciting research program, as well as a set of physical laws or ways of informing our under deeper understanding of physical laws.\nLet's keep going.\nKara says, quote, to develop it, this exciting research program.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1268"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c2c4cb5a-6d22-4dae-b636-823f57002ca9": {"page_content": "These theories of existence that these things just are.\nWell, they're not falsifiable either.\nYou make any claim of anything existing.\nSo what this has to do with anything is that it construct a theory might be considered as the start of an exciting research program, as well as a set of physical laws or ways of informing our under deeper understanding of physical laws.\nLet's keep going.\nKara says, quote, to develop it, this exciting research program.\nOne would have to formulate laws of physics about systems displaying the counterfactual properties discussed in this book and to show that dynamical laws such as quantum theory and general relativity are emergent, derivative approximations following from those principles.\nThis is potentially a whole new avenue for physics being opened up by taking counterfactual seriously.\nIt is for physicists and other scientists and philosophers to explore its development in the years to come.\nA program of that sort is no simple matter for a start in order to adopt any of these putative laws about the counterfactuals as laws of physics, one would have to ensure they are testable.\nAnd quite so what Kara's saying there is that you would need to find laws themselves that are testable, counterfactual laws and testable, but this is different too for any individual particular counterfactual physical law being testable, which makes it therefore scientific.\nThis is a different question to whether the whole research program that we might label constructor theory, whether or not that thing is testable, whether the existence of counterfactuals in the world and the fundamental nature of the counterfactual properties of physical reality and the physical laws, whether that is testable, simply just seems to be the truth of the matter.\nIt just is the case that these counterfactuals exist in reality.\nThat's a research program, but that itself might not be testable.\nIt's sort of prior to the scientific theory itself.\nIt's the thing inside which other theories testable theories are nested in the same way that in biology, all the theories of genetics and the way individual species happen to evolve over time is nested within this broader view of biology as species evolving via the process of natural selection.\nThat just is the case.\nNow, you then use that to see what follows, what specific biological laws you end up and biological knowledge you end up creating, which itself is testable.\nOkay, there goes on to say and explains what fans of podcasts will be more than familiar with, but let's just read through it anyway.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1366"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9ad3eeec-c99f-445a-a1ae-a659d3c9df88": {"page_content": "That just is the case.\nNow, you then use that to see what follows, what specific biological laws you end up and biological knowledge you end up creating, which itself is testable.\nOkay, there goes on to say and explains what fans of podcasts will be more than familiar with, but let's just read through it anyway.\nRight, quite.\nA law is testable if it produces predictions about observable traits of a physical system.\nTestability, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, is a pillar of the scientific method where a theory that makes testable predictions can be refuted if its predictions are not borne out by experiments.\nA classic example, as recounted in Chapter 2, is testing a prediction about the speed of a ball of a given mass rolling down a slope with a given inclination.\nEconomics and medicine are two disciplines where testability is problematic because although predictions can be made, it is hard to make repeated experiments under control conditions to check the predictions against reality.\nPhysics, on the other hand, is privileged because many of its predictions are testable.\nCan principles about counterfactuals be tested?.\nYes, but the process is one step removed from the tests of rolling ball predictions that you store in Chapter 2.\nPrinciples such as the conservation of energy are in general tested by deducing their implications for the behavior of physical systems that are assumed to obey them.\nPrinciples are laws about laws.\nThey are meta laws.\nOne needs first to have at least two rival theories concerning a physical situation to which the principle reports to apply.\nFor instance, one can consider a model for a pendulum that obeys the principle of energy conservation.\nFor example, a model based on Newton's laws and then another model that does not predict that once the pendulum is set into motion, it spontaneously swings to higher and higher points.\nThen one performs an experiment with an actual pendulum to test the prediction of one model against the other.\nIn the case of the pendulum, all experiments done so far have refuted the model that predicts that energy is spontaneously created.\nWhenever it looks as though the pendulum swings to higher and higher points, it is because some nearby system is actually providing the energy to do so.\nFor instance, by driving the oscillations with some mechanical engine, which provides the required energy for the swings so far.\nThe principle of conservation of energy has withstood all tests performed on it in its domain of applicability.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1497"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "098491f7-824f-491b-83dd-0cf7339a5dab": {"page_content": "In the case of the pendulum, all experiments done so far have refuted the model that predicts that energy is spontaneously created.\nWhenever it looks as though the pendulum swings to higher and higher points, it is because some nearby system is actually providing the energy to do so.\nFor instance, by driving the oscillations with some mechanical engine, which provides the required energy for the swings so far.\nThe principle of conservation of energy has withstood all tests performed on it in its domain of applicability.\nOkay, I'm going to skip a fair bit and I'm going to pick it up in the chapter where Kiara begins to talk about, right about, rather, a part of science she is actively engaged in in physics in trying to measure things that are by.\nWell, you're not really sure what laws these things are by.\nMaybe they are by the laws of general relativity.\nMaybe they are by the laws of quantum theory.\nMaybe these two sets of laws actually make incompatible claims about reality.\nThis is an interesting place where constructor theory can have something to say.\nLet's read what she says about this intriguing experiment that she has been working on.\nShe writes, quote, the principle of interoperability also has an intriguing twist, which allows one to make predictions about physical systems without knowing exactly what their laws of motion are.\nIt is something I have been working on for the past few years.\nWith dynamical laws, the only way to make predictions about what happens when two systems are considered together is to know the dynamics of each of them, as well as how to construct the composite laws of motion.\nBut sometimes one does not know all that.\nFor example, it is still a matter of heated debate, whether and how gravity obeys quantum theory.\nThe reason is that the current best explanation of gravity is general relativity, a theory with no quantum information media in it.\nSo we may not have all the tools to describe the joint motion of a qubit interacting with gravity, yet we may still want to make certain testable predictions about that system.\nEnd quote.\nSo that's intriguing.\nYou can read more by looking up Kyara and these gravity experiments.\nHow a qubit behaves in a gravitational field.\nSo you've got a qubit, which is clearly being governed by a quantum theory, but then you're looking at how it behaves according to gravity.\nSo then you've got general relativity.\nSo trying to marry up these two things in such a way as you're observing it, observing its behavior.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1615"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e287073-0b98-426a-b529-0cb007b54be2": {"page_content": "End quote.\nSo that's intriguing.\nYou can read more by looking up Kyara and these gravity experiments.\nHow a qubit behaves in a gravitational field.\nSo you've got a qubit, which is clearly being governed by a quantum theory, but then you're looking at how it behaves according to gravity.\nSo then you've got general relativity.\nSo trying to marry up these two things in such a way as you're observing it, observing its behavior.\nAnd so coming to a deeper understanding, and I'll go back to the book and just pick it up where she talked about something slightly different, where she says, quote, other times, even if the law of motion is known, it is too complicated to follow all the motions of the constituents of one of the systems.\nThis is the case for complex molecules that have so many sub particles that it is impossible to use the laws of motion to predict their behavior, too complicated, even for the existing supercomputers in such cases, counterfactuals come in very handy because they allow us to still make predictions end quote.\nYeah.\nSo even if you've got complicated molecules, and we're just talking about molecules, then you can't make predictions about the evolution over time of the system of molecules interacting just because the sub particles, the smaller particles that make up the bigger molecules are just too many and too complicated.\nSo never mind when you get to the level of cells made up of millions of molecules and never mind when you put the cells together and you get an animal and never mind when you the animal gets complicated that is a person and never mind when you put people together and you get social and political and economic systems and people think you can reduce these things the dynamical laws.\nPeople trying to make predictions about the stock market and people try to make predictions about people making shopping choices and so on and so forth.\nWe can't do it with simple or complicated molecules and we're going to struggle to do it with simple molecules, by the way.\nSo all this is to say that this traditional conception of physics in terms of dynamical laws that allow us to just make predictions of the evolution of the system over time, well, not applicable when you get more complicated systems, but maybe a counterfactual approach can bear fruit.\nAnd Chiarra writes on this quote, why?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1739"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4fb044fa-fe32-41f6-a730-499ab4121a2d": {"page_content": "We can't do it with simple or complicated molecules and we're going to struggle to do it with simple molecules, by the way.\nSo all this is to say that this traditional conception of physics in terms of dynamical laws that allow us to just make predictions of the evolution of the system over time, well, not applicable when you get more complicated systems, but maybe a counterfactual approach can bear fruit.\nAnd Chiarra writes on this quote, why?.\nBecause they, counterfactuals, hold for those systems irrespective of their details, imagine that you know two systems, each qualifies a bit, but you do not know all the details of their dynamics, nor how to describe the dynamics when they interact with one another.\nThe interoperability of information would still allow you to make predictions about certain tasks on the composite system because it is based on the counterfactuals rather than on the dynamics.\nThis is an example of how the laws about counterfactual properties can be useful and go beyond the testable predictions of known dynamical laws.\nI want to mention a very recent example where this logic applies, which is at the heart of the current struggle to merge the two best explanations of the universe known to us, quantum theory and general relativity.\nThere are some physical systems such as particles with masses comparable to those of human cells for which both gravity and quantum theory are thought to be relevant, yet there is no unified dynamical law that describes a system that both gravitates and is quantum.\nThere have been brilliant proposals to achieve that unification, but to date, none of these candidates has been conclusively chosen over the others.\nWhen it comes to those systems, we did not know what law of motion we should be using to make predictions.\nStill, we know that the counterfactual interoperability law applies in that domain, even when the specific laws of motion are unknown, so we can use the interoperability law to make predictions in that domain.\nThis approach with counterfactuals has recently led to an idea to test effects in quantum gravity, which has created a lot of interest within the quantum gravity and the experimental communities.\nThe race to realize the experiment has started, and if it is realized, it could finally refute the idea that gravity is not quantum, such as the reach of counterfactuals.\nThey provide a powerful underpinning of deep conceptual ideas, as well as the robust theoretical nature, to support experimental ideas of this kind.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1829"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6377034-e180-4012-9caf-c92d3fff83ad": {"page_content": "This approach with counterfactuals has recently led to an idea to test effects in quantum gravity, which has created a lot of interest within the quantum gravity and the experimental communities.\nThe race to realize the experiment has started, and if it is realized, it could finally refute the idea that gravity is not quantum, such as the reach of counterfactuals.\nThey provide a powerful underpinning of deep conceptual ideas, as well as the robust theoretical nature, to support experimental ideas of this kind.\nI expect there will be more experimental ideas to come, in addition to the exciting consequences for physics, switching to counterfactuals has deep important implications for other fields.\nOne of them could be to revolutionize the understanding of knowledge and quote, and just my reflection in this.\nThis is a purported experiment, by the way.\nYou can just do a Google search to find out more of the details, just type in Kyara and Vlattko, who's a collaborator on this, gravity and qubit.\nSo there you're four big things that are the two authors of the paper, and the two concepts we're talking about here.\nOne of the papers by Kyara and Vlattko, appears in the journal Nature, one of the most prestigious journals in the world.\nAnd you can look up the details there, and they talk about how Feynman was the one who first suggested coming up with some kind of test.\nThey've come up with a kind of test.\nThese experiments are about quantum theory and general relativity, but now Kyara goes on to talking about counterfactuals and the relationship to knowledge, explanatory knowledge.\nAnd she writes, quote, I said that knowledge is a particular type of information, with the counterfactual property of being resilient.\nIt can cause itself to remain instantiated in physical systems.\nI also explained that we do not know exactly how it is created, but we know that it can arise out of no knowledge via the process of natural selection, and that another process for creating new knowledge is what happens in the brain when we think science does not know if there are new laws that govern this type of resilient information, but routing knowledge and counterfactuals is the right approach to creating a corpus of such laws.\nThis is not least because the approach via counterfactuals freeze knowledge from all the subjective connotations that have traditionally played theories of it end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=1946"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f7beea32-11c6-4de9-91a1-64e61f8de87c": {"page_content": "This is not least because the approach via counterfactuals freeze knowledge from all the subjective connotations that have traditionally played theories of it end quote.\nYes, and so if this is a popularian view of knowledge, this is an addition on top of, or goes deeper in some sense, then pop a view of knowledge, but properties of course, and escape from all the subjective connotations that have traditionally played theories of knowledge.\nSo he certainly took the subjectivity out of knowledge.\nHe's entire epistemology was to talk about objective knowledge, and I've spoken about this before.\nIf you're interested, one of my episodes is just called objective knowledge.\nIt's literally about pop-as-view of this stuff.\nLet's see what Kiara adds to this.\nChirat.\nQuote, moreover with counterfactuals knowledge becomes a physical entity rooted in the resilience of a particular kind of information, which is an objective counterfactual property independent of observers, sentient beings, and the like.\nThe most far-reaching consequence of this shift is that some open problems that have been traditionally labelled as spiritual, mystical, and even religious, such as finding laws and regularities about knowledge and its evolution, can via that shift be posed firmly within the scientific domain, without appeal to dogmas or supernatural ideas.\nThis is the first necessary step in order to solve these problems of our scientific methods, and it relies on counterfactuals in quote.\nYes, so knowledge as useful information, as information that solves problem, is going to tend to get itself replicated in the minds of entities out there, and indeed, well, in the minds of entities, whether those entities count as living or not.\nSo you could have some robotic system which doesn't count as living by some criteria, depending upon how you define things, it may not replicate.\nIt may be incapable or not want to reproduce, but it still counts as a thinking conscious thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2068"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "01b9830f-15a5-49c4-899f-3c6e79a2a467": {"page_content": "I don't know, are all thinking conscious things necessarily alive, but certainly not all alive things are conscious and thinking, like bacteria or trees, but if you're a scientist looking into outer space and you find structures, technologies, industry, buildings out there that have been created by an intelligence, then you've found a kind of knowledge instantiated in those industries, that building, whatever happens to be the diaspora sphere that you find, you've found explanatory knowledge of a kind, and it's not about that knowledge being in the mind of any particular subject, it's not subjective, it's out there having an effect on reality, taking advantage of knowledge of physical laws, knowledge of matter and so on and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2183"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4589477c-fc43-4518-b386-c4b7b789b4b2": {"page_content": "Let's get going.\nOkay, all right, it's quite.\nThis switch removes from the shoulders of scientists and rationalists, a heavy burn that comes with those problems, and apparent dilemma, which goes like this.\nOn the one hand, there are certain phenomena that require explanation.\nPhenomena such as artificial selection, the unfolding of creativity at the level of the individual with new theoretical ideas popping up in various disciplines as a result of individual creativity and of society with the progress of civilization.\nWe are intrigued by these phenomena and compelled to understand them in depth, yet contrary to this intuition, it is often anathema to scientists to talk about the creativity in human brains, knowledge and related phenomena as having any real significance.\nThis is because of a prejudice that affects the scientists in much the same way that prejudices of other kinds affect religious thinking.\nKnowledge is regarded suspiciously as anthropocentric, subjective and related to daykarts, mind, body, dualism, which is the root of all sorts of misconceptions that are also deeply entrenched in religious thinking.\nAs a result, many open problems about the human mind and knowledge creation are sometimes regarded as not interesting by some scientists.\nThe contemplation of the possibility of laws applying to knowledge and the like appears, like literal nonsense to part of the scientific community, some retreat to the domain of reductionism and materialism, denying that knowledge is a phenomenon requiring an explanation.\nOthers simply ignore the question, thinking that it goes several steps too far into stuff that is not proper science, end quote my reflection on that.\nYes, well, some physicists are irrational, some physicists will say, well, we don't have to have experimental testable theories.\nI've talked about that before, some physicists will say, well, all we need is to have an instrumentalist view of quantum theory.\nWell, what scientists, what particular scientists regard as proper science, is of no concern.\nScience can be universal in its approach to looking at problems.\nSome problems will be just by definition outside of its capacity to really make deep inner agendas.\nSo for example, moral questions are what should be the case?.\nBecause science is about, what is the case?.\nWhat is going on right now?.\nHow do we explain this particular phenomenon?.\nNow, if you're trying to consider trying to construct a theory of what should be the case, well, now you've immediately left science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2224"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9d0b49e2-4d8f-4558-96c7-bff3d3d0b2d5": {"page_content": "Some problems will be just by definition outside of its capacity to really make deep inner agendas.\nSo for example, moral questions are what should be the case?.\nBecause science is about, what is the case?.\nWhat is going on right now?.\nHow do we explain this particular phenomenon?.\nNow, if you're trying to consider trying to construct a theory of what should be the case, well, now you've immediately left science.\nSo by definition, if you want to prove a particular theorem, well, you don't need to worry about the experimental testability of that particular thing, it's independent of science.\nBut for anything that exists, name it, you know, name your thing, and even the existence of religion, of this thing called religion, that's a mainable to scientific study in the sense that you can come up with theories and then you can go out and try and refute these theories, you know, look in the world to see if your theory is actually refuted by the existence of any particular religion that's out there right now, or it ever has existed, let's say.\nAnd so to with knowledge, these conceptions of knowledge that talk about knowledge as being just a thing that people think that's just going on inside of human minds.\nWell, it's wrong, and we know it's wrong because, well, a proper explain, knowledge is instantiated in physical objects.\nIt can be written in the books, it can appear in our microscopes and technology.\nThat's knowledge.\nKnowledge has this all objective character, but it doesn't matter what particular scientists or philosophers or anyone thinks, okay?.\nPeople who want to make progress can just largely ignore the game-sayers, you know, you just will, you know, sometimes it's important to just solve your problem, to find the thing that you're interested in and solve it, and whether it's someone wants to call what you're doing science or not should have no bearing on your capacity to make progress.\nWho cares what names they call you, I suppose?.\nYou're not a scientist, okay, fine.\nYou're the only real scientist in it.\nIt doesn't matter.\nKeep on going on this question of whether or not things like knowledge is amenable to a scientific study.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2336"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2242733-465b-4fc7-94f1-8fa4b2df7704": {"page_content": "Who cares what names they call you, I suppose?.\nYou're not a scientist, okay, fine.\nYou're the only real scientist in it.\nIt doesn't matter.\nKeep on going on this question of whether or not things like knowledge is amenable to a scientific study.\nOkay, all right, it's quote, but counterfactuals provide a way out of this trouble if we use counterfactuals to define knowledge as information with the ability to last, such as that in genes that code for useful adaptations and creativity as the ability to create new knowledge, we are able to free them of any subjective tinge making them objective.\nThis is still very far from providing a theory of those phenomena, but it provides a scientific handle on knowledge by grounding it in the laws of physics, posing their own reflection.\nJust to say, wonderful, that's great, isn't it?.\nThat's very, very cool that we have this physical way, this kind of in-road into knowledge creation and epistemology from physics via constructor theory.\nLet's keep on going.\nAll right, it's quote, after taking this step, one can make further useful moves.\nFirst, consider as a problem for physics, the fact that certain systems in the biosphere exhibit a property that neither system in the known universe has, namely creativity, the ability to create new knowledge by thinking human brains have this ability, it may be that other systems say beetroot plants have it too, but it is at best much less manifest than it is for humans.\nPause the game on reflection.\nYou don't know about that.\nThis is one of those areas where we're just saying postulating that, anything like a beetroot plant, having the capacity for creativity of that kind, let's say we should specify the creation of explanatory knowledge, what problem does it solve?.\nWhat do we notice about beetroot plants?.\nPerhaps someone does have the problem, they think that the beetroot plant actually might be maybe there is some observation out there that is crying out for explanation in the form of, well, the only way to understand what's going on there with that beetroot plant is it's explaining the world.\nIt's got a problem and it's trying to create the solution by conjecturing explanations.\nMaybe, maybe we don't know enough but at the moment I don't know that we have such a problem.\nAnyway, let's give it a go.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2448"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28fd1eff-24f9-4f05-8385-fc2cbc1dbc09": {"page_content": "It's got a problem and it's trying to create the solution by conjecturing explanations.\nMaybe, maybe we don't know enough but at the moment I don't know that we have such a problem.\nAnyway, let's give it a go.\nRight, it's quite now thanks to our objective definition of knowledge, stating facts like this that human brains can create knowledge is no longer vulnerable to allegations of anthropocentrism, claiming that it is anthropocentric would be equivalent to considering the statement a dishwasher has special properties among all the known systems in the known universe.\nAs supporting a dishwasher-centric view of the universe, clearly it does not, it is an objective statement about the fact that dishwashers can do certain things such as quickly scrubbing away dirt from cutlery and crockery and being unchanged by the experience to an accuracy that is unparalleled in the known universe.\nLikewise, the statement human brains are capable of constructing new knowledge is not anthropocentric.\nThe relevant difference between the case of human brains and that of dishwashing machines is that the detailed functionality of being knowledge-creating is not as well understood as the functionality of dishwashing machines posing the MRI reflection.\nThat would be to understate things.\nSo, we understand very well to high fidelity to the point where something goes wrong with your dishwashing machine, you can fix it so they continue to dishwash.\nBut on the other hand, knowledge creation, we understand basically next to nothing about how it happens.\nWe know that all people do.\nWe know that it's occurring in the brain in some way manifested in the ideas, which are in the mind and so on and so forth.\nBut we don't understand the genesis of any particular bit of knowledge that we create.\nThe brain is doing something remarkably unusual.\nAnd although we carry around this head with us all the time, it's almost simultaneously the thing most opaque to us.\nWe just don't know where the ideas and conjectures are coming from.\nWe just know that we have them.\nLet's keep going.\nCarrots.\nStill, lie the counterfactual notion of knowledge.\nOne can now refer to knowledge creation in an objective fashion.\nIt is the first essential step in regarding problems about creativity as pertaining to the domain of science, which is in turn step zero to even hoping to address them effectively.\nQuite right.\nAnother consequence of this which is that we can consider a number of other related issues as coming into the domain of science.\nThere are several examples.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2578"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8a381ac5-20d3-4d44-be72-fb4b23d63bb1": {"page_content": "First, there is the issue of whether there are other systems in the universe with the same creative capabilities as the human brain, other species on earth or the forms of life and other planets, or possibly existing and future artificial intelligence, related to this is the problem of understanding how knowledge comes into the world, understanding the thinking process and creativity from the point of view of physics and information theory, starting from our objective definition of knowledge, we can wonder probably within science about such questions as how can one set up that creative ability in a computer?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2713"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6fe278b7-ef81-4a46-8108-82bee310a082": {"page_content": "Is the termination of creativity with death necessary as some would like to argue, or is it actually possible to defer death to later and later in life by means of some sort of error correction?.\nWhat is it exactly that we have to store an error correct?.\nCan a person be copied stored and downloaded into another embodiment when the time of death for the body approaches?.\nEach of these topics requires very careful consideration and it could be the subject of countless research programs.\nHere I just want to point out one fact, whatever your view on these questions, it is far easier to approach them from the point of view of science, free of the prejudice that knowledge related issues are anthropocentric, subjective and non-scientific.\nCounterfactuals allow one to take all these issues seriously and fully within the scientific method.\nEnd quote.\nThat's great, that's great.\nNow, Cara then goes through a couple of stories.\nOne about Alexander the Great that I'm not going to read and basically at the end of his long journeys of conquest, he comes back to his home and basically becomes depressed because he's done it all.\nThere's nothing left for him to do, so he becomes depressed at the fact that he has nothing left to accomplish kind of thing.\nHe's profoundly dissatisfied, but on the other hand, Cara compares this to Odysseus, another figure from Greek mythology, who goes on all of his adventures but comes back excited for having been on the adventures and he's learned so much and he just wants to do so much more.\nIn fact, I'll just read the end of what Cara says, a commentary on comparing that he's two particular tales from antiquity.\nShe writes, quote, unlike Alexander, Odysseus has not lost himself at the end of the story but has acquired more knowledge and has the ability to put it to some future use.\nThe end of the Odyssey has a firm higher point than it starts, which is essential for future improvement.\nIt is richer in possibilities, which are a special case of counterfactuals.\nAlexander, by contrast, has lost his capacity to dream of further deeds, his creativity, and all the knowledge acquired along the way, is therefore useless because it cannot be put to any further use.\nEnd quote.\nSo this is a wonderful comparison of modern intellectuals, two ways of going.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2737"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f807594e-28a7-40a6-932c-43981ff190c9": {"page_content": "The end of the Odyssey has a firm higher point than it starts, which is essential for future improvement.\nIt is richer in possibilities, which are a special case of counterfactuals.\nAlexander, by contrast, has lost his capacity to dream of further deeds, his creativity, and all the knowledge acquired along the way, is therefore useless because it cannot be put to any further use.\nEnd quote.\nSo this is a wonderful comparison of modern intellectuals, two ways of going.\nBe Odysseus, be optimistic, learn as much as you possibly can, and realize in becoming enriched with knowledge that there is always more to learn and problems to solve than this is unending.\nDon't be like Alexander, the pessimist, who, upon gaining all this knowledge, thinks that, well, it's just about all finish.\nWe've just about discovered everything we can, and in fact, I'm so brilliant and I'm so smart that I've already figured out all of these problems that are definitely going to kill if not my present generation, and certainly my children or their children's generation, because it's inevitable that humans are going to be destructive.\nThere's nothing more for us to accomplish, nothing to look forward to.\nEverything is dark and grim that appears to be this comparison between Odysseus and Alexander.\nIt's to visions of reality.\nAnd we here like to be Odysseus, we here like to gain as much explanatory knowledge, but realize we're always at the beginning, scratching the surface, and every problem solved, opens up a new visitor of just more and more problems.\nLet's keep on going, because this is now coming right to the end of the book, and so let's read the last few paragraphs.\nAnd, K.R. Right, quite.\nMore generally, any journey without necessarily being literally an exact circle can still be a successful nostos of sorts, and its end can be a positive uplifting fact.\nWhat matters is, whether along the journey the character has or has not managed to create more knowledge while preserving his or her own individual capacity to create new knowledge.\nSo an ending can be a fertile starting point.\nIt depends on whether the character reaching the end is still capable of being creative.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2857"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d29ac777-720e-4173-95e3-28535ed35735": {"page_content": "More generally, any journey without necessarily being literally an exact circle can still be a successful nostos of sorts, and its end can be a positive uplifting fact.\nWhat matters is, whether along the journey the character has or has not managed to create more knowledge while preserving his or her own individual capacity to create new knowledge.\nSo an ending can be a fertile starting point.\nIt depends on whether the character reaching the end is still capable of being creative.\nIn fact, a successful nostos does not have an ending, its ending is just the starting point of new adventures, and quote, there's not a bit left to read, but I just want to, in fact, isn't that reminiscent, doesn't that echo the beginning or infinity, and certainly the sentiments of the beginning infinity and the David Deutsches worldview.\nGreat to see this influence permeating this book here.\nIt was throughout the book, but here, particularly at the end, let's keep on going.\nBy the way, K.R. is using this word nostos, which is the Greek for a particular kind of story in ancient Greece, which is a kind of a circular kind of a journey, you know, someone beginning in a certain place and coming all the way back to the start, but as she says there, you don't want a perfect circle.\nIt's not approximately a circle, okay?.\nYou solve the problem and in finding the solution, it reveals more problems.\nSo you kind of back to you this start, you know, why?.\nHey, you haven't been relieved of all problems.\nIn fact, you've just got more again, but they're better problems, hopefully, by Popper's lights anyway.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=2950"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "479190e1-deb7-4721-bac8-9eb3cd882729": {"page_content": "And as she writes, quote, just as with a nostos, there may be no actual ending for a book either, provided that something particular occurs while the reader goes through the book when a reader makes his way through a book, a unique relationship is established between the book and the reader, which grows within the space that the writer Philip Pullman has masterfully called the borderland, the relationship is entirely based on counterfactuals, the knowledge that the reader creates in their mind while reading the book, and it is something unique and private to the reader.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=3037"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4500825-f399-409d-8163-69c2ba3f7aed": {"page_content": "Whenever knowledge creation happens while the book is read, the reader undergoes a nostos.\nEven once the book is completed, implications of the knowledge created along the way stay with the reader for as long as the reader's mind survives and can be put to some use in the future.\nIn that case, the book does not really have an end porting there, my reflection on that, and moreover, the knowledge that has been instantiated in the text of a book by the author is not always the knowledge that is gained by the reader.\nThe reader has to go through this process of interpreting what is written there on the page, and they may pick up subtly different lessons, and they may even go on to create an end-of-mind new knowledge which goes beyond what is in the book as well.\nThis is an interesting feature of the transmission of knowledge or memes that happens between people.\nLast paragraph, and this is of course where we're going to end it today.\nAs I am writing these lines, I'm thinking of you, my reader, like a modern Odysseus.\nYou are now emerging from this journey, approaching the end.\nYou can moor the boat at the war, take a world of zurved rest at the hostel that overlooks the harbour, and look back through your memories, considering them carefully, as you are pondering all the ideas encountered in the book, perhaps a smile lights up your face.\nBefore you, there is still vast unexplored waters, waiting for you to take to the sea once more and create further knowledge.\nMay the knowledge you discovered in this book serve you well on the journey.\nThe end, that's the end of the book, and a beautiful way to end them, and hopefully my scenes have captured something of the poetry, especially of this final chapter here today.\nAnd so that's the end of the science of Ken and Ken, and yes, I'm sure people will ask, will I have a discussion with Ken and no doubt I will at some stage, I'm not sure when, but that will be what remains of my discussions of the science of Ken and Ken as to speak with the author herself about what's been done since, perhaps the publication of this book, and what deeper insights we might be able to look forward to when it comes to the application of constructive theory to our deepest moments.\nUntil next time, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFvZGqKWiE&t=3073"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f18cd660-982c-4df4-8a18-673dc61efbbc": {"page_content": "Area correction is the most important method in technology and learning in general.\nIn biological evolution, it appears to be the only means of progress.\nOne rightly speaks of the trial and error method, but this understates the importance of mistakes or errors of the erroneous trial.\nAll life is problem-solving.\nAll organisms are inventors and technicians, good or not so good, successful or not so successful in solving technical problems.\nThis is how it is among animals, spiders, for example.\nHuman technology solves human problems such as sewage dispersal, or the storage and supply of food and water as, for example, bees already have to do.\nHostility to technology, such as we often find among the grains, is therefore a foolish kind of hostility to life itself, which the grains have unfortunately not realised.\nBut the critique of technology is not foolish of course, it is urgently necessary.\nEveryone is capable of it in their different ways, and most welcome to contribute.\nAnd since criticism is an occupational skill of technologists, the critique of technology is a constant preoccupation of theirs.\nWhile Papa, from the essay, all life is problem-solving from the book of the same title or life is problem-solving.\nSo welcome to ToKCast and episode 90, I think, certainly part two of chapters three, problem-solving in the fabric of reality.\nAnd I began there with what Karl Popper had to say about problem-solving, namely, all life is problem-solving.\nAnd what I understand he meant by this is not only that every single thing in a human life is about problem-solving, you are continually trying to solve different problems.\nBut not only a way in which to avoid suffering the bad things in life, but also a way in which to enjoy life.\nIf you had a situation where you had no problems or you weren't trying to solve anything, then as David Deutsch says in the beginning of infinity, the other name for a problem-free state is death.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2bd451f-d2ec-4577-bdea-b3b965c67fc7": {"page_content": "But not only a way in which to avoid suffering the bad things in life, but also a way in which to enjoy life.\nIf you had a situation where you had no problems or you weren't trying to solve anything, then as David Deutsch says in the beginning of infinity, the other name for a problem-free state is death.\nWe are constantly trying to solve the problem of how to be warmer and more comfortable, how to be more interested or interesting, what to do next is often a problem for us, how to solve a particular scientific problem, how to go about our work lives, how to go about our family and social lives, how to get out of pandemics and difficult situations, we find ourselves in, how to find out which of the interesting things and opportunities that we have before us might be best for us to pursue.\nBut of course, it's not only about humans, it's about every single living organism.\nSo we can also take all life is problem-solving to, that's literally what life is trying to do, trying to solve the problem of keeping itself in existence, individual organisms are kind of trying to do that to some extent, really it's the genes, trying to get themselves replicated.\nHowever, life, whether it's our human lives personally or life broadly speaking, as broadly as you can conceive it, it's about problem-solving.\nAnd in part one of my discussion of this chapter, we eventually got to a universal scheme, which I'll put up on the screen now, a universal scheme for the solving of problems.\nAnd this scheme that David is setting out, it's a practical vision for problem-solving.\nIt's a universal program of a kind.\nAs he will say, this applies to every topic, no matter the subject matter.\nAnd of course, it applies importantly to people's personal lives, to business, to something like police detective work, as well as science, history, mathematics, philosophy and so on.\nWhat separates science in this scheme is the existence of crucial experimental testing.\nSo let's pick it up where David writes, quote, what I have described so far applies to all problem-solving, whatever the subject matter or techniques of rational criticism that are involved, scientific problem-solving always includes a particular method of rational criticism, namely experimental testing, where two or more rival theories make conflicting predictions about the outcome of an experiment, the experiment is performed, and the theory of theories that made false predictions are abandoned.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=128"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "52b4cf18-f232-46d1-a865-a4def16a0da1": {"page_content": "So let's pick it up where David writes, quote, what I have described so far applies to all problem-solving, whatever the subject matter or techniques of rational criticism that are involved, scientific problem-solving always includes a particular method of rational criticism, namely experimental testing, where two or more rival theories make conflicting predictions about the outcome of an experiment, the experiment is performed, and the theory of theories that made false predictions are abandoned.\nThe very construction of scientific conjectures is focused on finding explanations that have experimentally testable predictions.\nIdeally, we are always seeking crucial experimental tests.\nExperiments whose outcomes, whatever they are, will falsify one or more of the contending theories.\nNow, to learn more about the idea of falsifying one or more, ideally all the other rivals, leaving only one standing, then consult David's seminal paper, titled, in part at least, the logic of experimental tests, or my own guide to the paper, which is simply called the philosophy of science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=241"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b80d603c-894b-4141-bfea-367d8ccef073": {"page_content": "I call it that because it seemed to me at the time, and it still does, that this was the crown jewel so far as that subject, the philosophy of science, is concerned, it takes Galileo, Galilei, and his writings, his work on cemential trials, up through Francis Bacon, who, along with Locke, pioneered empiricism, through to Popper and his work on demarcation and conjectural knowledge, and finally, all the way up to David Deutsch, and his hard to very good explanations in the nature of what's called a crucial experimental test.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=316"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ca862c4-f3ad-4411-8172-defd2a51650f": {"page_content": "Okay, so let's keep going, David writes.\nThis process is illustrated in figure 3.3, whether or not observations were involved in the instigating problem, stage one, and whether or not in stage two, the contending theories were specifically designed to be tested experimentally.\nIt is in this critical phase of scientific discovery, stage three, that experimental tests play the decisive and characteristic role.\nThat role is to render some of the contending theories unsatisfactory by revealing that their explanations lead to false predictions, that bears repeating, or say it again, that role, the role of experimental tests, is to render some of the contending theories unsatisfactory by revealing that their explanations lead to false predictions.\nHere I must mention an asymmetry, which is important in the philosophy and methodology of science, the asymmetry between experimental refutation and experimental confirmation.\nWhereas an incorrect prediction, automatically renders the underlying explanation unsatisfactory, a correct prediction says nothing at all about the underlying explanation, like I just pausing their my reflection, when you have this disagreement between an experimental result, an incorrect prediction, in other words, and the theory itself, which makes that prediction, so you have this clash between an experimental result and a theory, then the underlying explanation is unsatisfactory.\nNow it doesn't mean that the theory itself is necessarily logically wrong.\nIt means the underlying explanation, which is the explanation of what's going on in the experiment, coupled with what's going on with the theory.\nSo these two things together, there's a conflict there, so the explanation of the whole thing is unsatisfactory.\nNow the standard way of understanding this is to, of course, say, well, the experimental result has falsified the theory.\nAnd that is typically how science works, but it's also an ideal about how science works.\nIt could be the case that the experimenters flawed, but whatever the case, whether it's experiment that's flawed, or whether it's the theory that's flawed, the underlying explanation of the conjunction of those two things is flawed.\nThat's what David is saying here.\nNow this also bears repeating that last thing that I read, a correct prediction says nothing at all about the underlying explanation, such an important point, easily missed by lay people in science, but sometimes scientists themselves.\nThere is this asymmetry, as David has said there, between experimental refutation and experimental confirmation.\nAnd we might, without any loss of meaning, simply add the word apparent there.\nIt is an apparent confirmation whenever you see a confirmation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=345"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5eb36c95-af41-4998-a609-4ab25770c89e": {"page_content": "That's what David is saying here.\nNow this also bears repeating that last thing that I read, a correct prediction says nothing at all about the underlying explanation, such an important point, easily missed by lay people in science, but sometimes scientists themselves.\nThere is this asymmetry, as David has said there, between experimental refutation and experimental confirmation.\nAnd we might, without any loss of meaning, simply add the word apparent there.\nIt is an apparent confirmation whenever you see a confirmation.\nAfter all, what does it mean to confirm something?.\nWell, philosophically, and absolutely worse, putting it in its worst possible light so to speak, confirm or confirmation could mean to show as actually being true something or other, so if you confirm a theory by observation, you have shown that theory to be true, like finally true.\nWhy that people talk, okay, I was listening to, I know he's not a scientist, but somebody who has studied some philosophy.\nand I think represents common understandings on this thing is the comedian Ricky Javez, and he talks in this way.\nHe talks about confirming a theory and confirming a theory as true and knowing that something is true and so on and so forth, and I think that's, I'm just using him because that's a good example of the way I think another one majority of people think on these topics.\nAnd he's someone with actual philosophical training and someone who indeed talks to prominent scientists and others.\nSo it could mean that, it could mean that confirm means to show something as actually true, which any preparing will of course say, well this is impossible, it's an impossible standard so we can throw confirm into the bin, we don't need it.\nBut if I was to try and steal man that position, that confirm doesn't need to mean something like show absolutely and finally true, it could mean something like this observation and conforms to that theory and therefore lends credence to it, which is a fancy way of kind of saying shows it more likely to be true without showing it finally true, which is of course an inductivist mistake of a kind.\nNow Popper himself in various places, logical scientific discovery, objective knowledge, various other things and places that he's written about this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=483"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2277e095-47a4-4757-9399-ffa056fe33fa": {"page_content": "Now Popper himself in various places, logical scientific discovery, objective knowledge, various other things and places that he's written about this.\nHe makes a big deal about this, about the whole idea of rejecting confirmation, of course he's right to do so, but it seems to me that he wants to still have the word, still meet the media's opposition half way and so he comes up with this word corroborate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=614"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "580b7107-3783-427b-a885-cd720b88020a": {"page_content": "and so he uses the word corroborate instead of confirm and says, well we can use the idea of experiments that agree with a particular theory corroborate the theory and of course if you get a dictionary and you look up or corroborate means, it means something like confirm, so I think it gets him very far, because whether it's confirm or corroborate, it seems to imply some kind of possibility of support for a theory and you can't support a theory by which we mean the theory isn't justified, the theory isn't absolutely true in any way, shape or form, the best that I can say for what Popper is saying about corroboration in this case is that he's kind of talking about how some theories really do stick their neck out in a way and then don't get falsified by experiment which can be telling, you know it says something, it's not completely contentless that information when a particular theory makes a risky prediction and gets the prediction right or rather doesn't get falsified by the experiment as the way I would better say it, so for example the classic case of testing how much light bends during a solar eclipse you know this Eddington's experiment to distinguish between whether general relativity is the best theory or Newtonian gravity, on this view about corroboration you would say well general relativity is corroborated by the correct prediction about how much the light bends, I don't know that it adds that much given what Popper says elsewhere about how well the best explanation is of course general relativity and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=636"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e9eb55ac-d698-4d75-936e-a2e99823eb40": {"page_content": "once that experiment that crucial test Eddington's experiment refutes shows as inadequate Newton's theory of gravity therefore we say it falsifies Newton's theory of gravity, you don't need to use this word confirm corroborate support anything like that because the only theory you have left standing is general relativity there are no rivals it doesn't need support because heck it's the only one we've got what more do you want then the best theory the only theory that is there before you with regards to what the nature of gravity is it can do all the explanatory work that you need and it can do all the predictive work that you need until such time as you find a problem with it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=731"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0fcb8ab-af50-4cbb-97bc-347e0d7b459d": {"page_content": "so I don't think any of this is needed again I think that Popper's just conceding a certain amount of ground to his opponents politely so that the conversation can keep on going because they of course are absolutely enamored by this idea of justification and support and confirmation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=771"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29fc7bf7-a5bd-4cc1-9bc5-06ed7935fc16": {"page_content": "and so he's throwing them a bone I suppose perhaps it'll be good to be able to ask him the fact is that in many of these cases we have in case of gravity we have an explanation of gravity an existing best explanation of gravity emphasis on the an okay there's not multiple excellent explanations of gravity there's one so it doesn't matter how often it gets corroborated you know it makes these risky predictions because it's already the only existing theory so it doesn't need more support it just is the theory now is it true is it finally true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=789"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e4d92856-0715-4a70-9bb3-fa5412b8fd90": {"page_content": "no we've been through that of course it's not finally true.\nit's just the best it contains some truth about reality.\nbut you know how does being consistent with predictions help well let's go back to the book David writes quote shorty explanations that yield correct predictions are too a penny as UFO enthusiasts conspiracy theorists and pseudo scientists of every variety should but never do bear in mind.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=825"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f55df3f2-9bfe-4e2c-a0c3-3649892ba633": {"page_content": "pausing they're just a little comment on that bit so for example a person who believes aliens are visiting us will be able to confirm or corroborate if you like their belief that namely the pictures of UFOs that are sometimes published are consistent with the existence of aliens visiting earth from another galaxy via spacecraft that travel beyond the speed of light or something like that they don't look for refutations they look for consistency with their already existing theory they look for confirmation now some scientists and some people who regard themselves critical thinkers call this an example of confirmation bias.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=846"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "45956d9c-c82f-4343-960e-d30eae593bb0": {"page_content": "but of course I would say it's just the error of thinking that confirmation is even a thing at all many many scientists do indeed think that it is a thing.\nand I think that's a kind of bias of a kind they think that too much confirmation is a bad thing but just the right amount of confirmation is a good thing that's possible it's possible to have a little bit of confirmation but not too much confirmation.\nthen you have confirmation bias so there's there's almost like there's an ideal amount of confirmation on this view basing epistemology is kind of like this.\nyou know it says that some stuff is a confirmation of the theory not a finally true confirmation of a theory just a probabilistic confirmation of the theory and the more you have confirmation the more confident you become that this particular theory is the correct theory we don't usually need that because again we only ever have one good explanation at any given time and in the rare cases where we have two then we do a crucial test ruling out one of them and holding up the one as the explanation.\nnot the finally true explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=886"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f9898743-4168-4e5d-b404-6410c22628fd": {"page_content": "I'm repeating myself so whatever the case what we're after are refutations where we can get them not confirmations because confirmation is impossible back to the book David writes quote if a theory about observable events is untestable that is if no possible observation would rule it out then it cannot by itself explain why those events happen in the way they are observed to and not in some other way for example the angel theory of planetary motion is untestable because no matter how planets moved that motion could be attributed to angels therefore the angel theory cannot explain the particular motions we see unless it is supplemented by an independent theory of how angels move that is why there is a methodological rule in science which says that once an experimentally testable theory has passed the appropriate tests any less testable rival theories about the same phenomena are summarily rejected for their explanations are bound to be inferior this rule is often cited as distinguishing science from other types of knowledge creation but if we take the view that science is about explanations we see that this rule really is a special case of something that applies naturally to all problem solving theories that are capable of giving more detailed explanations are automatically preferred that bears repeating again theories that are capable of giving more detailed explanations are automatically preferred they are preferred for two reasons one is that a theory that sticks its neck out by being more specific about more phenomena opens up itself and its rivals to more forms of criticism and therefore has more chance of taking the problem solving process forward the second is simply that if such a theory survives the criticism it leaves less unexplained which is the object of the exercise okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=948"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ce044fe-b9d4-4bbe-95d8-c98091de9207": {"page_content": "pausing there and an example I did a much rope example Newtonian gravity said that gravity is this force that varies as the product of the masses involved divided by the square of the distance between the masses and in stating something true about gravity something approximately true about gravity it reached beyond whatever Newton was specifically interested in the particular problem he was interested in across the whole solar system across the galaxy to every single where in the universe and every single when in the universe it reached into how the tides work and how planets moved and how rocks fell to the ground when they were dropped and so on and so forth however it could not explain certainly not adequately things like modern day examples of gravitational lensing or the existence of neutron stars or black holes or the procession of orbits or gravitational waves or if you want to get really fancy lens throwing frame dragging which is where space time itself is literally dragged by a massive body when it's rotating much less all the stuff that couldn't even be imagined in the previous paradigm you know the previous idea of how physics worked gravity as well as space and time you couldn't even imagine things like the relativity of simultaneity length contraction and time dilation so all those phenomena amount to predictions of a kind given general relativity arising out of a far more detailed explanation of the nature of gravity in general relativity over Newtonian gravity which was less detailed it general relativity sticks its neck out in many directions or you can think modern medicine compared to focal ancient or pseudoscientific nostrums drink this herbal tea or wear this magic pendant to ward off your illness is one thing one level of non explanation so to speak but take this paracetamol because it inhibits prostagland and synthesis preventing the creation of enzymes that cause pain receptors to be activated is something else entirely especially when it works more often than not over those nostrums okay back to the book in David writes I have already remarked that even in science most criticism does not consist of experimental testing that is because most scientific criticism is directed not other theories predictions but directly at the", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1071"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f420964c-ed85-4e77-99ed-ab6ab1b1ee2d": {"page_content": "it inhibits prostagland and synthesis preventing the creation of enzymes that cause pain receptors to be activated is something else entirely especially when it works more often than not over those nostrums okay back to the book in David writes I have already remarked that even in science most criticism does not consist of experimental testing that is because most scientific criticism is directed not other theories predictions but directly at the underlying explanations testing the predictions is just an indirect way albeit an exceptionally powerful one when available of testing the explanations in chapter one I gave the example of the grass cure the theory that eating a kilogram of grass is a cure for the common cold that theory and an infinity of others of the same ilk are readily testable but we can criticize and reject them without bothering to do any experiments purely on the grounds that they explain no more than the prevailing theories which they contradict yet make new unexplained assertions the stages of a scientific discovery shown in figure 3.3 a seldom completed in sequence at the first attempt there is usually repeated backtracking before it stages completed or rather solved for each stage may present a problem whose solution itself requires all five stages of a subsidiary problem solving process just pausing that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1189"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a8dfe80-c8e2-4f5a-8201-47df0ce377a8": {"page_content": "yes my reflection on this is that that scheme or any scheme that you want to write out is subject to revision and modification within actual science as it's practiced.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1268"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a06700d8-4c17-45e3-8eb8-9d2941866e3a": {"page_content": "and so there's no real method of science you're taught this in school follow the scientific method people talk about the scientific method the method is if there is one way of doing things one way of reaching discovery we know this isn't true because we know all no stories of so-called serendipity in science I think too much is often made of serendipity the people that make the biological breakthroughs are often biologists and that's not me luck that their biologist they've made the conscious choice to go into that area.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1283"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9398347e-84fa-41ee-a4de-f1e9a8155737": {"page_content": "but you speak to biologists about famous cases for example the discovery of penicillin let's say it's the trope example where luck was apparently involved and how does luck feature into this scientific method well the scientific method really is about the methods of criticism putting all that aside I remember one of the first essays I ever wrote on the philosophy of science was in response to a question which I cannot remember what the question was about the logic of scientific discovery pop is first book and it's not a great in road to pop is work as I think I might have commented on here before it's very technical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1313"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28e915b1-ec57-498d-b649-375a57bef694": {"page_content": "it's dense it's not particularly an enjoyable read like so many of his other ones are there so much more clear and especially as a person who was very beautiful philosophy reading any kind of philosophy was a bit of a struggle but in my essay I did manage to conclude that in a sense pop is own title of his work was in a sense misleading because there was no logic to scientific discovery if you buy what you mean by logic is something more like a deductive process of course he calls it a hyperthetico deductive process because it's it's kind of the use of what's called modus tolens which is where you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1348"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cc925331-993e-4aff-932f-4a84748e3ca3": {"page_content": "well it's refutation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f24e1c99-eb50-420c-a38b-20fb36974fb2": {"page_content": "okay if the theory leads to particular prediction and the prediction turns out to be false then the theory can show itself to be false but whatever the case it's not like you're putting observations in at the front of this scientific method and getting out the end scientific theories that kind of program just doesn't work so what you're taught in school about write down your observations and at the end of it reach a conclusion no that you have to start with a guess of some sort and the guess should be an explanation of some kind.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1385"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7b2d5c95-3476-42a6-9d48-0039681d4ecb": {"page_content": "but when I wrote this essay happily for me the professor seems to agree the point here is that David is pointing out what popper does that creativity in science is messy and not formulaic there are heuristics that one might apply of course experimental testing is essential to the whole project of remarketing science from everything else.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1420"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dce00e82-95a4-4f47-bbec-2702173d7c41": {"page_content": "but you're going to go back and forth between these stages of what might be referred to as cycles of creativity and criticism and only at the end of all these cycles might you get something called scientific knowledge at the end of it like looking at the scheme here we've got the five stages problem well number one how do we know that we've got a problem in the first place that takes a certain amount of creativity of recognizing of seeing before you you have a theory and you have an observation and these things don't seem to agree with each other but you have to creatively conjecture what's going on before you as to whether or not that really is a problem or whether or not you've simply made a mistake we're just still a problem two step two is more creativity conjecturing a solution this can be the hardest part of all the entire scientific exercise that even if you do find this problem then being able to solve the problem well that's a whole other step that's a whole other level many many physicists might have observed that mercury is all but wasn't being correctly predicted by Newtonian gravity they could all agree and check for themselves that this prediction seemed to be inaccurate and they were coming out with conjectured solutions some of which included other planets that were yet to be observed perturbing the orbit of mercury but it took the genius of Einstein to solve it lots of scientists might have thought how do we have this diversity of species on the planet is there this thing called evolution but it could took the genius of down to figure out this is thing called natural selection evolution by natural selection so on and so forth when we get to parts.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1444"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d594c865-5558-49b5-882d-515e82040155": {"page_content": "three.\nand I'm going to mention more on this later we've got criticism including experiments test that can require an equal amount of creativity simply devising the experiment can be one of the hardest parts of this entire enterprise I asked David a question about this.\nactually one of my questions for David and he talked about how yes you know you people underestimate just how difficult some experiments can be to do so anyway all this entire scheme this one through five scheme all of it requires a significant amount of creativity there's no formula to it.\nand you're going to go backwards and forwards between thinking there's a problem recognizing perhaps there's not a problem thinking there's a problem again coming up with a solution realizing the solution doesn't seem to work because you've conjectured a particular kind of criticism and the criticism has been valid or invalid.\nand so it goes I mean it can be a very messy process which of course or brings us to the idea that scientists and scientific progress needs time it can't be this standard kind of a job with other people might be in where you're working in a factory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1540"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce8fe927-8cc5-4c03-a73d-65f76f70eb48": {"page_content": "and you're doing a similar thing over and over again day after day or even in the media where you're just reporting on things that you see in front of you and coming up with a story and the stories are going to move on tomorrow so it doesn't matter if you made a mistake yesterday you just keep moving forward moving forward but science can't be quite like that you know it's very difficult to try and e-count a little bit of truth in the mess of falsehoods and errors that you're surrounded with that can be hard and so David talks a little about this this going backwards and forwards.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1609"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7914d2b9-4dfe-4763-a0a5-d6feb62b6c6e": {"page_content": "but I'm going to skip most of that part where he discusses this moving between the stages that he has here except to mention that also he talks about stage three there which is so important with the the idea of criticism here in science you might need to invent new modes of criticism they might have to be a new way of coming up with a scientific theory as I flagged earlier and so that can just be extremely difficult to do and that can lead to sub-problems the sub-problem of how to come up with the new experiment how to figure out how to solve the problems in the experiment so often in physics at least it's very difficult to see the effect that you want to see there's the famous Mickelson Morley experiment to try and detect the so-called ether this material through which light waves would propagate it used among other things in interferometer now forgetting putting aside exactly what the experiment sought to establish and failed to establish the existence of the ether this thing we either wind rather just trying to set the whole thing up to get it to work in the first place the engineering problems were so difficult I think the entire experiment had to sit in a bath of mercury liquid mercury and because it's an interferometer it's looking at interference effects with light that's extremely difficult I trust me from experience that you try and do experiments on the interference of light and it's very difficult to see little own measure what's going on it's a very subtle effect so much in physics about subtle effects difficult to observe effects and to pick them up you often need to invent new instrumentation or faster computers you know my own very very modest inroads into doing kind of experiments required me to figure out whether or not these two particular galaxies were going to merge or pass through one another and the number of parameters that you needed to change for each galaxy kind of ballooned exponentially the more accurate you wanted your prediction today and in particular the more stars you had in your simulated galaxies the higher the computing power that you needed which again is more ways of changing the experiment and so more creativity is required in order to try and use a slower computer in order to figure out what and otherwise", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1640"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3496c6e4-b6b8-45e2-9603-c654d0cd5a4c": {"page_content": "or pass through one another and the number of parameters that you needed to change for each galaxy kind of ballooned exponentially the more accurate you wanted your prediction today and in particular the more stars you had in your simulated galaxies the higher the computing power that you needed which again is more ways of changing the experiment and so more creativity is required in order to try and use a slower computer in order to figure out what and otherwise faster computer might have been able to tell you and so this is kind of a sub-problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1757"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f0aa820d-294f-4333-a275-9f7f0e30d1b8": {"page_content": "so I'll pick it up where David says quote not only is there constant backtracking but the many sub-problems all remain simultaneously active and are addressed opportunistically it is only when the discovery is complete that a fairly sequential argument in a pattern something like figure 3.3 can be presented it can begin with the latest and best version the problem then it can show how some of the rejected theories fail criticism then it can set out the winning theory and say why it survives criticism then it can explain how one copes without the superseded theory and finally it can point out some of the new problems that this discovery creates or allows for while a problem is still in the process of being solved we are dealing with a large heterogeneous set of ideas theories and criteria with many variants of each all competing for survival there is a continual turnover of theories as they are altered or replaced by new ones so all the theories are being subjected to variation and selection according to criteria which are themselves subject to variation and selection the whole process resembles biological evolution a problem is like an ecological niche and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche or niche variance of theories like genetic mutations are continually being created and less successful variants become extinct when more successful variants take over success is the ability to survive repeatedly under the selective pressures criticisms brought to bear in that niche and the criteria for that criticism depends partly on the physical characteristics of the niche and partly on the attributes of other genes and species i.e. other ideas that are already present there the new worldview may be implicit in a theory that solves a problem and the distinctive feature of a new species that it takes over a niche are emergent properties of the problem on niche in other words obtaining solutions is inherently complex there is no simple way of discovering the true nature of planets given say i critique the celestial sphere theory and some additional observations just as there is no single way of designing the DNA of a koala bear given the properties of eucalyptus", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1786"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "850284d3-1326-418f-805d-c5ec0afe79a4": {"page_content": "the distinctive feature of a new species that it takes over a niche are emergent properties of the problem on niche in other words obtaining solutions is inherently complex there is no simple way of discovering the true nature of planets given say i critique the celestial sphere theory and some additional observations just as there is no single way of designing the DNA of a koala bear given the properties of eucalyptus trees just pausing there i know in the Australians listening to this will book the idea of a koala bear we are metaphorically bashed over the head as children that koala is not bears but we can forgive this the use is kind of like teddy bear.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1901"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "06fbc1d5-56bf-48bb-91f1-9f412a34295e": {"page_content": "i mean a teddy is not a bear.\neither so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3f3d3f47-b95a-48ba-b67d-9b5d8f4d254d": {"page_content": "but nonetheless i think it's so quite fine to use that terminology going on david rats quote evolution or trial and error especially the focused purposeful form of trial and error called scientific discovery are the only ways for this reason proper called his theory that knowledge can grow only by conjecture and refutation in the manner of figure 3.3 an evolutionary epistemology this is an important unifying insight and we shall see that there are other connections between these two strands what are the strands just to me here the strands are epistemology and biological evolution or evolution by natural selection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1948"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15bbc3bf-1b1d-4208-a4bb-3cc3b8d5c70c": {"page_content": "okay.\nbut david goes on to say.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47339e5b-69d9-44c8-8b74-6e48b7626597": {"page_content": "quote but i did not want to overstate the similarities between scientific discovery and biological evolution for their important differences too one difference is that in biology variations or mutations a random blind purposeless while in human problem solving the creation of new conjectures is itself a complex knowledge laden process driven by the intentions of the people concerned perhaps an even more important difference is that there is no biological equivalent of argument all conjectures have to be tested experimentally which is one reason why biological evolution is slower and less efficient by an astronomically large factor pausing there i'm just my reflection on that we're just rather my emphasis here because conjectures which in biology amount to gene mutations must themselves be tested individually so each time an organism the variation between organisms within a species amount to a kind of gene mutation from one species to another each of them gets tested in the environment and because each of them are getting tested tested by the measure that the organism itself does not survive so it goes through its natural life or whatever okay which usually some years that's a very slow process but as David has been pains to say here we criticize explanations without ever needing to actually test them necessarily in the real world so often whereas biological evolution only ever does that testing in the real world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=1983"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1dc38e82-13ba-4c59-b1c8-d2bb56ce262e": {"page_content": "okay we can we can cut through and just look at the quality of the explanation rather than constructing the experiment which as i've just said and explained itself is a creative process which requires quite a lot of effort to do it's not trivial to do especially these days scientific experiments back to the book nevertheless the link between these two sorts of process is far more than mere analogy they are two of my four intimately related main strands of explanation of the fabric of reality both in science and in biological evolution evolutionary success depends on the creation and survival of objective knowledge which in biology is called adaptation that is the ability of a theory or a gene to survive in a niche is not a haphazard function of its structure but depends on whether enough true and useful information about the niche is implicitly or explicitly encoded there i shall say more about this in chapter eight.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=2087"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e3da6fb5-b67a-4964-b9c1-ca832c1bfdd1": {"page_content": "okay now i'm skipping a small amount and i'm going to where David says quote take a moment to compare figures 3.1 and 3.3 look how different these two conceptions of the scientific process are inductivism is observation and prediction based whereas in reality science is problem and explanation based inductivism supposes that theories are somehow extracted or distilled from observations or justified by them whereas in fact theories begin as unjustified conjectures in someone's mind which typically precede the observations that rule out rival theories inductivism seeks to justify predictions as likely to hold in the future problem solving justifies an explanation as being better than other explanations available in the present inductivism is a dangerous and recurring source of many sorts of error because it is superficially so plausible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=2147"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e85368b4-06cc-4187-acb2-2f3533375e8c": {"page_content": "but it is not true i'll say that again inductivism is a dangerous and recurring source of many sorts of errors because it is superficially so plausible.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "930499bc-a45a-48fe-bc78-973f8aa67f0f": {"page_content": "and then David goes on to say quote when we succeed in solving a problem scientific or otherwise we end up with a set of theories which though they are not problem-free we find preferable to the theories we started with what new attributes the new theories will have therefore depends on what we saw as the deficiencies in our in our original theories that is on what the problem was science has characterized by its problems as well as by its method astrologists has solved the problem of how to cast more intriguing horoscopes without risking being proved wrong are unlikely to have created much that deserves to be called scientific knowledge even if they have used genuine scientific methods such as market research and are themselves quite satisfied with the solution the problem in genuine science is always to understand that some aspect of the fabric of reality by finding explanations that are as broad and deep and as true and specific as possible when we think that we have solved a problem we naturally adopt our new set of theories and preference to the old set that is why science regarded as explanation seeking and problem solving raises no problem of induction there is no mystery about why we should feel compelled tentatively to accept an explanation when it is the best explanation we can think of end quote end of the chapter there isn't that brilliant there in that last paragraph we have encapsulated so much which is in the beginning infinity so much that is in poppers work so much that today motivates people who follow in this particular mold of the way in which we understand how knowledge is created science is the process the methodology of science science it's very self seems to be debased denuded of its character by people who see it as a purely predictive exercise and again as i've said before this seems to happen only in physics i mean it's not like the geologists are out there only concerned about predicting what minerals are where what rocks are where they want to understand why they're there in the first place astrophysicists want to understand why it is that galaxies have the shapes that they do why it is in cosmology the universe is behaving the way that it is whether it's going to expand forever", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=2219"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "629cd8ed-06b2-4b32-a560-feb72040ea5f": {"page_content": "to happen only in physics i mean it's not like the geologists are out there only concerned about predicting what minerals are where what rocks are where they want to understand why they're there in the first place astrophysicists want to understand why it is that galaxies have the shapes that they do why it is in cosmology the universe is behaving the way that it is whether it's going to expand forever and be accelerating right.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=2347"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d442490c-3ad3-4555-a8e3-cea3beb2a5b6": {"page_content": "or what's going to happen in the future and why what is the nature of this dark energy not that it's just there.\nand it's causing this particular phenomena and that particular phenomena allows us to make a prediction the prediction is only a small part of what we're really interested in science we're interested in in understanding reality which requires good hard to vary explanations and that's all here another way of putting that is of course it's about problem solving.\nokay.\nso that's where i'll end it today thank you so all of my supporters if you'd like to join them in supporting the podcast then look up patreon talkcast we'll go to breadhall.org where there is a donate button.\nnow i'll just leave you before i say goodbye with a final quote from David Deutsch about the centrality of problems not merely to science but to the entire project of knowledge creation and the search for good explanations until next time.\nbye bye and with problems that we are not aware of yet the ability to put right not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely is our only hope not just of solving problems but of survival so take two stone tablets and carve on them on one of them carve problems are soluble and on the other one carve problems are inevitable.\nthank you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRsa8voI-bc&t=2373"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7743697f-97c3-4a6f-85e9-6608833c2058": {"page_content": "Hello, so I'm home again now and in the comfort of home outside of the wind and so I can continue and hopefully complete chapter 3.\nSo the last thing I talked about was the definition or as I say the explanation of what is a person is according to David Deutsch.\nThose entities that can create explanatory knowledge and I spent a vast amount of time on this but and I probably waxed it lyrical a little too much.\nSo I'm going to skip forward a number of pages and move towards the second half really of the chapter.\nIt's a very long chapter.\nand I'm going to just jump over sections such as for example where David distinguishes between explanatory knowledge genetic knowledge and there's a third type which he calls cultural knowledge and cultural knowledge is of course the way it sounds.\nIt is the knowledge that is embedded within a culture in some way.\nIt's this in explicit type knowledge.\nThere's also a sense in which other animals have cultural knowledge as well and so we're going to come to see and this is the reason I'm passing over it.\nIn chapter 16 a cultural knowledge of a sort that for example great apes have where they're able to behave your paths and behave your passing is where knowledge can be passed on from one generation to the next via a culture.\nSo there are memes there that are being transmitted from one place to the next.\nbut it's not explanatory.\nNow it's very interesting it's a nuanced argument.\nbut it says that there are certain kinds of knowledge that can be passed from one generation to another in great ape species that isn't encoded entirely in their genes but can't be divorced from their genes either.\nKind of like us.\nbut it's not explanatory and it's not universal.\nWe'll get there in chapter 16 so for now I'm going to skip over the part of chapter three where it's mentioned.\nSo now let's get to a new part of chapter three and David writes.\nOne might wonder whether the reach of people in general might be greater than the reach of humans.\nWhat if for instance the reach of technology is indeed limited but only to creatures with two opposable thumbs on each hand or if the reach of scientific knowledge is unlimited but only to being whose brains are twice the size of ours but our faculty of being universal constructors makes these issues as irrelevant as that of access to vitamins.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "97ade6af-b243-4f6e-8823-aaa8a9611648": {"page_content": "So now let's get to a new part of chapter three and David writes.\nOne might wonder whether the reach of people in general might be greater than the reach of humans.\nWhat if for instance the reach of technology is indeed limited but only to creatures with two opposable thumbs on each hand or if the reach of scientific knowledge is unlimited but only to being whose brains are twice the size of ours but our faculty of being universal constructors makes these issues as irrelevant as that of access to vitamins.\nIf progress at some point would it depend on having two thumbs per hand then the outcome would depend not on the knowledge we inherit in our genes but on whether we could discover how to build robots or gloves with two thumbs per hand or alter ourselves to have a second thumb.\nIf it depends on having more memory capacity or speed than a human brain then the outcome would depend on whether we could build computers to do the job.\nAgain such things are already commonplace in technology.\nSo this is the argument I hear frequently from popularizers of science physicists especially who are interested in questions of astrobiology and whether there are aliens out there or not.\nAnd the argument is about the extent to which the laws of physics as I mentioned in my last video the extent to which the laws of physics might be incomprehensible to us but comprehensible nonetheless to some other kind of intelligent life format there.\nSo there might be these super intelligent aliens or indeed the super intelligence of the form that the AI catastrophes are concerned about.\nSo this is the Nick Bostrom flavor of pessimist, technological pessimist who argues that the AGI could turn up or it's not an AGI really I've written a blog about this.\nIt's sort of a super AI, a conniving sort of AI that might decide to take over humanity either because of benevolence or because it's simply uncaring and wants to convert everything into paperclips and having been told to convert everything into paperclips you know refuses to stop.\nWhatever the case there might be these kind of super intelligences that are able to comprehend things in the universe, physical laws, that our brains don't allow us to and they have a logistics plane there and that can't be possible because the only things that can be augmented could be the speed and memory capacity and those things we already routinely do.\nI'll continue David Speaks along similar lines now.\nHe says, the astrophysicist Martin Reese has speculated that somewhere in the universe there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=127"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "453f0ad2-621b-4df2-ade2-15ce7ffe9f35": {"page_content": "I'll continue David Speaks along similar lines now.\nHe says, the astrophysicist Martin Reese has speculated that somewhere in the universe there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive.\nJust as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory it could be there are aspects of reality that are far beyond the capacity of our brains.\nI'll just pause there and add a little personal anecdote.\nMy father says exactly the same thing.\nHe says that attempting to understand God is like a chicken trying to understand a human and I've always found this objectionable because of this idea of being able to comprehend stuff if it can be put into words and so it can be put into words for a God or for a super alien intelligence in their language then it can be translated into our language and we can understand it.\nAnyway we'll continue with what David has to say here.\nDavid writes, but that cannot be so.\nFor if the capacity and question is mere computational speed and amount of memory then we can understand the aspects in question with the help of computers just as we have understood the world for centuries with the help of pencil and paper.\nAs Einstein remarked, my pencil and eye are more clever than I. In terms of computational repertoire our computers and brains are already universal but if the claim is that we may be qualitatively unable to understand what some other forms of intelligence can if our disability cannot be remedied by mere automation then this is just another claim that the world is not explicable.\nIndeed it is tantamount to an appeal to the supernatural with all the arbitrariness that is inherent in such appeals.\nFor if we wanted to incorporate into our worldview an imaginary realm explicable only to superhumans we need never have bothered to abandon the myths of Persephone and her fellow deities.\nOf course there this is me speaking again.\nThis is wonderful so when in a discussion about these issues among scientifically minded people you encounter this objection that a person is thinking trying to think hard and rationally about these issues and whether or not aliens are out there and whether or not the world is comprehensible and whether or not there's superintelligence out there.\nOne thing to keep in mind is if someone argues that there could be realms out there that are inexplicable to us but explicable either to super intelligent aliens or to super intelligent artificial intelligence then what they're saying is that there are realms regions of the universe laws of physics that essentially are as inexplicable to us as a supernatural being would be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=283"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6e80c4bf-8e4d-45d8-9a69-7d8c32134dc2": {"page_content": "and so the argument is precisely the same instead of having God being the thing that cannot be explained by the human mind you're just replacing your supernatural God with a supernatural alien or a supernatural technology they're serving exactly the same function they're arguing that certain things can't be understood by human beings so let's continue David writes so human reaches essentially the same as the reach of explanatory knowledge itself an environment is within human reach if it is possible to create an open-ended stream of explanatory knowledge there that means that if knowledge of a suitable kind were instantiated in such an environment in suitable physical objects it would cause itself to survive and would then continue to increase indefinitely can there really be such an environment this is essentially the question that I asked at the end of the last chapter can this creativity continue indefinitely and it is the question to which the spaceship earth metaphor assumes a negative answer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=443"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8d842e3-36d3-4fd7-abf6-45a36c8804a9": {"page_content": "okay.\nso now David moves into explicitly writing about the content of one of his TED talks this amazing insight he gives that anywhere in the universe could be a potential hub of knowledge creation of open-ended knowledge creation he says there's only three things that you need so I won't read the entire chapter here I'll just pick out a few key points so he says what's needed for this open-ended creation of knowledge is firstly matter we need to get matter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=502"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3bd14dc4-597f-4a4c-8dbd-15b48582d051": {"page_content": "and he also argues the reason why we need matter is so that we can power everything so if we want to power our knowledge creation we're going to need some form of energy and that requires matter and we're going to need somewhere to store the knowledge that we create and that's going to require matter we're also going to need evidence we're going to need to be able to find out about the world so the evidence comes flooding in and so when we start to create our knowledge we need to test our theories and the way to test our theories is by recourse to comparing our theories against the evidence or we have competing theories to see which one is ruled out by the evidence that's the purpose of evidence so these are the things that we need we need matter and evidence so he says matter energy and evidence are just matteries energy right according to our science theory of general relativity we can convert one into the other so that's no problem and he writes matter energy and evidence are the only requirements that an environment needs to have in order to be a venue for open-ended knowledge creation it's not amazing in other words just about anywhere in the universe even intergalactic space where all of those things are at their lowest possible values it's the least amount of matter of energy and evidence is out there in intergalactic space but there is matter and energy out there and there is evidence coming in all you need is a moderate size telescope as he points out so if we want to transform any part of the universe into a hub of knowledge creation we can do so if we know how if we can figure out how I'm skipping a bit so now he's speaking about once you have this matter energy and evidence what can you do with it you can have an open-ended stream of knowledge creation what does that mean well it could mean converting things into space colonies where people can be in order to create the knowledge we might start at the moon so he writes setting up self-sufficient colonies on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system and eventually in other solar systems we'll be a good hedge against the extinction of our species or the destruction of civilization and is a highly desirable goal for that reason among others as Stephen Hawking has said I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space there are too many", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=536"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3f4f7503-4cae-4805-83e7-c5b15cbe9e41": {"page_content": "might start at the moon so he writes setting up self-sufficient colonies on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system and eventually in other solar systems we'll be a good hedge against the extinction of our species or the destruction of civilization and is a highly desirable goal for that reason among others as Stephen Hawking has said I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space there are too many accidents that can be fall-life in a single planet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=661"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "26d70c0c-139f-4af2-be05-af00cecb1dba": {"page_content": "but I'm an optimist we will reach out to the stars end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f38a127d-eeb8-427b-b6a7-63ad5c4f34ec": {"page_content": "quote David writes but even that will be far from an unproblematic state and most people are not satisfied merely to be confident in the survival of the species they want to survive personally also like our earliest human ancestors they want to be free from physical dangerous suffering skipping a little in fact people will always want still more than that they will want to make progress for in addition to threats there will always be problems in the benign sense of the word errors gaps inconsistencies and inadequacies in our knowledge that we wish to solve including not least moral knowledge knowledge about what to want what to strive for just going to pause there this is another place that David Deutsch provides a parsimonious true and refined way of getting at the heart of what morality is about so many people now are concerned about what are the moral foundations of civilization they are concerned that if we or in many cases they're concerned about giving up religion because if we give up religion then we have that we're fruitfully free of a moral foundation others say well now that we've had religion we've tried that now let us look for a new moral foundation once more David provides this third way we don't have to be concerned about moral foundations in religious moral foundations and we don't need to be concerned about secular moral foundations we don't have to be concerned about moral foundations you'll get to a part about what morality essentially consists of and how to ensure that we can continue to improve our morality and make progress in morality just as anywhere else.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=687"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d11e383e-9bf0-42ea-bc96-e7d1c28b3975": {"page_content": "but here he's hinting about how morality is different to other areas now other areas are relevant to making moral decisions but what morality is about so repeat what David has said there is that morality or moral knowledge is knowledge about what to want what to strive for so it's about the should it's about the future it's about what we are trying to achieve what we should want we always have a very large possibly infinite repertoire of things before us that we could choose to do morality is about which one should we choose do we need foundations for this we don't what we need is a stance of error correction but i'm getting ahead of myself we'll leave that for future chapters so let's continue David writes here is another misconception in the Garden of Eden myth that the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in some theologians have denied this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=784"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d1d73aef-c98b-4216-b7cd-22c53e58c8ed": {"page_content": "and i agree with them and unproblematic state has a state without creative thought its other name is death this is fantastic this is the idea of utopias whether they're religious utopias.\nso i think people like Christopher Hitchens have complained that heaven as it is normally spoken about in monotheism sounds like a terribly boring place.\nand i would agree um not only terribly boring it sounds awful.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=855"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f51f9695-0dc1-4983-aa87-348023779672": {"page_content": "you're under perpetual surveillance apparently by this all-seeing god but nothing ever changes because everything's perfect so to in political utopias this idea that we can finally once and for all grock the alternate political system such that everything is working in its best possible way it's most perfect way instead if we simply have an understanding that people are fallible so the institutions are fallible and what we should be striving for is incremental improvement things tend to go a lot better we don't tend to have bloody revolutions we improve things where we can and we improve things slowly such that we can correct the errors when we make missteps but striving for utopias is a bad idea striving for unproblematic states is striving for somewhere where we do not have to correct errors anymore because all the errors have been corrected and that sounds like hell rather than heaven or any kind of utopia let's continue with chapter three david writes nor we ever run out of problems the deeper an explanation is the more new problems it creates that must be so if only because there could be no such thing as an ultimate explanation just as the gods did it is always a bad explanation so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too it must be easily variable because it cannot answer the question why that foundation and not some other nothing can be explained only in terms of itself that holds for philosophy just as it does for science and in particular it holds for moral philosophy no utopia is possible but only because our values and our objectives can continue to improve indefinitely we're about to get to the part that not only is the most famous part of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=884"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c8451549-191b-4a44-9121-9851ac768cb0": {"page_content": "but it's possibly the most famous part of the book or the many famous parts of the book but this this one really stands out so let me just read it he writes Thus fallibleism alone rather understates the error prone nature of knowledge creation knowledge creation is not only subject to error error is a common and significant in all ways will be and correcting them will always reveal further and better problems and so the maxim that I have suggested should be carved in stone namely the earth's biospheres in capable of supporting human life is actually a special case of a much more general truth namely that for people problems are soluble so let us carve that in stone problems are inevitable it is inevitable that we face problems but no particular problem is inevitable we survive and thrive by solving each problem as it comes up and since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impossible barrier so a complementary and equally important truth about people and in the physical world is that problems are soluble by soluble.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=997"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b0c2f349-b99f-4ad4-be46-f0afb0baeaf5": {"page_content": "I mean that the right knowledge would solve them it is not of course that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it.\nbut it is in principle accessible to us so let us carve that in stone to problems are soluble so this is very famous and people speak about this and sometimes as a criticism of David's philosophy and it's in mistaken criticism David is a fallibleist.\nbut they find this grating in some way that he's carved things in stone I think John Horgan perhaps made this criticism or some others have done it in print as well this idea that one would carve things in stone sounds somewhat ridiculous and religious.\nbut.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1065"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ef783693-a737-4e5b-b6b5-8d435a9f213e": {"page_content": "but I find it a quaint idea and it's a way of emphasizing this magnificent dichotomy it also underpins construct a theory a a a fully fledged scientific theory and so it's important to have these principles that underline that underlie our rationality and our reason it doesn't mean that they cannot possibly be criticized it doesn't mean they're not fallible it simply means that they're a good way in order to arrange our reason in order to approach problems in an optimistic way so this provides a basis not an unalterable foundation they provide a basis or a framework within which we can operate it's an infinite science framework.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1113"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "49d87934-3863-4847-af8e-bb11c3b8d82f": {"page_content": "okay the idea that problems are inevitable and problems are soluble so the criticism is more a criticism of a approach rather than the criticism of David on this point I think is nothing but a criticism of approach or of style rather than anything to do with substance.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1168"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2dd80007-4c88-4257-a8e2-9ea4e6298c93": {"page_content": "so I'll continue that progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the enlightenment it motivates all traditions of criticism as well as the principle of seeking good explanations but it can be interpreted in two almost opposite ways both of which confusingly are known as perfectibility one is that humans or human societies are capable of attaining a state of supposed perfection such as the Buddhist or Hindu Nirvana or various political utopias the other is that every attainable state can be indefinitely improved fallibleism rules out the first position in favor of the second.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1187"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "88764718-1514-473c-90c3-195da3523f73": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c838405-681e-4032-9748-35d864733d9e": {"page_content": "so everything can be improved there's no such thing as heaven or Nirvana or utopia now there proceeds to be some lengthy discussion and it's worthwhile reading get the book and read the book but about the history of the enlightenment and it's very interesting I personally find it very interesting because I don't have to be interested in the history of philosophy but it's essentially about these esoteric matters of the difference between continental French style German style enlightenment thinking and British style enlightenment thinking and David points out that the continental style seemed to be seeking final answers and utopias and the British style recognized the more fallibleist nature of the human condition and human beings then there's another lengthy section which David I think will date of definitely drew from in order to frame his TED talk it was the one that got the biggest laugh if I remember where he speaks about the matter energy and evidence out there into galactic space are all there at their lowest possible supply.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1221"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5ff45163-fefd-48f9-81a6-f9a4bcd6a4e1": {"page_content": "so it's completely empty and then he says or is it that is another perochial misconception of people laugh because it's so astounding it's outstanding idea that you know you're about to hear something astonishing namely that even this implacably dark and empty place is going to turn out to be a hub of a potential hub of knowledge creation that's fantastic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1285"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8be54338-aacd-40ec-8cb7-1e80766867e7": {"page_content": "so I'll continue after missing those two significant sections he writes all people in the universe once they have understood enough to free themselves from perochial obstacles face essentially the same opportunities this is an underlying unity in the physical world more significant than all the dissimilarities I have described between our environment and the typical one the fundamental laws of nature are so uniform and evidence about them so ubiquitous and the connections between understanding and control so intimate that whether we are on our perochial home planet or a hundred million light years away and intergalactic plasma we can do the same science and make the same progress so with typical location in the universe is amenable to the open-ended creation of knowledge and therefore so are almost all other kinds of environment since they have more matter more energy and easy access to any evidence than intergalactic space the thought experiment considered almost the worst possible case perhaps the laws of physics do not allow knowledge creation inside say the jet of a quasar or perhaps they do but either way in the universe at large knowledge friendliness is the rule not the exception that is to say the rule is person friendliness to people who have the relevant knowledge death is the rule for those who do not skipping some more and now I get to one of my favorite parts of this entire chapter and something that I have prefaced previously in the last two parts of this chapter so let me just read quite a lengthy section here now he writes now I can turn to the significance of knowledge and therefore of people in the cosmic scheme of things many things are more obviously significant than people space and time are significant because they appear in almost all explanations of other physical phenomena similarly electrons and atoms are significant humans seem to have no place in that exalted company their history and our politics our science art and philosophy our aspirations and moral values all these are tiny side effects of a supernova explosion a few billion years ago which could be extinguished tomorrow by another such explosion supernova to a moderately significant in the cosmic scheme of things but it seems that one can explain everything about supernova and almost everything else without ever mentioning people or knowledge at all however that is merely another parochial era due to our current untypical vantage point in an", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1312"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "990dd66c-4684-46a8-a8e8-d9d3e04f2aef": {"page_content": "aspirations and moral values all these are tiny side effects of a supernova explosion a few billion years ago which could be extinguished tomorrow by another such explosion supernova to a moderately significant in the cosmic scheme of things but it seems that one can explain everything about supernova and almost everything else without ever mentioning people or knowledge at all however that is merely another parochial era due to our current untypical vantage point in an enlightenment that is mere centuries old in the longer run humans may colonize other solar systems and by increasing their knowledge control ever more powerful physical processes if people ever choose to live near a star that is capable of exploding they may well wish to prevent such an explosion probably by removing some of the material from the star such a project would use many orders of magnitude more energy than humans currently control and more advanced technology as well but it is a fundamentally simple task not requiring any steps that are even close to limits imposed by laws of physics so with the right knowledge it could be achieved indeed for all we know engineers elsewhere in the universe already achieving it routinely and consequently it is not true that the attributes of supernova in general are independent of the presence or absence of people or of what those people know and intend more generally if we want to predict what a star will do we first have to guess whether there are any people near it and if so what knowledge they may have and what they may want to achieve outside our perochial perspective after a physics is incomplete without a theory of people just as it is incomplete without a theory of gravity or nuclear reactions note that this conclusion does not depend on the assumption that humans or anyone else will colonize the galaxy and take control of any supernova the assumption that they will not is equally a theory about the future behaviour of people knowledge is a significant phenomena in the universe because to make almost any prediction about astrophysics one must take a position about what types of knowledge will or will not be present near the phenomena in question so all explanations of what is out there in the physical world mention knowledge and people if only implicitly but knowledge is more significant even than that consider any physical object for instance a solar", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1432"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "27cad6f9-0dd1-4258-bf63-5afed52c08db": {"page_content": "not is equally a theory about the future behaviour of people knowledge is a significant phenomena in the universe because to make almost any prediction about astrophysics one must take a position about what types of knowledge will or will not be present near the phenomena in question so all explanations of what is out there in the physical world mention knowledge and people if only implicitly but knowledge is more significant even than that consider any physical object for instance a solar system or a microscopic chip of silicon and then consider all the transformations that it is physically possible for it to undergo for instance the silicon chip might be melted and solidify in a different shape or it might be transformed into a chip with a different functionality the solar system might be devastated when its star becomes a supernova or life might evolve on one of its planets or it might be transformed using transmutation and other futuristic technologies in the microprocessors in all cases the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously in the absence of knowledge is negligible is negatively small compared to the class that could be affected artificially by intelligent beings who wanted those transformations to happen so the explanations of almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring these phenomena about if you want to explain how an object might possibly reach a temperature of 10 degrees or a million you can refer to spontaneous processes and can avoid mentioning people explicitly even though most processes at those temperatures can be brought about only by people but if you want to explain how an object might possibly cool down to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero you cannot avoid explaining in detail what people would do and then it's still only the least of it in your mind's eye continue your journey from that point in intergalactic space to another.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1544"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b3b279d-8449-471d-8bb3-a9a4d2428846": {"page_content": "at least 10 times as far away a destination this time is inside one of the jets of a quasar what would it be like in one of those jets languages barely capable of expressing it.\nand we'd rather like facing a supernova explosion a point blank range but for millions of years at a time there's some sorry that is the best explanation that is the best description of a quasar that I have read and I have read a lot of astrophysic books before.\nyeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1656"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7811174b-d96e-44e9-86d3-750b955136c0": {"page_content": "so let's continue the the survival time for a human body we'll be measuring figure seconds as I said it is unclear whether the laws of physics permit any knowledge to grow there let alone in life support system for humans it is about as different from our ancestral environment as could possibly be the laws of physics that explain it there are no resemblance to any rules of thumb that were ever in our ancestors genes are in their culture yet human brains today now in considerable detail what is happening there we're about to get to this amazing relationship between the laws of physics and structures out there in the universe and our brains a connection is made here that has never been made before so let me read David writes of the quasar jet somehow that jet happens in such a way that billions of years later on the other side of the universe a chemical scum can know and predict what the jet will do and can understand why that means that one physical system say an astrophysicist brain contains an accurate working model of the other the jet not just a superficial image though it contains that as well but an explanatory theory that embodies the same mathematical relationships and causal structures that is scientific knowledge furthermore the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is steadily increasing that constitutes the creation of knowledge here we have physical objects very unlike each other and whose behavior is dominated by different laws of physics embodying the same mathematical and causal structures and doing so ever more accurately over time of all the physical process that can occur in nature under the creation of knowledge exhibits that underlying structure.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1687"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e1cb86d4-013f-422e-8afd-91136d02de06": {"page_content": "wow that's amazing.\nso he's just said picking possibly the most alien kind of environment that we can presently think of a quasar jet where as far as we know theoretically it's powered by a rotating black hole that's spinning so fast that the magnetic fields cause the material that is spiraling into the black hole to be shot out because of the magnetic fields in great jets and these jets as far as I remember the matter in those jets is accelerating away from the black hole at close to relativistic speeds.\nso it's kind of like a particle accelerator.\nbut.\nbut it but it ridiculously high energy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1790"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a5bd38c1-c1a8-4862-8251-c9a071f258d4": {"page_content": "and so if you were to stand inside of that jet as they've said it'd be something like experiencing supernova blows it'd be something like experiencing a supernova blast whatever the case it is an environment completely unlike the human brain the human brain is a wet 36 degree Celsius object rather complicated a quasar jet is millions billions of degrees Celsius um traveling at relativistic speeds the human brain is not they're completely different the quasar jet and the human brain and yet and yet what's going on inside of that quasar jet is replicated inside of the astrophysicist mind in terms of the relationships between the entities that are involved creating the phenomena so in the quasar jet what's going on is a bunch of physical relationships between black holes magnetic fields light matter what's going on inside of the brain is a bunch of relationships as well but these are abstract relationships representing the physical ones that are out there and as we create more knowledge the model the theory the explanation that's inside of an astrophysicist brain of what a quasar is represents the quasar with ever greater accuracy so this is what scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge is where we embody mathematical relationships we embody explanatory relationships abstract ones inside of our minds that represent the mathematical and causal relationships of things out there in the universe and as that increases as that improves or becomes more accurate that's what we call the creation of knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1838"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3dc714c-3336-4138-a2e9-2da77b7fc543": {"page_content": "well.\nokay so that that's a really impressive way of looking at things.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5c77c810-1239-4434-a99b-ff7df56f85a6": {"page_content": "so now I'm going to skip a bit more but David also speaks about how physical processes in general when we're trying to predict what's going to happen we really have to consider the knowledge that happens to be present at any particular location and he uses the quaint example of the SETI project and the RSC by telescope is it's in Chile and it is part of the SETI project a search for extraterrestrial intelligence and in a fridge at the RSC by telescope is a bottle of champagne which will be opened one day if they find evidence of alien intelligence out there somewhere using the radio telescope so normally if you're trying to predict if a gas-filled bottle is going to explode you use equations from physics equations from chemistry we'll use something called the universal gas law universal gas law is PV equals NRT P is the pressure V is the volume.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=1956"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a0001513-9654-4091-8430-4b4602934867": {"page_content": "N is the number of miles R is the gas constant T is the temperature and you can solve this equation and you can if you already know what pressure is required in order to release the cork from a bottle well you can make a prediction about when that cork is going to be released from the bottle if we start to heat the bottle up given its volume and the pressure that's inside already and then pressure that's outside and etc you get what I'm saying you can make a prediction of when the cork will flip off the bottle but if you're talking about that particular bottle in that particular fridge then no amount of physics and chemistry and thermodynamics expertise is going to allow you to make that prediction David writes of whether or not the cork is going to pop out of the bottle he writes to predict it you have to know whether there really are people sending radio signals from various soul systems to explain it you have to explain how people know about those people in their attributes nothing less than that specific knowledge which depends upon which depends among other things on subtle properties of the chemistry of the planets on distant stars can explain or predict with any accuracy whether and when that cork will pop.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=2026"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b84312be-cd2c-4145-a323-abb32bc0789e": {"page_content": "so I basically reached the end of this fantastic chapter it's an amazing read the entire thing is an amazing read I've taken something like two hours to read the entire thing so let me just read the conclusion David writes about how as far as we know only here on earth is there a hub of knowledge creation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=2089"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a8a7263-c635-4284-87e5-0896ed65427e": {"page_content": "the nowhere else in the universe is knowledge being created and knowledge is a cosmically significant thing for all the reasons that he's explained in this chapter but the rest of the universe can become a knowledge creating hub just like the earth is all it needs is a spark and he writes like an explosive awaiting a spark unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there for eons on end doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space almost any of them would if the right knowledge ever reached it instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity intentioned knowledge creation displaying all the various kinds of complexity universality in reach that are inherent in the laws of nature and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could become typical in the future if we want to we could be that spark well amazing um he has a section at the end of every chapter that contains terminology I don't think I'll always read this I didn't read it for chapter one I didn't read it for chapter two.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=2116"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a0fad898-831e-427e-898a-393780a5aa42": {"page_content": "but I just want to pause and reflect on some of the terminology used in this particular chapter as it will become relevant in subsequent chapters so he defines a person if you remember this is from the last episode he defines a person as an entity that can create explanatory knowledge he talks about fundamental or significant phenomena as one that plays a necessary role in the explanation of many phenomena or whose distinctive features require distinctive explanation in terms of fundamental theories Perochialism is the making is mistaking appearance for reality or local regularities for universal laws a constructor is a device capable of causing other objects to undergo transformations without undergoing any net change itself a universal constructor is a constructor that can cause any raw materials to undergo any physical physically possible transformation given the right information.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=2193"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "520dc5c7-1bc0-40e9-abfd-edd0d8d81873": {"page_content": "so um this is for telling constructor theory there's a whole website now for constructor theory www dot constructor theory dot org which you should visit there are some fantastic videos there there are excellent papers that have been written um and this really shows a huge amount of promise it's a new mode of explanation it's a new way in which we can make progress in physics many people have recognized i think increasingly physicists have recognized that string theory useful as it is mathematically beautiful that it might be mathematically isn't making the kind of progress that people assumed it would have after this many decades so whatever the case david's offering an alternative unifying theory this constructor theory that has the potential to achieve not only some of the things that string theory might have but could be a way of looking at many other kinds of science many other kinds of philosophy this dichotomy between what it is possible to achieve what is in what is possible versus impossible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=2260"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a72b527a-be6f-4c34-9898-457f8075c531": {"page_content": "so i myself i'm looking forward to learning more and more about this i'm still still an amateur in this area and so perhaps after the the beginning of infinity readings i'll attempt to tackle some of the constructive theory.\nokay thanks next time chapter four.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLydNSiYPjY&t=2333"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dacc0b9d-9a8b-498c-8da4-5c60a07ce213": {"page_content": "Hello, welcome to ToKCast episode 32, part 2 of the chapter on choices.\nIn the last episode, David was describing how certain mathematicians and other people were disappointed by the way in which certain supposedly rational systems would sometimes throw up paradoxes problems and things they didn't want the system to have.\nIn other words, they bemoaned the fact that logic could cause problems.\nThey wished that logic wasn't so, that logic didn't cause these issues that they thought were inherently problematic inside of these certain democratic systems, so let's just dive straight into what David has to say about that.\nHe writes, We need something better to wish for, something that is not incompatible with logic, reason or progress.\nWe've already encountered it.\nIt is the basic condition for a political system to be capable of making sustained progress.\nPop is criterion that the system facilitates the removal of bad policies and bad governments without violence.\nWhat entails abandoning who should rule as a criterion for judging political systems?.\nThe entire controversy about important rules and all other issues in social choice theory has traditionally been framed by all concerned in terms of who should rule.\nWhat is the right number of seats for each state or for each political party?.\nWhat does the group, presumed entitled to rule over its subgroups and individuals, want?.\nAnd what institutions will get it what it wants?.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, pause their my reflection.\nNow I'm going to go to what Poppy himself wrote about this in just a moment.\nAnd it's really a timeless point to make, actually.\nEven if it's particularly relevant right now as I'm speaking in 2020, I don't mention much at all typically in any of these podcasts or videos that I do.\nAnything about current events, I attempt to try and avoid current events because I'd like this series to stand for itself at the time and not be talking about parochial issues that won't be relevant in a few years to come.\nSo hopefully no matter when you're listening to this, maybe someone's listening to this right now in 2025, 2030, things will still make sense to you, nothing will be out of context so to speak.\nNow all of that said, I'm going to allow myself one gratuitous mention of current events.\nAnd that is about the fact that there is a vast number of people as there always would be after any election, a vast number of people in the United States and elsewhere who regret who the president is right now, President Trump.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b68f2be5-3f24-4d0e-aaf4-86aaf86e52e4": {"page_content": "Now all of that said, I'm going to allow myself one gratuitous mention of current events.\nAnd that is about the fact that there is a vast number of people as there always would be after any election, a vast number of people in the United States and elsewhere who regret who the president is right now, President Trump.\nAnd they've been calling not just for a change of president, but a change in the system ever since he was elected.\nAt first they were calling for the electoral college, the way in which the president is elected to be utterly upended, changed, thrown out and replaced with something else.\nBut just yesterday, interestingly enough, a suggestion was put forward that a bipartisan committee, that seems fair, doesn't it, bipartisan, a bipartisan committee be established that will be able to vet and veto candidates for the presidency before they ever stood for election.\nIn other words, an unelected panel deciding who would be a fit and proper person to stand for the presidency.\nSo this is to say that there's something deficient with the process that exists right now according to these people, that I think if you've committed certain crimes, you can't stand for elected office, including for the presidency.\nThe fact that the media is supposed to have some responsibility in trying to find out about the background of these people that run for high office, whatever the case.\nSome people are very unhappy with President Trump and so they want to change the system so that a president Trump's style person can never again be elected.\nIn many ways, none of this debate is particularly new.\nEver since democracy was invented, people have lost elections and so blamed the system rather than their own candidates or policies.\nIt's the system or the stupidity of the voter that is the error, not their policies.\nNow they may be right, there may be a flaw in the system, perhaps voters who are voting in ignorance of what actually the policies happen to be.\nSo they might be right in some ways, but as a criticism, it's a poor one because it can always be thrust forth whenever anyone loses an election.\nIt's rather like a football team losing a match and then blaming not merely the referee but the rules themselves.\nIt was the rules that was against them.\nIf only there was a by team committee who could decide who was a fit and proper person to play for either side, then we could have fair football games.\nAnd it should be telling if the losing football team consistently complains that the rules themselves, the rules of football themselves are unfair.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=153"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "27ca01d6-40b3-418f-92ea-65f91d4d8f90": {"page_content": "It's rather like a football team losing a match and then blaming not merely the referee but the rules themselves.\nIt was the rules that was against them.\nIf only there was a by team committee who could decide who was a fit and proper person to play for either side, then we could have fair football games.\nAnd it should be telling if the losing football team consistently complains that the rules themselves, the rules of football themselves are unfair.\nNow this doesn't really happen that often, of course the analogy fails in certain ways.\nHowever, if your first response upon losing an election or being on the side of the person who lost is to blame the system, then that should be revealing and it should give you pause about what's motivating you apart from just the fact that you lost.\nNow I'll put it up on the screen, but on Twitter, David Deutsch commented in 2018 that hyperbole is basically a sign of our times.\nHe wrote in response to someone who said we live in an age of darkness and a lot of people talking about this, that Trump out in some ways ushering in a new age of darkness.\nDavid disagreed with just the general, he wasn't talking about Trump in any way, I don't think, but he did say quote, we are not living in an age of darkness.\nNot in an age of hyperbole, end quote, perhaps the most hyperbolic thing one can say of their political opponents, certainly these days is that they are Nazis.\nGodwin's law is the notion that this happens inevitably in online discussions.\nOf course, Godwin's law is no law actually, it's just a funny reproach of how to behave online.\nBut the Trump is Hitler trope, it's no joke to some people it seems.\nSome really do need to understand the history of Hitler and how he is categorically different in many ways to Donald Trump.\nSome really do need to understand that there is no actual parallel here between Trump and Hitler.\nIt's a ridiculous criticism to make, but it's being made more and more fervently for some strange reason.\nInitially, Hitler had checks on his power under German law, but he violated them over and again with violence.\nFor example, in the night of the long knives, and soon after that in 1934, Germany's president Hindenburg died and Hitler simply declared himself head of both the state and the government and thus an absolute tyrant in Germany.\nTrump does not, as Hitler did at the time, have a private army.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=279"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a6816a1-826a-4ea5-b4f9-80d1b4316f9d": {"page_content": "Initially, Hitler had checks on his power under German law, but he violated them over and again with violence.\nFor example, in the night of the long knives, and soon after that in 1934, Germany's president Hindenburg died and Hitler simply declared himself head of both the state and the government and thus an absolute tyrant in Germany.\nTrump does not, as Hitler did at the time, have a private army.\nHe has not assassinated his political rivals and he has not dissolved or absorbed the powers of either the Congress, the Senate or the Supreme Court.\nThis hyperbole nonetheless continues each side, caricatures the other to some extent by exaggerating.\nPresident Trump himself, of course, is a figure that has not always helped to clarify things, speaking of hyperbole, he speaks in the most hyperbolic terms that we generally ever hear a politician using.\nIt's almost a trademark of his.\nEverything is the biggest or the best or the greatest.\nNow, of course, in some cases, in the case of the US in particular, it's quite right to talk about them being the biggest and the best and the greatest.\nBut when President Trump claims elections that have not yet been held might be rigged, it has an area of hyperbole to it.\nIt tends to undermine institutions and it's just as bad a sin as claiming we need to change the whole system when our candidate loses.\nTrump hasn't even lost yet, but he's setting things up so that if he loses, he can say, well, the system was the thing that was flawed.\nSo again, systems might be flawed, but the solution is not to suggest that the entire system is altogether bad, but rather it's to identify the precise error that you think is there in the system and to propose a policy to correct it.\nThat's how improvements work.\nIn the case of democracy, how can it be improved?.\nHow can we come to identify errors in a democratic system and correct them?.\nWell, let's take a deeper dive into that very question through what Popper had to say on the matter.\nSo I'll read part of his article.\nHis article can be found here in the economist and you should read the whole thing yourself.\nIt was first published in 1988 and then it was published again just before the last presidential election in the United States in 2016.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=404"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3599df09-669a-42fc-84ac-9af1f525f5bb": {"page_content": "How can we come to identify errors in a democratic system and correct them?.\nWell, let's take a deeper dive into that very question through what Popper had to say on the matter.\nSo I'll read part of his article.\nHis article can be found here in the economist and you should read the whole thing yourself.\nIt was first published in 1988 and then it was published again just before the last presidential election in the United States in 2016.\nAs the economist says here and I'll just read the introduction to the article says, quote, the first book in English by Professor Sir Carl Popper was accepted for publication in London while Hitler's bombs were falling and was published in 1945 under the title The Open Society and its enemies.\nThe book was well received, but in this article Sir Carl questions whether his central theory of democracy, which he does not characterize as the rule of the people, has been understood end quote.\nSo what Popper's going to do here is to re-imagine, re-explain what democracy actually means.\nIt doesn't matter that prior to Popper, people thought that democracy was about solving the who should rule question and about the rule of the many and all this kind of stuff.\nThat doesn't matter.\nIn the same way that when people tried to understand what science was and thought that it was about empiricism, it was about observing and deriving from those observations, the laws of nature, despite the fact that that's what people thought science was and what some people still think science is today or that what science amounts to is repeatedly observing things and extracting from those, the laws of nature by extrapolation.\nIt doesn't matter that that's what people think distinguishes science from non-science.\nIf some people think the difference between science and non-science is that in science you use a method of induction and you repeatedly observe things, fine trends and then extrapolate natural laws from those observations.\nIt doesn't matter that they think that that's what distinguishes science from everything else.\nThey're wrong.\nScience is distinguished from other things by the criterion of demarcation that popper figured out which is a falsification, testability, being able to experimentally test your hypotheses.\nThis is what separates science from non-science and as David Deutsch refined further, although testable theories are a dime a dozen, what we're really looking for is hard to vary explanations of the physical world and part of the hard to vary features of theories about physical reality is their experimental testability.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=511"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a09f2b2c-5f1c-44df-a3ee-6ddac467ddc9": {"page_content": "Science is distinguished from other things by the criterion of demarcation that popper figured out which is a falsification, testability, being able to experimentally test your hypotheses.\nThis is what separates science from non-science and as David Deutsch refined further, although testable theories are a dime a dozen, what we're really looking for is hard to vary explanations of the physical world and part of the hard to vary features of theories about physical reality is their experimental testability.\nThis is what science is.\nWhat that's got to do with this is just because many people think that democracy is about the rule of many people, poppers about to explain, that's not really what it's about.\nThat's not the essential characteristic of democracy nor why we should hope to have democracy rather than alternatives like tyrannies.\nSo let me read from the article, I won't be reading it all and just as with the beginning of infinity I'll let you know when I'm cutting bits out so you might want to go to the article itself.\nI'll put the link in the description and up there on the screen there's also what you're looking for.\nThat's the article you're looking for, popper rights.\nMy theory of democracy is very simple and easy for everybody to understand but it's fundamental problem is so different from the age-old theory of democracy which everybody takes for granted that it seems that this difference has not been grasped just because of the simplicity of the theory.\nIt avoids high sounding abstract words like rule, freedom, and reason.\nI do believe in freedom and reason.\nbut I do not think that one can construct a simple practical and fruitful theory in these terms, they are too abstract and too prone to be misused and of course nothing whatever can be gained by their definition.\nBecause they're my reflection on this, that's seen a quanon, an essential component if we excuse the irony of saying that, of popers approach to philosophy.\nGetting caught up in definitions is a losing game and it is the game played by so many other philosophers, the linguistic philosophers, which is to say most philosophers today and see the last chapter of the beginning of infinity for more about that.\nMoving on and popper rights, quote, this article is divided into three main parts.\nThe first sets out briefly what may be called the classical theory of democracy, the theory of the rule of the people.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=643"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3d8295db-2c6f-4e22-87a4-f7aa908cfc7b": {"page_content": "Getting caught up in definitions is a losing game and it is the game played by so many other philosophers, the linguistic philosophers, which is to say most philosophers today and see the last chapter of the beginning of infinity for more about that.\nMoving on and popper rights, quote, this article is divided into three main parts.\nThe first sets out briefly what may be called the classical theory of democracy, the theory of the rule of the people.\nThe second is a brief sketch of my more realistic theory, the third is in the main and outline of some practical applications of my theory in reply to the question, what practical difference does this new theory make, and then pop it goes into the first part, the classical theory.\nThe classical theory is in brief the theory that democracy is the rule of the people and that the people have a right to rule, for the claim that the people have this right, many in various reasons have been given.\nHowever, it will not be necessary for me to enter into these reasons here.\nInstead, I will briefly examine some of the historical background of the theory and some of the terminology.\nPlato was the first theoretician to make a system out of the distinctions between what he regarded as the main forms of the city state.\nAccording to the number of rulers he distinguished between, number one, a monarchy, the rule of one good man and tyranny, the distorted form of monarchy, two, the aristocracy, the rule of a few good man, and oligarchy its distorted form, and three democracy, the rule of the many of all the people, democracy did not have two forms, for the many always formed a rabble, and so democracy was distorted in itself, pause there just mere reflecting on that.\nSo Plato didn't like democracy, he argued in the republic which some of us had to suffer through at university, he argued for philosopher kings, educated people who were justly and rightly rule over the masses who couldn't be trusted with power, okay, let's keep going.\nPopper writes, quote, if one looks more closely at this classification, and if one asks oneself what problem was at the back of Plato's mind, then one finds that the following underlay not only Plato's classification and theory, but also those of everybody else, from Plato to Karl Marx and beyond, the fundamental problem has always been, who should rule the state?.\nOne of my main points will be that this problem must be replaced by a totally different one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=756"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "70e54cbf-3744-49cb-8be6-14b4be9b9e4b": {"page_content": "Popper writes, quote, if one looks more closely at this classification, and if one asks oneself what problem was at the back of Plato's mind, then one finds that the following underlay not only Plato's classification and theory, but also those of everybody else, from Plato to Karl Marx and beyond, the fundamental problem has always been, who should rule the state?.\nOne of my main points will be that this problem must be replaced by a totally different one.\nPlato's answer was simple and naive, the best should rule.\nIf possible the best of all alone, next choice, the best few, the aristocrats, but certainly not the many, the rabble, the demos, the Athenian practice had been even before Plato's birth precisely the opposite, the people, the demos, should rule.\nAll important political decisions such as war and peace were made by the assembly of all full citizens.\nThis is now called direct democracy, but we must never forget that the citizens formed a minority of the inhabitants, even of the natives.\nFrom the point of view here adopted, the important thing is that in practice the Athenian Democrats regarded their democracy as the alternative to tyranny, to arbitrary rule.\nIn fact, they knew well that a popular leader might be invested with tyrannical powers by a popular vote, so they knew that a popular vote may be wrong-headed, even in the most important matters.\nThe institution of us ostracism recognizes, the ostracized person was banned as a matter of precaution only, he was neither tried nor regarded as guilty, the Athenians were right, decisions arrived that democratically, and even the powers conveyed upon the government by democratic vote may be wrong.\nIt is hard, if not impossible, to construct a constitution that safeguards against mistakes.\nThis is one of the strongest reasons for founding the idea of democracy upon the principle of avoiding tyranny rather than upon a divine or morally legitimate right of the people to rule.\nI'll pause down my reflection, so that's really important.\nThis is why the American Constitution, the British tradition is held up as being a form of excellence in governing because it attempts to avoid tyrants.\nIt's not perfect, but it's a way of trying to ensure that no one single person has so much power as to be able to become a tyrant of everyone else.\nThis therefore is the idea of checks and balances.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=640"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c56e7664-d6d3-4452-b611-86206dbb53d4": {"page_content": "I'll pause down my reflection, so that's really important.\nThis is why the American Constitution, the British tradition is held up as being a form of excellence in governing because it attempts to avoid tyrants.\nIt's not perfect, but it's a way of trying to ensure that no one single person has so much power as to be able to become a tyrant of everyone else.\nThis therefore is the idea of checks and balances.\nSo democracy, regarded as the rule of the many, can make mistakes, but as we will come to see, democracy in the Perperian sense is a system for correcting errors.\nIf we consider democracy wrongly as the who should rule question, then if it has privacy, what we have and what Plato correctly identified as a problem is my rule.\nFor example, people could democratically vote away their rights, or democratically vote to take away everyone's money or other wealth.\nAnd on that view, some of us argue that freedom or free markets or capitalism, liberty, whatever you want to call it, is morally prior to that kind of democracy.\nAnd that means we need certain things, we should call them rights, that cannot be voted away by any government, they are prior to the government.\nAnd to protect such things, a constitution is required and courts are needed to arbitrate.\nThe rule of the many may be the best system, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time, but it cannot be an absolute ruler.\nFor then, it would be a kind of tyranny, with no protections for minorities.\nAnd now I'm skipping a bit and Popper goes through all the ways in which the who should rule question has repeatedly come up over the years in the British tradition.\nAnd he writes, after me skipping a couple of paragraphs, quote, Karl Marx, who was not a British politician, was still dominated by the old platonic problem, which he saw as who should rule.\nThe good or the bad, the workers or the capitalists.\nAnd even those who rejected the state altogether, in the name of freedom, could not free themselves from the fetters of a misconceived old problem.\nFor they call themselves anarchists, that is, opponents of all forms of rule.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=640"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f2c8979e-e986-413f-b2cc-a89f1bd46e42": {"page_content": "And he writes, after me skipping a couple of paragraphs, quote, Karl Marx, who was not a British politician, was still dominated by the old platonic problem, which he saw as who should rule.\nThe good or the bad, the workers or the capitalists.\nAnd even those who rejected the state altogether, in the name of freedom, could not free themselves from the fetters of a misconceived old problem.\nFor they call themselves anarchists, that is, opponents of all forms of rule.\nOne can sympathise with their unsuccessful attempt to get away from the old problem, who should rule, on to part two, which Popper calls a more realistic theory, quote, in the open society and its enemies, I suggested that an entirely new problem should be recognised as the fundamental problem of a rational political theory.\nThe new problem, as distinct from the old who should rule, can be formulated as follows.\nHow is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence?.\nOkay, just pause there in repeating that.\nThe new problem with respect to democracy, as distinct from the old who should rule question, can be formulated as follows.\nHow is the state to be constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence?.\nThis, in contrast to the old question, is a thoroughly practical, almost technical problem.\nAnd the modern so-called democracies are all good examples of practical solutions to this problem, even though they were not consciously designed with this problem in mind.\nFor they all adopt what is the simplest solution to the new problem, that is, the principle that the government can be dismissed by a majority vote.\nIn theory, however, these modern democracies are still based on the old problem, and on the completely impractical ideology that it is the people, the whole adult population who are, or should by rights be, the real and ultimate and only legitimate rulers.\nBut of course, nowhere do the people actually rule.\nIt is the governments that rule, and unfortunately also bureaucrats, our civil servants, or our uncivil masters as Winston Churchill called them, whom it is difficult, if not impossible, to make accountable for their actions, pause their my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=1081"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fdd54721-5f1d-488f-9c82-bf9a8e348625": {"page_content": "But of course, nowhere do the people actually rule.\nIt is the governments that rule, and unfortunately also bureaucrats, our civil servants, or our uncivil masters as Winston Churchill called them, whom it is difficult, if not impossible, to make accountable for their actions, pause their my reflection.\nYes, controversially, sometimes I make noises like this myself, that the bureaucrats, and again, I'm allowing myself in this episode to be a little bit parochial, a little bit contemporary, and remind people that in 2020, we had a coronavirus, where bureaucrats became far more powerful, seemingly than they had been, certainly, in my lifetime anyway.\nBut chief health officers and their deputies were the people who were getting up in front of the Demos each and every day, and informing us of new restrictions, almost by feet, and the politicians were, at least in the place that I occupy in New South Wales and Victoria, in Australia, there seemed to be very little resistance, and this concerned me, it concerned me because, as Popper says there, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make them accountable for their actions.\nThey aren't accountable, so if they make a mistake, apparently it goes to the politician who is responsible.\nThe politician could always turn around and say, well, I was just following the expert advice of the chief bureaucrat, of the chief scientist, of the chief health officer.\nSo it's not my fault, what would you want me to do, not take the advice of the expert?.\nBut the expert can always say, well, I was just giving the best advice I had at the time.\nIt's ultimately the politician's decision as to whether or not they enact this policy or not.\nSo here we have a violation of what I would regard as a violation of Popper's criterion.\nNo one's accountable.\nAnd this is a problem.\nOkay.\nOther than me, going on a tirade, let me continue to read Popper's article, quote, what are the consequences of this simple and practical theory of government?.\nMy way of putting the problem, and my simple solution, do not of course clash with the practice of Western democracies, such as the unwritten constitution of Britain.\nAnd the many written constitutions, which took the British Parliament more or lesses their model.\nIt is this practice, and not their theory, which my theory, my problem and its solution, tries to describe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=1094"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e757712-9ab4-4de8-b0f2-32516738d24c": {"page_content": "My way of putting the problem, and my simple solution, do not of course clash with the practice of Western democracies, such as the unwritten constitution of Britain.\nAnd the many written constitutions, which took the British Parliament more or lesses their model.\nIt is this practice, and not their theory, which my theory, my problem and its solution, tries to describe.\nAnd for this reason, I think that I may call it a theory of democracy, even though it is emphatically not a theory of the rule of the people, but rather the rule of law that postulates the bloodless dismissal of the government by a majority vote.\nMy theory easily avoids the paradoxes and difficulties of the whole theory.\nFor instance, such problems as what has to be done if ever the people vote to establish a dictatorship?.\nOf course, this is not likely to happen if the vote is free, but it has happened.\nAnd what if it does happen?.\nMost constitutions in fact require far more than a majority vote to amend or change constitutional provisions.\nAnd thus would demand perhaps a two-thirds or even a three-quarters qualified majority for a vote against democracy.\nBut this demand shows that they provide for such a change, and at the same time they did not conform to the principle that the unqualified majority will is the ultimate source of power.\nBut the people, through a majority vote, are entitled to rule.\nAll these theoretical difficulties are avoided if one abandons the question who should rule and replaces it by the new and practical problem.\nHow can we best avoid situations in which a bad ruler causes too much harm?.\nWhen we say that the best solution known to us is a constitution that allows a majority vote to dismiss the government, then we do not say that the majority vote will always be right.\nWe do not even say that it will usually be right.\nWe say only that this very imperfect procedure is the best so far invented.\nWinston Churchill once said jokingly that democracy is the worst form of government, with the exception of all other known forms of government.\nAnd this is the point.\nSomebody who has ever lived under another form of government, that is under a dictatorship, which cannot be removed without bloodshed, will know that a democracy, imperfect though it is, is worth fighting for, and I believe worth dying for.\nThis however, is only my personal conviction, I should regard it as wrong to try and persuade others of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=982"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6a543a40-c7c2-44fb-9400-b94adb143f33": {"page_content": "And this is the point.\nSomebody who has ever lived under another form of government, that is under a dictatorship, which cannot be removed without bloodshed, will know that a democracy, imperfect though it is, is worth fighting for, and I believe worth dying for.\nThis however, is only my personal conviction, I should regard it as wrong to try and persuade others of it.\nWe could base our whole theory on this, that there are only two alternatives known to us, either a dictatorship or some form of democracy.\nAnd we did not base our choice on the goodness of democracy, which may be doubtful, but solely on the evilness of a dictatorship, which is certain.\nNot only because the dictator is bound to make use of his power, but because a dictator, even if he were benevolent, would rob all others of their responsibility, and thus of their human rights and duties.\nThis is a sufficient basis for deciding in favour of democracy.\nThat is, a rule of law that enables us to get rid of the government.\nNo majority, however large, ought to be qualified to abandon this rule of law.\nAnd pause there, pop it then goes into a lengthy discussion of proportional representation, which is what David talks about in the beginning of the infinity.\nSo I don't want to repeat that here now.\nAnd so instead of reading that part, I'm going to skip all the way to where Papa talks about, talks about the two party system.\nHe's just criticized the idea of minority government, in other words, governments that are made up of coalitions, and we've talked about the problem of coalitions and compromises before.\nSo it's better to have a majority government who can be held accountable for the policies that they enact.\nAnd so when they fail, they can be held responsible for that, and they can take accountability for it as well.\nSo this is why majority government is better than coalitions, where people can all say, I'm not responsible for this bad policy because it's a compromise, and I have to agree with these people over here that I don't particularly like, but in order to form government, we have to compromise, but the compromise wasn't my idea.\nI wanted to do this other different policy over there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=1437"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "693a46dc-ee72-4086-80e3-cbd17777261c": {"page_content": "So this is why majority government is better than coalitions, where people can all say, I'm not responsible for this bad policy because it's a compromise, and I have to agree with these people over here that I don't particularly like, but in order to form government, we have to compromise, but the compromise wasn't my idea.\nI wanted to do this other different policy over there.\nOkay, so having established a majority rule is better, let's read what Papa has to say about the two party system and he writes, quote, in order to make a majority government probable, we need something approaching a two party system, as in Britain and the United States.\nSince the existence of the practice of proportional representation makes such a possibility hard to attain, I suggest that in the interests of parliamentary responsibility, we should resist the perhaps tempting idea that democracy demands proportional representation.\nInstead, we should strive for a two party system, or at least for an approximation to it, for such a system encourages a continual process of self criticism by the two parties.\nSuch a view will, however, provoke frequently voiced objections to the two party system that merit examination, a two party system suppresses the formation of other parties.\nThis is correct, but considerable changes are apparent within the two major parties in Britain as well as the United States.\nSo the repression need not be a denial of flexibility.\nThe point is that, in a two party system, the defeated party is liable to take an electoral defeat seriously.\nSo it may look for an internal reform of its aims, which is an ideological reform.\nIf the party is defeated twice in succession, or even three times, the search for new ideas may become frantic, which obviously is a healthy development.\nThis is likely to happen, even if the loss of votes was not very great.\nUnder a system with many parties, and with coalitions, this is not likely to happen, especially when the loss of votes is small, both the party bosses and the electorate are inclined to change quietly.\nThey regarded as part of the game, since none of the parties had clear responsibilities.\nPause their admirer flexion, yes.\nSo again, we get into this idea of compromise.\nIf you are not clearly responsible, you as the leader or you as the party for a particular policy that fails, then you can always revert back to saying, well, let's actually try my policy, even if you don't have power to get your policy in.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=1536"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1cac433d-5641-4279-a505-3f0032b71356": {"page_content": "They regarded as part of the game, since none of the parties had clear responsibilities.\nPause their admirer flexion, yes.\nSo again, we get into this idea of compromise.\nIf you are not clearly responsible, you as the leader or you as the party for a particular policy that fails, then you can always revert back to saying, well, let's actually try my policy, even if you don't have power to get your policy in.\nSo it just becomes this vicious cycle of compromise and refusing to take responsibility, coming up with another compromise, refusing to take responsibility, and so on.\nAnd so I'll just finish with the final paragraph that Papa wrote in this article, quote, it is also said, a two party system is incompatible with the idea of an open society, with the openness for new ideas, and with the idea of pluralism, reply.\nBoth Britain and the United States are very open to new ideas.\nGreat openness would, of course, be self-defeating, as would be complete freedom.\nAlso, cultural openness and political openness are two different things.\nAnd more important even than opening wider and wider the political debate may be a proper attitude towards the political day of judgment.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, so now let's segue from Papa straight to David Deutsch in the beginning of infinity.\nAnd David writes, so let us reconsider collective decision making in terms of Papa's criterion instead, instead of wandering earnestly, which of the self-evident yet mutually inconsistent criteria are fairness, representativeness, and so on are the most self-evident, so that they can be entrenched.\nWe judge such criteria, along with all other actual proposed political institutions, according to how well they promote the removal of bad rules and bad policies.\nTo do this, they must embody traditions of peaceful, critical discussion, of rulers, policies, and the political institutions themselves.\nIn this view, any interpretation of the democratic process is merely a way of consulting the people to find out who should rule or what policies to implement misses the point of what is happening.\nAn election does not play the same role in a rational society as consulting an oracle or a priest, or obeying orders from the king did in earlier societies.\nThe essence of democratic decision making is not the choice made by the system at elections, but the ideas created between elections.\nAnd elections are merely one of the many institutions whose function is to allow such ideas to be created, tested, modified, and rejected.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=105"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8eff7836-e4f4-487b-a027-4265f6d221ac": {"page_content": "An election does not play the same role in a rational society as consulting an oracle or a priest, or obeying orders from the king did in earlier societies.\nThe essence of democratic decision making is not the choice made by the system at elections, but the ideas created between elections.\nAnd elections are merely one of the many institutions whose function is to allow such ideas to be created, tested, modified, and rejected.\nThe voters are not a fount of wisdom from which the right policies can be empirically derived.\nThey are attempting, fallible, to explain the world and thereby improve it.\nThey are, both individually and collectively, seeking the truth, or should be, if they are rational.\nAnd they ease an objective truth of the matter.\nProblems are soluble, society is not a zero-sum game.\nThe civilization of the Enlightenment did not get where it is today by cleverly sharing out the wealth, votes, or anything else that was in dispute when it began.\nIt got here by creating ex-neilio, in particular.\nWhat voters are doing in elections is not synthesising a decision of a superbeing society.\nThey are choosing which experiments are to be attempted next.\nAnd principally, which are to be abandoned because there is no longer a good explanation for why they are best.\nThe politicians and their policies are those experiments.\nWhen one uses no-go theorem such as arrows, to model real decision making, one has to assume, quite unrealistically, that none of the decision makers in the group is able to persuade the others to modify their preferences or to create new preferences that are easier to agree on.\nThe realistic case is that neither the preferences nor the options need be the same at the end of the decision making process as they were at the beginning.\nPause their moral reflection.\nYes.\nAnd so this, in a nutshell, is, that's why the traditional way of thinking about decision making as selecting among existing options is completely false.\nPeople being creative as they go through the decision making process are going to improve the theories they have on offer, the choices they have before them.\nThey're going to freely create new knowledge, freely choose, freely bring into their will, new content, new ideas.\nThey're the ones that do it.\nThey are the causal agents.\nThey're the thing in the universe, which, if you had to explain, how was that choice arrived at, it was the fact that that person or that committee or that group of people decided upon that choice, they chose that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=518"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8de9b038-2815-47d6-b33c-d6bf837fcc24": {"page_content": "They're going to freely create new knowledge, freely choose, freely bring into their will, new content, new ideas.\nThey're the ones that do it.\nThey are the causal agents.\nThey're the thing in the universe, which, if you had to explain, how was that choice arrived at, it was the fact that that person or that committee or that group of people decided upon that choice, they chose that.\nIt wasn't an outworking of the laws of physics, although the laws of physics were still being abayed by everything in that system.\nThe real causal explanation comes down to a creative agent, namely a person or a group of people.\nOkay.\nI'm skipping a number of paragraphs here.\nand I'm going straight to the section on proportional representation because, oh, this is something we avoided in the copyrightical and David writes about this quote, proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies for compromises and malgums of the policies of the contributors have an undeservedly high reputation.\nThough they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally as I have explained bad policies.\nIf a policy is no one's idea of what will work, then why should it work?.\nBut that is not the worst of it.\nThe key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.\nThus, compromise policies shield with the underlying explanations which do at least seem good to some faction from being criticized and abandoned.\nThe system used to elect members of the legislature of most countries in the British political tradition is that each district or constituency in the country is entitled to one seat in the legislature.\nAnd that seat goes to the candidate with the largest number of votes in that district.\nThis is called the plurality voting system, plurality meaning largest number of votes, often called the first-past-post system because there is no prize for any runner-up and no second round of voting, both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of outcomes.\nEquality voting typically over-represents the two largest parties compared with the proportion of votes they receive.\nMoreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=1321"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5e03b2f-e03e-46aa-a888-a92cd4520ecd": {"page_content": "Equality voting typically over-represents the two largest parties compared with the proportion of votes they receive.\nMoreover, it is not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.\nPoor semi-reflection precisely what happened with the 2016 election and people were so upset with the electoral college because although the loser, Hillary Clinton, got the largest number of votes overall, the system, the electoral college system, actually enabled Donald Trump to take power back to the book.\nThese features are often cited as arguments against plurality voting and in favor of a more proportional system either literal proportional representation or other schemes such as transferable vote systems and runoff systems which have the effect of making the representation of voters in the legislature more proportional.\nHowever, under pop as criterion, that is all in significant in comparison with the greater effectiveness of plurality voting at removing bad governments and policies.\nLet me trace the mechanism of that advantage more explicitly.\nFollowing a plurality voting election, the usual outcome is that the party with the largest total number of votes has an overall majority in the legislature and therefore takes sole charge.\nAlthough losing parties are removed entirely from power, this is rare under proportional representation because some of the parties in the old coalition are usually needed in the new one.\nConsequently, the logic of plurality is that politicians and political parties have little chance of gaining any share in power unless they can persuade a substantial proportion of the population to vote for them.\nThat gives all parties the incentive to find better explanations or at least to convince more people of their existing ones.\nFor if they fail, they will be relegated to palaces if at the next election.\nPoor semi-reflection, so that's what it's all about.\nIf we have coalitions, if we have 10 parties that have to come together and share power in order to form government, then at the next election, not all of them will be voted out only some and we could expect that some of them will retain power and therefore do not need to change their policies.\nSo even though a vast number of people might want to remove those politicians from power, in fact a majority might want to remove them from power, they won't be removed from power.\nThey'll remain there.\nIf the party with the greatest number of votes still only has 10% of the votes because there are 20 plus parties and all the other parties have 5% or less of the vote, this is a real problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e820239b-ab14-408f-bacc-1785eabf4125": {"page_content": "So even though a vast number of people might want to remove those politicians from power, in fact a majority might want to remove them from power, they won't be removed from power.\nThey'll remain there.\nIf the party with the greatest number of votes still only has 10% of the votes because there are 20 plus parties and all the other parties have 5% or less of the vote, this is a real problem.\nIt means that even if 90% of people haven't voted for the party that gets the most number of votes, now we 10% of the votes, we can't get rid of that party from power because it will just continue to have this minority of people who continue to vote for it.\nThis is why the two party system is better.\nThis is why coalitions are bad, why compromises are bad, why the ability to remove bad policies, bad politicians, politicians you don't want is the criterion of a democratic system.\nIf you can't get rid of that bad government or that those bad people in power because they've only got 10% of the vote, this is a violation of proper criterion that needs to be easy to remove these people if the majority disagree with them, but these systems that are not a plurality voting system, that are proportional voting systems are a violation.\nIt's not to say the plurality system is perfect or even good, as Popper would say.\nIt's just that it's better than any of the other systems that are out there.\nAll the other systems that are out there, there are knock down criticisms of them and that's why we should defend two party systems, first past the post-13, skipping a little bit and David writes, under a proportional system small changes in public opinion seldom account for anything and power can easily shift in the opposite direction to public opinion.\nWhat counts most is the changes in the opinion of the leader of the third largest party.\nThis shield's not only that leader, but most of the incumbent politicians and policies from being removed from power through voting.\nThey are more often removed by losing support within their own party or by shifting alliances between parties, so in that respect the system badly fails Popper's criterion.\nUnder plurality voting it is the other way around.\nThe all or nothing nature of the constituency elections and the consequent low representational small parties makes the overall outcome sensitive to small changes in opinion.\nWhen there is a small shift in opinion, away from the ruling party, it is usually in real danger of losing power completely.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=2123"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb241242-3972-4ced-b2ab-bd7f6eebe168": {"page_content": "They are more often removed by losing support within their own party or by shifting alliances between parties, so in that respect the system badly fails Popper's criterion.\nUnder plurality voting it is the other way around.\nThe all or nothing nature of the constituency elections and the consequent low representational small parties makes the overall outcome sensitive to small changes in opinion.\nWhen there is a small shift in opinion, away from the ruling party, it is usually in real danger of losing power completely.\nUnder proportional representation, there are strong incentives for the system's characteristic unfairness to persist or to become worse over time.\nFor example, if a small faction defects from a large party, it may then end up with more chance of having its policies tried out than it would if its supporters had remained within the original party.\nThis results in a proliferation of small parties in the legislature, which in turn increases the necessity for coalitions, including coalitions with the smaller parties, which further increases their disproportionate power.\nIn Israel, the country with the world's most proportional electoral system, this effect has been so severe that the time of writing, even the two largest parties combined, cannot muster an overall majority.\nAnd yet under that system, which is sacrificed all other considerations in favor of the supposed fairness of proportionality, even proportionality itself is not always achieved.\nIn the election of 1992, the right wing parties as a whole received a majority of the popular vote.\nBut the left wing ones had a majority of the seats.\nThis was because I had a proportion of the fringe parties that failed to reach the threshold for receiving even one seat were right wing.\nIn contrast, the error correction attributes of the plurality voting system have a tendency to avoid the paradoxes to which the system is theoretically prone, and quickly to undo them when they do happen.\nBecause all those incentives are the other way around.\nFor instance, in the Canadian province of Manitoba in 1926, the Conservative Party received more than twice as many votes as any other party.\nBut one none of the 17 seats allocated as that province.\nAs a result, it lost power in the National Parliament, despite having received the most votes nationally too.\nAnd yet, even in that rare, extreme case, the disproportionateness between the two main parties' representations in Parliament was not that great.\nThe average liberal voter received 1.31 times as many members of Parliament as the average Conservative one.\nAnd what happened next?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82cc831a-89b9-4b81-85f5-f69f1461f954": {"page_content": "But one none of the 17 seats allocated as that province.\nAs a result, it lost power in the National Parliament, despite having received the most votes nationally too.\nAnd yet, even in that rare, extreme case, the disproportionateness between the two main parties' representations in Parliament was not that great.\nThe average liberal voter received 1.31 times as many members of Parliament as the average Conservative one.\nAnd what happened next?.\nIn the following election, the Conservative Party again had the largest number of votes nationally, but this time, that gave it an overall majority in Parliament.\nIt's voted to increase by 3% of the electorate, but its representation increased by 17% of the total number of seats, bringing the party's share of seats back into rough proportionality and satisfying proper criterion with flying colours.\nOK, skipping more about voting systems, and just getting into some political philosophy here, and David Wright's insight, we did not consider it surprising that a community of scientists with different initial hopes and expectations continually in dispute about their rival theories gradually coming to near unanimous agreement over a steady stream of issues.\nYet still continued to disagree all the time.\nIt is not surprising, because in their case, there are observable facts that they can use to test their theories.\nThey converge with each other on any given issue, because they are all converging on the objective truth.\nIn politics, it is customary to be cynical about that sort of convergence being possible.\nBut that is a pessimistic view.\nThroughout the West, a great deal of philosophical knowledge that is now a day is taken for granted by almost everyone.\nSay that slavery is an abomination, or that women should be free to go out to work, or that all topies should be legal, or that promotion in the armed forces should not depend on skin color, was highly controversial, only a matter of decades ago.\nAnd originally, the opposite positions were taken for granted.\nA successful truth-seeking system works its way towards broad consensus or near unanimity.\nThe one state of public opinion that is not subject to decision-theoretic paradoxes and where the will of the people make sense.\nSo convergence in the broad consensus over time is made possible by the fact that all concerned are gradually eliminating errors in their positions and converging on objective truths, facilitating that process.\nAnd meeting Papa's criterion, as well as possible, is more important than which of two contending factors with near-equal support gets its way out of particular election, pause the admirer reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d215c79-9f13-4feb-8e2c-1e8b33e063ff": {"page_content": "So convergence in the broad consensus over time is made possible by the fact that all concerned are gradually eliminating errors in their positions and converging on objective truths, facilitating that process.\nAnd meeting Papa's criterion, as well as possible, is more important than which of two contending factors with near-equal support gets its way out of particular election, pause the admirer reflection.\nThis is one of the most contentious parts of what might be called realist philosophy in the broader sense.\nMany people are realist when it comes to science, but not necessarily realist when it comes to morality.\nThat there is a best thing to want that there is an objective good out there.\nReligious people are often moral realists in that sense.\nThey believe there's an objective difference between good and bad, and there is an objective good that we should strive for, but when you get to politics, even some people who would endorse that notion don't necessarily think that in politics that there's an objective good that we could be searching for, but this is an argument that in fact there is because people tend to converge on certain political opinions that either two might have been regarded as completely irreconcilable.\nWe're going to see in the next chapter which is on beauty and aesthetics that there's an objectivity to aesthetics as well.\nAnd so a realist is someone who thinks there's an objectivity to just about everything.\nOkay, so I'm skipping a little bit and getting just to the last paragraph.\nAnd David Wright's apportionment systems, electoral systems, and other institutions of human cooperation were for the most part designed or evolved to cope with day-to-day controversy to cobble together ways of proceeding without violence despite intense disagreement about what would be best.\nThe best of them succeeded as well as they do because they have often unintentionally implemented solutions with enormous reach.\nConsequently, coping with controversy in the present has become merely a means to an end.\nThe purpose of deferring to the majority in democratic systems should be to approach unanimity in the future by giving all concerned the incentive to abandon bad ideas and to conjecture better ones.\nCreatively changing the options is what allows people in real life to cooperate in ways that no-go-theorems seem to say are impossible, and it is what allows individual minds to choose at all.\nThe growth of the body of knowledge about which there is unanimous agreement does not entail a dying down of controversy.\nOn the contrary, human beings will never disagree any less than they do now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=2456"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f1ebf73f-bd7e-4edd-9f53-1f27dc296a72": {"page_content": "Creatively changing the options is what allows people in real life to cooperate in ways that no-go-theorems seem to say are impossible, and it is what allows individual minds to choose at all.\nThe growth of the body of knowledge about which there is unanimous agreement does not entail a dying down of controversy.\nOn the contrary, human beings will never disagree any less than they do now.\nAnd that is a very good thing.\nIf those institutions do, as they seem to, fulfill the hope that it is possible for changes to be for the better on balance, then human life can improve without limit as we advance from misconception to ever better misconception.\nAnd that is the end of the chapter.\nA great way to end as well.\nDavid has talked about this before.\nRather than saying moving from explanation to ever better explanation or from theory to ever better theory or from policy to better policy, he has said there what he has said in other places, it will be better if we all just recognize that everything that we think is our best idea right now is nonetheless a misconception.\nAnd so we are moving from misconception to better misconception all the time.\nAnd this idea too that even though disagreements can be intense at any given parochial moment in time, we can expect that even if a democratic vote is very, very close.\nAnd we might think that 49% of people, or you know, 49.9% of people or whatever number you'd like to have less than 50% of people are the losers and therefore fail to convince the rest of society of their ideas and fail to be convinced themselves.\nAnd so it seems like we have this irreconcilable difference, nonetheless, over time, people can use their creative minds to, in their own minds, by their own lights, come to be persuaded.\nAnd therefore we come to a certain amount of unanimity in society.\nWe come to all agree that certain things are good things, slavery is bad, raising our children in a certain way is good, respecting reason and logic is better than deferring to superstition and so on and so forth.\nBut in time, people can be persuaded of the objective good.\nSo at this time, right now, in 2020, there are a number of elections coming up in my country and around the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=1520"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25fc38ac-eb5e-4e4c-96b6-4b9cf46a2077": {"page_content": "And therefore we come to a certain amount of unanimity in society.\nWe come to all agree that certain things are good things, slavery is bad, raising our children in a certain way is good, respecting reason and logic is better than deferring to superstition and so on and so forth.\nBut in time, people can be persuaded of the objective good.\nSo at this time, right now, in 2020, there are a number of elections coming up in my country and around the world.\nI hope that people read this chapter, no matter what side of the political debate they're on, to come to understand which systems are more or less democratic, what ways in which we might improve decision-making ourselves personally or as a society.\nAnd one simple rule of thumb is, is this change that you're suggesting going to make it easier to remove a bad ruler or not?.\nAnd if we've got committees of non-elected officials making decisions and those officials can't be easily removed by the voters, then that's an undemocratic system.\nAnd in your own life, if you're confronted with some kind of challenge and you've got a number of choices before you, don't think that you simply have to choose, that there's this false dichotomy, there are only these two things, these two ways forward that you can see.\nIt's a feature of Popper's philosophy, David Deutsches philosophy, that there's always a third way.\nYou can creatively come up with the third way, in fact, that really is your purpose as a human being, to creatively come up with better options in your own life and perhaps better options for other people as well.\nAll right, so let's end up there.\nAnd next time, we're on to perhaps the most controversial of all the chapters that exist in the book, many of them are controversial, of course, not controversial in a bad way, controversial in the way of making you think that what you have up until now thought was the right thing to think, in fact, is flawed in some way.\nAnd this idea that there is an objectivity to aesthetics is certainly something that today needs to be defended and David has a really interesting way of talking about, is there an objectivity to beauty?.\nIs there a way of actually trying to come up with a criterion for beauty attractiveness aesthetics?.\nOkay, until then, bye bye.\nAs always, thank you to everyone on Patreon who's been supporting me.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=2683"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "86909865-a97f-4ee4-99ae-be15d7610243": {"page_content": "And this idea that there is an objectivity to aesthetics is certainly something that today needs to be defended and David has a really interesting way of talking about, is there an objectivity to beauty?.\nIs there a way of actually trying to come up with a criterion for beauty attractiveness aesthetics?.\nOkay, until then, bye bye.\nAs always, thank you to everyone on Patreon who's been supporting me.\nWe've got a couple more Patreons right now, and anyone who'd like to give the PayPal donation, please know that it's accepted with great gratitude, especially right now.\nOkay, thanks everyone.\nBye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMsnE043rek&t=899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a5adbe2d-9bc0-49a6-abd5-ed87e2ac4d12": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and Episode 3, or Part 3, rather, of Chapter 1, The Theory of Everything from the Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.\nBefore I begin, a little note on my setup, some people have been saying that it's a bit distracting when I am actually reading from one of the books that I read from, because I'm not staring straight into the screen.\nI'm going to try and remedy this, if anyone has any ideas for me about precisely how to go about doing that, so it's not so distracting.\nI'd be happy to hear them, but one of the reasons it hasn't been a priority is because the overwhelming majority of people actually only listen, they don't actually watch.\nI think the downloads from the podcast version, the audio only version, are like 10 times greater than the views that I get on YouTube.\nIt would be so much more simple, efficient if I didn't bother putting together the video, because the video actually takes a lot longer to edit and all that sort of stuff, audio is much easier to deal with.\nNonetheless, I like doing the video, so I'm going to persevere with that.\nIf you have any ideas about how I can read by doing this, which is me looking at the screen right now, while simultaneously looking straight at the camera I would appreciate it.\nI use an iPhone, one of the more recent iPhones, or iPhone 11, in order to actually record the video and the audio goes into that.\nDon't need to go into the technical details, but anyway, if you have an idea for how I can fix the way in which I look at the camera whilst simultaneously reading, then that would be great.\nI know I think called an AutoQ Exists, but presumably that's quite a professional piece of gear.\nAnyway, no more preamble.\nLet me get into the reading for today, and we're getting very close to the end of the chapter.\nIt's a very fun part of the end of the chapter, because we start to encounter some real seeds, and I'm going to mention that word a few times today, real seeds of the science of Canon cards, which is sitting there behind me by Chiara Maleta, the beginnings of constructor theory.\nThey're right here in the fabric of reality, and so I'm going to concentrate a little on that today, not only in the fabric of reality, in the first few pages of the fabric of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=18"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c6c92aa-1616-4a60-92b0-55f7bde0f151": {"page_content": "They're right here in the fabric of reality, and so I'm going to concentrate a little on that today, not only in the fabric of reality, in the first few pages of the fabric of reality.\nSo let's go, and I'm at the point where David says on page 23, quote, in the reductionist worldview, the laws governing subatomic particle interactions are of paramount importance, as they are the base of the hierarchy of all knowledge.\nBut in the real structure of scientific knowledge, and in the structure of knowledge of reality, such laws have a much more humble role, what is that role?.\nIt seems to me that none of the candidates for a theory of everything that has yet been contemplated contains much that is new by way of explanation, perhaps the most innovative approach from the explanatory point of view is super string theory, in which extended objects, strings rather than point like particles are the elementary building blocks of matter.\nBut no existing approach offers an entirely new mode of explanation, new in the sense of Einstein's explanation of gravitational forces in terms of curved space and time pausing there, just my reflection on this.\nSo David has said right there that nothing about the other conceptions of the way in which we might improve physics off into the infinite future, string theory is one such, is a new mode of explanation.\nThis term, mode of explanation is right there at the beginning of the fabric of reality.\nAnd that's remarkable, because here in 1997, we have the motivation for constructive theory.\nWe have the phrase mode of explanation.\nWe can see those seeds.\nAs I've talked about in previous episodes for the fabric of reality, for what is happening right now over the last few years and right now in 2021, it's almost like a prediction of the content of future knowledge isn't it?.\nNot quite.\nThat's a joke of course, but it's clear David is appealing for a new way forward in physics.\nIt seems like no one else really took up the mantle between 1997 through to today.\nSo he did and Kiara and others.\nAnd it's another good reason for me to be doing this book right now alongside Kiara's book.\nHere we are getting the appeal for that new fundamental theory.\nAnd there in Kiara's book, we are getting the description and explanation of what has been accomplished so far with this exact new theory constructor theory.\nSo it's a wonderful symmetry between the two books back to this book, the fabric of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=137"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e10849bd-8b13-4769-9996-c1d9e309fe5e": {"page_content": "So he did and Kiara and others.\nAnd it's another good reason for me to be doing this book right now alongside Kiara's book.\nHere we are getting the appeal for that new fundamental theory.\nAnd there in Kiara's book, we are getting the description and explanation of what has been accomplished so far with this exact new theory constructor theory.\nSo it's a wonderful symmetry between the two books back to this book, the fabric of reality.\nAnd David writes, quote, in fact, the theory of everything is expected to inherit virtually its entire explanatory structure.\nIt's physical concepts, its language, its mathematical formalism, and the form of explanations from the existing theories of electromagnetism, nuclear forces, and gravity.\nTherefore, we may look to this underlying structure, which we already know from existing theories for the contribution of fundamental physics to our overall understanding.\nThere are two theories in physics, which are considerably deeper than all others.\nThe first is the general theory of relativity, which, as I have said, is our best theory of space, time, and gravity.\nThe second quantum theory is even deeper.\nBetween them, these two theories, and not any existing or currently envisaged theory of subatomic particles, provide the detailed explanatory and formal framework within which all other theories and modern physics are expressed.\nAnd they contain overarching physical principles to which all other theories conform.\nA unification of general relativity and quantum theory to give a quantum theory of gravity has been a major quest of theoretical physicists for several decades and would have to form part of any theory of everything in either the narrow or the broad sense of the term.\nAs we shall see in the next chapter, quantum theory, like relativity, provides a revolutionary new mode of explanation of physical reality.\nThe reason why quantum theory is the deeper of the two, lies more outside physics than within it.\nFor its ramifications, they are very wide, extending far beyond physics, and even beyond science itself, as it is normally conceived, okay, pausing there just my reflection on this.\nSo yes, quantum theory is the deeper of the two.\nWe've got general relativity and we've got quantum theory, both of which purport to be explanations of the universe as a whole in a certain sense.\nThe reason why quantum theory is the deeper of the two is because it affects other areas of our knowledge more so than what general relativity seems to.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=273"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6885313c-07c4-4a04-bd66-45f8b2f8017f": {"page_content": "So yes, quantum theory is the deeper of the two.\nWe've got general relativity and we've got quantum theory, both of which purport to be explanations of the universe as a whole in a certain sense.\nThe reason why quantum theory is the deeper of the two is because it affects other areas of our knowledge more so than what general relativity seems to.\nIn another video that I did called The Nexus, which was some personal musings on the nature of personhood, I tried to describe what the implications are of our most modern understanding of quantum theory upon this question of what it means to be a person.\nBecause we exist in a multiverse and the multiverse consists of these interesting entities called fungible things, okay, so fungibility is this idea of where a particle or even a larger object and ensemble of particles, which includes something like a human body, is extended across the multiverse.\nAnd so in order to understand the nature of personhood more fully, you need to grapple with quantum theory.\nSo I think quantum theory absolutely has deep implications for the nature of personhood.\nIt also, of course, has ramifications for the field of computation.\nAnd this is what David Deutsch actually proved in his famous 1986 paper, one of the things he's most famous for beyond writing books is this particular proof that he did, this proof of the possibility, the physical possibility of quantum computation, which means that now computation is truly a part of physics.\nSo quantum theory has got ramifications there and therefore it's also got ramifications for mathematics because it provides a limit constraints on what can be proved given those quantum mechanical laws.\nSo because quantum mechanical laws are universal, they apply to everything in the universe, including the brains of mathematicians, it limits what those brains of those mathematicians can do or what computers can do that are made out of matter.\nAnd so quantum theory has this reach into mathematics, even into pure mathematics because it is the very thing which tells you what laws, computers, things that prove stuff, which includes human brains can do what they are able to do.\nAnd then it also reaches therefore into epistemology, beyond mathematics because it provides constraints on our ability to perfectly know anything at all.\nWe are necessarily fallible because we're error prone human beings due to just making mistakes, but those mistakes are also embedded there in the laws of physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=413"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "986a73ae-a02a-476f-9fe9-91207835e514": {"page_content": "And then it also reaches therefore into epistemology, beyond mathematics because it provides constraints on our ability to perfectly know anything at all.\nWe are necessarily fallible because we're error prone human beings due to just making mistakes, but those mistakes are also embedded there in the laws of physics.\nAnd related to this, quantum theory mandates that not everything can be known simultaneously, that matter behaves in ways governed by quantum mechanical laws such that we have to rule out epistemic certainty or in simple language, no, you cannot be sure of anything.\nYou can have good explanations, but they must remain fallible, even the contents of your own memory must remain fallible, given quantum theory among other things.\nAnd so that has ramifications for psychology.\nAnd so it goes.\nSo these are just some of the senses in which quantum theory has implications for all those other areas that we typically partition off from the rest of science.\nOkay, back to the book and David writes, quantum theory is one of what I shall call the four main strands of which our current understanding of the fabric of reality is composed.\nBefore I say what the other three strands are, I must mention another way in which reductionism misrepresent the structure of scientific knowledge.\nNot only does it assume that explanation always consists of analyzing a system into smaller simpler systems, it also assumes that all explanation is of later events in terms of earlier events.\nIn other words, that the only way of explaining something is to state its causes and this implies that the earlier the events in terms of which we explain something, the better the explanation.\nSo that ultimately the best explanations of all are in terms of the initial state of the universe, supposing there, they were getting constructive theory again.\nThis idea that the best explanations are in terms of something that happened earlier that caused something to happen later is of course, all this dynamical laws and initial conditions vision of physics.\nThis are kind of narrow way of viewing the way in which the universe evolves over time of the way in which change happens at all in the universe.\nBack to the book David writes, A theory of everything which excludes a specification of the initial state of the universe is not a complete description of physical reality because it provides only laws of motion and laws of motion by themselves make only conditional predictions that is they never state categorically what happens but only what will happen at one time given what was happening at another time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=576"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "722ccd68-7388-483d-ac34-215c1d4f3e6e": {"page_content": "Back to the book David writes, A theory of everything which excludes a specification of the initial state of the universe is not a complete description of physical reality because it provides only laws of motion and laws of motion by themselves make only conditional predictions that is they never state categorically what happens but only what will happen at one time given what was happening at another time.\nOnly if a complete specification of the initial state is provided can a complete description of physical reality in principle be deduced pausing their my reflection again.\nSo I have heard theoretical physicists specifically particle physicists say that the deeper theory of everything would be one that would provide the initial conditions in some way as a matter of necessity like mathematical necessity.\nNow I suppose that's one way to go.\nOf course, all you then get out of that so-called theory of everything is again this reductionist idea that gives you that would give you the initial conditions and then the dynamical laws presumably and you would have this the deeper theory this deeper mathematical theory that says well these initial conditions can only be in such and such a way but whatever that theory is that gives you these initial conditions of the universe you might ask of that theory why it has the form that it does.\nI suppose you get into some kind of infinite regress then I don't know exactly how they resolve this.\nAnyways, whatever the case, David in that passage there and in the next few passages is really emphasizing this idea that this initial conditions dynamical laws kind of thing that the laws of motion and initial conditions problem doesn't seem to be able to provide a true theory of everything.\nSo he's really providing clues there for someone else had they wanted to create constructor theory.\nIt reminds me a little bit of another book that I've read recently called from 0 to 1 which is by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel.\nIf you don't know who he is he's Elon Musk's sort of off-sider he's another billionaire he was Elon Musk's off-sider he worked on PayPal and so on.\nSmart guy businessman anyway his book from 0 to 1 is about how to create a business or a startup.\nYoung people come up to him and want to know how to become rich themselves by creating a new business they seem to be after the recipe the algorithm.\nOf course his advice is he can't possibly tell you that because there is no such algorithm there is no recipe.\nIf it were that simple then everyone would just follow the recipe and become rich but that's the very point about creativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=712"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e46fda9-c88c-4479-9e0b-c65d7fcbccf9": {"page_content": "Smart guy businessman anyway his book from 0 to 1 is about how to create a business or a startup.\nYoung people come up to him and want to know how to become rich themselves by creating a new business they seem to be after the recipe the algorithm.\nOf course his advice is he can't possibly tell you that because there is no such algorithm there is no recipe.\nIf it were that simple then everyone would just follow the recipe and become rich but that's the very point about creativity.\nSimilarly physicists want to make fundamental breakthroughs they need creativity here in the fabric of reality we've got the same thing there are clues here for the taking for anyone who might have wanted to conceive of a new mode of explanation.\nBut the thing is with any of this stuff it has to be a very personal thing it has to be part of your personal problem situation as Papa might put it unless you are truly really invested in the problem then you won't spend much time thinking about it.\nDavid did of course so much that he wrote a book on it.\nand then he went on to begin to solve the problems that he is laying out here in constructive theory.\nThe point is anyone can do it they just have to choose to do it and become interested in it but most won't.\nMost won't actually be that genuinely interested even people with physics degrees.\nI have a physics degree.\nIt doesn't mean anything in terms of trying to create fundamental theories because that's not part of my problem situation.\nI'm genuinely not deeply interested enough.\nI'm more interested in for example in my particular problem situation trying to explain ideas that have already been discovered in new ways so that people out there who have a casual interest can to some extent level up and learn more about this and perhaps then develop a really deep interest in it.\nI think that's what sort of my function is in this.\nI don't have any illusions that I'm going to make deep breakthroughs here but maybe someone listening will be enticed to go off and read the details read the technical details.\nand then they perhaps will make some of the more fundamental breakthroughs.\nIt all depends on what you find fun doing.\nI have fun just talking about this and solving the problem of trying to explain it with ever more clarity in more and more simple terms to the extent that I can.\nBut what I notice sometimes is that.\nwell I'll just say it sometimes people seem to kid themselves.\nI see this in physics to some extent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=863"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8ce56623-e3aa-4c67-a6c0-d849a8e71b3e": {"page_content": "and then they perhaps will make some of the more fundamental breakthroughs.\nIt all depends on what you find fun doing.\nI have fun just talking about this and solving the problem of trying to explain it with ever more clarity in more and more simple terms to the extent that I can.\nBut what I notice sometimes is that.\nwell I'll just say it sometimes people seem to kid themselves.\nI see this in physics to some extent.\nPeople who say they either want to be physicists want to make breakthroughs.\nThey're already in physics but you dig a little and it's quickly apparent that this is not how their life is quite set up.\nThey're actually invested rather more in other things.\nThey have other interests as well.\nThey have other problems and that's perfectly fine but there might be something that psychologists call to the extent that it exists cognitive dissonance.\nNot really being aware that your explicit words about what you're trying to achieve don't quite match up to what you're doing day to day in reality behind the scenes to put this another way.\nEinstein it might have been thought while he was working at a patent office was just working on relativity as a kind of hobby but that would be to misunderstand what was going on.\nSo many of his waking moments were devoted solely to figuring out these problems.\nHe was obsessed by the fun of finding this stuff out and later on being a physicist wasn't a job that he clocked into and worked up until morning tea and then clocked off again and then went back to work at his desk for another few hours while checking emails and so on.\nNo.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=985"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "31d39681-f0a1-4c8b-bb05-097934e1c0f6": {"page_content": "He was utterly obsessed with figuring out specific problems and he made progress because he was passionate and he found joy in solving these particular problems and there's a difference there between that kind of approach towards problem solving in a specific area and those who might say that that's what they want to do but instead splitting their attention and their fun between many other things and of course that's totally fine this is not a judgment it is the difference between being able to because you have a finite amount of attention and a finite amount of creativity given a certain amount of finite time in order to solve particular problems and if you are utterly obsessed with certain problems then you're probably going to make you're possibly going to make more progress there than someone who is not quite so obsessed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1079"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "73b5c810-0da1-4934-be8c-b7a345d19c39": {"page_content": "That's my diversion on the psychology of making progress in physics and in elsewhere.\nI don't do it often.\nand I'm not about to be doing it often here either so let's go back to the book and David writes.\nCurrent cosmological theories do not provide a complete specification of the initial state even in principle but they do say that the universe was initially very small very hot and very uniform in structure.\nWe also know it cannot have been perfectly uniform because that would be incompatible according to the theory with the distribution of galaxies we observe across the sky today.\nThe initial variations in density lumpiness would have been greatly enhanced by gravitational clumping that is relatively dense regions would have attracted more matter and become denser so they need only have been very slight initially pausing their.\nyes my reflection this this lumpiness was a mystery for some time it was a.\nit was a mystery until the Kobe the the satellite satellite telescope called the cosmic microwave background explorer which took the first images somewhere between 1989 and 1993 of the cosmic microwave background the heat left over after the big bang.\nNow prior to Kobe the thing was that wherever we pointed out telescopes effectively temperature probes at the sky we found exactly the same temperature everywhere 2.3 above absolute zero 2.3 Kelvin or 2.3 degrees Celsius above absolute zero the minimum possible temperature so the universe is bathed in this heat.\nbut it's extremely uniform and that is that's kind of a problem it's a problem.\nbecause the universe itself when you look in the visual band or in any other band aside from the microwave band if you're looking if you're looking at things other than at that temperature you find lumpiness as David says here and this is in fact what the astronomers and the astrophysicist talk about the cosmologist talk about I talk about the lumpiness of the universe there are regions where there are galaxies that's a lump and the region between galaxies which have nothing at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1143"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "182a779e-e86c-408e-8c84-b8c0493446e3": {"page_content": "but why is the distribution of matter the way that it is given the cosmic microwave background is not lumpy well the cosmic microwave background explorer this satellite that was put up there in the late 80s early 90s revealed that in fact the cosmic microwave background is lumpy after all it's not perfectly uniform it has these regions of cooler and warmer and the cooler areas are going to be the places where in the early universe the matter would have been attracted towards that's where it would have collapsed and in the warmer areas where the matter would have expanded out so you get the voids in the area where you get a higher temperature and in the cooler areas that's where the galaxies form and that's where the stars form that's where your your glowing matter forms and and and and this is this is our George Smoot was awarded the Nobel Prize for this although his student is Charlie Langweaver that I've talked about very very often it was his research student his PhD student at the time I think it was his PhD student might have been his graduate student anyway Charlie Langweaver the great Charlie Langweaver he's also one of these physicists not on social media which is a great shame he's got this wonderful list of papers that that stretch from biology and cancer through to cosmology and astrophysics and planetary science and all this sort of great stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1282"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50e95692-41bf-47b4-9e0c-a48006d4cc0c": {"page_content": "and he's a great speaker as well you can find him on youtube.\nand I always talk him up because he was my lecturer.\nand so he tells the story about how he was actually the one that processed the data and he was looking for that data from the cosmic microwave background explorer and it was something like 2 a.m. one early one morning that he finally figured out we do have the so-called anisotropies which is a fancy name for this lumpiness this variation in cosmic microwave background.\nand he was so excited he had to get on his push bike and and ride to George Smoot's house and and and slipped the the the research he's slipped the the discovery of the the anisotropies underneath George Smoot's door I think with the words we found it written on the top of it.\nand so that was the moment that was the moment of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies now why is this something who cares about this.\nwell the reason that you get these anisotropies that these variations in the temperature goes back to quantum theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1372"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a1170888-05cd-487f-a8d1-d2ff86fab211": {"page_content": "Stephen Hawking actually described it as like looking at the face of god looking at this images like looking at the face of god to bit of an exaggeration of course but basically the lumpiness is there in the earliest universe the the earliest image we have of the universe that lumpiness seems to be explained by quantum mechanical laws the quantum fluctuations acting on a universe which was small enough you know the size of an atom or whatever such at the effects back then had lumpiness in them which quantum mechanical laws lead to this lumpiness and so then when the universe expanded so to the lumpiness and so you get this lumpiness today on the very larger scales because that is an image of what it was like at the beginning of time because the beginning of time was governed by quantum mechanical laws which necessarily led to this sort of thing if we didn't have quantum mechanical laws presumably the universe would have been perfectly uniform and it would have expanded out such that you wouldn't get lumpiness which means you might not have gotten stars in the way that we have stars now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1432"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28222ed0-9fe3-4b49-8c53-762992abc370": {"page_content": "and so you certainly wouldn't have had the distribution of galaxies in the way that they are now so I find that absolutely astounding it's astounding to think that the effects of quantum theory at the very smaller scales namely on the universe when it was much smaller than an atom can be seen today revealed today in the universe as a whole the the structure of the universe as a whole the very largest scales have been determined to buy what was going on at the beginning of the universe which shouldn't be so surprising I mean this is what goes on with initial conditions and dynamical laws after all anyway if you want to learn more about that you can look up the the history of the cosmic microwave back and explore after that by the way there was this thing called W map the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1499"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "403bac5c-1234-4134-af71-6820c8a45c37": {"page_content": "and so they they improved the image of the of Kobe of the cosmic microwave background and today the most recent one is the plank the plank satellite has has again given us images of this to even greater resolution so very interesting area of science one of these pieces of evidence explained by the theory of the Big Bang.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1552"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "14c63eb7-fc5c-4955-9e44-268ab5731457": {"page_content": "okay after that extended self-indulgent diversion let's go back to the book and David writes but slight though they were this variations and density is what he's talking about but slight though they were they are of the greatest significance in any reductionist description of reality because almost everything that we see happening around us from the distribution of stars and galaxies in the sky to the appearance of bronze statues on planet earth is from the point of view of fundamental physics a consequence of those variations if our reductionist description is to cover anything more than the grossest features of the observed universe we need a theory specifying those all important initial deviations from uniformity let me try to restate this requirement without the reductionist bias the laws of motion for any physical system make only conditional predictions and are therefore compatible with many possible histories of that system this issue is independent of the limitations on predictability that are imposed by quantum theory which i shall discuss in the next chapter for instance the laws of motion governing a cannonball fired from a gun are compatible with many possible trajectories one for each possible direction and elevation in which the gun could have been pointing when it was fired and this is the figure from the fabric of reality mathematically the laws of motion can be expressed as a set of equations called the equations of motion these have many different solutions one describing each possible trajectory to specify which solution describes the actual trajectory we must provide supplementary data some data about what actually happens one way of doing that is to specify the initial state in this case the direction in which the gun was pointing but there are other ways to for example we could just as well specify the final state the position and direction of motion of the cannonball at the moment it lands or we could specify the position of the highest point of the trajectory it does not matter what supplementary data we give so long as they pick out one particular solution of the equations of motion okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1573"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "883ee017-ccee-42bb-8298-87a8e2987bcd": {"page_content": "pausing there now for more on this you can see chapter two of the science of cannon kart by kara my letter there's a deep symmetry is already said between these two books and to understand a little bit more about this the topic is projectile motion and if you have the trajectory of a projectile then there are unique coordinates x and y.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1700"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "44aafe8c-8f23-4e25-ae9d-0cc946fd068c": {"page_content": "well not unique coordinates there are specific coordinates x and y which pick out a unique trajectory for any given projectile as you can see there with the picture that David has provided there's going to be if you pick out in the plane that's there in fact you'll have x, y and z coordinates in that particular three-dimensional version of it if you pick out particular x, y, z coordinates there will be only one of those possible trajectories that will fit that x, y, z coordinate that x, y, z coordinate is the initial conditions so to speak the supplementary data we sometimes call the initial conditions if it's at the beginning the final conditions which is at the end or any other condition in between so supplementary data is what you need you need a point along the trajectory to pick out that particular trajectory as unique and different to all the other ones that could have possibly happened but why that particular one well that's the open question especially when applied to the whole universe and that's what David's about to get to so let's go back to the book where he rides the combination of any such supplementary data with the laws of motion amounts to a theory that describes everything that happens to the cannonball between firing an impact similarly the laws of motion for physical reality as a whole would have many solutions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ceb1f33a-5b4c-4514-90c3-80321245323c": {"page_content": "each corresponding to a distinct history to complete the description we should have to specify which history is the one that has actually occurred by giving enough supplementary data to yield one of the many solutions of the equations of motion in simple cosmological models at least one way of giving such data to specify the initial state of the universe but alternatively we could specify the final state or the state at any other time or we could give some information about the initial state some about the final state and some about the states in between in general the combination of enough supplementary data of any sort with the laws of motion would amount to a complete description in principle of physical reality pausing there yes that's precisely right but as we've been keen to highlight such a description would be at best a predictive kind of description it would never actually explain much at all about what happened like for example evolution knowledge crash and therefore increasingly from this moment onwards what actually occurs in the universe because from this moment onwards knowledge creation will become the dominant unfolding feature of the universe into the distant future so long as we don't go extinct and perhaps there are other people out there whatever the case we are going to begin constructing around us transforming physical reality around us and that is to do with the knowledge we have trying to understand why certain things are going to happen for example the construction of cities is not going to be explained by the simple laws of physics and supplementary data what we need of course is an explanation in terms of peoples choices and they're wanting to create certain things and so on and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1808"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5353fa85-404b-49cf-8bf7-93ec078270ae": {"page_content": "okay so we've made that point throughout the beginning of infinity.\nbut here it is in the fabric of reality back to the book and David writes for the cannonball once we have specified say the final state it is straightforward to calculate the initial state and vice versa so there is no practical difference between different methods of specifying the supplementary data but for the universe most such calculations are intractable pausing there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1915"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0da7d1f6-9a05-4690-ba8b-89e3910b0557": {"page_content": "yes this is to put things mildly of course it's intractable to try to figure out the trajectories of all the particles in the entire universe yes given that for a single particle just pick any single particle like an electron there's no sense in which the observables you need in order to make a precise prediction can be known simultaneously anyway Sam Kipers who is a physicist who collaborates with David Deutsch has written collaborated with David Deutsch on a number of papers he's written some on his own exploring variations subtle variations to quantum theory about a related point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1938"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6d81d90d-a229-44b1-b159-b309e56c85f0": {"page_content": "but I won't go into the details about that but you can see here for Sam's excellent papers they're highly technical.\nand I guess to be true to be honest they're not precisely related to what I'm about to mention here.\nbut I just want to observe that on this point about a deterministic universe and I've said this before it's true in a very basic sense.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=1986"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4c39fa0f-d412-4cb0-aa02-7af09243ff9b": {"page_content": "okay namely stuff is indeed determined in the universe we live in a deterministic universe things happen according to the laws of physics and it wouldn't matter if the laws of physics mandated that any old random stuff happened that will still be determined by laws of physics we are governed by laws of physics as it happens we're governed by quantum mechanical laws of physics and laws of general relativity as well things happen according to the laws of physics but this is utterly different utterly different to things being predictable we live in a deterministic universe but not in a predictable universe I would argue and there is predictable in practice and there's predictable in principle and I want to suggest that neither in principle neither in practice nor in principle can we make predictions about the universe as a whole let me give the we can't predict things in practice for the whole universe this is the easy one in order to be able to predict in practice how the universe is going to evolve over time with certainty of some kind that would mean to know the conditions of the universe right now all the initial conditions of the universe which is basically the same thing that one's not necessarily going to be easier than another presumably right now finding the conditions right now the very single particle would be easier than finding the conditions of every single particle in the deep dark past because we only have access to measurements right now so can we get this perfect knowledge that we need of every single particle in order to plug in this supplementary data into our equations of motion for all the particles in the universe it would seem to be clearly not one would wonder by what mechanism you're going to make these measurements of every single particle in the universe what instruments would you need to do this what are they made out of and are these instruments themselves that do the measurements of the particles themselves made of particles for which you need to know their conditions at any given time we have a recursive problem don't we we'll need instruments measuring instrument when it will lead instruments measuring particles the positions and momentum presumably of", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2002"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "992fbe69-a2a5-4bc2-bf1c-5b933ef0819b": {"page_content": "single particle in the universe what instruments would you need to do this what are they made out of and are these instruments themselves that do the measurements of the particles themselves made of particles for which you need to know their conditions at any given time we have a recursive problem don't we we'll need instruments measuring instrument when it will lead instruments measuring particles the positions and momentum presumably of particles but those instruments themselves are made of particles so we need to find the momentum and the position of those particles as well in the instruments but to do that we need more instruments so we've got this weird infinite regress of trying to measure everything including the measuring devices themselves so I don't think that in practice it's possible and in principle we've got a problem as well people often say things like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2120"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f19e21ad-89be-4b75-8543-d42ffea969d2": {"page_content": "well the oracle or the supercomputer to take it away from the supernatural the supposed quantum supercomputer of the future might be able to somehow or other have the conditions of all particles in the universe plugged into it and thereby make a perfect prediction of how the universe is going to unfold off into the infinite future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2176"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "232cca74-d31c-4fd2-a9a5-cd4c154abee5": {"page_content": "but I don't think that it can and and and one reason why I don't think that it can is because the conditions right now the the whatever the conditions are at time t call it now in in this room where I am are going to be different to the conditions for particles on the other side of the galaxy let alone the other side of the universe there is no now here now that is the same for here as compared to the other side of the galaxy relativity tells us that whatever you think is going on here right now might be well and good but your knowledge of what is going on over there is limited by the finite speed of light you cannot know now what is happening there now because guess what there is no simultaneous now here and now over there that is known as the relativity of similar to nayity now I'm somewhat practiced in explaining this so let me do it very very briefly this is that this is the classic so called thought experiment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2202"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a3018a07-693a-4998-bcb6-bc0bfa2ea555": {"page_content": "and it goes like this let's say you're sitting in the middle of a train.\nand it's a special kind of train where you can pull a chain in the middle of the train and it will turn on a light that is immediately above your head until you're left until you're right there is a door and the door is opened at either end of the train by a light so as soon as the light when you switch it on reaches the doors the doors will open.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2270"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "12619eb2-ebc7-45a0-99f4-56273ebf170b": {"page_content": "so if you're right in the middle of the train and you pull the chain and the light switches on then it will reach if you're right in the middle of the train it will reach the front and the rear doors simultaneously or reach both of those doors at the same time so both of the doors will open according to you at precise at the same time now this is all dependent on the fact that the speed of light is constant it doesn't matter whether the light is traveling to the left or to the right forwards or backwards to the rear door or to the front door the speed of light is constant always for all observers that's a fact that is one of the postulates a special relativity but now and here's the key brain bending thing if you've never heard it before let's say you're watching from the outside of the train as someone inside the train performs this experiment they are turning the light on there in the middle of the train they observe the light travel to the front and rear of the train striking the front and rear doors simultaneously causing those doors to open up simultaneously but you are now on the outside let's presume the train is now moving from the left to the right the person inside the train they don't care about this after all the light's still going to travel a certain distance to the front and the certain distance to the back and that distance happens to be the same the doors open simultaneously but for the person outside as they see the train moving from the left and moving to the right what they notice is as the light is switched on as the light is switched on it will travel towards the rear of the train which is coming towards the light now so effectively that light beam has a shorter distance to travel it will strike that rear door first whereas the light beam that is traveling towards the front door now has further to travel because that front door has moved away from where the light began and it has further to travel so for the person outside they see the rear door strike the beam of light causing that rear door to open up not simultaneously with the front door because at the front door the light beam is still yet to reach there because it's a finite speed of light it can only travel so far in so much amount of time and although it struck the rear door", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2293"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "506a7213-9b54-4bea-ac39-fa19a716128a": {"page_content": "to travel because that front door has moved away from where the light began and it has further to travel so for the person outside they see the rear door strike the beam of light causing that rear door to open up not simultaneously with the front door because at the front door the light beam is still yet to reach there because it's a finite speed of light it can only travel so far in so much amount of time and although it struck the rear door opening that rear door the front door is still closed so the permanent person on the outside of the train sees that the rear door is opened and the front door has not yet opened but the person inside the train says no I'm here inside the train and I have seen that both of those doors have opened simultaneously the person on the outside says no they haven't I can see right now I have made an observation these two doors have not opened at the same time have not opened simultaneously now if you've never heard that before it can screw with your mind a little bit I would suggest okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2403"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1342a6cd-34c2-4425-b405-550148931332": {"page_content": "this is the relativity of simultaneity and it's to do with the deep fact of the universe which is the speed of light is constant this is not something that we are used to in day to day life people have struggled for a long time they did struggle for a long time to accept that this is true and physicists know that this is true and you should accept that this is true because this is the explanation of how things work so people won't agree about now about what is happening now for the person inside of the train they say that now the two doors open simultaneously a person on the outside they say no now the doors didn't open simultaneously in fact there is no now in which the doors open simultaneously in other words even for a simple situation like this we can't agree on what the supplementary data might be okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2466"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "94fe6945-508e-4d43-963a-85197f12ade7": {"page_content": "we can't agree let alone what's going to happen here compared to the other side of the universe for every single particle now there's a proviso here I accept because there is something actually that can agree on that's something is called the space time interval they will agree on what that is so there is actually something that's constant in the universe so to speak in relativity but that's beyond the scope of what I'm talking about right now anyways this all comes to bear on this idea that we can have something like perfect knowledge in principle of the initial conditions of the universe now or at any other time making what I would suggest an in principle prediction of the unfolding of the universe despite the fact everything is determined an in principle prediction cannot be done and because the in principle prediction cannot be done there's no point debating about what such and such evolution of the universe would be a family we knew we can't know and it among many other things I think this is well there's many ways but this is a this is a reason why reduction should accept the fact they shouldn't be reductionists but one reason why they can accept the fact that this provides scope for genuine creativity in the universe things to be able to come into being in the universe that weren't there before that can't be adequately explained by and appeal to the laws of physics things like knowledge creation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2512"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2245a1e4-6c71-4ca4-ae5e-f5796cafb490": {"page_content": "okay so all of that was just a response to David's sentence there where he says but for the universe most such calculations are intractable yes intractable to put it mildly back to the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2603"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0bee1963-853b-4162-98f2-1452204ee1d3": {"page_content": "and he writes I have said that we infer the existence of lumpiness in the initial conditions from observations of lumpiness today but that is exceptional most of our knowledge of supplementary data of what specifically happens is in the form of high level theories about emergent phenomena and is therefore by definition not practically expressible in the form of statements about the initial state for example in most solutions of the equations of motion the initial state of the universe does not have the right properties for life to evolve from it therefore our knowledge that life has evolved is a significant piece of the supplementary data we may never know what specifically this restriction implies about the detailed structure of the big bang.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2615"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "119084a6-c4f1-49cb-89e9-e9eb8b4ddaf8": {"page_content": "but we can draw conclusions from it directly for example the earliest accurate estimate of the age of the earth was made on the basis of the biological theory of evolution contradicting the best physics of the day only a reductionist prejudice could make us feel that this was somehow a less valid form of reasoning or that in general it is more fundamental to theorize about the initial state than about emergent features of reality even in the domain of fundamental physics the idea that theories of the initial state contain our deepest knowledge is a serious misconception one reason is that it logically excludes the possibility of explaining the initial state itself why the initial state was what it was.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2661"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "957d4f26-91f2-4a81-a0a8-3be037a222e1": {"page_content": "but in fact we have explanations of many aspects of the initial state and more generally no theory of time can possibly explain it in terms of anything earlier yet we do have deep explanations from general relativity and even more from quantum theory of the nature of time and pausing that again see some more discussion of this in the science of can and can't if you can't wait for my discussion of the fabric of reality chapter 11 which is not going to come for presumably months or of course hopefully buy the book by the fabric of reality and get there much sooner back to the book David writes thus the character of many of our descriptions predictions and explanations of reality bare no resemblance to the initial state plus laws of motion picture that reductionism leads to there is no reason to regard high level theories as in any way second class citizens our theories of subatomic physics and even of quantum theory or relativity are in no way privileged relative to theories about emergent properties none of these areas of knowledge can possibly subsume all the others each of them has logical implications for the others but not all the implications can be stated for they are emergent properties of the other theories domains in fact the very terms high level and low level are misnomers the laws of biology say are high level emergent consequences of the laws of physics but logically some of the laws of physics are then emergent consequences of the laws of biology it could even be that between them the laws governing biological and other emergent phenomena would entirely determine the laws of fundamental physics this this I'd reported this idea that the laws of physics might emerge from some fundamental laws of biology I'm reminds me of that scene in the Big Bang theory with Sheldon who's the character who's the theoretical physicist and he's debating with who would eventually be his girlfriend Amy who's a neuroscientist I think and they're arguing about what's more fundamental or what's logically prior the laws of physics or the laws of neurobiology Sheldon of course says physics is but Amy has this argument that given that all of what we know about physics comes from human brains anyway and understanding of", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2697"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9015e62c-1a42-491b-8bb5-420bd1a235d6": {"page_content": "the character who's the theoretical physicist and he's debating with who would eventually be his girlfriend Amy who's a neuroscientist I think and they're arguing about what's more fundamental or what's logically prior the laws of physics or the laws of neurobiology Sheldon of course says physics is but Amy has this argument that given that all of what we know about physics comes from human brains anyway and understanding of how they work must be a pre-orion away prior to physics if you really want to understand where physics is coming from you've got to study the human brain therefore neuroscience is deeper that what physics is of course that's a silly debate and it misses the point about actually what thinking is and the fact that the physics is outside of brains and all that sort of stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2811"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b7d8f8fc-4757-4917-9004-9044a4a0d141": {"page_content": "but it made me think of that and that idea that David just says there that's quite the striking claim that the laws of biology and other emergent phenomena might completely determine the laws of fundamental physics would certainly upset their Sheldon Cooper's of the world or anyone who wants to argue that the physical laws and initial conditions picture rules out the reality the reality of emergent phenomena free will of course excuse me back to the book David writes but in any case when two theories are logically related logic does not dictate which of them we ought to regard as determining wholly or partly the other that depends on the explanatory or relationships between the two theories the truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy but the ones that contain the deepest explanations the fabric of reality is not only consist of reductionist ingredients like space time and subatomic particles but also of life thought computation and the other things to which those explanations refer what makes a theory more fundamental and less derivative is not its closeness to the supposed predictive base of physics but its closeness to our deepest explanatory theories quantum theory is as I have said one such theory but the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all high level from the point of view of quantum physics they are the theory of evolution primarily the evolution of living organisms epistemology a theory of knowledge and the theory of computation about computers and what they can and cannot in principle compute pausing their my reflection so these are the four strands quantum theory theory evolution epistemology theory of computation now as I said previously our previous episode this idea of theory of everything well already there's unification happening here and to some extent we must concede the theory of computation really has been subsumed into physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=2861"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e33cb09f-cf78-4eef-bab9-23d7572f9806": {"page_content": "anyway it's a theory of physics.\nso it's a part of quantum physics I mean the theory of quantum computation really is the theory of computation as viewed through the lens of quantum theory and places you know strict constraints on what computers can and can't do namely what those quantum laws of physics say that they can and given that brains the things that create knowledge about the universe are a kind of computer then the theory of knowledge really is very much a part of this theory of computation which is a part of quantum physics.\nas well so there are these deep deep links.\nand I said in the Nexus videos well well given that we are involved biological organisms with kind of we human beings we are the we are the thing the entity in the universe that unifies all of these things in a very real physical way.\nokay we've evolved to create knowledge which is itself a kind of computation that is done by a computer obeying quantum laws of physics.\nokay so again my Nexus video for more about that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b8b279c1-9eb2-4a4b-bcac-12321cdbda0c": {"page_content": "okay let's go back to the book and David writes as I shall show such deep and diverse connections have been discovered between the basic principles of these four apparently independent subjects that it has become impossible to reach our best understanding of any one of them without also understanding the other three the four of them taken together former coherent explanatory structure that is so far reaching and has come to encompass so much of our understanding of the world that in my view it may already properly be called the first real theory of everything thus we have arrived at a significant moment in the history of ideas the moment when our scope of understanding begins to be fully universal up to now all our understanding has been about some aspect of reality untypical of the whole in the future it will be about a unified conception of reality all explanations will be understood against the backdrop of universality and every new idea will automatically tend to illuminate not just a particular subject but to varying degrees.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3070"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "127c87c0-5dce-4b4a-8550-a1be58c85e6f": {"page_content": "all subjects the dividend of understanding that we will eventually reap from this last great unification may far surpass that yielded by any previous one for we shall see that it is not only physics that is being unified and explained here and not only science but also potentially the far reaches of philosophy logic and mathematics ethics politics and aesthetics perhaps everything that we currently understand and probably much that we do not yet understand porting their my reflection if I was to reflect on why I would bother spending so much of my time explaining these ideas why I would devote a rather large fraction of my life to doing this to trying to do public outreach to trying to spread these ideas to try and have people appreciate the significance of this so that they too could perhaps contribute to solving this particular problem then it's all encapsulated there I mean how much more grand a vision of reality do you want there have been unifications in the past electricity and magnetism into a unified theory of electromagnetism by Faraday and Gauss and others the unification of a standard model of particle physics the unification of space and time by Einstein you know these unifications that have happened physics but here David is talking about how we can have the unification of disparate theories in different subjects coming together to give us a far deeper richer explanation of reality as a whole that will touch everything everything everything that we know philosophy logic mathematics ethics politics aesthetics okay you mentioned aesthetics of course in the beginning of infinity as well sharpens that up too.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3134"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d71e2be-7640-4aa6-a632-7f76ec75c676": {"page_content": "so it's not like this is just throw away kind of I'm I'm I'm hopes that he is that he's dreaming up here there's actually been progress made on lots of these points between the time of writing through the beginning of infinity and through to the science of can and can't he's under work as I've said before quantum computation that entire field was a unification of computation and quantum theory.\nso it's happened what more do you want out of life you know in terms of understanding and being able to solve problems than being able to unify all of that stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3256"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a29b717d-bc8d-46e3-94b5-538dca164702": {"page_content": "so I can't think of a better kind of science to really dive into them this one all other sciences are ultimately going to be aspects of this grand theory of everything and of course the interesting thing about this particular theory of everything is it doesn't solve all problems it just provides a framework in which we can come to understand solutions to those problems better and of course better and so as as as he said elsewhere it would this would only be the first such theory of everything giving us a vision there to see the next theory of everything which would unify even more presumably once we have this this kind of theory of everything we would then it would reveal new problems because for any solution any theory will open up new problems that we could not possibly have imagined before in the world view that we presently hold and so that would enable new better solutions to rise to the new better problems that we discover let's go back to the last very last part of the book and now I'll read a little bit of the glossary that that it's a that the end that is at the end of this book as well David writes quote what conclusion then would I address to my younger self who rejected the proposition that the growth of knowledge was making the world ever less comprehensible I would agree with him though I now think that the important issue is not really whether what our particular species understands can be understood by one of its members it is whether the fabric of reality itself is truly unified and comprehensible there is every reason to believe that it is as a child I merely knew this now I can explain it end of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3296"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a61f0735-7f32-45e3-bed5-0327e876f3d5": {"page_content": "okay.\nand that there's terminology at the end there's a little glossary at the end.\nand I won't always read this.\nbut I just think that there's some stuff here that is worth going over I'm not going to read all the words in the terminology section in the little glossary at the end of the chapter.\nbut this is worth pointing out at the end of the chapter he's got a definition of the word explanation and in brackets he says roughly a statement about the nature of things and the reasons for things so there you see and as I asked David in my questions for David one of my recent questions for David and you can find these on YouTube or on podcast I might even put a link.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3412"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6b592082-097c-41ef-a4d4-bc0ed225b1f0": {"page_content": "I hopefully I remember I'll put a link below this video to this particular one asking David about you know sort of the the motivation for sharpening up this understanding of what an explanation is in the beginning of infinity in the fact these TED talk you know he says that explanations are hard to vary while still accounting for the thing they purport to account for the phenomena they purport to account for but here we don't have that and the reason that we don't have it here is because he thought and he says of himself you know erroneously he thought that it was just an uncontroversial kind of a word.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3444"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "798a245b-21ba-4485-9d94-db6d00815dea": {"page_content": "but it's not of course we now know that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d8b6e67-f364-453f-ba8a-5c449ec42531": {"page_content": "and so he is sharpened it up very healthfully for the rest of us and I think that this really pushes a popular in epistemology ahead you know in a very valuable way because explanations reach beyond science into every other field that we happen to be interested in and it also sharpens up what science is about science isn't merely about testable theories or even testable explanations it's about finding good explanations of things good explanations of things as defined in the fabric of reality go to there go there for that now the next word he defines is instrumentalism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3481"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "72a4690b-cde4-41ef-9d0c-723f7020b694": {"page_content": "and it's a word that comes up here in the beginning of infinity elsewhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "495a619c-29b3-4562-9add-ee288069e2a0": {"page_content": "and it's going to come up throughout the fabric of reality especially as we talk about the physics sections instrumentalism means the view that the purpose of a scientific theory to predict the outcomes of experiments now that definition is only you know the only point of that definition it seems to me it only applies to physics and even then usually only to particular kinds of physics particle physics and quantum physics and stuff you know it's a bias from those areas you ask a geophysicist if the purpose of science is to predict the outcomes of experiments and they're not going to be happy with that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3526"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69d9d78a-aebb-4ce8-b26e-4cc499effb20": {"page_content": "okay.\na geophysicist actually wants to know what really is in the center of the earth or in the ground beneath their feet they want to know that that's where the minerals are okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3564"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ef26876d-6b38-4390-8dcc-97b2d189a1b1": {"page_content": "it's not merely predicting that the resistivity found by a particular meter that you're using to look into the ground happens to be this or that that's not what it's about certainly not what an astronomer wants to know either okay astronomer wants to know if there really is a planet orbiting that star or if that star is a white dwarf as opposed to a red giant and so on much less biology medicine think of any science that you're interested in okay instrumentalism is this weed kind of philosophy that some philosophers are interested in and they're only interested in it because there's this bad turn in theoretical physics quantum physics and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3575"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb42cf84-08be-43ba-a37a-45fd763d13ca": {"page_content": "so on okay the next definition yeah positivism is the next word positivism David says an extreme form of instrumentalism which holds at all statements other than those describing or predicting observations are meaningless this view is itself meaningless according to the time criterion.\nyes precisely okay so positivism just rules out understanding the world at all really I mean describing or predicting observations I mean all of philosophy mathematics is not about observations you know pure mathematics is not about observations.\nbut it's very useful there's lots of things that aren't about observations and anyway all statements I mean what about fiction what about art.\nI mean what is a positivist supposed to and this is where Wittgenstein you know it's called the two versions of Wittgenstein you know we blame Wittgenstein for a lot of this right Ludwig Wittgenstein in his tractatus his first book this impenetrable kind of it's not nonsense.\nbut but basically he was trying to say that the purpose of language is simply to describe stuff.\nokay.\nand if you if you can't describe stuff.\nthen well it's pointless useless metaphysical baggage and you can you can do away with it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3619"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ef49f57-7016-4ade-8fa3-db397897f000": {"page_content": "but you know in his latter life you know that the second Wittgenstein Wittgenstein version two I think his book was philosophical investigations he rejects what he did in the tractatus he said as well I was wrong about all that because he recognizes a whole lot of other reasons that language has for existing asking people questions comforting people writing fiction and so on doing art and there's all these other functions of language that aren't just about describing stuff or stating facts there are other purposes for language how this escaped him the first time around I don't know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3706"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f781d5bb-7256-400f-ba8b-9d93100a2277": {"page_content": "but he was focused very very narrowly very narrowly on science and problems within science and trying to be a hard knows macho kind of philosopher who just wanted to get rid of the supernatural fair enough or discussions of of mystical stuff fair enough to some extent fair enough.\nokay I can understand the motivation even if I don't agree with it but sometimes people go too far as I like to say baby in the bathwater and all that you know you you want to try and sharpen up things in philosophy but that doesn't mean you just do away with everything just because you've managed to dissect out certain amounts of nonsense.\nokay.\nokay.\nnext word David defines I'm missing a few of them but he also defines emergence and he says an emergent phenomena is one such as life thought or computation about which there are comprehensible facts or explanations that are not simply deducible from lower level theories but which may be explicable or predictable by higher level theories referring directly to that phenomenon.\nokay.\nso.\nyeah.\nso emergence is a key part of understanding the world you need to appreciate that and and common sense realism is about this right man on the street type thinking is of course of course these things really exist okay.\nand this is why people make fun of philosophers you know they they knock on a table.\nand they go you know is this real kind of thing this is real and they have long debates about whether or not the table is real man on the street looks at that and goes.\nyeah that's ridiculous.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3745"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e2a3011-30e4-4dc7-9f52-0b6ea5435b35": {"page_content": "it's like small brain big brain you know a galaxy brain kind of thing you know small brain is you know like the table is real and then supposedly the big brain philosopher comes along and says well actually the table is not real because all that's there are fundamental particles and the fundamental particles are only things that really truly exist the table doesn't exist who of course galaxy brain then looks at that and goes well that's ridiculous you know all you're doing is kind of thinking in the abstract now you're not really connecting with how objects actually do exist in reality cats exist my cat happens to be sitting here today coffee mugs exist you know these emergent things exist people exist and in fact some of these things that are emergent things are also fundamental things kind of fundamental thing is a thing which features and the explanations of lots of other things as well I like to say people are fundamental as fundamental as fundamental particles are and one day we might consider them in a sense more fundamental than fundamental particles because people might be able to exist in a universe without particles.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3847"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f35c0412-a9fd-452e-9c6a-7a927523509f": {"page_content": "okay we might be able to be instantiated in something other than particles I don't know how right now you know some sort of gravitational pattern spacetime or something I don't know but in order to have a person you just need a way of processing information anyway people people are this confluence of as I've already said and emphasized the theory of evolution the theory of computation quantum theory and epistemology and so we're fundamental because we appear in a sense across all of those it.\nwell we're not really there in quantum physics.\nbut we're certainly there in epistemology it doesn't epistemology doesn't make sense in a world in which you don't have knowledge creators in so far as you got evolutionary universe and there is a possibility of people arising in such a universe and if you got people in such a universe then you've got these things that are computers of a client in fact you just need animals for that.\nokay I'm starting to rant and so let me stop here for today next time we move on to chapter two shadows which is as I have said before probably the chapter that most affected me when I first read the fabric of reality back in 1997 because it was the chapter that cured me of my up until then complete disillusionment with quantum physics I'd been doing quantum physics at university I didn't understand what was going on you know I sort of I could do the problems.\nbut it was like what am I doing I don't get it it doesn't make any sense to me this is all nonsense.\nand I was I was reassured by lecturers.\nthat well.\nyeah it's supposed to be nonsense it's just a bit we just shut up and calculate so to speak and I'd read lots of popular science books and none of them really helped they all made it sound mystical until shadows until I read the fabric of reality chapter two so that's next time look forward to that.\nit's going I would presume to be I think I'll get through it fairly quickly the reason is because I've talked about the multiverse before I've got a five or six-part series up there on YouTube all about the multiverse.\nand so I'm going to be referring to that quite a bit so we'll be doing a a slimmed down version of chapter two of the fabric of reality shadows but until then bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyb_jjOUJ4I&t=3920"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4135fb7f-454f-45a8-b411-fdfba69c42a2": {"page_content": "Hello and welcome to episode 27 of ToKCast.\nI say 27 on YouTube it's episode 27 but if you go to iTunes or if you go to Podbean or one of those other places where the audio only versions of these podcasts come out you'll find the numbering are slightly different there are more audio only versions of ToKCast and what there are video versions all of the beginning of Infinity material is definitely on YouTube however.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=19"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d3b8beed-acc1-4057-9605-00c7c5a7bb4b": {"page_content": "Okay so we're still on chapter 11 this is the multiverse it's part 4 now of the multiverse and I'm anticipating today that we'll finish the multiverse so I'm going to be sticking reasonably closely to the book today but also at the end we're going to do a little bit of a short story and the purpose of the short story is to emphasize exactly how the multiverse is indeed a testable theory and testable against other ways of looking at quantum theory that have been tried over the years the other so-called interpretations so we tend not to call the multiverse an interpretation of quantum theory we tend to just call it quantum theory in the same way that dinosaurs are just how we explain what fossils are we tend not to add on this whole idea of dinosaurs are in our interpretation of fossils even though they are but they are the only interpretation of fossils they're the only scientific interpretation of fossils and in the same way if we take quantum theory literally we are kind of forced into this idea of the multiverse because it is a simply a literal reading of what the equations are saying in particular I'd like to refer to the Schrodinger wave equation so the Schrodinger wave equation describes all the for example positions in which an electron can occupy around a nucleus and there's a variety of them simultaneously and so taking that literally means that the electron really is in these different positions now not in the one universe that's not possible but in although there is a sense in which the electron is spread out around the nucleus as we've talked about before it has this kind of ink block character as David describes at the beginning of infinity but more than that it extends across many universes occupying all physically possible places across the multiverse around that nucleus but let's go back to the book now recapping what's been said in previous episodes we've been talking about this story where there are people on a spaceship that has a transporter and the transporter malfunctions and in one spaceship the transporter malfunction causes a spark which causes a person to spill some coffee which then causes them to", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=43"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e2a0e297-4885-49ec-b363-e45ff64150a9": {"page_content": "occupying all physically possible places across the multiverse around that nucleus but let's go back to the book now recapping what's been said in previous episodes we've been talking about this story where there are people on a spaceship that has a transporter and the transporter malfunctions and in one spaceship the transporter malfunction causes a spark which causes a person to spill some coffee which then causes them to have an interaction with another person which leads to romance and so on and in the other universe there is no such spark there is no transporter malfunction so we have this differentiation of the universes that prior to which prior to which the spark or malfunction happened we had fungible universes we had two universes but they are absolutely identical in all respects and then this deterministic law this deterministic event causes the universes to differentiate and we had a story going on so far about that it's a fictional story you diving straight back into the beginning of infinity David writes in the real multiverse there is no need for the transporter or any other special apparatus to cause histories to differentiate and to rejoin under the laws of quantum physics elementary particles are undergoing such processes of their own accord all the time moreover histories may split into more than two often into many trillions each characterized by a slightly different direction of motion or difference in other physical variables the elementary particle concerned also in general the resulting histories have unequal measures so let us now dispense with the transporter in the fictional multiverse too let's pause their my reflection so only in very contrived quantum experiments might we get equal measures by which we mean 50 50 so let's say for example we have a photon heading towards a half silver mirror now we can contrive the experiment there such that half of the instances of the electron go straight through and half of the electrons instances get reflected off that's where we have equal measures that's all measure means it's kind of like a proportion however in general this is not what happens when an electron or when a subatomic particle in elementary particle has a choice about what to do I", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=150"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4f0839f1-74d1-4926-b4b2-27de9184911a": {"page_content": "towards a half silver mirror now we can contrive the experiment there such that half of the instances of the electron go straight through and half of the electrons instances get reflected off that's where we have equal measures that's all measure means it's kind of like a proportion however in general this is not what happens when an electron or when a subatomic particle in elementary particle has a choice about what to do I say choice of course it doesn't have conscious choice when there is a possibility of it going one way rather than another it typically isn't 50 50 the measure of universes is some other proportion you know it could be spread amongst 10 20 30 as long as they all add up to 100 in the end it could be any percentage that you like and when I say any percentage that you like of course I mean any percentage as determined by the physical laws that are governing that particular event at that particular time let's go back to the book the rate of growth in the number of distinct histories is quite mind boggling even though thanks to interference there is now a certain amount of spontaneous rejoining as well because of this rejoining the flow of information in the real multiverse is not divided into strictly autonomous subplers branching autonomous histories although there is still no communication between histories in the sense of message sending they are intimately affecting each other because the effective interference on a history depends on what other histories are present not only is the multiverse no longer perfectly partitioned into histories individual particles are not perfectly partitioned into instances for example consider the following interference phenomenon where x and y now represent different values of the position of a single particle so we've got here x and y so that the particle could be at either position x or at position y.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=261"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "04e86f0b-aa01-4a3c-9a01-552bde38c33e": {"page_content": "and then these histories join together so that the particle is now at position x.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d6500182-1250-45a8-8476-383e976b8936": {"page_content": "and then at some later time it differentiates again the universe differentiates again such that the particle could now be in x or y once more and the blurb underneath that picture says how instances of a particle lose their identity during interference has the instance of the particle at x stated x or moved at y move to y as the instance of particle y return to y or move to x and David's about to explain why this kind of question doesn't really make any sense because fungibility completely erases in a sense the identity of which instances which instance it doesn't make any sense to ask the question let's persevere David right because these two groups of instances of the particle initially at different positions have gone through a moment of being fungible there is no such thing as which of them has ended up at which final position this sort of interference is going on all the time even for a single particle in a region of otherwise empty space so there is in general no such thing as the same instance of a particle at different times.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=376"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dee56ae6-df9d-468c-8c76-b8dc59deaf07": {"page_content": "okay just pause their my reflection this is just like with the finance example we had right at the beginning of the chapter if there's two dollars in your bank account and the tax office owns one of them it makes no sense to say which of them is yours and which of them is the tax office all we know is that one of them belongs to your one belongs to tax office but they're fungible even though there are two there's diversity within fungibility there's a difference between them however we can't say which of them belongs to so our usual way of speaking our language is sort of reached its limits when we start talking about these things like the multiverse right at the edge of our understanding of science and I'll just emphasize now as well the astonishing fact that you yourself are made up of uncountably infinite numbers of instances of yourself possibly uncountably infinite number if it's not uncountably infinitely large then it's certainly a very large number of instances of yourself occupy the space and time where you are now that's very strange you might think what does it mean for me to be made up of many many instances of myself well it doesn't mean anything over and above what you thought of your self identity prior to knowing this when something happens where you actually physically differentiate into two versions of yourself where you could have gone left or right and you ended up going left and copies of you went to the right you're no longer one of those copies that went to the right you're only the instances that went to the left all those instances that went to the right they're no longer you in a sense they're copies of you I would say all the copies that went to left will dare you and so you feel the way you feel having gone to the left and you will never know what it was like to have gone to the right or what happens to that person it's like the sliding doors movie so what I would say about personal identity is then is that they are now two versions of you but you are you and you are different too the copy that just went to the right you are only the copies that went to the left and that continues to happen they continues to be this branching if you like this branching of not only", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=439"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8c584232-6cb2-454e-9cc2-48a8c17a9023": {"page_content": "it was like to have gone to the right or what happens to that person it's like the sliding doors movie so what I would say about personal identity is then is that they are now two versions of you but you are you and you are different too the copy that just went to the right you are only the copies that went to the left and that continues to happen they continues to be this branching if you like this branching of not only elementary particles but everything in the physical universe does this as well again amazing astonishing but not unbelievable I'm not unbelievable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=551"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "80424ea8-c5d3-46e8-9cf7-38180d26f1a5": {"page_content": "okay let's go back to the book even within the same history particles in general do not retain their identities over time for example during a collision between two atoms history is the event split into something like this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=576"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a54f53d4-e80a-4277-b669-a1c8b7702e25": {"page_content": "so either we can have the two atoms that apparently collide collide such that one retains its identity another retains its identity having bounced off one another that's what that first diagram is showing or something like that which is where the two particles pass through each other in either case they retain their identities and David writes so for each particle individually the event is rather like a collision with a semi-sovered mirror each atom plays the role of the mirror for the other atom but the multi-versal view of both particles looks like this where at the end of the collision some of the instances of each atom have become fungible with what was originally a different atom of course they're just my reflection what I was saying before about a human being okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=591"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff643dde-176a-405c-9a4c-218ede8fe9f3": {"page_content": "this happens for everything.\nokay it doesn't just happen for human being as it happens for any living thing cats and dogs and happens for planets it happens for anything that you like where something could have happened one way but in fact happens a different way although that differentiation can happen so far as I know it's not possible for anything much larger than elementary particles perhaps atoms.\nokay.\nfine but nothing like a human being can then interfere with itself it's not like the two instances of you one having gone one set of instances having gone left and one set of instances having turned right will then recombine and interfere I don't think that's physically possible back to the book for the same reason there is no such thing as the speed of one instance of a particle at a given location speed is defined as distance divided by time taken.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=642"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d1656f01-8312-4d69-8dd3-9c600fb81e09": {"page_content": "but that is not meaningful in situations where there's no such thing as a particular instance of the particle over time instead a collection of fungible instances of a particle in general have several speeds meaning that in general they will do different things in instant later this is another instance of diversity within fungibility not only can a fungible collection with the same position have different speeds a fungible group with the same speed can have different positions furthermore it follows from the loss of quantum physics that for any fungible collection of instances of a physical object some of their attributes must be diverse this is known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle after the physicist Werner Heisenberg who deduced the earliest version from quantum theory pause their my reflection emphasizing the word deduced there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=692"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fede7e31-409b-4a60-83a6-b5d4a22e9b60": {"page_content": "so this is not a an axiom or a postulate of quantum theory it is derived from quantum theory from more basic things it is a consequence of the rest of quantum theory that is what the uncertainty principle is about so poorly named as David will explain shortly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=735"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "09a71d2b-7e67-469c-a111-11abe9c287a7": {"page_content": "but it just means that for any instance or for any elementary particle let's say let's stick with elementary particle like an electron it doesn't have a super sharp position it's not in a particular place at any given time it is spread out in space like an ink blot so too is it speed and so in fact the way that the the way that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle works is that the sharper that you try to make your the position of your electron then the less sharp things like the speed of the electron become now for anyone who has studied classical physics you don't even need quantum physics for that you will understand something called diffraction perhaps okay diffraction of light this is where you narrow a slit through which light can pass and the more and more narrow you make the slit the more that the light going through the slit spreads out it diffracts more and more this is certainly related to quantum theory but to a first approximation we can simply talk about the fact that we are isolating the photons that pass through the slit to a particular point in space we've narrowed the x value and by narrowing that x value the delta.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=756"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9d48c29d-176b-4055-831a-7ccdf5290a5a": {"page_content": "x value the possible positions where it can be what we make uncertain is all the different ways in which it can have momentum it can have speed and so it could go more to the left and more to the right.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=834"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "516c381d-5f1d-4eeb-8ab4-d3ebaff5adc1": {"page_content": "so the uncertainty principle actually kind of predates quantum theory in a certain sense there's a version in classical theory just to do with diffraction simple classical diffraction back to the book David Wright hence for instance an individual electron always has a range of different locations and a range of different speeds and different directions of motion as a result it's typical behavior is to spread out gradually in space it's quantum mechanical law of motion resembles the law governing the spread of an ink blot.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=847"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "482a4a8b-ab66-4dcf-82a1-2299ac42e71e": {"page_content": "so if it is initially located in a very small region it spreads out rapidly and the larger it gets the more slowly it spreads the entanglement information that it carries ensures that no two instances of it can ever contribute to the same history or more precisely at times and places where there are histories it exists in instances which can never collide if a particle's range of speeds is centered not on zero but on some other value then the whole of the ink blot moves with its center obeying approximately the laws of motion in classical physics in quantum physics this is how motion in general works skipping a short bit and then David writes now put a proton into the middle of that gradually spreading cloud of instances of a single electron the proton has a positive charge which attracts the negatively charged electron as a result the cloud stops spreading when when it size is such that tendency to spread outwards due to its uncertainty principle diversity is exactly balanced by its attraction to the proton the resulting structure is called an atom of hydrogen historically this explanation of what atoms are was one of the first triumphs of quantum theory for atoms could not exist at all according to classical physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=884"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0b1c01e-283e-4e5e-bb3c-5c02497f3061": {"page_content": "okay pause there just my reflection I'm reason why classically atoms shouldn't exist is because in classical physics we knew that for example accelerating electrons in a magnetic field causes electromagnetic radiation to be produced and so this is how radio works for example.\nright so a radio a radio transmitter radio transmitter will literally radio transmitter is like just a piece of metal right.\nit's a.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=959"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4d96b2a8-a6a3-4f72-a612-d3055947f1a5": {"page_content": "it's an aerial it's a wire and what you do is you accelerate an electron up and down that aerial up and down the wire or antenna I think sometimes it's called anyway the transmitter is a piece of wire and the faster that the electron goes up and down there then the higher the frequency of the radiation that escapes from there but you have to keep on providing energy in order for the electron to go up and down so that you can produce more and more photons of light coming out okay radio photons if you want to create radio waves okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=987"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8af283cb-ada2-444d-8b15-60c067ca6ad2": {"page_content": "and so this is the principle of how radio's operate electrons vibrate up and down a piece of metal of some sort.\nokay it doesn't have to be metal these days and the mobile phone.\nit's not necessarily metal.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "04834591-1487-47b6-84e3-a78e91e9d146": {"page_content": "I mean it's a carbon area or something whatever the case energy is provided to the electrons making them go up and down and that creates electromagnetic radiation now if you don't keep on adding energy to this system to the transmitter then of course the radiation will stop the electrons will stop moving what has this got to do with atoms well if an atom is really an electron going around a proton then it's the same idea as the aerial the electron should be emitting photons of radiation of some sort but in general they don't okay except under very special circumstances the electron is going around but not emitting a radiation but it should be emitting radiation and especially because the electron is moving in a circle.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1024"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cf8372d3-2212-4d6c-96c7-a22b4e0d9076": {"page_content": "so it's changing its direction while moving in a surface moving in a sphere something like that.\nit's going around anyway in order for it to go around you know curved path that means it's changing its direction if it's changing its direction there must be some energy causing it to change its direction.\nokay a force has to be applied and if there is no external source of energy doing this causing it to change its direction then there must be an internal source of energy causing it to do that which should cause it to decay into the orbit to decay into the nucleus so all atoms should have collapsed on the classical theory.\nbut they don't so let's just read what David has to say about this to he writes it used to be a mystery why electrons do not fall onto the nucleus in a flash of radiation neither the nucleus nor the electrons individually have more than 110 thousandth the diameter of the atom.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1074"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a4aaf32-5eef-4841-9097-80f55cd8cac7": {"page_content": "so what keeps them so far apart and what makes atoms stable at that size in non-technical accounts the structure of atoms is sometimes explained by an algae with the solar system one imagines electrons in orbit around the nucleus like planets around the sun but that does not match the reality for one thing gravitationally bound objects do slowly spiral in emitting gravitational radiation the process has been observed for binary neutron stars and the corresponding electromagnetic process in an atom would be over in a fraction of a second for another the existence of solid matter which consists of atoms packed closer together is evidence that atoms cannot easily penetrate each other yet solar system certainly could furthermore it turns out that in hydrogen atom the electron in its lowest energy state is not orbiting at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1125"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a07527ed-287b-4f14-9370-94b9b46c2673": {"page_content": "but as I said just sitting there like an ink plot it's uncertainty principle tendency to spread out exactly balanced by the electrostatic force in this way the phenomena of interference and diversity within fungibility are integral to the structure and stability of all static objects including all solid body bodies just as they are integral to all motion so pause there my reflection here just to drive that point home if the classical version of the atom was true and we had this electron orbiting the nucleus then indeed the atom would be almost entirely empty space and if the atom was entirely empty space then atoms should go through each other and no matter would really be solid because you have this single little electron orbiting this tiny little nucleus and when you sit on a chair you should just go through the chair and worsen that you and the chair should go straight through to the core of the earth etc.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1166"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "99a431eb-7403-49f0-bd2a-9243e34eb2c1": {"page_content": "okay this should be no solid matter to begin with if the classical version of the atom was true but the classical version of the atom is not true in fact what's going on is the atom is a multiverse object.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1227"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89b84f45-9d92-4aa8-bfbc-d5c0f0ca0d87": {"page_content": "and so there are many many instances of the electron and because there are many instances of the electron spread around the nucleus like an ink blot then you can't have one atom penetrating another atom very easily that's extremely difficult happens in certain circumstances when you get into neutron stars and the weed areas of astrophysics and whatever putting outside that's situations where the gravitational force actually overcomes the electrostatic force but this tendency to spread out means that the negative cloud of any given atom such as the chair on which you sit the atoms on the chair in which you sit and the reason that you know you can't push one hand through the other hand no matter how hard you push is because the atoms in one hand contain electrons which are spread out around the atom kind of like a cloud but better to say like this all the fungible many many of the fungible instances are spread out all around the nucleus and so to the atoms in this hand.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1237"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "24adf878-e1a3-4d8c-993f-aad036b1872f": {"page_content": "and so the fungible instances here are repelling the fungible instances there and you can't get matted to go through matter for that reason back to the book the term uncertainty principle is misleading let me stress that it has nothing to do with uncertainty or any other distressing psychological sensations that the pioneers of quantum physics might have felt when an electron has more than one speed or more than one position that has nothing to do with anyone being uncertain what the speed is any more than anyone is uncertain which dollar in their bank account belongs to the tax authority the diversity of attributes in both cases is a physical fact independent of what anyone knows or feels nor by the way is the uncertainty principle are principle for that suggests an independent postulate that could logically be dropped or replaced to obtain a different theory in fact one could know more drop it from content theory than one could admit eclipses from astronomy there is no principle of eclipses their existence can be deduced from theories of much greater generality such as those of the solar systems geometry and dynamics similarly the uncertainty principle is deduced from the principles of quantum theory thanks to the strong internal interference that it is continuously undergoing a typical electron is an irreducibly multiversal object and not a collection of parallel universal parallel histories objects that is to say it has multiple positions and multiple speeds without being divisible into autonomous sub entities each of which has one speed and one position even different electrons do not have completely separate identities.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1300"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a29c5d82-51e8-4f1b-ae54-7ad7381603a7": {"page_content": "so the reality is an electron field throughout the whole of space and disturbance has spread through this field as waves at the speed of light or below this is what gave rise to the often quoted misconception among look pioneers of quantum theory that electrons and likewise other particles are particles and waves at the same time there is a field or waves in the multiverse for every individual particle that we observe in a particular universe pause their my reflection this can be very difficult to understand so there is a strict sense in which wave particle duality is absolutely false namely that within any given universe like the one you occupy the electron is like this ink lotting I prefer to regard it as more closely related to our concept of particle than anything else one it's not is a wave the electron can't both be isolated at a single point and spread out throughout all of space at the same time the wave function of an electron would suggest that it is spread out greatly throughout a vast region of space that's what the wave function says and that's what the wave model of the electron would also suggest as well if we were going to go down that path in regard electrons as waves the electron is acts far more like a particle.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1399"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d41251a-9df3-45b5-9b44-22794220fe31": {"page_content": "okay in the experiments that can be done like the photoelectric effect showed the electron is in fact far more particle like now that's one thing the other thing is that the multiverse exists and if you could have a god's eye view of the multiverse then you would see that the electron for example to pick one particle occupies all the physically possible places that the electron could occupy given its wave function and that would look like a wave across the entire multiverse across all the universes any person in a particular universe can't have access to all those other universes can't observe those other universes but.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1487"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4ef389ce-02b9-45d1-828c-c939a5bd8682": {"page_content": "someone who was in theory like a god outside of the multiverse I'm looking down at subatomic particles would see that they're in all these different positions and that that multiverse a object which is the subatomic particle or the electron would resemble a wave all of its positions would seem to be a wave because it would be this continuously changing varying thing sometimes commonly in this place less commonly in that place pick up peaks and troughs and so it would look like a wave the the and why in which you would see all the different positions of the electron would resemble something like a wave.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1528"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d27f40f-7f8a-4898-9d25-445b861e1c83": {"page_content": "okay now I'm skipping another paragraph here and then David writes a history is part of the multiverse in the same sense that a geological stratum is part of the Earth's crust one history is distinguished from the others by the values of physical variables just as stratum is distinguished from others by its chemical composition and by the types of fossils found in it and so on a stratum and a history are both channels of information flow they preserve information because although their contents change over time they are approximately autonomous that is to say the changes in a particular stratum or history depend on most entirely on conditions inside it and not elsewhere it is because of that autonomy but a fossil found today can be used as evidence of what was present when that stratum was formed similarly it is why within a history using classical physics one can successfully predict some aspects of the future of that history from its past a stratum like a history has no separate existence over and above the objects in it it consists of them nor does the stratum have a well-defined edges also there are regions of the earth for instance near volcanoes where strata have merged although I think there are no geological processes that split and reemerge strata in the way the history split and reemerge there are regions of earth such as the core where there are never being strata and there are regions such as the atmosphere where strata do form but their content interact and mix on much shorter time scales than in the crust similarly there are regions the multiverse that contain short lived histories and others that do not even approximately contain histories however there is one big difference between the ways in which strata and histories emerge from their respective underlying phenomena although not every atom in the earth's crust can be unambiguously assigned to a particular stratum most of the atoms that form a stratum.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b56a69a-fcf2-4a06-9a8d-c5613ab75864": {"page_content": "can and contrast every atom in an everyday object is a multiverse object not partitioned into nearly autonomous instances and nearly autonomous histories yet every area yet everyday objects such as star ships and betrothed couples which are made of such particles are petitioned very accurately into nearly autonomous histories with exactly one instance one position one speed of each object in a history that is because of the suppression of interference by entanglement as I explained interference almost always happens either very soon after splitting or not at all that is why the larger and more complex and object or process is the less its gross behavior is affected by interference at that coarse grained level of emergence events in the multiverse consist of autonomous histories with each coarse grained history consisting of a swald of many histories differing only in microscopic details but affecting each other's growing interference spheres of differentiation tend to grow at nearly the speed of light so on the scale of everyday life and above those coarse grained histories can justly be called universes in the ordinary sense of the word each of them some what resembles the objects of classical physics and they can usually be called parallel because they are nearly autonomous to the inhabitants each looks like each looks very like a single universe would pause their my reflection just recall when I was speaking earlier about how it's rather strange to think that you yourself are made of many many fungible instances of yourself right now and when a choice is made in the universe such as you could have gone left or right instances of you that have gone right cease to be you where if you choose to go left instances of you that choose to go left are still you until such time as there's another choice to make however we don't get interference of human beings they don't come back together for the reasons that they've just says here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1671"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1a279b4b-9529-43b2-8fcf-59c91be36230": {"page_content": "okay the larger and larger the object becomes the less and less it's going to be affected by interference okay back to the book microscopic events which are accidentally amplified to that coarse grained level like the voltage surge in our story a rare in any one coarse grained history but common in the multiverse as a whole for example consider a single cosmic ray particle traveling in the direction of earth from deep space that particle must be traveling in a range of slightly different directions because because the uncertainty principle implies that in the multiverse it must spread sideways like an ink block as it travels by the time it arrives this ink block may well be wider than the width of the whole earth so most of it misses and the rest strikes everywhere on the exposed surface remember this is just a single particle which may consist of fungible instances the next thing that happens is that they cease to be fungible splitting through their interaction with atoms at their point of arrival into a finite by huge number of instances each of which is the origin of a separate history in each such history there is an autonomous instance of the cosmic ray particle which will dissipate its energy in creating a cosmic ray shower of electrically charged particles thus in different histories such a shower will occur at different locations in some that shower will provide a conducting path down which a lightning bolt will travel every atom on the surface of the earth will be struck by such lightning in some history in other histories one of those cosmic ray particles will struck a human cell damaging some already damaged DNA in such a way as to make the cell cancerists some non negligible proportion of all cancers are caused in this way as a result there exist histories in which any given person alive in our history at any time is killed soon afterwards by cancer there exist other histories in which the course of a battle of war is changed by such an event or by a lightning bolt at exactly the right place in time or by any countless other unlikely random events this makes it highly plausible that there exist histories in which events have played out more or less as alternative history stories such as fatherland and roma atona in", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1785"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a569ded-49c0-4150-94a7-39b645157284": {"page_content": "histories in which any given person alive in our history at any time is killed soon afterwards by cancer there exist other histories in which the course of a battle of war is changed by such an event or by a lightning bolt at exactly the right place in time or by any countless other unlikely random events this makes it highly plausible that there exist histories in which events have played out more or less as alternative history stories such as fatherland and roma atona in or which or in which events in your own life played out very differently for better or worse the great deal of fiction is therefore close to a fact somewhere in the multiverse but not all fiction for instance there are no histories in which my story is the transport of malfunction of true because they require different laws of physics nor are there histories in which the fundamental constants of nature such as the speed of light or the charge on electron are different there is however a sensing which different laws of physics appear to be true for a period of time in some histories because of a sequence of unlikely accidents they may also be universities in which there are different laws of physics as required and anthropic explanations are fine-chaining but as yet there are no viable theory there is no viable theory of such a multiverse pause their my reflection this is certainly related to what I said in the last episode if you recall about these things called Harry Potter universes places where magic has appeared to have worked but not places where magic actually does work okay go back to last episode for that one and David also mentions there these other kinds of multiverse multiverse is where different physical laws might actually be true but they're not scientific theories for now they are rather metaphysical theories which is fine they're very interesting and again in the last episode and the one before that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=1891"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc5f2365-081f-439e-a645-09c5c8de636f": {"page_content": "I think I mentioned these other kinds of multiverse non quantum multiverses much larger sets or classes indeed of multiverses okay back to the book and David writes some of my own research in physics has been concerned with the theory of quantum computers please are computers in which the information carrying variables have been protected by a variety of means from becoming entangled with their surroundings this allows a new mode of computation in which the flow of information is not confined to a single history in one type of quantum computation enormous numbers of different computation taking place simultaneously can affect each other and hence contribute to the output of a computation this is known as quantum parallelism in a typical quantum computation individual bits of information represented in physical objects known as qubits quantum bits in which there is a large variety of physical implementations but always with two essential features first each qubit has a variable that can take one of two discrete values and second special measures are taken to protect the qubits from entanglement such as cooling them to temperatures close to absolute zero a typical algorithm using quantum parallelism begins by causing the information carrying variables in some of the qubits to acquire both their values simultaneously consequently regarding those qubits as a register representing say a number the number of separate instances of the register as a whole is exponentially large two to the power of the number of qubits then for a period classical computations are performed during which waves of differentiation spread to some of the other qubits but no further because of the special measures because of the special measures to prevent this hence information is processed separately in each of the vast numbers of autonomous histories finally and interference process involving all the affected qubits combines the information in those histories into a single history because of the intervening computation which has processed the information the final state is not the same as the initial one as in the simple interference experiment I discussed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2007"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc7b8adc-c397-424e-92f9-65a1f9c30d3c": {"page_content": "but it's some function of it like this.\nokay.\nand there's a picture or a representation of what's going on where in a typical quantum computation you've got x splitting into all these different possible histories.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2137"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "57394fd0-71d3-4da7-a8a0-1aab121c30ab": {"page_content": "okay all these different possible versions then interference happens and they all combine together to give you the output function and David writes just as the Starship crew members could achieve the effect of large amounts of computation by sharing information with their doppelgangers computing the same function on different inputs so an algorithm that makes use of quantum parallelism does the same but while the fictional effect is limited only by Starship regulations that we may invent to suit the plot quantum computers are limited by the laws of physics that govern quantum interference only certain types of parallel computation have been performed with the help of the multiverse in this way they are the ones for which the mathematics of quantum interference happens to be just right for combining into a single history the information that is needed for the final result in such computations a quantum computer would only a few hundred cubits could perform far more computations in parallel than there are atoms in the visible universe at the time of writing quantum computers with about 10 cubits have been constructed scaling the technology to larger numbers is a tremendous challenge for quantum technology but it is gradually being met of course the MRI reflection so again as I've mentioned in previous episodes once we've got fully functioning quantum computers of the kind David just described there where the resources classically that would have been required to complete the computation would exceed all of the atoms in the known visible universe we have to conclude that the computational resources that are actually performing that computation successfully exist somewhere and it's not in the visible universe hence the multiverse must exist so once we have that proof if you like once we have that evidence or that problem the only known explanation of which is that the universe and reality is much much greater than we ever thought then the majority of physicists one would presume will be on board with the multiverse finally now as of today like David says we've got quantum computers back then when the beginning of infinity was written of 10 cubits I don't know what it is today it depends on who you ask which university you go to sometimes in quantum computation now there is this issue but necessarily say problem there is this", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2151"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4c51c969-d55e-455b-83e7-c9354bbaad8d": {"page_content": "much greater than we ever thought then the majority of physicists one would presume will be on board with the multiverse finally now as of today like David says we've got quantum computers back then when the beginning of infinity was written of 10 cubits I don't know what it is today it depends on who you ask which university you go to sometimes in quantum computation now there is this issue but necessarily say problem there is this issue where the results of what's going on aren't published kind of like with pharmacology where there is a tension between commercial confidence and wanting to keep your intellectual property to yourself so that your competitors don't have access the information you do so that's on the one hand you don't want to publish all of your results about how good your quantum computation is or how good your particular medicine is the tension between that and the usual process of peer review and getting other scientists to be able to check your results to see that you haven't made errors so I literally don't know what the best quantum computer is right now there are places where things are going very well where they've got only four six cubits something like that but others are claiming they've got you know hundreds of cubits and they're doing things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2264"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "86f65aea-54c6-45e0-a409-8ea7eebbe855": {"page_content": "but there's very few published results.\nand I'm not up on all that.\nbut I'm sure Google search will reveal more than what I can teach you here now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2de710e7-155e-4e0b-906c-75f0c51e871d": {"page_content": "okay now I'm going to skip a significant part here and move on to something about how discrete changes of energy can occur especially around an atom let's say for example where an electron absorbs a photon when an electron absorbs a photon remember there are a few things that could happen one thing that could happen is that nothing observable happens beyond the photon striking the electron and then the photon disappearing and no apparent change in the electron occurring or the photon strikes the electron orbiting the atom and the electron moves up an energy level around the atom so it moves up to a higher orbital or indeed if the electron is struck by a photon where it's sufficient energy it can knock the electron completely out of the atom altogether but what we're interested in here is this idea of the quantum where where the electron absorbs just the right amount of energy such that it moves from one particular energy level up to another particular energy level.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2360"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c385a357-b16f-47a2-8a5f-b87b8b588c32": {"page_content": "and so the photon coming in is a single quantum of energy.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "505e69da-f0b5-4061-b91e-68998d7433ef": {"page_content": "but what David has to write about this particular phenomenon and he writes now let us look at the arrival of that single quantum of energy to see how that discrete change can possibly happen without any discontinuity consider the simplest possible case an atom absorbs a photon including all its energy this energy transfer does not take place instantaneously forget anything that you may have read about quantum jumps there are myths pause there just my reflection you can look at David's edge question answer on what scientific idea needs to be retired and he said the idea of quantum jumps and just google that quantum jumps David Deutsch and you'll find some really interesting material there let's keep going David writes there are many ways in which it can happen but the simplest is this at the beginning of the process the atom is in say its ground state in which its electrons have the least possible energy allowed by quantum theory that means that all its instances within the relevant course grain history have that energy assume that they are also fungible at the end of the process all those instances are still fungible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2425"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec96bca0-fa3f-4699-b153-841a4ed8f618": {"page_content": "but now they are in the excited state which has one additional quantum of energy what is that atom like halfway through the process its instances are still fungible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2499"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cebf9d38-d23c-42c3-8fed-a14a8c101212": {"page_content": "but now half of them are in the ground state and half in the excited state it is as if a continuously variable amount of money changed ownership gradually from one discrete owner to another this mechanism is ubiquitous in quantum physics and as the general means by which transitions between discrete states happen in a continuous way in classical physics a tiny effect always means a tiny change in some measurable quantities in quantum physics physical variables are typically discrete and so cannot undergo tiny changes instead a tiny effect means a tiny change in the proportions that have the various discrete attributes this also raises the issue of where the time itself is a continuous variable in this discussion I am assuming that it is however the quantum mechanics of time is not yet fully understood and will not be until we have a quantum theory of gravity the unification of quantum theory with the general theory of relativity so it may turn out that things are not as simple as that one thing we can be fairly sure of though is that in that theory different times are a special case of different universes in other words time is an entanglement phenomenon which places all equal clock readings of correctly prepared clocks or of any objects usable as clocks into the same history this was first understood by physicist Don Page and William Wooters in 1983 pause their mind reflection so that's some very interesting stuff there about the physics of time and David has spoken elsewhere about the physics of time because the time has this very what was the time I think it was Thomas Aquinas who said something to the effect of them I know exactly what time is until someone asks me time has been mysterious for a long time in physics but there is an interview that David Deutsch gave and I'll link to it in the description to this video that I think articulates quite well what time kind of years and why isn't as mysterious sometimes as many people think but let's not get distracted by that just for now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2511"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4da1677f-61b8-4dda-9a06-a6b7e1ce123c": {"page_content": "and I'm skipping a bit.\nand I'm skipping two a large part about what I would still call Harry Potter universes where David is talking about boiling some water for example and.\nyes.\nand this is what in the last episode Brett Weinstein was very concerned about that sometimes these highly unlikely events indeed happen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2639"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "41429032-63fa-40dc-a0b7-13c13c19b011": {"page_content": "and you know for example if you're boiling water David writes in some tiny sliver of the multiverse the kettle transforms itself into a top hat and the water into a rabbit which then hops away and you get neither tea nor coffee but rather a very surprise that is the history after that transformation but there is no way of correctly explaining what was happening during it or predicting the probabilities without referring to other parts of the multiverse and normally larger parts with larger measures in which there was no rabbit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2659"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f77e840d-02d6-4a05-9b28-de74e8e18642": {"page_content": "yes and so there's no reason to reject the multiverse just because there's this tiny tiny sliver of universes in which some bizarre things happen and what David writes about this.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2693"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2cb47adf-809d-4739-bd7d-f5b927114017": {"page_content": "so where we have a situation where you're boiling water to make tea throughout your entire life of course every time you boil water to make tea one would expect nothing particularly unusual happens but David does say that well it's consistent with the laws of existence quite possible for the kettle to turn itself into a top hat and the water to turn itself into a rabbit which can hops away so we've got these kind of two versions the one in which you boil water nothing unusual happens and you might tea and one in which you end up with the rabbit on that David says.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2706"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5c78b446-d61d-43a4-8eab-c0de09225b3f": {"page_content": "and so I'm skipping a huge amount here from this chapter from the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2829cccd-ed67-42a8-84b4-5b718f1a9a09": {"page_content": "but I'll just concentrate on the section where he says quote the rabbit history is fundamentally different from the tea history in that the latter the tea history remains very accurately autonomous throughout the period in the rabbit history I end up with memories that are identical to what they would be in a history in which water became a rabbit but those are misleading memories there was no such history the history containing those memories began only after the rabbit had formed for that matter there are also places in the multiverse of far larger measure than that one in which only my brain was affected producing exactly those memories in effect I had an hallucination caused by random motion of the atoms in my brain caused their my reflection so just to emphasize this bit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2749"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2e8cd53a-82e3-4c80-9276-60786ccb910d": {"page_content": "yes it's possible that indeed a kettle can form itself to a top hat and water can form itself into a rabbit such that boiling tea boiling water for tea leads to this rabbit jumping out of a top hat but as David says they're not only is that exceedingly unlikely the tiny tiny measure of universe which that happens but.\nif you actually did have that memory if you actually if that seemed to have occurred to you the better explanation according to quantum theory is that that occurred only in your brain that there was misfiring of neurons in your brain that caused you to hallucinate that exact thing rather than that exact thing actually happening.\nokay.\nso quantum theory makes sense out of those things and David writes straight after that some philosophers make a big issue of that sort of thing claiming that it casts doubt on the scientific status of quantum theory but of course they are empiricists in reality misleading observations misleading memories and false interpretations are common even in the mainstreams of history we have to work hard to avoid fooling ourselves with them.\nso it is not quite true that for instance there are histories in which magic appears to work there are only histories in which magic appears to have worked but will never work again there are histories in which I appear to have walked through a wall because all the atoms of my body happen to resume their original courses after being deflected by atoms in the wall but those histories began at the wall the true explanation of what happened involves many other instances of me and it.\nor we can roughly explain it in terms of random events at very low probability it is a bit like winning a lottery the winner cannot properly explain what has just happened without invoking the existence of many losers in the multiverse the losers are the other instances of oneself skipping a little bit more and reaching the end of this chapter here and it ends in a very poetic and eloquent way this won't be the end of the episode.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2797"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e2810cbe-c998-4377-8338-a466317060a6": {"page_content": "but there will be the end of me reading the books I'm going to read at the final two paragraphs of the chapter here and David writes we namely people we are channels of information flow so are histories and so are relatively autonomous objects within histories but we sentient beings are extremely unusual channels along which sometimes knowledge grows this can have dramatic effects not only within a history where it can for instance have effects that do not diminish with distance but also across the multiverse since the growth of knowledge is a process of error correction and since there are many more ways of being wrong than right knowledge creating entities rapidly become more alike in different histories than other entities as far as is known knowledge creating processes are unique in both these respects all other effects diminish with distance in space and become increasingly different across the multiverse in the long run but that is only as far as is known here is an opportunity for some wild speculations that could inform a science fiction story what if there is something other than information flow that can cause coherent emergent phenomena in the multiverse what if knowledge or something other than knowledge could emerge from that and begin to have purposes of its own and to conform the multiverse to those purposes as we do could we communicate with it presumably not in the usual sense of the term because that would be information flow but perhaps the story could propose some novel analogue of communication which like quantum interference did not involve sending messages would we be trapped in a war of mutual extermination with such an entity or is it possible we could nevertheless have something in common with it let us shun parochial resolutions of the issue such as a discovery that what bridges the barrier is love or trust but let us remember that just as we are at the top rank of significance in the great scheme of things anything else that could create explanations would be too and there is always room at the top.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=2926"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0ee23d1-bd00-42ab-b63b-c1e16fbbb82d": {"page_content": "okay.\nand that's the end of the chapter and there was always room at the top is a reflection of Richard Feynman's quip.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "964ccf68-e298-41db-81fe-d5ccd29d3a8b": {"page_content": "but there is always room at the bottom in other words there is a lot of space down there when you get smaller and smaller than molecules so you can store a lot of information in small stuff and data there is reflecting that with there is always more and more space out there as we get larger as well now David has ended the chapter there with mention of interesting science fiction stories and so it's also the way he began the chapter with an interesting science fiction story and I have been promising for about four episodes that I would explain the way in which the multiverse can be tested against other interpretations of quantum theory like any collapse model for example now I'm not going to talk about ways in which we can test the multiverse theory against for example things like the bermium pilot wave model as David has explained even recently these are versions of quantum theory which really are the multiverse in heavy disguise I might mention the bermium theory shortly but what I want to do now is to tell a story to tell a science fiction story about how to test an experimental test of the multiverse theory against the Copenhagen interpretation against any other interpretation that involves the collapse of the wave function and so for that I'm going to have to change then you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3064"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "98efde51-d611-4cbd-9dc2-d2feb061e668": {"page_content": "so here we are for the long promised explanation of how the multiverse is testable now in previous episodes I have actually explained certain ways in which the multiverse is experimentally testable but today on finally going to get to David Deutsch's own experimental test of the multiverse interpretation versus all those other kinds of interpretations of quantum theory namely the ones that involve so called collapse of the wave function so collapse models now the way in which I'm going to explain this experiment is not by simply reading David's papers that he's written on this or even going to some other popular accounts of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3158"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c28355d6-bf0c-4449-b08a-45fc8ef9346a": {"page_content": "but rather I'm going to try and turn it into a story and the reason for doing it this way a reason for telling a story the story of the experiment is the experiment isn't practically feasible right now.\nbut it will be one day.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3203"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "11f8e847-4462-4504-871b-d5b53c726473": {"page_content": "so it's kind of like how the Higgs boson this particle that gives other particles mass was postulated long before there was an actual practical way of testing it took the large Hadron Collider you know a piece of scientific apparatus much larger than anything else that had gone before it it took decades before the hypothesis of the Higgs boson could be tested by experiment or rather before the theory of the Higgs boson could be tested by experiment namely the large Hadron Collider smashing particles together and seeing what came out and seeing if we could actually observe the Higgs boson of course as perperians what we say is that we weren't confirming the existence of the Higgs boson we were refuting all the other ideas about what those observations could mean namely if the Higgs boson was some other kind of particle so every other theory about what was going on in those experiments was refuted but the Higgs boson explanation of the observations was not refuted.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3214"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dcd52916-e48e-4f1f-b8e5-37e57a151b42": {"page_content": "and so therefore we say that those experiments from the large Hadron Collider did indeed reveal the existence of the Higgs boson all right so now it's story time this is a science fiction story so perhaps sit back get yourself a nice cup of tea and enjoy being transported to the future so picture it's the year 2075 and though quantum computers are now carrying the pockets of most people David Deutscher's proposed test of Everrettian quantum theory against other so-called collapse models has yet to be performed many artificial general intelligences actually now populate the earth and while many silicans as the new general intelligences are happy to be called choose to house their minds within bodies that closely resemble those of typical humans others choose to take the form of cars or aircraft some few even choose bodies that double as space-faring vehicles because without the need oxygen or indeed air of any kind they can routinely explore the darker reaches of the solar system just for fun some of these intelligent spacecraft are very large indeed as they may carry huge payloads of batteries and some also choose to be employed as cargo vessels shipping resources between earth and other bodies in the solar system now one of these space silicans and the hero of our story is called parlox cubite parlox has what in the year 2020 would be regarded as a very unusual body for a person he has the shape of a very long about a hundred meters and very wide say about 50 meters box which is not very deep something about five meters deep so this is his body his body is a box this is useful for carrying cargo only a small portion of his body houses batteries and a landing gear and rocket fuel for landing and takeoff parlox can land in any number of configurations and generally takes off in such a way as to minimize his cross-sectional area and reduce air resistance on low gravity moons he's an explorer this parlox he likes to move between places in the solar system that no one else has been to before and so this is why he's chosen the body that he has now on a particular day somewhere in 2075 parlox is traveling from earth to", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3276"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b48e6995-8e07-4c81-895e-63fa7c90068e": {"page_content": "in any number of configurations and generally takes off in such a way as to minimize his cross-sectional area and reduce air resistance on low gravity moons he's an explorer this parlox he likes to move between places in the solar system that no one else has been to before and so this is why he's chosen the body that he has now on a particular day somewhere in 2075 parlox is traveling from earth to Jupiter's moon Europa it has long been known that the radiation saturating the surface of Europa from Jupiter is too intense for any regular human to endure so despite many probes over the years visiting the moon few people and no manned missions have ever landed there parlox is a physical chemist by training and wants to investigate the ocean beneath the ice on the surface for signs of life so far no other missions have found any evidence at all the journey to Europa is two months long and though he could enter a kind of hibernation state most silicon's are found for reasons yet to be known that the hibernation state tends to cause uncomfortable nightmares about three days in and terrible dizziness upon waking for this reason on long journeys like this parlox chooses the best known sleep wake sleep or wake cycle sleep seven hours wake seven hours sleep nine hours wake nine hours repeat he also has a list of tasks he set himself to keep himself occupied one item on the list that he's particularly excited about refers to a message in his ongoing correspondence with the now 122 year old professor David Deutsch parlox asked whether he might be able to conduct an adapted version of Deutsch's test set out in section eight of his 1985 paper quantum theory as a universal physical theory as published in the international journal of theoretical physics volume 24 David and parlox plan to co-author the paper in which the results will be published and finally perhaps putting to rest what they regard as almost 150 years worth of nonsense in the foundations of quantum theory parlox's huge body ears right now empty and an almost perfect vacuum isolated from any other matter as it travels through the emptiness's space but inside his cavernous body is one of the most perfect mark zender interferometers ever to", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3395"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a240a7b3-8aa5-4944-baae-abf4fbbecc28": {"page_content": "parlox plan to co-author the paper in which the results will be published and finally perhaps putting to rest what they regard as almost 150 years worth of nonsense in the foundations of quantum theory parlox's huge body ears right now empty and an almost perfect vacuum isolated from any other matter as it travels through the emptiness's space but inside his cavernous body is one of the most perfect mark zender interferometers ever to have been created the harpsil with mirrors near perfect the laser perfectly able to attenuate the beam down to just one photon each microsecond second or even hour if you like the detectors the most sensitive ever created there are two regular mirrors in the experiment regular except for one thing these mirrors are directly wired to parlox's mind.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3510"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4544aaa-9962-4360-bb14-ad5033c1aaf0": {"page_content": "so I just say that again these mirrors that are inside parlox's body are directly wired to his mind much like the retinas in our eye are directly wired via the optic nerve to our brains and our minds so parlox has a very special sense organ parlox can detect the slightest vibration of these mirrors due to a collision with something as small as a single photon parlox has a mind running on a brain with switching speeds as fast in the speed of light as all AGI in the year 2075 do.\nand so he is able to record and transmit data at this speed now I've got a schematic here a picture of the internal workings of parlox's sense organ that is the mirror set up and as we can see the inner workings of this particular organ if you like in parlox's brain are very similar to the mark zender interferometer.\nso we've got some source of photons the harpsil the mirror where the beam will be split into an up part and a down part that's the U and the D the regular mirror there is pair is parlox's sense organ it connects that regular mirror via some cable some wire.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3559"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c2568551-08ae-4493-be00-2efa3df4e234": {"page_content": "some nerve of the parlox's mind a similar thing with the other regular mirror that is on the down part and then as usual in the mark zender interferometer we've got a couple of detectors there detectors one and two now parlox has carefully set up the lengths of the U the up path and the D down path according to collapse theories like the Copenhagen interpretation indeed according to any interpretation that is not literal quantum theory saying all possibilities really do exist namely a multiverse when a photon is emitted at the source it makes no real sense to ask which of the paths the photon takes it simply has a 50% chance of going along the U path and a 50% chance of going along the D path if no one observes which of these paths it goes along then the photon will be detected with 100% probability at detector one and zero percent probability at detector two this is because of how parlox has set up the experiment namely by ensuring that the path length of U and D is slightly different but the details do not matter and I've mentioned this in an earlier episode as well about the details of how the mark zender interferometer works what the collapse interpretation says as do other interpretations is that some sort of interference effect has happened and that when the photon is finally detected at detector one all the possibilities have collapsed into one but what the collapse theory also says is that if anyone were to observe the photon mid-flyed for example if they knew it was traveling along the D path and not the U path then the interference effect would be destroyed and we would have 50% of the photons going to detect a one and 50% to detect a two in other words there is a special kind of physics of observation in quantum theory observation has a special effect in the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3637"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "761dd6b1-7ac8-4a4e-b9ab-dea229ed6eb3": {"page_content": "so this is on the Copenhagen or any so-called collapse theory observation has a special role in the world it has special physics anyone who says that the way function collapses or wonders about what happens during collapse or why it collapses and so on these people believe in alternatives to the multiverse but on the other hand proponents of the ever-at-way of understanding quantum theory the realistic way of understanding quantum theory the literal reading of the equations of quantum theory is to say that no such collapse happens observation has no special role observation does not cause the collapse of the wave function there is nothing special about observations on this view the so-called measurement problem is that sometimes called is solved it dissolves away by saying there is no special physics of measurement.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3751"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "678cb596-3747-48e6-ba6e-1d8d1f18b1c1": {"page_content": "so when it comes to the inner workings of parloxes braying its sense organs going on here the ever-at-understanding of this is that both possibilities happen both the up and the down paths are followed and this in fact explains why interference effects occur the photon is fired from the source the photon is in fact a multiverse object when the photon encounters the half silver mirror all the universes in which the experiment occurs differentiate into two groups one in which the photon takes the u-path and another group in which the photon takes the d-path this is the only difference between the two groups of universes these two universes then recombine at the second half silver mirror just prior to the detectors and it is the literal collision between these two photons the photons at the u and the d-path that caused the new recombine photon to set up the detector at detector one but not detector two now the key thing here for the year 2075 and for parlox and what we're now able to do in the distant future is that parlox is in fact able to sense the collision of the photon at either of the regular mirrors because he has a sense organ so he is able to observe interference going on prior to it happening so parlox's sense organs are part of the experiment his sense organs are those mirrors those regular mirrors he can detect if photons are striking those mirrors and so he is an observer of the experiment while it's going on hit the two impossible to do because we humans don't have such sense organs but an artificial general intelligence in the future could have such a sense organ could build themselves such a sense organ and perform this experiment according to the collapse interpretation this should cause the interference effect to be lost because it has been observed according to those interpretations i all other interpretations besides the multiverse observation plays a key role in physics it causes the collapse of the wave function at least a dissupposed to so in this view if we repeat the experiment we should see half the photons to be detected one and half the two no matter what if parlox is sensing that is to say observing", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3801"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b0f472a-c3bb-4723-9090-793ca7efcf25": {"page_content": "cause the interference effect to be lost because it has been observed according to those interpretations i all other interpretations besides the multiverse observation plays a key role in physics it causes the collapse of the wave function at least a dissupposed to so in this view if we repeat the experiment we should see half the photons to be detected one and half the two no matter what if parlox is sensing that is to say observing them with his sense organs the regular mirrors and if indeed the interference files to occur during this observation experiment during this interference experiment and parlox is observing it then we have refuted the multiverse theory this is the sense in which the multiverse is testable we can refute we can test we experimentally test and falsify the multiverse theory of course we have no real alternative but according to the multiverse account of things no collapse happens so long as parlox keeps the information about which mirror he has detected a collision at to himself here's what goes on according to literal quantum theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3910"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1ebf5d91-0268-41b3-8122-735e68de938d": {"page_content": "i according to the multiverse the photon at the first half silver mirror causes the differentiation of the universe into two groups in half the universe's the photon travels the d path and parlox in the d universe detects the collision with the photon in the other half of the universe's parlox detects the photons having traveled the u-path parlox himself actually splits into two separate versions in either case parlox u or parlox d in whichever universe he can record and transmit back to David an intermediate result and say i can testify that i have observed a photon traveling along one and only one path it must be the same message in either case now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=3977"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4f9e7773-81ea-4461-820b-fc74146c360b": {"page_content": "the distances d and u are long and it takes light some time to traverse this path so parlox does indeed have time to do all this because he's got a fast brain remember but very soon after he sends that message the message that says i have detected the photon striking one of my mirrors and only one of my mirrors he then sends another message and he repeats the experiment again and again as good scientists do sending message after message back to David who's part of the experiment if the messages went something like this i have detected the photon at one and only one mirror the next message comes i have detected the photon at the tep2 and then i have detected the photon at one and only one mirror i have detected the photon at tep1.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=4025"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "699b6c3f-fa6b-4733-a1c4-b2e068a66586": {"page_content": "i have detected the photon at one and only one mirror i have detected the photon at the tep2 and so on in other words, roughly half the time detector one is activated and half the time detector two is, because the photon only ever takes one path, either the u or the d-path, it does not take both paths simultaneously.\nIf this was to happen, if this was to happen, the multiverse is refuted, however, if the message was to run this way, I have detected the photon at one and only one mirror.\nTime delay, I have detected the photon at detected two, and then I have to detect the photon at one and only one mirror, time delay, I have detected the photon at detected two, etcetera, it keeps on detecting it at detected two, then interference has happened.\nDespite the fact the photon was observed that only ever one of the mirrors.\nWhat this means is that the active observing the photon has not collapsed to the wave function, and though the photon was detected at only one mirror, something travelled along the other path, in another universe, shoving aside the photon each time, and this collision forced the recombined photon to travel always into detected two.\nNow it is crucially important that Parlogs tells no one which mirror he observed the photon struck, because this ruins the experiment.\nIt ruins the experiment because once he says I detect the photon having struck only one mirror, and that is the mirror corresponding to the u-path.\nThis means that the universe have differentiated still further, and cannot come together again to interfere, they cannot become fungible once more.\nThe interference can happen if, and only if, the only thing that is different between them is the path of this single photon.\nIf other things start to change, like for example Parlogs sends David a message that the D-path was the one travelled, then David also knows in which universe he and Parlogs are in, and that is a difference in that universe outside the experiment.\nThis is called decoherence, by the way, decoherence is where information is leaked out of the experiment into the world differentiating the universes.\nMoreover, the message itself will carry different information in the two universes, making them quite different, and increasingly different as the energy of the message, as it goes, as it travels back to the earth, collides with objects in the solar system.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=4075"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce886daf-69ec-44fc-9e9c-0e7b418dd620": {"page_content": "This is called decoherence, by the way, decoherence is where information is leaked out of the experiment into the world differentiating the universes.\nMoreover, the message itself will carry different information in the two universes, making them quite different, and increasingly different as the energy of the message, as it goes, as it travels back to the earth, collides with objects in the solar system.\nWe need to keep the differences only, and exclusively, inside of Parlogs' mind, and effectively this entire apparatus is in Parlogs' mind, or brain, shielded as it were from the rest of physical reality.\nThis might seem awfully contrived, this might seem bizarre.\nWhat on earth are we doing in the year 2075?.\nWhy do I have artificial general intelligence?.\nDon't blame the multiverse theory.\nThis bizarre way of testing the multiverse is not the fault of the multiverse theory.\nIt's the fault of the so-called mainstream Copenhagen interpretations, or any of the collapse models.\nThey're the weed theory that requires a weird test to refute.\nThat's all.\nIt is those theories that says there is a special role for observers, and so we need to be able to test this special role of observers.\nIt is observers on that account, on that Copenhagen account, on the collapse models account.\nIt is those theories that say there is a special role for observers.\nThat special role is that the observers collapse the wave function.\nThat's what all other interpretations say.\nThat is the spooky and strange claim.\nSo to rule that out, that's why we need this elaborate method inside of a mind to test the claim that observers or minds or something like that is causing the collapse, the vanishing of all the possibilities except for one.\nIf we can rule out this single universe model by having interference between two universes occur within a single mind, then we refute the observer dependence of quantum theory.\nWith the many worlds idea of Everett and more precisely Deutsch, who replaced the concept that Everett had, a branching of a small number of universes into a larger and larger number, and instead David said, well, that's not quite right.\nIt's not that we start off with a small number, and that number gets greater and greater and greater over time as quantum phenomena occur.\nBut rather he said that the number of universes there, but the number of universes that exist all the way back to the beginning of time, a constant number and began fungible, but then differentiate when the possibilities arise.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=4206"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4abc6098-b1f7-4557-a123-4a0af993a7e0": {"page_content": "It's not that we start off with a small number, and that number gets greater and greater and greater over time as quantum phenomena occur.\nBut rather he said that the number of universes there, but the number of universes that exist all the way back to the beginning of time, a constant number and began fungible, but then differentiate when the possibilities arise.\nWe conclude that the single universe theory and collapse models can be refuted by this means.\nThe only known explanation is that the multiverse did split or differentiate into two different groups, a U-group and a D-group, and these universes then interfered with each other in such a way that the photon is only of the detected at, detected two and never detected one, despite the fact it was observed by parlocks at only one of the two mirrors.\nAnd this was possible because parlocks really did split into two versions of himself, different only to the extent of observing a single photon along the D-path or along the U-path.\nNow, what this might be like to split into two copies, they're no longer fungible, and then to come back together to have these kind of sense organs is anyone's guess at all, but I guess he was having fun.\nAfter all, he did know that he was going to be authoring a co-authoring a paper with David Doge about the fundamentals physics, so that must have been pretty exciting.\nOnce he experimenters over, it makes no sense to ask parlocks which mirror did you actually detect the photon at?.\nWas it the mirror at the D-path or the mirror along the U-path?.\nParlocks won't be able to say, because the two versions of parlocks, and indeed the whole two groups of universes have recombined at the second half silver mirror, parlocks simply cannot remember.\nBecause he split into two different copies, one of whom experienced you and one of whom experienced D, but he only recalls ever having experienced one.\nThis is where language kind of breaks down.\nHe both experienced both and one simultaneously.\nVery strange.\nSo, language somewhat fails to capture what is going on here, but the truth is he was both copies for a very brief amount of time.\nAnd again, whether this felt like something special or nothing particularly special, we may be able to interrogate him about that.\nBut he'll never be able to tell us which mirror he detected the photon at.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=4342"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "66c1190a-d140-4b4e-9136-a84d4ca44cd6": {"page_content": "This is where language kind of breaks down.\nHe both experienced both and one simultaneously.\nVery strange.\nSo, language somewhat fails to capture what is going on here, but the truth is he was both copies for a very brief amount of time.\nAnd again, whether this felt like something special or nothing particularly special, we may be able to interrogate him about that.\nBut he'll never be able to tell us which mirror he detected the photon at.\nOnce he becomes fungible again, once the two versions of him combined together to become a single version of parlocks once more.\nSo, he will in fact be the first earthling ever to have experienced this sensation of knowing he was in two universes at the same time, and then becoming one version of himself in one universe again.\nNow, that's if it all works out as predicted by the multiverse.\nBut what if he does not have this experience of being in and conscious of two different non-fungible universes simultaneously?.\nWell, then the whole experiment would refute the multiverse because observation apparently would collapse away function, or better to say the multiverse itself is simply refuted.\nThe point is, if the experiment works as predicted, there is no way of explaining any of it by recourse to a collapse model where all the universes but one sees to exist.\nSo, if indeed the interference fails to happen as predicted, then parlocks is experiment, David Deutsch's experiment, has roundly refuted the multiverse.\nQuantum theory would then have a hugely open problem about how observation works and why it is so fundamental to the nature of the universe.\nWe would need to develop a new physics of observation and measurement.\nAnd physics would become, in part, fundamental physics would become in part about us, about people and how it is that our choice to observe stuff or not can cause the majority of reality to vanish in an act of performing a scientific experiment.\nWhen we choose to perform particular experiment, we're causing the collapse of the wave function, the collapse of all these other realities that come to bear causing the result of the experiment to be the way it is.\nWhereas the multiverse just says all those realities really do continue to exist.\nWhatever the case, the multiverse is eminently testable by this technique and in principle, falsifiable.\nSo, that's that.\nAfter many months of prominence, I hope this satisfies some of you on the most contentious point when it comes to the multiverse.\nWell, perhaps not the most contentious point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=4473"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c2437b4-c573-488e-a2cc-ab54e1a450f3": {"page_content": "Whereas the multiverse just says all those realities really do continue to exist.\nWhatever the case, the multiverse is eminently testable by this technique and in principle, falsifiable.\nSo, that's that.\nAfter many months of prominence, I hope this satisfies some of you on the most contentious point when it comes to the multiverse.\nWell, perhaps not the most contentious point.\nOne of the most contentious points.\nNamely, the multiverse is a testable theory from a number of different angles.\nThere are experiments possible and the strange experiment here, again, is not the fault of the multiverse.\nIt's the fault of the collapse models that propose observation is a fundamental thing that affects reality.\nSo, we need an experiment that could possibly refute this idea.\nAnd David's version of this is different to the one that I've just told.\nMine is based entirely on his.\nOf course, here is a completely mine, but I thought that because we'd already explained the mark's ending interferometer, I wanted to explain that way of doing this experiment.\nNow, the way that David does it is via looking at this thing called the Stern-Goulash experiment, the pronunciation may be wrong there, and a property of subatomic particles called spin.\nAnd so, rather than attempting to explain all of that, I've stuck with what I hope we're already familiar with if you're being bearing with me through this multiverse series.\nAnd on that, this video doesn't quite finish the multiverse series, but for now it does.\nI've a couple more things to say about the multiverse, but we're going to save those for a more distant episode.\nFor now, I wish to move on to the next chapter, chapter 12, a physicist's history of philosophy.\nAnd that should be a lot of fun because bizarre as some of the things that we've been talking about during this series have been, like the claim, for example, that your observations can cause vast parts of physical reality to cease to exist.\nThe reason why people, including very smart people, very smart physicists, might come to endorse or insist on such ideas, or do very bizarre things like reject the multiverse, it's not because of the science, but it's because of their philosophy, bad philosophy.\nAnd an overview of bad philosophy by David Deutsch is just the remedy for undoing poor thinking on this point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=4596"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47340629-e61c-4ee5-a810-393fb2cd9917": {"page_content": "The reason why people, including very smart people, very smart physicists, might come to endorse or insist on such ideas, or do very bizarre things like reject the multiverse, it's not because of the science, but it's because of their philosophy, bad philosophy.\nAnd an overview of bad philosophy by David Deutsch is just the remedy for undoing poor thinking on this point.\nAnd it will help us to understand why quantum theory in particular has a special place in the hearts of many, many philosophers, because of this bad philosophy.\nSo the scientific community has sort of treated quantum theory in a way that's somewhat different to the way it treats any other scientific theory.\nBut we'll get on to that.\nWe'll get on to why bad philosophy has come to taint our understanding of quantum theory and hampered progress in quantum theory this time.\nUntil then, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&t=4706"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c02679d5-8caa-4299-b1ba-fa9885451463": {"page_content": "Hello, so this is part two of chapter three.\nIn the first part, we spent some time talking about the printable of mediocrity and this idea that the earth is here to sustain us.\nIt's specially suited.\nWe are specially suited to it and this has the idea of spaceship earth.\nThis is named the idea of spaceship earth and I've finished by saying that David had written today almost the entire capacity of the earth's life support system for humans has been provided not for us but by us using our ability to create new knowledge and he makes the point that whilst other organisms appear to be specially suited to the earth, this is kind of a misreading of the situation in at least one respect.\nThey're suited to the environment as it happens to be now but the purpose of biological evolution is to sustain genes over time not any particular individual species.\nIt's survival of the fittest genes in a very real sense and so the earth is not going to sustain organisms, collections of genes.\nSo let me continue reading chapter three and he's speaking about other organisms on the planet.\nHe says their home environments do have the appearance of having been designed as life support systems for them albeit only in a desperately limited sense that I have described but the biosphere no more provides humans with a life support system than it provides us with radio telescopes.\nSo the biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.\nFrom the outset it was only human knowledge that made the planet even marginally habitable by humans and the enormously increased capacity of our life support system since then in terms both of numbers end of security and quality of life has been entirely due to creation of human knowledge.\nWe will see, this is me speaking now, this is not a quote, we will see that as we proceed through the book David speaks, returns to this thing and speaks about these wonderful examples such as Malthusian named after Thomas Malthus, these Malthusian pessimistic prophecies.\nThis idea that the carrying capacity of the planet is finite for humans.\nCaring capacity works quite well if you're considering any other isolated organism.\nBut those isolated organisms in the environment are not creating knowledge.\nThat is a such a crucial point to grapple with.\nIt's something that people who are concerned about the environment don't consider in their calculations and it's very difficult to consider these things in calculations because the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "910beaf3-b171-41bf-89a4-3fdca4557975": {"page_content": "This idea that the carrying capacity of the planet is finite for humans.\nCaring capacity works quite well if you're considering any other isolated organism.\nBut those isolated organisms in the environment are not creating knowledge.\nThat is a such a crucial point to grapple with.\nIt's something that people who are concerned about the environment don't consider in their calculations and it's very difficult to consider these things in calculations because the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable.\nSo when Thomas Malthus, as we will see later chapters, tries to predict how long people can survive on this planet given that the amount of land where we can grow food is finite, he doesn't realise that things can be done and things are coming post.\nThomas Malthus, who was around in the 1700s, in particular in the 1900s.\nTechnology was found namely artificial fertilizers by this thing called the harbour process, where you take nitrogen gas and you take hydrogen gas and you can make ammonia out of it and the ammonia can then be used to create artificial fertilizers put into the soil, which remarkably I heard recently some people regard as a terrible evil because some of the fertilizers might go into rivers and cause algae to bloom and so algae bloom is a terrible evil so we should stop using artificial fertilizers.\nIf we did that a vast number of people on this planet would die of starvation.\nPeople now are not starving in the numbers that they used to because of artificial fertilizers because we now have the knowledge of how to create more food with the same amount of land than we ever had before.\nThere's something different about us.\nWe are not subject to the same sort of whimsical changes in the environment that other organisms are.\nOther organisms, if the environment changes, they may go extinct.\nNow if the environment changes too much and too quickly for us, we will go extinct.\nThat's why we have to create knowledge as fast as we possibly can.\nHaving created it, we should use it to create technology which helps to sustain us, to provide us with a spaceship earth.\nThat's the only thing that provides the spaceship earth is our building of it, our engineering of the planet, in order that it's more friendly for us.\nSo let me continue reading on the same thing David writes.\nThe moral component of the spaceship earth metaphor is therefore somewhat paradoxical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=169"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "45cf939c-9d42-4acd-8550-2a19b28f5fb4": {"page_content": "That's why we have to create knowledge as fast as we possibly can.\nHaving created it, we should use it to create technology which helps to sustain us, to provide us with a spaceship earth.\nThat's the only thing that provides the spaceship earth is our building of it, our engineering of the planet, in order that it's more friendly for us.\nSo let me continue reading on the same thing David writes.\nThe moral component of the spaceship earth metaphor is therefore somewhat paradoxical.\nIt casts humans as ungrateful for the gifts which in reality they never received and it casts all other species in morally positive roles in the spaceship's life support system with humans as the only negative actors.\nWe get this sense in our culture that humans are forever damaging the planet, that we are the cause of extinctions.\nI don't know how long it's been since there's been a natural extinction according to the prevailing conception of what's going on in ecology.\nWe know that 99.999% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct.\nBut over the last 50 years we hear about extinctions all the time, but simultaneously in all cases this is a challenge I'll throw out there.\nWe've never heard of a species that's gone extinct naturally.\nWhy is that?.\nWe know that they do, but they apparently don't anymore ever since humans have arrived on the same with the only things that cause extinctions.\nMore or less.\nSo we are a on this view uniquely evil species and yet coming this comes from the spaceship earth idea and the surrounding philosophy.\nYet the fact is that we're doing what we can to not suffer the same fate as every other species that's ever gone extinct.\nAnd the only thing that we can do is to try and mold the environment around us using our knowledge and technology.\nI'll continue reading.\nBut humans are part of the biosphere and the supposedly immoral behavior is identical to what all other species do when times are good except that humans alone try to mitigate the effect of that response on their descendants and other other species.\nThe principle of mediocrity is paradoxical too.\nSince it singles our anthropocentrism for special appropriate among all forms of parochial misconception, it is itself anthropocentric.\nAlso it climbs at all value judgments are anthropocentric.\nYet itself is often expressed in valued late and terminology such as arrogance, just scum, and the very word mediocrity.\nWe'd respect to whose values of those disparagements to be understood.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=295"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9bc575c-8942-4937-811c-e07c9ceb407d": {"page_content": "The principle of mediocrity is paradoxical too.\nSince it singles our anthropocentrism for special appropriate among all forms of parochial misconception, it is itself anthropocentric.\nAlso it climbs at all value judgments are anthropocentric.\nYet itself is often expressed in valued late and terminology such as arrogance, just scum, and the very word mediocrity.\nWe'd respect to whose values of those disparagements to be understood.\nWhy is arrogance even relevant as a criticism?.\nAlso, even if holding an arrogant opinion is morally wrong, morality is supposed to refer only to the internal organization of the chemical scum.\nSo how can it tell us anything about how the word world beyond the scum is organized as the principle of mediocrity purports to?.\nThis was very David Deutsch by the way.\nThis idea that the principle of mediocrity singles out anthropocentrism and that itself is anthropocentric.\nSo taking one misconception and explaining how another misconception comports to it.\nI'll continue.\nHe's speaking about people in the past and he says that in a sense their whole problem was that they were not arrogant enough.\nThey assumed these primitive people far too easily that the world was fundamentally incomprehensible to them.\nThe misconception that there was once a problematic era for humans is present in ancient myths of a past golden age, and of a garden of Eden.\nThe theological notions of grace, unknown benefit from God, and providence, which is God regarded as the provider of human needs, are also related to this.\nIn order to connect the supposed unproblematic past with their own less than pleasant experiences, the authors of such myths had to include some past transition such as a fall from grace when providence reduced its level of support.\nIn the spaceship earth metaphor, the fall from grace is usually deemed to be imminent or under.\nYes, so this idea of an unproblematic past.\nIt has a lot of modern variants beyond what David is speaking about now, but all sit under the same umbrella.\nThere's a lot of health fads like this.\nIf anyone's ever heard of the paleo diet, this idea that we should eat like people of the Paleolithic era, and so just eat grains and meats.\nI think the theory there is that everyone on the entire planet, no matter where they happen to be located, we're eating roughly the same things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=441"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15ee5720-0554-4951-ace1-c3e851e054b7": {"page_content": "It has a lot of modern variants beyond what David is speaking about now, but all sit under the same umbrella.\nThere's a lot of health fads like this.\nIf anyone's ever heard of the paleo diet, this idea that we should eat like people of the Paleolithic era, and so just eat grains and meats.\nI think the theory there is that everyone on the entire planet, no matter where they happen to be located, we're eating roughly the same things.\nAnyway, it's the idea that unrefined food of some sort or other is better for you than anything that has been processed in any way whatsoever.\nSo it's nutrition in the form of the past was definitely better.\nSo it's nutrition in the form of grace and providence, I suppose.\nNow, there might very well be a case to be made that certain kinds of unrefined food are going to be better than certain kinds of food, but that's a vacuous statement basically.\nYou take any two foods, one's going to be superior, sometimes it will be the refined food.\nIf you take a carrot, firstly, the orange carrots are genetically engineered, well they've been selectively bred.\nBut too, as far as I know, if you eat the raw carrot, then that's not going to provide you with as much nutrition as having cooked to the carrot, and having cooked the carrot is a rather unnatural white thing to do.\nI'm not sure if Paleolithic people are cooked carrots.\nI don't know.\nWhatever the case, cooking is unnatural, using a microwave in order to process your food is unnatural.\nAnd yet, we know that if you break down the cell walls of plants through mechanisms other than simply chewing them, now only by applying heat, which partially digests the food outside of your stomach, then you're able to extract more of the nutrients.\nAll this is to say is that technology and knowledge helps.\nLet's continue.\nThe principle of mediocrity contains a similar misconception.\nConsider the following argument, which is due to the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.\nHuman attributes, like those of other organisms, evolved under natural selection, in an ancestral environment.\nThat is why our senses are adapted to detecting things like the colours and smell of fruit, or the sound of a predator being able to detect such things, gave our ancestors a better chance of surviving to have offspring.\nBut for the same reason, Dawkins points out, evolution did not waste our resources on detecting phenomena that were never relevant to our survival.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=559"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5801632c-758e-4ea7-a955-1069dadfd354": {"page_content": "Human attributes, like those of other organisms, evolved under natural selection, in an ancestral environment.\nThat is why our senses are adapted to detecting things like the colours and smell of fruit, or the sound of a predator being able to detect such things, gave our ancestors a better chance of surviving to have offspring.\nBut for the same reason, Dawkins points out, evolution did not waste our resources on detecting phenomena that were never relevant to our survival.\nWe cannot, for instance, distinguish between the colours of most stars with the naked eye, and light vision is too poor and monochromatic, because not enough of our ancestors died of that limitation to create evolutionary pressure for anything better.\nSo Dawkins argues, and here he is invoking the principle of mediocrity, that there is no reason to expect our brains to be any different from our eyes in this regard.\nThey evolved to cope with the narrow class of phenomenon that commonly occur in the biosphere, and approximately humans' scales of size, time, and energy, and so on.\nSo phenomena in the universe happen to be far above, or most phenomena in the universe happen to be far above or below those scales.\nSome would kill us instantly, others could never affect anything in the lives of humans.\nSo just as our senses can not detect neutrinos or quasars, or most other significant phenomena in the cosmic scheme of things, there is no reason to expect our brains to understand them.\nTo the extent that they already do understand them, we have been lucky.\nBut a run of luck cannot be expected to continue for long.\nAnd Stalkens agrees with our earlier evolutionary biologist, John Haldon, who expected that the universe is not only queer than we can suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.\nThis is a powerful argument.\nIt's completely wrong, but it is very seductive.\nI think Dawkins uses the terminology middle world.\nWe don't understand things that are really, really small, like the quantum, and so what's going on there kind of challenges our intuitions in such a way that it's impossible to understand quantum mechanics, let alone string theory or anything else.\nAnd we don't understand things moving too fast.\nSo our intuitions don't really wrap around relativity theory.\nAnything approaching a speed of light starts to do things that make it difficult for us to understand.\nOkay, I'm going to pause now and change venue.\nI got to last time was discussing Richard Dawkins middle world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=686"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9205c56-4899-4ddf-8dc5-a9520ede1e70": {"page_content": "And we don't understand things moving too fast.\nSo our intuitions don't really wrap around relativity theory.\nAnything approaching a speed of light starts to do things that make it difficult for us to understand.\nOkay, I'm going to pause now and change venue.\nI got to last time was discussing Richard Dawkins middle world.\nI don't think that David uses those terms where I've heard them or read them written by Richard himself somewhere or other.\nThis idea that our brain is an evolved structure, of course it is.\nAnd why should we think it any different to any other feature of a biological organism?.\nNamely, evolved in such a way that it's suited to the environment in which it finds itself.\nThis is what evolution tends to do.\nIt tends to shape organisms to their environment.\nThat's why they seem so uniquely suited to those environments.\nSo when it comes to the human brain, shouldn't we assume that exactly the same concept should obtain that the brain is suited to the particular sizes and velocities and conditions in which it is generally surrounded by or with which it is generally surrounded by.\nIn other words, the quantum world seems strange because we evolved in an environment which is much larger than the quantum.\nSo we don't notice quantum effects.\nIndeed, not only do we not notice them, we're in some sense incapable of comprehending what's going on at the subatomic scale because it's so unfamiliar.\nSimilarly, trying to understand geological time or cosmological time for that matter is very, very difficult for us, perhaps even intractively so.\nWe can't have a good understanding of what it's like to travel near the speed of light because we never travel near the speed of light.\nNow, all of this is simply to say that there are limits to the human mind.\nWe can't picture certain things.\nWe can't even understand certain things.\nPerhaps people like Neil deGrasse Tyson or some others have read Richard Dawkins and taken the further leap to presume that there is no reason to suspect.\nI think Sam Harris might have offered something similar.\nThere is no reason to suspect that the brains that we have have the capacity to understand much more than what we know right now.\nThis is the John Horgan, the end of science idea in a sense.\nJohn Horgan just thinks that we actually are discovering everything that is possible to discover and we're going to reach a limit in that sense.\nWe're going to find the final theory and that's it, progress will stop at that point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=868"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2e7cd342-671a-43e1-a31e-dd4b7f44ab22": {"page_content": "I think Sam Harris might have offered something similar.\nThere is no reason to suspect that the brains that we have have the capacity to understand much more than what we know right now.\nThis is the John Horgan, the end of science idea in a sense.\nJohn Horgan just thinks that we actually are discovering everything that is possible to discover and we're going to reach a limit in that sense.\nWe're going to find the final theory and that's it, progress will stop at that point.\nThe other version of that, which often works in concert, is if there is something deeper than some of our most fundamental theories, perhaps string theory lies beneath or is more fundamental than general relativity and quantum theory, that we can just barely understand that.\nOnly the greatest theoretical physicists and mathematicians are able to struggle, mightily, to try and figure out what's going on with string theory.\nThat their failing could be an indication that we have simply reached the end of human brain computing power.\nWhatever the laws of physics ultimately turn out to be, so this argument runs, they might be simply too complicated for us to ever possibly understand.\nSo this is the idea of middle world.\nWe occupy a middle-sized world, it's not, we don't occupy the larger scales like super-classings of galaxies and we don't occupy the smallest scales like electrons and photons do.\nSo therefore we're trapped with our brains able to comprehend human-sized things, human time scales.\nDavid is the first person here and in this chapter to really challenge that in a deep way.\nI think he completely cuts the legs out from underneath that entire line of argument, persuasive as or as compelling as, that argument is.\nIt makes sense, it makes common sense.\nWhy should we have any capacity to understand what it's like to travel into a bit of light?.\nThe very theory is that speak about travelling near the speed of light.\nAlso say how difficult it is.\nNeed lots of energy and so forth to accelerate masses like ours to anywhere near the speed of light.\nSo it's almost as if it's prohibited.\nWe can't picture what's going on.\nWe struggle to bring our common sense into line with what we know from theories of physics.\nThe faster you go, the more that time slows down.\nOf course, in stating the problem that way, we also reveal what's wrong with it.\nAfter all, people do understand the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity and quantum theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=953"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f1952f7-ea00-48e1-99b8-673f2f0c4a96": {"page_content": "So it's almost as if it's prohibited.\nWe can't picture what's going on.\nWe struggle to bring our common sense into line with what we know from theories of physics.\nThe faster you go, the more that time slows down.\nOf course, in stating the problem that way, we also reveal what's wrong with it.\nAfter all, people do understand the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity and quantum theory.\nCounterintuitive as they are, we understand them.\nAnd we conclude from this that our intuitions on these matters are false.\nThere's a better way to understand reality than simply guessing out with your common sense, with the intuitions that you grew up with as a chart.\nYou can overcome those.\nNow, why should we expect that if there are deeper theories still and there must be deeper theories than either relativity or quantum theory, which govern their in conflict?.\nAnd so we know at least one of them is false, probably both.\nBut whatever the deeper theory is, why should we expect that to be any less counterintuitive?.\nIt will be counterintuitive, I would guess, but that is not to say it will be incomprehensible.\nIn fact, it must be comprehensible because the universe is comprehensible and we can comprehend it.\nNow we're going to hear David's argument for exactly that, and it has to do with one of his many areas of expertise, namely his understanding of computation, of universal computation.\nAnd we're going to apply that to human beings.\nNow, last few sentences I read with this, most phenomena in the universe happen far above or below those scales, human scales.\nSome would kill us instantly, others could never affect anything in their lives of early humans.\nSo just as our senses cannot detect neutrinos or quasars, almost other significant phenomena in the cosmic scheme of things, there's no reason to expect our brains to understand them.\nTo the extent that they already do understand them, we have been lucky.\nBut a run of luck cannot be expected to continue for long.\nSo like I say, this is a very powerful persuasive argument.\nIt's a good argument by Dawkins, but it's false, so let's continue.\nDavid writes, that is a startling and paradoxical consequence of the principle of mediocrity.\nIt says that all human abilities, including the distinctive ones, such as the ability to create new explanations, are necessarily parochial.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=1108"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89286bb6-e06e-4233-8019-6078c3f2dc00": {"page_content": "But a run of luck cannot be expected to continue for long.\nSo like I say, this is a very powerful persuasive argument.\nIt's a good argument by Dawkins, but it's false, so let's continue.\nDavid writes, that is a startling and paradoxical consequence of the principle of mediocrity.\nIt says that all human abilities, including the distinctive ones, such as the ability to create new explanations, are necessarily parochial.\nThat implies in particular that progress in science cannot exceed a certain limit defined by the biology of the human brain.\nAnd we must expect to reach that limit sooner rather than later.\nBeyond it, the world stops making sense or seems to.\nThe answer to the question that I asked at the end of chapter 2, whether the scientific revolution and the broader enlightenment could be a beginning of infinity, would then be a resounding no. Science for all its successes and aspirations would turn out to be inherently parochial, and ironically, anthropocentric.\nIn other words, what we discover is limited by our biological evolution in particular by our brains.\nAnd so we can understand things at roughly human size.\nOnce things start to get too big or too small, they will be incomprehensible to us, or perhaps of too long a duration or too short a duration.\nThere could be any number of ways in which we have trapped inside of a bubble, defined by the capacity of the human brain, to compute what is going on out there.\nEven if those things that are going on out there are governed by laws of physics, the laws of physics might be incomprehensible.\nSo just to preface what's about to happen, this line of argument arises out of a mathematical proof.\nIt's the mathematical proof that David himself did in 1986 on the universality of quantum computation.\nThe proof that quantum computers were possible, it says that whatever the physical laws are, they must be computable.\nThat's it.\nIf they're computable, that means a universal computer will be able to simulate those physical laws.\nNow people do object to this, but at the moment it's a mathematical proof.\nUntil someone can provide a refutation of the proof, it stands.\nIt's like Pythagoras is there.\nIt is like that in terms of how fundamental it is.\nLet's continue.\nDavid speaks about how Richard Dawkins says that within this human-sized world that is comprehensible to us, the world can turn out to seem unproblematic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=1236"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ac5b5fb9-08ad-4e94-bf93-23bfe7b03da8": {"page_content": "Now people do object to this, but at the moment it's a mathematical proof.\nUntil someone can provide a refutation of the proof, it stands.\nIt's like Pythagoras is there.\nIt is like that in terms of how fundamental it is.\nLet's continue.\nDavid speaks about how Richard Dawkins says that within this human-sized world that is comprehensible to us, the world can turn out to seem unproblematic.\nBut outside once things get too big to small, whatever, then there will be insoluble problems on that view.\nAnd David writes that Dawkins would prefer it to be otherwise, as he wrote.\nI believe that an ordinary universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations in which everything has an explanation, even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe that is tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.\nNow of course, and I think David says this later, if there can be no explanation about some phenomena, some physical phenomena out there in the universe, if there can be an explanation.\nThen that, in fact, is a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.\nSo Dawkins doesn't want it to be the case that there are these insoluble problems.\nBut he's arguing against, of course, supernatural beings.\nHe doesn't want supernatural beings to exist.\nHe thinks that that's a pessimistic view of the world.\nI would agree that if you've got all powerful beings, you've got gods or whatever, then that would mean that there's magic in the universe somewhere other.\nAnd so phenomena like miracles could exist because the gods could be doing it and you could never possibly understand it.\nNow he says that that's objectionable, but it's more objectionable.\nSo let me continue.\nLet me continue.\nAn orderly, explicable universe is indeed more beautiful.\nSee chapter 14.\nThough the assumption that to be orderly, it has to be indifferent to human preoccupations is a misconception associated with the principle of mediocrity.\nAny assumption that the world is inexplicable can lead only to extremely bad explanations.\nFor an inexplicable world is indistinguishable from one tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic by definition.\nNo hypothesis about the world outside the bubble of explicability can be a better explanation than that Zeus rules there, or practically any myth or fantasy one likes.\nSkipping a little, at root the principle of mediocrity and the spaceship earth metaphor overlapping in a claim about reach.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=1412"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d21e23ef-de28-4954-88c6-d904e0fd5605": {"page_content": "Any assumption that the world is inexplicable can lead only to extremely bad explanations.\nFor an inexplicable world is indistinguishable from one tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic by definition.\nNo hypothesis about the world outside the bubble of explicability can be a better explanation than that Zeus rules there, or practically any myth or fantasy one likes.\nSkipping a little, at root the principle of mediocrity and the spaceship earth metaphor overlapping in a claim about reach.\nThey both claim that the reach of the distinctively human way of being that is to say the way of problem solving, knowledge creating and adapting the world around us is bounded.\nAnd they argue that its bounds cannot be very far beyond what it is already reached.\nTrying to go beyond that range must lead to failure and catastrophe respectively.\nI'm going to skip a fair bit here.\nOnce again, if you've never read the book, you should read it.\nIf you haven't bought the book, you should buy it because I'm only giving you a taste of what is in any of these chapters.\nThis one's a particularly long chapter, but I'll continue a little further on now and he writes.\nSince the Enlightenment, technological progress has depended specifically on the creation of explanatory knowledge.\nPeople had dreamed for millennia of flying to the moon, but it was only with the advent of Newton's theories about the behaviour of invisible entities, such as forces and momentum, as they began to understand what was needed in order to go there.\nThis increasingly intimate connection between explaining the world and controlling it, there's no accident, but it's part of the deep structure of the world.\nConsider the set of all conceivable transformations of physical objects.\nSome of these, like faster than light communication, never happened because they are forbidden by laws of nature.\nSome, like the formation of stars out of primemordial hydrogen, happen spontaneously, and some, such as converting air and water into trees, or converting raw materials into a radio telescope, are possible, but happen only when the requisite knowledge is present, for instance, embodied in genes or brains.\nThat's an important dichotomy.\nThe two species of knowledge, if you like, that exist, and it's a difficult one to grapple with the first time that it is encountered, but it's true.\nThis idea that there are two kinds of knowledge that exist on planet Earth.\nOne is the knowledge of how to build organisms, and that is contained within the genes of any organism.\nIt is knowledge that is produced by selection of mutations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=1524"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9625418-eafe-452b-ade3-b0ed82add74b": {"page_content": "That's an important dichotomy.\nThe two species of knowledge, if you like, that exist, and it's a difficult one to grapple with the first time that it is encountered, but it's true.\nThis idea that there are two kinds of knowledge that exist on planet Earth.\nOne is the knowledge of how to build organisms, and that is contained within the genes of any organism.\nIt is knowledge that is produced by selection of mutations.\nThat's what natural selection is about.\nThe other kind of knowledge is explanatory knowledge, which superficially resembles the production of which superficially resembles how knowledge in genes is created, but there are crucial differences.\nExplanatory knowledge is generated by a creative conjecture and refutation.\nNow, in both cases, the genetic type knowledge and the explanatory type knowledge, we can state relatively cleanly what mechanisms lead to the production of both, but that doesn't mean that we know everything about them.\nWhen I say that, for example, conjecture and refutation leads to the production of knowledge, or another way of putting that in more straightforward languages, creativity and criticism, we don't actually know too much about creativity.\nAnd the same way, when we talk about random selection and mutation of genes that create biological knowledge, in other words, the knowledge of how an organism can survive in a given environment, that too is not perfectly well understood.\nWell, nothing is perfectly well understood, but we will come to see that we know that neither of these two great theories, the theory of biological evolution and the theory of epistemology, aren't well understood because we cannot program the computer in order to simulate either.\nWe cannot program a computer in order to simulate the capacity of creating explanatory knowledge.\nIn order to do so, we'd have to actually create an AGI and artificial general intelligence.\nWe can't do that.\nErgo, we do not know about how knowledge explanatory knowledge is actually produced.\nIt's not only explanatory knowledge, it's any kind of declarative knowledge, I suppose, implicit knowledge, explicit knowledge, knowledge that people have.\nThe other kind of knowledge, the genetic knowledge, we similarly cannot program computers in order to simulate evolution by natural selection.\nWe can do what are called evolutionary algorithms, and we'll get to this in subsequent chapters, but that is nothing like biological evolution.\nIn particular, I think one of the main problems there is that in order to simulate biological evolution, you would need to simulate the environment in which the biological organism is evolving.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=1643"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "22b71a5b-7932-4903-a68e-5d1ae392019d": {"page_content": "The other kind of knowledge, the genetic knowledge, we similarly cannot program computers in order to simulate evolution by natural selection.\nWe can do what are called evolutionary algorithms, and we'll get to this in subsequent chapters, but that is nothing like biological evolution.\nIn particular, I think one of the main problems there is that in order to simulate biological evolution, you would need to simulate the environment in which the biological organism is evolving.\nAnd simulating environments has all the problems of trying to simulate with high fidelity the real world.\nYou don't only need to simulate the laws of physics, but you need to simulate emergent laws as well.\nThat can get exceedingly difficult, and the world is a complicated place, so there are many, many complications.\nWe can't simulate either, is the main bullet point there.\nLet's continue, so the last sentence I read was some of those, like fast and light communication, never happened because our forbidden by the laws of nature, some like formation of stars out of primordial hydrogen happens spontaneously, and some such as converting air and water into trees, or converting raw materials into a telescope, are possible, but happen only when the requisite knowledge is present, for instance, embodied in genes or brains.\nBut those are the only possible abilities.\nThat is to say, every putative physical transformation to be performed in a given time with given resources, or under any other conditions as either, one, impossible because it is forbidden by the laws of nature, or two, achievable given the right knowledge.\nThis is the dichotomy that many, many people who've read the book are really taken aback by, taken aback in a good way.\nI certainly was.\nIt's a phenomenal claim.\nIt's something that Sam Harris spent a lot of time on in at least one of the waking up podcasts where he interviewed David, because he was taken aback by it.\nAnd many people have realised that this is a, I don't know that it originated with David, but he's given it the best defence.\nI think other people have hinted at this idea a few times, but no one has taken it quite so seriously and taken it forward.\nSo the momentous thing here is that you've only got two possibilities.\nEither something is impossible because the laws of nature say it's impossible, for some reason, example, fast and light communication, or it's possible given the right knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=1632"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "376afec7-a8c3-49c6-a91d-68b3e774ad41": {"page_content": "I think other people have hinted at this idea a few times, but no one has taken it quite so seriously and taken it forward.\nSo the momentous thing here is that you've only got two possibilities.\nEither something is impossible because the laws of nature say it's impossible, for some reason, example, fast and light communication, or it's possible given the right knowledge.\nSo when in the beginning of infinity, and when I'm talking about the beginning of infinity broadly, and I make weed clients seemingly strange claims like the transformation of the Andromeda galaxy, this entire galaxy 2.2 million light is away, made up of hundreds of billions of stars to radically transform that galaxy.\nThat could be done by human beings.\nWe could turn it into a galactic-sized city, maybe at some point it will be, some millions of years from now.\nThat could be surprised, it could be thousands of years.\nThat might seem science fiction and for now it is.\nHowever, we cannot say it's impossible because there's no law of physics saying that turning or converting the Andromeda galaxy into a fully fledged galactic-sized city is impossible.\nAnything that's not forbidden by the laws of physics is possible given the right knowledge, to remarkable.\nSo things are impossible because of the laws of nature or they're achievable given the right knowledge and David writes.\nThat momentous dichotomy exists because if there were transformations that technology could never achieve regardless of what knowledge was brought to bear, then this fact would itself be a testable regularity in nature, but all regularities in nature have explanations.\nSo the explanation of that regularity would itself be a law of nature or a consequence of one.\nAnd so again, everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable given the right knowledge.\nThis fundamental connection between explanatory knowledge and technology is why the heldained Dawkins queer than we can suppose argument is mistaken and why the reach of human adaptations does have a different character from that of all other adaptations in the biosphere.\nThe ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature, which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws.\nThis is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge and hence of people whom I shall hence forward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.\nWow, so that is an extremely dense paragraph.\nThere is a lot of stuff there happening.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=1900"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b3011480-5fc9-4fc3-a973-4750dd737a90": {"page_content": "The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature, which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws.\nThis is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge and hence of people whom I shall hence forward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.\nWow, so that is an extremely dense paragraph.\nThere is a lot of stuff there happening.\nSo this idea that the universe is queer than we can suppose, that there are things out there that are inexplicable.\nIn other words, there are things that we cannot do.\nThis is not possible.\nIt's not possible because of the simple dichotomy that David gave to us.\nEither things are impossible because they're forbidden by the laws of nature or they're achievable given the right knowledge.\nThere cannot be a third option.\nThere cannot be this thing that's out there that cannot possibly be done despite the fact it's permitted and we do have the knowledge.\nMoreover, I would emphasize again that we have a proof that whatever is physically possible is computable and our computers can compute anything that's physically possible.\nIn other words, anything that happens, anything that happens in physical reality, anything that happens in physical reality is being governed by laws of physics.\nSo if there's something out there that you think is incomprehensible, then that thing that's incomprehensible is governed by laws of physics.\nBut the laws of physics are computable as proved by David Toich.\nIf they're computable, that means we can write a code for a computer to simulate those laws of physics.\nNow this is where Martin Reese jumps in and says, but just because you can compute it doesn't mean you can comprehend it.\nAnd this is a misunderstanding of what it would take to compute something.\nWhat it takes to compute something is to write an algorithm.\nIf you can write down an algorithm, that means that you've understood something with sufficient accuracy in order to capture it in a list of instructions which can then be coded in a computer language and put into a computer.\nComputing something is comprehending it for a person.\nThose two things are synonyms.\nThey're not different for a person, for a human.\nObviously, for a computer, if a computer is doing the computation that's got comprehending anything.\nAnd the reason that's not comprehending anything is for the reasons that we're just read out, namely, that a computer is not a person.\nIt's not a universal explainer.\nIt's not creating knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=2043"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "abcc5376-d36f-44ea-8148-e6d589d790f3": {"page_content": "Computing something is comprehending it for a person.\nThose two things are synonyms.\nThey're not different for a person, for a human.\nObviously, for a computer, if a computer is doing the computation that's got comprehending anything.\nAnd the reason that's not comprehending anything is for the reasons that we're just read out, namely, that a computer is not a person.\nIt's not a universal explainer.\nIt's not creating knowledge.\nThere's a lot going on here.\nSo again, we'll just say, so again, I should emphasize that we have here an explanation of what people are.\nIt's a definition, but I think it's a deeper than that.\nIt's an explanation of what people are.\nThere is this thing called explanatory knowledge.\nexplanatory knowledge tells us what's going on in the world.\nIt's an account of what's going on in the world.\nThere's only one entity that we know of in the entire universe that is able to create explanatory knowledge.\nAnd that one entity in the universe are human beings, but presumably all intelligent aliens that are out there, and it has to be the case that all intelligent aliens out there will similarly be able to explain their world.\nIf you can explain your world, then you are universal in the capacity to do so.\nFor the reasons that we just said, either a thing can be explained and be computed or it cannot be.\nAnd someone has just started mowing their lawn outside, so I'm going to move for a third time.\nOkay, so get another experiment.\nOutside one, there's a lovely lake again.\nSmall waves coming in, so hopefully it's not too distracting.\nI probably won't read for much longer anyway.\nOkay, so we're just at the point where David provides the definition, which I regard as an explanation of what a person is.\nA person is an entity that can create explanatory knowledge.\nThis is phenomenal and far-reaching and it's changed my view deeply on a whole bunch of issues.\nIt resolves a bunch of problems.\nI think it currently in the present intellectual zeitgeist of the West really does go a long way to addressing a bunch of issues associated with the pursuit of artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence.\nIn particular, general intelligence of course, but it separates out, qualitatively speaking, the difference between artificial general intelligence, which is a kind of person from artificial intelligence, which I compare simply to a toaster.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=2223"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a8c94920-9582-4181-a1d0-a264a7cf28d3": {"page_content": "It resolves a bunch of problems.\nI think it currently in the present intellectual zeitgeist of the West really does go a long way to addressing a bunch of issues associated with the pursuit of artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence.\nIn particular, general intelligence of course, but it separates out, qualitatively speaking, the difference between artificial general intelligence, which is a kind of person from artificial intelligence, which I compare simply to a toaster.\nIt's something that operates by following a set of instructions without any creativity whatsoever.\nI don't think there are divisions between those two.\nI think it's a black and white categorical difference.\nI don't think you can have a little bit of capacity to create explanatory knowledge.\nI think it's an all or nothing thing.\nAnd it seems like the wind has picked up again, the universe doesn't have it in for us, but sometimes I wonder.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiGYkPCBY&t=2351"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "79b07b50-0b8e-4fda-ba83-724e32a0d576": {"page_content": "Welcome to Chapter 8.\nThis is another chapter that's largely about mathematics.\nWe had the reality of abstractions, which at least in part was about mathematics.\nAnd this one is a window on the infinity.\nAnd in the window on infinity, we're really laying the groundwork for some of the material that is to come about the multiverse.\nSo the motivation really is to speak about quantum theory and how to understand infinite sets and how to count them and otherwise measure their number.\nThat's what all this is about.\nAnd we'll look at some really cool maths along the way, hence why whiteboard here.\nSo let me just begin the reading rather than having a huge preamble of such as I did in the last episode and get straight into the book.\nDavid Wright, the beginning of Chapter 8, mathematicians realized centuries ago that it is possible to work consistently and, usefully, with infinity.\nAnd let's say it's infinitely large quantities and also infinitesimal quantities also makes sense.\nMany of their properties are counterintuitive, and the introduction of theories about infinities has always been controversial.\nBut many facts about finite things are just as counterintuitive.\nWhat Dawkins calls the argument from personal incredulity is no argument.\nIt represents nothing but a preference for parochial misconceptions over universal truths.\nIn Physics 2, infinity has been contemplated since antiquity.\nEuclidean space was infinite, and, in any case, space was usually regarded as a continuum.\nEven a finite line was composed of infinitely many points.\nThere were also infinitely many instants between any two times.\nBut the understanding of continuous quantities was patchy in contradictory, until Newton and Leibniz invented calculus, a technique for analyzing continuous change in terms of infinite numbers of infinitesimal changes.\nThe beginning of infinity, the possibility of the unlimited growth of knowledge in the future, depends on a number of other infinites.\nOne of them is the universality in the laws of nature, which allows finite, local symbols to apply to the whole of time and space until all phenomena and all possible phenomena.\nAnother is the existence of physical objects that are universal explainers, people, which it turns out are necessarily universal constructors as well, and must contain universal classical computers.\nI'll pause there.\nThis is my hobby horse, of course.\nA person is a universal classical computer, or as David says there, a person contains a universal classical computer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "93904adf-1168-487c-9a0b-053a67020fab": {"page_content": "Another is the existence of physical objects that are universal explainers, people, which it turns out are necessarily universal constructors as well, and must contain universal classical computers.\nI'll pause there.\nThis is my hobby horse, of course.\nA person is a universal classical computer, or as David says there, a person contains a universal classical computer.\nA person is a universal classical computer in a sense that they are that plus more.\nThey have all the capacities that a universal classical computer has, but unlike the universal classical computers that, for example, are making this podcast and video upon, those computers cannot explain anything.\nThey do not have the capacity for explanation, for learning what we need in order for something to be designated a person is a system that not only is universal in its capacity to compute, but also university in universal in its capacity to explain one, the universal capacity for explanation depends upon or has a prerequisite of universal computation, but not vice versa.\nAnd universal computer doesn't need to be a universal explainer.\nLet's continue with the book.\nThe next paragraph says, most forms of universality themselves refer to some sort of infinity, although they can always be interpreted in terms of something being unlimited rather than actually infinite.\nThis is what opponents of infinity call a potential infinity, rather than a realized one.\nFor instance, the beginning of infinity can be described either as a condition where progress in the future will be unbounded, or as the condition where an infinite amount of progress will be made, but I use those concepts interchangeably because in this context, there is no substantive difference between them.\nThere is a philosophy of mathematics called finiteism.\nSo it reads the next part, the next part is about the philosophical doctrine of finiteism.\nI won't read that, I would encourage people to go to the book for the full understanding of the problems with finiteism, but suffice it to say here, the question is, if one rejects the reality of infinity, then one is forced in mathematics to conclude there must be a large, largest possible number if you believe in finiteism, or if you think finiteism is true, then there are not infinite sets including the infinite set of numbers, infinite set of integers.\nIt must stop somewhere, so therefore there is an infinite there.\nSo therefore there is a finite number of numbers, however, in order to generate integers in the first place, what we do is we add one to any number that we currently do have.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=125"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d3cacc7-2fee-429e-9db2-599bc2f58bdd": {"page_content": "It must stop somewhere, so therefore there is an infinite there.\nSo therefore there is a finite number of numbers, however, in order to generate integers in the first place, what we do is we add one to any number that we currently do have.\nAnd so if the argument is there is a largest possible number, then we are contradicting the rule that in order to get to the next number, we add one.\nIn other words, if someone comes up to you and says, if someone comes along and argues for finiteism, then they are arguing for a large possible number, and they must be able to answer the question as to why, if that large is possible number, whatever it is, cannot have one added to it.\nSo David spends a number of paragraphs, criticizing finiteism, criticizing finiteism as unreasonable, and then he writes, the whole of the above discussion assumes the universality of reason, the rich of science has inherent limits, so does mathematics.\nSo does every branch of philosophy, but if you believe that there are bounds under the main in which reason is the proper arbiter of ideas, then you believe in unreason or the supernatural.\nSimilarly, if you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial, so there is no way of stopping there.\nThe best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity, for reach of explanations, cannot be limited by fiat, and skipping just a little more, and David writes.\nKantor found that the modern mathematical study of infinity, his principle was defended and further generalized in the 20th century by the mathematician, John Conway, who whimsically but appropriately, named it the mathematician's liberation movement.\nAs those defenses suggest, Kantor's discoveries encountered vitriolic opposition among his contemporaries, including mathematical mathematicians of the day, and also many scientists, philosophers and theologians.\nReligious objections, ironically, were in effect based on the principle of mediocrity.\nThey characterised attempts to understand and work with infinity as an encroachment on the prerogatives of God.\nIn the mid-20th century, long after the study of infinity had become a routine part of mathematics, and had found countless applications there, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein still contemptuously denounced it as meaningless, though eventually he also applied that accusation to the whole of philosophy, including his own work, see chapter 12, or pause there, and my commentary here, Wittgenstein again.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=273"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c7688e9e-a560-4afe-9a9f-b633e06ac376": {"page_content": "In the mid-20th century, long after the study of infinity had become a routine part of mathematics, and had found countless applications there, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein still contemptuously denounced it as meaningless, though eventually he also applied that accusation to the whole of philosophy, including his own work, see chapter 12, or pause there, and my commentary here, Wittgenstein again.\nYes, Wittgenstein and Popper had a great debate about whether or not there existed philosophical problems at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=402"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5ebf75e0-ebb9-450c-b7f2-e21419588958": {"page_content": "Wittgenstein argued that there were not, there were only these things called philosophical puzzles, that every single philosophical problem was an apparent problem because of our misunderstanding of how to use language, so in other words, all philosophical problems came down to language games, so this is the phrase that many people live in today, many philosophers today still use, and Wittgenstein indeed said of his own philosophy that it was rather useless, like the rest of philosophy and the rest of metaphysics, what he said of his own philosophy was, it's kind of like a ladder that helps you to climb out of a dark well, and once you are out of the dark well, you can dispense with the ladder, and that's what you thought of his own philosophy, there was this heroic thing that allowed people to get out and become enlightened.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=434"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2bebcdc7-e301-46d4-aeab-fe9afa4d4929": {"page_content": "Now this is wonderful book, it's called Wittgenstein's Popper, I don't have it he with me now, I'll put an image on the screen, it's sitting on my desk at my workplace actually, and Wittgenstein's Poaker is about the sole encounter that ever happened between these two big names in philosophy, Wittgenstein and Popper, and this great debate about whether or not there were philosophical problems, it's called Wittgenstein's Poaker because apparently during the debate, although accounts of what actually happened differ, apparently at some point Wittgenstein picked up the Poaker out of the fireplace and pointed it at Popper in order to emphasise a point, so there's some debate about whether or not that happens, so it's an interesting sociological study of these two communities of philosophers or philosophies as well as the debate itself, so I recommend this book, and I'll just say on the point it sounds like a very clever thing to say, and I think it is one of the better things that possibly Wittgenstein did say, it is clever, that his own philosophy is kind of like a ladder out of from which you use to escape a well, it's a great analogy, but ultimately it is a false analogy, it's a false analogy because you cannot escape from the problems of philosophy, the problems of philosophy are not like a well, and the well is always there, you are forever climbing out of the well, and the ladder, I suppose, is useful, this is the philosophical progress that you're making, but it is an infinite climb, it is an infinite climb towards the light if you like, which is an infinitely far distance off, so I suppose the ladder analogy works, but you just can't get out of the well, that's the mistake that Wittgenstein made, skipping a little more, and then David writes, in mathematics, infinity is stayed via infinite sets, meaning sets with infinitely many members, the defining property of an infinite set is that some part of it has as many elements as", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=479"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "149d0bf8-67d0-4a11-b9ab-4526314418b6": {"page_content": "which is an infinitely far distance off, so I suppose the ladder analogy works, but you just can't get out of the well, that's the mistake that Wittgenstein made, skipping a little more, and then David writes, in mathematics, infinity is stayed via infinite sets, meaning sets with infinitely many members, the defining property of an infinite set is that some part of it has as many elements as the whole thing, for instance, think of the natural numbers, now I'll pause here and David goes through some examples, so I'll go through the example over here, we've got the counting numbers here, I've added 0 to the numbers, so we've got integer numbers, so starting at 0, we go 1, 2, 3, 4, okay, off to infinity, now I'm actually just taking part of that set, just the even numbers, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, well it looks like this has half as many members, doesn't it, but in fact it doesn't, it has exactly the same number of members, and the reason why is because for every single number that I can write in the first set, I can write a number in the second set, now I'll never run out of numbers in the second set, even though it doesn't include all of the numbers that are in the first set, and so what we say is that they these two set are in 1 to 1 correspondence, but every member we can write down another member in the upper set, and so on if we did the three times tables, 3, 6, 9, 12, etc, if you take part of this first set, and write it down here, we have a 1 to 1 correspondence, and say therefore the size of the infinity is the same, they're both infinitely long, we'll never get to the end, but we're going to see in a very short moment that there are kinds of infinity that are bigger than other kinds of infinity, and the first thing I'll preface it to say is this one's accountable infinity, we can literally count at 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or this one 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, accountable infinities, they're infinite, but", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=570"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50e73a3d-c842-4154-be7c-46b50cffb6fb": {"page_content": "we'll never get to the end, but we're going to see in a very short moment that there are kinds of infinity that are bigger than other kinds of infinity, and the first thing I'll preface it to say is this one's accountable infinity, we can literally count at 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or this one 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, accountable infinities, they're infinite, but they're not as big as other infinities that we're about to come to, now so far I've skipped a actual substantial bit of the beginning of this chapter, but now I'm going to read an extended bit of this chapter, I find it really entertaining as part, and so let me just get straight into it, David writes, the mathematician David Hilbert devised a thought experiment to illustrate some of the intuitions the one has to drop when reasoning about infinity, he imagined a hotel with infinitely many rooms, infinity hotel, the rooms are numbered with the natural numbers starting with one and ending with what?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=667"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f5372ef2-5b24-4a6a-bd6e-4796566019e7": {"page_content": "The last room number is not infinity, first of all there is no last room, the idea that any numbered set of rooms has highest numbered member is the first intuition from everyday life we have to drop, second in any finite hotel whose rooms were numbered from one, there would be a number whose room equaled the total number of rooms and other rooms whose numbers were close to that, if there were ten rooms one of them would be room number ten and there would be a room number nine as well, but infinity hotel where the number of rooms is infinity, all the rooms have numbers infinitely far below infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=719"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b4c6d6b4-ac89-4387-abd9-c63287bbacdf": {"page_content": "Now imagine that infinity hotel is fully occupied, each room contains one guest and cannot contain more, with finite hotels fully occupied is the same thing as no room for more guests, but infinity hotel always has room for more, I'll just pause there, so that's another strange intuition and it's kind of it illuminates some of the struggle we have in trying to capture mathematical reality and mathematical truth in normal natural language like English, so again he rides, if the hotel is fully occupied in the case of a finite hotel, fully occupied means there's no room for any else, that's what fully occupied means, but if you've got an infinitely large hotel, fully occupied means there's still room, that seems like a contradiction, it's not and David's about to explain why, so let me continue reading, one of the conditions of staying there is that guests have to change rooms if asked by the management, so if and you guests arrives, the management just announced over the public address system will all guests please move immediately to the room number one more than their current room, thus the existing occupant room one moves to room two, whose occupant moves to room three and so on, what happens at the last room, there is no last room, and hence no problem about what happens there, the new arrival can now move into room one, an infinity hotel, it is never necessary to make a reservation, evidently no such places that infinity hotel could exist in our universe, because it violates several laws of physics, however, this is a mathematical thought experiment, so the only constraint on the imaginary laws of physics is that they be consistent, it is because of the requirement that they be consistent, that they are counterintuitive, intuitions of an infinity are often illogical, it was paused there just to remark, that we have to keep in mind throughout these thought experiments, that infinity hotel is not of our universe, infinity hotel is in abstract space, so to speak, and so it can violate laws of physics, that does not obey our laws of physics, this is absolutely crucial", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=756"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0db8bb23-849c-4251-b76c-a3c493ba66eb": {"page_content": "they be consistent, that they are counterintuitive, intuitions of an infinity are often illogical, it was paused there just to remark, that we have to keep in mind throughout these thought experiments, that infinity hotel is not of our universe, infinity hotel is in abstract space, so to speak, and so it can violate laws of physics, that does not obey our laws of physics, this is absolutely crucial because it's going to eliminate something about our laws of physics, okay, so let's keep on going, David writes, it is a bit awkward to have to keep changing rooms, though they are all identical and are freshly made up every time a guest moves in, but guest loves staying in infinity hotel, that's because it is cheap, only a dollar a night, it extraordinarily looks luxurious, how is that possible, every day when the management receive all the room rents of one dollar per room, they spend the income as follows, with the dollars they receive from the rooms numbered one to a thousand, they buy complementary champagne, strawberries, housekeeping services, and all the other overheads, just for room number one, with the dollars they receive from the rooms numbered a thousand and one to two thousand, they do the same for room two, and so on, in this way each room receives several hundred dollars worth of goods and services every day, and the management make a profit as well, all from their income of one dollar per room, word gets around, and one day an infinitely long train pulls up at the local station containing infinitely many people wanting to stay at the hotel, making infinitely many public address announcements will take too long, and anyway the hotel rules say that each guest can be asked to perform only a finite number of actions per day, but no matter, the management merely announced will all guests please move immediately to the room number that is double that of their current room, obviously they can all do that, and afterwards the only occupied rooms are the even numbered ones, leaving the odd numbered ones free for the new arrivals, that is exactly enough to receive the infinitely many", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=860"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a6925fe1-e26c-4f5f-bd44-405c64cf3375": {"page_content": "rules say that each guest can be asked to perform only a finite number of actions per day, but no matter, the management merely announced will all guests please move immediately to the room number that is double that of their current room, obviously they can all do that, and afterwards the only occupied rooms are the even numbered ones, leaving the odd numbered ones free for the new arrivals, that is exactly enough to receive the infinitely many new guests, because there are exactly as many odd numbers as there are natural numbers, and that's just as we can see here, of course there's equally as many even numbers as there are natural numbers here, counting numbers, and there will be equally as many odd numbers as well, so if person in room no one moves to two, person in two moves to four, then we're left with room number one being free and room number three being free, and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=955"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "973b2282-b468-4ca0-8a55-090e93c710d8": {"page_content": "Okay, so in that thought experiment we've had an infinitely long train turn up to infinity hotel that's packed to the brim with an infinite number of people, but are still accommodated inside of the hotel, and the next thought experiment is even there, so David writes, then one day an infinite number of infinitely long trains are over the station, all full of guests for the hotel, but the managers are still unperturbed, they just make a slightly more complicated announcement, which readers who are familiar with mathematical terminology can see in the footnote, the upshot is everyone is accommodated, so even an infinite number of infinite long trains with an infinite number of people on each train can still be accommodated in infinity hotel, which is just to say there is a one-to-one correspondence between those two sets, the set of infinitely long trains, the infinite set of infinitely long trains, each of which have an infinite number of people in them, and the set of natural numbers here, but then David writes, however, it is mathematically possible to overwhelm the capacity of infinity hotel.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=1005"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "13c23b46-a276-4551-8bfb-3f885fa6d2c7": {"page_content": "In a remarkable series of discoveries in the 1870s, Kanto proved, among other things, that not all infinities are equal, in particular, the infinity of the continuum, the number of points in a finite line, which is the same as the number of points in the whole of space or space time, is much larger than the infinity of the natural numbers.\nKanto proved this by proving that there can be no one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and the point in a line.\nThat set of points as a higher order of infinity than the set of natural numbers, and then David does an explanation of Kanto's diagonal argument, and I'm going to do a slightly different version here, it's kind of the version that you will see if you just look up Kanto's diagonalization argument.\nOkay, so let's start again, and here we're going to use the binary system.\nIn other words, just the number 0 and 1, so if we were to write down all the different permutations, different ways in which we could write an infinitely long sequence of zeros and ones, let's see what we do.\nSo maybe we could, if we were just going to write, we could write just zeros, that would be an infinitely long sequence of nothing but zeros, boring, or infinitely long sequence of just ones, okay, fine.\nAnd now if we start to combine, then maybe we could do an alternating series of 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, or we could do the opposite 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1.\nOh maybe we could do two ones and a 0, two ones and a 0, or maybe two zeros and a 1, two zeros and a 1, or maybe it could be three ones and two zeros, one zero or three zeros, three ones and two zeros.\nYou can imagine all the different possible permutations of ways of writing zeros and ones, all the infinite, all the different kinds of infinitely long sequences of zeros and ones.\nNow it's at this point I realized my microphone had ceased working.\nand so we're going to have to continue this explanation in the very next episode where I can promise the audio is far better.\nAnyway, we'll see you then.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggABJh1NQwg&t=1068"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ba2af7df-7171-4db8-a6ad-e1513764ef26": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and for my continuing series.\nOn the fabric of reality, we're up to chapter two shutters.\nFor what I imagine will be a relatively short episode.\nNo reason for that, I flagged in a previous episode because I've already completed approximately a five-part series on the multiverse, which is essentially what this is about.\nThis chapter is focused on quantum theory.\nAs I've also said previously, and in various other forums, this was the chapter that had the most profound impact on me when it came to reading the fabric of reality.\nAnd the reason for that, I suppose, is twofold.\nOn the one hand, I was struggling when I first read this chapter to understand quantum theory.\nI was studying it at university and the undergraduate level, and we were working through problem sets and doing exercises as you do in university physics classes.\nAnd although I could mechanically work through how to get the answer, I didn't understand what I was doing.\nI didn't understand exactly what the Schrodinger wave equation, for example, was telling me about reality.\nI didn't understand how to interpret the experiments, one of which David is going to explain to us today, which I'm going to go through again.\nSo in this confusion, this haze of disillusionment, I suppose, with the way in which I was being presented quantum theory.\nBy both my lecturers at university and by other popularizers of science, who'd written books on the subject, like Paul Davies, for example, who writes some very exciting and interesting books about the touch upon, at least, quantum theory.\nI never felt like I was getting an explanation that made any sense.\nAnd when I read the explanation here in chapter two shadows, it made sense.\nAnd so that was why it was astonishing to me on the one hand of why it had such a profound impact on me, because he finally, for the first time I got it, I felt as if now I understood what quantum theory was an explanation of, what it was telling us about reality.\nThat's on the one hand.\nOn the other hand, it was the fact that what it was telling us about reality was so astonishing.\nI kind of knew that it had to be astonishing in some way, shape or form, because I'd read various other so-called interpretations, and they were wacky to say the least.\nThings like the human mind or consciousness was somehow involved in fundamental physics.\nI didn't like this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bca305aa-32e6-4f28-9887-217252738006": {"page_content": "That's on the one hand.\nOn the other hand, it was the fact that what it was telling us about reality was so astonishing.\nI kind of knew that it had to be astonishing in some way, shape or form, because I'd read various other so-called interpretations, and they were wacky to say the least.\nThings like the human mind or consciousness was somehow involved in fundamental physics.\nI didn't like this.\nIt didn't ring true to me, because I didn't think there could be a place, really, for something as emergent and complex and large, as the human brain, giving right to the mind, on fundamental particles.\nIt evoked what Einstein called spooky action at a distance.\nI, like Einstein, not to put myself in the same category, but I rejected this idea I regarded it as spooky, this idea that if you're observing something, then the experiment goes in one direction, and if you're not observing something, the experiment goes in a different direction.\nI felt either this was a prosaic claim about the way in which light interacted with matter, who cares, or it was a weird claim about if you passively think of something, then that can affect a physical system somewhere other.\nAnyway, I wasn't buying it, I didn't understand it, but here we actually get the explanation.\nSo I'm going to do an abridged reading today of the chapter, and go through the double slit experiment, the way that David puts it in his words, and I've done this before actually in the beginning of infinity series, but we'll do it again here, because this is the fabric of reality.\nSo here we are, chapter two, shadows, and David writes, there is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle, Michael Faraday, a course of six lectures on the chemical history of a candle.\nIn his popular Royal Institution Lectures on Science, Michael Faraday used to urge his audiences to learn about the world by considering what happens when a candle burns.\nI'm going to consider an electric torch, or flashlight instead.\nThis is quite fitting for much of the technology of an electric torch is based on Faraday's discoveries.\nI'm going to describe some experiments which demonstrate phenomena that are at the core of quantum physics.\nExperiments of this sort with many variations and refinements have been the bread and butter of quantum optics for many years.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71326ed1-529f-4e02-b109-eb458fdf6892": {"page_content": "I'm going to consider an electric torch, or flashlight instead.\nThis is quite fitting for much of the technology of an electric torch is based on Faraday's discoveries.\nI'm going to describe some experiments which demonstrate phenomena that are at the core of quantum physics.\nExperiments of this sort with many variations and refinements have been the bread and butter of quantum optics for many years.\nThere is no controversy about the results, yet even now some of them are hard to believe.\nThe basic experiments are remarkably austere.\nThey require neither specialized scientific instruments nor any great knowledge of mathematics or physics.\nEssentially they involve nothing but casting shadows, but the patterns of light and shadow that an ordinary electric torch can cast are very strange.\nWhen considered carefully they have extraordinary ramifications.\nExplaining them requires not a just new physical laws but a new level of description and explanation that goes beyond what was previously regarded as being the scope of science.\nBut first it reveals the existence of parallel universes.\nHow can it?.\nWhat conceivable pattern of shadows could have implications like that?.\nImagine an electric torch switched on in an otherwise dark room.\nLight emanates from the filament of the torch's bulb and fills out part of the cone.\nIn order not to complicate the experiment with reflected light, the walls of the room should be totally absorbent, matte, black.\nAlternatively, since we are only imagining these experiments, we could imagine a room of astronomical size, so there is no time for any light to reach the walls and return before the experiment is completed.\nFigure 2.1 illustrates the situation, but it is somewhat misleading.\nIf we were observing the torch from the side we should be able to see neither it nor, of course, its light.\nInvisibility is one of the more straightforward properties of light.\nWe see light only if it enters our eyes, though we usually speak of seeing the object in our line of sight that last affected that light.\nOK, pausing there just my reflection on this.\nYes, this can be sometimes surprising to people who hear it for the first time that light is invisible.\nWhat that means is that if light is passing in that direction, let's say, and not entering your eye, then there's no way that you can possibly detect it.\nYou can't see it, which is why the laser bolts in Star Wars should be invisible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=269"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cabada27-a62b-4714-a6e0-91d05da8b7b9": {"page_content": "OK, pausing there just my reflection on this.\nYes, this can be sometimes surprising to people who hear it for the first time that light is invisible.\nWhat that means is that if light is passing in that direction, let's say, and not entering your eye, then there's no way that you can possibly detect it.\nYou can't see it, which is why the laser bolts in Star Wars should be invisible.\nNow, we don't know what these laser bolts technically speaking consist of, and Star Wars might very well be a magical universe, separator from our own operating via different physical laws.\nIndeed, the existence of the force probably suggests that that is the case, but presuming that you could indeed have bullets made of light coming from storm trip of guns, then you wouldn't be able to see them unless, of course, they're not actually made of light, which is quite possible after all, they're moving much, much slower than light, indeed, they're moving much, much slower than typical bullets.\nSo Star Wars laser bolts aren't lasers.\nYou can only see stuff that light reflects off.\nAnd when you see stuff, what you're seeing are the photons entering your eye.\nIf a laser is shone from here to there, you don't see the laser beam.\nFor example, here's my laser pointer.\nHere's me putting the laser pointer on.\nYou can't see it.\nI can see the little dot over there, and if I put the laser behind me, I'm not sure if that'll sharpen my screen or whatever, but here you can probably see it on my forehead there.\nNow, if I pointed out you, then you can see it, right.\nSo lasers, as they go from one place to another, you can't actually see the photons.\nSo explain those pictures where you can see the laser light.\nThat's because you've got some sort of smoke or mist or something in the room, and it's reflecting off the laser ray, beam, whatever you want to call it.\nThe photons of light are crashing into matter particles, particles of dust, usually of some kind or other.\nSo the other thing to say about light, especially light, such as comes out of a normal torch.\nAnd this is something we all have experience with, is that if you are close to the source of light, if you're close to where the torch is, then the torch is bright, and the further you move away from the torch, the more dim it becomes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=388"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4605c262-1d94-4aa2-84a2-9e74d5b7783f": {"page_content": "The photons of light are crashing into matter particles, particles of dust, usually of some kind or other.\nSo the other thing to say about light, especially light, such as comes out of a normal torch.\nAnd this is something we all have experience with, is that if you are close to the source of light, if you're close to where the torch is, then the torch is bright, and the further you move away from the torch, the more dim it becomes.\nNot surprising.\nAnd the reason is that the light is spreading out over an ever-greater area.\nAnd so it's getting spread more and more thinly, like butter being spread over more bread.\nLet me go back to the book at this point, and David Ryan's.\nCan light really be spread more and more thinly without limit?.\nThe answer is no.\nAt a distance of approximately 10,000 kilometers from the torch, its light would be too faint for the human eye to detect, and the observer would see nothing.\nThat is, a human observer would see nothing.\nBut what about an animal with more sensitive vision?.\nFrogs eyes are several times more sensitive than human eyes, just enough to make a significant difference in this experiment.\nIf the observer were a frog, and it kept moving further away from the torch, the moment at which an entirely lost sight of the torch would never come.\nInstead, the frog would see the torch light begin to flicker.\nThe flickers would come at irregular intervals that would become longer as the frog moved further away.\nBut the brightness of the individual flickers would not diminish.\nAt a distance of 100 million kilometers from the torch, the frog would see on average only one flicker of light per day, but that flicker would be as bright as any that it observed at any other distance.\nFrogs cannot tell us what they see, so in real experiments, we use photomultiplires, light detectors, which are even more sensitive than frog's eyes, and we thin out the light by passing it through dark filters, rather than by observing it from 100 million kilometers away.\nAnd then David compares light to gold.\nYou can't thin out light infinitely.\nThere comes a point at which the light begins to flicker.\nIn a similar way, gold is an infinitely malleable.\nNow, I've used this example myself, and it's an interesting psychological trick that is played on one's mind.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=498"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "400e2420-c4e3-4d67-8ea9-0e65ba1928da": {"page_content": "And then David compares light to gold.\nYou can't thin out light infinitely.\nThere comes a point at which the light begins to flicker.\nIn a similar way, gold is an infinitely malleable.\nNow, I've used this example myself, and it's an interesting psychological trick that is played on one's mind.\nI actually thought this analogy was something that I sort of came up with, but no, here it is gold is mentioned here in the fabric of reality.\nSo I have absorbed it then, only just reading it here again now, do I realize that, oh, the reason why I keep using gold is my go-to example of what stuff is quantized is because it's here in the fabric of reality.\nSo if you hammer out a metal, the degree to which you can hammer it out of the ease with which you can hammer it out is known as the malleability of that material.\nSo gold is extremely malleable.\nYou can spread it so thin, of course, that you can get that gold leaf stuff that is extremely thin indeed.\nBut you can't make gold infinitely thin, because you eventually get down to the gold atom.\nAnd once you get down to the gold atom, if you were to try and break that down still further, you would no longer have gold.\nYou'd have half of a gold atom, which is no longer gold.\nSo as David writes, and I'll pick up from where he talks about this, you're right.\nSo the only way in which one can make a one atom thick gold sheet even thinner is to space the atoms further apart, with empty space between them.\nWhen they are sufficiently far apart, it becomes misleading to think of them as forming a continuous sheet.\nFor example, if each gold atom were on average several centimeters from its nearest neighbor, one might pass one's hand through the sheet without touching any gold at all.\nSimilarly, there is an ultimate lump or atom of light, a photon.\nEach flicker scene by the frog is caused by a photon striking the retina of its eye, pausing their my reflection.\nSo what David's talking about here is, of course, quantization.\nThis concept that there is the smallest possible unit of stuff.\nIn the case of gold, the smallest possible unit of stuff is the gold atom.\nIn the case of light, it is the photon of light, smallest particle of light.\nCase of electricity, the smallest possible particle is the electron.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=239"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0ff64e3-11a6-45f3-a959-0380f0c2d075": {"page_content": "Each flicker scene by the frog is caused by a photon striking the retina of its eye, pausing their my reflection.\nSo what David's talking about here is, of course, quantization.\nThis concept that there is the smallest possible unit of stuff.\nIn the case of gold, the smallest possible unit of stuff is the gold atom.\nIn the case of light, it is the photon of light, smallest particle of light.\nCase of electricity, the smallest possible particle is the electron.\nIn the case of water, it's the water molecule and repeat for all stuff that's made out of matter, anything that appears in the so-called standard model of particle physics.\nAll the stuff that you can see around you is going to have a smallest possible unit of stuff that makes it up.\nAnd I say everything, of course, I mean the everything that's made out of pure substances you, of course, see mixtures around you.\nSo if you have in the simplest case, salt water, then the smallest possible unit of salt order is not a unit of salt water.\nThis smallest possible unit are two discrete things, one of which is called the salt lattice.\nWell, really, it's made of two ions, the sodium and the chloride, which are bonded together via electrostatic forces, and the water molecule.\nAnd so these two things constitute the units out of which the mixture, salt water is made.\nSo a lot of the things you're seeing in your environment, of course, are mixtures, including human beings, for example, which are made up of lots of pure substances, each of which have a smallest possible unit.\nSo pretty much everything is quantized.\nWhat doesn't appear to be quantized or what we don't know about the quantization of?.\nThings like gravity, it has been suggested that the standard model should contain a graviton.\nI don't know why, but this is just what people who want to quantize spacetime or quantize gravity talk about, they talk about a particle gravity, never been observed and doesn't appear to explain anything because we have an explanation of gravity, which is in terms of spacetime, which is continuously divisible.\nUnder that theory, under general relativity, we don't have a smallest unit of time or a smallest unit of space or a smallest unit of spacetime, et cetera.\nBut this idea of quantization in physics within the realm of quantum physics is the thing that gives quantum theory its name.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=681"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1cf1805f-df23-45f4-bba6-05ed3be9d165": {"page_content": "Under that theory, under general relativity, we don't have a smallest unit of time or a smallest unit of space or a smallest unit of spacetime, et cetera.\nBut this idea of quantization in physics within the realm of quantum physics is the thing that gives quantum theory its name.\nThere is a quanta, a smallest particle of something.\nOkay, so I'm skipping, as I say, a number of pages there.\nand I'm picking up where David says, I have made an assumption about light, namely that it travels only in straight lines.\nFrom everyday experience, we know that it does, for we cannot see around corners, but careful experiments show that light does not always travel in straight lines.\nUnder some circumstances, it bends.\nThis is hard to demonstrate with a torch alone just because it is difficult to make very tiny filaments and very black surfaces.\nThese practical difficulties mask the limits that fundamental physics imposes on the sharpness of shadows.\nFortunately, the bending of light can also be demonstrated in a different way.\nSuppose that the light of a torch passes through two successive small holes in otherwise opaque screens, as shown in figure 2.4, and that the emerging light falls on the third screen beyond our question now is this.\nIf the experiment is repeated with ever smaller holes and with ever greater separation between the first and second screens, can one bring theumbra, the region of total darkness, ever closer without limit to the straight lines through the centers of the two holes.\nCan the illuminated region between the second and third screens be confined to an arbitrarily narrow cone, in Goldsmith's terminology, we are now asking something like how ductile is light.\nHow fine a thread can it be drawn into?.\nIt turns out light is not as ductile as gold.\nLong before the holes get as small as a 10,000th of a millimeter, in fact, even with holes as large as a millimeter or so in diameter, the light begins noticeably to rebel.\nInstead of passing through the holes in straight lines, it refuses to be confined and spreads out after each hole, and as it spreads, it frays.\nThe smaller the hole, the more the light spreads out from its straight line path, intricate patterns of light and dark shadow appear.\nWe no longer see simply a bright region and a dark region on the third screen with a penumbra in between, but instead concentric rings of varying thickness and brightness.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89e1d691-7837-412d-ac48-b896d3a8506a": {"page_content": "Instead of passing through the holes in straight lines, it refuses to be confined and spreads out after each hole, and as it spreads, it frays.\nThe smaller the hole, the more the light spreads out from its straight line path, intricate patterns of light and dark shadow appear.\nWe no longer see simply a bright region and a dark region on the third screen with a penumbra in between, but instead concentric rings of varying thickness and brightness.\nThere is also color, because white light consists of a mixture of photons of various colors, and each color spreads and frays in a slightly different pattern.\nFigure 2.5 shows a typical pattern that might be formed on the third screen by white light that has passed through holes in the first two screens.\nRemember, there is nothing happening here but the casting of a shadow.\nFigure 2.5 is just a shadow that would be cast by the second screen in figure 2.4.\nIf light travelled only in straight lines, there would be only a tiny white dot, much smaller than the central bright spotting figure 2.5, surrounded by a very narrow penumbra.\nOutside that, there would be pure umbra, total darkness, pausing their my reflection and just skipping a little bit more.\nAt this point, nothing to a science student, in particular a physics student, as I was 20-plus years ago, was particularly surprising in what David had said.\nIt was a little bit idiosyncratic, I thought perhaps, that he was invoking frogs and torches, and I thought it was a nice harking back to the fact that, yes, Michael Faraday would explain stuff through contemplation of the operation of how a candle produced light, and so that was lovely, but so far nothing particularly surprising.\nPretty much run-of-the-mill science and the same kind of way in which things would be explained in a clear way with analogies, such as the analogy of light being quantized, to gold being quantized, but now we're about to get into the part where, as I've said before, the sense of vertigo comes in, for anyone who hasn't heard this description of the experiment before, much less the explanation which is to come.\nThe description of the experiment, including the result, is rather strange.\nThe first part, if you've even done high school physics, won't seem to be that mysterious, it is the double slit experiment.\nBut how it works with single photons, well that is the challenging part for us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=962"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "59388b6a-d9a7-4cc3-bf27-6d73c58c9649": {"page_content": "The description of the experiment, including the result, is rather strange.\nThe first part, if you've even done high school physics, won't seem to be that mysterious, it is the double slit experiment.\nBut how it works with single photons, well that is the challenging part for us.\nSo let's dive straight into it, David writes.\nFigure 2.6 shows that, roughly its actual size, a part of the pattern of shadows cast three metres from a pair of straight parallel slits in an otherwise opaque barrier.\nThe slits are one-fifth of a millimetre apart and illuminated by a parallel-sided beam of pure red light, from a laser on the other side of the barrier.\nWhy laser light and not torchlight?.\nOnly because the precise shape of a shadow also depends on the colour of the light in which it is cast.\nWhite light, as produced by a torch, contains a mixture of all visible colours, so it can cast shadows with multi-coloured fringes.\nTherefore, in experiments about the precise shapes of shadows, we are better off using a light of a single colour.\nWe could put a coloured filter, such as a pane of coloured glass, over the front of the torch, so that only line of that colour would get through.\nThat would help, but filters are not all that discriminating.\nA better method is to use laser light, for lasers can be tuned very accurately to emit light of whatever colour we choose with almost no other colour present.\nIf light travelled in straight lines, the pattern in figure 2.6 would consist simply of a pair of bright bands, one-fifth of a millimetre apart, too close to distinguish on the scale, with sharp edges and with the rest of the screen in shadow.\nBut in reality, the light bends in such a way as to make many bright bands and dark bands and no sharp edges at all.\nIf the slits are moved sideways, so long as they remain within the laser beam, the pattern also moves by the same amount.\nIn this respect, it behaves exactly like an ordinary, large-scale shadow.\nNow what sort of shadow is cast?.\nIf we cut a second identical pair of slits in the barrier, interleaved with the existing pair, so that we have four slits at intervals of one-tenth of a millimetre.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=1101"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a57867ef-3397-407d-9965-7cf46ac378b6": {"page_content": "If the slits are moved sideways, so long as they remain within the laser beam, the pattern also moves by the same amount.\nIn this respect, it behaves exactly like an ordinary, large-scale shadow.\nNow what sort of shadow is cast?.\nIf we cut a second identical pair of slits in the barrier, interleaved with the existing pair, so that we have four slits at intervals of one-tenth of a millimetre.\nYou might expect the pattern to look almost exactly like figure 2.6, after all, the first pair of slits by itself cast the shadow in figure 2.6, and as I have just said, the second pair by itself would cast the same pattern, shifted about a tenth of a millimetre to the side, in almost the same place.\nWe even know that light beams normally passed through each other, unaffected, so the two pairs of slits together should give essentially the same pattern again, though twice as bright and slightly more blurred.\nIn reality, though, what happens is nothing like that.\nThe real shadow of a barrier, with four straight parallel slits, is shown in figure 2.7a.\nFor comparison, I have repeated below it the illustration of the two-slit pattern, figure 2.7b.\nClearly, the four-slit shadow is not a combination of two slightly displaced two-slit shadows, but has a new and more complicated pattern.\nIn this pattern, there are places, such as the point marked x, which are dark on the four-slit pattern, but bright on the two-slit pattern.\nThese places were bright when there were two slits in the barrier, but when dark, when we cut a second pair of slits for the light to pass through, opening those slits has interfered with the light that was previously arriving at x.\nSo adding two more light sources darkens the pointed x, removing them, illuminates it again, pausing that as my reflection.\nNow, at this point, I still recall, to some extent, the excitement of reading that.\nEven though I didn't know the explanation yet, I'd read that sort of thing before, but probably not quite as well explained exactly what the problem was.\nBut this idea that if you open up more places that are light to come through, you actually decrease the amount of light on the screen.\nThere's more shadows, even though you've got more light sources.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=1213"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e3c0b305-f201-4a48-81dc-8e44c2f0d5dc": {"page_content": "Now, at this point, I still recall, to some extent, the excitement of reading that.\nEven though I didn't know the explanation yet, I'd read that sort of thing before, but probably not quite as well explained exactly what the problem was.\nBut this idea that if you open up more places that are light to come through, you actually decrease the amount of light on the screen.\nThere's more shadows, even though you've got more light sources.\nYou had two previously, two places that are light to come through, and you had a certain pattern of light and dark.\nAnd then you open up more places that are light to go through, more gaps, more slits, and you actually decrease the amount of light.\nYou actually increase the number of shadows.\nThis seems bizarre.\nIt's like opening up more places that are light to get through, darkens the screen.\nSo this is really mysterious.\nAnd I don't know exactly what my psychology was back at the time of reading this, but I guess it might have been something like, I'm about to be given another confusing account of what's going on here.\nI'm not going to understand this.\nI've read about this before.\nI've even conducted this experiment myself before, and I've had lecturers tell me about the results of the experiment and what it could mean, and I haven't understood anything about what's going on.\nSo I guess I had my hopes were pretty low for being given a realistic account, a clear account, a logical account that I would be able to actually explain to other people.\nAfter all, that's a measure of whether or not you understand something.\nIf you can actually explain to someone else that such that they then walk away, nodding their head and going, oh, now I also get it, then that means to some extent that you understand it.\nAt the very least, you've convinced yourself you understand it, even if you might have some misconceptions.\nOkay, so backtracking a little bit and reading on David wrote.\nThese places were bright when there were two slits in the barrier, but when dark, when we cut a second pair of slits of the light to pass through, opening those slits has interfered with the light that was previously arriving at X.\nSo adding two more light sources, darkens the pointed X, removing them, illuminate it again.\nHow?.\nOne might imagine two photons heading towards X and bouncing off each other, like billiard balls.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aa47a76c-5867-4600-8661-a8a1a7ae222f": {"page_content": "These places were bright when there were two slits in the barrier, but when dark, when we cut a second pair of slits of the light to pass through, opening those slits has interfered with the light that was previously arriving at X.\nSo adding two more light sources, darkens the pointed X, removing them, illuminate it again.\nHow?.\nOne might imagine two photons heading towards X and bouncing off each other, like billiard balls.\nEither photon alone would have hit X, but the two together interfere with each other so that they both end up elsewhere.\nI shall show in a moment that this explanation cannot be true, nevertheless.\nThe basic idea of it is inescapable.\nSomething must be coming through that second pair of slits to prevent the light from the first pair from reaching X. But what?.\nWe can find out with the help of some further experiments.\nFirst, the four-slit pattern of figure 2.7A appears only if all four slits are illuminated by the laser beam.\nIf only two of them are illuminated, a two-slit pattern appears.\nIf three are illuminated, a three-slit pattern appears, which looks different again.\nSo whatever causes the interference is in the light beam.\nThe two-slit pattern also reappears if two of the slits are filled by anything opaque, but not if they are filled by anything transparent.\nIn other words, the interfering entity is obstructed by anything that obstructs lights.\nEven something as even substantial as fog.\nBut it can penetrate anything that allows light to pass, even something as impenetrable to matter as diamond.\nIf complicated systems of mirrors and lenses are placed anywhere in the apparatus, so long as light can travel from each slit to a particular point on the screen, what will be observed at that point will be part of a four-slit pattern.\nIf light from only two slits can reach a particular point, part of a two-slit pattern will be observed there and so on.\nSo whatever causes interference behaves like light, or just pausing there, what we mean by interference is something affecting that light that would have struck X, but which didn't.\nSo remember, in figure B, we've got the pattern that happens that occurs with two slits.\nAnd that bit that's light then goes dark when you add two more slits, additional places for the light to come through.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=1300"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5e9f2f67-452c-46dc-9ad8-a42661730b1a": {"page_content": "So whatever causes interference behaves like light, or just pausing there, what we mean by interference is something affecting that light that would have struck X, but which didn't.\nSo remember, in figure B, we've got the pattern that happens that occurs with two slits.\nAnd that bit that's light then goes dark when you add two more slits, additional places for the light to come through.\nSo something's interfering with light that otherwise would have hit X in picture B. Now those photons that we're heading towards point X, but which don't make it to point X in figure A, when you've got those two extra slits, has been interfered with something's interfered with it.\nThat's literally the word.\nAnd so there's some reason why it hasn't gotten there when it would have got there.\nOkay, just going back to the book.\nWhatever causes interference behaves like light.\nIt is found everywhere in the light beam and nowhere outside it.\nIt is reflected transmitted to a block by whatever reflects, transmits or blocks light.\nYou may be wondering why I'm laboring this point.\nSurely it is obvious that it is light.\nThat is, what interferes with photons from each slit is photons from the other slits.\nThat you may be inclined to doubt the obvious after the next experiment.\nThe genumont of the series.\nWhat should we expect to happen when these experiments are performed with only one photon at a time?.\nFor instance, suppose that our torches moved so far away that only one photon per day is falling on the screen.\nWhat will our frog observing from the screen see if it is true that one had a few years with each photon is other photons, then shouldn't the interference be lessened when the photons are very sparse?.\nShould it not cease altogether when there is only one photon passing through the apparatus at any one time?.\nWe might still expect penumbras since a photon might be capable of changing course when passing through a slit, perhaps by striking a glancing blow at the edge.\nBut what we surely could not observe is any place on the screen, such as X, that receives photons when two slits are open, but which goes dark when two more are opened.\nYet that is exactly what we do observe, however sparse the photons are, the shadow pattern remains the same.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "112d8d13-b199-4c0d-a258-61b83bc770f6": {"page_content": "We might still expect penumbras since a photon might be capable of changing course when passing through a slit, perhaps by striking a glancing blow at the edge.\nBut what we surely could not observe is any place on the screen, such as X, that receives photons when two slits are open, but which goes dark when two more are opened.\nYet that is exactly what we do observe, however sparse the photons are, the shadow pattern remains the same.\nEven when the experiment has done one photon at a time, none of them is ever observed to arrive at X when all four slits are open, yet we need only close two slits for the flickering at X to resume.\nCould it be that the photon splits into fragments, which after passing through the slits change course and recombine?.\nWe can rule that possibility out too if again we fire one photon through the apparatus, but use four detectors, one at each slit, then at most one of them, ever registers anything.\nSince in such an experiment we never observe two of the detectors going off at once, we can tell that the entities that they detect are not splitting up, so if the photons do not split into fragments and are not being deflected by other photons, what does deflect them?.\nWhen a single photon at a time is passing through the apparatus, what can be coming through the other slits to interfere with it?.\nLet us take stock.\nWe have found that when one photon passes through the apparatus, it passes through one of the slits, and then something interferes with it, deflect it in such a way that depends on what other slits are open.\nThe interfering entities have passed through some of the other slits.\nThe interfering entities behave exactly like photons, except that they cannot be seen pausing there, just my reflection, just a psychological reflection.\nSo I think at this point, this is where the sense of vertigo really begins to happen.\nIt's, you're recognizing that he is David is offering for you, served up on a platter, the explanation.\nThere are photons there that you can't see.\nAt this point, you don't understand the full explanation, but you're getting a hint of it.\nSo everything will be understood at this point.\nEverything is logical, realistic, it makes sense.\nWe're not having the wall pulled over your eyes, at no point, at least to me, do I have questions ago?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=1659"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5f87a8e8-3eaa-4055-8734-8988cd6b6c55": {"page_content": "There are photons there that you can't see.\nAt this point, you don't understand the full explanation, but you're getting a hint of it.\nSo everything will be understood at this point.\nEverything is logical, realistic, it makes sense.\nWe're not having the wall pulled over your eyes, at no point, at least to me, do I have questions ago?.\nBut wait, what about, what about, what about, because he's answering any of the objections I might have raised.\nIf you have any objections throughout this, please write a question in the comments because I like to talk about this stuff.\nIt's very interesting to try and clarify if you're not too sure let's keep going.\nDavid writes, I shall now start calling the interfering entities photons.\nThat is what they are, but for the moment it does appear that photons come in two sorts, which I shall temporarily call tangible photons and shadow photons.\nTangible photons are the ones we can see or detect with instruments, whereas the shadow photons are intangible, invisible, detectable only indirectly through the interference effects on the tangible photons.\nLater we shall see that there is no intrinsic difference between the tangible and shadow photons.\nWhich photon is tangible in one universe and intangible in all other parallel universes, but I anticipate what we have inferred so far, is only that each tangible photon has an accompanying retinue of shadow photons and that when I photon passes through one of our four slits, some shadow photons pass through the other three slits.\nSince different interference patterns appear, when we cut slits of the other places in the screen, provided that they are within the beam, shadow photons must be arriving all over the illuminated part of the screen, whenever a tangible photon arrives.\nTherefore, there are many more shadow photons and tangible ones.\nHow many?.\nExperiments cannot put an upper bound on the number, but they do set a rough lower bound in a laboratory, the largest area that we could conveniently illuminate with a laser might be about a square meter, and the smallest manageable size for the holes might be about a thousandth of a millimeter, so there are about one trillion possible hole locations on the screen.\nTherefore, there must be at least a trillion shadow photons accompanying each tangible one.\nThus we have inferred the existence of a seething, prodigiously complicated hidden world of shadow photons.\nThey travel at the speed of light, bounce off mirrors, are refracted by lenses and are stopped by opaque barriers or filters of the wrong colour.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=1777"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4155fb5-4b21-4bb2-b560-c16b6ad3275a": {"page_content": "Therefore, there must be at least a trillion shadow photons accompanying each tangible one.\nThus we have inferred the existence of a seething, prodigiously complicated hidden world of shadow photons.\nThey travel at the speed of light, bounce off mirrors, are refracted by lenses and are stopped by opaque barriers or filters of the wrong colour.\nYet, they do not trigger even the most sensitive detectors, the only thing in the universe that a shadow photon can be observed to affect is the tangible photon that it accompanies.\nThat is the phenomena of interference.\nWell, pausing that.\nSo at this point, I think I understood interference, and you should understand interference as well.\nInterference is these photons that you see, colliding, physically colliding with these photons that cannot be seen, these photons that cannot be seen, push aside the photons that you can see, because if they weren't there, then the photon would have just continued off through that double slit and landed in one of two places behind those two slits.\nThat's the single photon version of reality, the classical universe, version of reality.\nBut that's not what we're in.\nWe're in a multiverse, back to the book, we're almost there at where we have to accept the explanation of the multiverse.\nDavid Wright's shadow photons would go entirely unnoticed if it were not for this phenomena and the strange patterns of shadows by which we observe it.\nSometimes it's not a special property of photons alone.\nQuantum theory predicts and experiment confirms that it occurs for every sort of particle.\nSo there must be hosts of shadow neutrons accompanying every tangible neutron, hosts of shadow electrons accompanying every electron, and so on.\nEach of these shadow particles is detectable, only indirectly, through its interference with the motion of its tangible counterparts, pausing there.\nOkay, so at this point I think I accepted the multiverse account because I knew about doing the twin slit experiment with electrons.\nIn fact, I'd read about it being done with oxygen atoms.\nSo it's clear to me at this time that, well, not only do you have this retinue of photons following around every photon you can see, you have a retinue of electrons following every electron that you can detect and oxygen atoms, and therefore you just conclude that, well, every single particle of matter has a retinue of unseen counterparts.\nSo that's it.\nWe live in a multiverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "96ad23e3-22d4-4551-901d-44e60adc6eba": {"page_content": "In fact, I'd read about it being done with oxygen atoms.\nSo it's clear to me at this time that, well, not only do you have this retinue of photons following around every photon you can see, you have a retinue of electrons following every electron that you can detect and oxygen atoms, and therefore you just conclude that, well, every single particle of matter has a retinue of unseen counterparts.\nSo that's it.\nWe live in a multiverse.\nWe live in a universe, a reality, where much of it is unseen, which again, it's an astonishing fact, but it's also consistent with the history of ideas of their universe just getting larger and expanding beyond what we can see.\nThe scene, in terms of the unseen, indeed, as David says, going back to the book, it follows that reality is a much bigger thing that it seems, and most of it is invisible.\nThe objects and events that we and our instruments can directly observe are the mere tip of the iceberg.\nNow tangible particles have a property that entitles us to call them collectively a universe.\nThis is simply the defining property of being tangible.\nThat is, of interacting with each other and hence of being directly detectable by instruments and sense organs made of other tangible particles.\nBecause of the phenomena of interference, they are not wholly partitioned off from the rest of reality, that is, from the shadow particles.\nIf they were, we should never have discovered that there is more to reality than tangible particles.\nBut, to a good approximation, they do resemble the universe that we see around us in everyday life, and the universe referred to in classical pre-quantum physics.\nFor similar reasons, we might think of calling the shadow particles collectively a parallel universe.\nFor they, too, are affected by tangible particles, only through interference phenomena.\nBut we can do better than that.\nFor it turns out, that shadow particles are partitioned among themselves in exactly the same way, as the universe of tangible particles is partitioned from them.\nIn other words, they do not form a single homogenous parallel universe, vastly larger than a tangible one, but rather a huge number of parallel universes, each similar in composition to the tangible one, and each obeying the same laws of physics, but differing in that the particles are in different positions in each universe.\nIt's pausing there, and this is where it helped me understand the Schr\u00f6dinger wave equation, which I've been learning about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=393"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "09e4b1ef-2784-4f88-b2f8-ea1b38a98ac7": {"page_content": "In other words, they do not form a single homogenous parallel universe, vastly larger than a tangible one, but rather a huge number of parallel universes, each similar in composition to the tangible one, and each obeying the same laws of physics, but differing in that the particles are in different positions in each universe.\nIt's pausing there, and this is where it helped me understand the Schr\u00f6dinger wave equation, which I've been learning about.\nBecause the Schr\u00f6dinger wave equation gives you the distribution of all the positions that a particle can have.\nBut you only ever observe one.\nAnd previously, I'd of course been taught that well, when you observe, this of course is the collapse of the wave function, and the wave function is the thing given by the Schr\u00f6dinger wave equation.\nAnd you make an observation, and then you find that all of the different possibilities collapse into the one that you observe.\nThey all the others disappear, which makes you think, why does the equation describe all of these other possible positions if only one of them really exists?.\nWhat is going on there?.\nAnd usually, you're given the non-explanation that, well, this is just the formalism that just helps you to predict the outcome of experiments, don't worry.\nIt doesn't really mean anything in actual reality, there's no point asking about actual reality.\nWhat this says here is that, in fact, the Schr\u00f6dinger wave equation, the wave function, is telling you that all these particles really do exist.\nBefore and after, before, during and after, an experiment is conducted.\nThey really do exist when you make an observation, you find that in which universe you are, in which universe you occupy.\nYou occupy this one, or you occupy that one.\nBut all the others absolutely exist, and they continue to exist.\nThey evolve over time.\nThey change over time.\nThe distribution of particles changes over time, but they all exist.\nI'm skimming apart there where David talks about terminology, this idea of the universe versus multiverse, and he writes, so I'll just go to the bit where he explains the distinction.\nA new word multiverse has been coined to denote physical reality as a whole.\nSingle particle interference experiments, such as I have been describing, show us that multiverse exists, and it contains many counterparts of each particle in the tangible universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=2121"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a0cbaf53-5575-475d-aceb-ac03eef1099e": {"page_content": "The distribution of particles changes over time, but they all exist.\nI'm skimming apart there where David talks about terminology, this idea of the universe versus multiverse, and he writes, so I'll just go to the bit where he explains the distinction.\nA new word multiverse has been coined to denote physical reality as a whole.\nSingle particle interference experiments, such as I have been describing, show us that multiverse exists, and it contains many counterparts of each particle in the tangible universe.\nTo reach the further conclusion that the multiverse is roughly partitioned into parallel universes, we must consider interference phenomena involving more than one tangible photon.\nThe simplest way of doing this is to ask, by the way, of a thought experiment, what must be happening at the microscopic level when shadow photons strike an opaque object.\nThey are stopped, of course.\nWe know that because the interference ceases when an opaque barrier is placed in the parts of the shadow photons, but why what stops them, we can rule out the straightforward answer that they are absorbed like tangible photons would be by the tangible atoms in the barrier.\nFor one thing, we know that shadow photons do not interact with tangible atoms.\nFor another, we can verify by measuring the atoms in the barrier or more precisely by replacing the barrier with the defector that they neither absorb energy nor change the state in any way unless they are struck by tangible photons.\nShadow photons have no effect.\nTo put that another way, shadow photons and tangible photons are affected in identical ways when they reach a given barrier, but the barrier itself is not directly, is not identically affected by the two types of photon.\nPause in other words, or in my words, if you are shining a torch at the wall, we know already given David's explanation that coming out of that torch are the photons you can see, and a lot to not, I would say, the more modern understanding of conduct areas uncountably infinite fungible instances of these other photons are also coming out of the torch.\nBut when it hits a wall and opaque barrier, the opaque barrier that you can see is only absorbing the photons that you can see, so how are all the other shadow photons being absorbed?.\nWell, only because there must be shadow barriers there as well.\nThere's a shadow wall there.\nHowever, many shadow photons are, there are, that's how many shadow barriers they are, there are, absorbing the photons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c54b38a-0858-4b0c-b444-6f7f2b7e5574": {"page_content": "But when it hits a wall and opaque barrier, the opaque barrier that you can see is only absorbing the photons that you can see, so how are all the other shadow photons being absorbed?.\nWell, only because there must be shadow barriers there as well.\nThere's a shadow wall there.\nHowever, many shadow photons are, there are, that's how many shadow barriers they are, there are, absorbing the photons.\nWhich leads you inexorably to the idea that everywhere there's matter, there are uncountably infinite copies of that matter, existing, in a sense, in the same place at the same time.\nBut I'd refer you to the book if you need more about this chapter 2 is certainly worth reading.\nAnd I'll just read the final part of the chapter, I've skipped a fair bit, ignoring stuff that David says there about instrumentalism, because I've concentrated on that before in various episodes, so just in the last part of this chapter and David writes, so far I have been using temporary terminology which suggests that one of the many parallel universes differs from the others by being tangible, it is time to sever that last link with the classical single universe conception of reality.\nLet us go back to our frog, we have seen that the story of the frog that stares at the distant torch for days at a time, waiting for the flicker that comes on average once a day, is not the whole story, because there must also be shadow frogs in shadow universes that coexist with the tangible one, also waiting for photons.\nSuppose that our frog is trained to jump when it sees a flicker.\nAt the beginning of the experiment the tangible frog will have a large set of shadow counterparts, all initially alike, but shortly afterwards they will no longer all be alike.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eec757e9-3412-4797-923c-ed17925d051c": {"page_content": "Many particular one of them is unlikely to see a photon immediately, pausing there, so all of these frogs that are alike beforehand, fungible instances, indeed, so the beginning of infinity sharpens this notion up with new terminology, but it's the same idea back to the book, David writes, any particular one of them, the frogs, is unlikely to see a throat photon immediately, but what is a rare event in any one universe is a common event in a multiverse as a whole, at any instance somewhere in the multiverse, there are a few instances in which one of the photons is currently striking the retina of the frog in that universe, and the frog jumps.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=2445"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b90f0b3a-82b3-4037-819b-76792498e5c4": {"page_content": "Why exactly does it jump?.\nBecause within its universe, it obeys the same laws of physics as tangible frogs do, and its shadow retina has been struck by a shadow photon belonging to that universe.\nOne of the light-sensitive shadow molecules in the shadow retina has responded by undergoing complex chemical changes to which the shadow frog's optic nerve has in turn responded, shadow optic nerve.\nIt has transmitted a message to the frog's shadow brain, and the frog has consequently experienced the sensation of seeing a flicker.\nOr should I say the shadow sensation of seeing a flicker?.\nSurely not.\nIf shadow observers, be they frogs or people are real, then the sensations must be real too.\nWhen they observe what we might call a shadow object, they observe that it is tangible.\nThey observe this by the same means, and according to the same definition, as we apply when we say that the universe we observe is tangible.\nTangibility is relative to a given observer.\nSo objectively, there are not two kinds of photons, tangible and shadow, nor two kinds of frog, nor two kinds of universe, one tangible in the rest shadow.\nThere is nothing in the description I have given of the formation of shadows, or any of the related phenomena that distinguishes between tangible and shadow objects, apart from the mere assertion, that one of the copies is tangible.\nWhen I introduce tangible and shadow photons, I apparently distinguish them by saying that we can see the former, but not the latter.\nBut who are we?.\nWhile I was writing that, hosts of shadow davids were writing it too.\nThey drew a distinction between tangible and shadow photons, but the photons they called shadow included the ones I called tangible.\nAnd the photons they called tangible are among those, I called shadow.\nNot only did none of the copies of an object have any privileged position in the explanation of shadows that I had just outlined, neither did they have a privileged position in the full mathematical explanation provided by quantum theory.\nI may feel subjectively that I am distinguished among the copies as the tangible one, because I can directly perceive myself and not the others, but I must come to terms with the fact that all the others feel the same about themselves.\nMany of those davids are at this moment, writing these very words, some are putting it better, others have gone for a cup of tea.\nAnd there we end it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=1781"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f6d9311-778d-44b4-b291-73c149916094": {"page_content": "I may feel subjectively that I am distinguished among the copies as the tangible one, because I can directly perceive myself and not the others, but I must come to terms with the fact that all the others feel the same about themselves.\nMany of those davids are at this moment, writing these very words, some are putting it better, others have gone for a cup of tea.\nAnd there we end it.\nAnd that, as I say, is the most affecting, for me, personally, of the chapters in the fabric of reality, because it explains what's going on in this double-strict experiment.\nAnd once you understand that, coupled with this concept of quantization in quantum theory, you've gone a long way to understand in quantum theory.\nMaybe not the mathematical formalism, but who cares about that unless you want to be a professional?.\nIf you want to understand reality, the best that everyone who works in physics understand reality, then after reading shadows, you will have a very good understanding.\nIn fact, you might understand a better than some physicist, in fact, a physicist who deny this way of explaining what we see in terms of the unseen.\nFor more on this, find my multiverse series on YouTube, and until next, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkj6XbRsTc&t=1781"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db26b31d-3aa4-48ad-8673-e1e600be78e0": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast Chapter 17 Unsustainable from the beginning of Infinity series.\nThis is part four of that particular chapter and we'll be the last.\nWe will get through to the end of the chapter today, possibly a little longer than the previous chapter and next time I'll be back in my studio where I can do the final chapter called the beginning.\nBut for now, for a few parts now, we've been talking about the Easter Islanders, but let's read the final part about Easter Island.\nThe culmination, if you like, of their civilization, their primitive civilization, David writes, we do not know what horrors the Easter Island civilization perpetuated in the course of preventing progress, but apparently its fall did not improve anything.\nIndeed, the fall of tyranny is never enough.\nThe sustained creation of knowledge depends also on the presence of certain kinds of idea, particularly optimism, and a negotiated tradition of criticism.\nThere would have to be social and political institutions that incorporated and protected such traditions, a society in which some degree of dissent and deviation from the norm was tolerated and whose educational practices did not entirely extinguish creativity.\nNone of that is trivially achieved.\nWestern civilization is the current consequence of achieving it, which is why, as I said, it already has what it takes to avoid an Easter Island disaster.\nIf it really is facing a crisis, it must be some other crisis.\nIf it ever collapses, it will be in some other way, and if it needs to be saved, it will have to be by its own unique methods.\nPause their my reflection.\nAt the end of the last chapter, I was riffing on the idea of civilization being this unfathomably complicated system that we know contains in explicit knowledge, certainly our Western civilization contains in explicit knowledge of how to maintain stability while undergoing great change.\nWe don't know all the reasons why this happens, why we are able to maintain peace and relative harmony, relatively good wealth creation, relatively fast knowledge creation.\nWe're able to come up with vaccines and new technologies, relatively quickly, certainly at a rate unprecedented throughout human history, but we don't know all the ways in which this happens.\nAnd I neglected to refer to David Deutsch's excellent analogy of this way of viewing a civilization with people being on a submarine, and he mentioned this in one of his podcast with Sam Harris.\nAnd it's a wonderful analogy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5fc5025d-328c-4edb-abf2-725198391a1b": {"page_content": "We're able to come up with vaccines and new technologies, relatively quickly, certainly at a rate unprecedented throughout human history, but we don't know all the ways in which this happens.\nAnd I neglected to refer to David Deutsch's excellent analogy of this way of viewing a civilization with people being on a submarine, and he mentioned this in one of his podcast with Sam Harris.\nAnd it's a wonderful analogy.\nHe basically said, look, people who want to upend Western civilization, who want to tinker with the long-standing institutions which maintain stability, they don't know what they're doing.\nIt's basically like they are passengers on an extremely technologically advanced underwater nuclear-powered submarine, but they don't know that they're on a nuclear-powered submarine.\nInstead, they think they're on a yacht or some other kind of boat, and they want to open up all the hatches in order to get a better view.\nOkay, so that's the situation that we're kind of in.\nWe are all of us.\nPassengers on this submarine, passengers on this amazingly sophisticated, complicated piece of societal-level technology, call it a civilization, call it Western civilization.\nAnd there are some people who just ignore the fact that it has taken a long time, lots of philosophers, leaders, scientists, people, a culture gradually evolving, gradually trying things out, finding out what doesn't work, and preserving those things that work and enable the civilization to remain stable over time.\nThese traditions, especially these traditions of criticism, are so important and so underappreciated.\nThat many people think that, well, the problems we've got in society are so bad.\nIt's because of the society, and so we need to undo society in order to improve it, have a revolution, burn everything to the ground, start again.\nWell, this is entirely ludicrous.\nIt's the wrong way of going about things.\nWe don't know how to maintain stability, progress, moral, ethical, legal, and scientific progress without the kind of institutions that we have slowly and painfully managed to create, managed to evolve over time through difficult trial and error.\nBecause the historical state of things, I wouldn't like to say the natural state of things, the natural state of things are striving to improve things.\nBut historically, the state of humanity has been tribal and the violent, and not making any progress, and everyone being just mired in poverty and disease.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=140"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "af031ca3-e8f7-4bcc-89ee-87166587412a": {"page_content": "Because the historical state of things, I wouldn't like to say the natural state of things, the natural state of things are striving to improve things.\nBut historically, the state of humanity has been tribal and the violent, and not making any progress, and everyone being just mired in poverty and disease.\nAnd if we did burn everything to the ground, that's what we should expect would come back again.\nIt would be the hellscape.\nIt would be the kind of thing that David is about to talk about that certain intellectuals think already is going to happen.\nIt's not going to happen unless people deliberately try to undo the institutions and traditions that we have.\nAnd traditions are very, very important.\nI've heard some quite prominent and influential intellectuals that I respect on many other matters, dismissing the importance and indeed the centrality of tradition within our culture, within Western culture.\nTradition is just so important, the way in which we have done things hitherto.\nIt's not to say that those traditions cannot be improved or should not be improved, but they should be only incrementally improved, slowly improved.\nLet's take away one part we don't particularly like, replace it with something that we think might be better, but let's be careful about it and be very reasonable in our criticism of whether or not that change has affected an improvement and an objective improvement or not.\nBecause what we might find is many of these traditions that people might think are silly quirks of just a historical accident might contain within them important in explicit knowledge about how to ensure that everyone can coexist peacefully and continue to make the kind of progress and improvements that we have become accustomed to.\nThat is indeed our tradition.\nLet's think of one, I'll give you one.\nThe institution of marriage, the traditional institution of marriage.\nSome people want to undo it or some people want to apply it to an entire spectrum of different relationships.\nThis is very dangerous.\nThe tradition of marriage has gradually evolved over time and improved over time slowly.\nNow, we might think that either doing away with the institution of marriage altogether might improve things or allowing anyone to marry anything might improve things as well.\nWhy not be free?.\nWell, that would undermine what has traditionally been the institution of marriage.\nI'm not saying the institution of marriage needs to be kept in the same way that it has been for the last thousand years.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=293"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8cb9aaef-761c-47fb-bbe7-b189d9fd601f": {"page_content": "This is very dangerous.\nThe tradition of marriage has gradually evolved over time and improved over time slowly.\nNow, we might think that either doing away with the institution of marriage altogether might improve things or allowing anyone to marry anything might improve things as well.\nWhy not be free?.\nWell, that would undermine what has traditionally been the institution of marriage.\nI'm not saying the institution of marriage needs to be kept in the same way that it has been for the last thousand years.\nBut if we're going to tinker with something like that, we do it at our peril to some extent and we need to be very careful, carefully calibrate the changes that we make to marriage and have a look after a few years.\nIf we change this particular part of marriage, this way in which marriage works, let's see how it works, let's reflect, let's not keep changing, changing, changing, changing marriage until such time as families and societies, communities begin to fall apart and only then.\nIn retrospect, we look back and go, oh, perhaps we shouldn't have completely undone what we thought of as marriage.\nMaybe that was a bad turn.\nThis is the sense in which certain kinds of traditions are important to preserve.\nEven if we think that that institution might have aspects which are prejudiced or discriminatory, sure we don't want to discriminate against people, we might want to change certain institutions, but let's do it slowly via an incremental evolutionary process rather than a completely revolutionary one, one which undoes what for so long the overwhelming majority of people have thought of as an important tradition.\nAnd that's just what?.\nThat's just illustrative.\nIt's not meant to be Brett Hall's opinion on the way in which the institution of marriage needs to be kept in exactly the same way for evermore, merely saying that the institution of marriage has worked in a certain way to a certain extent for a long time in order to enable, for example, families which are important units within communities and then broader civilization to ensure that children are, for example, raised well.\nIt doesn't mean that they can't be raised better, of course children can be raised better, but doing away with certain institutions that have allowed society, hitherto, to raise children well, well as a relative term, should not be toyed with, should not be used as a political football in order to allow different sides who want to either maintain the status quo for evermore or to completely upend and revolutionize things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=427"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "438cf6a9-c853-43af-bba7-462bc48db657": {"page_content": "It doesn't mean that they can't be raised better, of course children can be raised better, but doing away with certain institutions that have allowed society, hitherto, to raise children well, well as a relative term, should not be toyed with, should not be used as a political football in order to allow different sides who want to either maintain the status quo for evermore or to completely upend and revolutionize things.\nIn some sense, we need this tension.\nMy only point there is that traditions are important, even if we personally individually or even as a large group sometimes can't see how, even if we can't see how the institution is important, we need to think very carefully about undoing the institution just because we can find single problems with the institution, doesn't mean the entire institution needs to be thrown in the bin, metaphorically speaking.\nOkay, let's go back to the book.\nand I just want to flag here that we're about to come to one of my favorite anecdotes in the book.\nI think I like to call it the parable of European and it's a wonderful example of all the ways in which people who argue that resources are going to run out ignore the fact that it's not so much about particular resources running out as about knowledge being scarce.\nAnd at the same time, ignorance being this infinitely deep will from which people draw their ignorance and then conclude on the basis of their ignorance that therefore disaster is going to come, that disaster is going to strike because they're ignorant of all the ways in which that resource might not run out or might be easily replaced by something else.\nOkay, so let's go back to the book and here David is about to talk about when he was at high school.\nand so I'll have some remarks about this comparing it to present day high school.\nOkay, and David writes, in 1971, while I was still at school, I attended a lecture for high school students entitled Population Resources Environment.\nIt was given by the population scientist Paul Erlich, I do not remember what I was expecting, I don't think I'd ever heard of the environment before, but nothing had prepared me for such a bravara display of raw pessimism, just pausing there and my reflection on that.\nI guess that David would be absolutely horrified with what goes on in schools now.\nNo doubt he has some knowledge, no doubt people watching this have some knowledge, I have a little bit of inside knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=562"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc57e6f1-25fc-4131-9e80-d60fce6eafd8": {"page_content": "It was given by the population scientist Paul Erlich, I do not remember what I was expecting, I don't think I'd ever heard of the environment before, but nothing had prepared me for such a bravara display of raw pessimism, just pausing there and my reflection on that.\nI guess that David would be absolutely horrified with what goes on in schools now.\nNo doubt he has some knowledge, no doubt people watching this have some knowledge, I have a little bit of inside knowledge.\nToday, children do not need visiting experts to scare them about how their futures are basically some apocalyptic hellscape.\nThey don't need visiting experts because their teachers do that and not now and again, it's basically daily or weekly, they're getting it from every corner.\nIn geography class, they will talk about all the impacts on population of population, all the impacts on communities of pollution and of all the ways in which resources are being depleted and are about to run out.\nIn science class, they understand how carbon dioxide is heating up the planet and causing the melting of the polar ice caps.\nThis is a huge part of the curriculum for a rather esoteric part of science.\nIt forms a vast amount, a consumes of vast amount of the science curriculum, it's looked at from all angles and of course, there's the moral aspect there as well in science class.\nEven mathematics does not escape.\nMathematics class in many places does indeed consist of the rates at which, for example, you might have a study of the rates at which the polar ice caps are melting or the rate at which the temperature is increasing or the rate at which there's deforestation going on.\nAnd of course, it's all captured in terms of this is the fault of people, okay?.\nThis is the fault of human beings simply existing and that previous generations have caused this damage and it's going to be left to the children to try and fix the damage, but there's little hope of that because we don't talk about the solutions, of course.\nSo it's just an anti-human, anti-technology, certainly anti-energy, anti-so-called waste, especially plastics view of the world.\nSo David got this once from a visiting scientist and students today get something similar every day or every week from their teachers.\nNow and again, of course, they might have a guest come in to say how it's much worse than what they've been learning.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=686"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0d5d9cd-c4ef-41b4-89b4-b933f9893d30": {"page_content": "So it's just an anti-human, anti-technology, certainly anti-energy, anti-so-called waste, especially plastics view of the world.\nSo David got this once from a visiting scientist and students today get something similar every day or every week from their teachers.\nNow and again, of course, they might have a guest come in to say how it's much worse than what they've been learning.\nWell, I smile and smoke a little bit, but it is quite disgusting and terrible, to be honest.\nAnd then putting aside concerns about whether or not schools need to exist in their present form, it would be wonderful if there was just a little optimism somewhere or other.\nEven the traditional parts of schooling, even if you go to a religious school, you will still encounter this.\nAnd of course, we know that religions, like, for example, the Catholic Church are pivoting.\nThat's the modern word, are pivoting towards a pessimistic view of humanity.\nIn an institution, otherwise, otherwise concerned with the sacredness and the uniqueness of human beings are beginning to talk about the evils of human beings.\nOkay, back to the book.\nErlich starkly described to his young audience, the living hell we would be inheriting, half a dozen varieties of resource management catastrophe were just around the corner.\nAnd it was already too late to avoid some of them.\nPeople would be starving to death by the billion in 10 years, 20 at best raw materials were running out.\nThe Vietnam War, then in progress, was a last ditch struggle for the region's tin, rubber and petroleum.\nNotice how his biographical explanation, politely shrugged off the political disagreements that were, in fact, causing the conflict.\nThe troubles of the day in American inner cities, rising crime, mental illness, all were a part of the same great catastrophe, just pausing there.\nNow, first, just notice that least it could easily be drawn from the newspapers today.\nSo this is back in 1971, all the problems with American inner cities, I mean, I never stop hearing about how terrible, terrible things are in Los Angeles, and this pretends the end times, apparently.\nAnd of course, right now, we're supposedly in the midst of a mass extinction of a kind, the Holocene extinction, as it's called, all due to us, we are the murderers.\nWe are genocidal species, level genocidal virus of a kind.\nWe just spread out across the planet, wiping out other species.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e6d43ad6-a735-4656-b9d0-98c85abd702a": {"page_content": "And of course, right now, we're supposedly in the midst of a mass extinction of a kind, the Holocene extinction, as it's called, all due to us, we are the murderers.\nWe are genocidal species, level genocidal virus of a kind.\nWe just spread out across the planet, wiping out other species.\nThis is seemingly what we are.\nAnd this is what is taught to students.\nThey do learn about the current great extinction events, and it caused bias.\nI mean, how evil can we be?.\nWe are just irredeemably evil on this view, back to the book.\nAll were linked by ehrlich to overpopulation, pollution, and the reckless overuse of fine-art resources.\nWe had created too many power stations and factories and mines and intensive farms, too much economic growth, far more than the planet could sustain.\nAnd worst of all, too many people, the ultimate source of all the other reals, in this respect, ehrlich was following in the footsteps of malthas, making the same era, setting predictions of one process, against prophecies of another.\nThus, he calculated that if the United States was to sustain, even its 1971 standard of living, it would have to reduce its population by three quarters to 50 million.\nWhich was, of course, impossible in the time available.\nThe planet as a whole was overpopulated by a factor of seven, he said.\nAnd Australia was nearing its maximum sustainable population, and so on, paused their mere reflection.\nSo I have an article inspired by this called Cosmological Economics, which I've kind of turned into a video, which you can find on my channel there, or the Cosmological Economics, which is Google, that typically comes up now under my name.\nAnd it's precisely about this.\nWe have this fellow in Australia, the Paul Ehrlich of Australia, if you like, his name is Dick Smith, he runs a chain of electronic stores, and he's otherwise a reasonably good science popularizer, but like everyone else of our age almost, he's a terrible pessimist and a profit.\nAnd he speaks in exactly these kind of terms that Australia is overpopulated.\nIf you've been to Australia, especially if you've flown in over the top of Australia, you will see it is very hard to even spot a community that'll learn the overpopulation.\nThe place is barren, it is barren, it's largely a desert.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=963"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c9fe1d7-5335-48a0-8a3a-1fba292dc465": {"page_content": "And he speaks in exactly these kind of terms that Australia is overpopulated.\nIf you've been to Australia, especially if you've flown in over the top of Australia, you will see it is very hard to even spot a community that'll learn the overpopulation.\nThe place is barren, it is barren, it's largely a desert.\nAlthough not entirely, even the desert parts have become green almost every year.\nWe have rains out there under desert, we're constantly being told we're in a drought or floods recently, by the way.\nIt simply isn't the case that the earth is overpopulated.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1092"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cd374e0c-97f4-4024-ba47-bd74181487b3": {"page_content": "These claims of overpopulation are typically relying on the assumption that no new knowledge will be created, and the rate at which we are consuming resources will remain the same as the population increases, it's the same old Malthusian argument that population increases exponentially, resource consumption increases linearly, we're not going to find any new resources, we're not going to solve any new problems, we're just going to run out of the resources we have, we're going to begin to starve, so on, et cetera, et cetera.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1126"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9c9e625f-3d5c-4875-9ed9-819a6432bb65": {"page_content": "It's been said for centuries, it is tiresome for optimists, generation after generation after generation to encounter these same people, to win the argument but for no one to ever notice that the argument has been won many times before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aa38cc88-8b5b-4b5a-a01b-c760596b8617": {"page_content": "This is my pessimist coming out, even though Paul Erlich has gone, even though Dick Smith will go as well, even though Gretelenburg and the people who inspired her or follow her will go, there will be more, there will be more that will come and so the debate never seems to be won, because it's a powerful argument and people have to learn the refutation of the argument as well, and so it is this arms race between the people who argue the resources are going to run out and can point to all these scientific ways in which it leads clear the resources going to run out and the optimists coming along and say we understand that argument, however it's flawed for reasons x, y, z, namely we're going to solve those problems, we're going to create the knowledge, we're going to find new resources, we're going to be able to sustain, more people on the planet, we're going to be able to support more people on the planet at a higher standard living than ever before trying to explain what's going on throughout history.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1178"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "adf63293-ca43-42df-a2aa-b208b050ca77": {"page_content": "That's the story of history and there's a reason why things get better because we continue to improve our lot because we live in a culture of criticism where we literally do improve things, we do solve our problems, we aren't simply a product of our environment, we shape the environment around us.\nThis is a complicated argument, I realise that it's a subtle argument and so it's seemingly going to be the case that we just have to keep defending this thesis again and again and again and explaining and hopefully at some point we achieve escape velocity and we leave behind the pessimists as a small minority of naysayers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1238"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8fa2560e-253f-4b42-847c-918db9bd7483": {"page_content": "At the moment they're still in the ascendancy, they're still in the majority, they still control the culture, control the media, control politics to a great extent but there's light because more and more people are coming on board and it becomes just impossible to deny the reality of improving standards, improving technology, the fact that we were able to come up with a vaccine to what would have otherwise been a terrible global pandemic that killed far more people than what it had in a much shorter amount of time than it did but our knowledge was able to solve that problem and it will continue to solve problems at a never faster rate into the future, we'll never run out of problems and we'll never run out of resources, that's the optimistic part, pessimistic part is we'd have to keep on having the argument for a long time yet,.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1274"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8051c2da-390d-4ef7-a5fd-35b2dcfd59c7": {"page_content": "okay let's go back to the book David's talking about how he's sitting in school, listening to the visiting professor and he writes, quote, we had little basis for doubting what the professor was telling us about the field he was studying yet for some reason our conversation afterwards was not that of a group of students who had just had their futures stolen, I did not know about the others but I can remember when I stopped worrying at the end of the lecture a girl asked Erlich a question, I have forgotten the details but it had the form, what if we solve one of the problems that Erlich had described within the next two years, wouldn't that affect your conclusion, Erlich reply was brisk, how could we possibly solve it, she did not know and even if we did how could that do more than briefly delay the catastrophe and what would we do then?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1330"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eaf2818d-9538-4c87-ad78-58bc772c006d": {"page_content": "What a relief, once I realized that Erlich's prophecies amounted to saying, if we stopped solving problems we are doomed I no longer found them shocking, for how could it be otherwise quite possibly that girl went on to solve the very problems she asked about and the one after it, at any rate someone must have because the catastrophe scheduled for 1991 has still not materialized, nor have any of the others that Erlich foretold, pausing their my reflection, so it looks as though David Deutsch, when he was in high school, was the first optimist in the sense that David Deutsch talked about off the missile, right there where he says, if we stopped solving problems we are doomed, he was no longer worried because how could it be otherwise, so he understood even then that we would just continue to solve problems, so we don't have to worry because if someone says how can we possibly solve that, if they don't know, it doesn't matter, someone will solve it, someone is going to put their mind to that and they will come up with a solution, we don't want to not solve certain problems, especially the civilization level destroying problems, we are going to turn our minds to it, so don't worry, we are going to get through, David Deutsch understood that then, back to the book, Erlich thought that he was investigating a planet's physical resources and predicting their rate of decline, in fact he was prophesying the content of future knowledge and by envisaging a future in which only the best knowledge of 1971 was deployed, he was implicitly assuming that only a small and rapidly dwindling set of problems would ever be solved again, furthermore by casting problems in terms of resource depletion and ignoring the human level explanation, he missed all the important determinants of what he was really trying to predict, namely, did the relevant people in institutions have what it takes to solve problems and more broadly what does it take to solve problems, okay, so just pausing there my reflection here, we have been at pains to point out throughout this series", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1376"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d17d378a-0dae-49f0-918c-84be6adc86fc": {"page_content": "problems in terms of resource depletion and ignoring the human level explanation, he missed all the important determinants of what he was really trying to predict, namely, did the relevant people in institutions have what it takes to solve problems and more broadly what does it take to solve problems, okay, so just pausing there my reflection here, we have been at pains to point out throughout this series that resources in the general sense, in the broad sense are not infinite, of course pick any one resource like naturally occurring crude oil, it's going to be finite because the planet is finite, as far as we know there's no other oil out there in the universe, as far as we know, so particular resources are going to be finite, but far more important factor is that our knowledge is the scarce resource that we need, whether we know how to replace the oil once it's run out or once it's running out, that's the important thing and how, for example, we might mitigate problems that oil creates along the way, of course oil solves more problems.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1476"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a999647c-a117-4622-be5e-29d1e86549b5": {"page_content": "and it creates far more problems and the problems that it creates are far better problems to want to solve, then the problem that the oil solved in the first place, namely keeping people warm, helping us to generate electricity, helping us to get from A to B faster than we ever have before, these are really, really important problems to solve and along the way oil creates a few little problems, it creates some pollution and we can solve those problems of pollution, but simply turning off the supply of oil because we're concerned about the problems that it causes, it causes way worse problems than it solves, enforcing someone to replace oil before they're ready to, before it's cheap enough for them to do so, is likewise a recipe for increased suffering.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1543"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d5f8611-30c2-4512-a309-0c4a2c9787f2": {"page_content": "So ultimately, for any one resource, of course, it might run out, but ultimately the resources won't run out, it has to be the case into the future, we know this that we can have something like a 3D printer where the ink is single atoms and you just assemble the atoms Lego like into literally any device that you want, so you can create any resource you want, you can create any piece of technology that you can think of, anything that you can program the 3D printer to build, in other words this thing would be a universal constructor, it would be able to build anything, including building things that can build anything at all, the universal constructor.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1585"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25e41477-fcc1-443a-8611-1c97f485c0d0": {"page_content": "But of course, we're not there yet in the meantime, we're going to have the profits and the dune size and the naysayers and the pessimists all, we have to deal with them, we have to deal with trying to refute their claims that the catastrophe is looming and so that brings us to my favourite.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1627"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0b6deda4-ea50-42f1-9e24-fb60c863317a": {"page_content": "I think my favourite anecdote in the book, it's the one I use, whenever anyone talks about this particular point, about the scarcity of particular resource and I like to counter with the scarcity of knowledge versus the bottomless pit really, that is our ignorance, I shouldn't say pit, it's just a well, it's a well of ignorance, it's an infinite well of ignorance, we have an infinite amount of ignorance, but some people like to draw from the well of ignorance and try and plead for slowing down progress, so that we don't get ahead of ourselves lest we run out of some resource, they think that they're found is about to run out and that deep well of ignorance is an important well today, if your university PhD student working in the natural sciences or the environmental sciences in particular, identifying any old thing that a human civilization happens to be relying on right now, calculating how much of known reserves we have of that thing, the rate at which we're using it and then of course concluding with a prediction about the horrors that are about to unfold when the disaster strikes, when we actually run out of this thing, so this is effectively refuted by what we're about to talk about here and what we might subtitle the parable of European, so let's go to that now, and David writes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1646"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dde1880b-1846-4ea4-8c2b-32e2be4af6fa": {"page_content": "A few years later a graduate student in the then new subject of environmental science explained to me that colour television was a sign of the imminent collapse of our consumer society, why?.\nBecause first of all he said, it served no useful purpose, or the useful function of television could be performed just as well in monochrome, adding colour at several times the cost was merely conspicuous consumption.\nThat term had been coined by the economist, Thorstein Viblin, in 1902, a couple of decades before even monochrome television was invented.\nIt meant wanting new possessions in order to show off to the neighbours.\nThat we had now reached the physical limit of conspicuous consumption could be proved, said my colleague, by analysing the resource constraints scientifically.\nThe cathode ray tubes and colour televisions depended upon the element European to make the red phosphors on the screen.\nEuropean is one of the rarest elements on Earth.\nThe planet's total known reserves were only enough to build a few hundred million more colour televisions.\nAfter that would be back to monochrome, but worse.\nThink what this would mean, from then on there would be two kinds of people, those with colour televisions, and those without.\nAnd the same would be true of everything else that was being consumed.\nIt would be a world with permanent class distinction, in which the elites would hoard the last of the resources and live lives of gaudy display, while to sustain that illusory state through its final years, everyone else would be laboring on in drab resentment.\nAnd so it went on nightmare, built upon nightmare.\nPause there just my reflection quickly.\nNotice how this is day rigour.\nIt is so common today, it is just what intellectuals say, especially with the advent of any technology, but particularly AI, if AI comes along, there will be the haves, the people who can afford the AI's and who never need to work ever again.\nAnd those who can't afford the AI's and no longer have any jobs, because the AI's have long since taken them, there will be two kinds of people in the world, the haves and the have nots, the AI quadrillionaires, and the people who are unemployed and destitute.\nAnd also think of any medical technology, the favourite one that people refer to these days, of course, any longevity type medicine, any kind of technology that might come along and increase our lifespan by a significant amount.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=318"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50b3d460-14ab-4c51-b71d-4593145dc8b8": {"page_content": "And also think of any medical technology, the favourite one that people refer to these days, of course, any longevity type medicine, any kind of technology that might come along and increase our lifespan by a significant amount.\nLet's say you have this pill that can cure all the ills, let's say, that might kill you within an additional 200 years.\nSo anyone who can afford to buy this pill can live between 200 and 300 years.\nWell we're going to have two sorts of people to begin with aren't we, we're going to have the people who are going to afford this pill, which no doubt these evil pharmaceutical companies are going to charge people untold millions of dollars in order to get a hold of this pill so that they can live forever.\nAnd the other people, they won't, they won't be able to afford it at all and they'll have to die early.\nIn fact, the cost of medicine just might generally go up because the rich people who live forever are going to demand all the additional treatments and resources for medical facilities and so on and so forth.\nNo one ever acknowledges the fact that whenever a new technology comes out of course, of course there is a transition period, a short, increasingly short, transition period where, yes, only the very wealthy can afford it, only the very wealthy can travel into space at the moment, commercially, but eventually the price comes down, it used to be the case that the first automobiles could only be afforded by the most wealthy in the world.\nIt used to be the case that only the most wealthy in the world could afford the most fashionable clothes and so on and so forth.\nThis has always been the case.\nThe first computers, the first home computers, rarely owned by the most wealthy, but the costs come down, the cost will always come down, but you need to have this initial investment by the most wealthy people.\nIt is good and right and in a certain sense, heroic for the wealthy people to try out these new technologies first to pay a premium for them so that then the economies of scale kick in and everyone can eventually afford it.\nLook at mobile phones.\nOkay, let's go back to the book where again, just to recap David is talking about how European was about to run out according to his colleague, this other student who's studying environmental science, and he writes of his colleague, I asked him how he knew that no new source of European would be discovered.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1858"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "10eb353c-6ea3-459c-a23d-9c11f45a6289": {"page_content": "Look at mobile phones.\nOkay, let's go back to the book where again, just to recap David is talking about how European was about to run out according to his colleague, this other student who's studying environmental science, and he writes of his colleague, I asked him how he knew that no new source of European would be discovered.\nHe asked how I knew that it would, and even if it were, what would we do then?.\nI asked how he knew that colour cathode ray tubes could not be built without European.\nHe assured me that they could not, it was a miracle that there existed even one element with the necessary properties.\nAfter all, why should nature supply elements with properties to suit our convenience?.\nI had to concede the point.\nThere aren't that many elements and each of them has only a few energy levels that could be used to emit light, no doubt they had all been assessed by physicists.\nIf the bottom line was that there was no alternative to European for making colour televisions, then there was no alternative.\nYet something deeply puzzled me about that miracle of the red phosphor.\nIf nature provides only one pair of suitable energy levels, why does it provide even one?.\nI had not yet heard of the fine-tuning problem, it was new at the time, but this was puzzling for a similar reason.\nThis meeting accurate images in real time is a natural thing for people to want to do, like travelling fast.\nIt would not have been puzzling if the laws of physics forbade it, just as they do forbid faster than light travel, for them to allow it, but only if one knew how, would be normal too.\nBut for them, only just to allow it would be a fine-tuning coincidence.\nWhy would the laws of physics draw the line so close to a point that happened to have significance for human technology?.\nIt would be as if the centre of the earth had turned out to be within a few kilometres of the centre of the universe, it seemed to violate the principle of mediocrity.\nWhat made this even more puzzling was that, as with the real fine-tuning problem, my colleague was claiming that there were many such coincidences.\nHis whole point was that the colour television problem was just one representative instance of a phenomenon that was happening simultaneously in many areas of technology.\nThe ultimate limits were being reached.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1983"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "222fcc54-bec8-4aa6-a87d-014f12381bd9": {"page_content": "What made this even more puzzling was that, as with the real fine-tuning problem, my colleague was claiming that there were many such coincidences.\nHis whole point was that the colour television problem was just one representative instance of a phenomenon that was happening simultaneously in many areas of technology.\nThe ultimate limits were being reached.\nJust as we were using up the last stocks of the rarest of rare earth elements for the frivolous purpose of watching soap operas in colour, so everything that looked like progress was actually just an insane rush to exploit the last resources left on our planet.\nThe 1970s were, he believed, a unique and terrible moment in history.\nHe was right in one respect, no alternative red phosphor has been discovered to this day.\nYet, as I write this chapter, I see before me a superbly coloured computer display that contains not one aten of European.\nIts pixels are liquid crystal consisting entirely of common elements, and it does not require a catered ray tube, nor would it matter even if it did, for by now enough European was being mined to supply every human being on earth with a dozen European-type screens, and the known reserves of the element comprise several times that amount.\nEven while my pessimistic colleague was dismissing colour television technology as useless and doomed, optimistic people were discovering new ways of achieving it, and new uses for it, uses that he thought he had ruled out by considering for five minutes how well colour televisions could do the existing job of monochrome ones.\nBut what stands out for me is not the found prophecy, and its underlying fallacy, nor relief that the nightmare never happened.\nIt is the contrast between two different conceptions of what people are.\nIn the pessimistic conception, they are wasters, they take precious resources and maddling verdivity, useless coloured pictures.\nThis is true of static societies, those statues really were what my colleague thought colour televisions are, which is why comparing our society with the old culture of Easter Island is exactly wrong in the optimistic conception, the one that was unforceably vindicated by events.\nPeople are problem-solvers, creators of the unsustainable solution, and hence also of the next problem, in the pessimistic conception, that distinctive ability of people is a disease for which sustainability is the cure, in the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease, and people are the cure, cause they're my reflection.\nThat is beautiful, wonderful, and needs to somehow permeate the zeitgeist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=2089"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a6b0abe-05ba-4509-b20c-c7d3d69941e5": {"page_content": "People are problem-solvers, creators of the unsustainable solution, and hence also of the next problem, in the pessimistic conception, that distinctive ability of people is a disease for which sustainability is the cure, in the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease, and people are the cure, cause they're my reflection.\nThat is beautiful, wonderful, and needs to somehow permeate the zeitgeist.\nIt really does, of all the messages here, the counter-cultural message is that people are the solution or the cure, it is only people that will solve the problems of tomorrow, only people.\nPeople are not the problem, overpopulation is not the problem, it's insufficient numbers of people that's a problem, because people are the things that generate ideas, we need more ideas, we need creative people to come up with solutions to our most pressing problems, they're not causing them, at least they're not causing worse problems, every solution that a person finds is going to generate new problems, but those problems are better, more interesting, more fun.\nThey enable us to explore a greater range of possibilities, and to do away with the problems that cause us suffering.\nWe need more people to cure the diseases that we're going to discover tomorrow, as well as the ones we already know of today.\nWe need people to figure out new resources, as other ones begin to be depleted.\nWe need people to figure out new technologies so that we can communicate better, so we can travel faster, and so on and so forth.\nPeople are the solution, they provide the solutions, the only thing that provide the solutions, the problems, the worst problems are those ones thrown at us by a hostile universe.\nIt's the universe that's not really helping us out.\nWe have to eke out our existence as I continue to say, we are the ones just scratching the surface of a reality, which is ever more unexpectedly, throwing floods, fires, earthquakes, natural disasters, diseases, comets, cosmological events, etc and so forth.\nIf we don't want to go the way of the dinosaur, and if we don't want indeed other species to go the way of the dinosaur, we'd better have more people working faster, not to sustain the way things are, not to try and ensure that resources don't become depleted, or that pollution isn't created.\nThese are inevitable, inevitable problems, problems are inevitable, but as we know, all the way back in chapter one, these inevitable problems have solutions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=1920"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3801b7b2-4327-4d71-b2f7-2860c16bead8": {"page_content": "If we don't want to go the way of the dinosaur, and if we don't want indeed other species to go the way of the dinosaur, we'd better have more people working faster, not to sustain the way things are, not to try and ensure that resources don't become depleted, or that pollution isn't created.\nThese are inevitable, inevitable problems, problems are inevitable, but as we know, all the way back in chapter one, these inevitable problems have solutions.\nIf we try to find them, if we put effort into finding them, and if we encourage people to find those solutions, rather than having people fixate upon problems, and all the ways in which we can slow down progress, because in this ridiculous pessimistic worldview, it is faster and faster progress that leads us closer and closer to the end times, and that's precisely the wrong way to think about it.\nEnd times become closer and closer, the more we slow down, the more we try and ensure that what we do is sustainable in the environmental sense.\nWe need fast progress and error correction, we'd need knowledge, creation, we need more people.\nOkay, back to the book, just reading the last bit there, David said, quote, in the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.\nSince then, whole new industries have come into existence to harness great waves of innovation, and in many of those from medical imaging to video games to desktop publishing to nature documentaries like Edinburgh's, colour television, proved to be very useful after all.\nAnd far from there being a permanent class distinction between monochrome and colour television users, the monochrome technology is now practically extinct as our cathode ray televisions.\nColour displays are now so cheap that they are being given away with magazines as advertising gimmicks, and all those technologies far from being divisive are inherently egalitarian, sweeping away many formally entrenched barriers to people's access to information, opinion, art and education, just pause down just a little comment on that.\nColor television is becoming so inexpensive, and the associated technology is so inexpensive audio systems, huge flat screen televisions that go into the cinema is becoming redundant.\nWho would have thought of that?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=2252"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a980e818-19d2-4388-b32a-2961a5256639": {"page_content": "Colour displays are now so cheap that they are being given away with magazines as advertising gimmicks, and all those technologies far from being divisive are inherently egalitarian, sweeping away many formally entrenched barriers to people's access to information, opinion, art and education, just pause down just a little comment on that.\nColor television is becoming so inexpensive, and the associated technology is so inexpensive audio systems, huge flat screen televisions that go into the cinema is becoming redundant.\nWho would have thought of that?.\nI mean, you can have a cinema experience inside your house, you can exceed what a cinema can do in many, many cases, so you can have your own projector and your own sound system in the comfort of your own home, for a fraction of the cost overall as to what frequently going to the cinema would have been in days gone by.\nAnd yet this is not undermining the movie industry, or at least that the audio visual industry.\nThere is a renaissance of a kind with television, all of the ways in which people who we thought were going to lose their jobs because people weren't going to the movies anymore have more jobs than ever.\nAll the people who are actors and who work on sound and vision and whatever else, they now have many new avenues on many different streaming services, sort of making movies of and television shows of higher quality than ever before.\nThe art is improving because the technology is improving and becoming cheaper and all boats are rising with that tide.\nLet's keep going.\nDavid Rites.\nThe optimistic proponents of the Malthusian arguments are often, rightly, keen to stress that all evils are due to lack of knowledge and that problems are soluble, prophecies of disaster, such as the ones I have described, do illustrate the fact that the prophetic mode of thinking, no matter how plausible it seems prospectively, is fallacious and inherently biased.\nHowever, to expect that problems will always be solved in time to avert disasters would be the same fallacy and indeed the deeper and more dangerous mistake made by Malthusians is that they claim to have a way of averting resource allocation disasters, namely sustainability.\nThus, they also deny that that other great truth that I've suggested that we engrave in stone, problems are inevitable, just pausing their just my reflection on this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=2452"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38a2216c-0a66-4ac0-9ce1-0308d761d969": {"page_content": "However, to expect that problems will always be solved in time to avert disasters would be the same fallacy and indeed the deeper and more dangerous mistake made by Malthusians is that they claim to have a way of averting resource allocation disasters, namely sustainability.\nThus, they also deny that that other great truth that I've suggested that we engrave in stone, problems are inevitable, just pausing their just my reflection on this.\nNow, having heard David be interviewed many times over the years now about the beginning infinity, one of the common misunderstandings that people seem to have on this point is the idea that problems are soluble, which is true, problems are soluble, that this somehow means it is inevitable that the problems will be solved and that progress is inevitable.\nThis is not what's being claimed and David has never said this, but it is a very common misunderstanding of this entire thesis.\nWe have to work hard to solve problems and because problems are inevitable, that undermines this thesis that therefore progress is inevitable.\nNo, there will be problems coming along and if we don't choose to work really hard to try and solve these problems, then progress will falter.\nIt will stop.\nWe can go the way of the dinosaur, there's nothing in this worldview of David Deutsch that says we cannot go extinct.\nHe can't say whether we will go extinct or not, no one can say we will go extinct or not.\nThere's a possibility that we won't go extinct.\nWe could be the first.\nIt is certain, as certain as anything can be, that well, given our current knowledge, we can predict that absent us, absent human beings, every species that exists on this planet will go extinct, absolutely, absolutely.\nWe know, okay, if it's not going to be the sun expanding into a red giant and evaporating all the oceans and consuming the Earth in a massive fireball, then other asteroids will hit, other comets will hit a supernova or go off nearby, massive volcano or go off, something will happen that will wipe out all life on Earth.\nIt is going to happen, but the fact that we're here means that there's a chance that not only will that not happen, but that we will be the ones who are able to survive.\nMaybe we'll leave the Earth behind, maybe.\nBut we can survive if we choose to create knowledge and if we choose to solve the problems in time, but there's no guarantee of that at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=381"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f15c1f3d-081a-413f-8596-db84c1fd8b45": {"page_content": "It is going to happen, but the fact that we're here means that there's a chance that not only will that not happen, but that we will be the ones who are able to survive.\nMaybe we'll leave the Earth behind, maybe.\nBut we can survive if we choose to create knowledge and if we choose to solve the problems in time, but there's no guarantee of that at all.\nDavid has been at pain to say that there's no guarantee of this.\nIt's just that we have the chance of doing so, a chance that no other species hitherto has ever had.\nWe are the one possible, possible exception to the rule, so we need to emphasize that.\nThings are soluble, but it's not inevitable that they will be solved.\nIt's only inevitable that they will arise, and that if we want to, we can try and solve them.\nOkay.\nBack to the book, and he writes, on this point, a solution may be problem-free for a period and in a parochial application, but there is no way of identifying in advance, which problems will have a solution, hence there is no way short of stasis to avoid unforeseen problems arising from new solutions, but stasis itself is unsustainable, as witnessed every static society in history.\nMalthus could not have known that the obscure element uranium, which had just been discovered, would eventually become relevant to the survival of civilization.\nJust as my colleague could not have known that, within his lifetime, color televisions would be saving lives every day.\nSo there is no resource management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories, but there are ideas that reliably cause disasters.\nAnd one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned.\nThe only rational policy in all three cases is to judge institutions, plans, and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting the mistakes, removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters.\nOkay, now I'm skipping a bit in this chapter, and David talks about how, for a whole bunch of solutions, there's always been the naysayers, so antibiotics, you know, someone will say, oh, this is only temporary antibiotics, which kill bacteria, just you wait, just you wait until the antibiotic-resistant pathogens come along, then we'll be in trouble.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=2705"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ef6b92ac-e770-48ea-adba-2a75f59a428f": {"page_content": "Okay, now I'm skipping a bit in this chapter, and David talks about how, for a whole bunch of solutions, there's always been the naysayers, so antibiotics, you know, someone will say, oh, this is only temporary antibiotics, which kill bacteria, just you wait, just you wait until the antibiotic-resistant pathogens come along, then we'll be in trouble.\nAnd so people like to talk about how all we're ever doing is post-boning disaster.\nSo every solution, I'll just you wait, something will come along, which for which we will have no solution.\nAnd so I'm skipping that.\nLet's just go to where he talks briefly about climate change, where he says, quote, we face the prospect that carbon dioxide emissions from technology will cause an increase in the average temperature of the atmosphere with harmful effects such as droughts, sea level rises, disruption to agriculture, and the extinctions of some species.\nThese are forecasts to outweigh the beneficial effects, such as an increase in crop yields, a general boost to plant life and a reduction in the number of people dying of hypothermia in winter.\nTrillions of dollars and a great deal of legislation and institutional change intended to reduce those emissions currently hang on the outcomes of simulations of the planet's climate by the most powerful supercomputers, and on projections by economists about what those computations imply about the economy in the next century.\nIn the light of the above discussion, we should notice several things about the controversy and about the underlying problem.\nFirst, we have been lucky so far, regardless of how accurate the prevailing climate models are, it is uncontroversial from the laws of physics without any need for supercomputers or sophisticated modeling that such emissions must eventually increase the temperature, which must eventually be harmful.\nConsider, therefore, what if the relevant parameters had just been slightly different and the moment of disaster had been in, say, 1902, Veblen's time when carbon dioxide emissions were already orders of magnitude above their pre-enlightenment values, then the disaster would have happened before anyone could have predicted it or known what was happening.\nSea levels would have risen, agriculture would have been disrupted, millions would have begun to die, with worse to come, and the great issue of the day would have been not had to prevent it, but what could be done about it?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=2830"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e510498f-c444-4825-be3f-e97aea9f8847": {"page_content": "Sea levels would have risen, agriculture would have been disrupted, millions would have begun to die, with worse to come, and the great issue of the day would have been not had to prevent it, but what could be done about it?.\nThey had no supercomputers then, because of Babidge's failures and the scientific communities misjudgments and perhaps, most importantly, their lack of wealth, they lacked the vital technology of automated computing altogether.\nMechanical calculators and roomfuls of clerks would have been insufficient, but much worse, they had almost no atmospheric physicists.\nIn fact, the total number of physicists of all kinds was a small fraction of the number who today work on climate change alone.\nFrom society standpoint of view, physicists were a luxury in 1902, like color televisions were in the 1970s, yet to recover from the disaster, society would have needed more scientific knowledge and better technology and more of it, that is to say, more wealth.\nFor instance, in 1900, building a seawall to protect the coast of a low-lying island would have required resources so enormous that the only islands that could have afforded it would have been those with either large concentrations of cheap labor or exceptional wealth as in the Netherlands, much of whose population already lived below sea level thanks to the technology of dark building.\nThis is a challenge that is highly susceptible to automation, but people were in no position to address it in that way, or relevant machines were underpowered, unreliable, expensive and impossible to produce in large numbers, and an enormous effort to construct a Panama canal had just failed with the loss of thousands of lives and vast amounts of money due to inadequate technology and scientific knowledge.\nAnd to compound those problems, the world as a whole had very little wealth by today's standards.\nToday, a coastal defence project would be well within the capabilities of almost any coastal nation and would add decades to the time available to find other solutions to rising sea levels.\nIf none are found, what would we do then?.\nThat is a question of a wholly different kind, which brings me to my second observation on the climate change controversy.\nIt is that while the supercomputer simulations make conditional predictions, the economic forecasts make almost pure prophecies, for we can expect the future of human responses to climate to depend heavily on how successful people are at creating new knowledge to address the problems that arise.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=2954"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4f7897eb-6b51-4221-87d7-b918213fc510": {"page_content": "If none are found, what would we do then?.\nThat is a question of a wholly different kind, which brings me to my second observation on the climate change controversy.\nIt is that while the supercomputer simulations make conditional predictions, the economic forecasts make almost pure prophecies, for we can expect the future of human responses to climate to depend heavily on how successful people are at creating new knowledge to address the problems that arise.\nSo comparing predictions with prophecies is going to lead that same old mistake, supposing they're just my reflection, just we really need to emphasise this, so there are scientific predictions of what is going to happen with climate change, scientific predictions, derivations from good explanations, using supercomputer modelling.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3066"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e3beb19-2695-4fba-b04e-73925e758811": {"page_content": "Of course, there's going to be errors with these, and yes, they change now and again, but this does not change the fact that there really is a scientific theory about how, for example, certain gases, like carbon dioxide, like methane, really do interact with certain kinds of light, so for example, the bonds in the carbon dioxide and molecule just happen to be right to resonate with certain photons of light and then they re-emit that light in all directions, including towards the ground, as infrared radiation, and so this cause that we know, the mechanisms that cause climate change, it really is a real thing, and you really can make reasonable predictions about these things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3112"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "37f4a18c-a478-433a-8e7d-06a642d69683": {"page_content": "All that aside, putting all of that aside, knowing that climate change is a real phenomenon and it really is affected by the burning of fossil fuels, for example.\nThose predictions are in a completely different category to what will happen economically as a consequence of that possible natural disaster, what would be a natural disaster if we didn't do anything about it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3153"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c367eec-e9ae-4a8d-bc07-e3d5dbcee430": {"page_content": "What we will do something about it, as it becomes more clear to politicians, industry leaders and so on and so forth, things will be done, things are being done already, but trying to suggest that this is going to mean economic tragedy, that it's going to require certain economic tweaks and changes to the economy, is all based upon not scientific prediction, but upon pure guesswork, pessimistic guesswork, about the future ways in which people will trade one with another, but this is to do with their free choices and what knowledge they'll create.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "385fe802-b241-4db8-8d1d-1c0b2b19ffc6": {"page_content": "So let's go back to the book and David Rarts.\nAgain, suppose that disaster had already been underway in 1902, consider what it would have taken for scientists to forecast, say, carbon dioxide emissions for the 20th century, from the shaky assumption that energy use would continue to increase by roughly the same exponential factors before, they could have estimated the resulting increase in emissions, but that estimate would not have included the effects of nuclear power.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3220"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9e2e00b-fcc5-4861-b448-fe9fdb79856e": {"page_content": "It could not have, because radioactivity itself had only just been discovered and will not be harnessed for power until the middle of the century, but suppose that somehow they'd been able to foresee that, then they might have modified their carbon dioxide forecasts and concluded that emissions could easily be restored to below the 1902 level by the end of the century, but again, that would only be because they could not possibly foresee the campaign against nuclear power, which would put a stop to its expansion, ironically on environmental grounds, before it ever became a significant factor in reducing emissions and so on, time and again, the unpredictable factor of new human ideas, but good and bad, would make the scientific prediction useless, the same as bound to be true, even more so, of forecast today for the coming century, which brings me to my third observation about the current controversy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3245"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4a437c47-d974-499a-ab4e-4c6d2bbecc4a": {"page_content": "It is not yet accurately known how sensitive the atmosphere's temperature is to the concentration of carbon dioxide.\nThat is, how much are given increase in concentration increases the temperature.\nThis number is important politically, because it affects how urgent the problem is.\nHigh sensitivity means high urgency.\nLow sensitivity means the opposite.\nUnfortunately, this has led to the political debate being dominated by the side issue of how anthropogenic human caused the increase in the temperature to date has been.\nIt is as if people are arguing about how best to prepare for the next hurricane, while all agreeing that only the hurricanes one should prepare for, are the human induced ones.\nAll sides seem to assume that if it turns out that a random fluctuation in the temperature is about to raise sea levels, disrupt agriculture, wipe out species and so on, our best plan would simply be to grin and bear it.\nOr if two-thirds of the increase is anthropogenic, we should not mitigate the effects of the other third, trying to predict what our net effect on the environment will be for the next century.\nAnd then subordinating all policy decisions to optimizing that prediction cannot work.\nWe cannot know how much to reduce emissions by, nor how much effect that will have, because we cannot know the future discoveries that will make some of our present actions seem wise, some counterproductive, and some irrelevant nor how much our efforts are going to be assisted or impeded by sheer luck, tactics to delay the onset of foreseeable problems may help, but they cannot replace and must be subordinate to, increasing our ability to intervene after events turn out as we did not foresee.\nIf that does not happen in regard to carbon dioxide-induced warming, it will happen with something else.\nIndeed, we did not foresee the global warming disaster by call it a disaster, because the prevailing theory is that our best option is to prevent carbon dioxide emissions by spending vast sums and enforcing severe worldwide restrictions on behavior, and that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure.\nI called it unforeseen because we now realized that it was already underway even in 1971 when I attended that lecture.\nEhrlich did tell us that agriculture was soon going to be devastated by rapid climate change, but the changing question was going to be global cooling caused by smog and the condensation trials of supersonic aircraft.\nThe possibility of warming caused by gas emissions had already been mooted by some scientists, but Ehrlich did not consider it worth mentioning.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3319"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aca05ce2-505c-46ec-80f0-358e2ea711ed": {"page_content": "I called it unforeseen because we now realized that it was already underway even in 1971 when I attended that lecture.\nEhrlich did tell us that agriculture was soon going to be devastated by rapid climate change, but the changing question was going to be global cooling caused by smog and the condensation trials of supersonic aircraft.\nThe possibility of warming caused by gas emissions had already been mooted by some scientists, but Ehrlich did not consider it worth mentioning.\nHe told us that the evidence was that a general cooling trend had already begun and that it would continue with catastrophic effects, though it would be reversed in the very long term because of heat pollution from industry, and a fact that it is currently at least a hundred times smaller than the global warming that preoccupies us, causing my reflection.\nA planet like Earth, geologically speaking, is active.\nIt is geologically active.\nIt is kind of alive in a geological sense.\nThe outgassing of volcanoes coupled with rain, which absorbs those gases in the atmosphere and then causes the acidification of oceans, which can then cause precipitates to form at the bottom of those oceans, which then carried into the core of the Earth and then re-arrupted back into the atmosphere by those same volcanoes.\nThis process, this constant process, this carbon cycle, this natural carbon carbon dioxide cycle, coupled with the way in which we orbit the planet would mean that even if there was no anthropogenic climate change, there wouldn't unless be climate change, it would be absolutely astonishing if the climate did not change, if there wasn't a trend of heating or cooling.\nSo regardless of where the humans are doing it or not, regardless of that, let's say we find that there is climate change, but the humans aren't doing anything at all to contribute to it.\nIt's not the case at the moment, but let's say that it was.\nLet's say that scientists come to a consensus tomorrow and the United Nations begin to tell us about how, hey, guess what everyone, the fossil fuel thing isn't what we thought it was.\nThere's no human-induced climate change.\nThere would still be climate change.\nThere would be climate change via the factors, and that climate change will eventually cause problems for humans.\nIt'll either cause the sea levels to rise or cause the amount of ice to increase or cause the temperature change in uncomfortable ways for people living in certain places.\nAnd we should want to mitigate that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=3416"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3fe2a3ce-b232-463c-b7b7-be1fe2502c61": {"page_content": "There's no human-induced climate change.\nThere would still be climate change.\nThere would be climate change via the factors, and that climate change will eventually cause problems for humans.\nIt'll either cause the sea levels to rise or cause the amount of ice to increase or cause the temperature change in uncomfortable ways for people living in certain places.\nAnd we should want to mitigate that.\nWe should want to treat the planet like we treat our homes, sometimes they're too cold, sometimes they're too warm.\nWe should want to, regardless of whether humans are causing the climate change or not, want to control the climate.\nAnd even if the almost impossible was to happen and nothing ever changed on planet Earth, we'd respect to the climate, we should still want to change the climate.\nWe should still want to make the places that are barren, fertile.\nWe should still want to change the certain places in the poles, which are too cold, to be somewhat warmer.\nIf we can do that, we should.\nThis whole idea of living in a pristine natural environment, or we've counted that, we don't like that.\nThe natural environment is not a good thing, even for the species that's sort of evolved there, because the environment is hostile in very many ways.\nOkay, so let's go back to the book.\nAnd David's about to write what he says in one of his TED talks.\nHe says, there is a saying that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that is only when one knows what to prevent.\nNo precautions can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee.\nTo prepare for those, there is nothing we can do, but increase our ability to put things right if they go wrong, trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering.\nThe world is currently buzzing with plans to force reductions and gas emissions at almost any cost, but it ought to be buzzing much more with plans to reduce the temperature or for how to thrive at a higher temperature and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply.\nSome such plans exist, for instance, to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by a variety of methods and to generate clouds over the ocean to reflect sunlight and to encourage aquatic organisms to absorb more carbon dioxide.\nBut at the moment, these are very minor research efforts.\nNeither supercomputers nor international treaties nor vast sums are devoted to them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=2753"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0cbae660-1468-43c4-8707-a3ae60b84b72": {"page_content": "Some such plans exist, for instance, to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by a variety of methods and to generate clouds over the ocean to reflect sunlight and to encourage aquatic organisms to absorb more carbon dioxide.\nBut at the moment, these are very minor research efforts.\nNeither supercomputers nor international treaties nor vast sums are devoted to them.\nThey are not central to the human effort to face this problem or problems like it.\nThis is dangerous.\nThere is as yet no serious sign of retreat into a sustainable lifestyle, which would really mean achieving only the semblance of sustainability.\nBut even the aspiration is dangerous.\nFor what would we be aspiring to?.\nTo forcing the future world into our image endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes, for what would we be aspiring to?.\nTo forcing the future world into our image endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes.\nBut if we choose instead to embark on an open-ended journey of creation and exploration whose every step is unsustainable until it is redeemed by the next, if this becomes a prevailing ethic and aspiration of our society, then the ascent of man, the beginning of infinity, will have become, if not secure, then at least sustainable.\nThe end of the chapter.\nThere we go.\nA wonderful way to end up the sustainability that we want, the sustainability we want, and need and require, in order to survive, its constant change is this open-ended journey of creation and exploration.\nEach step of which is unsustainable, we can't stay there at that step just doing that same thing over and over again.\nIt's not sustainable.\nWhat is sustainable is change, this rapid progress, this journey of creation and exploration.\nAnd so we come finally to chapter 18, to the conclusion of the book, which I think will take some weeks to get through.\nThere will be many episodes based on the beginning, which is chapter 18.\nAnd it's appropriate that it's called the beginning, because this is, as I said before, the beginning of the beginning of infinity, the beginning of spreading these ideas of finding new ways in which to promote the understandings and the learnings that are within this book, the messages that are in this book, because this is civilization level important as we've just learned from that previous chapter.\nWe need to counter the prevailing narratives about all of these topics.\nAnd it's simply a good way.\nThe book is a good way of having a touchstone, a way of summarizing what this worldview is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=318"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "acda3aa8-75b7-47d0-b210-99b445df342e": {"page_content": "We need to counter the prevailing narratives about all of these topics.\nAnd it's simply a good way.\nThe book is a good way of having a touchstone, a way of summarizing what this worldview is.\nThe worldview is clearly summarized and encapsulated within the book, but it's beyond the book, of course, of course.\nAnd there's many more people and communities that need to spring up and have an optimistic view of humanity and problem solving.\nBut for now, until next time, bye bye.\nJust to thank you to my Patreons.\nAnd if you'd like to become a patreon of mine, I would greatly appreciate it.\nYou can find me at patreon.com forward slash ToKCast or simply Google, um, ToKCast patreon or even Brithall patreon.\nAnd something will come up there for you.\nOr you can go to my own website, www.brithall.org.\nAnd you'll find a link there to a PayPal link.\nAnd so you can donate.\nThere's a donate button.\nIt is greatly welcome.\nI greatly appreciate it.\nAny contributions that anyone can make at whatever level.\nThank you so much.\nUntil next time, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmB10nI0JGU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b674a11b-4f1a-4d74-aafe-6a475f01152b": {"page_content": "Hello and welcome to episode 35.\nThis is part two of the evolution of culture which is chapter 15 of the beginning of infinity.\nToday I'll be going through selfish means and static societies and we'll be distinguishing between static societies and dynamic societies.\nBut I'll leave dynamic societies until next episode.\nA crucial question we'll be considering in this chapter is why it is that human creativity can express itself in such different ways in different societies in a sort of reliable way.\nSo in certain kinds of societies which we call dynamic societies, this creativity is used to cause progress and change but in a static society, something else is going on.\nWe've got the same kind of creativity but it's being used not for progress, it's being used to maintain the status quo.\nI think David Deutsch gives a unique creative answer himself and this is a question that has civilizational consequences.\nAfter all we want to tend towards being a dynamic society, a society that continues to solve problems at a rapid rate.\nIn fact we need to be able to continue to solve problems at a rate more rapid than the rate at which we encounter them because eventually the civilizational destroying problem might arise and if we aren't able to create knowledge in time, if we are too slow to react, then that'll be the end of this.\nNow a static society isn't making progress hardly at all.\nIt's not really creating knowledge.\nThere are very few perfectly dynamic societies and perfectly static societies.\nHistorically we might be able to look at examples of near-perfect static societies although nothing comes quite perfect.\nNothing is quite perfectly static but the lesson is that societies these days contend in one direction or the other and we always want to tend in the direction of dynamism, of fast progress, of being able to change in a direction that allows us to improve.\nNow before we get to the main discussion about static societies and the causes of static societies, we need to go back to the idea of means and David's up to the point where he talks about the selfish mean, obviously a play on, the selfish gene from Richard Dawkins.\nSo I'll begin reading and for anyone following along I happen to be up to page 377.\nThe selfish mean, if the gene is in a genome at all then when suitable circumstances arise it will definitely be expressed as an enzyme as I described in chapter 6 and will then cause its characteristic effects.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=24"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2ec451db-d17c-4db1-8980-ce633e02c3f1": {"page_content": "So I'll begin reading and for anyone following along I happen to be up to page 377.\nThe selfish mean, if the gene is in a genome at all then when suitable circumstances arise it will definitely be expressed as an enzyme as I described in chapter 6 and will then cause its characteristic effects.\nNor can it be left behind if the rest of its genome is successfully replicated but merely being present in a mind does not automatically get a meme expressed as behaviour.\nThe meme has to compete for that privilege with other ideas, memes and non-memes about all sorts of subjects in the same mind and merely being expressed as behaviour does not automatically get the same meme copied into a recipient along with other memes.\nIt has to compete for the recipient's attention and acceptance with all sorts of behaviours by other people and with the recipient's own ideas.\nAll that is in addition to the analogue of the type of selection that genes face.\nEach meme competing with rival versions of itself across the population, perhaps by containing the knowledge for some useful function, memes are subject to all sorts of random and intentional variation in addition to that selection and so they evolve.\nSo to this extent the same logic holds as for genes, memes are selfish, they do not necessarily evolve to benefit their holders or their society or again even themselves except in the sense of replicating better than other memes.\nThough now most other memes are their rivals, not just variants of themselves.\nThe successful meme variant is the one that changes the behaviour of its holders in such a way as to make itself best at displacing other memes from the population.\nThis variant may well benefit its holders or their culture or the species as a whole, but if it harms them or destroys them, it will spread anyway.\nMemes that harm society are a familiar phenomenon.\nYou need only consider the harm done by adherence of political views or religions that you are especially a bore.\nSocieties have been destroyed because some of the memes that were best at spreading through the population were bad for a society.\nI should discuss one example in Chapter 17 and countless individuals have been harmed or killed by adopting memes that were bad for them, such as irrational political ideologies or dangerous fads.\nFortunately, in the case of memes that is not the whole story, to understand the rest of the story, we have to consider the basic strategies by which memes cause themselves to be faithfully replicated.\nOkay, pausing there just my brief reflection on this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=159"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9afe4d1f-e836-4214-b1d3-b1d4d2f29bc9": {"page_content": "I should discuss one example in Chapter 17 and countless individuals have been harmed or killed by adopting memes that were bad for them, such as irrational political ideologies or dangerous fads.\nFortunately, in the case of memes that is not the whole story, to understand the rest of the story, we have to consider the basic strategies by which memes cause themselves to be faithfully replicated.\nOkay, pausing there just my brief reflection on this.\nThis is reminiscent in some sense to what in biology is called the naturalistic fallacy, which I've talked about before.\nThe naturalistic fallacy is the idea that if something is natural, then therefore it's good.\nI think of new age types or people who believe and only living a paleo diet.\nThink of people who regard chemicals as altogether bad and only things which appear biologically natural are good.\nBut of course, all that style of thinking is refuted by funnel-web spider venom or snake venom.\nIt's a thing that occurs naturally, but it's certainly not good for you and you want the artificial anti-venom if it can be got if you happen to get bitten by one of these things.\nLots of natural things like rape or eating your children happen to exist out there in nature among low-off animal forms.\nBut of course, just because it's natural doesn't make it good.\nSo when it comes to humans, what is natural for us is typically what is unnatural for everything else and often what is good, what is unnatural is what is quite good.\nCreating knowledge is natural for us.\nCreating technology is natural for us.\nSometimes the technologies have side effects which themselves cause certain problems.\nThat's all a natural part of being human.\nSo in a way, the distinction between the natural and the artificial for us is nonsensical.\nEverything we do is a natural outworking of our creative capacity which we happen to have.\nBut if you're going to say that everything we do is unnatural and therefore bad in some way, then you're caught in this bind of assuming that we should be replicating or repeating or trying to emulate what's going on out there in nature.\nBut you really don't want to emulate the behavior of I don't know.\nA lion, you know, lions typically eat the children of their competitors.\nSo it's not an ideal society to emulate.\nNot everything that is natural is good.\nWe already know this.\nThis is straightforward.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=277"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "509540e4-e140-4965-8de4-b01ee235a95a": {"page_content": "But you really don't want to emulate the behavior of I don't know.\nA lion, you know, lions typically eat the children of their competitors.\nSo it's not an ideal society to emulate.\nNot everything that is natural is good.\nWe already know this.\nThis is straightforward.\nRelated to this kind of naturalistic fallacy, which I think many rational, clear thinking people typically reject this idea of natural is good, is the idea that anything that has evolved in biology is therefore useful or beneficial or even works to some extent.\nThis idea that biological structures exist only if they work well sometimes, but not all ways.\nThe only thing that's being replicated, the only thing that works as the gene, the structure that actually arises, including the whole organism itself, isn't necessarily benefited by the evolutionary process that has led to it.\nLet's sharpen this up a bit.\nIf you have appendicitis, someone telling you that the existence of the gene that causes your eventual appendicitis that could be a genetic thing, it's small comfort to think that well, in some way, that was natural in some way it has worked.\nThat's why it's there in your body.\nWell, it's not working for you.\nIt's also not working for you if you happen to have genes as most human beings do for the eventual decay of the discs between the vertebrae and their spine.\nPeople get bad backs as they get older.\nIn fact, something as simple as the genes that eventually lead to death, the genes that eventually lead to disease of any kinds.\nI don't know too much about sharks, but I have read that sharks apparently don't suffer from cancer.\nSo they have good genes that we lack.\nOur genes apparently allow for the possibility of cancer.\nIf we had different genes, then perhaps we wouldn't.\nPerhaps we wouldn't have disease of any kind if our genes were slightly different.\nPerhaps we would live forever if our genes were of a certain kind.\nThat solution must be out there in abstract biological space.\nPeople living longer.\nPeople living for instead of 80 years, 160 years, perhaps a thousand years.\nThose genes must be out there somewhere.\nSo the genes that we do have aren't necessarily of great benefit to us necessarily.\nThey can be of some benefit.\nThey can kind of work.\nThey aren't perfect, and there would be better variants out there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=427"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c81cf51-3b73-4118-8145-88d1b01ebc32": {"page_content": "Perhaps we would live forever if our genes were of a certain kind.\nThat solution must be out there in abstract biological space.\nPeople living longer.\nPeople living for instead of 80 years, 160 years, perhaps a thousand years.\nThose genes must be out there somewhere.\nSo the genes that we do have aren't necessarily of great benefit to us necessarily.\nThey can be of some benefit.\nThey can kind of work.\nThey aren't perfect, and there would be better variants out there.\nAnd all of these problems that are there within our genes, all these non-ideal structures and features of our lives that we happen to inherit from our genes, we will change gradually with our ideas as we come up with better ways of genetically engineering ourselves, of curing disease, of trying to fix cancer, and so on and so forth, of trying to combat age.\nWell, that will be memes that will be causing the big changes in us.\nNot the genes.\nSo genes don't exist because they're necessarily beneficial to the organisms which they give rise to.\nThe same two for memes, just because a meme happens to have survived over and again, does not necessarily mean that it's good for that organism.\nOr as David says, the society in which it finds itself being replicated.\nGenes do not have our best interests at heart.\nMemes do not necessarily have our best interests at heart.\nSo just because a meme is popular does not mean that it's good.\nIn fact, sometimes the opposite.\nMany memes are very, very harmful.\nThey are, after all, as David has said, selfish.\nThey're all about themselves.\nTo this extent, they do survive.\nSome do so at our expense.\nNot all of them, but this is where rational analysis comes in.\nThe meme that says, killing yourself and other innocent people in order to secure a place and eternal paradise is one that does attract people and new adherence every single year.\nHopefully less and less every single year as we learn more and as rational dynamic societies spread throughout the world.\nNevertheless, this idea of doing harm to yourself and harm to other people in order to appease nasty God in the eternal paradise is something that has persisted over time.\nIt's a meme that gets itself replicated and it resists correction.\nOften because it's conjoined with other memes that tell you that thinking that that particular meme as false is a reason for you not getting into paradise or a reason that you are deficient in some way.\nSo this is an anti-rational kind of meme.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=549"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "000f3286-7769-4ea5-8ddd-3bfba11f8891": {"page_content": "Nevertheless, this idea of doing harm to yourself and harm to other people in order to appease nasty God in the eternal paradise is something that has persisted over time.\nIt's a meme that gets itself replicated and it resists correction.\nOften because it's conjoined with other memes that tell you that thinking that that particular meme as false is a reason for you not getting into paradise or a reason that you are deficient in some way.\nSo this is an anti-rational kind of meme.\nIt's a meme that causes itself not to be criticized.\nIt resists criticism.\nIt resists error correction.\nSo therefore it gets replicated in its existing form.\nWell, not therefore, it exists in its existing form and it is attractive for some reason to the society or to the adherence of the meme.\nOkay, back to the book and David has just finished the section there that I read by saying I'll repeat it.\nTo understand the rest of the story, we have to consider the basic strategies by which memes cause themselves to be faithfully replicated.\nAnd the next section is subtitled static societies and he writes, as I have explained a human brain, quite unlike a genome, is itself an arena of intense variation selection and competition.\nMost ideas within a brain are created by it for the very purpose of trying them out in imagination, criticizing them and varying them until they meet the person's preferences.\nIn other words, meme replication itself involves evolution within individual brains.\nIn some cases, there can be thousands of cycles of variation and selection before any of the variants is ever enacted.\nThen, even after a meme has been copied into a new holder, it has not yet completed its life cycle.\nIt still has to survive a further selection process, namely the oldest choice of weather to enact it or not.\nPause their just my reflection again.\nRemember in the last episode, if you heard that there were four kinds of ideas, not all of which are memes.\nIn fact, the first three kinds are not memes.\nSo the four kinds are like this.\nThe first is an idea you simply have, and it causes no behavior in you whatsoever.\nI might be sitting here and thinking, I wouldn't mind getting a cup of tea.\nBut if I don't act on it, well, it hasn't caused any behavior and I've just thought about it.\nand maybe I've criticized it.\nand I've thought to myself, no, we've already had two cups of tea a day.\nI don't want another one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=291"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "57ac140f-e0e7-42bc-85f2-4f2b4c01a288": {"page_content": "The first is an idea you simply have, and it causes no behavior in you whatsoever.\nI might be sitting here and thinking, I wouldn't mind getting a cup of tea.\nBut if I don't act on it, well, it hasn't caused any behavior and I've just thought about it.\nand maybe I've criticized it.\nand I've thought to myself, no, we've already had two cups of tea a day.\nI don't want another one.\nOkay, that's an idea of the first type.\nThe idea of the second type is, I wouldn't mind having a cup of tea and actually get up, go over to the kettle and the tea pile and go through the process of making the tea and then drinking the tea.\nBut if there's no one else here in my house and no one ever sees me having that cup of tea, there's no possibility that anyone could ever copy it.\nAnd so although it's an idea, it's an idea that's caused a behavior in me.\nThere's no possibility of it being replicated.\nSo that's the second type.\nSo an idea of the third type would be, everything I just did, then in the second type, have the idea of a cup of tea actually going through the process of making the cup tea and someone actually sees me having the cup of tea and drinking the cup of tea.\nBut if they decide not to copy that, well, it's not a meme at all.\nOkay, it's just an idea that's caused a behavior that they happen to have observed.\nNow in the fourth type, this is where we have the idea and it causes a behavior in me and I go and have my cup of tea.\nand I drink it here out of my University of Oxford Cup.\nand I put it onto a podcast like this and people who are watching see it and then for whatever reason, lots of people go out and buy University of Oxford Cups and decide to start, I don't know, drinking cups of tea on video.\nThat would be a meme.\nThat is where we've got an idea that has caused behavior that's being replicated.\nNow that's a silly idea.\nMost other memes are far more useful and they tend to get replicated because they're solving some kind of problem or they're achieving other some other kind of aim.\nAlthough there are memes out there that are just as silly or trivial as that and tend to get replicated.\nThey might not have a long lifespan though.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=800"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "994278ab-d162-44a1-9e38-145c9f69699a": {"page_content": "That would be a meme.\nThat is where we've got an idea that has caused behavior that's being replicated.\nNow that's a silly idea.\nMost other memes are far more useful and they tend to get replicated because they're solving some kind of problem or they're achieving other some other kind of aim.\nAlthough there are memes out there that are just as silly or trivial as that and tend to get replicated.\nThey might not have a long lifespan though.\nBut whatever the case, this is how the broad category of things that we call ideas can be distinguished from memes, the ideas that tend to get replicated and that tend to persist over time, especially across many generations.\nNot always, maybe they'll only exist for some days or weeks or years.\nWe know this definitely on the internet that there are certain memes that seem to arise and then decline again very quickly.\nBut broadly speaking, memes are things that do persist over many generations and the longest live memes tend to cause cultural changes as well.\nNow we might consider, I have a couple of volumes up here of Feynman's lectures on physics.\nWell, they came from a certain history of memes, the history of memes that began with Galileo and Kepler and then Newton, who came up with Newtonian classical physics and those memes were passed on through many generations due to people delivering lectures, convening classes, writing books about them, eventually leading to Feynman himself delivering lectures, which were published in a book which included aspects of Newtonian physics.\nSo that meme has persisted over time and has been refined even and its rate of propagation has increased throughout the world.\nAnd in fact, some of the refinements to those original memes tend to improve them and cause them to be replicated in even better ways or to be or to persist even more robustly or to be promoted throughout the world even more than what they otherwise would have been.\nFeynman himself was very, very good at this.\nLet's take, for example, something like specific heat capacity.\nSpecific heat capacity is a part of physics, it describes, well, specific heat capacity is defined as the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one unit mass of a substance, a unit mass is usually regarded in physics as a kilogram by one Kelvin or one degree Celsius.\nSo just to say that again, specific heat capacity, the amount of energy it takes to raise a substance of one kilogram by one degree Celsius.\nNow, there's all sorts of ways to try and understand and explain this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=892"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b492edb3-58be-4231-89a0-55950dc25821": {"page_content": "So just to say that again, specific heat capacity, the amount of energy it takes to raise a substance of one kilogram by one degree Celsius.\nNow, there's all sorts of ways to try and understand and explain this.\nFeynman had his own way of explaining and understanding this and he taught his students that it's analogous to wetness, that you could describe something that is able to absorb water as having a certain degree of wetness and it can absorb a certain amount of water before it becomes entirely saturated.\nSome things can hold a lot of water, let's say a big bath towel, and some things can not hold much water at all, let's say a tissue.\nWhat's it's got to do with specific heat capacity?.\nWell, people have an idea in their mind, they already have common sense understanding that the tissue cannot hold much water before it becomes saturated, but the bath towel can hold quite a bit of water before it becomes completely saturated.\nNow, if we extend this analogy to specific heat capacity, the idea here is that some substances like iron cannot hold much heat before their temperature increases.\nSo if you take an iron pot, stainless steel pot and stick it on the stove, then after a few seconds, the temperature will rise very quickly.\nIn order to raise one kilogram of iron by one degree Celsius, it takes very little energy.\nIn comparison to something like water, if you fill that pot with water, what you will notice is it takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, in order to cause the temperature of that water to increase.\nAnd the reason is, specific heat capacity, there is this quality of substances that determines how much energy is absorbed to cause the temperature to rise.\nAnd what has got to do with means?.\nWell, Feynman's way of explaining this has been regarded by some people involved in physics education as being particularly useful analogy.\nAnd so it helps the mean to spread because it makes it easier for some people to learn this concept, to understand this concept of specific heat capacity.\nSo Feynman not only promoted the meme of specific heat capacity, the idea that got replicated over time, but found ways of causing it to be replicated with ever increasing fidelity or certainly to cause it to be spread more widely than it might otherwise would have been.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1015"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9975040-3f72-417e-8f62-2c0c98fc2c0c": {"page_content": "And so it helps the mean to spread because it makes it easier for some people to learn this concept, to understand this concept of specific heat capacity.\nSo Feynman not only promoted the meme of specific heat capacity, the idea that got replicated over time, but found ways of causing it to be replicated with ever increasing fidelity or certainly to cause it to be spread more widely than it might otherwise would have been.\nAfter all, if you're trying to teach someone and not using analogies and not trying to explain things in terms they might already understand, then they may not very well understand it and they won't therefore have behaviors like being able to explain it to someone else later on, causing the meme to otherwise be replicated.\nSo this is what I mean about, there are memes themselves like the meme of trying to analogize something or trying to use a metaphor in order to explain something that themselves can cause other memes like specific heat capacity to be replicated better.\nOkay, so let's go back to the book and David writes, some of the criteria that a mind uses to make such choices are themselves memes, some are ideas that it has created for itself by altering memes or otherwise and which will never exist in any other mind.\nSuch ideas are potentially highly variable between different people, yet they can decisively affect whether any given meme does or does not survive a given person.\nSince a person can enact and transmiting memes soon after receiving it, a meme generation can be much shorter than a human generation, and many cycles of variation and selection can take place inside the mind's concern to even during one meme generation.\nAlso, memes can be passed to people other than the holder's biological descendants.\nThose factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution which partly explains how memes can contain so much knowledge.\nHence, the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on earth in which human civilization occupies only the final second of the day during which life has so far existed is misleading.\nIn reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains and it has barely begun.\nThe whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution.\nThe evolution of memes, now that bears repeating.\nYou see this in biology textbooks, you see this in geology textbooks.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1141"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "91a27b11-c236-40c9-9e3e-496059a96e46": {"page_content": "In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains and it has barely begun.\nThe whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution.\nThe evolution of memes, now that bears repeating.\nYou see this in biology textbooks, you see this in geology textbooks.\nIf you regard the beginning of life on earth as being January 1st, then by the time you get to December 31st of that same year, human beings only appear in the final second if you were to spread out evolution that long or geological time anyway that long.\nSo it appears as if we haven't been that profound.\nWe're not very profound compared to all other life on earth, but that's a strange measure of profundity, of the profundity of evolution in the universe.\nBecause really, although there has been a vast amount of evolution biologically speaking, if we consider all forms of evolution, all forms of change that have ever happened, then the evolution of ideas that has happened over time, far outstrips what goes on in biology and will continue to.\nThe rate of change of ideas in human civilization is far, far greater and far faster than anything that's going on in the biological realm.\nFast though that may be, it is completely outstripped.\nSo again, as David says, in reality a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains and it has barely begun.\nThe whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.\nIf anyone out there listen, ever listens to the podcaster, Joe Rogan.\nJoe speaks in terms like this now and again when he's in particular moods, he will talk about precisely that actually, how it seems as though his understanding of human beings is that we are giving birth to something that he's not sure of what it is, but it's something technological, something beyond biology, it's something post governed by natural evolutionary laws, or natural biological evolutionary laws.\nWe're moving beyond that.\nAnd his common sense understanding of that that he's come to is quite right and in line with this idea that biological evolution is merely a preface to whatever is coming next, this evolution of ideas which might allow us to fly free completely of our biology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1278"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ece97613-d70e-4da7-80c2-ee50b285fcb7": {"page_content": "We're moving beyond that.\nAnd his common sense understanding of that that he's come to is quite right and in line with this idea that biological evolution is merely a preface to whatever is coming next, this evolution of ideas which might allow us to fly free completely of our biology.\nAt the moment we're not there, at the moment we are very much subject to the biology, but if one day we can have bodies that are more robust and not made out of this meat, we're not packets of meat, but our brains are able to be put into something far more resilient, something like silicon, then evolution will not have a bearing on us.\nWe won't have brains that are determined by genes, we'll have brains instead that run minds that are completely independent of our bodies, and therefore we'll not be subject to the biological necessities that we have, like eating and drinking and so on and so forth, etc.\nIt's just too much to think about.\nYeah, but we have to.\nI know we do have to.\nOne of the things that's always been amusing to me is that we seem to have this insatiable desire to prove things, and I've always wondered why.\nBut is that maybe because this is what human beings are here for?.\nYeah.\nIt's what we do.\nIt's who we are.\nBut this is a product, it's just us being intelligent, trying to survive against nature and predators and weather and all the different issues that we came up that we evolved growing up and dealing with, and then now we just want things to be better.\nWe just want things to be more convenient, faster, but more data and whatever the case is.\nThis process of meme replication is not controlled by the genes.\nNow, there are analogous in the sense that both of them evolve, but genes evolve over time and names evolve over time.\nBut the memes are not in the genes, and this is where evolutionary psychology gets things so seriously wrong at times to think that all of our memes, our ideas are in some way, if not determined by, then certainly shaped by biological determinism, that there's genes that cause us to have certain thoughts.\nNow, that might be true, but that would be the tiniest fraction of thoughts we ever have, ones in which there's some biological antecedent in which you could trace some sort of idea to a gene.\nThat would be a rare exception to the rule.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1392"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c5a11300-87b1-4c25-b1c7-4d616258417f": {"page_content": "Now, that might be true, but that would be the tiniest fraction of thoughts we ever have, ones in which there's some biological antecedent in which you could trace some sort of idea to a gene.\nThat would be a rare exception to the rule.\nThe evolution of memes, also, unlike genes, evolution of memes can be a highly intelligently designed process, because not always, of course, but we are intelligent, and so we can design certain ideas.\nIf we have an idea for a certain kind of architecture, then that's most certainly intelligently designed, and that meme can spread throughout the world and cause certain styles of buildings to be built all over the world, and so that's a certain kind of meme that can spread, it can be replicated, and it's intelligently designed.\nNow, not, it's not always the case that memes are intelligently designed.\nSome are not.\nWe would presume that memes that actively tend to destroy the lives of human beings haven't been intelligently designed.\nThey have had reason for non-intelligent reasons, and they persist over time, and they anti-rational in many, many ways.\nBut broadly speaking, many of the memes that we're interested in are these ones that people subject to criticism, that they refine over time, and that propagate because someone wants them to propagate, but not all meme evolution is blind in that sense.\nSome is, much is not, and that's another key difference with gene evolution.\nOkay, so I'm going to skip a little here.\nThey have talked about how meme replication is less reliable than gene replication, clearly because people have these creative minds, and so they're constantly changing their ideas, and so that can cause memes to themselves be criticized, destroyed, and therefore not be replicated at all.\nAnd he mentions the term intentional variation with respect to memes.\nThis intelligent designing that I was talking, speaking of, I guess my terms a little bit more louder than my David's is, intentional variation, unlike random variation which goes on with the gene.\nSo the intentional variation of a meme can itself cause it to be criticized or varied in such a way that it's not going to be replicated.\nIt's not going to be passed on to the next generation or to another person.\nIn fact, it might be criticized in such a way as it causes no further behavior, even if it's been causing behavior prior to that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1545"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2b4d5965-2803-4448-bc3e-8e8fdf38bd22": {"page_content": "So the intentional variation of a meme can itself cause it to be criticized or varied in such a way that it's not going to be replicated.\nIt's not going to be passed on to the next generation or to another person.\nIn fact, it might be criticized in such a way as it causes no further behavior, even if it's been causing behavior prior to that.\nPeople want to improve their ideas, and so therefore, some of the ideas that might have been causing behavior for many, many generations might cease to cause any further behavior.\nI think of all the ridiculous medical practices that used to go on.\nBlood letting, for example, you were sick and so the doctor would cut you and release some of your blood because it had the bad stuff in you.\nWell, that was certainly a meme that went around for a long time.\nEventually, someone figured out that was ridiculous and so it ceased to be propagated.\nAnd so this is the reason why we can have intentional variation of memes.\nWe can have this intentional variation of memes and therefore, the replication isn't reliable in the sense that you don't get this persistence necessarily.\nAnd it's not just for reasons of fitness.\nWe can deliberately stop the replication of memes.\nWe can deliberately stop the replication of certain genes in ourselves as well.\nBut out there in biology, of course, the genes will get replicated as long as their fifth.\nThat's all that is needed.\nAnd David goes through a little bit about what dynamic societies are, which I'll talk about in the next episode because I really want to spend most of the time here talking about static societies.\nBut basically, the concept here is that but only post enlightenment societies are dynamic ones.\nAnd by dynamic, dynamic, we mean stable under change over time.\nThat's one measure.\nMaking rapid progress, rapid meaning, progress that is noticeable on the time scale of individual human lives.\nAnd even today, we'd want something even more rapid than that within a year, we noticed a certain amount of progress.\nA new smart phones come out every single year.\nIf a year went by where a new kind of car did not come out, then we'd think it a bit strange.\nSure, a new piece of software didn't come out.\nThe rate of progress is increasing.\nThe rate of change is increasing.\nSo we notice that year-on-year, this is the feature of a dynamic society.\nBut then what are the features of a static society?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1677"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8965b7da-3069-4761-b1ad-3adcf7bb494a": {"page_content": "A new smart phones come out every single year.\nIf a year went by where a new kind of car did not come out, then we'd think it a bit strange.\nSure, a new piece of software didn't come out.\nThe rate of progress is increasing.\nThe rate of change is increasing.\nSo we notice that year-on-year, this is the feature of a dynamic society.\nBut then what are the features of a static society?.\nWell, let's turn to the book and David writes.\nFor a society to be static, all its memes must be unchanging, or changing too slowly to be noticed.\nFrom the perspective of our rapidly changing society, such a state of affairs is hard to even imagine.\nFor instance, consider an isolated, primitive society that has, whatever reason, remained almost unchanged for many generations.\nWhy?.\nQuite possibly, no one in the society wants it to change, because they can conceive of no other way of life.\nNevertheless, its members are not immune from pain, hunger, grief, fear, or other forms of physical and mental suffering.\nThey try to think of ideas to alleviate some of that suffering.\nSome of those ideas are original, and occasionally, one of them would actually help.\nIt need only be a small, tentative improvement, a way of hunting or growing food, but slightly less effort, or of making slightly better tools, a better way of recording debt or laws, a subtle change in the relationship between husband and wife, or between parent and child, are slightly different attitude towards a society's rulers or gods.\nWhat will happen next?.\nThe person with the idea may well want to tell other people.\nThose who believe the idea will see that it could make life a little less nasty, brutish, and short.\nThey will tell their families and friends, and they theirs.\nThis idea will be competing in people's minds with other ideas about how to make life better.\nMost of them, presumably, false.\nBut suppose for the sake of argument that this particular true idea happens to be believed, and spreads through the society.\nThen the society will have been changed.\nIt may not have changed very much, but this was merely the change caused by a single person thinking of a single idea.\nSo multiply all that by the number of thinking minds in the society, and by the lifetimes worth of thought in each of them, and let this continue for only a few generations, and the result is an exponentially increasing, revolutionary force transforming every aspect of society.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1844"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "67708e20-6e84-4c2d-a068-704be6b7d5e3": {"page_content": "Then the society will have been changed.\nIt may not have changed very much, but this was merely the change caused by a single person thinking of a single idea.\nSo multiply all that by the number of thinking minds in the society, and by the lifetimes worth of thought in each of them, and let this continue for only a few generations, and the result is an exponentially increasing, revolutionary force transforming every aspect of society.\nAnd quote, and pause there.\nNow, this mirror doesn't at all the way back to chapter one of the beginning of infinity.\nPeople want to be less hungry, suffer less.\nThey want to improve their lives.\nThey want to be less disease.\nThey want to grow more food, etc.\nThey have problems.\nAnd what do they want to do?.\nWell, they want to explain the world around them.\nSo the quest for good explanations is what causes the society to change over time.\nWhat normally preoccupied them also involved, yearning to know, they wish they knew how to prevent their food supply from sometimes failing, and how they could rest when they were tired without risking starvation.\nBe warmer, cooler, safer, in less pain.\nI bet those prehistoric cave artists would have loved to know how to draw better.\nBecause the quest for good explanations is a problem-solving enterprise.\nAnd where we find solutions to the problems that we have, then those solutions, if they're effective, can become memes that transmit themselves throughout society.\nAnd a special case of memes would be good explanations, hard to vary explanations.\nAnd so when you've got a hard to vary explanation, a good explanation of a particularly pressing problem that society has, then you have a beginning of infinity.\nBecause then you have the capacity to incrementally, over time, improve your ideas, and continue to solve that particular problem and related problems.\nAnd more interesting problems as well, back to the book.\nThey have rights.\nBut in a static society, that beginning of infinity never happens.\nDespite the fact that I have assumed nothing other than that people try to improve their lives, and that they cannot transmit their ideas perfectly, and that information subject to variation and selection of roles, I have entirely failed to imagine a static society in this story, because they're my reflection.\nSo that's interesting.\nSo he tried to imagine what a static society was by assuming that nothing more than that people wanted to improve their lives.\nThis has caused him to actually imagine a dynamic society, a society which causes problems to be solved at the time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=1931"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "31487002-efa4-4433-b8e3-bde96030a25e": {"page_content": "So that's interesting.\nSo he tried to imagine what a static society was by assuming that nothing more than that people wanted to improve their lives.\nThis has caused him to actually imagine a dynamic society, a society which causes problems to be solved at the time.\nHe's imagined a dynamic society.\nAnd so he goes on to write, David goes on to write, quote, for a society to be static, something else must be happening as well.\nOne thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws to booze that prevent their memes from changing.\nThey enforced the enactment of existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants and suppressed criticism of the status quo.\nHowever, that alone could not suppress change.\nFirst, no enactment of a meme is completely identical to that of the previous generation.\nIt is infeasible to specify every aspect of acceptable behavior with perfect precision.\nSecond, it is impossible to tell in advance, which small deviations from traditional behavior would initiate further changes.\nThird, once a variant idea has begun to spread to even one more person, which means that people are preferring it.\nPreventing it from being transmitted further is extremely difficult.\nTherefore, no society could remain static solely by suppressing new ideas once they have been created.\nThat is why the enforcement of the status quo is only a very secondary method of preventing change, a mopping up operation.\nThe primary method is always and only can be to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity.\nLet's pause there.\nLet's just read that again because I think this is so profound and poorly understood out there, especially among people who are otherwise very interested in this question about why do some societies make progress slower than others?.\nIs it that these fast dynamic wealthy societies are oppressing these other societies?.\nAnd some people will come with the answer and say, no, it's not our fault.\nIt's not the fault of the West, the enlightenment societies, that some other societies aren't quite as wealthy.\nThe problem is that in those societies, there's a form of tyranny or enforcement of the status quo.\nWell, that's part of the answer.\nBut as David says there and let's just reread it, he says, quote, the enforcement of the status quo is only every secondary method of preventing change, a mopping up operation.\nThe primary method is always and can only be to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=2086"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "87959328-bd1d-4b7a-b64e-0dc805e9fc9d": {"page_content": "The problem is that in those societies, there's a form of tyranny or enforcement of the status quo.\nWell, that's part of the answer.\nBut as David says there and let's just reread it, he says, quote, the enforcement of the status quo is only every secondary method of preventing change, a mopping up operation.\nThe primary method is always and can only be to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity.\nSo, static societies always have traditions of bring up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties.\nThat ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society, I never thought of in the first place, pausing there again.\nOkay, so it's worse than merely having a government let's say, which is oppressive and tyrannical.\nSomething else is going on at a much deeper level where the culture is such that children and others never have the idea in the first place to improve the society because there are other ideas in their mind, means causing them to be afraid, fearful, or simply unable to have new ideas.\nBecause as soon as the genesis of the idea begins to make itself known to the thinker, these means clamp down on that, prevent it from reaching fruition.\nThey undermine disabled human creativity, which is a remarkable thing.\nAnd so let's read what I think is a discovery by David Deutsch with respect to mean theory.\nI haven't read it anywhere else.\nI've read a few books on mean theory, but this is the first time I've read this solution to that problem of why people might not be able to be in a position necessarily to criticize the ideas that cause their society to be static and not make progress and solve problems in the way that other societies might be better at.\nDavid writes, how is this done?.\nThe details are variable not relevant here, but the sort of thing that happens is that people are growing up in such a society, acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else, which amounts to reading themselves of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society's constitutive means.\nThey not only enact those means, they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them.\nSo not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety, and devotion to duty, their members sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards.\nPeople know no others.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=2233"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4e6f38dd-66fe-4f83-b5e0-8c7b8e170b2b": {"page_content": "They not only enact those means, they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them.\nSo not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety, and devotion to duty, their members sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards.\nPeople know no others.\nSo they feel pride and shame and form all their aspirations and opinions by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society's means.\nOkay, so just pausing there.\nand I'm reflecting on that.\nHere's the idea that there are certain kinds of means which disable the ability of their holders of thinking it's anything new because their creativity instead is being used to ever more faithfully enact the status quo.\nOkay, and then David writes, quote, how do memes know how to achieve all such complex reproducible effects on the ideas and behavior of human beings?.\nThey do not of course know.\nThey are not sentient beings.\nThey merely contain that knowledge implicitly.\nHow did they come by that knowledge?.\nIt evolved.\nThe memes exist at any instant in many different variant forms and those are subject to selection and favor of faithful replication.\nFor every long-lived meme of a static society, millions of variants will have fallen by the wayside because they lack that tiny extra piece of information, that extra degree of ruthless efficiency in preventing rivals from being thought of or acted upon.\nThat slight advantage in psychological leverage or whatever it took to make it spread through the population better than at travels and, once it was prevalent, to get it copied and enacted with just that extra degree of fidelity.\nIf ever a variant happened to be a little better at inducing behavior with those self-replicating properties, it soon became prevalent.\nAs soon as it did, there were again many variants of that variant which were again subject to the same evolutionary pressure.\nThus, successive versions of the meme accumulated knowledge that enabled them to ever more reliably inflict their characteristic style of damage on their human victims.\nLike genes, they may also confer benefits though, even then, they are unlikely to do so optimally.\nJust as genes for the eye implicitly know the laws of optics, so the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of the human condition and use it mercilessly to evade the defences and exploit the weaknesses of the human minds that they enslave.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=2386"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6b3c17e-dd24-4060-b539-f9de86b9af74": {"page_content": "Like genes, they may also confer benefits though, even then, they are unlikely to do so optimally.\nJust as genes for the eye implicitly know the laws of optics, so the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of the human condition and use it mercilessly to evade the defences and exploit the weaknesses of the human minds that they enslave.\nThen skipping a substantial bit here, where David talks about time scales, and he says that static societies are not perfectly unchanging, but certainly primitive societies would have been static by our, any measure that we would think of as being static.\nOver the course of anyone's lifetime, nothing would have been improved much.\nYour life would have been the same as your parents' lives, would have been the same as your grandparents' lives, and so on, back hundreds or thousands of generations.\nDavid also then mentions the fact that meme evolution tends to make memes static, but not necessarily whole society static.\nMemes, he says, do not evolve to benefit the group, just like genes, as we were saying, the genes, not only don't benefit necessarily to benefit the group, genes don't even exist to benefit the individuals in which they exist as well.\nThey might, but the gene is there to try and get itself replicated, and that can be via various means, which might not include necessarily the survival of that particular individual, let alone that particular group.\nOkay, and then I'll pick it up where David says, quote, a static society forms when there is no escape from this effect, or significant behavior, or relationships between people, and all thoughts are subordinated to causing faithful replication of the memes.\nIn all areas controlled by the memes, no critical faculties are exercised, no innovation is tolerated, and almost none is attempted.\nThis destruction of human minds makes static societies almost unimaginable from our perspective, countless human beings hoping throughout lifetimes and for generations for their suffering to be relieved, not only fail to make progress in realizing any such hope, they largely fail even to try to make any, or even to think about trying.\nIf they do see an opportunity, they reject it.\nThe spirit of creativity with which we are born is systematically extinguished in them before it can ever create anything new.\nA static society involves, in a sense consists of, a relentless struggle to prevent knowledge from growing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=2536"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b3e5d1db-1c18-4538-b1d2-1d62823fc4aa": {"page_content": "If they do see an opportunity, they reject it.\nThe spirit of creativity with which we are born is systematically extinguished in them before it can ever create anything new.\nA static society involves, in a sense consists of, a relentless struggle to prevent knowledge from growing.\nBut there is more to it than that, for there is no reason to expect that a rapidly spreading idea if one did happen to arise in a static society would be true or useful.\nThat is another aspect missing from my story of a static society above that David imagined.\nI assumed that the change would be for the better.\nIt might not have been, especially as the lack of critical sophistication in a static society would leave people vulnerable to false and harmful ideas from which their taboos did not predict them.\nAnd then David mentions the example which I won't read about, the Black Death, and all the bad ideas that people used to use in order to try and cure disease like the Black Death, killing Jews, killing witches, flagellating yourself, all these silly things that of course didn't work.\nIn fact, caused far more harm than good.\nAnd then he goes on to write, thus ironically, there is much truth in the typical static society fear that any change is much more likely to do harm than good.\nOkay, so pausing that as my reflection.\nYeah, any change is more likely to do harm than good.\nWhen we talk about progress, we're not just talking about change for changes sake.\nAfter all, most change that could happen could be random.\nAnd a random change should not be expected to improve things, quite the opposite.\nA lot of institutions that exist, a lot of ideas that we have, have evolved over time, and weathered the criticisms that have been brought to bear against it, and have survived.\nAnd so we end up with robust ideas, good ideas, good institutions, any change to that, any random change is going to be for the worse.\nWhat we need is very carefully calibrated change that itself is subject to criticism, which can cause change in a particular direction that we call progress.\nSo back to the book and David writes, static society survive by effectively eliminating the type of evolution that is unique to memes, namely creative variation intended to meet the holders individual preferences.\nIn the absence of that, meme evolution resembles gene evolution more closely, and some of the grim conclusions of the naive analogies between them apply after all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=2672"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cbdd754e-ef58-4ed3-a1d6-e5539bac555f": {"page_content": "What we need is very carefully calibrated change that itself is subject to criticism, which can cause change in a particular direction that we call progress.\nSo back to the book and David writes, static society survive by effectively eliminating the type of evolution that is unique to memes, namely creative variation intended to meet the holders individual preferences.\nIn the absence of that, meme evolution resembles gene evolution more closely, and some of the grim conclusions of the naive analogies between them apply after all.\nStatic societies do tend to settle issues by violence, and they do tend to sacrifice the welfare of individuals for the good of that is to say for the prevention of changes in society.\nI mentioned that people who rely on such analogies end up either advocating a static society or condoning violence and oppression.\nWe now see that those two responses are essentially the same.\nOppression is what it takes to keep a society static.\nOppression of a given kind will not last long until the society is static.\nSince the sustained exponential growth of knowledge has unmistakable effects, we can deduce without historical research that every society on earth before the current western civilization has either been static or has been destroyed within a few generations.\nThe golden ages of Athens and Florence are examples that are latter, but there may have been others.\nThis directly contradicts the widely held belief that individuals in primitive societies were happy and away that has not been possible since.\nThey were unconstrained by social convention and other imperatives of civilization, and hence were able to achieve self-expression and fulfillment of their needs and desires.\nBut primitive societies, including tribes of hunter gatherers, must all have been static societies.\nBecause if ever one ceased to be static, it would soon cease to be primitive.\nOr else destroy itself by losing its distinctive knowledge.\nIn the latter case, the growth of knowledge would still be inhibited by the raw violence which would be immediately, which would immediately replace the static societies institution.\nFor once violence is mediating changes, they would typically not be for the better.\nSince static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge, they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness.\nIronically, creating knowledge itself is itself a natural human need and desire.\nAnd static societies, however primitive, are naturally suppressed.\nI'll say that again because I think I bespoke a little, but it's worth repeating.\nCreating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire.\nCreating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=2795"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "55349265-a86e-4c40-9527-1403b12742a3": {"page_content": "Since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge, they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness.\nIronically, creating knowledge itself is itself a natural human need and desire.\nAnd static societies, however primitive, are naturally suppressed.\nI'll say that again because I think I bespoke a little, but it's worth repeating.\nCreating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire.\nCreating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire.\nSo as I was saying right at the beginning of this, so much of what is regarded as unnatural, artificial and therefore bad, it's actually what we do naturally.\nCreating knowledge, this whole natural artificial, natural, unnatural distinction is a chimera of sorts.\nIt's a silly way of trying to divide up any aspect of reality.\nUnless you're a biologist, I suppose.\nMoving on, David writes.\nFrom the point of view of every individual in such a society, its creativity, suppressing mechanisms are catastrophically harmful.\nEvery static society must leave its members chronically borked in their attempts to achieve anything positive for themselves as people.\nOr indeed anything at all.\nOther than their meme mandated behaviors, it can perpetuate itself only by suppressing its member self-expression and breaking their spirits and its memes are exquisitely adapted to doing this.\nAnd that's where we'll end.\nThe next section is about dynamic societies.\nSo just to summarize all of this, the reason a static society exists and persists over time, despite having creative people within it, is that the creativity has been disabled and all being used to ever more faithfully enact the status quo.\nAnd it does that because all the other kinds of creativity have been switched off, disabled, especially in young people.\nThey're threatened with violence and violence is used, they're told that they're going to an eternal hell of suffering if they do not enact the rituals in the same way that has always been done.\nIf they seek to improve something, then that would be regarded as unholy or unnatural.\nAnd so in this way, the society remains the same over time, it remains static.\nEven if the people would like things to improve, they have no means by which to improve because the ideas are switched off.\nAnd it's not to say that our society is perfectly dynamic and that we lack these kind of irrational memes.\nWe're going to learn about that in the very next part that we talk about, about dynamic societies.\nAnd then after that, the real distinction, the rational versus anti-rational memes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=2919"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "289565d3-2e74-4931-a6d2-1cff4d50c0f8": {"page_content": "Even if the people would like things to improve, they have no means by which to improve because the ideas are switched off.\nAnd it's not to say that our society is perfectly dynamic and that we lack these kind of irrational memes.\nWe're going to learn about that in the very next part that we talk about, about dynamic societies.\nAnd then after that, the real distinction, the rational versus anti-rational memes.\nBut that's the next time.\nUntil then, let's see it.\nAs always, thank you to everyone who's supporting me.\nI have means and ways by which you can support my ongoing efforts with this via Patreon.\nJust look up, top-cast Patreon or Brett Hall Patreon.\nYou can also pay power me, which a couple of people have and thank you very much to those people.\nOnce more, I'm able to bring these out and buy little gadgets like this to hopefully improve the quality somewhat with people's contributions.\nSo thank you very much for that.\nUntil next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNQJbOJWjH4&t=3108"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "abe9b1d0-af6f-4add-b4ac-ccc9b6073cf7": {"page_content": "Hello, so today I'm up to the end of Chapter 4.\nChapter 4 is about creation and this subsection is entitled fine-tuning.\nWe've already dealt with creation in terms of biological knowledge.\nOne of the interesting things we're now getting to is this huge issue in physics and philosophy of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics or the constants of nature or the parameters of nature, how would people like to put it?.\nIf there's one issue that it doesn't matter what kind of physics you're interested in, that physicists in general seem to converge upon, so in my experience it doesn't matter who the physicist is, everyone seems to have an opinion on this.\nAnd the issue is whether or not it's a problem in science as to the degree to which the laws of physics appear to be bio-friendly.\nSo this is all about why the laws of physics have the form that they do.\nIt seems unusual when we look at the details of what the kinds of laws of physics are that we have and the constants of nature that appear in those physical laws, it appears that values all sit on a knife edge that if you were to change any of them ever so slightly, then the conditions which are at the moment in this universe favorable for life would quickly turn the universe into one that isn't favorable for life.\nSo I'm going to have a look at some issues surrounding that.\nThere's been a lot of books written on this.\nSo when I was in high school I was interested in science, I was interested in physics, I was interested in astronomy, and it was towards the end of high school that I picked up the mind of God by Paul Davies.\nAnd this is the book for which he won the Templeton Prize, which is a very well remunerated prize, I think it's in the millions of dollars.\nAnd it was next in the book.\nIt was basically an overview of physics as it stood at the time at the late 90s.\nAnd a lot of philosophy was really a summary of important issues in metaphysics and ontology, but really it also concentrated on this very question about whether or not the laws of physics appear to have been a put up job.\nThat's the way that Paul Davies often put the issue and it seems like it's a put up job.\nIt seems as if the laws of physics have been especially, are especially bio-friendly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ab977f10-19ca-42c5-b248-1e8d5dfe450f": {"page_content": "And a lot of philosophy was really a summary of important issues in metaphysics and ontology, but really it also concentrated on this very question about whether or not the laws of physics appear to have been a put up job.\nThat's the way that Paul Davies often put the issue and it seems like it's a put up job.\nIt seems as if the laws of physics have been especially, are especially bio-friendly.\nNow Paul Davies, like many physicists on this topic, don't come down on one side or the other as to what the underlying explanation is.\nMany present the options and allow the listener to decide for themselves.\nThere's an interesting phenomena here socially as well when we get into talking about this fine-tuning of the laws of physics.\nFor many people who are interested in the issue of religion and arguments foreign against religion, there's something we want to reject the issue outright.\nThere's a school of thought who says, it's just a coincidence.\nWhy can't you accept it to coincidence that the laws of physics are the way they are and we just happen to have appeared in a universe where the laws of physics have the form they do.\nNow of course this isn't an explanation.\nA coincidence isn't an explanation.\nI might mention a few books here.\nI've mentioned Paul Davies, the mind of God.\nPaul Davies has many books on this topic.\nOne of the more recent ones that he wrote was called the Goldilocks and Eapman.\nThat's another fantastic book specifically about why it is that not only does earth occupy the physical place that it does around the sun, that's probably our coincidence, but also all of the other kind of coincidences that appear to be out there in terms of the physical constants.\nStuff like it just give an example that's often cited when we speak about the universal gravitational constant G.\nThe universal gravitational constant G is one of the things that gives strength to gravity in our universe.\nBut in using Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's general relativity, it doesn't matter.\nThis universal gravitational constant appears in the equations.\nIt has a certain value.\nIt determines the strength of gravity with our universe.\nIf that constant was even fractionally greater than we're talking fractions of a percent, then what would happen is that stars would collapse into black holes and we'd have a featureless universe.\nIf we don't have stars, then we're not going to have complex elements.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=112"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3d1d8e3a-f0c9-4394-abb6-138532cc40b5": {"page_content": "But in using Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's general relativity, it doesn't matter.\nThis universal gravitational constant appears in the equations.\nIt has a certain value.\nIt determines the strength of gravity with our universe.\nIf that constant was even fractionally greater than we're talking fractions of a percent, then what would happen is that stars would collapse into black holes and we'd have a featureless universe.\nIf we don't have stars, then we're not going to have complex elements.\nAnd so we're not going to have planets and we're certainly not going to have life.\nWe'd have a universe devoid of chemistry.\nOn the other hand, if the gravitational constant was much weaker, stars might not form at all.\nAs the hydrogen began to collapse, what would happen is that it would heat up and then it would start to expand again under thermodynamic rules.\nSo the value of the gravitational constant seems to be finally tuned.\nAnother book on this topic is by a couple of Australians.\nIt was published last year, I believe, and it's called a fortunate universe.\nIt's by Luke Barnes and Garnt Lewis.\nLuke Barnes is at the University of Western Sydney.\nGarnt Lewis is at the University of Sydney and they're at this fantastic book as well and it traverses all of these issues about fine chiming.\nAnd the way that Luke likes to put things is to consider if you had a safe and the safe had a whole number of dials that you need to twiddle in order to gain access to the safe.\nWe don't really know what all the constants in nature are.\nI've seen a number like 26.\nSo let's go with 26.\nIf there were 26 dials on this safe and someone broke into the safe, what would be the explanation of how they got in?.\nOne possibility is that it could be pure coincidence.\nThey're filled with the dials and they've managed to pick the number on every, the correct number on every single one of those 26 dials.\nThat would be a terribly bad explanation.\nThat is not what the police would assume is someone had broken into the safe.\nThat assumed they already had knowledge of what the numbers on the dials should be.\nAnd so that seems to be the situation in which we find ourselves.\nOf course, one objection to the safe analogy might be, for example, that there could be many, many, many, many different combinations that give you access to the safe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=236"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc920f01-f33c-4335-b0e7-0a45b31303e1": {"page_content": "That would be a terribly bad explanation.\nThat is not what the police would assume is someone had broken into the safe.\nThat assumed they already had knowledge of what the numbers on the dials should be.\nAnd so that seems to be the situation in which we find ourselves.\nOf course, one objection to the safe analogy might be, for example, that there could be many, many, many, many different combinations that give you access to the safe.\nWe don't know what all the different combinations of constants of nature there are in order to gain a bio-friendly universe.\nSome of these constants of nature, by the way, include things not only like the gravitational constant, but other things like the mass of an electron or the mass of a quark or the charge of an electron.\nThis thing could be fine structure constant, which determines the strength of the electromagnetic force.\nSo how closely, for example, electrons orbit nuclei around atoms.\nThese things determine the formation of molecules.\nThese things determine whether or not DNA can form self-replicating molecules in ultimately life.\nSo it seems like we have a problem.\nNow, not everyone thinks that we have a problem.\nThe late Vic Distinger, who was a particle physicist, read a bunch of books on this bunch of papers, gave a bunch of talks, just prior to when he died in 2014, I think, actually wrote to Vic Distinger because I was writing a project myself.\nI was finishing my masters in astronomy and so I wrote to Vic Distinger because he was about to publish a book.\nHe hadn't published it yet, and so I really needed the information for the project that I had.\nHis book was called the fallacy of fine tuning, and it was coming after the time, so that I need to get a hold of this book.\nI was very grateful he actually sent me a copy of the book before it was published.\nSo it's thing of the hint is in the title of the book, the fallacy of fine tuning, and he doesn't buy it.\nHe doesn't buy this idea that there's any special mystery to be solved.\nHe disagree with him, but he basically thinks that there's just a lack of knowledge that we've got here.\nOne example uses, which isn't one that these days have brought up very often, but just as a related issue, I suppose.\nThe great Fred Hoyle, who was the astrophysicist of whom we owe much credit for explaining the origin of all the elements.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=357"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "24dd6933-0108-4812-b04b-db9d5725ae2a": {"page_content": "He doesn't buy this idea that there's any special mystery to be solved.\nHe disagree with him, but he basically thinks that there's just a lack of knowledge that we've got here.\nOne example uses, which isn't one that these days have brought up very often, but just as a related issue, I suppose.\nThe great Fred Hoyle, who was the astrophysicist of whom we owe much credit for explaining the origin of all the elements.\nStill a nuclear synthesis is what he explained.\nSo how it is that the elements are forged inside of the cause of stars.\nHe had a problem.\nOne of the problems was in trying to explain early on how different nuclear reactions happen, different fusion reactions happen inside of stars.\nWe had great difficulty in trying to figure out how carbon was formed.\nThe way in which carbon is formed is through a process called the triple alpha process.\nSo what you need in order to create a carbon nucleus is three alpha particles, three helium nuclei.\nA helium nucleus has two protons, whereas a carbon nucleus has got six protons.\nSo you need three of them to crash into each other in order to form this carbon nucleus.\nThe problem is that if you take three helium nuclei, each of those helium nuclei, having two protons, has got a charge of two plus and positive charge to repel one another.\nAnd so when you try and get three of them together, they don't want to go together.\nSo you need exceedingly high energies.\nIt's an exceedingly unlikely event to occur, to get three objects, all of which have positive charges, to combine and to stick together.\nThat's what you need for fusion.\nSo Hoyle had a problem here thinking that that was just too unlikely he'd done the calculations that I don't understand.\nAs it turns out, the mathematics shows that this particular event is exceedingly unlikely to occur.\nSo they had a workaround and they figured out that if you take two helium nuclei, you can form a nucleus of beryllium.\nAnd then if the beryllium collides with another helium nucleus, then you can get carbon.\nBut they found that even this was too unlikely, because the beryllium nucleus lasts for a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second too short in order to form the carbon that was required.\nUnless and Hoyle predicted this, unless the carbon nucleus thus formed was of high energy.\nHad a particularly high energy, it's called a resonant state.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=466"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5434d7b7-7b5e-4290-89da-b2a564305169": {"page_content": "And then if the beryllium collides with another helium nucleus, then you can get carbon.\nBut they found that even this was too unlikely, because the beryllium nucleus lasts for a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second too short in order to form the carbon that was required.\nUnless and Hoyle predicted this, unless the carbon nucleus thus formed was of high energy.\nHad a particularly high energy, it's called a resonant state.\nSo he predicted that this resonant state would exist.\nPublic resonance state itself was exceedingly unlikely to happen to extremely precise.\nIt happens at a particular energy.\nThis appeared to be suspiciously finely churned.\nIf the carbon nucleus formed from the collision of these two helium together to form the beryllium and then having a third helium nucleus combined with the beryllium, if the carbon nucleus thus formed didn't have precisely this energy, then you wouldn't end up with carbon at all.\nAnd so this tend to be a mystery.\nAnd so this is called the Hoyle resonance.\nHe kind of solved the problem in one respect.\nNamely, this is how carbon is formed.\nBut in the other raised a problem.\nNamely, why should this energy be so precise?.\nWhy should it be at that particular level?.\nWhy couldn't you form carbon at any level?.\nAnd I bought this for a while.\nI've read this both in the mind of God by Paul Davis and then later on in the Goldilocks Enigma.\nBut in doing research for the project I undertook, I then found a paper by another astrophysicist called Mario Livia.\nAnd Mario Livia calculated that the Hoyle resonance wasn't so precise after all, that if you try to create carbon at energy slightly different, then you'll get, then you will indeed get carbon.\nIn fact, you will get the same amount of carbon in our universe if the Hoyle resonance was ever so slightly different to what it actually is in our universe.\nSo what Mario Livia found was that you could fit it with this very precise value for the Hoyle resonance by a small amount.\nAnd still get the same amount of carbon being produced in our universe inside the choral stars as what you actually do see in our universe.\nSo if you change the Hoyle resonance, you'd still get carbon.\nIndeed, you can change the value of the resonance state of this carbon nucleus by quite a bit and still end up with sufficient carbon in the universe for life to appear.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=586"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5ccb738d-9718-4f11-9d63-03b838ab5b3a": {"page_content": "And still get the same amount of carbon being produced in our universe inside the choral stars as what you actually do see in our universe.\nSo if you change the Hoyle resonance, you'd still get carbon.\nIndeed, you can change the value of the resonance state of this carbon nucleus by quite a bit and still end up with sufficient carbon in the universe for life to appear.\nAnd so this is one of the arguments that Stanger points to and says that, well, maybe all of the fine-tuning type problems will turn out to be like this, that if you vary the constants one after another, you will end up nonetheless producing bio-friendly laws.\nSo he's not particularly impressed by it.\nBecause my purpose here isn't to go through all the surrounding literature on the fine-tuning argument.\nI'll provide a link to the paper that I wrote.\nIn fact, I might even read that paper at some point which does provide an overview of the broad issues, but I'd encourage people to get an unfortunate universe is a great book about this fine-ching problem.\nAnd it's a great book because the two physicists that have written it have come from quite different places.\nThey both agree it's a problem.\nBut on the one hand, Grant Lewis says, well, possibly the multiverse could explain this.\nNow, when I say multiverse, I should probably say megaverse, although there's this nomenclature problem, there's this difficulty with terminology.\nMultiverse, of course, to me, to David Deutsch, to many other people, means the quantum multiverse.\nAnd in the quantum multiverse, all the universes obey precisely the same laws of physics.\nIndeed, it's the laws of physics that tell us that this quantum multiverse must exist.\nOn the other hand, there is a whole bunch of people who use the word multiverse in a completely different sense.\nTo talk about an ensemble of universes, each of which obeys different physical laws.\nSo it would be like a multiverse of multiverse versus.\nAnd so this is why sometimes I just refer to it as the megaverse.\nThe megaverse is scientific in some senses, metaphysical in other senses.\nThere's a sense in which it really is scientific now.\nI've come to convince myself, and through some of the work that Luke Barnes has been doing recently, on trying to simulate some of these other universes.\nSo we don't have access to these other universes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=716"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "96a7d072-fb55-4053-81b0-08559a6e49ef": {"page_content": "So it would be like a multiverse of multiverse versus.\nAnd so this is why sometimes I just refer to it as the megaverse.\nThe megaverse is scientific in some senses, metaphysical in other senses.\nThere's a sense in which it really is scientific now.\nI've come to convince myself, and through some of the work that Luke Barnes has been doing recently, on trying to simulate some of these other universes.\nSo we don't have access to these other universes.\nWe don't think the physical access, which kind of relegates these theories to something like string theory.\nSo it's difficult to understand how we can test this experimentally.\nBut there's a weak sense in which we can test them experimentally, I think, by simulating these universes inside of a virtual reality at the moment, those simulations are a very low resolution.\nSo whether or not the calculations that are done inside of these super computers, modeling other physical laws or set to physical laws, how robust those calculations are, our time will tell.\nAnd as time goes on, we get better and better super computers than maybe quantum computers will be able to help with this by the way.\nSo when I say we don't have access to these universes, one other post-script before I get into reading the beginning of infinity, the relevant part here.\nAnd that post-script is some years ago, a team of physicists at primarily the University of New South Wales, led by John Webb and Michael Murphy did some excellent, interesting work on looking at the change, the possible change, and what's called the fine structure constant that I mentioned earlier.\nThis fine structure constant appears in our laws of physics.\nIt is the thing that sets the strength of the electromagnetic force.\nSo in the same way that we have a constant g that sets the value of gravity, there's another constant that sets how strong the electromagnetic force is in our universe.\nAnd that determines things like the size of atoms and therefore bond strength between molecules.\nAnd therefore whether or not complex molecules can exist and whether or not life can exist.\nWhat this experiment involved was taking some of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, some of the telescopes that are on the top of those big volcanoes in Hawaii, and using those reflecting telescopes to pee into the very distant parts of the universe, where light from quasars was coming.\nAnd that light from quasars in its trends at between the quasars and us can in some cases pass through other galaxies.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=858"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "84bbc3a1-3cc2-4aec-bcff-1d1ae936507b": {"page_content": "What this experiment involved was taking some of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, some of the telescopes that are on the top of those big volcanoes in Hawaii, and using those reflecting telescopes to pee into the very distant parts of the universe, where light from quasars was coming.\nAnd that light from quasars in its trends at between the quasars and us can in some cases pass through other galaxies.\nAnd as it passes through other galaxies, some of that light is absorbed.\nAnd one of the remarkable things in astronomy, one of the remarkable things that allow us to know about what's out there are these things called absorption spectra.\nAnd in the absorption spectra, when we look at the light coming from the quasars, we see that some of the light has been absorbed.\nAnd that light is characteristic, the light that's been absorbed is characteristic of the kinds of materials that are inside the galaxy.\nLong story short, when we look at the lines, the absorption lines, I'll put a picture up here somewhere of the light coming from the quasars, the distance between the lines is well known in the laboratory.\nAnd it's well known in astrophysics as to what the distance between these particular lines is.\nNow what lines they're looking at at the pens that could be absorption lines from hydrogen, but in this case, I think they used in part magnesium.\nWhat they found, and this was a remarkable finding at the time, was that the lines were ever so slightly different in terms of their distance in the distant quasar, in the distant galaxy as compared to what they are here in the laboratory.\nThis has got nothing to do with redshift.\nIt's a completely separate issue to that.\nOkay, all the lines were redshifted because the galaxies are moving away and they're doing quasars moving away.\nIt's a very, very complicated.\nThey're looking at the distance between the lines, because everything should get shifted by the sound amount.\nAnd they found a difference.\nBut so this was very exciting.\nAnd I'm saying this because if the constants of nature are somewhere different, are different in some distant part of the universe, then we have to start questioning what we mean by universe.\nWhat we mean by universe?.\nBecause a universe is something that obeys, a set of physical laws, at least in part that's on where you could define it.\nEverything that universe obeys the same set of physical laws.\nSo therefore it has the same constant of nature.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=945"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "54e3146a-44c8-4f88-bb7c-9c3e0f8bb080": {"page_content": "And I'm saying this because if the constants of nature are somewhere different, are different in some distant part of the universe, then we have to start questioning what we mean by universe.\nWhat we mean by universe?.\nBecause a universe is something that obeys, a set of physical laws, at least in part that's on where you could define it.\nEverything that universe obeys the same set of physical laws.\nSo therefore it has the same constant of nature.\nSo if we were to find a region of space out there where the constants of nature were different, if we could see it via some technique by using a telescope such as Michael Murphy and the rest did, may attain did, then we'd kind of be seeing another universe.\nWe'd be seeing universe that obeys a different set of physical laws.\nSo this was exciting at the time because to me it sort of implied perhaps that as you get further and further away, kind of going back in time as well.\nBut as you're going further and further away, maybe you're seeing into an ever so slightly different universe and maybe if you could see even further, you'd see a wildly different universe in someone.\nOkay, kind of a bizarre idea.\nAs it was, sadness struck a few years ago when they found out that all of the results that they published were infected by the same systematic error.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1065"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9247aa4-0df6-459f-82bf-cdf2723f4d6b": {"page_content": "I'll provide a link to the papers and if you're interested in looking at that, it's something that I found really fascinating, not only in terms of the physics, I think it was a really important physics technique that they figured out, but not only that this is a wonderful example of how scientists self-correcting because immediately Michael and his team published all the results saying, you know, we kind of, we have got this excellent technique, but the things that we said about the fine structure constant changing aren't actually true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1136"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "96249c49-6f50-45c5-985f-3e03158d7208": {"page_content": "So they haven't found the fine structure constant changing, but it's still, nonetheless, it could be a technique for literally seeing another universe, possibly, possibly.\nSo let's just preface what we're about to hear from the beginning of infinity with the possibilities of what's going on with this fine change.\nSo it seems like electrons have just the right charge in order for complex molecules to exist.\nIt seems like the value of gravity is just right for stars to form and planets to form.\nIt seems like all the other constants of nature that we could enumerate have just the right value such that if there are any different than we wouldn't have life in the universe at all, we'd have some boring universe that was nothing but a black hole or boring universe that was nothing but guess.\nThe two options before us appear to be and a most commonly said to be either a designer has created this universe subsidized by our friendly.\nPaul Davies kind of puts it as, it appears like the universe has a purpose.\nHe's not saying there's necessarily a designer, but there's some kind of purpose behind it all.\nThere's some reason behind it all.\nAnd so if there's a reason, then it's no wonder that the universe is bio-friendly because maybe we are the reason.\nWe are the universe trying to look at itself or something like that.\nAgain, we're starting to get into metaphysics there.\nOn the other hand, people who reject that and don't like that will go to or jump to this idea of the megaverse, the cosmological multiverse, where every single possible set of physical laws that we can imagine, that is possible beyond what we can imagine, but every set of physical laws that is possible, I think it's a class actually.\nIn other words, it's an uncountable number.\nThere's no way to even begin counting this number to collect an infinite class of universes, an infinite class of physical laws, that if all of them exist, then we are just one of the infinite number that exists.\nAnd so therefore, the mystery is solved because all the universes are out there.\nMost of them aren't filled with life.\nAnd so we find ourselves in one where it's possible to have life.\nSo the wonderful thing now about David Deutsch's approach to this, of course, everything, every issue that he raises, he's going to put his own personal spin on it.\nAnd this is no exception.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1164"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d7885ef-6fcb-4b00-b02d-0b7b9df3b910": {"page_content": "And so therefore, the mystery is solved because all the universes are out there.\nMost of them aren't filled with life.\nAnd so we find ourselves in one where it's possible to have life.\nSo the wonderful thing now about David Deutsch's approach to this, of course, everything, every issue that he raises, he's going to put his own personal spin on it.\nAnd this is no exception.\nAnd so I'm very excited to read the next part of creation, chapter four, function.\nSo let's just get into it.\nHe writes under the subtitle function.\nThe physicist Brandon Carter calculated in 1974 that if the strength of the interaction between charged particles were a few percent smaller, no planets would ever have formed.\nAnd the only condensed objects in the universe would be stars.\nAnd if it were a few percent greater, then no stars would ever explode.\nAnd so no elements other than hydrogen, helium would exist outside of them.\nIn either case, there will be no complex chemistry.\nAnd presumably, no life.\nAnother example.\nIf the initial expansion rate of the universe at the Big Bang had been slightly higher, those stars would have formed.\nAnd there will be nothing in the universe but hydrogen at an extremely low and every decreasing density.\nIf it had been slightly lower, the universe would have re-collapsed soon after the Big Bang.\nSimilar results have since been obtained for other constants of physics that are not determined by any known theory.\nFor most, if not all of them, it seems that if they had been slightly different, there would have been no possibility for life to exist.\nThis is a remarkable fact, which has even been cited as evidence that those constants were intentionally fine-chined, A.E. designed by a supernatural being.\nThis is a new version of creationism.\nAnd of the design argument, now based on the appearance of design in the laws of physics, ironically given the history of the controversy, the new argument is that the laws of physics must have been designed to create a biosphere by Darwinian evolution.\nIt even persuaded the philosophy Antony Flue, formerly an enthusiastic advocate of atheism, of the existence of a supernatural designer, but it should not have.\nAs I shall explain in a moment, it is more to be clear that this fine-chining constitutes an appearance of design in paleysense.\nBut even if it does, that does not alter the fact that invoking the supernatural makes for a bad explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1290"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7a47ac9f-b8b8-4a1c-8418-f1dff798a359": {"page_content": "It even persuaded the philosophy Antony Flue, formerly an enthusiastic advocate of atheism, of the existence of a supernatural designer, but it should not have.\nAs I shall explain in a moment, it is more to be clear that this fine-chining constitutes an appearance of design in paleysense.\nBut even if it does, that does not alter the fact that invoking the supernatural makes for a bad explanation.\nAnd in any case, are you in for supernatural explanations on the grounds that a current scientific explanation is flawed or lacking is just a mistake?.\nAs we carved in stone in Chapter 3, problems are inevitable.\nThere are always unsolved problems, but they get solved.\nScience continues to make progress, even or especially after making great discoveries, because the discoveries themselves reveal further problems.\nI'm just me talking, I'm just prefacing the next point with.\nThis has been, according to my Kindle, highlighted 80 times around the world, so I'll just read this to you.\nThe next sentence says, therefore, the existence of an unsolved problem in physics is no more evidence for a supernatural explanation than the existence of an unsolved crime is evidence that a ghost committed a single objection to the idea that fine-chining requires an explanation at all is that we have no good explanation implying that planets are essential to the formation of life, or the chemistries.\nThe physicist Robert Ford wrote a superb science fiction story, drag and zag, based on the premise that information could be stored and processed, and life and intelligence could evolve through the interactions between neutrons.\nOn the surface of a neutron star, a star that has collapsed gravitationally to a diameter of only a few kilometers, man gets so dense that most of its matter has been transmuted into neutrons.\nIt is not known whether this hypothetical neutron analogue of chemistry exists, nor whether it could exist if the laws of physics were slightly different.\nNor do we have any idea what other sorts of environment permitting the emergence of life would exist under those a variant of laws.\nThe idea that similar laws of physics can be expected to give rise to similar environments is undermined by the very existence of fine-chining nevertheless.\nRegardless of whether the fine-chining constitutes an appearance of design or not, it does constitute a legitimate and significant scientific problem for the following reason.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1394"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3d17390e-8770-4328-90fa-396544533591": {"page_content": "Nor do we have any idea what other sorts of environment permitting the emergence of life would exist under those a variant of laws.\nThe idea that similar laws of physics can be expected to give rise to similar environments is undermined by the very existence of fine-chining nevertheless.\nRegardless of whether the fine-chining constitutes an appearance of design or not, it does constitute a legitimate and significant scientific problem for the following reason.\nIf the truth is that the constants of nature are not fine-chined to produce life after all, because most slight variations in them do still commit life and intelligence to evolve somehow, though in dramatically different types of environment, then this would be an unexplained regularity in nature and hence a problem for science to address.\nSo that's really interesting.\nSo if changing the laws of physics, higgledy piggledy, changing the conservation momentum law, changing the law of gravitation, changing the constants of nature, if changing these still permits life to arise, then that's a regularity in nature.\nThat's really unusual.\nIt's like, why do all these variations still cause life?.\nLife is like this fundamental thing to physics.\nIt's definitely something to explain if that was the case.\nBack to the book.\nIf the laws of physics are fine-chined, as they seem to be, then there are two possibilities.\nEither those laws are the only ones to be instantiated in reality as universes, or there are other regions of reality, parallel universes, and here he's not talking about the quantum parallel universes.\nHe's talking about universes with physical laws, so let me just repeat that back to the book.\nIf the laws of physics are fine-chined, as they seem to be, then there are two possibilities.\nEither those laws are the only ones instantiated in reality as universes, or there are other regions of reality, parallel universes with different laws.\nIn the former case, we must expect that to be an explanation of why the laws are as they are.\nIt would either refer to the existence of life or not.\nIf it did, that would take us back to paleo's problem.\nIt would mean that the laws had the appearance of design for creating life, but had not evolved.\nWell, the explanation would not refer to the existence of life, in which case it would leave and explain why, if the laws are, as they are, for non-life related reasons, they'll fine-tune to create life.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1511"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb83989f-92ab-477f-8329-ad249e109de0": {"page_content": "It would either refer to the existence of life or not.\nIf it did, that would take us back to paleo's problem.\nIt would mean that the laws had the appearance of design for creating life, but had not evolved.\nWell, the explanation would not refer to the existence of life, in which case it would leave and explain why, if the laws are, as they are, for non-life related reasons, they'll fine-tune to create life.\nIf there are many parallel universes, each with its own set of laws of physics, most of which did not permit life, then the idea would be that the observed fine-chine is only a matter of parochial perspective.\nIt is only in the universes that contain astrophysicists that anyone ever wonders why the constant seem fine-chined.\nThis type of explanation is known as an anthropic reasoning.\nIt is set to follow from a principle known as the weak anthropic principle.\nThough really no principle is required, it is just logic.\nThe qualifier weak is there because several other anthropic principles have been proposed, which are more than just logic, but they need not concern us here.\nJust as a side note, the link to my paper below contains a little bit of a summary of some of the other anthropic principles back to the book.\nHowever, on closer examination, anthropic arguments never quite finished the explanatory job.\nTo see why, consider an argument due to the physicist Dennis Jiamen, who is, just by the way, this is me talking again, who was one of David Deutsch's supervisors or bosses at some point, back to the book.\nImagine that, at some time in the future, theoreticians have calculated, for one of those constants of physics, the range of its values for which there would be a reasonable probability that astrophysicists of a super kind would emerge.\nSo that range is from 137 to 138, no doubt the real values will not be whole numbers, but let us keep it simple.\nThey also calculate the highest probability of astrophysicists occurs at the midpoint of the range when the constant is 137.5.\nNext, experimentalists say how to measure the value of that constant directly, in laboratories, or by astronomical observations say, what should they predict?.\nSeriously enough, one immediate prediction from the anthropic explanation is that the value will not be exactly 137.5.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1637"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f0fb32c9-7634-4481-9aeb-5379394cfd56": {"page_content": "They also calculate the highest probability of astrophysicists occurs at the midpoint of the range when the constant is 137.5.\nNext, experimentalists say how to measure the value of that constant directly, in laboratories, or by astronomical observations say, what should they predict?.\nSeriously enough, one immediate prediction from the anthropic explanation is that the value will not be exactly 137.5.\nFor suppose it were, by analogy, imagine that the balls I have a dartboard represents the values that can produce astrophysicists.\nIt would be a mistake to predict that a typical dart that strikes the balls I will strike it at the exact center.\nLikewise, in the overwhelming majority of universes in which the measurement could take place, because they contain astrophysicists, the constant would not take the exactly optimal value for producing astrophysicists, nor be externally close to it, compared with the size of the balls.\nI. So, see how that concludes.\nIf we did measure one of those constants of physics and found that it was extremely close to the optimum value for producing astrophysicists, that would statistically refute, not corroborate, the anthropic explanation for its value.\nOf course, that value might still be a coincidence, but if we were willing to accept astronomically unlikely coming sentences as explanations, we should not be puzzled by the fine tune in the first place, and we should tell Paoli that the watch on the heat might just have been formed by chance.\nFurthermore, astrophysicists should be relatively unlikely in universes whose conditions are so hostile that they barely permit astrophysicists at all.\nSo, if we imagine all the values consistent with the emergence of astrophysicists arrayed on a line, then the anthropic explanation leads us to expect the measured value to fall at some typical point, not too close to the middle or to either end.\nHowever, and here we are reaching the skyarmours main conclusion, that prediction changes radically, if there are several constants to explain.\nFor although any one constant is unlikely to be near the edge of its range, the more constants there are, the more likely it is that at least one of them will be.\nThis can be illustrated pictorially as follows, with our bullseye replaced by a line segment, a square, a cube, and we can imagine this sequence continuing for as many dimensions as there are fine tune constants in nature, arbitrarily defined near the edge, as meaning within 10% of the whole range from it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1733"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "428b1b36-c9e5-4dda-8085-05e419e3bb7b": {"page_content": "This can be illustrated pictorially as follows, with our bullseye replaced by a line segment, a square, a cube, and we can imagine this sequence continuing for as many dimensions as there are fine tune constants in nature, arbitrarily defined near the edge, as meaning within 10% of the whole range from it.\nThen in the case of one constant as shown in the diagram, 20% of its possible values are near one of the two edges of the range, and 80% are away from the edge, but with two constants, a pair of values has to satisfy two constraints in order to be away from the edge, only 64% of them do so, hence 36% are near the edge.\nWith three constants nearly half the possible traces are near the edge, with a hundred constants over 99.999% of them are.\nSo I'll just pause there for a moment, but the way that you can do the maths for the square here is to say, well, you've got 0.8 in the horizontal direction and 0.8 in the vertical direction, and 0.8 times 0.8 is 6 for leaving 1 minus 0.64, which is 0.36 in the edge, and then if you've got the cube, you've got 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8.\nIf you do 1 minus 0.8 times 0.8 times 0.8, then you have 0.48 or 48.8% back to the book.\nSo the more constants are involved, the closer they're having no astrophysicist, a typical universe with astrophysicist is.\nIt is not known how many constants are involved, but it seems to be several, in which case the overwhelming majority of the universes in the anthropically selected region would be close to its edge, hence Shiyama concluded.\nThe anthropic explanation predicts that the universe is only just capable of producing astrophysicists, almost the opposite prediction from the one that it makes in the case of one constant.\nOn the face of it, this mind in turn seemed to explain another great unsolved scientific mystery, known as Fermi's problem, named after the physicist Enrique Fermi, who is said to have asked us, where are they?.\nWhere are the extraterrestrial civilizations?.\nGiven the principle of mediocrity, or even just what we know of the galaxy and the universe, there is no reason to believe that the phenomenon of astrophysicist is unique to our planet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1860"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f1811164-c90f-45be-9a92-82b68f61bcd7": {"page_content": "On the face of it, this mind in turn seemed to explain another great unsolved scientific mystery, known as Fermi's problem, named after the physicist Enrique Fermi, who is said to have asked us, where are they?.\nWhere are the extraterrestrial civilizations?.\nGiven the principle of mediocrity, or even just what we know of the galaxy and the universe, there is no reason to believe that the phenomenon of astrophysicist is unique to our planet.\nSimilar conditions presumably exist in many other solar systems, so why would some of them not produce similar outcomes?.\nMoreover, given the timescars on which stars and galaxies develop, it is overwhelmingly unlikely that any given extraterrestrial civilization is currently at a similar state of technological development to ours.\nIt is likely to be millions of years younger by a non-existent or older.\nThe older civilizations have had plenty of time to explore the galaxy, or at least to send robot space probes or signals.\nFermi's problem is that we'd not see any such civilizations, probes, or signals.\nMany candidate explanations have been proposed, and none of them, so far, are very good.\nThe entropic explanation of fine-tuning, in the light of Sheyama's argument, might seem to solve the problem neatly.\nIf the contents of physics in our universe are only just capable of producing astrophysic, then it is not surprising that this event has happened only once.\nSince it's happening twice independently, in the same universe would be vanishingly small.\nUnfortunately, that turns out to be a bad explanation too, because focusing on fundamental constants is proactive.\nThere is no relevant difference between one, the same laws of physics with different constants, and two different laws of physics.\nAnd there are infinitely many logically possible laws of physics.\nIf they were all instantiated in real universes, as has been suggested by some cosmologists such as Max Tegmark, it would be statistically certain that our universe is exactly on the edge of the astrophysic producing class of universes.\nSo this is great.\nOften, this is me talking my commentary.\nOften these discussions about fine-tuning, there's a fixation on the constants purely upon the constants, and less attention is paid to the form of the laws of physics themselves.\nAnd the form of the laws of physics is a crucial thing that we could manipulate if we were some all-powerful god, or if we had control of various different universes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=1972"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f2a1fd34-1491-44f4-ae72-83b57d26c9c0": {"page_content": "So this is great.\nOften, this is me talking my commentary.\nOften these discussions about fine-tuning, there's a fixation on the constants purely upon the constants, and less attention is paid to the form of the laws of physics themselves.\nAnd the form of the laws of physics is a crucial thing that we could manipulate if we were some all-powerful god, or if we had control of various different universes.\nAnd so David's about to get to the discussion about why, assuming that there are an infinite class of universes out there, all of which instantiated completely different physical laws really doesn't solve the problem whatsoever.\nThe problem is definitely there.\nSo we will proceed.\nHe writes, we know that that cannot be so from an argument due to finement, which he applied to a slightly different problem.\nConsider the class of all possible universes that contain astrophysic.\nAnd consider what else most of them contain.\nIn particular, consider a sphere just large enough to contain your own brain.\nIf you are interested in explaining fine-tuning, your brain in its current state counts as an astrophysicist for these purposes.\nIn the class of all universes that contain astrophysic, there are many that contain a sphere.\nHis interior is perfectly identical to the interior of your sphere, including every detail of your brain.\nBut in the vast majority of those universes, there is chaos outside the sphere.\nAlmost a random state.\nSince most random states are by far the most numerous, a typical such state is not only amorphous, but hot.\nSo in most such universes, the very next thing that is going to happen is that that chaotic radiation emanating from outside the sphere will kill you instantly.\nAt any given instant, the theory that we are going to be killed in a picosecond, hence, is refuted by an observation, a picosecond later, whereupon another such theory presents itself.\nSo it is a very bad explanation, an extreme version of the gambler's hunches.\nThe same holds for purely anthropic explanations of all under fine-tuning, involving more than a handful of constants.\nSuch explanations predict that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are in a universe in which astrophysic is only just possible, and will cease to exist in an instant.\nSo they are bad explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=2095"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a05082ad-31a1-4c98-98de-ce5533ccaee5": {"page_content": "So it is a very bad explanation, an extreme version of the gambler's hunches.\nThe same holds for purely anthropic explanations of all under fine-tuning, involving more than a handful of constants.\nSuch explanations predict that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are in a universe in which astrophysic is only just possible, and will cease to exist in an instant.\nSo they are bad explanations.\nThis is this idea of Boltzmann brains, where if you assume that the, if you assume randomness obtains out there in the universe or out there in reality beyond our universe, then randomness implies that everything that can possibly happen is going to happen somewhere or other at some point.\nAnd when we say possible to happen, logically possible could happen.\nAnd that includes you yourself, your brain, your consciousness, right now, popping into existence, and then popping out of existence now.\nAnd what we are saying about that here, what they are saying about that here is that that's an exceedingly bad explanation.\nIt doesn't explain anything, it doesn't explain why the laws of physics have the form that they do.\nOf course, everything could popping through existence now and then pop out of existence.\nI think I first heard this at university that God could have done that, that he could have clicked these fingers and everything comes into being, including you with your memories right now and at any moment it could disappear again as well.\nAnd I found that an exceedingly bad explanation at that time as well.\nBack to the book.\nOn the other hand, if the laws of physics exist in only one form, with only the values of a few constants differing from one universe to another, then the very fact that laws with different forms are not instantiated is a piece of fine-tuning that that anthropic explanation leaves unexplained.\nThe theory that all logically possible laws of physics are instantiated as universes has a further severe problem as an explanation.\nAs I shall explain in chapter 8, when considering infinite sets, such as these, there is often no objective way to count or measure how many of them have one attribute rather than another.\nOn the other hand, in the class of all logically possible entities, those that can understand themselves as the physical reality that we are in does are surely in any reasonable sense a tiny minority.\nI'll just pause there for a moment.\nSo when he says that there's this class of all logically possible entities, there is a tiny sliver of logically possible entities that can understand themselves.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=2208"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f032a28c-2c03-48d1-85c8-e0789e6ee670": {"page_content": "On the other hand, in the class of all logically possible entities, those that can understand themselves as the physical reality that we are in does are surely in any reasonable sense a tiny minority.\nI'll just pause there for a moment.\nSo when he says that there's this class of all logically possible entities, there is a tiny sliver of logically possible entities that can understand themselves.\nNamely, universes like ours in which we have evolved and we now are part of the universe that is understanding itself, just continuing.\nSo that's a tiny minority.\nHe says, the idea that one of them just happened without explanation is surely just a spontaneous generation theory.\nIn addition, almost all the universes described by those logically possible laws of physics are radically different from ours.\nSo different, that they do not properly fit into the argument.\nFor instance, infinitely many of them contain nothing other than one bison in various poses.\nAnd last for exactly 42 seconds, infinitely many others contain a bison and a astrophysicist.\nBut what is a astrophysicist in a universe that contains no stars, no scientific instruments, and almost no evidence?.\nWhat is a scientist or any sort of any sort of thinking person, any universe in which any bad explanations are true?.\nAlmost all logically possible universes that contain astrophysicist are governed by laws of physics that are bad explanations.\nSo should we predict that our universe too is inexplicable or has some high but unknowable probability to them?.\nThus, again, anthropic arguments based on all possible laws are ruled out for being bad explanations.\nFor these reasons, I conclude that while anthropic reasoning may well be part of the explanation for apparent fine-tuning and other observations, it can never be the whole explanation for why we observe something that would otherwise look too purposeful to be explicable as coincidence.\nSpecifically, specific explanation in terms of specific laws of nature is needed.\nAnd here we've finished the subsection kind of of the fine-tuning part, and we're going to the conclusion about the whole chapter.\nSo some remarks are made about neodalminism as well.\nAnd he writes, the reader may have noticed that all the bad explanations that I'll have discussed in this chapter are ultimately connected with each other.\nExpect too much for anthropic reasoning.\nI wonder too carefully about how Lamarckism could work, and you get to spontaneous generation.\nTakes spontaneous generation too seriously, and you get to creationism, and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=2311"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2e9b3d53-a77c-4235-aa45-7870a91cac29": {"page_content": "So some remarks are made about neodalminism as well.\nAnd he writes, the reader may have noticed that all the bad explanations that I'll have discussed in this chapter are ultimately connected with each other.\nExpect too much for anthropic reasoning.\nI wonder too carefully about how Lamarckism could work, and you get to spontaneous generation.\nTakes spontaneous generation too seriously, and you get to creationism, and so on.\nThat is because they all address the same underlying problem, and are all easily variable.\nThey are all, they are easily interchangeable with each other, or with variants of themselves, and they are too easy as explanations.\nThey could equally will explain anything.\nBut neodalminism was not easy to come by, and it is not easy to tweak.\nTry to tweak it.\nEven as far as Darwin's own misconceptions, and you will get an explanation that doesn't work nearly as well.\nTry to account for something non-dalwinian with it, such as a new complex adaptation of which there were no precursors in the organism's parents, and you will not be able to think of a variant with that feature.\nAnd swabbing explanations are attempting to account for purposeful structure, such as the fine tune constants, in terms of a single active selection.\nThat is unlike evolution, and it cannot work.\nThe solution of the fine tune puzzle is going to be in terms of an explanation that will specifically explain what we observe.\nIt will be, as we look at it, an idea so simple, that we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?.\nIn other words, the problem has been not that the world is so complex that we cannot understand why it looks the way it does, but it is that it is so simple that we cannot yet understand it, but this will be noticeable only with hindsight.\nAll those bad explanations, the biosphere, are the fails who address the problem of how the knowledge and adaptations have created, or they explain it badly.\nThat is to say, they all underrate creation, and, ironically, the theory that underrates creation most of all, is creationism.\nConsider this, if a supernatural creator would have created the universe at the moment when Einstein or Darwin or any great scientist appeared to have just completed their major discovery, then the true creator of that discovery, and of all early discoveries, would not have been not that scientist, but the supernatural being.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=2449"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3fa71e86-fe21-4b9f-b16c-9e678a0823ef": {"page_content": "That is to say, they all underrate creation, and, ironically, the theory that underrates creation most of all, is creationism.\nConsider this, if a supernatural creator would have created the universe at the moment when Einstein or Darwin or any great scientist appeared to have just completed their major discovery, then the true creator of that discovery, and of all early discoveries, would not have been not that scientist, but the supernatural being.\nSuch a theory would deny the existence of the only creation that really did take place in the genesis of that scientist's discoveries.\nAnd it really is creation.\nBefore a discovery is made, no predictive process could reveal the content or the consequences of that discovery.\nFor if it could, it would be that discovery.\nSo scientific discovery is profoundly unpredictable, despite the fact it is determined by the laws of physics.\nI'm just going to pause there because that's amazing, and this brings in some issues that people have about free will.\nAnd we're starting to think that free will is tied up very much with this idea of creativity, or at least it's synonymous in a way with creativity.\nThat it doesn't matter what the laws of physics are, the laws of physics cannot.\nWe cannot derive the laws of physics, the discoveries in science themselves.\nAs he says there, it's not possible for a predictive theory, a predictive process, to reveal the content of discoveries of scientific discoveries, because if there was such a theory that could predict the content of scientific discoveries, then it would include that discovery.\nIt would be that discovery.\nSo scientific discoveries are profoundly unpredictable, the growth of knowledge is profoundly unpredictable.\nEven though it is determined by the laws of physics.\nAnd this is a subtle and often misunderstood point back to the book.\nI shall say more about this curious fact in the next chapter.\nIn short, it is due to the existence of emergent levels of explanation.\nIn this case, the upshot is that what science and creative thought in general achieves is unpredictable creation.\nX, Nilo, so does biological evolution.\nNow the process does.\nCreationism, therefore, is misleadingly named.\nIt is not a theory explaining knowledge as being due to creation, but the opposite.\nIt is denying the creation happen in reality by placing the origin of the knowledge in an explanation must realm.\nCreationism is really creation to nile, and so are all those other false explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=2561"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40f67b04-ad2e-4a06-a2df-3ca15517da9f": {"page_content": "X, Nilo, so does biological evolution.\nNow the process does.\nCreationism, therefore, is misleadingly named.\nIt is not a theory explaining knowledge as being due to creation, but the opposite.\nIt is denying the creation happen in reality by placing the origin of the knowledge in an explanation must realm.\nCreationism is really creation to nile, and so are all those other false explanations.\nThe puzzle of understanding what living things are and how they came about has given rise to a strange history of misconceptions, near misses and ironies.\nThe last of the ironies is that the neo Darwinian theory, like the popular theory of knowledge, really does describe creation, while their rivals, beginning with creationism, never could.\nThat's the end of the chapter.\nThat's wonderful, so if I could just recap that bit there.\nCreationism says that God created everything, which means that God created all of the knowledge, including the knowledge of how ironstone got to his theory of relativity, including how Darwin got to his theory of evolution, one after selection.\nSo everything that people create isn't actually a creation, because it was already there in the mind of God at some point.\nAnd so creationism is denying actual creativity, actual creativity is done by people, and it's inherently unpredictable.\nAnd so this is the weird thing about creationism.\nIt denies actual creativity.\nWhat explains actual creativity?.\nTwo things.\nThe theory of evolution by natural selection, neo Darwinism, and end-perperian epistemology, the way in which knowledge grows.\nWe understand neither theory perfectly.\nWell neither theory are we able to turn into a predictive theory such that we can program, we can't capture the algorithm for either of these theories into a computer program.\nBut we understand something.\nThere's a whole bunch of people who deny neo Darwinism, creationists, and so on.\nThere's a whole bunch of people who deny popular inner epistemology as well, or who fail to understand either often, I think that's actually the case.\nThe creationists just don't understand neo Darwinism, and people who deny a superior epistemology just aren't familiar with it enough.\nAnyway, this was one of the most exciting parts of the book for me so far, this idea of fine-cheening, a whole bunch of links down below to books related to this, or try and make a video of my own paper as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=2699"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2b02b922-d26c-439c-b547-1cc1a21153dd": {"page_content": "The creationists just don't understand neo Darwinism, and people who deny a superior epistemology just aren't familiar with it enough.\nAnyway, this was one of the most exciting parts of the book for me so far, this idea of fine-cheening, a whole bunch of links down below to books related to this, or try and make a video of my own paper as well.\nThanks for watching and we'll see you in chapter five, the reality of abstractions next, which is also very exciting.\nThis has a lot to do with the nature of mathematics, which is in the fabric of reality.\nIt's one of my favorite chapters of the fabric of reality, and so I might do a little bit of meshing of those two together.\nIt's a very exciting chapter.\nIt's a very poorly understood chapter as well, so reality of abstractions is up next.\nSee you next time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJ-13IGAzE&t=2825"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3e4b170a-286a-45e7-81aa-c0a98fb3faa7": {"page_content": "So the death of me too has been hilarious and of course.\nI'm talking of the Johnny depth versus amber her trial.\nAnd I've been following this trial as much as we can.\nBut it's you know constantly every day being streamed and I don't have much time for it.\nBut so I've been checking in with the clips and sending you the clips and you could send me clips.\nSo they've been enjoyable clips to be fair.\nIt's been gold.\nSo we'll get to a rotten born And I have to start with a shell here.\nSo we'll start with the the book club shell here being job jut mills on liberty in case you want to find out what we do at the book club series So please do go enjoy that however, we shall get into exactly the what I'm talking about We'll start off with Viva Fry who has been covering this in far more detail than we have a good.\nSo for good next one, please jump and we could see via fries Channel in which if you want to go into the nitty gritty details of each day and whatnot Of course, he does that we don't have time for that nor do I have the time to do that at the moment.\nSo instead we're going to enjoy the overview of how the trials gone because the thing is this this isn't new of course.\nAnd we've covered it before I mean you guys did a segment on this trial.\nBut I remember with car we covered the the old Cases as well in the news and if we continue on this if you can go to the next link here We can see the just some of the footage at the time.\nBut I remember cutting up back in the I think was the 2016 hearings first this all came out.\nSo I'm going to the very good rendition so then we had to cover that.\nand if we go to the next one We can see the opinion piece that she wrote in 2018 being like I stood up against the actual violence This is what the court case is centered around this being defamation.\nYeah, even though we have you as the previous one showed on tape Saying that you are the abuser.\nSo this is the opinion piece saying that she's the victim here of saying by amber heard where I have heard that it might have been written by a ghost writer.\nYeah, but either way it's the point of her trying to.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5f27dacd-680e-4dcd-b871-f42eaa609514": {"page_content": "Yeah, even though we have you as the previous one showed on tape Saying that you are the abuser.\nSo this is the opinion piece saying that she's the victim here of saying by amber heard where I have heard that it might have been written by a ghost writer.\nYeah, but either way it's the point of her trying to.\nYeah, so it's just just to head off any criticism because it happened last time as well The reason that we're covering this is not necessarily because it's all its celebrity gossip or anything like that This is in this is pretty important in terms of one.\nIt's the tail end of the me-to movement.\nYeah, and it's the best possible way it could die.\nYes.\nAnd also it is just demonstrating how difficult it is for men in society to be taken seriously When it comes to abuse allegations.\nI mean she literally says in the court case There's one clip of her saying to Johnny.\nWhat is it that.\nyeah, go out and tell the world You were a victim of domestic abuse mocking him.\nYes And actively saying that she knows that no one's gonna take him seriously and for the first year when all of this and information came out Sadly, nobody did now I also love as as you say the end of the me-to movement because me too Of course started out as like hey, there are a bunch of Hollywood sexual perverts and nonces That there was some very legitimate nasty stuff going on Which everyone knew about as well?.\nThat's the thing.\nYeah, like everyone knew Hollywood was an absolute air show and should have been shut down ages ago And lots of those people who were just standing by and letting it happen still making your favorite movies right now As a result, it was a Democrat starlet estate in which you were public in town You couldn't work because you'd call that stuff out and I mean to be honest.\nIt's probably even worse in terms of the political hegemony that whole Hollywood is.\nbut But then the fact that that's all taking place and then we had the series of events of well Then women getting in who remember that women are human and therefore of course Also do human things like lying in the example of a hood and her being tail end of this is very much hilarious.\nSo I want to draw the clips.\nThey've got the first one here in which we can see Johnny dealing with amber hoods lawyers And just laughing at how painful they are to deal with The first thing I'm sorry, I was talking you said.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=80"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f7c4cd38-8615-49b1-b0c8-7c666419716d": {"page_content": "So I want to draw the clips.\nThey've got the first one here in which we can see Johnny dealing with amber hoods lawyers And just laughing at how painful they are to deal with The first thing I'm sorry, I was talking you said.\nall right.\nyou did you you'd have to make questions We'll take a look at it.\nThank you Long job, you sir relevant to me Your honor, I'm trying to move this line when we stop with Rollins I just hate you.\nHe said in the injection hearsay I'm saying group I'm calling I'll just stay in the church I'll just stay in the church.\nAnd in 2016 Would he use your honor here, sir I haven't finished anything I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I've held up drunk to movie premiere I don't know This is here, sir June 21st Inside the trials of Johnny Depp Did I read that.\nright?.\nYou did, you should read the order code And the last one Mr. Depp is a pathetic attempt Mr. Depp, please just respond to the question I'm asking you.\nWould you the next question up?.\nThe next thing There's nothing about this text that's trying to protect her I need to go back and look at some of the live shoes Because I just want to know the context of some of these clips Because it just looks so confused the whole time Because it's just having to deal with a lawyer who keeps saying everything you say is hearsay Why do you ask me the question, Ben?.\nYou lose the best clip from Johnny Dealing with their lawyers Has to be the one in which he's asked Do you think you're bigger than Amber Heard?.\nAnd him going, would say that.\nSo that's why that one Now you're a lot bigger than Amber, correct?.\nPhysically I wouldn't say that.\nYeah I wouldn't say that I wouldn't say that I wouldn't say that Oh, I love the smile.\nas well I think that account is abuse Maybe we've got some evidence now Some verbal abuse right there The petty lies, I've also enjoyed being exposed Because as mentioned, we've got over this before.\nAnd I'm very much in the camp of.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=190"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "66d2909b-205e-4738-a9d8-20e48f48405d": {"page_content": "Well, she's an obvious liar Like a multiple occasion, she has been caught lying in these facts I'm not, I've not looked into this, have we got any of the stuff with her Test the money, yes, I'm in this There is a little bit of the end, just to see what she's like But of course, this was all Johnny's side of the day Of course, and then her side's going on Just to put out, she has started testifying now And obviously that'll probably come up with some more information Given the information that she's been giving in her testimony Seems a little bit suspicious Like she was saying that during a drunken encounter He like assaulted her physically with a bottle Sexually assaulted her physically with a bottle.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=333"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ca38a0b9-2acc-4a6e-811a-c584b2f5ea8f": {"page_content": "And they were like, okay, could you tell if the bottle was broken or not No, I couldn't tell Are you sure Are you sure?.\nAre you 100% sure You can't tell if something's being shoved inside of you If it's broken and cutting you or not Okay, but here's the thing, you know, multiple times Like we have on camera, you were admitting to hitting him When you previously said you never hit him in the exact same circumstance.\nSo just provable liar by the audio tapes provided So yes, and then we just have the petty lies which makes me laugh.\nSo this is one of them that got caught during the trial that's played Now let's talk about the summer of 2013 Are you aware that Paul Bettany claims he's never met Amber?.\nObjection relevance What's your name call for here saying?.\nJust to find that he was there on the island I mean, I haven't added this meme music, but it is beautiful.\nYeah, God bless everybody who's been coming up with these compilation clips because they are fantastic They are gold, and that one there again, it's so pet petty.\nBut again, just why lie?.\nWhy do I tell the night?.\nYeah, when you know that there are photographs of the two of you together Why even bring it up?.\nSo then we have the next one which is probably the best one Which is the lawyer for Amber objecting to the answer he was given After asking a question for that answer Let's play this one.\nI'm sure people have seen it if you haven't enjoyed You didn't know what could cause damage to Mr. Depp's hand while you were there on March 8th, correct?.\nDr. Kippen told me it sustained an injury on one of his You asked the question, you asked the question, okay?.\nYou said it's a stand-up, an injury to his finger.\nYes Okay, I'm tired All right then Can you please tell me what happened?.\nWell, I was told from the doctor who else.\nNo, no, that's it.\nI can't hear it, but you asked me for what I knew,.\nidiot.\nSo just dumb again I did watch I come in which lawyer YouTuber talking about that Where he said that he could have objected and asked for the statement to be taken off.\nBut then why asked the question?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=310"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fc075f2f-7835-4376-9f3d-27fc027fa88d": {"page_content": "Yes Okay, I'm tired All right then Can you please tell me what happened?.\nWell, I was told from the doctor who else.\nNo, no, that's it.\nI can't hear it, but you asked me for what I knew,.\nidiot.\nSo just dumb again I did watch I come in which lawyer YouTuber talking about that Where he said that he could have objected and asked for the statement to be taken off.\nBut then why asked the question?.\nYeah, because I think that if he said, I've seen it said that He objected to it because he would say, oh, the doctor told me So it's like, oh, that's hearsay because you would need the doctor to come in and testify on that.\nspecifically But if he just said, oh, I got this, I know that this is what happened He would probably follow it up with, who do you heard that from?.\nThat's just nonsense that you've made up obviously, you liar Either way, it's very poor, poor, poor work, if nothing else We also have this one here, which is the, of course, the amber turds trending If you wonder why this might have been, this is apparently because of the human fecal matter In Johnny's bed, because, well, it wasn't from a dog, according to depth.\nAnd, yeah, not memes made about this, let's go to the next one Which, probably my favorite meme about this This might be my favorite meme about this Oh, honey, I'm home Got a jar of dirt, I don't know.\nYeah, I've got a jar of dirt, something else for you.\nAnd you may think, I'm not taking this particularly seriously.\nAnd, yeah, that's also because the court isn't either Like, you can see from the live streams, this is just a joke for everyone I mean, in the audience, whoever's sat there in the trial You can hear people laughing, constantly Yeah, and here's a little compilation of just some of these stupider things And people that take you seriously, let's play that Is your depth was trying to urinate in the far ear, wasn't he?.\nNo, Mr. Dappad is a penis out of the pan, didn't he?.\nI'll take care of the man Relatives Next question.\nAnd you were trying to get Mr. Dapp out of the house, correct?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=237"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bcf5c258-431b-4ade-b596-20c58dc01c26": {"page_content": "No, Mr. Dappad is a penis out of the pan, didn't he?.\nI'll take care of the man Relatives Next question.\nAnd you were trying to get Mr. Dapp out of the house, correct?.\nCorrect, I'm trying to get Mr. Dappad out of the house, yeah.\nAnd Mr. Dappad I think, uh, Jack's father, we don't want to be doing it.\nSo, okay, so that's, that's, uh, marijuana Did I read that right?.\nYes, but that was my question I read that right, sir.\nNow, I'm part of the services that you provide, that you're from provides to Mr. Dappad.\nShe's giving you gifts over $8,500, correct?.\n$8,500,.\nyeah Give me a little more than that.\nOkay And your loyal and Mr. Dapp, right?.\nThere's nothing wrong with wanting to spend time with your friends The music festival after being abused by your husband, right?.\nWhat abuse?.\nThis is so funny.\nThis is so funny.\nThis is so funny.\nThis is so funny.\nThis is so funny White, white, white, white, white.\nShe knows she's at the center of a circus, right?.\nThat's the thing, like, everyone involved seems to admit This is obviously a waste of time Like, we've got the video footage, the audio footage And just to show that she's not telling the truth, she hasn't for years Because these cases have been going on for years.\nYeah, I mean, this would have, this should have been sorted a few years ago.\nAnd he tried to sue the sun for defamation Because I think that whole court case was involved as well.\nBut the reason that he lost that one was because from what I'm aware They refused to let him enter the video and audio evidence It was like, what's the point in this case?.\nIt's a waste of time.\nSo then I love it in America as well You live stream these things Because we can actually see what's going on in Britain You have to have a court drawing, which isn't even a photograph.\nAnd that's it, it's all you get, which is crap Because we really should be seeing what's going on in our courts And especially with Count Danker's case, I want that footage.\nYes, I want that public.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=253"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "64f6b3fc-f5e7-48e2-bb58-57c7913b416a": {"page_content": "It's a waste of time.\nSo then I love it in America as well You live stream these things Because we can actually see what's going on in Britain You have to have a court drawing, which isn't even a photograph.\nAnd that's it, it's all you get, which is crap Because we really should be seeing what's going on in our courts And especially with Count Danker's case, I want that footage.\nYes, I want that public.\nAnd it's also very sad, of course Because you don't get this for, like, Maxwell's trials But all other conversations we had There's also just the evidence here given by some of the witnesses That Amber Heard is just lying again about multiple things This one from a psychologist who's just like,.\nyeah, she lied about having PTSD Which would explain a thing or two, so let's play that As a result of applying those protocols, what did you conclude?.\nMiss Heard did not have PTSD.\nAnd there were also pretty significant indications That she was grossly exaggerating symptoms of PTSD When asked about them How did you make that latter conclusion?.\nSo, one of the strengths of this test As I mentioned, the important thing about any test used When you're doing an evaluation in forensics Is to make sure that the person is responding accurately And this test does that by not just asking people whether they have a symptom But asking follow up questions that draw out very detailed accounts Of every single symptom of PTSD.\nAnd when you're really familiar with this disorder, which you need to be to administer this test There are nuances in the way a person will describe their symptoms That have been shown repeatedly to indicate exaggeration or faking There are also indications when somebody is clearly giving you a genuine response Just looks at her, which said Grab her to end that, but anyway, that's that accusations made in the court Of course, she's on depth side of there, but there's what's been said.\nAnd the reason again, it's not just celeb gossip It's because that, of course, this is also the death of the Me Too movement.\nAnd there are some feminists who are still pinning their hopes desperately On amber her for some weird reason, I don't understand it If you go back to the links real quick, I just want to show that this comes early this one for me It comes from the fact that we got it from GB News Because there's one host here What's her name?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=472"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ac052fee-6411-4488-90d1-a4fdc3fc8aea": {"page_content": "And there are some feminists who are still pinning their hopes desperately On amber her for some weird reason, I don't understand it If you go back to the links real quick, I just want to show that this comes early this one for me It comes from the fact that we got it from GB News Because there's one host here What's her name?.\nI forget it now The one who's hosting Who is just endlessly feminist for some weird reason.\nAnd so her coverage of this is that she decided to bring on someone else And just claim that the psychologist was just making up the misogynistic claims.\nWell, I mean, the thing is, I know that the psychologist didn't just deny that she had PTSD.\nBut also claims that she had a personality disorder Not just a personality disorder, I think borderline personality disorder, BPD Which I have known and do know people with BPD And from the details that I've heard of what Amber did And the way that she reacted to certain circumstances and such It sounds very consistent with what I know of people with BPD No, you and those people you know are misogynists All of the women that I know with BPD just hate women.\nYeah, they hate women.\nSome of them hate other women, but that's what's beside the point At least this is the opinion of the feminist host and guest here Which is a weird thing to see I don't find Amber heard reports of it.\nOh, I think that what you're seeing is the deliberate position of her is mentally ill.\nIt's something that thousands of women are going through to this day You know, diagnosed in a woman with borderline personality disorder Or a histrionic personality disorder, which I have never heard a professional say Seriously, and without irony in my whole career I thought we would stop, we'd stop using that term Where does this come from?.\nBecause I mean bare facts were statistics suggested to us But psychopathy is more prevalent in men Suicide happens far more often in men than women.\nAnd yet this still seems to be these sorts of beliefs that women somehow are emotional More emotional and therefore more vulnerable to mental health issues.\nYeah, that's right, and you're looking at 4,000 years worth of misogyny.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=310"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5532f64b-b071-48d9-9bb1-323cda45fcb4": {"page_content": "So, you know, in even some of the ancient Greek philosophers argued That women were just defective, deformed versions of men Their minds were smaller, their brains were smaller, they couldn't think, they didn't remember things, they couldn't learn So Amber heard it innocent, I'm going to explain to you how Let's start 4,000 years ago Yeah, because ancient Greeks had weird ideas about medicine Therefore, this affects the fact that women get borderline personality disorder This actually came up in the trial, this argument, the stupid feminist nonsense In which the judge for Amber Turd asked the psychologist Aren't women with personality disorders?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=310"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "73ee7652-44a0-4ccb-9b81-67a7abd5d549": {"page_content": "Sorry, aren't personality disorders overrepresented in women As if it was sexist psychologists, like her That's just how it feels, literally like, neuroscience Has shown that women just on-gen in general, men might be more prevalent in psychopathy Very specifically, women are much more likely to have emotional issues.\nYeah, the psychologist has responded, no dummy, they're more prevalent in women.\nIt's not that they're overrepresented in women as such, like, you know, sexist psychologists Keep doing this to us, no, no,.\nno, it's just more prevalent 90% of the people that I know with depression and anxiety and all those sorts of things Are women, and it's not nice that that happens to women more often, that's just the fact of it Different, and, of course, that's a big shook violation of feminism.\nAlthough I also just love the fact that she's like, isn't this misogyny.\nAnd we have a response here from some user named Hallelujah Who decided to go with a wonderful clip, and which, uh, shut up, B, has said by the rock there Which you can't play,.\noh well, based rock.\nIf you guys are the next one as well, I just want to point out this is not new For this host, either, if you scroll up on this one, we can see her asking about Sarah Everodd And saying, have things always been so bad, or is the 21st century a dreadful era for women?.\nUh, no, just, again, just by the data, like, I know what's wrong with this taking a host What's streaming here, man?.\nWhy?.\nShe's their token feminist.\nYeah, I'm not trying to be rude, but seriously, like, she has a feminist agenda, obviously, otherwise She wouldn't be saying things that are obviously false I mean, this being a perfect example, it just makes the data It does make it more entertaining when they have her on a panel with actual intelligent people.\nYeah, it's also interesting, because the other amber turd, believers are up here as well If you got the next one, we can see an individual who has footage of someone here.\nAnd you'll notice that this has a lot of likes and whatnot from people who stand with amber hood Except the comments are turned off.\nOh, interesting, just everyone, just no comment here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=310"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3e17ebac-bbe4-49d8-8a37-f03a9a2439aa": {"page_content": "Yeah, it's also interesting, because the other amber turd, believers are up here as well If you got the next one, we can see an individual who has footage of someone here.\nAnd you'll notice that this has a lot of likes and whatnot from people who stand with amber hood Except the comments are turned off.\nOh, interesting, just everyone, just no comment here.\nOh, this is the clip that I was talking about where she's talking about, oh, how amber told me that, you know, she got salted up the With a bottle, and then it's afterwards the amber comes up and they're like, oh, could you tell?.\nNo.\nYeah, we'll move on, we'll go to the next one as well, which is, we can see the jar of dirt This was amber saying that Johnny Depp had a jar of cocaine, and of course a lot of mentions were made to the jar of dirt there Which also he just looked up and goes jar of cocaine I could afford more than that, I'm like, yeah, just a jar.\nYeah, we'll go to the next one as well, we then have amber's acting, and I'm going to call it acting because it's not convincing In my opinion, and we'll all play, and you can make your own mind, I've made up mine Let's play this one.\nYeah, he was About this pressure, I felt this pressure.\nYou know, my beauty I just saw his arm, I could feel his arm He was arm moving away, it looked like he was punching me.\nBut I could just feel this pressure.\nYeah, I might, I might I mean, she is an actor, I would like to also point out just to be sure that Johnny Depp is also an actor, so you could also levy that criticism at his.\nBut he doesn't seem to be acting Well, the evidence is a place for the mannerisms, or even the testimony is based on the audio recordings The audio recordings don't look good for No, they really don't, and if if I had to call out one of them is looking performative over the other I know who I'd go for.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=310"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3d4d75d4-384b-4734-8b3b-ebce201f6247": {"page_content": "But he doesn't seem to be acting Well, the evidence is a place for the mannerisms, or even the testimony is based on the audio recordings The audio recordings don't look good for No, they really don't, and if if I had to call out one of them is looking performative over the other I know who I'd go for.\nBut I suppose we'll end on this, we go to the next one, we can see some response for her, which is the high quality foes of her testimony Which you can't see the tears, presumably they evaporated by then Because the next one's well, we can see the evidence of how they're arriving at court, both of them, Johnny looking very happy and taking gifts random people.\nWhich, okay Bad, a bit weird, but okay, yeah, and everyone very happy, and then the alternative happens, which is the amber hertz turns up with And I want to say hi, certainly doesn't No, no, no, okay.\nAnd then we'll get to the last one here, which is the fact that I think maybe we'll see those tears when she fetches And loses, and then we'll see that in the middle.\nThere we are, that's the end of the Me Too movement, this is how it died I mean, you remember it's starting off all that This is the death of it right now, which is hilarious, if nothing else.\nAnd I thought we'd enjoy it because it's Friday, if nothing else If you're appreciated that segment, from the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, you can go to Lotus Eaters.com to access to all the Premium constantly on the sites, such as the premium articles that we do, this one from Hugo, Bill Gates to the rescue, our savior It also has an audio track there for silver tears to listen in case you don't like reading Also, you can follow us on getter if you want to see what else we're putting out.\nBut, Lotus Eaters underscore com on getter.\nThank you and goodbye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9Cp23OZEk&t=1173"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0b79f10-d214-4039-bbe1-c38184974855": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast where we are up to chapter 15 of the beginning of infinity titled the Evolution of Culture.\nHere in this chapter what we're learning about is a number of quite new ways in which David Deutsch approaches the spread of ideas.\nWhat we're going to talk about in particular are what are known as memes.\nNow a meme is a technical term for an IZ that tends to get itself replicated, that tends to get itself copied so that it spreads through different minds through different people.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=42"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9beb6c8b-98ec-4790-b109-a9631a4b0754": {"page_content": "Now this idea of a meme for anyone who's new to this is somewhat different to the idea of a meme that appears on the internet, although memes that appear on the internet, those funny things, those funny cartoons that are shared between people, they are themselves memes of a kind, but when we talk about memes, when we speak about memes, we're speaking about a much broader category of ideas and David's going to really refine not only what our understanding of memes are, the mental or abstract analog of a gene, we're not only going to refine our understanding of what that is, but importantly for him in the central, one of the central themes of the beginning of infinity is how it is that memes are replicated under what conditions do they tend to get replicated and under what conditions do they not tend to get replicated and what is the process by which they get replicated.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=56"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ee780d54-5e0e-4cc7-ac27-3afb62dde881": {"page_content": "Now this centrality of the idea of memes for the beginning of infinity, I've touched on before with respect to how it is brought up in the beginning of infinity.\nOne important way in which it comes up in the beginning of infinity is the discussion of and the distinction between static versus dynamic societies.\nAs I often do sometimes in these podcasts, I do tend to steal the thunder of the main point that's coming later and I'm about to do that now.\nSo let me preface everything that we're about to talk about with the idea that perhaps there can be no greater civilizational challenge than to ensure that we become dynamic societies and avoid being static societies.\nThat this is the one fundamental thing which can ensure either you will definitely go extinct as a civilization or you have the potential to have an unbounded open-ended future of knowledge creation before you.\nThe distinction rests upon whether or not the culture is saturated with anti-rational memes.\nAnti-rational memes are means that tend to disable the capacity of their holders to criticize themselves.\nSo if you feel as though there are ideas in your society that you may not criticize and therefore may not seek improvement of, then this can tend to slow down the rate of progress in your society.\nIn the worst cases, it can stop progress altogether and we can end up in a static society and then we might even get regression whether society moves backwards in various ways.\nOn the other hand, if we can avoid the ideas that tend to cause us not to criticize things, then we can help to inculcate a more dynamic society, a more open-ended society, a society that welcomes criticism, a society that wants to create new things rather than remain satisfied with the status quo.\nOkay, so after that, let's get straight into the reading and David writes at the beginning of this chapter, subtitled, ideas that survive.\nA culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways.\nBy ideas, I mean any information that can be stored in people's brains and can affect their behaviour.\nThus, the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline, and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, sets of ideas that define cultures.\nMany of them are in explicit.\nIn fact, all ideas have some in explicit component, since even our knowledge of the meanings of words is held largely in explicitly in our minds.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=106"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "460abd3b-0392-41df-b22a-7a222ebbc60a": {"page_content": "Thus, the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline, and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, sets of ideas that define cultures.\nMany of them are in explicit.\nIn fact, all ideas have some in explicit component, since even our knowledge of the meanings of words is held largely in explicitly in our minds.\nPhysical skills, such as the ability to write a bicycle, have an especially high in explicit content, as do philosophical concepts such as freedom and knowledge.\nThe distinction between explicit and in explicit is not a way sharp.\nFor instance, a poem or a satire may be explicitly about one subject, while the audience in a particular culture will reliably end without being told, interpret it as being about a different one.\nThe world's major cultures, including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions, have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years.\nMost of the ideas that define them, including the in explicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another.\nThat makes these ideas means ideas that are replicators.\nPause their my reflection.\nSo already a lot has been said about this explicit and in explicit distinction.\nThis was made much earlier on in the beginning of infinity, and you can go back and look at, or hopefully you've got the book at the beginning of infinity.\nIf you haven't, I urge you to go out and buy it.\nHave a look at the index and have a look at what the meaning is of explicit versus in explicit.\nExplicit, of course, has something to do with the capacity to be able to be put into words.\nCertain kinds of ideas have a highly explicit content.\nScientific theories have highly explicit content.\nNot to say there's no in explicit content, but it's highly explicit.\nA recipe for baking a cake will be highly explicit, and the more explicit it is, the better, because then you'll be able to replicate the picture of the cake that's in the recipe book.\nOn the other hand, there's a whole bunch of ideas that have a much greater in explicit content, and sporting skills are like this.\nRoger Federer, who can serve a tennis ball really, really well, has knowledge of how to do that.\nOkay, yes, he has certain genetic propensities to be able to do that as well.\nBut importantly, he has knowledge of how to serve the tennis ball really well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=251"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "09bf4d2a-583f-49b0-b29a-f340aa2b2492": {"page_content": "On the other hand, there's a whole bunch of ideas that have a much greater in explicit content, and sporting skills are like this.\nRoger Federer, who can serve a tennis ball really, really well, has knowledge of how to do that.\nOkay, yes, he has certain genetic propensities to be able to do that as well.\nBut importantly, he has knowledge of how to serve the tennis ball really well.\nWe'll have to return the tennis ball really, really well.\nAnd no doubt, he could probably coach someone and train them so they can improve, but it's unlikely they'll ever become as good as he is.\nEven if their genetics was that good, people who were regarded as great geniuses in many fields have lots and lots of in explicit knowledge.\nThe great mathematician that I've mentioned recently, Romano John, he would have had a lot of in explicit knowledge about how it is that he arrived at the Theorems that he did, or how it was that he arrived at the Theorems that he did.\nHe wasn't able to explain fully what the process was that he went through.\nIn other words, it's in explicit.\nHe couldn't put it into words.\nThat doesn't mean that it is imprincible impossible to put into words.\nIt's just that he didn't know how.\nAnd so it's true of many, many other things in our lives.\nAnd when David says there that words, the definition of words, has lots of in explicit content, all you need to do is to consider trying to explain to someone who is visually impaired, or completely without sight, what something looks like.\nIf you try to explain what the color red looks like to someone who's never seen it before, you will suddenly, it will come down on you with full force, the idea that this word has lots of in explicit content.\nWe all know, to some extent, what the word red means.\nCertainly when we say the sky is blue, that has lots and lots of in explicit content when we use the term blue.\nAll of us agree.\nBut to a person who's never actually seen the blue sky before, trying to explain to them what that sensation of blue is like is going to leave you floundering.\nYou're going to realize that there is just a barrier, an in explicit barrier between you and the person of trying to put into words what that feeling, that sensation, that observation, that sight is actually like back to the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=370"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bfe601fd-6069-4d52-9800-375006f80641": {"page_content": "All of us agree.\nBut to a person who's never actually seen the blue sky before, trying to explain to them what that sensation of blue is like is going to leave you floundering.\nYou're going to realize that there is just a barrier, an in explicit barrier between you and the person of trying to put into words what that feeling, that sensation, that observation, that sight is actually like back to the book.\nMost of the ideas that define them, including the in explicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another.\nThat makes these ideas, memes, ideas that are replicators.\nNevertheless, cultures change.\nPeople modify cultural ideas in their minds and sometimes they pass on the modified versions.\nInevitably, there are unintentional modifications as well, partly because of straightforward error, and partly because in explicit ideas are hard to convey accurately.\nThere is no way to download them directly from one brain to another, like computer programs.\nEven native speakers of a language will not give identical definitions of every word, so it can be only rarely, if ever, that two people hold precisely the same cultural idea in their minds.\nThat is why, when the founder of a political or philosophical movement, or a religion, dies, or even before, schisms typically happen.\nThe movements most devoted followers are often shocked to discover that they disagree about what its doctrines really are.\nIt is not much different when a religion has a holy book in which the doctrines are stated explicitly.\nThen there are disputes about the meanings of the words and the interpretation of the sentences, pause there just my brief reflection on that.\nThis here is an interesting criticism of dogma.\nIn fact, it's a withering criticism of dogma because it suggests that even if you were to complain that let's say a particular holy book is the inherent word of God.\nThat has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with your capacity to understand it inherently, or your capacity to pass it on to another person, inherently.\nYou remain, of course, always a fallible person, so that even if you had access to the perfect knowledge, nonetheless, because you are a person, you are a human being, you are fallible, you are subject to error, your identification of a particular work as being inherent, as being perfect, as being coming straight from the creator of the universe, has to be filtered through your mind, your imperfect mind, out into the rest of the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=309"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "857e07d1-5634-4be6-b3b6-1c158c6dc2f2": {"page_content": "You remain, of course, always a fallible person, so that even if you had access to the perfect knowledge, nonetheless, because you are a person, you are a human being, you are fallible, you are subject to error, your identification of a particular work as being inherent, as being perfect, as being coming straight from the creator of the universe, has to be filtered through your mind, your imperfect mind, out into the rest of the world.\nSo if you stand on a street corner preaching that this is the word of the Lord, well, what you have to understand is that the message that you're passing on is not perfect.\nThe word of the Lord in the book might very well be perfect, according to your lights, but that does not mean that you're reading of it as perfect.\nYou might be emphasizing things differently.\nIn fact, the particular copy of the inherent word of God you might have might itself be errant.\nHe filled with riddled with errors, of course, just as an aside to this.\nThere are general purpose criticisms from the religious people of that kind of perspective.\nOne would be that the higher being, divinely inspires you and prohibits you from making any errors.\nHowever, this would be a general purpose objection that anyone could make, even where two people have competing interpretations of the same inherent word of the Lord, back to the book.\nThus, a culture is in practice defined, not by a set of strictly identical memes, but by a set of variants that cause slightly different characteristic behaviors.\nSome variants tend to have the effect that their holders are eager to enact or talk about them.\nOthers less so.\nSome are easier than others for potential recipients to replicate in their own minds.\nThese factors and others affect how likely each variant of a meme is to be passed unfaithfully.\nA few exceptional variants, once they appear in one mind, tend to spread throughout the culture with very little change in meaning, as expressed in the behaviors they cause.\nSuch memes are familiar to us because long-lived cultures are composed of them, but nevertheless, in another sense, they are a very unusual type of idea.\nFor most ideas, are short-lived.\nA human mind considers many ideas for everyone that it ever acts upon, and only a small proportion of those cause behavior that anyone else notices.\nAnd of those, only a small proportion are ever replicated by anyone else.\nSo the overwhelming majority of ideas disappear within a lifetime or less.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=610"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fc6a12c2-c544-4be0-80b8-33dc3201bed2": {"page_content": "Such memes are familiar to us because long-lived cultures are composed of them, but nevertheless, in another sense, they are a very unusual type of idea.\nFor most ideas, are short-lived.\nA human mind considers many ideas for everyone that it ever acts upon, and only a small proportion of those cause behavior that anyone else notices.\nAnd of those, only a small proportion are ever replicated by anyone else.\nSo the overwhelming majority of ideas disappear within a lifetime or less.\nThe behavior of people in a long-lived culture is therefore determined partly by recent ideas that will soon become extinct and partly by long-lived memes.\nExceptional ideas that have been accurately replicated many times in succession pause their my reflection.\nThat was extremely dense.\nThere was a lot of information going on there, and I think it behooves us to go back and to just consider what David was saying.\nEssentially, the idea here is that for any individual person, an individual mind, we come up with a vast number of ideas throughout the course of any day, and only a few of them do we have an act upon.\nWe think, maybe I should have a coffee now, but maybe we don't act on it, we just have that idea.\nMaybe we have the idea that, gee, I really should finish off that essay I've been writing, but never actually act on it.\nMaybe I think of all the different jobs in which I could do, and I only act on one of those.\nThere's lots of ideas that remain inside a particular person's mind, and never cause any outward manifestation.\nThere's no outward sign that you ever had that idea.\nThere's no behavior that goes along with that idea.\nBut for some, there is a behavior.\nSometimes you really do write the essay.\nSometimes you really do take the job.\nSometimes you go for the walk.\nSometimes you decide to take up dancing, so on and so forth.\nSometimes the ideas you have cause behaviors.\nDavid says, so far we've got two sorts.\nThe kind of ideas, the overwhelming majority of which don't cause any behavior at all.\nSome small proportion of your ideas actually cause you to do something different.\nThere are ideas you think, yes, I'll act on that, and you actually do, and there's some behavior that goes along with it.\nThen there's an even smaller proportion that the behavior happens, and someone else notices it as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=756"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7cb73064-e520-43da-91a5-b884b8aeba45": {"page_content": "David says, so far we've got two sorts.\nThe kind of ideas, the overwhelming majority of which don't cause any behavior at all.\nSome small proportion of your ideas actually cause you to do something different.\nThere are ideas you think, yes, I'll act on that, and you actually do, and there's some behavior that goes along with it.\nThen there's an even smaller proportion that the behavior happens, and someone else notices it as well.\nIf you're at home on your own and you go and get a glass of water, well then no one else is ever going to notice that, and it's an idea you have in your head, I feel like a glass of water, you go and get the glass of water.\nIt's caused a behavior, so already it's a rare kind of idea, but no one has noticed it.\nSo there is a small proportion of ideas where someone else does indeed notice.\nYou turn up to the job interview, and you've decided not to wear a tie, let's say, if you're a man, or you decide to turn up shabbily.\nSo people have noticed this particular behavior in you.\nSo then we get to the even smaller proportion of ideas, ideas that you have, that cause a behavior, that are noticed by someone else, and then other people replicate them.\nSo this is an exceedingly small fraction of all ideas that ever exist.\nIf you're the first person to enact a particular kind of fashion, and someone else copies that fashion, that's very rare indeed.\nThat's a very rare kind of idea indeed.\nSo if you're a fashion designer and you're sitting at home.\nand you think I've got a design for a new hat, it's a strange-looking, tall and thin red top hat, but you never actually design it.\nWell then that's an idea of the first kind.\nThere might be an idea of the second kind where you decide, well I'm actually going to design, create, build this strange hat, and you do, but then you destroy it because you think it's ugly.\nThat's an idea of the second kind.\nAnd then there's the idea of the third kind where you think about it, design it, build it, and keep it and wear it, and everyone else notices.\nBut that don't particularly like it.\nAnd so you realize that this is a bad idea.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=855"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fceb617b-c844-44ba-8ae1-075f6d83d775": {"page_content": "That's an idea of the second kind.\nAnd then there's the idea of the third kind where you think about it, design it, build it, and keep it and wear it, and everyone else notices.\nBut that don't particularly like it.\nAnd so you realize that this is a bad idea.\nBut at least they've noticed, and then there's the fourth kind of idea, where it takes off as a fashion where other people decide to replicate that idea, they're interested in your new design for a hat, and so they all start wandering around in your new hat.\nThat's the idea that is replicated by someone else.\nBut as David says, the overwhelming majority of ideas disappear within a lifetime or less.\nOne of our purposes here in this chapter is to try to tease out what are the reasons why some ideas do end up in that fourth category of getting replicated, affecting people's ideas, but persisting over time and causing a change in behavior that actually has some longer lasting effect on the culture, as opposed to certain other ideas that don't have such an effect.\nAnd so back to the book and David writes, a fundamental question in the study of cultures is, what is it about a long lived meme that gives it this exceptional ability to resist change throughout many replications?.\nAnother central to the theme of this book is, when such memes do change, what are the conditions under which they can change for the better?.\nThe idea that cultures evolve is at least as old as that of evolution in biology.\nBut most attempts to understand how they evolve have been based on misunderstandings of evolution.\nFor example, the Communist thinker Karl Marx believed that his theory of history was evolutionary, because it spoke of a progression through historical stages determined by economic laws of motion.\nBut the real theory of evolution has nothing to do with predicting the attributes of organisms from those of its ancestors.\nMarx also thought that Darwin's theory of evolution provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.\nHe was comparing his idea of inherent conflict between socio-economic classes with the supposed competition between biological species.\nFascist ideology, such as narcissism, likewise used garbled or inaccurate evolutionary ideas such as the survival of the fittest to justify violence.\nBut in fact, the competition in biological evolution is not just between different species, but between variants of genes within a species, which does not resemble the supposed class struggle at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=960"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ceb544f9-b513-42e5-8589-ad10f2fe6501": {"page_content": "He was comparing his idea of inherent conflict between socio-economic classes with the supposed competition between biological species.\nFascist ideology, such as narcissism, likewise used garbled or inaccurate evolutionary ideas such as the survival of the fittest to justify violence.\nBut in fact, the competition in biological evolution is not just between different species, but between variants of genes within a species, which does not resemble the supposed class struggle at all.\nIt can give rise to violence or other competition between species, but it can also produce co-operation, such as the symbiosis between flowers and insects, and all sorts of intricate combinations of the two, pause their myreflection.\nThis is just an aside, and stretches all the way back to chapters that spoke more directly about evolution.\nBut this idea of the survival of the fittest, I don't think it's something that Darwin himself ever said, and it is actually a tautology of a kind, because if we ask, what is defined as the fittest?.\nSo if evolution by natural selection is the survival of the fittest, then what are the fittest?.\nWell, the fittest by definition are those that survive.\nAnd so what then are the ones that survive?.\nWell, the ones only that are the fittest.\nSo this doesn't really help anything.\nIt doesn't really help to explain what's going on in evolution by natural selection.\nThe true explanation is, of course, to do with the capacity of genes to replicate in the circumstances under which they will replicate the environments in which they find themselves, are fittest, namely the environments where they're going to be replicated.\nAnd the reason they get replicators is because they're selfish.\nIn other words, that is their sole objective is to replicate themselves, not because they're consciously got that feeling of selfishness or anything like that, but because that essentially is what genes do, they try to have themselves replicated.\nThat's their purpose in existence.\nAnd more substantively on this passage here is indeed there is, it's a form of scientism, isn't it?.\nIt's this idea that because something is true in science, because there's an element of truth within this, that obviously, evolution by natural section is a true theory.\nIt's correct.\nIt's an explanation of how biological organisms work.\nThat does not mean it can be extrapolated into domains outside of biology.\nIt's not applicable in those other domains.\nMark thought it was, but that's incorrect.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1083"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "35aa2c44-947c-407a-af1e-7fe658a787e7": {"page_content": "It's this idea that because something is true in science, because there's an element of truth within this, that obviously, evolution by natural section is a true theory.\nIt's correct.\nIt's an explanation of how biological organisms work.\nThat does not mean it can be extrapolated into domains outside of biology.\nIt's not applicable in those other domains.\nMark thought it was, but that's incorrect.\nAnd the reason it's incorrect is because the unit of selection is a gene, which he never knew anyway, but moreover, as David has said, it's just a metaphor.\nHe was using a metaphor and taking the metaphor too seriously, comparing evolution of biological organisms to the way in which a state is going to evolve over time to change over time.\nSo he saw change going on in the natural world, and so he thought, therefore, change going on society, the laws or the scientific principles that discover, that obtain in this particular area, that are not predictive, but are explanatory in this particular area, are going to be explanatory in this particular area, but worse than that, he thought that you could use this to predict things.\nAnd as David quite rightly says there, although we have this good explanatory theory in biology, to some extent, there are gaps, again, go back to earlier chapters in the beginning of infinity all about this, about how we do indeed have gaps in our understanding of evolution by natural selection.\nThat's not to say it's false.\nThere are gaps in every single scientific theory.\nIt's not to say that they are utterly false, I should say, in every single respect.\nThey're not.\nThey're our best understandings at the moment.\nHowever, one part of evolution by natural selection does indeed say that we cannot predict what the organisms are going to evolve into in the future.\nIt doesn't allow us to do that kind of prediction.\nBut Marx, we understood what evolution by natural selection was all about, and thought that he could not only take it as a metaphor for how societies undergo change over time, but thought he could use it to predict what kind of change would occur over time.\nHe thought that he could predict the growth of knowledge, which as we know is not possible.\nOkay, let's go back to the book and David writes.\nAlthough Marx and the fascists assumed false theories of biological evolution, it is no accident that analogies between society and the biosphere are often associated with grim visions of society.\nThe biosphere is a grim place.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1212"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6a43489b-1bfc-4681-8582-e787d5117e16": {"page_content": "He thought that he could predict the growth of knowledge, which as we know is not possible.\nOkay, let's go back to the book and David writes.\nAlthough Marx and the fascists assumed false theories of biological evolution, it is no accident that analogies between society and the biosphere are often associated with grim visions of society.\nThe biosphere is a grim place.\nIt is rife with plunder, deceit, conquest, enslavement, starvation, and extermination.\nHence those who think that cultural evolution is like that end up either opposing it, advocating a static society, or condoning that kind of immoral behavior as necessary or inevitable.\nPause there.\nThere's a lot to unpack there as well.\nAnd this is going to lead into the next chapter, and the subsequent chapters, and an underlying part of David Deutsch's philosophy, which is that the vision of the natural world that we are presented with sometimes today as being this clean, pristine provider of resources, a provider of our safety, and our home, and our comfort.\nThe natural world is the ideal, and we come along and we pollute it and ruin it and destroy it.\nThis vision that we are sometimes presented with today is utterly false.\nAnd I guess at least to say something on the side of Marx here, at least he kind of understood that the biosphere was indeed a grim place, and did entail all of these awful things like starvation and extermination, because that's true.\nNature is read into thin claw.\nIt is a cruel place.\nIf you're concerned about the suffering of animals, then you should be concerned about trying to prevent predators from getting hold of their prey.\nBut then of course, if you do that, you're caught in a bind because that's going to cause the suffering of predators.\nSo perhaps we should have meat farms for predators, and perhaps we should fend off all the predators from all of the prey.\nAnd our task as human beings should be if we want to prevent the suffering of other conscious creatures like animals, literally imprison these animals, or in some other way corral them so that they don't have much to do with one another.\nIn fact, they should be kept individually separate from each one from another, because male animals will fight amongst themselves.\nSo if you're really interested in the supposed suffering of animals, or concerned about bloodshed among animals, then we should do what we can to protect animals from themselves.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1344"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a755351-bc0a-4aaa-b05c-ed70b7e715ea": {"page_content": "In fact, they should be kept individually separate from each one from another, because male animals will fight amongst themselves.\nSo if you're really interested in the supposed suffering of animals, or concerned about bloodshed among animals, then we should do what we can to protect animals from themselves.\nBecause of all the harms that animals suffer, surely the suffering at the hands of other animals is what we should be most concerned about, because that is the worst form of suffering that any animal undergoes.\nWhatever the case, people might very well have these competing ideas in their mind.\nOn the one hand, the natural environment is the ideal pristine place, and that's what human civilization should be trying to preserve the natural environment, because it's the ideal.\nAnd yet on the other hand, keep the competing idea in their mind that in fact, evolution by natural selection, and the animal kingdom is all about base concerns about avoiding starvation, about deceiving one another, and about killing your prey and avoiding the predators.\nSo we've got two visions.\nThe natural world has been grim and awful, and we don't want to be like that.\nAnd the natural world has been the pristine ideal towards that we need to protect.\nSo Marx has used this analogy between the truth of the natural world as being an awful place.\nAnd in fact, as the worldview of David Deutsch would teach us that in fact, it's the natural world that we have to protect ourselves from.\nIt can be something as grandiose as the asteroid heading towards us, perfectly naturally, but we want to avoid that.\nAnd so artificially, we're going to have to create the knowledge to push it out of the way.\nOr it can be something more day to day, the thunderstorm that's going to happen, the hail that's going to fall from the sky, the cold temperatures that are going to come tonight.\nWe need to protect ourselves from that.\nAnd we're going to need technology to do that.\nWe're going to need houses.\nWe're going to need air conditioning.\nWe're going to need energy in order to protect ourselves from the worst aspects of the natural environment, the perfectly natural viruses and bacteria that are infecting our bodies in all sorts of awful ways we want to protect ourselves from.\nSo nature is not the ideal that we wish to protect.\nIt's not us that are a danger to nature.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1484"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f3f65e22-c15e-4dc8-b1c0-0ed72ab792fd": {"page_content": "And we're going to need technology to do that.\nWe're going to need houses.\nWe're going to need air conditioning.\nWe're going to need energy in order to protect ourselves from the worst aspects of the natural environment, the perfectly natural viruses and bacteria that are infecting our bodies in all sorts of awful ways we want to protect ourselves from.\nSo nature is not the ideal that we wish to protect.\nIt's not us that are a danger to nature.\nOr insofar as we are a danger to nature, we are only a danger of nature in order to respond to the constant slings and arrows that nature is trying to sail us with.\nAnd so we need to do things to protect ourselves.\nAnd indeed, the life forms that we care about are pets and other animals and so on and so forth.\nBecause hurricanes are as indiscriminately going to destroy human homes and buildings and lives as they will animal homes and lives.\nOkay, let's continue in David Wright's.\nArguments by analogy are fallacies.\nAlmost any analogy between two things contains some grain of truth.\nBut one cannot tell what that is until one has an independent explanation for what is analogous to what and why.\nThe main danger in the biosphere culture analogy is that it encourages one to conceive of the human condition in a reductionist way that obliterates the high level distinctions that are essential for understanding it, such as those between mindless and creative determinism and choice right and wrong.\nSuch distinctions are meaningless at the level of biology.\nIndeed, the analogy is sometimes drawn for the very purpose of debunking the common sense idea of human beings as causal agents with the ability to make moral choices and to create new knowledge for themselves.\nPause their mind reflection.\nThis is a contentious point.\nAnd I guess people who believe in a deterministic worldview when it comes to society must reject that.\nAnd so it is controversial in many, many ways.\nBut to me, and I think to many people listening, it will seem like a deep truth about what human beings are.\nHuman beings as causal agents with the ability to make moral choices and to create new knowledge for themselves.\nAll of those things kind of are tied up together.\nThis capacity to create knowledge means that you are a causal agent.\nIt means that you are bringing into the world something that wasn't there before.\nAnd because it wasn't there before, now you have a wider array of choices to make.\nThere are more choices available before you about what to do because you've literally bought into being.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1607"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f9d29250-56b9-4249-9f7f-6b635fb6cf5b": {"page_content": "Human beings as causal agents with the ability to make moral choices and to create new knowledge for themselves.\nAll of those things kind of are tied up together.\nThis capacity to create knowledge means that you are a causal agent.\nIt means that you are bringing into the world something that wasn't there before.\nAnd because it wasn't there before, now you have a wider array of choices to make.\nThere are more choices available before you about what to do because you've literally bought into being.\nYou've literally created a piece of knowledge that was not there before.\nAny discovery in physics which leads to a piece of new technology is something that allows us to therefore choose to use that technology in the future.\nMy go-to example is being fish and energy.\nThis idea that prior to the advent of nuclear physics, prior to scientists fully understand that there was energy, potential energy, held within the nucleus of all atoms.\nPrior to us understanding that there was no possible way to conceive of how to get energy out of the nuclei of atoms.\nBut once we knew there was energy in there, then the process could begin of trying to extract that energy in some way, and it turned out by splitting the atom, we could do that, firing neutrons at the atom, cause large nuclei to split apart and to release lots and lots of energy.\nAnd that energy could be gathered together, because it comes out of heat energy and you put it into some water and of course the water deboiled and the water would turn into steam, the steam can spin a turbine and the turbine can cause a generator to make electricity and so on and so forth.\nBut prior to that knowledge being created about the nucleus, we didn't have the choice.\nWe didn't have the choice about building a fish and reactor or building a coal-fired power station.\nWe now do have that choice.\nAnd so therefore it becomes a moral choice.\nShould we build this kind of energy source, or that kind of energy source?.\nAnd of course today that is a huge area of discussion.\nThe lesson behind that is of course, that they will always be new kinds of energy, new solutions to how to create energy that will come along.\nAnd so any debate about, well we shouldn't use that kind of energy because it could cause pollution, or that kind of energy because it could lead to a dangerous accident.\nAvoid the simple point that all kinds of energy are going to be transition kinds of energy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1697"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "04075a37-7ee5-4abb-871d-afd1f8a517ae": {"page_content": "And of course today that is a huge area of discussion.\nThe lesson behind that is of course, that they will always be new kinds of energy, new solutions to how to create energy that will come along.\nAnd so any debate about, well we shouldn't use that kind of energy because it could cause pollution, or that kind of energy because it could lead to a dangerous accident.\nAvoid the simple point that all kinds of energy are going to be transition kinds of energy.\nThere are still places in the world where we are using wood in order to generate electricity.\nRather those places are, they do still exist.\nPeople have transitioned into coal and from coal to nuclear.\nAnd so it will continue to happen.\nBut in the meantime, artificially forcing everyone to use a particular kind of energy ignores the fact that if we want to make progress fast, we should probably use the cheapest, most efficient, highest energy density form of energy production that we can.\nBecause it won't be too long in the future that someone will develop and even better, more efficient, more highly energy dense way of generating electricity.\nBut that will be slowed down.\nThat discovery, whatever it is, will be slowed down if you slow down progress.\nAnd that can be slowed down by artificially increasing the cost of things like knowledge production because you've slowed down the rate at which people can get information.\nAnd so on and so forth, that is a long discussion.\nLet's go back to the book and David writes, As I shall explain, although biological and cultural evolution are described by the same underlying theory, the mechanisms of transmission, variation, and selection are all very different.\nThat makes the resulting natural history is different too.\nThere is no close cultural analog of a species or of an organism or a cell or a sexual reproduction.\nGenes and memes are about as different as can be at the level of mechanisms and of outcomes.\nThey are similar only at the lowest level of explanation where they are both replicators that embody knowledge.\nAnd are therefore conditioned by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot be preserved, can or cannot improve.\nOkay, I'm skipping a little bit.\nDavid talks about a very interesting perspective on jokes and where they come from.\nThat some jokes might not indeed be created by anyone.\nThey may very well have begun as a non-jerk in some way, then became a slightly funny with you remark and eventually end up as a joke.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1859"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a90eead-b6ad-4e3c-937d-64a2c8135c77": {"page_content": "And are therefore conditioned by the same fundamental principles that determine the conditions under which knowledge can or cannot be preserved, can or cannot improve.\nOkay, I'm skipping a little bit.\nDavid talks about a very interesting perspective on jokes and where they come from.\nThat some jokes might not indeed be created by anyone.\nThey may very well have begun as a non-jerk in some way, then became a slightly funny with you remark and eventually end up as a joke.\nIf you're being chased by a bunch of rabid taxidermists, don't play dead.\nAnd of course, this is not to say that jokes can't be invented.\nThey are and you stand up comedian will tell you that.\nThey work on crafting a joke and then testing it in front of audiences and allowing it to evolve over time based upon the critical feedback the amount of laughs they're getting at their stand-up routine.\nAnd what David says on this after me skipping a little bit, he says, you're right.\nPeople tell each other amusing stories, some fictional, some factual.\nThey are not jokes, but some become memes.\nThey are interesting enough for the listeners to retell them to other people.\nAnd some of those people retell them to return, but they rarely recite them word for word.\nNor do they preserve every detail of the content.\nHence, an often retold story will come to exist in different versions.\nSome of these versions will be retold more often than others.\nIn some cases, because people find telling them amusing.\nWhen that is the main reason for retelling them, successive versions that remain in circulation will tend to be ever more amusing.\nSo the conditions are there for evolution, repeated cycles of imperfect copying of information, alternating with selection.\nEventually the story becomes amusing enough to make people laugh, and a fully fledged joke has evolved.\nIt is conceivable that a joke could evolve through variations that were not intended to improve upon the funniness.\nFor example, people who hear a story can miss here or misunderstand aspects of it or change it for pragmatic reasons, and in a small proportion of cases by sheer luck, that will produce a funnier version of the story, which will then propagate better.\nIf a joke has evolved in that way from an unjoke, it truly has no author.\nAnother possibility is that most of the people who altered the amusing story on its way to becoming a joke designed their contributions, using creativity to make it funnier intentionally.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=1983"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f7511c13-4080-4c81-8bd9-b4fde669d8c7": {"page_content": "If a joke has evolved in that way from an unjoke, it truly has no author.\nAnother possibility is that most of the people who altered the amusing story on its way to becoming a joke designed their contributions, using creativity to make it funnier intentionally.\nIn such cases, although the joke was indeed created by variation in selection, its funniness was the result of human creativity.\nIn that case it would be misleading to say that no one created it, yet at many co-authors, each of whom contributed creative thought to the outcome.\nBut it may still be that literally no one understands why the joke is as funny as it is, and hence no one could create another joke of similar quality it will.\nPause their my reflection.\nYes, so there's lots of jokes that people tell each other like this.\nI like Jerry Seinfeld's famous routine he does in television show.\nAnd Jerry talks about how a survey has published each year that talks about what people's greatest fear is.\nAnd typically, what comes in second is death.\nDeath comes in second, which is surprising.\nWhat's first is public speaking.\nPeople are more afraid about public speaking.\nAnd Jerry quips that that means that at a funeral, the vast majority of people at the funeral would much rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.\nAnd so this kind of joke is something that is created by the stand-up comedian, and which possibly goes through a small amount of refining, but at least there we can identify the author.\nDavid goes on to write, although we do not know exactly how creativity works, we do know that it is itself an evolutionary process within individual brains.\nFor it depends on conjecture, which is variation, and criticism for the purpose of selecting ideas.\nSo somewhere inside brains, blind variations and selections are adding up to a creative thought at a higher level of emergence, pause there.\nAnd so here we have some ideas about creativity that we know so little about, the creativity in human mind, how it operates.\nAfter all, once we do have a fully fledged scientific theory of how creativity works, fully fledged philosophical theory of how knowledge is created, then we'll be able to program AGI artificial general intelligence.\nBut as yet, the repeated failures of people to produce artificial general intelligence is due entirely to misunderstanding the capacity of humans to create knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=2127"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "92729d38-0354-4cf5-b8b3-626e98f4e304": {"page_content": "And so here we have some ideas about creativity that we know so little about, the creativity in human mind, how it operates.\nAfter all, once we do have a fully fledged scientific theory of how creativity works, fully fledged philosophical theory of how knowledge is created, then we'll be able to program AGI artificial general intelligence.\nBut as yet, the repeated failures of people to produce artificial general intelligence is due entirely to misunderstanding the capacity of humans to create knowledge.\nAnd until we understand how it is that we do what we do, there's nowhere we're going to be able to create an external device that can do what we do.\nThat extended device, by the way, would be a person.\nSo it's kind of wrong to refer to such a thing as a thing, or as something other than a person, anything that can create explanatory knowledge as a person.\nIt will be able to understand the world around it, and it will have an open-ended capacity to improve itself and to improve its own knowledge, which would also entail being able to create all the senses that we have to have all the thoughts that we have, the motivations we have, values and emotions, and so on.\nOkay, I'm skipping a bit more here where David talks about how the idea of memes has been criticized over time, and he rejects that criticism and provides a number of reasons why.\nSo I'm skipping beyond some of the criticisms and the discussion on jokes.\nAnd I'll go to the section where he starts to talk about the rules of grammar, and he writes, we say, I am learning to play the piano in British English, but never I am learning to play the baseball.\nWe know how to form such sentences correctly, but until we think about it, very few of us know that the inexpensive grammatical rule we are following even exists that alone what it is.\nIn American English, the rule is slightly different, so the phrase, learning to play piano is acceptable.\nWe may wonder why and guess that the British are more fond of the definite article, but again, that is not the explanation.\nIn British English, a patient is in hospital and in American English in the hospital.\nOf course, they're my reflection.\nI think even within certain kinds of British English to be fair, northern accents will sometimes eliminate the definite article where it should appear, where lots of other people think it should appear.\nFor instance, someone might say they're going up stairs instead of going up the stairs.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=2242"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b087f9cc-3e20-4d84-b69c-fb7204afb2eb": {"page_content": "In British English, a patient is in hospital and in American English in the hospital.\nOf course, they're my reflection.\nI think even within certain kinds of British English to be fair, northern accents will sometimes eliminate the definite article where it should appear, where lots of other people think it should appear.\nFor instance, someone might say they're going up stairs instead of going up the stairs.\nSo this is a function of the way in which people speak at the time, bleeding into rules of grammar, of course.\nSo back to the book, David writes, The same is true of memes in general.\nThey implicitly contain information that is not known to the holders, but which nevertheless causes the holders to behave alike.\nHence, just as native English speakers may be mistaken about why they have said, the, in a given sentence, people enacting all sorts of other memes often give false explanations even to themselves of why they are behaving in that way.\nLike genes, all memes contain knowledge, often in explicit, of how to cause their own replication.\nThis knowledge is encoded in strains of DNA, or remembered by brains respectively.\nIn both cases, the knowledge is adapted by causing itself to be replicated.\nIt causes that more reliably than nearly all its variants do.\nIn both cases, this adaptation is the outcome of alternating rounds of variation and selection.\nHowever, the logic of the copying mechanism is very different for genes and memes.\nIn organisms that reproduce by dividing, either all the genes are copied into the next generation, or, if the individual fails to reproduce, none are.\nIn sexual reproduction, a full complement of genes randomly chosen from both parents is copied, or none are.\nIn all cases, the DNA duplication process is automatic.\nGenes are copied indiscriminately.\nOne consequence is that some genes can be replicated for many generations without ever being expressed, causing any behavior at all.\nWhether you're parents of a broker-bone or not, genes for repairing bones will, barring unlikely mutations, be passed on to you and your descendants.\nThe situation faced by memes is utterly different.\nEach meme has to be expressed as behavior.\nEvery time it is replicated.\nFor it is that behavior and only that behavior, given the environment created by all the other memes, that affects the replication.\nThat is because a recipient cannot see the representation of the meme and the holder's mind.\nA meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program.\nIf it is not enacted, it will not be copied.\nPause the entire selection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=2382"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "83683fe7-1943-475c-a6ae-2d63f2726e97": {"page_content": "The situation faced by memes is utterly different.\nEach meme has to be expressed as behavior.\nEvery time it is replicated.\nFor it is that behavior and only that behavior, given the environment created by all the other memes, that affects the replication.\nThat is because a recipient cannot see the representation of the meme and the holder's mind.\nA meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program.\nIf it is not enacted, it will not be copied.\nPause the entire selection.\nOr, my just exposition on this point.\nSo, a meme is inside of your mind, represented in your mind in some way, but no one has access to that.\nThis is why this so-called bucket theory of mind is so false.\nPopper talks about, Carl Popper talks about the bucket and the search light.\nAnd the bucket theory of mind is this idea that knowledge is somewhat more like a fluid that you can pour from one person into another's, from one mind to another.\nAnd so, a teacher standing at the front of the class is able to transmit the knowledge to the students in the same way that pouring a fluid from one vessel into another is accomplished.\nOf course, this is utterly false.\nThere's no way of inherently, faithfully, getting the knowledge from one mind into another.\nInstead, what has to happen is that the speaker, the person with the knowledge, the person with the memes, has to undertake some behavior that behavior might include speaking, that behavior might include just accumulating, that behavior might include writing something on a board, someone in circle, there are various behaviors that might go on.\nBut then the recipient of this idea, the intended recipient, has to interpret the behavior, the watching the behavior, they don't have direct access to the mind, to the memes, but only the behaviors, which they might replicate.\nAnd so, if someone's speaking, giving an explanation, this is the knowledge, then the person hearing that is going to hear it and interpret it and try and understand it in their own mind, such that at some later time, they will be able to express it as well, but not in exactly the same words necessarily.\nThey might not remember it by road, but they will have an understanding, and their understanding might result in slightly different words being used to articulate this particular explanation.\nWe're going to come to that as well.\nSo, as David says, a meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=2514"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7dbd4735-d47f-43ab-99dd-988914c81bcb": {"page_content": "They might not remember it by road, but they will have an understanding, and their understanding might result in slightly different words being used to articulate this particular explanation.\nWe're going to come to that as well.\nSo, as David says, a meme cannot be downloaded like a computer program.\nIn other words, there's not this same sort of error correction that goes on inside of a computer program.\nThere is a further level of interpretation that must go on.\nIt's self-filled with errors, and David has a picture all about this, so I'll put the picture up, and let's just read what he has to say about this.\nAnd he writes, the upshot of this is that memes necessarily become embodied in two different physical forms, ultimately, as memories in a brain and as behavior.\nWe can see there.\nSo, we've got a meme in brain number one, and that causes the behavior of this first person.\nThe second person is observing that behavior from person number one, and trying to interpret what that meme is, and so that meme will end up in that brain number two.\nNow, whether or not the meme in brain number two is exactly the same as the meme in brain number one, is a open-ended question.\nIt depends, well, it depends upon the circumstance.\nMaybe it is faithfully reproduced, faithfully replicated, but it may also be replicated with some error, with some slight variation.\nWe can still say that aspects of the meme, or the meme flex, or the broad idea has been replicated, but not in the same way that genes typically get replicated.\nBecause the gene needs to be perfectly replicated, or not replicated at all, or otherwise, a mutation occurs.\nWhatever the case, the process here is of copying behavior in order to replicate the meme in the brain of the second person, which then causes behavior and so on as we see.\nDavid goes on to write.\nEach of the two forms has to be copied, specifically translated into the other form, in each meme generation.\nMemes generations are simply successive instances of copying to another individual.\nTechnology can add further stages to a meme's life cycle.\nFor instance, the behavior may be to write something down, thus embodying the meme in a third physical form, which may later cause a person who reads it to enact other behavior, which then causes the meme to appear in someone's brain.\nBut all memes must have at least two physical forms.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=2638"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cf7d99ea-96c0-4748-9e5b-8598e69bc356": {"page_content": "Memes generations are simply successive instances of copying to another individual.\nTechnology can add further stages to a meme's life cycle.\nFor instance, the behavior may be to write something down, thus embodying the meme in a third physical form, which may later cause a person who reads it to enact other behavior, which then causes the meme to appear in someone's brain.\nBut all memes must have at least two physical forms.\nIn contrast, for genes, the replicator exists in one physical form, the DNA strand of a germ cell, even though it may be copied to other locations in the organism, translated into RNA and expressed as behavior.\nNone of those forms is a replicator.\nThe idea that the behavior might be a replicator is a form of Lamarckism.\nSince it implies, the behaviors that had been modified by circumstances would be inherited.\nBecause of the alternating forms of a meme, it has to survive two different and potentially unrelated mechanisms of selection in every generation.\nThe brain memory form has to cause the holder to enact the behavior, and the behavior form has to cause the new recipient to remember it and to enact it.\nSo for example, although religions prescribe behaviors such as educating one's children to adopt the religion, the mere intention to transmit a meme to one's children, or anyone else is quite insufficient to make that happen.\nThat is why the overwhelming majority of attempts to start in your religion fail, even if the founder members try hard to propagate it.\nIn such cases, what has happened is that an idea that people have adopted has succeeded in causing them to enact various behaviors.\nIncluding one's intended to cause their children and others to do the same, but the behavior has failed to cause the same idea to be stored in the minds of those recipients.\nThe existence of long-lived religions is sometimes explained from the premise that children are gullible, or that they are easily frightened by tales of the supernatural.\nBut that is not the explanation.\nThe overwhelming majority of ideas simply did not have what it takes to persuade, or frighten, or cajole, or otherwise cause, children or anyone else into doing the same to other people.\nIf establishing a faithfully replicating meme with that easy, the whole adult population in our society would be proficient at algebra, thanks to the efforts made to teach it to them when they were children.\nTo be exact, they would all be proficient, algebra, teachers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=2777"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "edf2b5fe-5389-4137-bc81-1ad6949603ab": {"page_content": "But that is not the explanation.\nThe overwhelming majority of ideas simply did not have what it takes to persuade, or frighten, or cajole, or otherwise cause, children or anyone else into doing the same to other people.\nIf establishing a faithfully replicating meme with that easy, the whole adult population in our society would be proficient at algebra, thanks to the efforts made to teach it to them when they were children.\nTo be exact, they would all be proficient, algebra, teachers.\nTo be a meme, an idea has to contain quite sophisticated knowledge of how to cause humans to do at least two independent things, assimilate the meme faithfully and enact it.\nThat some memes can replicate themselves with great fidelity for many generations is a token of how much knowledge they contain, pause their, my reflection, and also the end of this episode.\nThis is going to be a multi-episode treatment of this chapter, because it is so dense, and there are new ideas.\nDavid Deutsch has contributed to our understanding of memes in many interesting ways.\nThis exposition, this explanation that he has given about the way in which memes are transmitted, is sometimes poorly understood.\nThis idea that they need to first cause behaviors in people, which then cause others to gain that idea, to gain that meme inside of their mind, inside of their brain, and then to enact those behaviors as well, to pass them on.\nAs he says there, certain ideas are not very good at this, so teaching everyone at school algebra doesn't have the result of making everyone very good at algebra.\nThere's something going wrong there, that those ideas tend not to have what it takes.\nWe don't have lots of people proficient at algebra, moreover, we don't have lots of people proficient at algebra, teaching out there, because that teaching of algebra meme isn't particularly robust.\nWhat does seem to be robust?.\nWhat is passed on from one year to the next is simply the existence of school, coercive compulsory type schooling that exists in many different countries around the world.\nThis idea that we all get our children into classrooms and sitting in rows, this meme is robust in many, many ways.\nIt is resistant to change, it has existed for centuries, and it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere soon.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=2888"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b501480a-9d93-49f5-8784-772cddfa6c6e": {"page_content": "Our recent experiences of many schools closing down, and I had some thoughts that this will reveal to some extent to some people the poverty of the schooling system as it exists right now, and that if everyone had their children at home learning behind a computer screen, in animal free and perhaps fun for the student way, after all they're at home, after all they're probably talking to their friends via the computer, and they're not being forced to turn up to lessons at a particular time, in a particular place, they have more time during the day.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=3036"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "388ea30e-2be0-4418-9248-1298be6fb0f5": {"page_content": "Perhaps those students, those parents, perhaps even the teachers, would start to think there's a better way of doing things.\nWell in fact it turns out that that's not the case, that many, many people in the system seem to revert back as soon as possible to going back into the classroom, and so this meme of this is the way in which we teach our young people, we treat young people, is resistant to change for reasons that I won't get into now, but clearly there is this idea that causes behavior of turning up to school, of encouraging people to go to school, of indeed enforcing the attendance at school from people.\nThese ideas causing these behaviors seem to have no end in sight at the moment, and some people see them as very virtuous and of course that's one reason that they would propagate is because we see that as an extremely virtuous thing, wrong though that might be for some of us to think.\nOkay, until next time when we move on to more about memes, you can perhaps look forward to some of my other shorter bite-size introductions to Karl Popper and David Deutsch.\nUntil then, thank you.\nThank you once more to my Patreons.\nI've gotten a couple more Patreons, I've lost a couple of Patreons, the numbers seem to go up and down, but there's a gradual increase and that's lovely to see, and I'm very grateful to anyone who wishes to contribute to ToKCast.\nIf you're watching this on YouTube, then you may not be aware that there are additional episodes that are audio-only, if you search for ToKCast, T-OK, C-A-S-T on Apple iTunes or wherever else you get your podcast.\nOn the other hand, if you're an audio-only listener, then you may not be aware there is a YouTube version of this which has some visuals and for some episodes more than others, the visuals, I think, help some of the explanations.\nOnce more, thank you again for any support at all.\nI'm Patreon, or PayPal, and links to those on my website www.brethal.com.\nThanks again, and bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzd7Q_fljwM&t=3080"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d710190a-4cb4-45af-8309-bdcbe76239a2": {"page_content": "Hello, and welcome to episode 22 of ToKCast.\nAnd today it's an audio-only podcast, there's no video for this one.\nIt's basically about another esoteric area of philosophy, one of my more favourite papers that David Deutsch has published over the years.\nThe logic of experimental tests, particularly of Everretian quantum theory, that was a 2016 paper that David published.\nDavid is very much the intellectual heir of Pop-Bart, so in this episode, not only am I going to be discussing that paper with a few little embellishments of my own, but also going back to have a look at what Pop-A said about many of the same issues, obviously Pop-A wasn't talking about Everretian quantum theory, he didn't understand that he wasn't aware of it, he did struggle to try and understand quantum theory himself and fail to do so.\nNonetheless, the material here about the kinds of experiments that exist in science and how science makes progress really find their seed in Pop-A's work very early on as well, right back to his first book, back in 1934, I think it was the logic of scientific discovery, so we'll come back to that at some point.\nSo this episode is somewhat a standalone episode, but it's also going to serve as an introduction to chapter 11, the multiverse, which is the next video and the next podcast that I'll be doing.\nThat's going to spread over at least three more episodes, it's going to be quite a big one, I want to be able to explain lots of the experiments that force us to realise that classical physics just won't cut it in order to explain what's really going on.\nNow the multiverse, which does explain what's happening in these experiments that I'll be discussing, turns out to be a testable physics theory, it's not an unfulcifiable interpretation as it's often claimed to be.\nEven some physicists who purport to support the multiverse as the way of understanding what happens in quantum mechanical experiments say the multiverse is unfulcifiable, which seems to me to be a contradiction in terms, after all, if the results of those experiments were otherwise, there'd be no reason to invoke the multiverse in the first place.\nI've heard all sorts of prominent physicists go so far as to say that the whole principle of falsificationism as explained by Popper is obsolete because the quantum multiverse exists or perhaps other multiverse exists.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9d21b483-107a-4456-98fd-66e73e6baa0c": {"page_content": "I've heard all sorts of prominent physicists go so far as to say that the whole principle of falsificationism as explained by Popper is obsolete because the quantum multiverse exists or perhaps other multiverse exists.\nAnd because those other multiverse exists, but aren't testable, then we can jettison the falsifiability criterion, sometimes people who follow Popper in this regard about the falsifiability criterion, sidelined as paparazzi.\nAs a fan of Popper, I'm yet to come across these people myself.\nYou can tell people who haven't really read Popper, they are prone to say things like Popper didn't understand, you cannot categorically refute a theory in science, or he didn't realize that falsification isn't so straightforward.\nThe problem with this is that Popper wrote many, many books on this topic.\nHe didn't merely blog or tweet, he wrote hundreds of thousands of words basically about critical rationalism, epistemology, as applied to everything.\nHe considered very many angles that people could object to falsification from.\nHe encountered critics in his long life and he responded to them, few stones were left unturned.\nWhy he elicits such casual dismissal among some remains a mystery.\nWhatever the case, falsification, or another way of putting this, the experiment is a crucial aspect of science.\nI should be a little bit clearer.\nThe crucial experiment is a crucial aspect of science, and we'll be talking today about two different kinds of experiment that do exist in science.\nThere's the crucial kind, the crucial test being, as David describes it, the centerpiece of scientific experimentation.\nCrucial experiments can be conducted that would, if the results were just so, falsify quantum theory, or at least make it problematic.\nPeople who try to reject falsificationism in science tend to never to grapple with this idea of the crucial experiment that could merely make a theory problematic.\nDavid is explained two ways the multiverse can be tested.\nFirstly, against so-called collapse interpretations.\nAnd secondly, against rival theories that purport that not everything that can happen does happen.\nSo I'll make some remarks about that first thing, against so-called collapse interpretations today, but we'll basically be concentrating on the latter, that a crucial experiment would be able to decide between the everything that can happen does happen idea, and the idea from classical physics that basically only one thing ever does happen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=138"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2edb095-37c0-41e1-a393-8057bc5290aa": {"page_content": "Firstly, against so-called collapse interpretations.\nAnd secondly, against rival theories that purport that not everything that can happen does happen.\nSo I'll make some remarks about that first thing, against so-called collapse interpretations today, but we'll basically be concentrating on the latter, that a crucial experiment would be able to decide between the everything that can happen does happen idea, and the idea from classical physics that basically only one thing ever does happen.\nAnd an everything that could possibly happen actually does happen in physical reality is another term for ever eddy and quantum theory or the multiverse.\nForcification in many ways is just a very simple idea, but for many philosophers and scientists, it seems too difficult an idea.\nand so they want to jettison it.\nOn social media, we often find people rediscovering the Duhamquine thesis, and we'll be talking about that today too.\nNow the paper that David wrote in 2016, the logic of experimental tests.\n, I think that if you're really interested in the philosophy of science or epistemology more broadly, then you really should read this.\nIt should be required reading for you.\nYet it is hard going in places, and if you don't have a physics background, you might stumble over some of the nomenclature and some of the other formalism that's in the paper.\nBut you can read it more or less by ignoring those few pieces of mathematical jargon and quantum physics stuff that's in it.\nWhat I want to do here is try and denude the paper of some of its jargon and attempt, however poorly, to try and reconstruct some of the arguments.\nI'm going to quote somewhat from the paper today, not hugely lengthy quoting, so that you can get a flavour of how clearly David writes about these issues.\nI really do think, however, there's no substitute for reading the original paper, but it's absolutely seminal work, and do consult the original paper as linked to on my website.\nI'll have a link to that also here in the podcast.\nSome of the material in the paper can, of course, be found elsewhere, particularly in David's previous works, The Fabric of Reality, back in 1997, and The Beginning of Infinity in 2011.\nHowever, there's much that's new in this paper, and it supplements and is supplemented by those books.\nAnd some excellent clarifications of key points in the philosophy of science, and as one may guess from the title, the actual role of the experiment in the sciences.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=258"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d7c81ba-ed08-4044-a6ec-98012d8fe769": {"page_content": "Some of the material in the paper can, of course, be found elsewhere, particularly in David's previous works, The Fabric of Reality, back in 1997, and The Beginning of Infinity in 2011.\nHowever, there's much that's new in this paper, and it supplements and is supplemented by those books.\nAnd some excellent clarifications of key points in the philosophy of science, and as one may guess from the title, the actual role of the experiment in the sciences.\nAlthough the central concern of the paper is a defence of the role of explanation in science, and so an explanation both of explanation itself and the purpose of experimental tests in science.\nAnother crucial point emphasise throughout the paper, despite David's books and comments on the topic, is how quantum theory is fully deterministic.\nDespite what passes for high school and undergraduate teachings on the subject, and what one finds in popular books and documentaries, name and text, quantum theory is not a theory about how the world is governed by laws that are probabilistic.\nAll laws that bring true objective randomness into the world.\nIn fact, there are no truly random processes.\nThere may be subjective randomness.\nWe may not have information within our universe to know what's going to happen next.\nThat's subjective randomness.\nBut it's all explained by purely deterministic laws.\nEverything is determined by the quantum mechanical laws of motion, in the general theory of relativity.\nAnd those laws of motion specify that what is observed to occur happens because of everything else that happens in physical reality.\nThat is to say, the laws of quantum theory predict that prior to an observation, everything physically possible actually occurs.\nAnd all those occurrences come to bear upon the outcome that you do observe, indeed not merely prior to the observation, but during and after the observation, whatever is physically possible and can happen at those times does happen.\nNecessarily an observer finds themselves only in one universe and therefore observing only one thing, not many things simultaneously.\nNow, to my mind, this should be no more mysterious than that observers necessarily only ever experience a particularly instant in time as well.\nThey never experience many times simultaneously.\nAlthough they know that the past must have happened and that the future will come and that the past and future are just as real as the present, the observer can only possibly at any given moment experience the present.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=266"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90b1dc30-db41-4dd0-aedf-c97a7fa071d2": {"page_content": "Necessarily an observer finds themselves only in one universe and therefore observing only one thing, not many things simultaneously.\nNow, to my mind, this should be no more mysterious than that observers necessarily only ever experience a particularly instant in time as well.\nThey never experience many times simultaneously.\nAlthough they know that the past must have happened and that the future will come and that the past and future are just as real as the present, the observer can only possibly at any given moment experience the present.\nNow another way of looking at this, and I'm taking this from an interview that David gave, and I'll link to that interview in the notes of this podcast, is about trying to just see an object in space.\nSo if we imagine a statue about which a person can walk and view from any angle, and any instant the person might be found north of the statue, or south of it or west, or south west, or any position in a 360 degree space around the statue, what they cannot do is experience more than one's perspective on the statue simultaneously, but not without technology anyway.\nI can't view it from the north and the south, say.\nThis is hardly a deep philosophical problem.\nWe must stand somewhere with respect to the statue if we wish to view it, even from above we cannot see it all, unless and until we move, some places on the statue are hidden from us.\nYet we know those places that remain hidden are just as real as the places we are observing at some given instance.\nWithout those parts, the statue would perhaps topple or collapse upon itself depending upon how large and massive a structure it was.\nWhat you are able to see depends entirely on what you cannot see, if it's a real and complete statue or not a hollowed cast, say, and we are not otherwise deceived, and this is easy to check if we just continued to change our perspective.\nSo it is with quantum theory, what happens in the two slit experiment, for example, with single particles, is that all the possible parts taken through the apparatus each time a particle is fired at it, but we necessarily only ever see one.\nWhen we know the other possible parts really do exist, because if you repeat the experiment often enough, you will eventually approximate all those other parts.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=486"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "42662e95-46a2-41a5-9137-c41eccb0562d": {"page_content": "So it is with quantum theory, what happens in the two slit experiment, for example, with single particles, is that all the possible parts taken through the apparatus each time a particle is fired at it, but we necessarily only ever see one.\nWhen we know the other possible parts really do exist, because if you repeat the experiment often enough, you will eventually approximate all those other parts.\nLike slowly walking around the statue to gain a different perspective, David uses the statue analogy to resolve some of the mystery about the nature of time, the subjective consciousness of an observer must experience only the present moment and not the present past and future simultaneously, for much the same reason that the statue viewer sees only one angle of the statue at a time.\nI'm using that analogy here in an attempt to convey that if you take seriously what the Schr\u00f6dinger wave equation predicts about reality, then all physically possible events actually occur even if you only ever experience one tiny slice of that reality at any given moment.\nThe statue analogy actually shows how deep this idea of the observer having a particular perspective on reality runs, and it must have something to do with how quantum theory, which explains how an observer finds themselves only in every one universe, is going to be united with the general theory of relativity, which explains how time is related to space and that times are just specially cases of universes.\nThe single perspective on the greater whole that any observer necessarily has is at once a very simple common sense and true way in which we understand the space and events around us, but it should also be the way in which we understand better the nature of time and the nature of so-called parallel universes, not actually parallel because they can interfere.\nNow, let me turn to a little bit of quoting from the original paper that David wrote, and I'll make some further remarks along the way.\nSo David wrote, In this paper, I shall be concerned with the part of the scientific methodology that deals with experimental testing, but note that experimental testing is not the primary method of finding fault with theories.\nThe overwhelming majority of theories or modifications to theories that are consistent with existing evidence are never tested by experiment.\nThey are rejected as bad explanations.\nExperimental testing cells are primarily about explanation too.\nThey are precisely attempts to locate flaws in a theory by creating new explicander of which the theory may turn out to be a bad explanation.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, so my remarks on that.\nThis is a key theme in the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=595"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82340fb4-ee57-4239-8d52-194faff4a3b9": {"page_content": "The overwhelming majority of theories or modifications to theories that are consistent with existing evidence are never tested by experiment.\nThey are rejected as bad explanations.\nExperimental testing cells are primarily about explanation too.\nThey are precisely attempts to locate flaws in a theory by creating new explicander of which the theory may turn out to be a bad explanation.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, so my remarks on that.\nThis is a key theme in the beginning of infinity.\nThe idea that science is all about experiments is a misconception, probably handed to culture by the education system.\nIndeed, it is the case that experiments are necessary in science, but they are far from sufficient and although crucial, not central to the whole project, the purpose of science is explanation.\nNot experiments.\nDavid's about to come to two different types of experiments that are performed and the purpose of those experiments, but it is vital here to notice the point.\nBad theories or silly ideas that purport to be about the physical world do not need to be tested to be shown worthless.\nThat could be dismissed outright as bad explanations without it ever being tested.\nThis point was made in the fabric of reality with the so-called grass cure thought experiment.\nIf a herbalist comes to you and says that eating one kilogram of grass is a cure for the common cold, what is the reasonable response?.\nWell of course it is to reject the suggestion, but on what basis?.\nSurely not that it is untestable because it is.\nYou could eat a kilogram of grass if you want to, but who would ever bother doing that?.\nWhat is truly missing from the grass cure theory is any explanation.\nHow on earth is the theory supposed to work?.\nUnless the herbalist can give an answer that is a good explanation that explains how the one kilogram of grass actually interacts with, let's say, viruses and destroys them or otherwise is able to alleviate symptoms, then we know we have an explanationless theory.\nAnd if they do, and this is key, such an explanation must be able to account for why it's exactly one kilogram and not 0.9 kilograms or 1.1 kilograms or any other of the infinite number of other explanations.\nOf course, I'm just noting here that many herbalists are like, do suggest something akin to grass cures, and they do attempt explanations, but they never good explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=713"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5497a31f-8b6b-4e4a-8340-4e2ae836e6ae": {"page_content": "And if they do, and this is key, such an explanation must be able to account for why it's exactly one kilogram and not 0.9 kilograms or 1.1 kilograms or any other of the infinite number of other explanations.\nOf course, I'm just noting here that many herbalists are like, do suggest something akin to grass cures, and they do attempt explanations, but they never good explanations.\nThey're often nonsense, they conflict with some other actual piece of science, so if you just think about homeopathy, for example, the idea that water remembers things that was once diluted in it, so it remembers certain kinds of medicine once diluted in it, although apparently it forgets the sewage that was also once in it.\nThis conflicts with the idea that chemicals are the agents that can actually do pharmacological work, and not vibration or other such nonsense like that.\nOkay, let me go back to David's paper and David writes, quote, scientific methodology in turn does not, nor could it validly provide criteria for accepting a theory, conjecture, and the correction of apparent errors and deficiencies are the only processes at work.\nAnd just as the objective of science isn't to find evidence that justifies theories as true or probable, so the objective of the methodology of science isn't to find rules which, if followed, are guaranteed or likely to identify true theories as true.\nThere can be no such rules, a methodology is itself merely a philosophical theory.\nA convention, as Popper in 1959 put it, actually proposed, that has been conjectured to solve philosophical problems and is subject to criticism for how well or badly it seems to do that.\nThere cannot be an argument that certifies it as true or probable any more than there can be for scientific theories, end quote.\nSo there David is pointing out that in the same way that we can't prove as true scientific theories, we can't prove as true philosophical theories either.\nWe can't show as true this entire idea about demarcating science from non-science using the falsification criterion.\nIt's the wrong question, you know, how do you know that the falsification criterion is actually true?.\nWell, that undermines the whole idea of critical rationalism, where it's all about finding errors.\nYou'd need to find out what's wrong with the falsification criterion.\nJust more broadly on that point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "12c490fc-fb5e-4082-aa4d-b6df9ce7ab8c": {"page_content": "We can't show as true this entire idea about demarcating science from non-science using the falsification criterion.\nIt's the wrong question, you know, how do you know that the falsification criterion is actually true?.\nWell, that undermines the whole idea of critical rationalism, where it's all about finding errors.\nYou'd need to find out what's wrong with the falsification criterion.\nJust more broadly on that point.\nThis is one of the most contentious pieces of philosophy that Karl Popper and David Deutscher indeed any perperian or critical rationalist proposes about how science works.\nIt's poorly understood and the opposing worldview is still very much the dominant philosophy of science, even though it's completely false.\nThe false idea, subscribed almost universally by scientists philosophers and laymen alike, is that science somehow provides a way of demonstrating that certain theories are true or close to true or probably true and moreover that the more one gathers evidence for some theory called that theory T, then the more likely T is to be true.\nWhat David following Popper is saying here is that there is no such process as that.\nThere is no method in science, no set of rules to follow that can demonstrate theories as either true or probably true and no method in philosophy for that matter to demonstrate that philosophical theories are true or probably true.\nThe whole purpose of science is not to support theories with evidence.\nThis is a complete misconception.\nThe truth is that science is about correcting errors in our explanations.\nThis is a completely different view of science to what most people have.\nNow some admittedly have read a little bit of Popper or maybe some of David Deutscher but are afraid or perhaps confused about fully taking the step to actually appreciate the significance of this.\nNow the reason I say afraid is because it seems to me that some have the concern if they too strongly endorse even a correct theory like this one might seem dogmatic.\nSo often people profess to partly support Popper that falsification is kind of a good idea.\nbut sometimes we still need confirmations.\nYou can't mix popularian critical rationalism and falsifiability with any kind of confirmation or Bayesianism.\nThey don't mesh together and reading Popper really illustrates this quite well because Popper's entire philosophy is about rejecting the idea that we can be true or probably true theories.\nSo there's no way in which we can simultaneously endorse Popper's idea of rejecting true and probably true theories while simultaneously accepting the possibility of true or probably true theories.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=936"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1a8ce6c7-2e23-4b13-99ca-e827cdf91b06": {"page_content": "but sometimes we still need confirmations.\nYou can't mix popularian critical rationalism and falsifiability with any kind of confirmation or Bayesianism.\nThey don't mesh together and reading Popper really illustrates this quite well because Popper's entire philosophy is about rejecting the idea that we can be true or probably true theories.\nSo there's no way in which we can simultaneously endorse Popper's idea of rejecting true and probably true theories while simultaneously accepting the possibility of true or probably true theories.\nThis would be a perversion of logic.\nThis would simply upset the law of the excluded middle.\nThings cannot both be true and not true simultaneously.\nI'm just observing that there are many smart people and you prominently smart people who struggle to grapple with the centrality of what science is even all about.\nNow many science today do not want to call themselves Popurians or critical rationalists which means they do not want to endorse the idea that science is not about supporting theories with evidence and so they call themselves empiricists or sometimes Bayesian's these days.\nNow I've got a detailed critique of Bayesianism as a philosophy of science or as an epistemology and you can just google my name, Brett Hall, Bayesian epistemology.\nand it will bring up an article about that.\nJust in brief however, a Bayesian is essentially someone who thinks that repeatedly observing a phenomena allows them to build up a probability that a particular theory is true.\nSo they can assign a number between 0% and 100% that a given theory is true or something like that.\nSo if the result of an experiment continues to come out the same way, the number, the probability number, climbs closer and closer to 100%, but perhaps it can never reach 100%, maybe these people are fallibleists, they don't think you can be 100% certain but you can asymptotically approach that 100% number.\nIf you're just interested in probably true theories, perhaps 90% is okay or 95%.\nOr perhaps 99.99999% at the five sigma confidence level if you understand what that means.\nPeople in physics especially, astrophysics in particular make a big deal about the five sigma confidence level.\nBut one need only consider the question, what probability would a Bayesian have assigned to Newton's theory of gravity being true at any time prior to what's having been found false?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=1058"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50acc65a-b21b-44af-aa81-063045945595": {"page_content": "If you're just interested in probably true theories, perhaps 90% is okay or 95%.\nOr perhaps 99.99999% at the five sigma confidence level if you understand what that means.\nPeople in physics especially, astrophysics in particular make a big deal about the five sigma confidence level.\nBut one need only consider the question, what probability would a Bayesian have assigned to Newton's theory of gravity being true at any time prior to what's having been found false?.\nNow if a scientist were actually a Bayesian in the year 1900 say, then it would seem that every experiment ever devised to test Newton's theory of gravity always corroborated it.\nNewton's theory correctly predicted the outcome of every well-designed and executed test prior to it and up to and including the year 1900 and maybe a little bit later.\nA Bayesian could do statistics on any prediction you like and generate some number and the number would be pushing the ceiling of the magic 100%.\nNewton's theory of gravity according to that philosophy of science would be very, very, very close to being certainly true and yet ultimately it was shown to be false.\nIt was shown false by a crucial experiment on May 29, 1919 by the great physicist Arthur Edington who measured the amount of light by which star light was bent as it passed by the sun during a solar eclipse Newton's theory predicted one number, Einstein's another.\nThe amount of bending was in agreement with Einstein's theory of general relativity but not in agreement with Newton.\nNewton's theory was then refuted so far from being very, very close to true because of all the experiments that it had ever predicted the outcomes of up until then accurately it was shown false by a crucial test that pitted it against arrival.\nNow general relativity is in the same position that Newton's was prior to around 1900.\nBut it's not probably true or true or anything like that.\nIt contains some truth and more truth than Newton's which was closer to true than any random guess would be but in neither case can we say that the theory is true, only that it contains some truth.\nWe don't know what truth that is and it doesn't matter anyway.\nThe theories can be used to help us control reality around us by making predictions and helping us to create technology to solve our problems at any time, however, to paraphrase Thomas Huxley, the beautiful theory could be slain by some ugly fact.\nIndeed, we have to expect that it will be at some point general relativity is at odds with quantum theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=1158"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8a87b47a-88ea-482d-afe6-6668ab37b951": {"page_content": "We don't know what truth that is and it doesn't matter anyway.\nThe theories can be used to help us control reality around us by making predictions and helping us to create technology to solve our problems at any time, however, to paraphrase Thomas Huxley, the beautiful theory could be slain by some ugly fact.\nIndeed, we have to expect that it will be at some point general relativity is at odds with quantum theory.\nThey are mutually incompatible for reasons that I won't go into now beyond the scope of my present piece, but in brief, the dispute might come down to a disagreement about whether the most fundamental parts of reality consist of discrete or continuous quantities.\nDavid has said in other places and I agree, it will be far better if we had all decided to call scientific theories scientific misconceptions to remind ourselves of how tentative they are and that they will one day be superseded by some better misconception, back to quoting David's paper.\nExpectations apply only to some physical events, not to the truth or falsity of propositions in general, and particularly not to scientific theories.\nIf we have any expectations about those, it should be that even our best and most fundamental theories are false.\nFor example, since quantum theory in general relativity are inconsistent with each other, we know that at least one of them is false, presumably both, and since they are required to be testable explanations, one or both must be inadequate for some phenomena, yet since there is currently no single rival theory with a good explanation for all the expletander of either of them, we rightly expect their predictions to be borne out in any currently proposed experiment.\nEnd quote.\nJust my exposition on that.\nIn other words, although we know at least one, but presumably both of our best deeper theories of physics are false, there's no rival theory out there to replace them that can do the job of both just as well.\nAnd we must just recall that when we were a few to theory, we did not discard every single part of the theory.\nAs a rule, very much is preserved, a short example from astronomy will suffice.\nTollamy explained that the universe was geocentric, an arrangement where the Earth was the center orbited by a smaller spheres and circles.\nCopernicus theoretically did away with parts of this.\nHe replaced the Earth with the Sun, but he kept the circular orbits.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "65360f00-ab44-44c3-ac45-4596617bb180": {"page_content": "And we must just recall that when we were a few to theory, we did not discard every single part of the theory.\nAs a rule, very much is preserved, a short example from astronomy will suffice.\nTollamy explained that the universe was geocentric, an arrangement where the Earth was the center orbited by a smaller spheres and circles.\nCopernicus theoretically did away with parts of this.\nHe replaced the Earth with the Sun, but he kept the circular orbits.\nHe kept the likewise came and replaced the circles with ellipses and then Galileo used observation to show how the Sun centered model was superior and that there were objects orbiting Jupiter.\nNewton then provided a universal physical law in mathematical form, allowing orbits to be precisely predicted and finally Einstein showed how Newton's law was a good approximation to a better theory of the behavior of spacetime, which explained why the paths around the Sun were how they were.\nBut each new improvement preserved much of the past and crucially the idea, for example, that the orbits were actually occurring, even if what was orbiting what and why changed as things improved.\nSo, refutation of a previously good theory, whether experimental or not, does not do away wholesale with everything that was valuable in the theory.\nIt preserves much, although ultimately demonstrating how the theory is fatally flawed, and therefore ultimately false, with the proviso, as David mentions in a sectional about to quote, that theories are never entirely logically contradicted by some experimental observation, but this is a technical point we can return to later.\nWe also might observe here that people often object to the quantum multiverse idea on the basis that, well, the next theory that replaces quantum theory and relativity might do away with the parallel universes.\nI would find this as unlikely as the next theory of gravity, doing away with orbits, or the next theory of genetics doing away with DNA.\nMore likely, that part of the theoretical apparatus will be retained.\nSo, DNA will be retained as in whatever the successor to genetics is going to be, or but will be retained in whatever the successor to the best gravitational theory will be, and what if the successor to quantum theory will be, will retain the idea of many universes?.\nBack to the paper, short quote from David.\nHe writes, quote, a test of a theory is an experiment whose result could make the theory problematic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=1411"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b66462bd-4cf7-4231-a8dd-2bc1e3187e84": {"page_content": "More likely, that part of the theoretical apparatus will be retained.\nSo, DNA will be retained as in whatever the successor to genetics is going to be, or but will be retained in whatever the successor to the best gravitational theory will be, and what if the successor to quantum theory will be, will retain the idea of many universes?.\nBack to the paper, short quote from David.\nHe writes, quote, a test of a theory is an experiment whose result could make the theory problematic.\nA crucial test, the centerpiece of scientific experimentation, can, on this view, take place only when there are at least two good explanations of the same explicandum.\nGood that is, apart from the fact of each other's existence.\nIdeally, it is an experiment such that every possible result will make all, but one of those theories problematic, in which case the others will have been tentatively refuted.\nEnd quote.\nNow, this is an amazingly important and clear articulation of what experiments are.\nExperiments test theories, but what can the results do?.\nWell, interestingly, if the result of an experiment conflicts with a theory, it does not necessarily rule out a theory.\nSo, take, for example, the more or less frequent media hype that can surround certain high-energy physics observations that are reported, quite often, as Einstein proved false.\nPerhaps one of the more famous examples was about an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.\nYou can Google this one, where neutrinos, these little particles, apparently exceeded the speed of light, and that violated special relativity.\nHowever, it turned out there was a cable incorrectly connected or some such.\nNow, the results were actually false.\nThe results of the experiment were false.\nBut even if the results were true, even if the neutrinos were exceeding the speed of light, this would not prove Einstein false, or possibly cause us to reject relativity theory.\nWhat it would do is make relativity theory problematic.\nRelativity theory would still be the best theory about how fast things can move and what happens to things as they move relative to one another.\nSo a test of a theory, an experiment, even if it disagrees with the best theory going, is not a reason to reject that theory.\nAfter all, if you reject that theory, then what theory should you use?.\nThe second best theory is almost never a second best theory.\nBut even if there were, that second best theory is second best for a good set of reasons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8ebbff66-f470-4934-adbc-612d57d05416": {"page_content": "So a test of a theory, an experiment, even if it disagrees with the best theory going, is not a reason to reject that theory.\nAfter all, if you reject that theory, then what theory should you use?.\nThe second best theory is almost never a second best theory.\nBut even if there were, that second best theory is second best for a good set of reasons.\nAnd if those reasons include things like, it cannot explain phenomena A, B, C, D, and F, while the first best theory can, then there still won't be a reason to turn to that theory in place of the first best.\nThere is only one way.\nAn experimental test of a theory can result in us rejecting our best explanation.\nAnd that is when we actually have an equally best rival theory that explains everything our other best theory does, plus it explains the outcome of the new experimental test.\nThis kind of experiment is called a crucial test.\nIt is that rare type of test, like Eddington's observation, the bending of light, that allows us to decide between two theories that make incompatible predictions about the outcome of the test.\nBut that otherwise are, until that moment, equally able to account for all other phenomena.\nAs it is now, of course, general relativity is able to account for far, far more than the mere bending of starlight during eclipses over what Newton's theory can.\nNewton's universal gravity, as brilliant as it is, it could get people to the moon, is left in the distant dust by Einstein's general relativity.\nWho could not only get us to the moon if we wanted to, but it also gave us GPS.\nIt explained neutron stars, predicted the existence of black holes, which were observed, in much more besides, none of which Newton's theory comes close to accomplishing.\nDavid writes in the next section, quote, the existence of a problem with a theory has little import besides, as I said, informing research programs.\nUnless both the new and the old, explicander are well explained by our rival theory.\nIn that case, the problem becomes grounds for considering the problematic theory tentatively refuted.\nEnd quote.\nSo what David's done there is de-emphasizing the supposed centrality of the experiment to the whole project of science, scientists acknowledge creation in the form of bold explanations, machine.\nThe genuinely difficult part is positing grand explanations for what's actually going on in the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "947d063f-2483-4133-aeb8-a2d5f29d3227": {"page_content": "Unless both the new and the old, explicander are well explained by our rival theory.\nIn that case, the problem becomes grounds for considering the problematic theory tentatively refuted.\nEnd quote.\nSo what David's done there is de-emphasizing the supposed centrality of the experiment to the whole project of science, scientists acknowledge creation in the form of bold explanations, machine.\nThe genuinely difficult part is positing grand explanations for what's actually going on in the world.\nOf course, those explanations need to be testable, but if the explanations account for the phenomena and survive the tests, the explanation then becomes a central concern of all of civilization who can then go about using it, making practical use of that science.\nFor example, to create technology, trick disease, solve other problems, and so forth.\nAn experiment that disagrees with some great theory just makes the theory problematic.\nBut if we did find some experiment that, for example, could not be explained by quantum theory, say, or seem to refute quantum theory, that would be a problem for quantum theory, but not a grounds for rejecting it.\nThe now problematic quantum theory would still be used to create technology, solve problems, essentially everyone would carry on more or less as before with the respect of the theory in regard as a genuine description of reality to some extent.\nBut there would be an unsolved problem.\nAnd once more, as David observed previously, and weren't about to get to as well, the problem might just be with the apparatus.\nAnd if it's not a problem with the apparatus, it could be a problem with us not understanding some subtlety of their theory, or it could be that the theory is genuinely not the best theory, because someone, somewhere, has just created something better, but is yet to publish it.\nAnd when they do, it will do all the quantum theory ever did, and explain the problematic result that quantum theory couldn't.\nAnd in that case, the test that created the problem in the first place now becomes a crucial test, as David writes, quote, in contrast, the traditional inductivist account of what happens when experiments raise a problem is, in summary, that from an apparent unexplained regularity, we are supposed to induce that the regularity is universal, or according to Bayesian inductivism, to increase our credence for those theories predicting that.\nWhile from an apparent irregularity, we are supposed not to drop the theory that had predicted the regularity, or to reduce our credence for it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "76061716-fcb0-4460-b31a-72bc0de53dc2": {"page_content": "While from an apparent irregularity, we are supposed not to drop the theory that had predicted the regularity, or to reduce our credence for it.\nSuch procedures would neither necessitate nor yield any explanation.\nEnd quote.\nThat's absolutely crucial.\nUnder the prevailing view of how science works.\nIf an experiment critically warns a theory such that it is once and for all falsified and so liable to be rejected, then where do we jump to?.\nIf we reject our best theory based upon an experimental refutation supposedly, and there's no rival, the process of rejection does not provide any new explanation for us, the negation of a theory is not a new theory, David has explained.\nAnd David writes, quote, in any experiment designed to test a scientific theory T, the prediction of the result expected in a T also depends upon other theories.\nBackground knowledge, including explanations of what the preparation of the experiment achieves, how the apparatus works and sources of error.\nNothing about the unmet expectation dictates whether T or any of those background knowledge assumptions was at fault.\nTherefore there is no such thing as an experimental result logically contradicting T, nor logically entailing a different credence for T. As David writes in a footnote in this paper, that is known as the Juham Quine thesis, Quine 1960.\nIt is true and must be distinguished from the Juham Quine problem, which is the misconception that scientific progress is therefore impossible or problematic.\nEnd quote.\nNow, when I first read that back in 2016, I was so excited because it was something new I learned about how to respond neatly to the Juham Quine thesis objections that are often raised, if anyone gets into discussions about proper and falsification.\nIt's usually the first thing that comes up.\nIt's usually the first objection that people have that upon learning the headline that pop are created, the demarcation criterion of falsification.\nAnd that if you falsify a theory, if you're able to falsify a theory with an experimental test, then you've got a way of distinguishing scientific type knowledge from other kinds of knowledge, like philosophical knowledge.\nYou can do experiments in science in order to show things are wrong.\nBut sometimes in philosophy, rather often, you can't.\nSometimes in maths, you can't.\nSometimes in morality, you can't.\nAnd in fact, in some of those places, it's undesirable to even try.\nShould we really try again to see if communism works?.\nI don't think so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40de5878-b355-4e16-9137-26655e21ab74": {"page_content": "You can do experiments in science in order to show things are wrong.\nBut sometimes in philosophy, rather often, you can't.\nSometimes in maths, you can't.\nSometimes in morality, you can't.\nAnd in fact, in some of those places, it's undesirable to even try.\nShould we really try again to see if communism works?.\nI don't think so.\nI think there's other reasons to reject it.\nWe don't need to experimentally test if next time all those people won't be massacred, or all those people won't starve.\nInstead, we can refute it based on argument.\nBut here, with respect that you have quine thesis, the thesis itself is correct.\nBut what many people assume follows from it is not.\nThe June quine thesis is, in my words, when an experiment is conducted, and the result disagrees with some theory t, then it's not logically the case that t must be false.\nLogically, it can always be the case that the experiment was conducted badly.\nThe method wasn't followed or the method was faulty in the first place.\nThe apparatus was faulty, or operated incorrectly, or some of the background assumptions were false.\nSo, some object, using this thesis, that there's no such thing as a crucial test because it might not be the theory t that's false, but rather it could be the experimental, the equipment that is incompetent.\nSure.\nSo far so good.\nBut David's point here is that poppers philosophy of science is the correct epistemology of how science generates knowledge, and although it can always logically be the case that an experimental error might be at root a reason for an apparently problematic observation.\nThis does not have any lasting effect on how science makes progress.\nScientific progress actually happens in spite of this.\nAs with the faster than light neutrinos, it might have been the case that the observation was a problem for relativity, or it might have been background assumptions in the form of badly connected cables.\nThat turned out to be the case, as June quine warned it always could be.\nAnd that had no bearing on the methodology of science.\nIndeed, it is the methodology of good science and uncover such problems in the first place, and I'll ask things to keep moving in the right direction.\nSo just to emphasize that again, the fact that a single experimental test apparently disagrees with your theory, so you've apparently observed something moving fast in the speed of light.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=1217"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "958c1b25-8b6d-4df1-a152-27492fbcbb4c": {"page_content": "That turned out to be the case, as June quine warned it always could be.\nAnd that had no bearing on the methodology of science.\nIndeed, it is the methodology of good science and uncover such problems in the first place, and I'll ask things to keep moving in the right direction.\nSo just to emphasize that again, the fact that a single experimental test apparently disagrees with your theory, so you've apparently observed something moving fast in the speed of light.\nAnd this is a problem for special relativity and general relativity.\nIt's a problem for an Einstein's relativity.\nSo what?.\nSo what?.\nContinue to repeat the experiment in many, many different ways, and you might just find out that your cables weren't connected correctly.\nAnd so you've used the critical method.\nYou've still used Poppurian epistemology.\nYou've been critical of the criticism.\nYou've criticized the criticism.\nThe criticism was, there's neutrinos, there's particles traveling fast in the speed of light, and this appears to be a problem for special relativity.\nWell, now let's criticize that observation.\nLet's see if that observation stands up to being repeated by many different teams around the world, or replicated by any other group of physicists.\nAnd if it's not, then the problem is not with relativity, the problems with your experiment.\nAnd that has been found by the method of falsification.\nWe've falsified the bad observation, back to quoting David, quote, but as I have said, an apparent failure of T's prediction is merely a problem.\nSo seeking an alternative to T is merely one possible approach to solving it.\nAnd although there are always countless logically consistent options for which theory to reject, the number of good explanations known for an explicandum is always small.\nThings are going very well when there are as many as two, with perhaps the opportunity for a crucial test, more typically it's one or zero.\nFor instance, when neutrinos recently appeared to violate a prediction of general relativity by exceeding the speed of light, no good explanation involving new laws of physics was in the event created.\nAnd the only good explanation turned out to be that a particular optical cable had been poorly attached.\nSee, Adam at all 2012 end quote.\nSo what I'd like to say about that is that forming theories to explain things adequately is very hard.\nIt is a highly creative process that takes understanding what seems to be happening in the world and how to communicate the idea clearly in a language others will understand.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=1217"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d5ab0d04-b933-41d0-a979-8ed04902098c": {"page_content": "And the only good explanation turned out to be that a particular optical cable had been poorly attached.\nSee, Adam at all 2012 end quote.\nSo what I'd like to say about that is that forming theories to explain things adequately is very hard.\nIt is a highly creative process that takes understanding what seems to be happening in the world and how to communicate the idea clearly in a language others will understand.\nSo this is not necessary.\nIt can require appreciating some of the current theories and what problems there are with them.\nIn short, it requires background knowledge and then lots of imagination.\nSo because of some of these factors, there is a poverty of good explanations in the world, but a proliferation of false and bad ones.\nNow here I just want to turn to a section of the paper that I won't quote, but instead we'll put into my own words about the special case of quantum theory.\nAnd this is really important and this is probably I guess the center of the bullseye as to why I'm doing this podcast now, because as I say, in the next three episodes of ToKCast, especially the video version, we're going to be talking about this.\nAnd so if you've got two explanations say, we've got explanation, capital E, and that's an explanation for everything happens.\nThe everything happens explanation.\nEverything possible happens, technically speaking, everything physically possible happens.\nSo let's call that E, it's a theory about what can possibly happen.\nSo the everything physically possible happens theory means that A happens and B happens and C happens and so on.\nAll these things actually happen, okay?.\nNow we're going to put that up against another theory, call that explanation.\nD. An explanation D only predicts that one thing happens, X.\nSo if that one thing that D predicts happens over and over and over again when you perform an experiment.\nWell, the interesting thing is that E, the everything possible happens theory, is not refuted by experiment because it also predicts that that thing should happen as well as everything else.\nBut what it cannot explain, and what E cannot explain is why only that thing should happen while D does explain why that one thing happens and only that one thing happens.\nSo although experiment can't refute E in that way, the fact it's a bad explanation does.\nOf course, if something else happens like B rather than X, then D is roundly refuted, but E is not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=2236"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e836910-53bd-4db9-af71-b3081df20969": {"page_content": "But what it cannot explain, and what E cannot explain is why only that thing should happen while D does explain why that one thing happens and only that one thing happens.\nSo although experiment can't refute E in that way, the fact it's a bad explanation does.\nOf course, if something else happens like B rather than X, then D is roundly refuted, but E is not.\nThe strange thing here is that even if X is observed every single time, which makes B apparently more accurate, E might still be actually true or closer to true.\nE might still be the best theory or closer to being the true theory.\nIt could just be a coincidence that X happens all the time, but that's a poor explanation.\nAnd this is why poor explanations might still be more true than good explanations, as David says at the very beginning of his paper, E could be augmented with G, where G explains why X has found to occur every single time.\nOkay, I'll quote a little bit of David here, and he writes, quote, thus, it is possible for an explanatory theory to be refuted by experimental results that are consistent with its predictions.\nIn particular, the everything possible happens interpretation of quantum theory, to which it has been claimed that ever writing in quantum theory is equivalent could be refuted in this way, provided as always that a suitable rival theory exists in.\nAnd hence it is testable after all.\nTherefore, the argument that ever writing in quantum theory is itself untestable fails at its first step, and I shall show in section 8 that it is in fact much more testable than any me everything possible happens theory.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, and just my remarks on that, as David's about to explain, in a quote I'm about to provide, but let me emphasize, the multiverse theory is testable, because it predicts that, for example, all possible paths are taken by particles through a double slit apparatus experiment.\nAnd that is exactly what we observe when we repeat the experiment again and again with lots of particles.\nIf the particles were instead just over and again striking the screen in one place, you know, point x, point x, point x, point x, the electrons are going through the double slit apparatus and just hitting the same point again and again and again, we could refute the everything possible happens multiverse theory, because strings like that are not expected, as David says, quote, this is because a string of repeated observations, like x, is not expected to happen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e02631f3-c11d-4240-90a4-9299e00335fc": {"page_content": "If the particles were instead just over and again striking the screen in one place, you know, point x, point x, point x, point x, the electrons are going through the double slit apparatus and just hitting the same point again and again and again, we could refute the everything possible happens multiverse theory, because strings like that are not expected, as David says, quote, this is because a string of repeated observations, like x, is not expected to happen.\nEven though it asserts that everything, including that string, actually does happen, this is no contradiction.\nBeing expected is a methodological attribute of a possible result, depending, for instance, on whether a good explanation for it exists, while happening is a factual one.\nWhat is an issue in this paper is not whether the properties expected to happen and will happen are consistent, but whether they can both follow from the same deterministic explanatory theory, in this case, e, under a reasonable scientific methodology.\nAnd I have just shown that they can end, quote, so that everyone would seem settles that the multiverse theory is testable.\nNow, I've got a few more little quotes here that I'll provide.\nI just might make a remark on the further testability of multiverse theory.\nNow, as far as I know, the first time it was published was in 1984 in a paper that David wrote, and in that paper he discussed an experiment that could be performed, an interference experiment using artificial intelligence technology.\nThis was also later published in a popular science book by Paul Davies, and I think it's John Brown, Julian Brown, and they wrote a book called The Ghost in the Machine, where they interviewed a wide variety of physicists about their understandings of quantum theory.\nThis is one of the first times I encountered David Deutsch, in fact.\nNow in that book, David also gives a lovely popular account of the experiment that could be performed that would refute all collapse theories, all other theories about quantum theory, all other interpretation of quantum theory, and not refute the multiverse version of quantum theory.\nOkay, but back to this paper for now, quote from David, quote, explanation itself cannot be defined unambiguously because, for instance, new modes of explanation can always be invented.\nFor example, Darwin's new mode of explanation did not involve predicting future species from past ones.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=2479"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89f36377-33e5-4266-b943-6c81944839b1": {"page_content": "Okay, but back to this paper for now, quote from David, quote, explanation itself cannot be defined unambiguously because, for instance, new modes of explanation can always be invented.\nFor example, Darwin's new mode of explanation did not involve predicting future species from past ones.\nDisagreeing about what is problematic or what counts as an explanation, will in general cause scientists to embark on different research projects, of which one or both may, if they seek it, there are no guarantees, provide evidence by both their standards that one or both of their theories are problematic.\nThere is no methodology that can validly guarantee, or promise with some probability, that following it will lead to true theories.\nAs demonstrated by countless examples of which quines is one.\nBut if one adopts this methodology for trying to eliminate flaws and deficiencies, then despite the opportunities for good faith disagreements that criteria, that the criteria is to allow one make seed in doing so.\nEnd quote.\nAnd I think that's really important.\nI have read some criticism of David's criterion for what constitutes a good explanation.\nThat being that hard to vary is not well defined.\nBut there we find a good response.\nNew types of explanations can always be created, not only simply new explanations, new types of explanation, new modes of explanation.\nAnd so a definition that is unambiguous could rule out legitimate explanations to come in the future.\nAnd so that's why hard to vary can't be constrained too much.\nWe're certainly after hard to vary explanations.\nBut if we make hard to vary too hard to vary, then we won't allow for new modes of explanation in the future.\nGoing back to quoting the paper from David, quote, we have become accustomed to the idea of physical quantities taking random values, with each possible value having a probability.\nBut the use of that idea in fundamental explanations in physics is inherently flawed, because statements are signing probabilities to events, or asserting that the events are random form with a deductively closed system from which no factual statement statements about what happens physically about those events follows, pappin out 2002.\nFor instance, one cannot identify probabilities with the actual frequencies and repeated experiments because they did not equal them in any finite number of repeats, and infinitely repeated experiments do not occur.\nIn any case, no statement about frequencies in an infinite set implies anything about a finite subset, unless it is a typical subset, but typically it's just another probabilistic concept, not a factual one, so that would be circular.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7f0dbc79-fdcf-44cf-be11-0fccd2a8a234": {"page_content": "For instance, one cannot identify probabilities with the actual frequencies and repeated experiments because they did not equal them in any finite number of repeats, and infinitely repeated experiments do not occur.\nIn any case, no statement about frequencies in an infinite set implies anything about a finite subset, unless it is a typical subset, but typically it's just another probabilistic concept, not a factual one, so that would be circular.\nHence notwithstanding it, they are called probabilities.\nThe pie in a stochastic theory will be purely decorative, and hence the theory would remain a mere something possible happens theory, where it not for a special methodological rule that is usually assumed implicitly.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, and so there David's talking about the physical reality or otherwise of probabilities, and he's done a wonderful lecture about this that can be found on his own website, and I think the constructive theory website about the physics of probability, I think it's called something like that.\nHe's quite right here about the philosophical difficulties of applying probabilities in real life.\nFor example, if we take a coin and it's a fair coin, a supposedly fair coin, and we're flipping it, now we expect to flip it out of 100 times and expect 50 times heads and 50 times tails.\nIt's very rare that that ever actually comes up, you get close to that, and you get asymptotically closer to the 50-50 over time, but you never get exactly 50-50, and we wouldn't expect in truth to get exactly 50-50, but rather something close to 50-50, you know, 47-53 or something like that, would still comport with our general understanding of probability, but in what way does probability refer to real life?.\nIf you're not getting exactly 50-50 every single time, you throw a fair coin 100 times, what does that mean?.\nWhat does it mean to say that it always comes up 50% heads and 50% tails when it doesn't?.\nIt means that, supposedly, one view of probability is if you were to throw it in infinite number of times, then 50% of those would be heads and 50% tails, but that's an unfulcifiable claim.\nIt's not a claim, but physical reality.\nIf you want to make a claim that physical reality, then the claim has to be testable, but you can't possibly test an infinite number of throws of the coin.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f793106e-f3ce-4307-b4ff-66b539422566": {"page_content": "It means that, supposedly, one view of probability is if you were to throw it in infinite number of times, then 50% of those would be heads and 50% tails, but that's an unfulcifiable claim.\nIt's not a claim, but physical reality.\nIf you want to make a claim that physical reality, then the claim has to be testable, but you can't possibly test an infinite number of throws of the coin.\nSo that seems to be a problem for probability, and David deals with this in his talk, which I recommend to everyone.\nOkay, and just as almost as a postscript here, did Popper ever say falsification was sufficient to establish a theory of scientific?.\nNot at all.\nThe logic of scientific discovery is needed 500 pages, and defends the criteria of demarcation among other things.\nIn that book, he also details what crucial experiments are.\nHe said all this back in the 1930s, and there's a free version of the logic of scientific discovery online, you can just look for a PDF version.\nAnd that was published in 1959, so it's got some updates from Popper himself.\nDavid and others have said it again, and I say now, Popper understood that any purported falsification could mean one of two things logically.\nIt could mean the theory as false, it would be experiment with the flawed.\nBut this is not a problem for science.\nWe make progress by refuting theories in this way regardless.\nWhat we do not do is confirm we are correct.\nChapter four of the logic of scientific discovery is in fact titled falsificationism.\nIf it was as simple as some people seem to think, or Popper was as naive as some people seem to think.\nOne might expect that chapter to run to a few sentences, or maybe a couple of paragraphs.\nBut no, Popper spends pages 57 through to 73 defending his thesis against all manner of objections, and he doesn't stop there.\nThe whole point is that he's epistemology, his philosophy of science is not summed up by those 16 pages.\nIt is summed up rather well by the other 486.\nForce of occasion is but a part of the greater whole.\nPopper was dealing with problems in science.\nWhat did it mean for Edington's experiment to refute Newton, but not Einstein?.\nWas Einstein considered true now, and Newton false?.\nWas that it?.\nWas Einstein simply more probably true?.\nCould we measure that probability?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=1205"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc45cfca-027a-47fe-ad71-0bd5628a6262": {"page_content": "It is summed up rather well by the other 486.\nForce of occasion is but a part of the greater whole.\nPopper was dealing with problems in science.\nWhat did it mean for Edington's experiment to refute Newton, but not Einstein?.\nWas Einstein considered true now, and Newton false?.\nWas that it?.\nWas Einstein simply more probably true?.\nCould we measure that probability?.\nOne could well spend many episodes of a podcast like this doing a little more than discussing Popper's epistemology is explained in the logic of scientific discovery.\nPerhaps one day I will, for he seems to me to be such an underrated genius.\nThat so many claim to have read, and yet it seems to me, have misunderstood entirely.\nIt is as if those 16 pages about falsificationism in the logic of scientific discovery were only 16 words, and that the rest of the chapter didn't exist, much less the rest of the book, and much less all of these other books and dozens of academic papers, journal articles and lectures, but it continues to be painted as naive, or not anticipating aspects of science difficult to test in practice.\nThose who try to explain his ideas more fully than the caricature that often passes for popularizing of Popper are often ridiculed as the paparazzi I've heard recently.\nThat kind of reaction against Popper isn't entirely unique in philosophy, but it is almost rather unique too philosophy or not completely, because physics suffers from this as well.\nMany physicists when you talk to them can tell funny stories of emails received from someone or other who claims to have, for example, proven Einstein wrong, perhaps with an algebraic proof.\nSuch people who claim to have proven Einstein wrong really go to the trouble of trying to engage with the experiments.\nThey look at the mathematics and refuse to believe that their common sense notion could possibly be false.\nGalilean relativity they think must somehow be at base true, so they try their hand at a mathematical disprove.\nBut they've engaged only with the Lorentz transformation, for example.\nThe very basics of special relativity, they prove somehow the speed of light is not constant.\nPhysicists know the feeling of dealing with these people, and they chuckle with each other about such stories, or from the next inventor who sent them an idea for a perpetual motion machine or whatnot.\nThese people haven't actually read much of relativity or about the conservation of energy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "446e94ca-74a0-49d0-b043-70ef1f8d791e": {"page_content": "But they've engaged only with the Lorentz transformation, for example.\nThe very basics of special relativity, they prove somehow the speed of light is not constant.\nPhysicists know the feeling of dealing with these people, and they chuckle with each other about such stories, or from the next inventor who sent them an idea for a perpetual motion machine or whatnot.\nThese people haven't actually read much of relativity or about the conservation of energy.\nThey've read perhaps a popular account or picked up a high school text and learned enough to attribute to Einstein only part of the story.\nTo those physicists, I say, that cranky engineer has a counterpart in philosophy.\nThey are the people who've read the popular account.\nIt happens with many prolific writers who solve deep problems, because the problem is deep, and the solution often subtle, it can be tempting to shoot off a blog post or an email or a tweet about how Einstein was wrong that relativity meant the speed of light is constant or that time slows down the greater one's velocity is.\nIt's a tempting prospect for someone new to the field, or a casual reader of the field.\nIt's so tempting, it might even cause someone to write a blog post about how Popple was wrong about falsification, and those that have read beyond the popularing headlines are terribly naive about how science actually works.\nSo let me leave this episode with some words directly from Popper himself.\nI'm going to read from unended quests, an intellectual autobiography, on page 42.\nPopper writes there, that quote, my main idea in 1919 was this, if somebody proposed a scientific theory, he should answer, as Einstein did, the question, under what conditions would I admit that my theory is untenable?.\nIn other words, what conceivable facts would I accept as reputations or falsifications of my theory?.\nI'm skipping a little any right, any rights, he says, I still uphold this, but when a little later I tentatively introduce the idea of falsifiability, or testability, or a futability of a theory as a criterion of demarcation, I very soon found that every theory can be immunised.\nThis excellent term is due to Hans Albert, against criticism.\nIf we allow such immunisation, then every theory becomes unfulsifiable, thus we must exclude at least some immunisations, so I just pause there, end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=3088"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d3dabe8a-474d-4564-a028-5c6a9e2dac77": {"page_content": "This excellent term is due to Hans Albert, against criticism.\nIf we allow such immunisation, then every theory becomes unfulsifiable, thus we must exclude at least some immunisations, so I just pause there, end quote.\nIn 1919, he is already considering objections to the falsification criterion, the people today who claim that falsification is too simple an idea in the philosophy of science, and a tribute and moreover attribute that position to Popper, haven't read Popper, given that he considers these so-called immunisations, given that he considers ways in which the falsification criterion can itself be problematic, and not as straightforward as a naive falsificationist might think, so I'll continue to read Popper.\nOn the other hand, I also realised that we must not exclude all immunisations, not even all which introduced ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses.\nFor example, the observed motion of Uranus might have been regarded as a falsification of Newton's theory, instead the auxiliary hypothesis of an outer planet was introduced ad hoc, thus immunising the theory.\nThis turned out to be fortunate, for the auxiliary hypothesis, is a testable one, even if difficult to test, and it stood up to tests successfully.\nAll this shows, not only that some degree of dogmatism is fruitful, even in science, but also that logically speaking falsifiably, or testability, cannot be regarded as a very sharp criterion.\nLater, in my logic to Foshang, the logic of scientific discovery, I dealt with this problem very fully.\nI introduced degrees of testability, and these turned out to be closely related to degrees of content, and surprisingly fertile, increase of content became the criterion for whether we should or should not, tentatively adopt an auxiliary hypothesis.\nIn spite of the fact that all this was clearly stated in the logic of scientific discovery of 934, a number of legends were propagated about my views.\nThey still are.\nFirst, that I had introduced falsifiability as a meaning criterion rather than as a criterion of demarcation.\nSecondly, that I had not seen that immunisation was always possible, and had therefore overlooked that since all theories could be rescued from falsification, none could simply be described as falsifiable.\nIn other words, mine results were, in these legends, turned into reasons for rejecting my approach, end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=2610"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f21c17a-4b4c-4ecf-9345-51508105eaf4": {"page_content": "They still are.\nFirst, that I had introduced falsifiability as a meaning criterion rather than as a criterion of demarcation.\nSecondly, that I had not seen that immunisation was always possible, and had therefore overlooked that since all theories could be rescued from falsification, none could simply be described as falsifiable.\nIn other words, mine results were, in these legends, turned into reasons for rejecting my approach, end quote.\nAnd I'll just make this personal reflection here on this idea that it's a very simple concept that Poppa pointed out that the criterion of demarcation is not a criterion of meaning.\nSo although he was saying that this separates science from non-science, that the ability to do an experiment demarcates the scientific enterprise from other kinds of knowledge, it's not saying that nothing else has any meaning, or isn't useful, quite the contrary.\nAfter all, Poppa was very interested in political philosophy, political science, political philosophy we should say, and morality.\nHe didn't think those things were meaningless.\nHe didn't think that philosophy was meaningless, that's why he was spending most of his time on.\nThose things are important, so when people talk about, let's say, multiverse theories that are not the quantum multiverse theory, these cosmological multiverse theories, theory where I would call it the megaverse, the idea that there are other universes out there that have different physical laws, this is a very different kind of multiverse to the multiverse that quantum theory forces us to understand the world through.\nThese are the megaverse theories where there might be universes out there with different physical laws.\nThere are some physicists who are very upset about the fact that these might be ruled out of science.\nNow, I would rule them out of science.\nI would say, well, they're not testable, there's no testable prediction.\nBut there are scientists, there are physicists who say, well, this is a problem for the demarcation criteria, and this is a problem for falsification, because we should be able to call these theories scientific.\nWhy?.\nIf you don't understand the problem, what they're upset by is that we're going to regard such a theory, a theory of other universes with different physical laws as metaphysical, and that somehow that is, in a way, lessening that theory, no, it's not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=3337"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8959faae-7283-4493-9100-3e6ac314adeb": {"page_content": "Why?.\nIf you don't understand the problem, what they're upset by is that we're going to regard such a theory, a theory of other universes with different physical laws as metaphysical, and that somehow that is, in a way, lessening that theory, no, it's not.\nYou can still go on and do your mathematics and do your physics of these alternate theories of these other kinds of multiverse.\nIn fact, you can test them in a certain way.\nSome people might be interested in the work of cosmologists Luke Barnes, he's from Australia, and one of his projects is actually to look at the question of fine-tuning, and I think he's not the only one.\nThere are other physicists who do this kind of thing, are the cosmologists who do this kind of thing, and they use computers.\nThey use supercomputers and simulations of universes with different laws of physics, and see what happens in those two.\nSo, to a certain extent, they're kind of testable, let's see what happens in such a universe where you've got different physical laws, and they do this for the purposes of fine-tuning.\nAre any of those universes that they simulate able to support complex chemistry, life, and so on?.\nWhatever the case, it's no insult to call a particular theory or idea metaphysical.\nIt's no insult.\nIt's scientism, rank scientism, to insist that if your theory cannot be tested by experiment, that it nonetheless should be regarded as science, then you've got a bias.\nYou think that scientific knowledge is in some way superior to, better than certain other kinds of knowledge which might be very legitimate.\nHere's a metaphysical theory.\nReality exists.\nThe universe really exists.\nIt's not just all being dreamed by you.\nThat's a metaphysical theory.\nThat's not a scientific theory.\nThere's no experiment that I can do to test whether or not I'm dreaming right now or not.\nMaybe when I go to sleep at night and I have a dream, I'm dreaming within a dream.\nI'm already here in a dream.\nOr maybe I exist inside of a simulation.\nThese are metaphysical theories.\nMy claim that all of that is nonsense, that we are not dreaming, we're not in a simulation.\nThere's not an evil demon deceiving us.\nMy theory that all of that is quite correct that none of this is true, that in fact reality just is and we exist inside reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e28f82f-e0ae-4a7a-ba51-4394689d695c": {"page_content": "I'm already here in a dream.\nOr maybe I exist inside of a simulation.\nThese are metaphysical theories.\nMy claim that all of that is nonsense, that we are not dreaming, we're not in a simulation.\nThere's not an evil demon deceiving us.\nMy theory that all of that is quite correct that none of this is true, that in fact reality just is and we exist inside reality.\nThat metaphysical theory is just as important as any scientific theory and I'm willing to defend that metaphysical theory and it's no insult to call it metaphysical.\nIt's no insult to call a certain theory, a moral theory or a mathematical theory.\nMetaphysics isn't an insult.\nNow pseudo-science is an insult, but I wouldn't regard ideas about other universes with different physical laws as being pseudo-science.\nIt's a legitimate area to investigate.\nIt could be fun, philosophically interesting.\nYou don't have to call it science and importantly you don't have to go throwing away the criterion of falsifiability because there's one very esoteric area of theoretical metaphysical cosmology that you happen to enjoy doing and exploring and thinking about.\nIt's only ever, and I'll just end on this, it's only ever the theoretical physicists that have a problem with the falsification criterion.\nThe ornithologists aren't worried.\nThe geologists aren't concerned.\nThe pharmacologists don't get into these debates.\nIt's only the theoretical physicists that get upset at pop-up and that should be very, very telling.\nIt's because they operate right at the very margins of what science can do, and that's great.\nThat's great.\nThey need to be pushing those boundaries, but they have to recognize when things are testable and when things aren't testable because if they're not testable, then their ideas can't be handed over to the managers at a large Hadron Collider or to the people in charge of the Hubble telescope.\nThere's no observation that can ever show that any of their ideas are wrong.\nIf they can't, well, you're doing metaphysics.\nIt could be interesting, it could be entertaining, it could even inform research projects in real science, but it's not science, and it's no big deal.\nAnyway, there we have it in pop-a-zone words that he wasn't an eye of falsificationists.\nHe did understand it all, he understood the objections, he spoke with scientists, including physicists.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69518499-4e83-4b41-adb6-8ea2c694c065": {"page_content": "If they can't, well, you're doing metaphysics.\nIt could be interesting, it could be entertaining, it could even inform research projects in real science, but it's not science, and it's no big deal.\nAnyway, there we have it in pop-a-zone words that he wasn't an eye of falsificationists.\nHe did understand it all, he understood the objections, he spoke with scientists, including physicists.\nHe spent his life defending that thesis, and if you take it seriously and really investigate it, and think of all the ways, it, critical rationalism, might be false, and then read what he said in his own words, you just might be convinced he was right.\nRather than convinced he was mistaken by a headline in a brief article that mangles what he meant in order to refute a strong man.\nIf you're getting value out of these podcasts on my YouTube videos or website, why not consider donating?.\nI've now got a Patreon account at Brett R. Hall, all one word, so that's Brett R. R. for Robert Hall, all one word, or if you got on my website, www.bredhall.org, there's a donate button now on my front page, if you'd like to make a small one-off donation.\nThanks for any support, as I'm trying to devote more time to this endeavour, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHLTBOJ5hoQ&t=3719"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "31c5a7eb-191e-4bf9-a9fc-9bcb16665ad3": {"page_content": "This is stuff that really would be magic, it would be considered magic in times past.\nIn fact, I think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past.\nThey weren't even in the realm of magic.\nSo it actually goes beyond that.\nSo I thought, well, if I can do some of those things, basically, if I can advance technology, then that's like magic and that would be really cool.\nAnd I was at sort of a slight existential crisis because I was trying to figure out what does it all mean?.\nLike, what's the purpose of things?.\nAnd I can't really conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened.\nAnd that's really the only way forward.\nWelcome to ToKCast, part two of chapter nine, optimism.\nThat was Elon Musk who, of course, is just getting on and doing what's fun and a longer way solving lots of problems and improving things of people of today and tomorrow.\nThat was him speaking at Caltech during a commencement speech.\nI think back in 2018, in today's episode, there's a real focus on optimism as applied to people, to our institutions and to us as individuals.\nPeople and knowledge creators, and we just heard from Elon there that he has felt that his calling was to create knowledge and quite right.\nThat's us, that's our nature of anything is our nature, to create knowledge.\nWe don't all have to be creating knowledge about rockets or rapid transportation systems.\nWe might just be creating knowledge in our own lives about how to best have tomorrow be better than today.\nBut we're all striving to solve our problems.\nWe're all equal in that.\nSo let's continue.\nContinue with the book.\nFurther misconception is Hawking's analogy between our civilization and pre-enlightenment civilizations.\nSo as I shall explain in chapter 15, there is a qualitative difference between those two types of civilization.\nCulture shock need not be dangerous to a post-enlightenment one, skipping a little bit, and David Rides, in the case of our civilization, the precautionary principle rules itself out.\nSince our civilization has not been following it, a transition to it would entail raining in the rapid technological progress that he's underway.\nAnd such a change has never been successful before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2c032e7f-88b1-4cbd-958d-375cc4d8b919": {"page_content": "So as I shall explain in chapter 15, there is a qualitative difference between those two types of civilization.\nCulture shock need not be dangerous to a post-enlightenment one, skipping a little bit, and David Rides, in the case of our civilization, the precautionary principle rules itself out.\nSince our civilization has not been following it, a transition to it would entail raining in the rapid technological progress that he's underway.\nAnd such a change has never been successful before.\nSo a blind pessimist would have to oppose it on principle.\nSo, and this is me, in other words, just for a little bit of exposition on just that bit, which I found subtle, is that our civilization is the one that has been making progress.\nSo in a way, the precautionary principle, the proposed principle says avoid making big changes because they're dangerous, avoid making progress because it's dangerous.\nIn this case, it would seem to implore us not to make any big changes to our society, which is the very society that's undergoing big changes.\nIt's kind of self-refuting.\nWell, it is self-refuting in that way.\nAnd David Rides, this may seem like logic chopping, but it is not.\nThe reason for these paradoxes and parallels between blind optimism and blind pessimism is that those two approaches are very similar to the level of explanation, both prophetic, both poor to know unknowable things about the future of knowledge.\nAnd since at any instant, our best knowledge contains both truth and misconception, prophetic pessimism about anyone aspect of it is always the same as prophetic optimism about the other.\nFor instance, Rhesus worst for use depend upon the unprecedented rapid creation of unprecedented powerful technology, such as civilization destroying bioweapons.\nIf Rhesus is right, that the 21st century is uniquely dangerous, and if civilization nevertheless survives it, it will have had an appallingly narrow escape.\nOur final century mentions only one other example of a narrow escape, namely the Cold War.\nSo that will make two narrow escapes in a row.\nYet by that standard civilization must already have had a similarly narrow escape during the Second World War.\nFor instance, Nazi Germany came close to developing nuclear weapons.\nThe Japanese Empire did successfully weaponize bubonic plague and attested the weapon with devastating effect in China, and had plans to use it against the United States.\nMany feared that even a conventionally won victory by the Axis powers could bring down civilization.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=113"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b330780f-a556-4c08-b00b-486c73e476a9": {"page_content": "So that will make two narrow escapes in a row.\nYet by that standard civilization must already have had a similarly narrow escape during the Second World War.\nFor instance, Nazi Germany came close to developing nuclear weapons.\nThe Japanese Empire did successfully weaponize bubonic plague and attested the weapon with devastating effect in China, and had plans to use it against the United States.\nMany feared that even a conventionally won victory by the Axis powers could bring down civilization.\nChurchill warned of a new dark age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science.\nThough as an optimist, he worked to prevent that.\nIn contrast, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942.\nIn the safety of neutral Brazil, because they considered civilization to be already doomed.\nSo that would make it three narrow escapes in a row.\nBut was there not a still earlier one?.\nIn 1798, Malthus had argued, and his influential essay on population, that the 19th century would inevitably see a permanent end to human progress.\nHe had calculated that the exponentially growing population at the time, which was a consequence of various technological and economic improvements, was reaching the limit of the planet's capacity to produce food.\nAnd this was no accidental misfortune.\nHe believed that he had discovered a law of nature about population and resources.\nFirst, the net increase in population in each generation is proportional to the existing population.\nSo the population increases exponentially, or in geometrical ratio, as he put it.\nBut second, when food production increases, for instance, as a result of bringing formally unproductive land into cultivation, the increase is the same as it would have been if that innovation happened in any other time.\nIt is not proportional to whatever the population happens to be.\nHe called this rather idiosyncratically, an increase in arithmetic ratio.\nAnd argued that population, when unchecked increases in geometric ratio, subsistence increases only in arithmetic ratio, a slight acquaintance with numbers, will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.\nHis conclusion was that the relative well-being of humankind in this time was a temporary phenomenon, and that he was living at a uniquely dangerous moment in history.\nThe long-term state of humanity must be an equilibrium between the tendency of populations to increase in the one hand and on the other starvation, disease, murder, and war.\nJust as happens in the biosphere.\nIn the event, throughout the 19th century, a population explosion happened.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=240"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae034d69-bc5b-437a-9faa-bda11d382438": {"page_content": "His conclusion was that the relative well-being of humankind in this time was a temporary phenomenon, and that he was living at a uniquely dangerous moment in history.\nThe long-term state of humanity must be an equilibrium between the tendency of populations to increase in the one hand and on the other starvation, disease, murder, and war.\nJust as happens in the biosphere.\nIn the event, throughout the 19th century, a population explosion happened.\nMuch as mouthless had predicted.\nYet the end of human progress that he had for seeing did not, in part, because food production increased even faster than the population.\nThen, during the 20th century, both increased farther still, or pause there.\nThis is a hobby horse of mine, I suppose.\nI've cataloged some other people who've made similar prophecies of doom over the decades.\nThey do happen rather regularly now.\nThere's people who appear in the media all the time, talking about the doom that is to come.\nThere's money to be made in doomsday.\nThe media likes the pessimists, but not so much the optimists.\nIf you want to read some more criticism of mouthless and those who followed in these footsteps all the way through to today, you can Google my essay that I have titled, cosmological economics, why infinite growth is no bad thing.\nAnd that's my summary of Malthusian pessimism over the last few decades.\nAnd alternatives to it, following David, of course, especially in this present chapter.\nAnti-humanism in pessimism are tied together, or as I like to say, pessimism broadly speaking, is the fundamental field out of which those other special cases are excitations.\nThose excitations are the pessimists' field.\nThings like anti-humanism and socialism or other forms of authoritarianism or anti-natalism and certain kinds of affective altruism and so on.\nThe affective altruists will get upset at me, but if you go to the EAA website, the www.effectiveoutroism.org website, and you just go to their about section, which is the article titled, Introduction to Effective Outroism.\nIt's basically a catalog of all these concerns we find elsewhere.\nThey're very much worried.\nLike, Bostrom is about existential risk, and they think that we need to have some form of redistribution.\nThat's the kind of the theme, but they suggest that you give to charity in order to redistribute the money.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=358"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a2648800-8a33-4585-aed0-c09484e4b766": {"page_content": "It's basically a catalog of all these concerns we find elsewhere.\nThey're very much worried.\nLike, Bostrom is about existential risk, and they think that we need to have some form of redistribution.\nThat's the kind of the theme, but they suggest that you give to charity in order to redistribute the money.\nI don't think they're not really forthcoming with the top-down authoritarian approach yet.\nI always get suspicious when altruism doesn't begin with either one's self or with one's local community, but is then focused on these massive global things.\nBecause the more distant you get from the problem you're trying to solve, the less you tend to know about it.\nWill McCaskle, the philosopher, one of the people who are credited with coming up with a lot of the philosophy, surrounding effective altruism, he talks about this case of the play pump.\nThe play pump was an invention, which seemed like a good idea at the time to help people in Africa pump water from wells.\nThe old hand pumps seemed to be too much work, so they invented this thing called the play pump that kids could jump on and play like a merry-go-round and push around, and it would pump water as well.\nAs it turned out, the play pump is a terrible idea because kids don't want to plant it.\nIt's too hard, and so now you have a situation where in certain places in Africa, if the play pump still exists, it has to be pushed in a rather undignified way by the old women of the village.\nWhat's the lesson here?.\nThe lesson here is that if you yourself are not if you yourself are not experiencing the problem and you try and solve someone else's problem without consulting them.\nSo probably the best of the bad bunch is to simply give them money, to give them cash.\nIf you're going to force a solution onto anyone, well, he have some money.\nNow, we can get into political ideas about the liability of doing money.\nThe actual solution, of course, to people in poverty is to trade with them, is to find something of value that they can give to you.\nAnd there's always something of value that they can give to you, always.\nPeople are creative, unique individuals, and given the opportunity, they will sell you something.\nAnd you will want to buy it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=480"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b6e3cead-0e28-4515-afd8-18a9fe5cd68b": {"page_content": "Now, we can get into political ideas about the liability of doing money.\nThe actual solution, of course, to people in poverty is to trade with them, is to find something of value that they can give to you.\nAnd there's always something of value that they can give to you, always.\nPeople are creative, unique individuals, and given the opportunity, they will sell you something.\nAnd you will want to buy it.\nAnd so this is the way, this idea of having free trade of allowing people to enter wealthy markets who themselves aren't wealthy and then to improve their lot.\nThis is what history shows, works and reduces and will eliminate poverty if we allow it to.\nTop down solutions tend to do quite the opposite.\nTheir pessimistic ideas about how people's creativity doesn't have sufficient value that we would like to invest in or that we, more wealthy people would like to invest in, but I think that's simply false.\nOkay, let's continue with the book.\nMalthus had accurately foretold the one phenomenon, but had missed the other altogether.\nWhy?.\nBecause of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone.\nIn 1798, the forthcoming increase in population was more predictable than the even larger increase in food supply, not because it was in any sense more probable, but simply because it depended less on the creation of knowledge by ignoring that structural difference between the two phenomenon that he was trying to compare.\nMalthus slipped from educated guesswork in the blind prophecy.\nHe and many of his contemporaries were misled into believing that they had discovered an objective asymmetry between what he called the power of population and the power of production.\nBut that was just a parocha mistake.\nThe same one that Mickelson and Lagrange made, they all thought they were making sober predictions based on the best knowledge available to them.\nIn reality, they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the interluctible fact of the human condition that we did not yet know what we have not yet discovered.\nLet me pause there.\nSo Martin Reese, Nick Bostrom, anyone who thinks they can extrapolate based upon the best of today's knowledge into the future, ignores that that we can't know what we have not yet discovered.\nAnd so it wouldn't matter if you've got a wonderfully complex set of mathematical formula and charts and graphs that you can extrapolate.\nThose charts and graphs, just as Malthus did, all the way back in 1798, can lead you into gross error.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=600"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9ff0d269-e754-4f85-bb64-0edd5f776328": {"page_content": "So Martin Reese, Nick Bostrom, anyone who thinks they can extrapolate based upon the best of today's knowledge into the future, ignores that that we can't know what we have not yet discovered.\nAnd so it wouldn't matter if you've got a wonderfully complex set of mathematical formula and charts and graphs that you can extrapolate.\nThose charts and graphs, just as Malthus did, all the way back in 1798, can lead you into gross error.\nBecause you can't possibly hope to know what is going to be discovered tomorrow, let alone in 10 years, let alone in 100 years, that will completely change the calculus, completely change your priors, and therefore upset your Bayesian reasoning.\nIt's not Bayesian reasoning, it's Bayesian unreasonable.\nDavid mentions their educated guesswork.\nAnd I just want to go off on a little tangent about that as well.\nThis would be a very narrow genre of epistemology.\nThis concept of educated guesswork.\nIt's rather, I suppose, the kind of thing that medical doctors might be often up to.\nSo when you've got a complex system, like the human body and the time arise and I'm solving a particular problem in front of you is really short.\nSo if we don't get the answer with the next few minutes or hours or, you know, most days, the patient might die.\nIt's important we distinguish between wild guessing, which is what many of us might engage in if we're trying to figure out what's wrong with us medically.\nAnd educated guesswork, which is what the experienced doctor might engage in, seeing the same symptoms.\nThe latter, educated guesswork, is really about when we have competing good explanations.\nThe same symptoms, but different causes.\nWe want to know the cause so we can find the appropriate treatment and that would come with experience.\nNow this is rather unlike what happens with, let's say, climate change.\nThere, the climate is also a complex system like the human body.\nHowever, the change that happens is not a matter of minutes, hours and days.\nThe time horizon is far, far greater.\nIt's a time horizon within which knowledge can be created by people that can affect the outcome.\nAnd lots of knowledge can be created in years and decades, the time in which the climate change is supposed to happen at earliest, at earliest.\nI mean, many of the predictions are, you know, you're talking many decades or centuries.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7b9932e4-db30-46aa-aeea-445fd56f059c": {"page_content": "However, the change that happens is not a matter of minutes, hours and days.\nThe time horizon is far, far greater.\nIt's a time horizon within which knowledge can be created by people that can affect the outcome.\nAnd lots of knowledge can be created in years and decades, the time in which the climate change is supposed to happen at earliest, at earliest.\nI mean, many of the predictions are, you know, you're talking many decades or centuries.\nNow this is unlike with a patient who has just come into the emergency department.\nThe patient, the proverbial patient has just turned up at the emergency department.\nOur educated guesswork is required because nothing is going, no new knowledge is going to be created.\nNo new explanatory theory is going to be sent down by the oncologists or by the medical scientists that is going to change the decision of that doctor within the next couple of minutes, extremely unlikely.\nHowever, for the expert climatologists that are trying to figure out what's going to happen with the climate and devise possible solutions for the climate, we're talking about, again, years to decades, centuries, a time during which the educated guesswork can be completely undone.\nThe educated guesswork at that point is indistinguishable from blind guessing, from wild guessing, okay?.\nBecause we might very well create knowledge over the next few years that can completely change what the outcome is going to be.\nOkay, so David writes, another mouthless, no race intended to prophesy.\nThey were warning that unless we saw certain problems in time, we are doomed.\nBut that has always been true, and always will be.\nProblems are inevitable.\nAs I said, many civilizations are fallen, even before the dawn of civilization, all of our sister species, such as the Ninianderthals, became extinct through challenges with which they could easily have coped, had they known how genetic studies suggest that our own species came close to extinction about 70,000 years ago.\nAs a result of an unknown catastrophe, which reduced its total numbers to only a few thousand, being overwhelmed by these and other kinds of catastrophe would have seemed to the victims like being forced to play Russian roulette.\nThat is to say, it would have seemed to them that no choices that they could have made, except perhaps to seek the intervention of the gods more diligently, could have affected the odds against them.\nBut this was a parochial error.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=848"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69650c54-a7ea-48b3-9b0e-2ee07688ebbc": {"page_content": "As a result of an unknown catastrophe, which reduced its total numbers to only a few thousand, being overwhelmed by these and other kinds of catastrophe would have seemed to the victims like being forced to play Russian roulette.\nThat is to say, it would have seemed to them that no choices that they could have made, except perhaps to seek the intervention of the gods more diligently, could have affected the odds against them.\nBut this was a parochial error.\nCivilization starved long before Malthus, because of what they thought of as the natural disasters of drought and famine.\nBut it was really because of what we would call poor methods of irrigation and farming.\nIn other words, lack of knowledge, skipping a bit now.\nAnd then David writes, If a one kilometer asteroid had approached the Earth on a collision course at any time in human history before the early 21st century, it would have killed at least a substantial proportion of all humans.\nIn that respect, as in many others, we live in an era of unprecedented safety.\nThe 21st century is the first ever moment when we have known how to defend ourselves from such impacts, which occurred once every 250,000 years or so.\nNow this may sound too rare to care about, but it is random.\nA probability of one in 250,000 of such an impact in any given year means that a typical person on Earth would have a far larger chance of dying of an asteroid impact than in an airplane crash.\nAnd the next such object to strike us is already out there at this moment, speeding towards us with nothing to stop but except human knowledge.\nCivilization is vulnerable to several other known types of disaster, with similar levels of risk.\nFor instance, ice ages occur more frequently than that, and many ice ages occur much more frequently.\nAnd some climatologists believe that they can happen with only a few years' warning.\nA super volcano, such as the one lurking under Yellowstone National Park could blot out the sun for years at a time.\nIf it happened tomorrow, our species could survive by growing food using artificial light and civilization could recover.\nMany would die, and the suffering would be so tremendous that such events should merit almost as much preventative effort as an extinction.\nWe do not know the probability of a spontaneously occurring in curable plague, but we may guess that it is unacceptably high.\nSince pandemic such as the Black Death in the 14th century have already shown us the sort of thing that can happen on a time scale of centuries.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=969"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "60943b61-7dff-4c16-9821-6f37d89202d4": {"page_content": "Many would die, and the suffering would be so tremendous that such events should merit almost as much preventative effort as an extinction.\nWe do not know the probability of a spontaneously occurring in curable plague, but we may guess that it is unacceptably high.\nSince pandemic such as the Black Death in the 14th century have already shown us the sort of thing that can happen on a time scale of centuries.\nShould any of these catastrophes alone, we now have at least a chance of creating the knowledge required to survive in time.\nWe have a chance because we are able to solve problems.\nProblems are inevitable.\nWe shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for the unimaginable future.\nWe shall never be able to afford to sit back and hope for the best.\nEven if our civilization moves out into space in order to hedge its bets as recent hawking both rightly advised, a gamma ray burst in our galactic vicinity would still wipe us all out.\nSuch an event is thousands of times rare as an asteroid collision, but when it does finally happen, we shall have no defense against it without a great deal more scientific knowledge and an enormous increase in our wealth.\nOf course, there's a minor affliction.\nWe should note there as David does, the gamma ray bursts are known.\nAt least we know they exist.\nBut what about things we don't yet know about?.\nWell, they're infinite.\nAnd in some sense, more scary.\nThis is what is astonishing with the pericule way of thinking that animates people that are engaged in certain kinds of political discussions.\nRather so often, our focus simply on this so-called big problem that requires all of us to donate massive resources towards and worse to curb wealth creation, the very thing that can help us with the problems that we don't yet know about.\nWealth to many people is, of course, a dubious thing.\nIt's an immoral thing.\nAnd this is another deeply religious notion.\nIt comes to us via a bad cultural meme.\nThe idea that poverty is a virtue.\nAnd it's not merely a Christian idea.\nThe East has it as well.\nBut the assumption is that the problems we have now are the biggest problems we will have tomorrow.\nAnd the heart of the problem, rather too often, is regarded as being us.\nAnd all of that is, in fact, the biggest problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=951"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5977d861-c624-49ee-9b05-50922bf52c4b": {"page_content": "It's an immoral thing.\nAnd this is another deeply religious notion.\nIt comes to us via a bad cultural meme.\nThe idea that poverty is a virtue.\nAnd it's not merely a Christian idea.\nThe East has it as well.\nBut the assumption is that the problems we have now are the biggest problems we will have tomorrow.\nAnd the heart of the problem, rather too often, is regarded as being us.\nAnd all of that is, in fact, the biggest problem.\nThis idea that we are the cause of the biggest problems and these biggest problems that we have today are going to continue through to being the biggest problems tomorrow.\nBut until we recognize that, in fact, it is people who are the solution.\nAnd wealth is a great thing, and we need, we need so much more of it to help fund people's creativity.\nSo we can engage with these problems we haven't foreseen that might arise tomorrow or the next day.\nWe may well end up causing events that bring to pass our own demise, because we have slowed down our wealth creation too much, too quickly.\nOr even at all.\nAny amount of slowing wealth creation in progress is very dangerous.\nThis whole idea that we are the problem, there's too many people in the planet.\nBegin to this rather religious type premise.\nIt's sort of this idea from Thomas Hobbs almost that we're all evil, or the idea from Genesis that we're born with original sin.\nWe hear it, that we should be careful about exploring the cosmos, because we're going to polluted as we've polluted the earth, polluted this planet.\nThat's the environmentalist concern.\nAnd that we shouldn't have more children, because people just exist in a state of suffering and to bring more people into the world is a terribly immoral thing.\nThis is the anti-natalists so-called view.\nThat the anti-natalists, I think, like environmentalists.\nThey all think they're on the side of morality.\nThey think they're on the side of doing good.\nBut morality is really, as David says elsewhere in the beginning of the infinity, that one moral injunction is not to destroy the means of error correction.\nAnd I suppose that has a few corollaries, that would mean we should increase the amount of error correction.\nWe have not merely failed to destroy it.\nBut also, where we have the opportunity to, to increase our rate of error correction.\nHow do we do that?.\nCreativity.\nWho's creative?.\nPeople.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=1187"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d874b3f4-8ee4-4ca4-b453-5b1f97361dfe": {"page_content": "But morality is really, as David says elsewhere in the beginning of the infinity, that one moral injunction is not to destroy the means of error correction.\nAnd I suppose that has a few corollaries, that would mean we should increase the amount of error correction.\nWe have not merely failed to destroy it.\nBut also, where we have the opportunity to, to increase our rate of error correction.\nHow do we do that?.\nCreativity.\nWho's creative?.\nPeople.\nTherefore, we need more of them.\nWe need more people to create the errors that we have and the errors are infinite.\nAnd we will continue to be confronted by them.\nAnd of course, one way to do is just to have global suicide to remove everyone and then there is absolutely no problem at all.\nI think this is a terrible idea, but some people take it seriously.\nSome people think that people are evil.\nWhereas I think that people are a source of progress and are the only thing that can create good in this universe.\nSo those who want to curb human life in one way to treat us like some sort of cosmic virus, they're about curbing creativity.\nThey're about reducing creativity.\nIn the form of us, they're about slowing down error correction or perhaps stopping error correction altogether.\nIf they can stop the birth of people.\nBut given that people are the means of error correction, we need more of them.\nThat's optimism.\nPeople are knowledge creators.\nSo they reduce evil in the world.\nOkay, skipping a little bit and then David writes, how can we formulate policies for the unknown if we cannot derive them from our best existing knowledge or from dogmatic rules of thumb like blind optimism or pessimism?.\nWhere can we derive them from?.\nLike scientific theories, policies cannot be derived from anything.\nThey are conjectures and we should choose between them not on the basis of their origin, but according to how good they are as explanations, how hard to vary.\nLike the rejection of empiricism.\nEnd of the idea that knowledge is justified to believe.\nUnderstanding that political policies are conjectures entails the rejection of a previously unquestioned philosophical assumption.\nAgain, Papa was a key advocate of this rejection.\nHe wrote, and this is one of my favorite passages that Papa did ever write.\nIt's a huge discovery in epistemology.\nIn fact, it really does form the core of Papa's epistemology.\nSo let me read the quote that David has put into the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=1313"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4c85ce1-b9e6-4924-b3b8-78e793281723": {"page_content": "End of the idea that knowledge is justified to believe.\nUnderstanding that political policies are conjectures entails the rejection of a previously unquestioned philosophical assumption.\nAgain, Papa was a key advocate of this rejection.\nHe wrote, and this is one of my favorite passages that Papa did ever write.\nIt's a huge discovery in epistemology.\nIn fact, it really does form the core of Papa's epistemology.\nSo let me read the quote that David has put into the beginning of infinity.\nPapa wrote, The question about the sources of our knowledge has always been asked in the spirit of, what are the best sources of knowledge?.\nThe most reliable ones.\nThose which will not lead us into error and those to which we can and must turn in case of doubt as the last court of appeal.\nI propose to assume instead that no such ideal sources exist.\nNo more than ideal rulers and that all sources are liable to lead us into error at times.\nAnd I propose to replace.\nTherefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question.\nHow can we hope to detect and eliminate error?.\nKnowledge without authority, 1960.\nThen David goes on.\nThe question, how can we hope to detect and eliminate error is echoed by Feynman Dromark that science is what we have learned about how to keep from filling ourselves.\nAnd the answer is basically the same for human decision making as it is for science.\nIt requires a tradition of criticism in which good explanations are sought.\nFor example, explanations of what has gone wrong, what would be better, what effect various policies have had in the past and what would have in the future.\nBut what use are explanations if they cannot make predictions and so cannot be tested through experience as they can be in science?.\nThis is really the question.\nHow is progress possible in philosophy?.\nAs I discussed in chapter five, it is obtained by seeking good explanations.\nThe misconception that evidence can play no legitimate role in philosophy is a relic of empiricism.\nObjective progress is indeed possible in politics, just as it is in morality generally and in science.\nPolitical philosophy traditionally centered on a collection of issues that pop up called the who should rule question.\nWho should wield power?.\nShould it be a monarch or aristocrats or priests or a dictator or a small group or the people or their delegates?.\nAnd that leads to derivative questions such as how should a king be educated?.\nWho should be in franchise into democracy?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=1436"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cb980d5f-0cf8-4766-af4f-39bd5cdf502d": {"page_content": "Objective progress is indeed possible in politics, just as it is in morality generally and in science.\nPolitical philosophy traditionally centered on a collection of issues that pop up called the who should rule question.\nWho should wield power?.\nShould it be a monarch or aristocrats or priests or a dictator or a small group or the people or their delegates?.\nAnd that leads to derivative questions such as how should a king be educated?.\nWho should be in franchise into democracy?.\nHow does one ensure an informed and responsible electric?.\nJust pause there, of course, there's an article that David and I like to tweet rather regularly when people begin to engage in these questions about who should rule.\nAnd it is the article from the economist that pop a wrote about what is democracy?.\nIt's about what is democracy.\nAnd democracy is about, of course, how to most easily remove rulers without violence rather than how to install certain rulers.\nBut you do hear this today.\nYou hear the certainly in Australia, I know the same discussion goes on the United Kingdom and you hear it from certain people in the United States as well about how we need a more scientifically literate politicians.\nWe need politicians who understand science more.\nOr we need more scientists in politics.\nI think, well, again, this is who should rule.\nThe person who should rule should have some sort of scientific understanding and I don't understand that at all.\nAlthough one thing, if you listen to the, if you listen to the RSA discussion between Martin Reese and David Deutsch was heartening to here, actually, then both agree and Martin Reese to talk about how he didn't really think it was a great idea for politicians to have a background in science.\nHe would much rather than have a background in, let's say,.\nhistory.\nand I suppose if I had a bias one way or the other, I'd tend to agree with him on that.\nOkay, so back to the book.\nPapa pointed out that this class of questions is rooted in the same misconception as the question, how are scientific theories derived from sensory data, which defines empiricism?.\nIt is seeking a system that derives or justifies the right choice of leader or government from an existing idea, such as inherited entitlements, the opinion of the majority.\nThe same misconception also underlies blind optimism and pessimism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=1569"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "18a2d93a-5c23-4d89-937f-f264b37aa8ad": {"page_content": "Okay, so back to the book.\nPapa pointed out that this class of questions is rooted in the same misconception as the question, how are scientific theories derived from sensory data, which defines empiricism?.\nIt is seeking a system that derives or justifies the right choice of leader or government from an existing idea, such as inherited entitlements, the opinion of the majority.\nThe same misconception also underlies blind optimism and pessimism.\nThey both expect progress to be made by applying a simple rule to existing knowledge to establish which future possibilities to ignore and which to rely on induction, instrumentalism, and even the mark is an all make the same mistake.\nThey expect explanationless progress.\nThey expect knowledge to be created by fear, with few errors and not by a process of variation in selection that is making continual stream of errors and correcting them.\nThe defenders of hereditary monoconym doubted that any method of selection of a leader by means of rational thought and debate could be improved upon.\nI'm skipping a substantial bit here now, and I'll just point people to, of course, the book and to Popper's important essay in the economist as well.\nI'll have the link there at the bottom of this video and also put it up on the screen now.\nBut the central point here that David is making and which she's echoing Popper here is that democracy is about trying to avoid violence.\nIt's about this political system of nonviolence.\nInstead of installing a ruler who is the best, because if the ruler is the best, then they should be kept there by some sort of force.\nAnd so the who should rule question is Popper says and the who should rule question really can be traced to a web actor Plato.\nBags for violent authoritarian answers and has often received them as David has written there at going Popper.\nSo I'll just read a very small part here where David writes, Popper therefore applies his basic, how can we detect and illuminate errors to political philosophy in the form of how can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence?.\nJust as science seeks explanations that are experimentally testable.\nSo a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect and persuade others that a leader or policy is bad and to remove them without violence if they are.\nSo there's this real philosophy of nonviolence.\nIt's absolutely crucial.\nI think to Popper's political philosophy.\nAnd I've had some disagreements with people over the years about to what extent Popper believed in coercion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=1695"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a61990a0-e297-421e-b424-9536a66bb820": {"page_content": "Just as science seeks explanations that are experimentally testable.\nSo a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect and persuade others that a leader or policy is bad and to remove them without violence if they are.\nSo there's this real philosophy of nonviolence.\nIt's absolutely crucial.\nI think to Popper's political philosophy.\nAnd I've had some disagreements with people over the years about to what extent Popper believed in coercion.\nAnd I don't think he really did, it depends in some senses, he seems to have been a little more socialist and so on.\nBut there's no point arguing.\nI don't think there's much point arguing about what Popper actually thought I'd rather concentrate on the ideas, the idea being, what is the place of force and coercion in politics, if any?.\nWell, it's remarkable to me how many people seem to think some level of initiating violence is necessary, state violence.\nBut I'm not just talking about violence in response to violence.\nSo if someone else initiates violence, you need some kind of police force to stop that violence or to respond to that violence or some guard or some, you yourself take personal responsibility for responding to that initiation of violence.\nBut there's many, many people who think the state should initiate violence.\nAnd should be initiated against people who disagree with the policies of the state.\nSo, you know, for example, I've listened to some professed optimists just to see how optimistic they are on this point.\nYou've got Matthew Ridley, he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist.\nStephen Pinker, probably the so-called most prominent, probably the most prominent optimist rivals with David Deutsch has been labeled an optimist.\nBut I don't find either of these people, Matthew Ridley or Stephen Pinker, universally optimists, like the way David Deutsch is.\nBecause both Ridley and Pinker, not to mention everyone else who's not an optimist, okay, which is everyone, they believe in the initiation of force by the state in order to address certain problems.\nThey really do.\nThey're both kind of with Thomas Hobbes.\nYou know, they think there's some kind of inherent evil lurking there in people that needs to be tamed and controlled.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=1828"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6fa3c3c4-8eae-40b1-895a-a4d257a94c00": {"page_content": "Because both Ridley and Pinker, not to mention everyone else who's not an optimist, okay, which is everyone, they believe in the initiation of force by the state in order to address certain problems.\nThey really do.\nThey're both kind of with Thomas Hobbes.\nYou know, they think there's some kind of inherent evil lurking there in people that needs to be tamed and controlled.\nPinker's not a blank slater, it's the norm I, but he, like many other who throw in with the ideas of evolutionary psychology, think that what evolution has written onto our blank slates before birth, really is quite bad in many ways.\nNot universally bad, not completely bad, but there are some bad aspects to our nature.\nAnd so we've got these genes for rape and genes for violence within us.\nAnd so even someone like Pinker, you know, the most celebrated of optimist, falls into terrible pessimism about people and what they're going to be compelled to do.\nIt's like they take William Golding's, the Lord of the Flights, if never had a Lord of the Flights, you should read the Lord of the Flights, or at least in the movie.\nThis idea that left to their own devices without state control, without some sort of imposition of power from the top, people will fall into violent anarchy and tyranny because of their genes are compelling into violence.\nThe thing is that every society has always been ruled by violence.\nIt's been kept under control by a certain amount of violence.\nThe status built on this kind of philosophy of violence.\nIt's certainly built on a philosophy of pessimism, not optimism.\nIt should be no surprise that now and again, people do rebel against the state and the controller state.\nEspecially when they feel that the only way to rebel is through violence.\nSo many religions, you know, Christianity probably chief among them, views used people as inherently immoral in some way.\nThey begin immoral and then it's this process of trying to become more moral at a time.\nIt's not just the West, it's not just Christianity here in certain Asian cultures.\nHistorically, there was a kind of a version of Confucianism called Legalism.\nAnd it's hard, it saw people as immoral as well.\nAnd so the idea there is that you need the strong state in order to control these evil people.\nMost organisations, most organised religion is kind of based upon this kind of principle.\nThere's something wrong with people inherently.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=1955"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69b0b5ad-2af7-4ef6-ae52-c1cbfda05877": {"page_content": "It's not just the West, it's not just Christianity here in certain Asian cultures.\nHistorically, there was a kind of a version of Confucianism called Legalism.\nAnd it's hard, it saw people as immoral as well.\nAnd so the idea there is that you need the strong state in order to control these evil people.\nMost organisations, most organised religion is kind of based upon this kind of principle.\nThere's something wrong with people inherently.\nAnd so they cannot be relied upon to not fall into a complete matter anarchy left to their own devices.\nWe're born tainted, we're born evil, not good.\nAnd this is a pessimistic view of what humans are in the potential of humans.\nSo I'm skipping just a small amount here and then David Wright's.\nThus, systems of government had to be judged, not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.\nThat entire stance is fallibleism in action.\nIt assumes that rulers and policies are always going to be flawed, that problems are inevitable.\nBut it also assumes that improving upon them is possible.\nProblems are soluble.\nThe ideal towards which this is working is not that nothing unexpected will go wrong, but that when it does, it will be an opportunity for further progress.\nOkay, I'm going to pause there.\nThat's the end of this part and yet there's still much more to read and to comment upon.\nThank you, everyone.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-iNNNidsFQ&t=2079"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f4710d1b-4758-426e-8de0-a3877bcf99e1": {"page_content": "So welcome to ToKCast and two episode three of the science of Canon cards called information.\nAnd this first episode is just going to be an introduction to the chapter, rather than me doing any readings of the chapter.\nAnd I'm going to call this the science of information, you know, and then go through some of what we know about information so far without really concentrating too much on constructor theory or the new material that is in this particular chapter.\nNo readings from the science of Canon card today, but I'll have another episode out very, very shortly, which does contain the readings from this chapter.\nIt has some really interesting insights about the link between physics and information.\nThese links have been made before, or I should say, links between physics and the theory of information have been made before.\nBut here with constructor theory, there is a new window into seeing the way in which information has physical properties.\nAnd of course, information is very closely connected, as we will see, to knowledge, which is an area of interest of mine, which means that we have an interesting connection as already mentioned in this series between physics and epistemology.\nThe work of David Deutsch, like I say, often focuses on knowledge more than information in the beginning of infinity, for example, but how are knowledge and information different if at all?.\nWell, before I get to the correct answer, I think we should look at some ways of describing the issue that are probably less than fruitful.\nHere, for example, is a popular meme type representation of things that get to round.\nAnd here are some more.\nI mean, we're getting some kind of insight here into what possibly the difference between information and knowledge is, knowledge seems to be higher up the hierarchy, so to speak.\nAnd in some of these, we're even getting a different species of this way of understanding the world, namely data, or data, on the one hand, and wisdom on the other.\nBut how true is this?.\nAnd how sharply can we distinguish between these different levels if indeed levels there are?.\nWhen I was a senior in high school, I could take a subject which was computer science, and I did so.\nAnd in that subject, we were taught that data was elemental, so to speak, and unorganized.\nAll information was still data, but it was organized now, so your list of data, just raw numbers, could be organized into a table, which turns it into information.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b8447eaa-7ea3-4304-8737-8dab641ef857": {"page_content": "And how sharply can we distinguish between these different levels if indeed levels there are?.\nWhen I was a senior in high school, I could take a subject which was computer science, and I did so.\nAnd in that subject, we were taught that data was elemental, so to speak, and unorganized.\nAll information was still data, but it was organized now, so your list of data, just raw numbers, could be organized into a table, which turns it into information.\nSo with this particular cartoon, we've got data, information, knowledge, wisdom.\nNow, data, I used to be told, was just the unorganized version of information, as I said, information being the organized kind.\nMaybe just a pose came down to something about it being useful in some way, that information, but we were never really told why, and then wisdom, well, what is wisdom?.\nHmm.\nI think these words do mean something, and I think we could still use these words in a rough way to capture realities about the world, for example, what I mean by that as well.\nData might very well be quite a to evidence.\nIt's always there, it's ready to be captured, but you haven't yet captured it, perhaps.\nAnd so the sun is shining right now, and that light that's falling down to the earth contains evidence or data, which if only you knew how to interpret it, if only you knew how to interpret the photons and the information being carried by those photons, then you would be able to construct knowledge, but you would need to collect the data first, using some kind of instrument, and you might not necessarily understand what that data means.\nWhen you begin to have an understanding and you begin to put it into tables and graphs and so on, then you have information, and once you finally figure out that there's a problem with your data or with your information, or that that information does or does not agree with a particular theory you previously had, then you start to create knowledge, then you start to solve problems with that information, that's when it becomes knowledge.\nAnd what's wisdom in this picture, although I would say that wisdom is basically a moral claim, something is described as being wise, simply when it is morally good.\nSo it's wise to do that thing, means it's good to do that thing.\nIt's unwise to do that thing, means it's bad to do that thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=142"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4f085c8c-92d0-4e1c-a1ea-6e66fb93c14b": {"page_content": "And what's wisdom in this picture, although I would say that wisdom is basically a moral claim, something is described as being wise, simply when it is morally good.\nSo it's wise to do that thing, means it's good to do that thing.\nIt's unwise to do that thing, means it's bad to do that thing.\nAnd I don't know if wisdom has much more cash, beyond that.\nIn so far as it is a form of knowledge, it is a moral claim about the knowledge, how we should use knowledge.\nYou have the knowledge perhaps of how to set off a bomb or how to create a virus, but would that be wise?.\nIn other words, should you do it, why is just means good, I would suggest.\nNow these days I would say that that is a kind of distinction which makes little difference.\nData is information, as we will come to see, anything one could say about a data fits with what we say about information, what will come to say about information.\nSo then how is knowledge different?.\nWell, following the work of David Deutsch, we have, I think, about three roughly equivalent approaches to what knowledge is in terms of information.\nAnd so these days I would say something like, knowledge is one useful information.\nAnd you might very well ask, what do you mean by useful?.\nWell, that brings us to the second quality that knowledge has in terms of information.\nThat is information that solves a problem.\nAnd so this is what it means to be useful, essentially those two are kind of equivalent.\nThree, knowledge is information that tends to get itself replicated.\nSo it's the stuff that gets copied.\nIt is the composition that the musician is trying to come up with that does not get thrown into the waste paper basket.\nIt is the data, not filled with noise or errors and so on, that the astronomer, the geologist, the zoologist keeps and preserves and then that ends up in the journal article somewhere that they publish.\nNow another way of formulating this, and it's a little bit more verbose, but I actually like the poetry of this one.\nBut it means the same thing as information that gets itself replicated.\nSo I'll call this three A, knowledge is information that once instantiated in some physical substrate tends to remain so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=270"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "919aa81b-a4fe-4b18-9a78-2a51578dbe7d": {"page_content": "Now another way of formulating this, and it's a little bit more verbose, but I actually like the poetry of this one.\nBut it means the same thing as information that gets itself replicated.\nSo I'll call this three A, knowledge is information that once instantiated in some physical substrate tends to remain so.\nAnd so this is a remarkable feature of knowledge, knowledge is that kind of information which once you've written it down on a piece of paper, well, there it is in a physical substrate.\nYou may very well have had that thought in your mind and it's in a physical substrate there.\nBut if you forget it, if it's utterly forgotten for the rest of your life, then it doesn't really form part of your knowledge, let alone everyone else's knowledge.\nSo if you write it down now, it's in a more robust physical substrate and maybe, then you go on to publish it somewhere and it remains there, not only instantiated in the original physical substrate for some time, for so long as that physical substrate remains.\nBut the important thing is it can get copied over and over again.\nAnd that brings us to what I would call three B.\nAnd this is following what we're about to read in the signs of Canon card by Caramel Ito.\nAnd she describes information here as knowledge which is resilient, it's resilient information.\nAnd so that's got now something to do with design, it's very much echoing what we just said in that three A definition, but it's the capacity of the system itself to maintain itself in existence.\nAnd the very remarkable and deep thing here is that as Caramel explained, knowledge is the most resilient, the most robust thing in the universe that seems to be able to just maintain itself, often to the indefinite future, far more robustly than other physical objects that exist.\nOther physical objects are subject to erosion and decay due to the second law of thermodynamics.\nThe issue there is, there's no error correction.\nSo if you really did want to preserve the rock, how do you go about doing it?.\nWell, the only way would be able to gather information about the rock and perhaps make a copy of it, but of course that wouldn't be the original.\nOkay, so there are some ways of circling around this knowledge.\nKnowledge has, of course, as we learned in the beginning of infinity, great reach, explanatory knowledge in particular has reach.\nAnd all of this is very well, but we're still talking about knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=397"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "94b4d25c-e23e-4616-afed-17d421679ccc": {"page_content": "Well, the only way would be able to gather information about the rock and perhaps make a copy of it, but of course that wouldn't be the original.\nOkay, so there are some ways of circling around this knowledge.\nKnowledge has, of course, as we learned in the beginning of infinity, great reach, explanatory knowledge in particular has reach.\nAnd all of this is very well, but we're still talking about knowledge.\nWe haven't actually gotten to information and the physics of information.\nWe haven't broached that topic yet.\nThere are mathematical theories of information, just information broadly.\nThe most famous is Claude Shannon, which links information to uncertainty or something like degrees of freedom, which means it is directly linked to entropy.\nEntropy is a concept from thermodynamics, which is about disorder.\nIt tries to quantify the amount of disorder disorder, uncertainty, degrees of freedom.\nThese are all ways of speaking about the same thing in more or less precise terms.\nWhatever the case, we can quantify how much information we have using this idea.\nFor example, before we toss a coin, we lack information about whether it's heads or tails.\nWhen we learn its heads, we've gained some information.\nIf the coin is fair, the chance of it being heads is one and two.\nTo encode that, using information would take one bit, one binary digit.\nIn other words, a zero or a one, zero representing perhaps the head and one representing perhaps the tail.\nSo because it only takes one bit of information, we can actually say its entropy is one.\nA way of looking at this is to ask, well, how many questions would a person need to ask to know the outcome of the coin toss?.\nWell, it's one, you need to ask one question.\nIs it a head and if the answer is yes, you know, it's a head and if the answer is no, you know, it's a tail.\nHence the entropy or information content is, if you like, one.\nIndeed, Claude Shannon provided us with a mathematical formula to tell you what the entropy H is.\nSo maybe we'll use this formula just just for the intuitive example of the heads versus tails case with the coin.\nSo let's go through this formula.\nAnd at the risk of losing everyone by explaining how logarithms work, I'll do the calculation only once for this simple case, but not for any more difficult cases.\nOkay, I know that many of my viewers are quite proficient in physics and mathematics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=512"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08216a75-327f-4efe-b418-a88ff025db76": {"page_content": "So maybe we'll use this formula just just for the intuitive example of the heads versus tails case with the coin.\nSo let's go through this formula.\nAnd at the risk of losing everyone by explaining how logarithms work, I'll do the calculation only once for this simple case, but not for any more difficult cases.\nOkay, I know that many of my viewers are quite proficient in physics and mathematics.\nSo you can skip this part because I'm going to do a basic introduction to logarithms and indices for the people who watch me who don't understand this staff.\nMaybe had a bad experience at school, let's say, and in particular who want to understand Shannon's formula that's about to come, which explains the quantification of information and requires us to have some understanding of logarithms.\nSo anyway, a logarithm, which is something that looks like this, usually written in this form here, is basically the same thing as an indices or an exponents, just two ways of writing the same thing.\nWhat this thing here means, the logarithm to base two of some number x equals eight means,.\nwhich number x do we need to raise two to the power of in order to get eight?.\nOr we can write it like this, two to the power of some number equals eight, what is that some number?.\nWell, two to the power of one would be two to the power of two is four, two to the power of three is eight.\nAll right, fine.\nBut what about other indices?.\nIn particular, what about negative indices?.\nWe're going to need negative indices for what I'm about to explain, so I thought it'd be useful to go through a pattern which can explain, or at least force one to the conclusion that negative indices end up giving us numbers that are less than one, a fractional numbers.\nAnd so here are the ones that people are familiar with over here, two to the power of one, two to the power of two, two to the power of three, two to the power of four.\nSo what two to the power of one, two to the power of two means is two times two, two to the power of three is two times itself three times and two to the power of four is two times itself four times.\nWhatever the case is, we always start with the number two because we're talking about powers of two.\nWe're halving what the two is being multiplied by.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=637"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b43879fb-8d8f-4d23-8ca2-e967432fcee0": {"page_content": "So what two to the power of one, two to the power of two means is two times two, two to the power of three is two times itself three times and two to the power of four is two times itself four times.\nWhatever the case is, we always start with the number two because we're talking about powers of two.\nWe're halving what the two is being multiplied by.\nSo here we're saying two multiplied by two times two times two times two, which is eight there, okay, two times eight is sixteen.\nHalf of eight, that's four, okay, and so we get two times four, which is eight.\nHalf of four, that's two, half of two is one.\nAnd so when we get down to two to the power of one, we're asking what is two times one, which is two, okay.\nThe only reason I'm emphasizing this is if we're halving this number by which two is being multiplied, then the next one logically would be half of one, which is itself a half.\nThe pattern here is we're going, the indices going down by one each time, four, three, two, one.\nWell, the next one, we subtract one again and we get to zero.\nAnd you can see what happens here, we subtract one and we get minus one, we subtract another one, we get minus two.\nThat's where the negative indices come in, but if we're following the pattern over in this column here about the product, then halving the one, leading to a half, then means we need to find half of what a half is, which is a quarter, and half of a quarter and eighth.\nAll right, so that's that, so this is why this pattern of going down by one each time leads to this pattern over here of halving the number by which two is being multiplied.\nSo what are our solutions?.\nWell, everyone's familiar with two to the power of four, 16, half of that eight, half of that four, half of that two, half of that one, two to the power of zero is one, which is sometimes surprising to people, but that's simply a fact given the pattern here.\nIn fact, any number, three to the power of zero is also one, four to the power of zero is one.\nYou might want to convince yourself of that if you're not already familiar with this by doing your own table.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=749"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c2790cf8-f137-4144-b77f-ebb0b62af70d": {"page_content": "In fact, any number, three to the power of zero is also one, four to the power of zero is one.\nYou might want to convince yourself of that if you're not already familiar with this by doing your own table.\nIf we have one, because that's what we've been doing in this column here, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, well half of one is a half.\nSo two to the power of minus one corresponds to a half.\nThis is the most important part of this table for what we need to understand next with Shannon's formula.\nContinuing the pattern though, two to the power of minus two, that's one over four, and the reason that's one over four, by the way, is because that's one over two squared.\nSo we could turn this into a positive indices, so just like this, but put one over that, and that's why we end up with this.\nOne over two cubed is one over eight, and so you can just imagine continuing the table down.\nThese numbers get ever and ever smaller.\nSo the smaller and smaller the indices or the exponent, the smaller and smaller the actual number that we're talking about.\nSo this is what indices are about, and this connects then to logarithms, which are just another way of writing, exponents or indices, just another way of talking about it.\nSo keep that in mind as we go forward from here on in.\nBut I think it's useful for people who might not be familiar with mathematics to link what looks like a complicated formula to common sense.\nSo what on earth are we looking at here?.\nOkay, well, H is going to represent H as a function of X. H is going to represent the quantity of information.\nOkay, so that's ultimately what we're looking for.\nWe're looking for H.\nAnd that's going to equal the negative of sigma, sigma means the sum.\nSo we've got the sum from i equals one.\nSo from whatever our first thing is, all the way up to n, the total number of possibilities that we've got.\nNow, in the case of the coin, we're going to have two possibilities.\nWe're going to have either a head to a tail.\nSo n is going to be two, and basically that will mean that we're summing two terms together.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=860"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dd0a7486-16d9-468d-8517-3a4d03514256": {"page_content": "So we've got the sum from i equals one.\nSo from whatever our first thing is, all the way up to n, the total number of possibilities that we've got.\nNow, in the case of the coin, we're going to have two possibilities.\nWe're going to have either a head to a tail.\nSo n is going to be two, and basically that will mean that we're summing two terms together.\nOkay, it's the sum of what the sum of, it's the probability of X occurring multiplied by the logarithm of that probability, okay, to some base B. And in this case, we're going to be using the base of two, because we have only two possibilities is the long and short of it for that explanation.\nOkay, so let's go through this in plain English.\nWhat this formula then means is that we've got the probability of heads happening, multiplied by the logarithm to base two of the probability of heads occurring, plus because we're doing a sum, so that was our first term, plus the probability of tails happening, multiplied by the logarithm to base two, of the probability of tails occurring.\nOkay, so that's the plain English way of understanding what that previous very abstract formula is getting at.\nOkay, so, and all I want to do here is to really show you that the formula does indeed lead to the common sense notion that you need one bit of information in order to quantify the amount of information in a coin toss.\nOkay, so now we move to the numbers.\nWhat is indeed the probability of getting a heads?.\nWell, it's one and two, okay, so there's a negative there, so negative in front of the probability.\nSo now we have that all being equal to the negative of what's the probability of heads?.\nWell, it's a half times the logarithm to base two of a half plus the probability of tails.\nAgain, it's a half, a logarithm to base two, of a half, there we go.\nAnd that all equals negative, a half times now what is the logarithm to base two of a half?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=960"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f113d6af-1250-4e14-8991-dec8d99e5fe6": {"page_content": "So now we have that all being equal to the negative of what's the probability of heads?.\nWell, it's a half times the logarithm to base two of a half plus the probability of tails.\nAgain, it's a half, a logarithm to base two, of a half, there we go.\nAnd that all equals negative, a half times now what is the logarithm to base two of a half?.\nWhat this means is you're looking for a number such that if you take two, that's how base, and the reason why it's called the basis, because when you put it into exponential form, okay, exponents and logarithms are the inverse operations of one another, much like multiplication is to division or addition is to subtraction.\nThey're the reverse of one another.\nWhat we're going to do here is to convert our logarithm into an exponent, or an exponential, we're going to take that two, and raise it to the power of x, and x is indeed the number we're searching for, it is going to be the logarithm of the number.\nAnd all of that equals a half, that's where that half comes in there.\nSo we've got two to the power of x equals a half.\nNow what is the x?.\nBecause that's going to be the solution to the number that we're actually after, well, it happens to be minus one, because if you raise two to the power of minus one, you'll get one over two.\nWhere are we up to?.\nWe've got negative outside of one over two times minus one plus, but we're just going to repeat it, aren't we?.\nBecause whatever we just did there for the case of heads, we're going to do for the case of tails.\nIt's exactly the same mathematics.\nIt's going to be the probability of a half multiplied by logarithm base two of a half, which again is minus one.\nSo this will reduce us to, it's going to equal minus, let's put a bracket there, minus a half plus in brackets minus a half.\nSo we've got minus a half, plus minus a half, which reduces to, if you've got minus a half, plus minus a half, or the plus and the minus.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=1056"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ea80fae1-b572-4f6e-b3e1-1232f460868b": {"page_content": "It's going to be the probability of a half multiplied by logarithm base two of a half, which again is minus one.\nSo this will reduce us to, it's going to equal minus, let's put a bracket there, minus a half plus in brackets minus a half.\nSo we've got minus a half, plus minus a half, which reduces to, if you've got minus a half, plus minus a half, or the plus and the minus.\nThe minus wins that battle there, so to speak, and so you end up with minus a half, minus a half is minus one, minus outside of minus one, that's one, that's it, that's the answer.\nSo we've managed to prove that our common sense notion that the amount of information in a coin flip, if you like, is one bit, using Shannon's mathematical description of what information is to quantify the amount of information in something.\nSo we've recovered, so to speak, the common sense understanding using the mathematical formula.\nSo I have up convinced you that the mathematical formula indeed has something to do with reality.\nBut consider if you were rolling a fair dice now, then you've got six possible outcomes.\nSo we could go through this and do it all over again, the chance of rolling a two, for example, chance of rolling any particular number is going to be one over six.\nSo if you wanted to go through and do the n equals six case for one over six and apply the formula, you'll need a calculator for this one, you will end up getting an answer, which is about 2.6.\nThis means that, on average, you need to ask 2.6 questions, binary yes or no questions, by the way, to get the right answer.\nSo you might ask, is the number when you roll the dice, is the number one, two or three, and the person would have to say yes or no?.\nAnd if they say no, then you would have to ask the question, is it four or five, for example?.\nAnd if they say no, well, then you know that it's six, so you've had to ask two questions there, but if they say yes to four and five to four or five, then you would have to say, well, is it four.\nand so you've asked three questions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=1155"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fc3ee25c-4a6c-4813-b440-5b3d23b52460": {"page_content": "And if they say no, then you would have to ask the question, is it four or five, for example?.\nAnd if they say no, well, then you know that it's six, so you've had to ask two questions there, but if they say yes to four and five to four or five, then you would have to say, well, is it four.\nand so you've asked three questions.\nSo it's somewhere between two and three questions on average in order to get the amount of information in a dice roll, but on average it's precisely 2.6.\nAnd the point of all this, all the point here is that there is more information gained on learning the outcome of a dice roll as compared to a coin flip.\nOne way I would put this in popular in terms is that we have ruled out more upon learning what the dice ended up being as compared to the coin toss.\nWith the coin, we ruled out one possibility only, but with the dice, we ruled out five possibilities.\nThis links nicely to the way David sometimes speaks about the loss of physics.\nThey're in large part about what they rule out.\nThey say what is impossible, what cannot happen, and very good explanations, explanations hard to vary, explanations with a lot of knowledge or information content rule out a lot more.\nAnd all of that is fine and accurate, but we're going to refine it here today.\nAfter all, what we've done there is we've talked about information entropy in such a way that it takes very seriously the physical reality of probability theory, as if probability is some sort of fundamental part of reality.\nBut anyone who's been watching me for a while here or following the work of David Deutsch would know the probability is not a fundamental part of physics, it's not a fundamental way in which the universe actually works.\nSo we have to reconcile these ideas about information with physics in some way, while not taking probability seriously as an explanation of what is really going on in fundamental reality.\nAnd that, of course, is where constructive theory comes in.\nWe are going to understand what is going on realistically and fundamentally, without saying that a coin has a probability of landing on heads of one half.\nAnd on all this, and the motivation I would imagine for this particular chapter in the science of Ken and Kant, is the paper by David Deutsch and Kiara Malito in the proceedings of the Royal Society, a published in 2015, called the Constructor Theory of Information.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=1212"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "816ea133-3e61-4523-bd7c-92e931e9e63b": {"page_content": "And that, of course, is where constructive theory comes in.\nWe are going to understand what is going on realistically and fundamentally, without saying that a coin has a probability of landing on heads of one half.\nAnd on all this, and the motivation I would imagine for this particular chapter in the science of Ken and Kant, is the paper by David Deutsch and Kiara Malito in the proceedings of the Royal Society, a published in 2015, called the Constructor Theory of Information.\nAnd I would absolutely recommend that for deep dives into this topic.\nI'll just read a short part of this paper here at the beginning, quote, Deutsch and Malito say.\nIn some respects, information is a qualitatively different sort of entity from all others, in terms of which the physical sciences describe the world.\nIt is not, for instance, a function only of tensor fields on space time, as general relativity requires or physical quantities to be, nor is it a quantum mechanical observable.\nBut, in other respects, information does resemble some entities that appear in laws of physics.\nThe theory of computation and statistical mechanics seem to refer directly to it, without regard to the specific media, in which it is instantiated, just as conservation laws do for the electromagnetic for current or energy momentum tensor.\nWe call that the substrate independence of information.\nInformation can also be moved from one type of medium to another, while retaining all its properties, choir information.\nWe call this its interoperability property.\nIt is what makes human capabilities such as language and science possible, as well as the possibility of biological adaptations that use symbolic codes, such as the genetic code.\nIn addition, information has a counterfactual character, an object in a particular physical state cannot be said to carry information unless it could have been in a different state.\nAs we've put it, this word information.\nIn communication theory relates not so much to what you do say as to what you could say, end quote from weaver and end quote from Deutsch and my letter 2015.\nSo this is where we'll begin our book reading today, more or less, after a few more comments by me about various things.\nInformation is real.\nIt's part of the physical world and it has effects in the physical world, so physics should have some account of it.\nAgain, this is a motivation for constructive theory because the dynamical laws and initial conditions approach is largely about predictions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=950"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a3b8c6e-89c0-48a6-9107-570d2266627e": {"page_content": "So this is where we'll begin our book reading today, more or less, after a few more comments by me about various things.\nInformation is real.\nIt's part of the physical world and it has effects in the physical world, so physics should have some account of it.\nAgain, this is a motivation for constructive theory because the dynamical laws and initial conditions approach is largely about predictions.\nBut here with information, we have yet another case where in the physical world, we are not necessarily most interested in what did happen and what does happen and what will happen, especially that latter one, we cannot always know this.\nWe want to know what could possibly happen, what might have happened.\nIt's the physics of possibility and thus what could happen is a vast array of possibilities.\nTo know what they are, we need a physics of the possible and impossible, what transformations are possible and which are not.\nSo we need this, physics of information.\nNow, before we begin the reading, there is a couple of other things I'd like to go into because anyone who studies physics to a sufficient depth encounters information at some point and one of the places in which, even if you just read widely about physics cosmology information, you're going to come across the black hole information paradox.\nThis is something that Stephen Hawking worked on and the whole idea here is that, well, if you take quantum physics seriously, it's a description of reality, which we do.\nWe can say something like, there is a wave function of the universe, there's wave functions of any given object, but there's a wave function of the universe and so the wave function determines what happens at any given point in the future.\nSo the wave function right now is going to determine what happens in the future.\nBut the wave function takes account of all the information that happens to exist in a system that the system is the entire universe, then that system, the wave function of that system right now is going to determine what happens in the future.\nBut that wave function right now must take account of all the information that's going on right now, the positions of the particles, the momentum of the particles, all these quantum properties of particles, they're spin, they're mass, various things, okay?.\nSo this can be the information of a system at a particular time is included in the wave function at any given time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=950"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "172b5e14-2ddb-4906-a905-b718a0b9b236": {"page_content": "But that wave function right now must take account of all the information that's going on right now, the positions of the particles, the momentum of the particles, all these quantum properties of particles, they're spin, they're mass, various things, okay?.\nSo this can be the information of a system at a particular time is included in the wave function at any given time.\nThe black hole information paradox is, well, what happens in a black hole, black holes are not only predicted by general relativity, but they have been observed.\nWell, the only explanation for some of the observations we have is that black holes really truly do exist.\nBut our understanding of black holes from general relativity also says that they are a they are a singularity and if they are a singularity then anything that falls into the black hole has its information destroyed living behind, basically only the mass, some other things as well.\nDoesn't matter.\nThe point is, the information is supposedly destroyed, but if the information is destroyed, then it can't be the case that the wave function at any given point in time is the only thing that determines what happens in the future after all.\nSome of that information right now, if it's falling into a black hole, is then vanishing from existence.\nSo this is a problem, it's called a paradox, but I would just say it's a problem.\nLong theory, general relativity says the information is destroyed and the other theory, quantum theory says that the information is required in order to determine the future state of the universe.\nHow do we reconcile this?.\nWell, again, this is just a problem that we've talked about before on this podcast series many, many times.\nIt's the difficulty of reconciling quantum theory and general relativity.\nIt's just another outworking of that.\nOne way that people have tried to suggest that I always found interesting with this is that.\nand I think the movie interstellar tries to represent this to some extent as well and various other science fiction notions have tried to represent this, which is that as an object falls into the black hole, an image of that object remains permanently fixed on the surface of the event horizon.\nSo a 2D image of the 3D object perfectly encapsulates the information that that object had for all time.\nAnd so the black hole grows and grows and grows and the surface of the black hole serves the event horizon, grows and grows and grows, preserving the information.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=1631"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "94f33c3f-a3b3-4e58-8279-7575e9df8ec7": {"page_content": "So a 2D image of the 3D object perfectly encapsulates the information that that object had for all time.\nAnd so the black hole grows and grows and grows and the surface of the black hole serves the event horizon, grows and grows and grows, preserving the information.\nSo the information doesn't get destroyed because it gets preserved at the surface of the event horizon of the black hole forever.\nAnd this leads to weird things like holographic cosmologies where if it is possible for all the information of a, let's say, quantum object or any object falling into a black hole to be preserved on the 2D surface of the black hole, so a 3D object can be preserved on a 2D surface.\nPerhaps our entire universe is kind of like that.\nOur entire universe being a universe of three dimensions of space, one dimension of time, can somehow be represented on a 2D surface of something else.\nAnd so that is the way in which this 3D universe can exist inside of a holographic type thing.\nBut I don't know.\nBut anyway, this black hole information paradox, as far as I know, it's a real thing that physicists are working on and it's yet another problem as to why quantum theory and general relativity aren't yet united.\nMaybe we need another theory.\nWhen we do, we do.\nWe need another theory.\nAnd perhaps constructive theory can help with this as well.\nThese various popular videos on YouTube, you can read about the quantum information paradox.\nPeople try different solutions.\nIf you want to watch a video where someone says, there's no problem and every single solution that's ever been suggested for this is completely fallacious and doesn't work.\nLook at Sabine Haas and Phil, this video, Sabine Haas and Phil Ders, I'm a video.\nSo I was looking through popular accounts of this, I stumbled across a video, which of course, as you can see by the title, is going to attract someone like me because it says the black hole information loss problem is unsolved.\nOkay.\nAnd unsolvable.\nShe likes that kind of thing, you know, it's a, it's kind of clickbaity.\nA lot of other videos are kind of like this yet.\nSo if you just get to seven minutes, 20 of that particular video, she goes through one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=1759"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d5a08bc-ea15-4623-ba75-38b135ebd1fc": {"page_content": "Okay.\nAnd unsolvable.\nShe likes that kind of thing, you know, it's a, it's kind of clickbaity.\nA lot of other videos are kind of like this yet.\nSo if you just get to seven minutes, 20 of that particular video, she goes through one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.\nShe goes through something like 10 different attempts to solve this and just dismisses them by waiting her hands essentially, or kind of mockingly describing them, just listing them one after another as if they're all equivalently silly, you know, number seven there is a paper by by Gerard to hoof to you who's not a, you can easily just dismiss like that as if he's writing nonsense.\nHe is not someone who writes nonsense.\nIn fact, I don't know all the physicists who she's dismissing that easily, but this is a habit of hers.\nI would say she likes to not necessarily present her own ideas about things, but present other people's ideas and then say, what's wrong with all those ideas and usually not in a substantive way, she just argues from incredulity, just says, well, I don't believe this.\nI think this is either religion or nonsense or gobbledygook, as she likes to say.\nShe likes to talk about physics without the gobbledygook.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=1883"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1838b24b-ebad-46e6-8c98-62966f44ac25": {"page_content": "That's in fact how she introduces that particular video, but of course what she actually means is I'm going to make a video about gobbledygook without really describing much of the interesting physics, at least that's my feeling and watching some of her videos, indeed in this particular case, she says, with regards to the ten different theories that she very quickly dismisses as not possibly being solutions of the black hole information paradox, is that it's not a matter of objectively choosing among the solutions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=1965"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d287dac-8674-4bae-a123-01da87b3fcce": {"page_content": "In fact, it's just arbitrarily choosing which one you prefer, which one you like best.\nNow, of course, I don't understand all of these ten theories, so I'm not in a position to try and objectively assess them, but I'm sure if I sat down for a while and really studied it for a long enough time, I could figure out that they're not all unequal footing and can't be that easily dismissed.\nThis is kind of her habit I don't understand until I'm doing that, so then, but she does have this habit of what's during interviews and even seeing her in discussions with other physicists.\nAnd she is quite critical, which is very good.\nIt's a very good, popularion attitude to have, but on the other hand, she tends to straw man and denigrate on the basis of her not liking, not preferring, a particular theory, which is, of course, not popularion at all.\nWe need to criticize, but we need to criticize the strongest possible version of any given theory.\nAnd we can only evaluate the theory when put in its strongest possible terms, which I don't think she necessarily does.\nShe tends to summarize the ideas of others in a way that lacks generosity, and then on the basis of her personal summary, rather than the actual theory itself, makes some sort of moral call, like, for example, such and such, as nonsense or such and such, as gobbledygook or such and such is religious when it comes to certain versions of the multiverse, let's say.\nAnd near the end, she actually claims that the problem here with the black all information paradox is that too many theoretical physicists think that physics reduces entirely to mathematics, and it doesn't do this.\nI agree.\nAnd of course, somehow like this, of course, you need to have testable predictions in physics, or you should hope to have testable predictions in physics.\nAnd she claims at the end of the video that not only is there no data here, but there's even in principle, we can't gather the data to observe Hawking radiation directly.\nAnd this is a problem inherently for all practical purposes of ever figuring out which of these theories, if any is true.\nAnd this is why she says it's insoluble.\nIt's insoluble because in practice we can't directly observe, we can't observe, the Hawking radiation, the very thing that would help us to figure out how to distinguish to rule out some of these theories in favor of others.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=2001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7a474553-5e09-418b-9ac8-fdbc033da592": {"page_content": "And this is a problem inherently for all practical purposes of ever figuring out which of these theories, if any is true.\nAnd this is why she says it's insoluble.\nIt's insoluble because in practice we can't directly observe, we can't observe, the Hawking radiation, the very thing that would help us to figure out how to distinguish to rule out some of these theories in favor of others.\nNow this, to me, is, of course, rank empiricism.\nShe wants to observe Hawking radiation in order to rule out all the other theories.\nIt exactly wreaks to me of wanting to observe dinosaurs in order to establish that dinosaurs really exist or to try and figure out theories about dinosaurs.\nAll we have accesses to with fossils and fossils tell us all about dinosaurs.\nNot everything we would want to know, but they tell us a lot about dinosaurs.\nWe do not need to travel to the center of the sun in order to understand stellar nuclear fusion.\nWe do not need to travel back in time, 13.7 billion years and observe the big bee there, the big bang in order to know the big bang existed.\nWe have other forms of evidence.\nThere's absolutely no reason why Sabine should rule out other forms of evidence that might arise in order to rule out these particular theories.\nIn fact, rule out all the theories except for one, which actually explains not only Hawking radiation and the black hole information paradox, but new evidence yet to be found.\nBut there we go.\nI think this is a complete misunderstanding of what observation is and what its purpose is in science.\nSo while many physicists are in her opinion too hooked on mathematical models, I tend to think a deeper problem actually at times as too many physicists are empiricists.\nCertainly Sabine is no doubt she's an absolutely competent physicist, no problem with that.\nHaving watched many videos of her, she is, I gather an instrumentalist of a kind, but then of course she's in good company being an empiricist and an instrumentalist.\nI think I'd like maybe to do a reaction video one day of her, the trouble with many worlds video.\nIt's deeply misconceived, but it's one of those cases where you begin listening in almost every sentence is something one can object to and reveals deep misunderstanding.\nSo I'm not sure how illuminating it would be is the first thing, but the second thing is I don't know how fun it would actually be from the ultimately.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=2110"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c80aa8bd-4013-4d85-84dd-3801d50c6957": {"page_content": "I think I'd like maybe to do a reaction video one day of her, the trouble with many worlds video.\nIt's deeply misconceived, but it's one of those cases where you begin listening in almost every sentence is something one can object to and reveals deep misunderstanding.\nSo I'm not sure how illuminating it would be is the first thing, but the second thing is I don't know how fun it would actually be from the ultimately.\nThe reason for that is she just seems kind of angry when she doesn't many of her videos, she gets very frustrated with other physicists doing work or coming up with ideas that are new and creative and she just misses them.\nNow for one thing in this particular video, she talks about the universe is splitting, which as we know is wrong and we've spent a lot of time explaining why that is wrong here.\nShe thinks that probability is fundamental in some way, including in the many worlds interpretation and somehow her eight minute video of which I must say only about three minutes are actually devoted to discussing the many worlds is supposed to be a complete refutation of, well, this entire book by Wallace, among other things.\nSo like I say, it's kind of a straw man, which might be ungenerous of me to say, but that's a theme in the videos of hers that I've watched and her interactions with other physicists sadly.\nAnd I should say she does go through other interpretations as well, but she dismisses them all likewise, you know, none of them are satisfactory to her.\nAnd this is again, she's in good company.\nThis means that she falls back basically on instrumentalism of a kind.\nOkay, so that's enough of that.\nAnd that's enough of my introduction to the chapter, the science of information, if you like.\nNext episode, we will do some actual reading from the chapter information and find ways in which constructive theory comes directly to bear on this question of what information is, how it, how it interacts with physics.\nUntil then, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uTVbdjMy8&t=2231"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "039bcb9c-16db-416b-96e1-a1f3678e86fd": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast.\nAnd to an unusual episode, I've titled it Things That Make You Go, Mmm.\nAnd I hope it's a fun one.\nAnyone of a certain age who live through the 90s will know the song.\nAnd I wondered what to call today's episode, because what I'm kind of doing is reacting to a making sense podcast.\nOne of the very early ones that Sam Harris did interviewing Max Tegmark.\nAnd Max is a fascinating guy who's written books, he's a physicist.\nAnd he steps into philosophy and epistemology philosophy of science and that kind of thing.\nAnd so it's interesting to tease out some of the differences.\nAnd I thought to myself, how should I title this episode?.\nYou know, sometimes people advise me, your titles are too boring.\nYou're not going to get as many viewers if you tried to be a little bit more clickbaity, you know?.\nSo I thought like, popularly in reacts to Sam Harris or Brett all destroy Max Tegmark something like that.\nBut this all just seems silly.\nI don't want to go down that road.\nThis is about a silly as I'll get today, playing a few little music clips.\nAnd really, when I thought about what I was doing, it wasn't so much a reaction to what Sam Harris was saying or what Max Tegmark was saying.\nIt just gave me prompts to talk about a particular worldview.\nIt allowed me to explain the differences between what I regard as more or less mainstream philosophical views on these particular things.\nAnd what I hear at ToKCast explain, which is a version of Perperina epistemology, a version of the way in which David Deutsch explains the world.\nEveryone has their own version of things.\nBut of course, I cleave most closely to what is explained in the fabric of reality in the beginning of Divinity amongst other things.\nAnd what Max does here with Sam is he talks about well, it just seemed like the letter M was coming up so often.\nHe's talking about mathematics and morality, the material world, the multiverse mind among other things.\nSo I thought on listening to him, I can get a podcast of my own out of this.\nAnd the more I thought about it, the more I thought I can get a series of podcasts out about all of this stuff.\nThe M's mathematics, morality, metaphysics, minds, multiverse, misconceptions, mistakes about the material world and many worlds in the modern world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=13"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4259745-7d4b-4d18-83e7-0eaedb5e5421": {"page_content": "He's talking about mathematics and morality, the material world, the multiverse mind among other things.\nSo I thought on listening to him, I can get a podcast of my own out of this.\nAnd the more I thought about it, the more I thought I can get a series of podcasts out about all of this stuff.\nThe M's mathematics, morality, metaphysics, minds, multiverse, misconceptions, mistakes about the material world and many worlds in the modern world.\nI could have called this whole thing an M theory podcast.\nBut then there's already a theory in physics or metaphysics by that name.\nM theory is the generalization of string theory, if you look it up or by Edward Whitten among others.\nBut we have so much else to cover, I just doubt we'll get to membranes and those mysteries bordering on magic.\nOstensibly, as I say, this is a reaction podcast, a reaction to Sam Harris and Max Tegma talking for the first time on making sense.\nTheir first conversation there.\nBut really, as I say, it's just an excuse for me to talk about these issues prompted by what they say there.\nThis is in the whole mainly me speaking.\nSo for example, in this first episode, which is an hour long or so, I can tell you the ratio, it's approximately 15% of those two guys, Sam and Max and 85% me.\nAnd in this first episode, actually, of the series, I've only got through about the first 18 minutes or so of their original podcast.\nI am over this series going to select snippets from throughout that entire podcast.\nAnd they also did a second podcast as well.\nAnd it's going to take the first part of that second podcast, which is largely about AGI and of course I'm going to say, there are serious fundamental misconceptions in the worldview of Sam and Max when it comes to AGI and issues around AGI.\nSo that's what's happening today.\nI think I've got this particular episode with Sam talking to Max in something like Tripleka.\nI've got the original podcast feed and I've also got the subscriber podcast feed as well.\nAnd then I actually got the audio book that Sam produced of the making sense podcast.\nThe first interview of which is in that book.\nI've got the physical book while I should say Kindle version of the book and the audio version of the book.\nThe very first one that Sam put in there, quite rightly, is David Deutsch.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=112"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0eca629a-8622-49bd-9b7b-1661de09b09b": {"page_content": "I've got the original podcast feed and I've also got the subscriber podcast feed as well.\nAnd then I actually got the audio book that Sam produced of the making sense podcast.\nThe first interview of which is in that book.\nI've got the physical book while I should say Kindle version of the book and the audio version of the book.\nThe very first one that Sam put in there, quite rightly, is David Deutsch.\nBoth of David Deutsch's interviews appear as number one and two of his selected interviews for the making sense book.\nAnd the last interview that is in there is with Max Tegmark.\nSo it's a nice way to top and tail that particular book.\nI think the two most interesting people that are interviewed throughout that entire book, the series of interviews is certainly David and Max.\nAnd of course Sam has an M&E's name and Max has an M&E's name as well.\nand I'm going to be playing a little music today.\nSo hence the title of the episode, I think I might be overrigging things a little bit.\nYou get the point.\nI'm going to of course play some clips from the episode, but certainly not the whole thing.\nIt's definitely worth listening to if you can get a hold of it.\nAnd I feel as if I agree when it comes to things on the multiverse and aspects of philosophy that I'm agreeing with the general tenor of what's being said, more often than not, more often than not.\nHowever, as I say, there are interesting differences here which will allow us to explore a perperian view of this thing and how David Deutsch comes to, especially these ideas about the multiverse.\nWhat struck me in the interview, and this is not so true of Max's books on the topic and articles on the topic, because he, his big thing is talking about levels of the multiverse, different versions of the multiverse.\nWell, in this interview, he gives with Sam Harris, where he spends a lot of time talking about the multiverse.\nWell, the one kind of multiverse that he doesn't talk about is the quantum multiverse, which is really, really bizarre.\nHe talks about all these other kinds, but not ever ready in quantum theory.\nSo we miss out on that.\nAnd instead we're talking about another M, I would say, metaphysics.\nWell, except for his level one multiverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=224"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ee7a780-e5be-40a3-895e-5ba92b7aea5f": {"page_content": "Well, the one kind of multiverse that he doesn't talk about is the quantum multiverse, which is really, really bizarre.\nHe talks about all these other kinds, but not ever ready in quantum theory.\nSo we miss out on that.\nAnd instead we're talking about another M, I would say, metaphysics.\nWell, except for his level one multiverse.\nHe says, level one multiverse, I don't even think kind of qualifies as a multiverse.\nIt's just the universe beyond what's observable, but we know that there is something beyond the observable universe.\nBut this also comes back to their view of science.\nWhen I say there, I mean, Sam and Max seem to agree about something to do with the unobserved and the unobserved is somehow or other regarded by others as being not a part of science.\nI don't know who these others are, these are empiricists, but no one seems these days much to answer to the title of empiricist.\nBut what they get wrong and we'll hear this is that they seem to think that things which are not observable are, therefore not popularion, but this is wrong.\nOkay, this is this is seriously wrong as we will come to a theory which is in principle, not testable is not science.\nNow scientists get really upset.\nWell, only a certain breed of physics.\nWell, only a certain breed of theoretical physicists get really upset if you start to say things like what you're doing there.\nWith your theory, interesting as it is close to physics as it is is not testable.\nWe have no way known of testing it even in principle and so therefore it doesn't qualify as science.\nIt's metaphysics, which is still really worthy and interesting and good to do and they get very, very upset.\nThey don't want to be accused of not doing physics, but I don't see why they're so upset.\nThey're doing either mathematics or they're doing metaphysics.\nIt's okay.\nThey're at the intersection of those areas and maybe one day in the distant future.\nWe will be able to find ways of testing these metaphysical theories.\nThings like one of Max's multiverse's, namely his level four multiverse, which is the multiverse of universes where those other universes have different different laws of physics.\nThey have a retion multiverse.\nAll the universes obey exactly the same laws of physics, namely they come out of our understanding of the quantum laws of physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=332"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f44e3494-a848-45e0-9c70-666978f090f7": {"page_content": "They're at the intersection of those areas and maybe one day in the distant future.\nWe will be able to find ways of testing these metaphysical theories.\nThings like one of Max's multiverse's, namely his level four multiverse, which is the multiverse of universes where those other universes have different different laws of physics.\nThey have a retion multiverse.\nAll the universes obey exactly the same laws of physics, namely they come out of our understanding of the quantum laws of physics.\nSo they all obey the quantum laws of physics, but this level four multiverse that Max talks about.\nThat's the universe that obeys all other possible different kinds of laws of physics and David Lewis first thought about this.\nIf you like these are the logically possible other universes, logically possible, not merely physically possible other universes, which is what the quantum multiverse is, those universes that are permitted by the existing laws of physics.\nNow, if there are places out there in reality beyond our physical reality, then they would obey, presumably other laws of physics.\nAnd if all such other laws of physics are instantiated somewhere out there, then we have all logically possible universes out there somewhere other.\nAnd David Lewis first had this, why do I think he first had this idea, but he certainly wrote the book on it.\nAnd we call this idea the plenitude.\nSo the plenitude is a much larger class of universes of different physical realities than the mere ever read a multiverse, vast as that is.\nSo Max endorses all of these multiverses and he's going to explain these different multiverses.\nLet me just give you a quick rundown.\nHe's got level one multiverse, which as I say, I wouldn't regard as being a multiverse.\nIt's just the universe where the universe means we have this region of space that we can observe.\nAnd we know that beyond what is observed as a matter of cosmological fact is just a small portion of the entire physical universe, all bang the same laws and all spatially continuous in somewhere other.\nSo that's the first kind of multiverse that Max talked about and I would just call it the universe.\nOkay.\nSo that's that.\nHis second kind, his level two multiverse.\nWell, this is perhaps at the big bang what happened was that during the inflationary period there were lots of other bubble universes created with different slightly different initial conditions, but obeying the same laws of physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=440"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "133251f7-23ca-427f-8744-06cd7a52a0df": {"page_content": "So that's the first kind of multiverse that Max talked about and I would just call it the universe.\nOkay.\nSo that's that.\nHis second kind, his level two multiverse.\nWell, this is perhaps at the big bang what happened was that during the inflationary period there were lots of other bubble universes created with different slightly different initial conditions, but obeying the same laws of physics.\nSo you have this proliferation at the big bang of many simultaneous big bangs going off and lots and lots and lots of different universes been created in parallel, but we don't have access to those other universes.\nI'm not actually aware of any experimental test that has been proposed that would allow us to even in principle access observations that would allow us to rule out the single universe theory or the many universes theory in that sense.\nThat kind of multiverse and so therefore it sits at the moment in the realm of mathematics or metaphysics it's not physics and it's not physics by the measure we say that well you can't test it there's no experimental test yet now I could be wrong about that someone clever might have thought of an experimental test.\nNow in fact there were observations going back a decade or more that suggested that we might have been able to observe these other universes with different initial conditions or perhaps even subtly different laws.\nAnd well the observation went like this if if beyond the horizon of what we could see let's say the constants of nature were different then you would be able to observe that change in the constants of nature in a different universe far away from where we are.\nAnd so a group of scientists among them at the University of New South Wales have been talking about the University of New South Wales a little bit recently, but led by Professor John Webb and his colleague Michael Murphy now professor of astrophysics down at Swinborn University.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=568"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "70b93ad3-d940-4d13-9a47-e2170a262a04": {"page_content": "These guys using among the largest land based telescopes reflecting telescopes on earth in Hawaii, the Keck telescopes they were looking at a lot from very distant quasars that passed through very distant galaxies and along the way got absorbed and changed and whatever else and they looking at the spectral lines and the spectral lines they looked at they thought had changed in some way were different to the ones in the laboratory here on earth now correcting for redshift and all that sort of stuff correcting for everything.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=657"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f3db3173-d16c-4d15-9288-ffdcaf120fb9": {"page_content": "They still found a change and the explanation for the change was this thing called the fine structure constant had changed.\nAnd if the fine structure constant change because it's made up of Planck's constant and the charge on an electron and the speed of light so you've got these fundamental constants coming together to make up the fine structure constant.\nIf the fine structure constant had changed one or more of these other fundamental constants must have changed but it's very hard to tell which one it would have been now whatever the case if the fine structure constant has changed in a different region of the universe very distant from where we are then that seems to suggest it is literally a different universe that you're seeing you're seeing some other region of space.\nA bang subtly different physical or so perhaps by that measure we would be able to see another universe and that would make such a kind of multiverse testable in that sense now in reality of course looking at this whole issue from a period perspective what they did was make a measurement of the fine structure constant and then.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=672"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a73226c1-af39-4245-b19b-bb3857d11949": {"page_content": "Concluded the fine structure constant is the thing that's changing but they published all the results and they seem to repeatedly find no matter how often they tested this and how many other groups also tested this they all seem to converge on yes the fine structure constant seem to change only a very, very tiny amount but one can imagine looking still further with more powerful telescopes and see even more of a change so perhaps the fine structure constant the constant the universe are what they are here around us but as you get further away closer to other universes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=741"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "170a7dda-95a8-408e-92fd-4076955f5a37": {"page_content": "Perhaps the constants of nature change and you can observe that with telescopes using clever methods.\nWell, as we say here in preparing a epistemology it could be the case the fine structure constant is changing or it could be the case that you've made an error with your measurements and yes it turned out there was a systematic error there was a systematic error with the measurements.\nso we were all very disappointed.\nBut still they had these really interesting techniques it's just that there was a issue with the mirror or something as far as I know from these cake telescopes that anyway I don't fully understand exactly what it was all.\nI know was their measurements of the change the fine structure constant turned out to be null and void there was no such change so.\nYes this method of seeing other universes has failed and there's no good explanation there's no good explanation of being able to.\nUse such a method to actually physically see if you like other universes by seeing changes in constant nature we should expect if we do see changes in the constant nature that what we're actually seeing is errors in the methodology errors with the instrumentation that kind of thing so we have no way of.\nKnowing knowing in the perperience and having a good explanation that there really do exist these other universes out there with different physical laws or that they really do exist these other universes bubble universes out there that started with different initial conditions.\nBut we do have a good explanation of the level three multiverse as Max calls it the ever read in multiverse we know that one exists because it's the only known explanation of what we observe in quantum theory and the equations of quantum theory and all that kind of thing.\nSo they're the four one the observed universe and the parts of the universe that are beyond the observed horizon the level two multiverse the bubble universe is the also began supposedly at the big bang with slightly different initial conditions but a bang the same laws the level three multiverse the ever read in multiverse.\nWhere everything abays the same physical laws but you're constantly getting differentiation of those universes and then last of all all the logically possible universes that could exist with different physical laws completely or not so completely but all possible physical laws are represented out there somewhere other now as I say the first of those is just the universe so that's fine that counts as science and number three cancer science but.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=762"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7a9b6d98-b4fe-414c-a8eb-727aead7627d": {"page_content": "Where everything abays the same physical laws but you're constantly getting differentiation of those universes and then last of all all the logically possible universes that could exist with different physical laws completely or not so completely but all possible physical laws are represented out there somewhere other now as I say the first of those is just the universe so that's fine that counts as science and number three cancer science but.\nTwo how do we observe these things and four how do we observe those things well no way known yet but again you hear some theoretical physicists talk and they get very upset they know very touch you about being told that this doesn't quite qualify science this is no insult though in the Paparian framework Papa zone work you know epistemology is not science it's non science and that's fine.\nit's totally fine the other one majority of people on planet earth aren't doing science.\nbut they're doing important work so why people get upset why physicists only physicists get upset when they're told well that's not experimentally testable just yet if you can think of a clever experimental test that would allow us to in some way access those other universes great then you've got an experiment so you're back within the realm of science that's the whole point of.\nA science is to be able to do two things at once to come up with the creative idea yes to to think of the new explanation the new theory that's great.\nAnd to also think of how we might go about testing this in the real world to rule out competing theories but if you can't rule out competing theories like well there's only one universe and it's the one that we're able to observe.\nThen well I'm sorry you're not quite doing science now they can call it science if they want that's fine.\nI'm not overly worried that certainly the next closest thing to science right this metaphysical discussion about other universes with different physical laws I would say it's right next door to science it is the next closest thing and.\nI can imagine that one day someone will think of some interesting way in which we might experimentally test for something like that you know I can imagine a distant future gravitational wave thing and that the text gravitational waves and the only explanation of the particular pattern of gravitational waves would be if at the big bang other universes were being produced perhaps even other universes with different physical laws I can imagine some distant future someone thinking of something like that.\nbut they haven't thought of it now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=890"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ac1bdf0c-ece2-4c5b-95a8-0545fcce1887": {"page_content": "I can imagine that one day someone will think of some interesting way in which we might experimentally test for something like that you know I can imagine a distant future gravitational wave thing and that the text gravitational waves and the only explanation of the particular pattern of gravitational waves would be if at the big bang other universes were being produced perhaps even other universes with different physical laws I can imagine some distant future someone thinking of something like that.\nbut they haven't thought of it now.\nSo let's get into listening to some of the discussion between Sam and Max and I'll pause it at various points and as I say I'm just small snippets today just picking out small snippets of the conversation and just reacting to it and it'll give me an opportunity to discuss what proper might have said about this kind of thing and what I think that science says about all of this stuff at the moment what our best epistemology would say about.\nSo without further ado let's get into it this is towards the beginning of their discussion.\nStart there kind of at the foundations of our knowledge and the foundations of science because you know in science we are making our best effort to arrive at a unified understanding of reality and I think there are many people in our culture many and humanities departments who think that knows such understanding as possible.\nI think there's no view of the world that encompasses subatomic particles and cocktail parties and everything in between.\nbut I think that from the point of view of science we have to believe that there is.\nWe may use different concepts at different scales but there shouldn't be radical discontinuities between different scales and our understanding of reality and I'm assuming that's an intuition you share but let's just take that as a starting point.\nSo I regard myself of course as a realist and as a scientific realist but I do think there is a difference between science and non science and Sam wanted to say there that there should be a scientific understanding of everything from the very smallest through to cocktail parties through to the very largest.\nNow in a sense this is right so long as you're just talking about the physical stuff.\nbut we know that there is also abstract stuff.\nand there is a distinction.\nand I think Sam gets this later on in the conversation certainly in his second conversation with Max where he talks about the distinction between software and hardware.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1017"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e1dddb6-2173-4634-9b79-72622c58dec3": {"page_content": "Now in a sense this is right so long as you're just talking about the physical stuff.\nbut we know that there is also abstract stuff.\nand there is a distinction.\nand I think Sam gets this later on in the conversation certainly in his second conversation with Max where he talks about the distinction between software and hardware.\nI don't know really if he has a clear idea in his mind as to what that difference is but what we say here is that there is a difference between physical stuff and abstract stuff and the abstract stuff can have an effect on the physical stuff.\nNow it's via physical forces obviously but the difference is and where this radical discontinuity does come in which Sam doesn't think it exists.\nbut I would say there is there is a radical discontinuity is where knowledge is created where you have inherently unpredictable stuff.\nBut within physics and within the physical sciences we can have predictions we can have quite precise predictions.\nSo long as they are carefully controlled but once you get into the realm of human affairs it's not merely because certain problems are intractable.\nBut there are in principle not predictable because they are acts of creation creating knowledge is an act of creation it wasn't there before it could not possibly have been predicted before and then it was created now how we don't know we don't yet know exactly how this creativity works we simply know it exists.\nAnd this is true of lots of things in science all the time we have this phenomena we don't quite understand.\nbut we know that it's there we know that it's real we yet to have a full understanding of it and there won't be a full understanding of course in our opinion view and I would say that on the side of people who don't regard themselves as per periods and as we will see here I would say one reason that people don't regard themselves per periods is that understand what poppers epistemology is.\nIt encompasses all of a period epistemology we know that's not true but if they think that that's what they think then they're apt to think that science is just this all encompassing thing and that anything that is non science is therefore not rational.\nTo begin with the same wants to bring everything within the scientific world view in that sense now it's fine to have a rational world view.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6669185c-e890-4763-95ab-2e4911d57766": {"page_content": "It encompasses all of a period epistemology we know that's not true but if they think that that's what they think then they're apt to think that science is just this all encompassing thing and that anything that is non science is therefore not rational.\nTo begin with the same wants to bring everything within the scientific world view in that sense now it's fine to have a rational world view.\nThey will view govern the by reason but at the same time to notice that there are differences in methodologies and to have names for these differences in methodology and not to make value judgments about these differences in methodology just to recognize they're real not everything is mathematics and mathematics is not science therefore science is not everything.\nThese things are different morality is not science science makes claims about everything it's universal but so too can epistemology make claims about everything but these are importantly distinct ways of coming to understand the world because they use different methodologies and we just got names for these but in certain moods we hear Sam kind of suggesting something like well science just is knowledge.\nIt just is knowledge just if you can know stuff then that science that seems to be the the way he's hinting at stuff and that if you claim that something's not science then what you're saying of that thing is it's unreasonable or rational or something else like that.\nAnd we just don't think that there are parts of reality that are not amenable to a scientific understanding our best way in is not to understand that thing scientifically.\nIt's to have a philosophical understanding a moral understanding a mathematical understanding.\nThese things won't contradict science but a different two science by the measure that he in science we have this method of criticism that we call the experimental test.\nAnd that experimental test the experiment distinguishes science from other stuff mathematics is distinguished by this method of proof.\nNow it's not only in mathematics that you have proof but it is distinguished by that it's one of the techniques that really is in mathematics and perhaps in logic as well and in argumentation of course.\nBut our scientific understanding of proof is to say it's a physical process and in fact we're going to get to that because I think that this is one area of Max's worldview that doesn't quite correspond to what we understand reality is according to.\nDavid Deutsches understanding of the mathematicians misconception this idea that mathematicians have privileged access to reality in some way.\nThey have a special way of getting to certain knowledge to the necessary truth will come back to that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1257"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "81788b9a-0a6f-46bf-b777-4d919ec90adf": {"page_content": "But our scientific understanding of proof is to say it's a physical process and in fact we're going to get to that because I think that this is one area of Max's worldview that doesn't quite correspond to what we understand reality is according to.\nDavid Deutsches understanding of the mathematicians misconception this idea that mathematicians have privileged access to reality in some way.\nThey have a special way of getting to certain knowledge to the necessary truth will come back to that.\nLet's just hear what Max has to say in response to Sam D. Yeah, when people when someone says that they think reality is just a social construct or whatnot.\nThen other people get upset and say you know if you think gravity is a social construct and encourage you to take a step out through my window here on the sixth floor and if you drill down into what this conflict comes from it's just that they're using that our word reality in very different ways.\nAnd as a physicist the way I use the word reality is I assume that there is something out there independent of me as a human.\nI assume that the Andromeda galaxy would continue existing you know even if I weren't here for example.\nAnd then we take this very humble approach of saying okay there is some stuff that exists out there or physical reality.\nLet's call it and let's look at it as closely we can and try to figure out what properties it has if there's some confusion about something you know that's our problem not reality's problem.\nThere's no doubt in my mind that our universe knows perfectly well what is doing and it's it functions in some way.\nWe physicists have so far failed to figure out what that way is and we're in this schizophrenic situation where we can't even make quantum mechanics talk to relativity theory properly.\nBut that's the way I see it simply a failure so far in our own creativity and I think it's not only would I guess that there is a reality out there independent of us, but I actually feel it's quite arrogant to say the opposite.\nBecause it sort of presumes that we humans play to go center stage solipsists say that there is no reality with that themselves ostrich is in the apocryphal story right make this assumption that things that they don't see don't exist.\nBut even very respected scientists go down this sleeper slope sometimes.\nbut I think that's very arrogant.\nand I think we can use a good dose of humility.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1400"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "087f52f8-e042-4245-95bd-98638c5e6419": {"page_content": "Because it sort of presumes that we humans play to go center stage solipsists say that there is no reality with that themselves ostrich is in the apocryphal story right make this assumption that things that they don't see don't exist.\nBut even very respected scientists go down this sleeper slope sometimes.\nbut I think that's very arrogant.\nand I think we can use a good dose of humility.\nSo my starting point is there is something out there and let's try to figure out how it works.\nI broadly agree with all of that, that's a rational defensive realism.\nThis is arguing against those relativists not many people actually self-identify sure a lot of this, but you do get this impression sometimes that people want to say well science has no privilege access to explaining the physical world.\nIt's just people engaging in narratives these are stories these are fictions they're not really uncovering truths about reality the explanations aren't necessarily objective this is just a certain way of explaining things that isn't privileged.\nI think all that's wrong and I think Max's defense of that is all quite right and there's a sense in which that is a kind of arrogance, but I would just maybe in this is where I'm of course splitting hairs is where I'm core of course nitpicking.\nI would say that humans are center stage in a sense we are we are the only known system in the entire observable universe that we've ever known about that can model the rest of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1524"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb1b7d90-dd03-4421-a786-730b17a72a63": {"page_content": "I think to have this self-similarity with the rest of the universe it's coming to resemble in certain ways the rest of physical reality and that's a wonderful thing that does put us at the center, the center of understanding it might be the only such place in the universe where the universe is understanding itself and so in that sense we've got every right to be arrogant not arrogant in the sense that we will come to a final understanding or arrogant in the sense that we can't possibly have any understanding and there's that arrogance of solipsism of not possibly being able to be saying of other people you can't understand anything either.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1628"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "df985bc5-6464-4be3-8005-8e623b3a3493": {"page_content": "Okay that that arrogance that we can rule that out as a bad explanation but the arrogance of.\nyeah.\nwe are really special.\nWe are so far as we know entirely unique in being able to do this stuff that we can do to explain everything to gain control over time of everything.\nI'm happy to put my hand up to that arrogance and I think we should we could do with a little bit more of that kind of arrogance and less of the humility of thinking.\nthat we can't or shouldn't.\nSo that's the splitting hairs minor difference I would have in emphasis between people who want to argue against relativism in that way and say well the relativists are wrong the solips are wrong I agree with them so far so good.\nBut when they then turn around and say well we shouldn't be arrogant we should have this humility now yes there's a humility of saying we don't have all the answers so we can't be arrogant that way but nonetheless not being so humble as to say we're not unique and special and powerful and all of that kind of thing and we can gain more power over time over the universe and that's a good thing let's keep going.\nIn conveniently for us this skepticism about the possibility of understanding reality does sort of sneak in the back door for us somewhat paradoxically by virtue of taking science seriously in particular evolutionary biology seriously and this is something you.\nand I were talking about when we last met where you know I think at one point the conversation I observed as almost everyone has who thinks about evolution that one thing we can be sure of is that that our cognitive capacity is in our common sense and our intuitions about reality.\nWe have not evolved to equip us to understand reality at the smallest possible scale or the largest or things moving incredibly fast or things that are very old that we have intuitions that are tuned for things at human scale things that are moving relatively slowly and we have to decide whether we can mate with them or whether we can eat them or whether they're going to eat us.\nAnd so you and I were talking about this.\nand so I know I said that it's no surprise therefore that the deliverances of science in particular your areas of science are deeply counterintuitive and you.\nYou did me one better though you you said that not only is it not surprising it would be surprising and in fact give you reason to mistrust your theories if they were aligned with common sense we should expect the punch line at the end of the book of nature to be deeply counterintuitive in some sense.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1676"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "01b7be57-a53e-4c6d-a40b-484220073b8e": {"page_content": "and so I know I said that it's no surprise therefore that the deliverances of science in particular your areas of science are deeply counterintuitive and you.\nYou did me one better though you you said that not only is it not surprising it would be surprising and in fact give you reason to mistrust your theories if they were aligned with common sense we should expect the punch line at the end of the book of nature to be deeply counterintuitive in some sense.\nand I just want you to expand on that a little bit.\nOf course I think that's kind of wrong kind of wrong there's this idea that we have these evolved intuitions and indeed evolved common sense.\nbut I don't think that's true.\nI think we learn what's called common sense over time we learn certain kind of intuitions there might be some that are inborn granted granted but what's not inborn is newton's physics but people who try and learn newton's physics tend to understand the three laws of motion pretty quickly an object emotion states emotion and less acted on by an external force moving in a straight line.\nPeople get it but back in Aristotle's time that wasn't regarded as being true or being common sense the common sense thing was any moving object eventually comes to a halt that was common sense now how do people come to this common sense what is common sense.\nIs it common sense that a moving object eventually comes to a stop or is it common sense that a moving object will just continue moving indefinitely and less acted on by a force which one's common sense.\nWell I don't know which one is common sense.\nbut I know that we need to learn both perhaps the first one is kind of learned by infants experimenting in the world or not I don't know I just can't remember what I used to think before I understood well it's actually Galileo's law.\nbut this idea of moving objects keep moving until acted on by force.\nWhat I'm saying here is that I don't think that this idea this is a Dawkins idea of middle world that we've evolved with a capacity that limits our ability to understand the world.\nWhat we've in fact evolved with in fact is a brain which has the capacity to explain everything to have this universal capacity for understanding the world.\nThis is what David Deutsch explains in the beginning of infinity there isn't some limit set by evolution of that kind of understanding of being impossibly unable to overturn your common sense or your intuition your intuitions can change with what you learn about reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1851"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9ae2883f-c92f-4939-a8ab-ca40e8499c84": {"page_content": "What we've in fact evolved with in fact is a brain which has the capacity to explain everything to have this universal capacity for understanding the world.\nThis is what David Deutsch explains in the beginning of infinity there isn't some limit set by evolution of that kind of understanding of being impossibly unable to overturn your common sense or your intuition your intuitions can change with what you learn about reality.\nMy intuitions used to be that you could come to certain knowledge you could get the final answer that was my intuition now my intuition is you can't do that it's exactly the opposite I've my intuition has changed my common sense has changed I think this is true of everyone and so people make a big deal of this are we've got an evolved brain.\nyeah.\nwe do have an evolved brain therefore it's limited in what it can understand.\nno.\nno you've misunderstood computational university and misunderstood explanatory universality.\nThis is what the brain is what the human mind is capable of doing but people make a big deal about this so they make a big deal about how people just can't understand quantum theory it's really hard or string theory it's really these things are new these things are really new on the scene.\nIn the distant future will have better ways of understanding these things especially if they comport with reality.\nI have no doubt that in generations from now people regard quantum theory and roughly the same way as we regard Newton's theories now.\nIt used to be thought that Newtonian physics was completely counterintuitive it took a long time for the general public to understand this stuff so now routinely you know kids in sort of the first year of high school learn the basics of Newton's physics.\nThey do one day non-coursively we'll be educating our you know new teenagers if they're interested or even younger is the basics of quantum theory.\nBut whatever the success of the quantum theory is because we will know how to do that we will know how to do it.\nbut there is this thought that well it's just mathematically too complex.\nBut we don't need all the idea in order to understand the basics of Newtonian physics you don't need to go down the road of being able to solve the three body problem for example.\nOkay.\nyeah.\nthat's technically difficult but the the basics the basic ideas that can be understood that can be understood by people if they take an interest and you can understand anything the more interest you take in it the more time you spend trying to understand that thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=1932"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a81469b7-7beb-40f5-8157-99c614c92a10": {"page_content": "But we don't need all the idea in order to understand the basics of Newtonian physics you don't need to go down the road of being able to solve the three body problem for example.\nOkay.\nyeah.\nthat's technically difficult but the the basics the basic ideas that can be understood that can be understood by people if they take an interest and you can understand anything the more interest you take in it the more time you spend trying to understand that thing.\nAnd the fact that one person can do it means that someone else can do it the string theory that Ed would wouldn't understand could be understood by anyone else if they took an interest but they tend not to take an interest in these things.\nAnd I understand this is an extremely poorly subscribed notion but all it is is a consequence of thinking of the mind as a universal explainer.\nThat doesn't mean that any one person will explain everything all have the capacity to explain everything even everything that's known because they will never take an interest in everything that's not.\nIt's just that if they did take an interest then they could.\nNow what causes someone to take an interest well add.\nso I think that's an open question you know why do some people find certain things inherently boring.\nAnd when they regard these things as inherently boring we say well I say the culture says they physically incapable of knowing nothing of understanding that thing you know certain people are just physically unable to learn maths or something like that a certain kinds of maths it's it's too hard for them.\nRather than saying it's too boring for them now a lot of people would just pull the straps there and say well maybe they're the same thing.\nMaybe they're the same thing too hard or too boring.\nWhat I'm saying is that in theory given the right explanations they could understand those things curiosity is a real thing trying to solve a certain problem you need to have the that problem situation we say this is part of theory and epistemology of course I part of papier in epistemology that almost no one except the papierians actually know so when people describe papier in epistemology and then not papierians and hear them talking about problems situations.\nAnd that's it.\nand that's what we're going to hear later on.\nokay let's go back.\nand we'll hear the next thing that Max has to say about this on this idea that the evolved brain is an evolved to understand the nature of reality or sophisticated physics or something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2061"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ad0a1f3-ca28-4f3c-ace1-6d44e757a8ec": {"page_content": "And that's it.\nand that's what we're going to hear later on.\nokay let's go back.\nand we'll hear the next thing that Max has to say about this on this idea that the evolved brain is an evolved to understand the nature of reality or sophisticated physics or something like that.\nYeah that's exactly right I think that's a very clear prediction of Darwin's ideas if you take them seriously that whatever the ultimate nature of reality is it should seem really weird and counterintuitive to us because you know developing a brain advanced enough to understand new concepts is costly in evolution.\nAnd we wouldn't have evolved it and spent a lot of energy increasing metabolism etc if it didn't help in any way if some cavewoman spent too much time pondering what was out there beyond all the stars that she could see or subatomic particles.\nBut she might not have noticed the tiger that snuck up behind her and gone clean right out of the gene pool moreover this is not just a natural logical prediction but it's a testable prediction.\nDarwin lived a long time ago right then we can look what has happened since then when we've used technology to probe things beyond what we could experience with our senses.\nSo the prediction is that whenever we with technology study physics that was inaccessible to ancestors.\nIt should seem weird so let's look at the fact sheet at the score card we started what happened when things go much faster than our ancestors near the speed of light.\nTime slowed down.\nSo weird that Einstein never even got the Nobel Prize for it because my Swedish commercially countrymen on the global committee thought it was too weird.\nYou look at what happens when things are really really huge and you get black holes which were considered so weird again.\nThe long time until people really started to accept them and then you look at what happens when you make things really small.\nEverything that's new is weird by definition.\nYou can talk about people struggling to understand why certain historical events happen.\nWe could talk about how not intuitive certain kinds of music are.\nThis thing about.\nwell it's evolutionarily costly to have a brain that can understand the secrets of the universe.\nIt misunderstands that that brain is only able to detect the tiger sneaking up on them just sneaking up on the proverbial cave woman he just talked about in order to understand that that's happening.\nIt's the same mind doing it using the same process of conjecture and refutation that's it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2196"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0bf873d5-4b3a-462a-b370-a93a045d0f47": {"page_content": "We could talk about how not intuitive certain kinds of music are.\nThis thing about.\nwell it's evolutionarily costly to have a brain that can understand the secrets of the universe.\nIt misunderstands that that brain is only able to detect the tiger sneaking up on them just sneaking up on the proverbial cave woman he just talked about in order to understand that that's happening.\nIt's the same mind doing it using the same process of conjecture and refutation that's it.\nThe remarkable thing is that the same mind using the same process can both detect the tiger or detect the false positive of the tiger and also look up into the sky at those pinpricks of light and also figure out they're actually super hot furnaces of nuclear fusion.\nIt's the same process going on of guessing and checking against reality.\nThat's what's going on.\nAnd this is why the brain was selected for the human mind was selected for.\nBut the fundamental way in which we come to an understanding of reality and understand what a tiger is and what that noise might be at night is a different kind of a thing to what any other animal does.\nAny other animal is not going to learn quite so well over time that the noise it just heard at night is not a reason to run off as fast as it possibly can.\nBut we can learn that false positives are a thing.\nBut what we thought was a tiger.\nIn fact, that's that same bush blowing in the wind and making that noise that kind of sounds like a tiger creeping up on us.\nBut a gazelle or a wielder beast or whatever tigers go after.\nThey don't have that same capacity.\nThey're always going to run.\nThey're instinct.\nThey have no choice but to obey their instincts.\nWe're different.\nWe can routinely violate what our instincts are telling us to do because we're also interpreting those interpreting those instincts in a way that animals just aren't.\nBut we explain what that sense data was.\nWe explained to ourselves to our unsatisfaction.\nNow we also have the system where, yeah, sure, we can react immediately to something.\nAnd that's good too.\nSo we have at least two systems.\nThe animal, the other animals only have this one.\nWe can only do what their instincts tell them to do.\nWe can go well beyond our instincts.\nIs it evolutionarily costly?.\nYes, but it also appears to have been the most evolutionarily valuable powerful thing that is ever evolved.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2334"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "32287682-777f-4d5c-8c11-52da039a7b03": {"page_content": "Now we also have the system where, yeah, sure, we can react immediately to something.\nAnd that's good too.\nSo we have at least two systems.\nThe animal, the other animals only have this one.\nWe can only do what their instincts tell them to do.\nWe can go well beyond our instincts.\nIs it evolutionarily costly?.\nYes, but it also appears to have been the most evolutionarily valuable powerful thing that is ever evolved.\nAnd as we like to say, it's a prelude to the rest of evolution that's going to happen, which is going to be mimetic.\nWe are the general intelligence.\nWe are the super intelligence.\nThat's what we are.\nWe have this universal mind that can literally understand and explain anything, anything.\nSo far so good, by the way, this is known argument from induction.\nIt's just saying that the only known explanation for the fact that we can continually make progress and have always made progress and haven't reached a stumbling block yet.\nWe've always got open questions, but they're not walls before us, not walls before our progress.\nThe only known explanation for that is we have a universal mind, a universal mind that can understand anything.\nAnd if it wasn't universal, shouldn't we have known by now, but people keep on saying, you know, scientists especially who don't know the philosophy, keep on saying, well, just you wait kind of thing.\nJust you wait, we're going to get the problem that we can't possibly solve.\nThere's going to come the gap in our knowledge of physics, which cannot be filled, no matter how hard we try, because our brain will be incapable of it.\nAnd people have always been saying this, since religious times, it's like there's no point trying to understand the world, just read the book.\nAnd you only God can understand the world.\nThis was the prevailing view.\nThis was why theologians and others and priests were saying to the scientists early on in the philosophers, they're actually committing sacrilege by even trying to do this stuff.\nYou should bow down to the authority of the books and of the priests, because we know the truth.\nYour puny mind can't possibly understand the laws of nature, the laws of motion, don't be ridiculous.\nAnd so have we moved beyond that sort of ideology?.\nNo, we haven't.\nBut it's just now scientists often making that claim rather than the priests.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2523"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bedf9df7-aaac-4eed-a142-32e2373eb0a3": {"page_content": "You should bow down to the authority of the books and of the priests, because we know the truth.\nYour puny mind can't possibly understand the laws of nature, the laws of motion, don't be ridiculous.\nAnd so have we moved beyond that sort of ideology?.\nNo, we haven't.\nBut it's just now scientists often making that claim rather than the priests.\nRather than the priests saying, don't try and understand reality because only God understands reality.\nIt's now the scientists turning around and saying, well, maybe they'll write all along.\nMaybe we can't understand reality.\nMaybe we have to look to the aliens, the gods, in order to get a full understanding of reality.\nBecause our puny human minds can't even begin to scratch the surface.\nWe've got Newtonian mechanics.\nWe're very lucky to have moved beyond that into general relativity and into quantum theory.\nBut maybe string theory will bring those two things together.\nBut you've got to expect the enders coming.\nThe enders knife or understanding.\nEither we complete physics or we're going to encounter the problem we can't solve.\nThat's what we should expect.\nOf course, the David Deutsch worldview tells us, no, we should expect exactly the opposite.\nWe should expect to continually solve our problems.\nAnd in retrospect, we look back and go, oh, look, those other theories are actually easy and intuitive.\nWhen you've got the right way to think about them, they're actually intuitive after all.\nOkay, let's keep on going.\nThen you look at what happens when you make things really small, so small that our ancestors couldn't see them.\nAnd you find that elementary particles can be in several places at once, extremely counterintuitive, the point that people are still arguing about what it means exactly, even though they can see the particles really can do this weird stuff.\nAnd the list goes on, whenever you take any parameter out of the range of what our ancestors experienced, really weird things happen.\nIf you have very high energies, for example, like when you smash two particles together near the speed of light that the Lord had wrong collider at CERN, you know, if you collide a proton and an anti proton together and out pops a Higgs boson, you know, that's about as intuitive as if you collide a Volkswagen with an Audi and out comes a cruise ship.\nAnd yet this is the way the world works.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2659"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6d149cb1-d93e-413c-9433-9bee6e27a20c": {"page_content": "If you have very high energies, for example, like when you smash two particles together near the speed of light that the Lord had wrong collider at CERN, you know, if you collide a proton and an anti proton together and out pops a Higgs boson, you know, that's about as intuitive as if you collide a Volkswagen with an Audi and out comes a cruise ship.\nAnd yet this is the way the world works.\nSo I think the verdict is in whatever the nature of reality actually is.\nThis seemed really weird to us.\nAnd if we therefore dismiss physics theories just because they seem counterintuitive, we're almost certainly going to dismiss whatever the correct theory is once someone actually tells us about it.\nSo again, I agree with him.\nI agree with that sentiment that we should expect our new theories to be counterintuitive in the same way that anything new is going to be counterintuitive.\nYou know, the next iPhone, people kind of get annoyed when they change the operating system too much.\nIt's like, it's no longer intuitive.\nIt was.\nNow, why was it intuitive that the first iPhones weren't intuitive?.\nWell, some people said they were, but it took, there's a learning curve.\nAny new bit of software people complain, you know, it's not intuitive.\nAnd then after a little bit of use, oh, this is great.\nIt's intuitive.\nWhat does it take to go from not intuitive to intuitive?.\nWell, learning, conjuring, guessing what things are true and by your own lights coming to understand stuff.\nThat's all this use of the word intuitive means.\nIt just means understanding.\nCan you understand it?.\nAnd then it becomes intuitive like mathematicians famously, all the time, intuiting their way to stuff that people who don't understand mathematics to that level of proficiency.\nSo don't find intuitive.\nIt takes a while to develop intuitions, intuitions about stuff.\nA professional gymnast is going to find certain movements of the body intuitive that the rest of us don't.\nA great pianist is going to understand how to play certain pieces intuitively that the rest of us don't.\nThis is eventually find certain things intuitive.\nBut at first they're jarring.\nAt first the new laws of the universe when they're explained to you, are not going to seem intuitive.\nUntil they are, once you've understood them.\nNow, they still might seem surprising in retrospect, but only because you remember your old self.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2680"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "41c32e5e-d54f-4686-b172-9a2c0d93f163": {"page_content": "A great pianist is going to understand how to play certain pieces intuitively that the rest of us don't.\nThis is eventually find certain things intuitive.\nBut at first they're jarring.\nAt first the new laws of the universe when they're explained to you, are not going to seem intuitive.\nUntil they are, once you've understood them.\nNow, they still might seem surprising in retrospect, but only because you remember your old self.\nYour old self remembers what it was like not to understand the phenomena of dark energy or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or the relativity of time.\nYour old self.\nBut once you learn these things, once you get what's going on intuitive, it just means understanding.\nBut you can still remember what it was like not to understand those things.\nAnd so therefore you can still say out loud, quite honestly, these things are weird and surprising.\nBut only in light of the previous theory, the previous understanding of reality, the false misconceptions that you had.\nSo yes, I totally agree.\nI totally agree that the next theories that we're going to develop, not just in physics, but physics is kind of preeminent in this sense of really challenging our intuitions.\nBut everywhere.\nI would expect that everywhere.\nThe reason why we have these open questions whether they're being biology, geology, astronomy, anywhere is because nothing is intuitive in that way.\nIf it was, we'd just be intuitive away, easily guessing, easily understanding the open question, the solutions to the open questions.\nBut the reason we don't, not intuitive.\nNothing is.\nWhat is intuitive?.\nI don't know.\nI would just say that this word is being used as synonymous with stuff you already know, intuitive is stuff you already know.\nAnd so new stuff, if it kind of challenges what you already know, refutes what you already know, then yeah, it's jarring and it can be difficult.\nSometimes you've got to fit it into your worldview in some way, but once you do, then it all becomes intuitive again.\nI think I've made that point.\nOkay, let's see what Sam has to say.\nSo I'm wondering though, whether this slippery slope is in fact more slippery than we're admitting here though, because how do we resist the slide into total epistemological skepticism?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2832"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2073cac7-e90e-4b7a-a266-fc23696fd38d": {"page_content": "Sometimes you've got to fit it into your worldview in some way, but once you do, then it all becomes intuitive again.\nI think I've made that point.\nOkay, let's see what Sam has to say.\nSo I'm wondering though, whether this slippery slope is in fact more slippery than we're admitting here though, because how do we resist the slide into total epistemological skepticism?.\nSo for instance, why trust our mathematical intuitions or the mathematical concepts born of them, or the picture of reality in physics that's arrived at through this kind of bootstrapping of our intuitions into areas that are counterintuitive?.\nBecause I understand why we should trust these things pragmatically.\nIt seems to work, we can build machines that work, you know, we can fly on airplanes.\nThere's a difference between an airplane that flies and one that doesn't, but as a matter of epistemology, why should we trust the picture of reality that math allows us to bring into view?.\nAgain, we are just apes who have used the cognitive capacities that have evolved without any constraints that they accord with reality at large, and mathematics is clearly, insofar as we apprehend it, discover it, invent it, and extension of those very humble capacities.\nIf it's the wrong question, epistemologically, he's asking, why should we trust any of these theories given the counterintuitive nature and the subtleness of mathematics that we don't seem to have really got to evolve brainful?.\nEmology is not about trust, it's about knowledge, and we don't need to trust our knowledge, because, as I've been saying on recent episodes of talkcast, generally speaking, you've only got the one explanation, the insights, it's just the explanation.\nAnd so, what else can you rely upon in order to solve your problems, and that, in the Perperian framework, is why, in answer to Sam's question, why it is that we should not trust these theories, but accept these theories as explanations of reality.\nWhy should we accept them as explanations of reality?.\nBecause they solve the problem, they solve whatever the problem happens to be that we have, we have problems, we come up with solutions, and in science we're able to test to see if those solutions really work, and if they do, then we say, hey, this explanation, this solution, it's got something right, it's saying something true about reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=2920"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5de099e3-d5c3-42e7-b76b-3e6f55ae3d0e": {"page_content": "Why should we accept them as explanations of reality?.\nBecause they solve the problem, they solve whatever the problem happens to be that we have, we have problems, we come up with solutions, and in science we're able to test to see if those solutions really work, and if they do, then we say, hey, this explanation, this solution, it's got something right, it's saying something true about reality.\nIt's solving our problem, it's making predictions into fields, we never could have guessed, it's postulating the existence of entities that we never imagined, but we can test for the reality of.\nThat's why we think these things are explanations that we can regard as good explanations of reality.\nNever mind trust, never mind trusting them as being true, or as finally true, or anything like that.\nTrust isn't required, in fact, we should expect them to be overturned at some point, so we shouldn't be trusting them in the sense of thinking they're true for no good reason.\nTrust is a word that's kind of like faith, why should we have faith in this theory?.\nWhy should we trust in this theory?.\nWell, neither of those things, we should rely on the theory, why?.\nBecause it solves the problem, it's the only thing you've got to go on in almost all cases.\nSo that's why, but why should we think it's an explanation of reality?.\nWell, because it's got something right, here you go, test the thing, test this logical outcome called a prediction of the theory, and you'll see that it works, but working doesn't mean it's an actual description of reality.\nWhat else could it mean other than it's making a prediction about the nature of reality, and it's getting it right, where no other theory, no other competing theory is?.\nSo it's got something right, it was able to tell you what's going to happen, and it's only able to do that, because it's making all of these other claims about reality simultaneously.\nThis grand theory is making a bunch of multitudinous number of claims that fall under the umbrella of the explanation, we've picked out one and gone, it works there.\nIn fact, it works universally, anytime you ask anything of it within its domain of applicability, it works.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3047"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8ef928a1-9a1b-4328-b2ad-a52cf01d0401": {"page_content": "So it's got something right, it was able to tell you what's going to happen, and it's only able to do that, because it's making all of these other claims about reality simultaneously.\nThis grand theory is making a bunch of multitudinous number of claims that fall under the umbrella of the explanation, we've picked out one and gone, it works there.\nIn fact, it works universally, anytime you ask anything of it within its domain of applicability, it works.\nSo it is capturing reality to some extent, not perfectly, not finally, that will never happen, but it's got something right, and that's just synonymous with, it's saying something true.\nThat's all.\nSo that's the way I like to explain.\nWhy it is we regard explanations that we hold as scientific theories of the world as being truly good explanations of reality, and not merely useful fictions, not merely useful fictions.\nThey really do capture something.\nNow, we can't say finally of any of them.\nWell, this is the bit here that is certainly once and for all finally true.\nNo, in fact, it could be that the truth is in explicit content that we can't quite say, but it preserved from one theory through to another theory through to another theory as we make progress and improve towards a better and better understanding of objectively true reality of the reality that's out there that has been captured by our best explanations.\nSo let's see what Max has to say about that bit.\nSome people tell me sometimes that theories that physicists discuss at conferences from black holes, the parallel universe is sound even crazier than a lot of myths from all time about fire, flame throwing dragons and whatnot.\nSo to me, there is a huge difference here in that these physics theories, even though they sound crazy, as you yourself said here, they actually make predictions that we can actually test.\nAnd that is really the crux of it.\nIf you take a theory quantum mechanics seriously, for example, and assume that particles can be several places once, then you predict that you should be able to build this thing called a transistor, which you can combine and vast numbers and build this thing called a cell phone, and it actually works.\nThis is very linked, I think, to where we should draw the borderline between science, what's science and what's not science.\nSome people think that the line should go between that which seems intuitive and not crazy and that which feels too crazy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3158"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51e7a376-45fc-4660-ba43-75204fb61d2b": {"page_content": "This is very linked, I think, to where we should draw the borderline between science, what's science and what's not science.\nSome people think that the line should go between that which seems intuitive and not crazy and that which feels too crazy.\nAnd I'm arguing against that because black holes seem very crazy at the time and now we've found loads of them in the sky.\nTo me, instead, really that the line and the sound that divides science from what's not science is, the way I think about it is, what makes me a scientist is that I would much rather have questions I can't answer than have answers I can't question.\nOne thing you're emphasizing here is that it's not in the strangeness or seeming acceptability of the conclusion, it's in the methodology by which you arrived at that conclusion and falsifiability and testable predictions is part of that.\nI don't think you would say that a proparian conception of science as a set of falsifiable claims subsumes all of science because they're clearly scientifically coherent things we could say about the nature of reality where we know there's an answer there, we just know that no one has the answer.\nThe very prosaic example I often use here is how many birds are in flight over the surface of the earth at this moment.\nWe don't know, we know we're never going to know because it's just changed before I can get to the end of the sentence.\nBut it's a totally coherent question to ask and we know that it just has an integer answer leaving spooky quantum mechanics or parallel universes aside.\nIf we're just talking about earth and birds as objects, we can't get the data but we know in some basic sense that this reality that extends beyond our perception guarantees that the data in principle exists.\nI think you say at some point in your book that a theory doesn't have to be testable across the board, it just parts of it have to be testable to give us some level of credence in its overall picture.\nIs that how you view it?.\nThings that make you go, hmm, so of course what I've got to say there is that, of course, Popper is not encapsulate, Popper's epistemology is not encapsulated by a series of testable statements.\nIt's not like his view of sciences.\nThis notion, this misconception about Popperian epistemology is near ubiquitous among anyone who's not a self-described popularian of a sort.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3282"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b7b2dcf0-455f-4fd6-9f01-d742babb6ad7": {"page_content": "Is that how you view it?.\nThings that make you go, hmm, so of course what I've got to say there is that, of course, Popper is not encapsulate, Popper's epistemology is not encapsulated by a series of testable statements.\nIt's not like his view of sciences.\nThis notion, this misconception about Popperian epistemology is near ubiquitous among anyone who's not a self-described popularian of a sort.\nPopper talked about problems and solutions, explanations and non-explanations.\nHe talked about a line of demarcation between science and non-science, which is drawn by this testability criterion, but he wasn't saying that you need to be able to in practice test everything.\nIt's an in principle idea.\nIn principle, Sam's thought experiment of how many birds are in flight right now is indeed in principle testable.\nBecause as he said, there's an answer.\nYou can imagine some series of lasers or something or other that could actually count up, you know, or satellites or something like that.\nThat could, in principle, gather that data.\nIt could in principle be gathered.\nThere's data there to be gathered, which is what makes it a scientific claim, if you like.\nBut of course, as we would say, well, what problem is this solving?.\nThat's what we would ask.\nWhat explanation are we looking for here?.\nThat Popper's view of science is explanation-centered.\nDavid Deutsch's view of Popperian epistemology's explanation-centered.\nAnd we want to be able to test our explanations.\nNow, what this number of birds in flight is all about, I don't know, but it's one of those things where we say it's a philosopher talking purely in the abstract.\nAnd not actually solving a problem.\nOnce you stick to asking the question, what problem are you trying to solve?.\nThings clarify themselves far more.\nThe problem of what a bird is, of how birds reproduce, of what distinguishes a bird from a mammal.\nAll these don't kind of things.\n.\nThey're useful biological problems.\nNow, number of birds in flight, I don't know what problem that would possibly solve.\nWhat are we looking for there?.\nIn principle, as I say, it's testable.\nIn principle, it's well within a Popperian view of science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3409"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e72361ae-74c2-40ce-88d2-b23a76f41879": {"page_content": "Things clarify themselves far more.\nThe problem of what a bird is, of how birds reproduce, of what distinguishes a bird from a mammal.\nAll these don't kind of things.\n.\nThey're useful biological problems.\nNow, number of birds in flight, I don't know what problem that would possibly solve.\nWhat are we looking for there?.\nIn principle, as I say, it's testable.\nIn principle, it's well within a Popperian view of science.\nAll the perperian view of science is, are the explanations testable or not?.\nThere's all these different kinds of explanations from moral through the political, historical, mathematical, philosophical, scientific ones as well.\nAnd the scientific ones are distinguished by, can you test them in some way, shape or form?.\nIt's all saying, can you test for the presence of every single thing that exists in the universe?.\nNo, in fact, the Popperian view, as well, David Deutscher's explanation of the Popperian view, says very much that what we're doing is explaining the scene, the stuff we can observe, in terms of the unseen, the stuff that, in principle, we can't observe.\nBut we know as there, because we can test the theory via some other means.\nMy go to example here is, of course, we know what's going on in the core of the Sun.\nWe know, we have good explanations that what's going on there is something like the PP chain in order to produce helium.\nYou've got hydrogen nuclei, protons being smashed together there to form helium.\nThis fusion reaction is happening there, but no one's ever going to go to the core of the Sun and gather the relevant data there.\nInstead, what we do is we interpret the light coming from the Sun, all the way here on Earth and satellites that are around the Sun, and looking at spectra, and inferring on that base is explaining what must be going on in the core.\nEven though we can't observe what's going on there, that's Popperian.\nThat's Popperian.\nThere is no rival to that theory, by the way.\nNo rival whatsoever.\nWe can rule out anyone who comes along with the rival by doing crucial tests, because in theory, their theory would make predictions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3524"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c211138f-e265-46b6-976a-204c8d80a188": {"page_content": "Even though we can't observe what's going on there, that's Popperian.\nThat's Popperian.\nThere is no rival to that theory, by the way.\nNo rival whatsoever.\nWe can rule out anyone who comes along with the rival by doing crucial tests, because in theory, their theory would make predictions.\nIt would make specific predictions that are different to the theory that we have about stellar nucleosynthesis, stellar fusion, how this wider Sun shines, and what must be going on in the core of the Sun.\nThat's what Popper's view is.\nNow, this is where Popper has been invoked, and Max is about to say he's sympathetic to Popper, but let's just hear what he says.\nI'm actually pretty sympathetic to Popper, and the idea of testability works fine for even these crazy concepts, sounding concepts like parallel universes and black holes, as long as we remember that what we test are theories, specific mathematical theories that we can write down.\nBut parallel universes are not a theory.\nThey're a prediction from certain theories.\nThe black hole isn't a theory either.\nIt's a prediction from Einstein's general relativity theory.\nOnce you have a theory in physics, it's testable as long as it predicts at least one thing that you can go check.\nYou can falsify it if you check that thing and it's wrong, whereas it might also make just because it happens to also make some other predictions for things you can never test.\nThat doesn't make it non-scientific as long as there's still something you can test.\nFor example, the theory of general relativity predicts exactly what would happen to you.\nIf you fall into the monster black hole in the middle of a galaxy that weighs four million times much as a Sun, it predicts exactly how you're going to win.\nYou're going to get spaghettified and how you're going to get spaghettified and so on, except you can never actually do that experiment and then write an article about it.\nThe multiverse is in a theory.\nIt's a prediction.\nBlack holes aren't a theory.\nThey're a prediction.\nWell, again, in the Papirian framework, these things are it's all theoretical.\nIt's all conjectures.\nIt's all interpretations of stuff.\nI might want to say, well, there is this broader theory called general relativity, which generates certain predictions, some of which are black holes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3631"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "34be4470-3ce3-410e-bd93-776ee35bc233": {"page_content": "The multiverse is in a theory.\nIt's a prediction.\nBlack holes aren't a theory.\nThey're a prediction.\nWell, again, in the Papirian framework, these things are it's all theoretical.\nIt's all conjectures.\nIt's all interpretations of stuff.\nI might want to say, well, there is this broader theory called general relativity, which generates certain predictions, some of which are black holes.\nBut the black hole itself is a theory of certain objects that actually exist out there.\nIt can themselves be tested for.\nSo that part of general relativity can be tested for.\nIf general relativity makes a prediction of black holes and we never detect black holes, that's not a refutation of general relativity.\nIs it?.\nIt could or could not be a problem.\nOf course, postulating the existence of something you never find in it doesn't mean that thing doesn't exist.\nBut let's say black holes didn't exist and.\ngeneral relativity was the only theory we had.\nWell, it's still only got general relativity and it would kept still capture something true about reality.\nIt might not get everything true, but we should expect that anyway.\nNow, I'm not saying all of this in order to defend Papirian epistemology, to sort of stand here and say, no, Carl Popper got it all right.\nAnd if only people would listen to David Dijkstra, kind of saying that it's important.\nIt's useful if people understand epistemology better because they're then they're thinking on certain matters is clearer, more refined.\nIt just makes sense.\nIt cohears together.\nAnd all the stuff they're saying that I agree with, it's just remarkable that they kind of distancing themselves.\nWell, Sam is kind of distancing himself in some way, seemingly from Popper.\nAnd he's done this on various podcasts, of course, over the years.\nBut often when he thinks he's disagreeing with Popper, he's not.\nHe's disagreeing with a version of Popper that never actually existed.\nWell, that maybe he read in a book somewhere by someone who disagreed with Popper.\nSee, I see this very often.\nI see this very often.\nBut Max is totally right in saying, there are these things that can't be observed out there.\nAnd that's fine.\nThat's fine.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dee86401-89fa-4086-a903-c27a583c960d": {"page_content": "But often when he thinks he's disagreeing with Popper, he's not.\nHe's disagreeing with a version of Popper that never actually existed.\nWell, that maybe he read in a book somewhere by someone who disagreed with Popper.\nSee, I see this very often.\nI see this very often.\nBut Max is totally right in saying, there are these things that can't be observed out there.\nAnd that's fine.\nThat's fine.\nAs I just said about the core of the Sun, as I've said before about the moment of the Big Bang, we know it happened, but no one's going to be there.\nAnd the David Deutsch says, dinosaurs, dinosaurs are literally unobserved unless we invent time machines.\nNo one's ever going to observe a dinosaur, or maybe genetic engineering of the future.\nBut all we have right now are fossils, rocks.\nThat's all we have.\nWe don't have access directly to dinosaurs.\nWe can't observe the very thing, the unseen thing, the dinosaur that explains what we do see the fossil.\nThis is perfectly popularion, perfectly popularion.\nAnd I would argue it's only popularion epistemology that properly accounts for this that says you have an explanation of the unobserved stuff, a Bayesian epistemology, and these other epistemologies talk about, well, it all comes down to observation if you can't observe the thing that somehow rather it's ruled out as being non-scientific because I have this empiricist bent, not all versions, I accept that.\nBut also there's this focus on prediction, prediction as well.\nWhereas we say, and I think Max could have subtly kind of got things wrong there a bit where he was saying that we could falsify general relativity, let's say something was pretty good about black holes or something.\nOnly if we have an alternative, the function of evidence, the function of observation in science at that level is to distinguish between competing theories.\nAnd if you have no competitor to general relativity, which is explaining all of your phenomena, maybe except for one thing that it gets wrong that just systematically gets wrong all the time, for whatever reason.\nWell, you've got nowhere else to leap to until such time as someone comes along and is able to explain that thing and everything else that general relativity can explain.\nIn general relativity, we had problems with gravity, we couldn't predict exactly why Mercury's orbit was, couldn't explain why Mercury's orbit was doing what it was doing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3865"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e284ccec-2057-4bb0-8b68-a1624028f65f": {"page_content": "Well, you've got nowhere else to leap to until such time as someone comes along and is able to explain that thing and everything else that general relativity can explain.\nIn general relativity, we had problems with gravity, we couldn't predict exactly why Mercury's orbit was, couldn't explain why Mercury's orbit was doing what it was doing.\nNow, for the time between when we only had Newton's theory and when we had these anomalies with Mercury's orbit and when we got general relativity between that time, when we got general relativity, there was nothing else to do, there was nothing else for it but to rely on Newton's theory of gravity.\nAt that time, when we've got these problems with Mercury's orbit, we literally didn't know them, people were postulating things like another planet perturbing, altering the orbit of Mercury as it went around the Sun.\nAnd that was reasonable, no one could rule that out at the time.\nThey didn't know, was it the theory of gravity that was wrong in some way or was it the observations being made that were wrong in some way, was there a hidden planet causing this strange orbital properties of Mercury as it went around the Sun?.\nWe just didn't know at that time, and this is the case for open problems today.\nWe don't know if it's the theory that's wrong, we don't know if it's our observation strong, we don't know if there's some underlying hidden thing yet to be observed that will explain that I find the solution to the problem that we have.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=3958"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a260c9fb-45e6-42ce-88b0-eecf8e89b8e6": {"page_content": "So I think we'll call this part one, so this will be enough for today, but I'm going to come back to this discussion, it's a fascinating discussion, you can see that I am being very nitpicky, but I think it's a helpful insight and in-road into distinguishing these kind of differences between, one would presume, rationally minded people, scientifically literate types, and people who have more or less an all-encompassing worldview, and people who might have cobbled together for lots of these that are kind of separate and may not cohere in some ways, I don't know how to put that, but until next time, bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=4041"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "21da2055-f430-4ee1-a3d8-2c1a6695a72a": {"page_content": "bye.\nThank you so much.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APQr4equ4nM&t=4062"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "659f20ac-1e05-4cf6-a1d3-e2e0055b0a88": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, an episode two in the fabric of reality series.\nDuring which the preparation thereof, I figured out we're going to need at least one more episode.\nSo this is going to be a three part series on chapter one, which is the theory of everything from the fabric of reality.\nAnd today we're absolutely going to see all the ways in which the beginning of infinity appears there in seed-like form in the fabric of reality.\nSo two parts of the science of can and can't, parts of constructive theory are absolutely here as well.\nSo I'm part way through after part one, I only got through a few pages.\nI'm only part way through the chapter right now.\nAnd I'm on page seven for anyone who's reading along, right down the bottom of page seven.\nWe're David Wright's quote, to say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends.\nIt is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel.\nIn fact, burning fuel is only one of many things a spaceship has to do to accomplish its real purpose, which is to transport its payload from one point in space to another.\nParsi experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.\nAs I have said, explanations are inevitably frame partly in terms of things we do not observe directly, atoms and forces, the interiors of stars and the rotation of galaxies, the past and the future, the laws of nature.\nThe deeper an explanation is, the more remote from immediate experience are the entities to which it must refer, but these entities are not fictional on the contrary.\nThey are part of the very fabric of reality, pausing there, just reflecting on this.\nToday, I've made a couple of other podcasts as well and now I'll be coming out, coincident with this within sort of a week or so.\nIt takes that long to edit these things.\nOne is about quasars, and so I'm sure you can find that in the YouTube feed or in the podcast feed somewhere or other, it's just called quasars.\nIt's been talking about quasars, the history of their discovery and the physics behind what causes them to do what they do.\nAlmost everything of interest there is unobserved.\nAlmost everything of interest about what causes a quasar to do what a quasar does.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=18"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec4c03d0-edc3-40d8-b25a-70eec4cf1308": {"page_content": "It takes that long to edit these things.\nOne is about quasars, and so I'm sure you can find that in the YouTube feed or in the podcast feed somewhere or other, it's just called quasars.\nIt's been talking about quasars, the history of their discovery and the physics behind what causes them to do what they do.\nAlmost everything of interest there is unobserved.\nAlmost everything of interest about what causes a quasar to do what a quasar does.\nMuch less to speak of, the history of quasar discovery is unobserved and also released with this episode is a series on the Science of Canon Can't by Chiara Marletto.\nAgain, I was talking about this very same issue.\nIt just comes up again and again, that the main content of an explanation is the unseen parts of it.\nDavid just listed a few things there, the things that we don't observe directly, atoms and forces, the interiors of stars and rotations of galaxies to pass in the future, the laws of nature.\nIn fact, not only not observed directly, not observe at all, in the case of the core of stars.\nI was saying in another episode that there's no possible way that we know of.\nIt appears to be impossible to observe the core of a star directly or at all.\nYou can't send a probe there.\nThere's no way in which you could get to the center of the star.\nIt's optically opaque anyway, so you can't get radiation through there.\nI suppose in some distant future, theoretically, some sort of hugely sensitive gravity meter or some other kind of device beyond which we have no conception right now, might be able to image the center of a star, but.\nat the moment, no chance, no chance.\nWhat about going on there is going on at 15 million Kelvin.\nNothing can survive 15 million Kelvin, and very little information survives at 15 million Kelvin.\nThe only way we have to figure out what's going on there is to observe the photons that arrive at Earth, and we can see some of the surface of the Sun and infer, therefore, what the explanation that produces the effects that we do observe must be.\nWhat the causes of the effects that we do observe must be.\nNamely, stellar fusion, fusion in the core of the Sun, the combining of hydrogen nuclei to form helium, and in the process producing heat and light.\nThinking of history, we observe documents, don't we?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=124"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2edbeac-bffb-4059-ba3b-119c42f45164": {"page_content": "What the causes of the effects that we do observe must be.\nNamely, stellar fusion, fusion in the core of the Sun, the combining of hydrogen nuclei to form helium, and in the process producing heat and light.\nThinking of history, we observe documents, don't we?.\nWe observe newspaper clippings, and these days, of course, video records, but we don't observe right now as a matter of our experience, our immediate experience here and now.\nWe don't observe the past, and so when I talked about the history of quasars in that episode, I don't observe those particular physicists that were involved in creating the knowledge about quasars, discovering the problem to begin with, and then slowly resolving the problem with this theory of quasars.\nAll I've got access to is documents, articles, online, and textbooks and so on, but that's hardly observing the past directly.\nIt's not observing the past at all, it's observing documents, interpreting them, and then constructing an explanation.\nA historical explanation about how it is that this theory arose all in the first place, interested in that, just look for the quasars episode.\nOkay, so I'm skipping there because David is distinguishing between the importance of explanations and how in physics we do have the capacity to make certain kinds of predictions, but that is hardly the main point of a scientific theory.\nBut this is a point of belay, but often in the various podcasts I've made.\nSo I won't do it again here now more than I've already done, so I'm skipping to the part where David says, quote, most people would say, and this is in effect what was being said to me on the occasional record from my childhood, that it is not only recorded facts which have been increasing at an overwhelming rate, but also the number and complexity of theories through which we understand the world.\nConsequently, they say, whether or not it was ever possible for one person to understand everything that was understood at the time, it is certainly not possible now, and it is becoming less and less possible as our knowledge grows.\nIt might seem that every time a new explanation or technique is discovered that is relevant to a given subject, another theory must be added to the list that anyone wishing to understand that subject must learn, and that when the number of such theories and anyone subject becomes too great, specializations develop.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=264"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c12cdc71-a59a-419c-af49-6829a28676a9": {"page_content": "It might seem that every time a new explanation or technique is discovered that is relevant to a given subject, another theory must be added to the list that anyone wishing to understand that subject must learn, and that when the number of such theories and anyone subject becomes too great, specializations develop.\nPhysics, for example, has split into the sciences of astrophysics, thermodynamics, particle physics, quantum field theory, and many others.\nEach of these is based on a theoretical framework at least as rich as the whole of physics was 100 years ago, and many are already fragmenting into subspecializations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=392"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e0926d2-069f-466f-94c7-e5f638af3b48": {"page_content": "The more we discover it seems, the further and more irrevocably we are propelled into the age of the specialist, and the more remote is that hypothetical ancient time, when a single person's standing might have encompassed all that was understood, confronted with this vast and rapidly growing menu of the collected theories of the human race, one may be forgiven for doubting that an individual could so much just taste every additional lifetime that alone, as might once have been possible, appreciate all known recipes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=426"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "92713095-f472-462b-b102-66c655247944": {"page_content": "Yet explanation is a strange sort of food, a large proportion is not necessarily harder to swallow, a theory may be superseded by a new theory, which explains more, and is more accurate, but is also easier to understand, in which case the old theory becomes redundant, and we gain more understanding while needing to learn less than before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=449"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89344874-422d-4b3f-9f08-dd2839299fa1": {"page_content": "This is what happened when Nicholas Copernicus's theory of the Earth traveling around the Sun superseded the complex telemax system, which had placed the Earth at the center of the universe, or a new theory may be a simplification of an existing one, such as when the Arabic decimal notation for numbers superseded Roman numerals, the theory here is an implicit one, each notation renders certain operations, statements and thoughts of that numbers simpler than others, and hence it embodies a theory about which relationships between numbers are useful or interesting, or a theory may be a unification of two old ones, giving us more understanding than using the old ones side by side, as happened when Michael Faraday and James Clark Maxwell unified the theories of electricity and magnetism into a single theory of electromagnetism, more indirectly better explanations in any subject, tend to improve the techniques, concepts and language with which we are trying to understand other subjects, and so our knowledge as a whole while increasing can become structurally more amenable to being understood, pausing there, and just skipping a very substantial piece on the Roman numeral system and its redundancy in the light of a better idea, namely Arabic numerals, and then we get into a section which really preface so much that is in the beginning of infinity, and motivates the underlying worldview of David Deutsch and is kind of an improvement upon the work of Karl Popper, a sharpening up of what Karl Popper said.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=471"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1f831db0-34df-47ae-aa3c-65daf712b029": {"page_content": "Here it is, quote David says, it is hard to give a precise definition of explanation or understanding, roughly speaking there about why, rather than what, about the inner workings of things, about how things really are, not just how they appear to be, about what must be so, rather than what merely appears to be so, about laws of nature, rather than rules of thumb, just pausing there.\nIt's also hard and this I get straight from David Deutsch, and I don't know if it's mentioned here in the fabric of reality, I don't recall it being mentioned in the fabric of reality, but one reason why we cannot give a precise definition of what an explanation is, and why we cannot give a precise definition of what hard to very means.\nDavid Deutsch has given us the idea that what we're seeking in knowledge creation are good explanations, and by good he means hard to vary, and people say, oh what's hard to vary, and he tries to give an explanation of what hard to vary is, namely that all the parts of the explanation so they purpose, such that none of them are arbitrary, and if you were to try and change any one of them, you would break the explanation, and that's my understanding of hard to vary more or less.\nAnd then people object and they want to say well, but that's not definitive.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=561"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "644f29ab-0540-4f0a-ae9b-72d72b047001": {"page_content": "There are options here, there's a certain looseness, there's a certain hazy character to these definitions, and one wants to say, in the Papurian view, absolutely there is, absolutely there is, we're not going to get hung up on definitions, we're not Wittgensteinian, okay, Ludwig Wittgenstein infected philosophy with the notion that we should argue about words and terminology, we need to sharpen up our understanding of words and terminology, and if we don't, then we're not doing proper philosophy, this is wrong, this is false, what we're trying to do in philosophy, on Karl Popper's view, on the Papurian view, and now us who inherit the Papurian view, is to solve problems, problems in philosophy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=648"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c59bb530-858b-4361-ac65-a54a77e6d77d": {"page_content": "Namely, things like, what are we after when we're trying to create trying to create knowledge, we're after explanations, we're after trying to explain the world, what's an explanation?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=693"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7398eaa5-cf5d-4032-8a85-1cc3135e820a": {"page_content": "Well, you know, it's an account of why rather than what, it's an account of what is really out there, how things, not just how things appear to be, but what must be so, this kind of thing, but that's not a strict definition, no, and one reason why, an important reason why we can't sharpen this up, is because we have to allow for new modes of explanation, we have to allow our definition, so to speak, our understanding of explanation, to be sufficiently elastic, to allow for new kinds of explanation to be invented in the future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=703"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7b02ead1-2776-48e0-a3b0-d17aec1b690e": {"page_content": "They didn't used to be a mode of explanation called the Darwinian understanding of evolution by natural selection, evolution by natural selection, this way in which genes can be selected for us, selected against the selfish gene ideas, new mode of explanation, nothing like that existed before, but if you tried to say that explanations could only consist of, let's say, as I've been talking about in physics recently, and Kiaramaa Leto's book, that if the only explanation that's permitted is an explanation terms of dynamical laws and initial conditions, then that would also rule out something like evolution by natural selection, which is not of that kind, it's not an explanation of that kind, much less all of constructive theory, we need to allow for explanations that don't necessarily comport with our conception of explanations right now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aa0437f0-3d18-47b2-95af-e5db124a5d1d": {"page_content": "Okay, so the best that we can do is to give broad brushstrokes about what explanations are.\nWe know it when we see it to a large extent, an explanation is an account of what exists out there, how it works, why it works, and all that kind of stuff, but we can't be too sharp about it.\nIn fact, this is true, I should just say, as a by the by, for any area of science or philosophical interests, we're not after definitions.\nIf you're after definitions, pick up a dictionary, read the dictionary definition, and if you think that gives you a deep understanding of the phenomena you're interested in, good luck.\nBut the rest of us who are interested in actually are comprehending the world in which we find ourselves using the best explanations that have thus far been found.\nWe want more than just definitions.\nAnd so, for example, when people get caught up on let's say, well, tell me what an electron really is?.\nWell, we can give you an under-best understanding we have right now, but a definition of an electron, like learning it, like supposedly, you know, a good student in high school does or something or other, we write down your glossary at the back of your science book, and you write down the definitions of words so that you can regurgitate them during a test, sounds have orange, and in fact, it's anti-prepirian, of course, like I'm saying.\nWe want an understanding.\nWhat's our best understanding of electrons right now?.\nWell, they're particles and they exist in multiple universes, their excitations of the quantum field to some extent.\nThere's these ways of conceptualizing what an electron is to give us an image, both mathematical and visual of what these objects called electrons happen to be.\nThat solves our problem.\nThat solves our problem of what our understanding of electrons is, what they are, what these objects are.\nDoesn't mean it's a final definitive forever definition of an electron.\nNo, absolutely not.\nAnd there can be no such definition.\nSo forget definitions.\nWe should also say, beyond things like that, something like a more controversial concept like free will, people get caught up in defining what free will is, and this is a perfect way for it to go off the rails.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=795"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cc8d72fb-e5b7-4164-ae1b-e20e7d28eed1": {"page_content": "That solves our problem of what our understanding of electrons is, what they are, what these objects are.\nDoesn't mean it's a final definitive forever definition of an electron.\nNo, absolutely not.\nAnd there can be no such definition.\nSo forget definitions.\nWe should also say, beyond things like that, something like a more controversial concept like free will, people get caught up in defining what free will is, and this is a perfect way for it to go off the rails.\nAnd so recently when people talk about free will, they'll say, well, what you have to find as free will isn't free will, and there's no point in trying to talk about something that isn't what everyone else regards as guards free will is being.\nAnd I just think to myself, well, just because everyone else defines free will in this particular way, just because the dictionary does, has no bearing whatsoever on the true nature of free will.\nIn the same way, the overwhelming majority of people, if asked to define what a species is, will get it wrong, that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on our best understanding of what a species is, or what an electron is, most people would get it wrong, okay, would be, would deviate from our best understanding of that.\nAnd when we encounter a problem with a concept like let's say free will, which is useful, because it's useful in trying to understand what a person is, that a person can generate explanations, can create explanations.\nThose explanations allow for a greater repertoire of choices to exist, choices that didn't exist before.\nNamely, if you create an explanation like general relativity, it gives you a choice at some point in the future, which you could never have possibly had before it.\nNamely, the existence of a really precise GPS system.\nSo that choice now exists, that choice took build or not to build that thing.\nYou can build it or not build it.\nThat's free will.\nIt's a very hard to avoid this word.\nBut if people insist on saying, well, free will is that supernatural thing that you can't possibly have in a deterministic universe.\nAnd that's that or something similar to that.\nThen of course, there is no progress to be made with fixated on definitions.\nAnd anyone can argue that nothing exists based upon a definition.\nSo for example, you can quite easily say that atoms don't exist.\nI can sit back with my arms crossed and say, no, I don't believe in atoms.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=908"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8a5c3575-38f9-45ae-8601-ebf8da57b99b": {"page_content": "And that's that or something similar to that.\nThen of course, there is no progress to be made with fixated on definitions.\nAnd anyone can argue that nothing exists based upon a definition.\nSo for example, you can quite easily say that atoms don't exist.\nI can sit back with my arms crossed and say, no, I don't believe in atoms.\nWhy?.\nBecause the Greeks said that the atoms are indivisible little spheres.\nI don't believe they exist.\nIn fact, science tells us those things don't exist.\nWhat we have instead are particles called electrons and protons.\nAnd that's it.\nAnd the atoms don't exist.\nAnd if I come along and say, but hold on, our understanding of atoms has moved on.\nIt's evolved.\nIt is that object where you've got a nucleus consisting of the protons and the neutrons orbited by electrons.\nThat's what we understand atoms to be.\nIf you're still then insist on saying, no, I'm not calling that an atom.\nThe Greeks invented the word, atom, and that's it.\nWell, then there's no possibility for consensus learning.\nWe're just arguing about words.\nAnd you can keep that word atom, if you want.\nAnd let's call that object something else for the purpose of making progress.\nLet's call it George.\nI'm happy to call it George and move on.\nBut that's rather strange, isn't it?.\nLike insisting that we have to adhere to certain definitions of words, rather than making progress on scientific and philosophical concepts, especially where there's open-ended questions, especially in an area like consciousness, creativity.\nAnd I would say free will belongs there as well, insisting that these things cannot possibly obtame to use the philosophical jargon in a universe which is deterministic is, again, falling into the Wittgensteinian trap that philosophy is about linguistics and words and that we can define out of existence certain things.\nThis is not to say, it's not to say that there are certain other things that we want to suggest don't exist, that our best understanding of them suggest they don't exist.\nFor example, ghosts, okay, there's a way in which we can talk about ghosts, that's supernatural thing.\nBy our understanding of science, there's no reason, there's no explanation that requires ghosts to exist, or unicorns to exist, or Gandalf the Gray, the wizard, to really exist in physical reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1075"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3dcd6ab8-2f17-4d18-b64f-05d3930425ca": {"page_content": "No explanation is required for those things, and this is where something may exist or may not exist, but something like free will is where we can have a reasonable debate about things, but insisting on a particular definition to rule out something, to rule out free will in the same way that we rule out Gandalf the Gray, or fairies, or something else like that, is simply to ignore the fact that we don't understand how it is, that people, different to all other creatures in the universe, all other systems in the universe, create knowledge, and then make choices in a way that is utterly different to any other species that exist in the universe, that we know of, any other system that exists in the universe that we know of, we create knowledge, it's mysterious, and part of that mystery is free will, and trying to define it out of existence, I don't buy it, and I don't think it's useful either, yet again another tirade on free will, I should ban myself from talking about that again for a while, I've done an episode after episode on it, but it keeps coming up, and so I can't fully blame myself, react against people who keep on saying that they have the final once and for all explanation of free will.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1140"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "650a8e11-407c-4814-b7cf-e156a4ea859e": {"page_content": "I think I have an explanation of free will, and I think it's the once and for all one, I think it's just better than anything that I've heard so far, and it's certainly better than ones that say, well, by definition, free will can't exist in a deterministic universe.\nAnd again, we'll have something more to say about that, that idea in the science of kind of cut, because this whole idea of deterministic universe based upon deterministic physical laws, laws of motion with initial conditions, well, constructed theory is going to have something to say about that as well, but that's a whole other story.\nWe're going to come here in the fabric of reality to part of the mystery about that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1211"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "87445362-749d-4473-87a4-64ef65ce0c1c": {"page_content": "Explanations, as David says, quote going back to the book, they are also about coherence, elegance, and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity, though none of those things is easy to define either, but in any case, understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind and brain and a unique one, many other physical systems, such as animals brains, computers, and other machines can assimilate facts and act upon them, but at present, we know of nothing that is capable of understanding and explanation or of wanting one in the first place, other than a human mind, every discovery of a new explanation and every act of grasp and explanation depends on the uniquely human faculty of creative thought, pausing their my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1248"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0bd4e458-2eac-4589-a1a4-d3c0661f8dda": {"page_content": "Well, right there, we see the seed of the explanation of what I person is.\nAnd in the beginning of infinity, we sharpen this up to be a person is a universal explanation, creator, a universal explainer.\nAnd that all comes straight from here, it's there's a prelude here to it, you know, only human mind that the human mind is the only thing that we know already in physical reality, capable of understanding and explanation or grasping explanation, all of which is equivalent to creating an explanation in the first place, this uniquely human faculty of creative thought.\nNow, we say uniquely human at the moment, if we have artificial general intelligence, and we know it must be physically possible, then the artificial general intelligence will also be part of these creatures that have this unique ability to create explanations.\nThe only other thing that I can think of really would be alien intelligence out there somewhere other, that could also be able to create explanations in their own mind, the mind of the aliens, and that would make them people.\nAnd just skipping a section here again and going to a part where David writes, quote, it is possible to understand something without knowing the one understands it, or even without having specifically heard of it.\nThis may sound paradoxical, but of course, the whole point of deep general explanations is that they cover unfamiliar situations, as well as familiar ones.\nIf you were a modern mathematician and counting Roman numerals for the first time, you might not instantly realize that you've already understood them, you would have to learn the facts about what they are.\nAnd then think about those facts in light of your existing understanding of mathematics.\nBut once you had done that, you'll be able to say in retrospect, yes, there's nothing new in the Roman numerals system beyond me effects.\nAnd that is what it means to say that Roman numerals in their explanatory role are fully obsolete.\nSimilarly, when I say I understand how the curvature of space and time affects the motion of planets, even though the solar systems I may never have heard of, I'm not claiming that I can call to mind without further thought the explanation of every detail of the loops and wobbles of any planetary orbit.\nWhat I mean is that I understand the theory that contains all those explanations, and that I could therefore produce any of them in due course, given some facts about a particular planet having done so, I should be able to say in retrospect.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1309"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d66439b6-afc7-4ad4-89a2-ef3f3f6d81ee": {"page_content": "What I mean is that I understand the theory that contains all those explanations, and that I could therefore produce any of them in due course, given some facts about a particular planet having done so, I should be able to say in retrospect.\nYes, I say nothing in the motion of that planet, other than me effects, which is not explained by the general theory of relativity.\nWe understand the fabric of reality, only by understanding theories that explain it.\nAnd since they explain more than we are immediately aware of, we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand, pausing their more reflection.\nThis is in part the concept of in explicit knowledge, or at least implicit knowledge, implicit knowledge.\nSo if I have an understanding to take a simpler case of Newton's law of gravity, okay, the formula is f equals gm1m2 over r squared, at least one formulation of it, then although I might not be able to call to mind to remember exactly how Neptune, for example, orbits the sun, using this law I can quite readily predict how fast Neptune will orbit the sun, given a few details about the mass of the sun and the distance Neptune, let's say.\nAnd so the one law contains within it, implicitly explanations, predictions, and descriptions of the orbits of all the planets in the source.\nIn fact, all the orbits of planets that exist in solar systems yet to be discovered.\nSo it's that that's the sense in which it's implicit and my understanding of those things is implicit, as well in David's understanding of these things is implicitly contained within those things.\nContinuing, David writes, I am not saying that when we understand a theory it necessarily follows that we understand everything it can explain, with a very deep theory.\nThe recognition that it explains a given phenomenon may itself be a significant discovery or acquiring independent explanation.\nFor example, quasars, extremely bright sources of radiation at the center of some galaxies, were for many years one of the mysteries of astrophysics.\nIt was once thought that new physics would be needed to explain them, but now we believe that they are explained by the general theory of relativity.\nAnd other theories that were already known before quasars were discovered.\nWe believe that quasars consist of hot matter and the process of falling into black holes, collapsed stars as gravitational field is so intense that nothing can escape from them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1418"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "822d9708-8e67-4913-aa2e-861971580e96": {"page_content": "It was once thought that new physics would be needed to explain them, but now we believe that they are explained by the general theory of relativity.\nAnd other theories that were already known before quasars were discovered.\nWe believe that quasars consist of hot matter and the process of falling into black holes, collapsed stars as gravitational field is so intense that nothing can escape from them.\nYet reaching that conclusion is required years of research, both observational and theoretical, now that we believe we have gained a measure of understanding of quasars, we do not think that this understanding is something we already had before, explaining quasars.\nScrew existing theories has given us genuinely new understanding.\nJust as it is hard to define what an explanation is, it is hard to define when a subsidiary explanation should count as an independent component of what is being understood.\nAnd when it should be considered as being subsumed in the deeper theory, it is hard to define, but not so hard to recognize in practice we know a new explanation when we are given one.\nThe difference has something to do with creativity, explaining the motion of a particular planet when one already understands the general explanation of gravity is a mechanical task, though it may be a very complex one.\nBut using existing theory to account for quasars requires creative thought, thus to understand everything that is understood in astrophysics today, you would have to know the theory of quasars explicitly, but you would not have to know the orbit of any specific planet, pausing their my reflection.\nAnd just because this is online right now, so what David's saying there is, okay, here's the situation with quasars and the sense in which they weren't already contained within existing knowledge of astrophysics, because it was a problem.\nHere's in short what my episode about quasars is all about.\nAnd it's just fortuitous that I happen to have made a thing about quasars, which was a response to something I said in an episode called The Nexus, which is basically about people, but I talked about quasars.\nAnd the reason I talk about quasars is because David has used it in the beginning of infinity and in his TED talks to talk about this concept of self-similarity, how our theories of quasars over time come to more accurately resemble actual quasars out there on the other side of the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1537"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf781ade-e25b-4cf0-99db-0ea6d2fbfc6b": {"page_content": "And the reason I talk about quasars is because David has used it in the beginning of infinity and in his TED talks to talk about this concept of self-similarity, how our theories of quasars over time come to more accurately resemble actual quasars out there on the other side of the universe.\nAnyway, the history of the discovery of quasars is that at first they were found to be extremely distant, okay, long story short.\nThey were found to have higher edge shifts, so therefore they are typically billions of light years away, billions of light years away.\nThat was found looking at the spectra of these things, fine very well.\nHowever, although the spectra told us that they were a long way off, receding at a very high velocity, other telescopes and other measurements were able to reveal what their luminosity was, how bright they were, and they were just too bright.\nThey were too bright for any existing theory of physics to account for.\nThey were small, smaller than, you know, basically, well, on the order of maybe a little bit bigger than a solar system, but certainly not as big as a galaxy, and yet thousands of times brighter than a galaxy, many thousands of times brighter than a typical galaxy.\nSo distant, brighter than a galaxy, much smaller than a galaxy.\nHow would this be possible?.\nWell, it's not possible if you assume that the quasar is truly a quasi-stellar radio source, a quasi, a somewhat like a star source of light.\nA star puts out light from all points on its surface, roughly evenly.\nIt's a big sphere, roughly speaking, of plasma, of hot gas, and it's putting out radiation equally in all directions.\nNow, this is true of objects in space generally, and this is what astronomers reasonably thought that a quasar should be.\nIt should be a spherical object putting out light in all directions equally.\nNow, if you make that assumption, then the physics just doesn't work.\nIt's not possible for something that small to be that bright.\nIt exceeds something called the editing to limit and violates laws of physics.\nSo they thought they needed new physics, as David says there.\nThey don't, and this is why, although you could have a full understanding of general relativity and a full understanding of quantum theory and nuclear physics and all that sort of stuff.\nAnd still not be able to explain what a quasar is, even though a quasar obeys all those laws.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1646"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a55dde1b-7b97-415b-b2f2-1780052c3377": {"page_content": "It's not possible for something that small to be that bright.\nIt exceeds something called the editing to limit and violates laws of physics.\nSo they thought they needed new physics, as David says there.\nThey don't, and this is why, although you could have a full understanding of general relativity and a full understanding of quantum theory and nuclear physics and all that sort of stuff.\nAnd still not be able to explain what a quasar is, even though a quasar obeys all those laws.\nAnd the reason is all the problem of how it could be so bright whilst being so distant is it's not putting out light in all directions evenly.\nIt's putting out light in beams.\nIt's putting out light in very narrow beams.\nAnd we can see just that part of the beam.\nAnd so it appears super bright.\nAnd that's fine if you notice and assume that it's not putting out that energy in all directions, but just a few privilege directions too, typically.\nAnd so we're getting a very concentrated part of that beam.\nAt least part in that, see my episode on quasar's for more about exactly what's going on.\nSometimes we're in the beam, in which case it's called a blazer.\nAnd sometimes we can see the lobes of gas produced by the beam being illuminated by the beam.\nAnd so it's sort of a complicated process.\nBut quasars are absolutely fascinating objects, because they are so distant, they allow us to understand what the universe was like in the deep dark past.\nIn fact, the deep bright past turns out because there are many more of these things in the early universe.\nAnd therefore we see them at very high redshifts, at very distant parts of the universe.\nOkay, skipping a section where David talks about other kinds of explanation, in explicit explanations, which people in bygone eras needed to rely on.\nSo they weren't proper explanations.\nBut rather rules of thumb, rules of thumb, things that appear to have worked probably by some process of evolution by natural selection.\nYou use this rule of thumb to build a bridge.\nAnd it's worked because all previous attempts to use it have worked and the ones that didn't work while the bridge fell down.\nBut you don't know why.\nYou don't know the engineering principles that underlie why this bridge stayed up and this bridge fell down.\nBut you use certain rules of thumb.\nAnd lucky for you, those rules of thumb happen to be able to be derived from deeper physical theories.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1778"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "98ec7a60-0261-4108-a7f5-e36f403420bf": {"page_content": "You use this rule of thumb to build a bridge.\nAnd it's worked because all previous attempts to use it have worked and the ones that didn't work while the bridge fell down.\nBut you don't know why.\nYou don't know the engineering principles that underlie why this bridge stayed up and this bridge fell down.\nBut you use certain rules of thumb.\nAnd lucky for you, those rules of thumb happen to be able to be derived from deeper physical theories.\nBut you don't know the physical theories.\nYou just guessed the right a bit of the theory without knowing what it is, if that makes sense.\nThat's why it's in explicit you haven't been able to put it into words, been able to explain it in any way.\nAs David says over this, when admiring centuries old structures, people often forget that we see only the surviving ones.\nThe overwhelming majority of structures built in medieval and earlier times have collapsed long ago, often soon after they were built.\nPeople get very excited about the pyramids.\nThey say, wow, the pyramids, the Egyptians built these big pile of rocks.\nThey must have had alien help.\nThey're so impressive.\nPutting aside then not that impressive, they are literally a pile of rocks.\nIn so far as there's any architectural ingenuity there that we can sort of think is impressive.\nIf you give a typical person with moderate amount of engineering understanding, sufficient amount of human labor, cheaply paid human labor, under the threat of a tyrant.\nWell, you can probably get a pretty impressive pile of rocks going as well with little chambers inside.\nBut how many pyramids were there that didn't survive that fell down?.\nDon't know.\nIt's hard for a pile of rocks to fall down, but collapse in some way or other, and needed to be rebuilt.\nWe don't know if there's no records of those.\nWe're impressed by the ones that survived.\nSo too with bridges, so too with cathedrals and so on.\nSo I'm skipping all of that.\nAnd David returns to this concept of specialization versus generalizing.\nAnd whether or not this constant apparent, apparent fragmenting of our knowledge means that we can't understand everything that could be understood.\nDavid writes, quote, I'm not of course denying that specialization is occurring in many subjects in which knowledge is growing, including architecture.\nThis is not a one-way process for specializations often disappear too.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=1926"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "11ad018c-e9bd-4ef9-8049-cae03ca1cdfd": {"page_content": "So I'm skipping all of that.\nAnd David returns to this concept of specialization versus generalizing.\nAnd whether or not this constant apparent, apparent fragmenting of our knowledge means that we can't understand everything that could be understood.\nDavid writes, quote, I'm not of course denying that specialization is occurring in many subjects in which knowledge is growing, including architecture.\nThis is not a one-way process for specializations often disappear too.\nWheels are no longer designed or made by wheel rights, nor plows by plow rights, nor a letter written by scribes.\nIt is nevertheless quite evident that the deepening, unifying tendency I've been describing is not the only one at work.\nA continual broadening is going on at the same time.\nThat is, new ideas often do more than just supersede, simplify, or unify existing ones.\nThey also extend human understanding into areas that were previously not understood at all, or whose very existence was not guessed at.\nThey may open up new opportunities, new problems, new specializations, and even new subjects.\nAnd when that happens, it may give us at least temporarily more to learn in order to understand it all.\nThe science of medicine is perhaps the most frequently cited case of increasing specialization, seeming to follow inevitably from increasing knowledge.\nAs new cures and better treatments for more diseases are discovered, but even in medicine, the opposite, unifying tendency is also present, and is becoming stronger.\nAdmittedly, many functions of the body are still poorly understood, and so are the mechanisms of many diseases.\nConsequently, some areas of medical knowledge still consist mainly of collections of recorded facts together with the skills and intuitions of doctors who have experience of particular diseases and particular treatments and who pass on these skills and intuitions from one generation to the next.\nMuch of medicine, in other words, is still in the rule of thumb era.\nAnd when new rules of thumb are discovered, there is indeed more incentive for specialization.\nBut as medicine and biochemical research comes up with deeper explanations of disease processes and healthy processes in the body.\nUnderstanding is also on the increase.\nMore general concepts are replacing more specific ones as common.\nUnderlying molecular mechanisms are found for the similar diseases in different parts of the body.\nOnce a disease can be understood as fitting into a general framework, the role of the specialist diminishes.\nInstead, physicians coming across an unfamiliar disease or a rare complication can rely increasingly on explanatory theories.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2009"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "07116ba1-aaaa-4a89-9ba4-7fdf28fe72eb": {"page_content": "But as medicine and biochemical research comes up with deeper explanations of disease processes and healthy processes in the body.\nUnderstanding is also on the increase.\nMore general concepts are replacing more specific ones as common.\nUnderlying molecular mechanisms are found for the similar diseases in different parts of the body.\nOnce a disease can be understood as fitting into a general framework, the role of the specialist diminishes.\nInstead, physicians coming across an unfamiliar disease or a rare complication can rely increasingly on explanatory theories.\nThey can look up such facts as are known, but then they may be able to apply a general theory to work out the required treatment and expect it to be effective, even if it never has been used before.\nThus, the issue of whether it is becoming harder or easier to understand everything that is understood depends on the overall balance between these two opposing effects of the growth of knowledge, the increasing breadth of our theories, and the increasing depth.\nBrett makes it harder, depth makes it easier.\nOne thesis of this book is that slowly, but surely, depth is winning.\nIn other words, the proposition that I refuse to believe as a child is indeed false and practically the opposite is true.\nWe are not heading away from a state in which everyone could understand everything that is understood, but towards it.\nIt is not that we shall soon understand everything.\nThat is a completely different issue.\nI do not believe that we are now.\nNor ever shall be close to understanding everything there is.\nWhat I am discussing is the possibility of understanding everything that is understood.\nThat depends more on the structure of our knowledge than on its content, but of course, the structure of our knowledge, whether it is expressible in theories that fit together as a comprehensible whole, does depend on what the fabric of reality as a whole is like.\nIf knowledge is to continue its open-ended growth, and if we are nevertheless heading towards a state in which one person could understand everything that is understood, then the depth of our theories must continue to grow fast enough to make this possible.\nThis can happen only if the fabric of reality itself is highly unified, so that more and more of it can become understood as our knowledge grows.\nIf that happens, then eventually our theories will become so general, deep and integrated with one another that they will effectively become a single theory of a unified fabric of reality.\nThis theory will still not explain every aspect of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2117"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2b843cad-bb80-414a-a2b7-a1492a608590": {"page_content": "This can happen only if the fabric of reality itself is highly unified, so that more and more of it can become understood as our knowledge grows.\nIf that happens, then eventually our theories will become so general, deep and integrated with one another that they will effectively become a single theory of a unified fabric of reality.\nThis theory will still not explain every aspect of reality.\nThat is unattainable, but it will encompass all known explanations, and it will apply to the whole fabric of reality in so far as it is understood.\nWhereas all previous theories related to particular subjects, this will be a theory of all subjects, a theory of everything, pausing their my reflection.\nLet's just notice that David Deutsch lives this philosophy.\nNot only is this notion expressed in the beginning of Findi, but David Deutsch's life has, in some sense, been an outworking of this, and if only the rest of us could contribute to this in some way, shape or form, because as he says there, once we have these deeper theories, then it enables us to solve problems in far more disparate areas.\nBut in terms of David's life, academic life, let's consider what's happened, my version.\nHe was interested in physics, quantum physics, and theory of computation, and he was the first one to properly unite the theory of quantum physics with computation.\nComputation prior to which was a part of pure mathematics invented by Alan Turing, let's say.\nThat's one history of it.\nAlan Turing invents the theory of computation.\nIt's just a mathematical thing.\nHe's trying to solve problems in mathematics, not until later they build physical computers, but even then people still think the theory of computation is just a part of mathematics.\nDavid Deutsch then applies quantum physics to the mathematical theory of computation, recognizing that computers are made out of matter.\nSo he unifies, brings together the theory of computation and theory of quantum physics, so we now have a theory of quantum computation.\nThat's the first thing.\nNext, construct a theory.\nConstruct a theory is a deeper generalization of the theory of quantum computation.\nAnd so now it appears as though, not all the work has been done yet, but it appears as though this construct a theory being a deeper version of quantum computation about what is possible and impossible might be able to provide a physics of knowledge, a physics of epistemology, unifying epistemology and physics.\nHow could this be possible at all?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2233"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "83954093-c2c2-45b4-95f7-9fc67ec9a1f4": {"page_content": "That's the first thing.\nNext, construct a theory.\nConstruct a theory is a deeper generalization of the theory of quantum computation.\nAnd so now it appears as though, not all the work has been done yet, but it appears as though this construct a theory being a deeper version of quantum computation about what is possible and impossible might be able to provide a physics of knowledge, a physics of epistemology, unifying epistemology and physics.\nHow could this be possible at all?.\nWell, because it's got to be possible to know some things and impossible to know other things.\nAnd if construct a theory is a fundamental theory of physics, and in fact, what knowledge creation is about, is about trying to construct knowledge about what is possible to know about, and figuring out what's not possible to know about, and so we can forget about those useless, uninteresting things.\nThen we have a physics of knowledge as well, and so now we've brought part of philosophy into this worldview.\nSo David Deutsch is doing this.\nHe is unifying our various deep theories of reality.\nIn fact, the fabric of reality is being united, specifically by him to a large extent.\nNukyara has done some work on biology as well, and so it could be within his lifetime.\nWe hope that this fabric of reality might actually end up being a single theory of biology.\nPhysics and computation already united, really.\nThey deserve to be considered as one theory, and the theory of epistemology as well, which might very well be just subsumed by construct a theory of physics.\nDavid then goes on to say, quote, it will not of course be the last such theory, but only the first.\nIn science we take it for granted that even our best theories are bound to be imperfect and problematic in some ways, and we expect them to be superseded in due course by deeper, more accurate theories.\nSuch progress is not brought to a halt when we discover a universal theory.\nFor example, Newton gave us the first universal theory of gravity, and a unification of, among other things, celestial and terrestrial mechanics.\nBut his theories have been superseded by Einstein's general theory of relativity, which additionally incorporates geometry, formerly regarded as a branch of mathematics, into physics, and in doing so provides far deeper explanations as well as being more accurate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2377"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90c59e58-c32a-4877-8b91-45d49127d44c": {"page_content": "The first fully universal theory, which I shall call the theory of everything, will, like all our theories before and after it, be neither perfectly true nor infinitely deep, and so will eventually be superseded, but it will not be superseded through unification with theories about other subjects, for it will already be a theory of all subjects, pausing there, and skipping a substantial part here again, and moving on, David writes, quote, I must stress immediately that I am not referring merely to the theory of everything, which some particle physicists hope they will soon discover, their theory of everything would be a unified theory of all the basic forces known to physics, namely gravity, not a force, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2521"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40b203c4-cc87-4b0b-a43b-7473caa168a3": {"page_content": "It would also describe all the types of subatomic particles that exist, their masses, spins, electric charges, and other properties, and how they interact.\nGiven a sufficiently precise description of the initial state of any isolated physical system, it would, in principle, predict the future behavior of the system, where the exact behavior of a system was intrinsically unpredictable, it would describe all possible behaviors and predict their probabilities.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2564"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "10b6fe87-2545-4531-8928-2bf71366f977": {"page_content": "In practice, the initial states of interesting systems often cannot be ascertained very accurately, and in any case, the calculation of the predictions will be too complicated to be carried out in all but the simplest cases, nevertheless, such a unified theory of particles and forces, together with a specification of the initial state of the universe, at the Big Bang, the violent explosion with which the universe began, when in principle contain all the information necessary to predict everything that can be predicted, but prediction is not explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2590"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "81f6846a-7370-4017-b58d-38c783b72f12": {"page_content": "The hoped-for theory of everything, even if combined with a theory of the initial state, will it best provide only a tiny facet of the real theory of everything?.\nIt may predict everything in principle, but it cannot be expected to explain much more than the existing theories to accept for a few phenomena that are dominated by the nuances of subatomic particle interactions, such as collisions inside particle accelerators, and the exotic history of particle transmutations in the Big Bang.\nWhat motivates the term, theory of everything for such a narrow, albeit fascinating piece of knowledge?.\nIt is, I think, another mistaken view of the nature of science held disapprovingly by many critics of science and alas, approvingly by many scientists.\nNamely, that science is essentially a reductionist.\nThat is to say, science allegedly explains things reductively by analysing them into components.\nFor example, the resistance of a wall being penetrated or knocked down is explained by regarding the walls of vast aggregation of interacting molecules, the properties of these molecules are themselves explained in terms of their constituent atoms and the interactions of these atoms with one another, and so on, down to the smallest particles and the most basic forces.\nReductionists think that all scientific explanations and perhaps all sufficiently deep explanations of any kind take that form.\nThe reductionist conception leads naturally to a classification of subjects, and theories in a hierarchy, according to how close they are to the lowest level, predictive theories that are known.\nIn this hierarchy, logic and mathematics form the immovable bedrock on which the edifice of science is built.\nThe foundation stone would be a reductive theory of everything, a universal theory of particles, forces, space and time, together with some theory of what the initial state of the universe was.\nThe rest of physics forms the first few stories.\nAstrophysics and chemistry are at a higher level.\nGeology even higher and so on.\nThe edifice branches into many towers have increasingly high level subjects like biochemistry, biology, and genetics.\nPerched to the tottering stratospheric tops are subjects like the theory of evolution, economics, psychology, and computer science, which in this picture are almost inconceivably derivative, pausing their just my reflection on this.\nYes, this is just the common way that people talk about our knowledge.\nDavid's going to come to the idea that even more than that, you have this conception that at the base and the most important immovable thing is mathematics or logic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2615"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a60d21c5-2d2e-44b5-a73c-4092d9c85814": {"page_content": "Perched to the tottering stratospheric tops are subjects like the theory of evolution, economics, psychology, and computer science, which in this picture are almost inconceivably derivative, pausing their just my reflection on this.\nYes, this is just the common way that people talk about our knowledge.\nDavid's going to come to the idea that even more than that, you have this conception that at the base and the most important immovable thing is mathematics or logic.\nBut above that, slightly, you have science, all the sciences, because they're based on evidence, whereas mathematics is absolutely certain.\nAnd then, well, science isn't quite certain, but it's empirically testable or provable, if you like.\nAnd then above that, you've got philosophy, which is mere matter of opinion.\nThis misconception arises out of the same kind of ideas.\nIt's a denial of the reality of emergence.\nNow, I'm skipping a little bit more where David talks about the reductionist theory of everything.\nAnd I'm just going to read a part which apparently, you know, because my Kindle tells me when people have highlighted certain passages.\nAnd this particular passage has been highlighted 100 times.\nAnd the couple of sentences before the highlighted passage reads like this.\nFor higher-level sciences, the reductionist program is a matter of principle only.\nNo one expects actually to deduce the many principles of biology, psychology, or politics from those of physics.\nNext part has been highlighted 100 times.\nThe reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances this tremendously complex behavior of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility.\nThis is called emergence.\nHigh-level simplicity emerges from low-level complexity.\nHigh-level phenomena are about which there are comprehensible facts that are not simply deducible from lower-level theories are called emergent phenomena.\nOkay, just pausing there.\nMy reflection, yes.\nAnd so almost everything of interest outside of theoretical physics is of this kind.\nIt's emergent phenomena.\nIt comes out of the lower-level theories, but it's not deducible from them.\nOkay, and so that's why I regard lots of the stuff that is mysterious about human beings, our ability to create knowledge and so on, as emergent and real and needs to be understood in its own terms at that level, not at the level of physics or any other level like the operation of neurons in a brain.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2731"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82b9669d-7a5c-4891-bf36-b1ca9db44a52": {"page_content": "It's emergent phenomena.\nIt comes out of the lower-level theories, but it's not deducible from them.\nOkay, and so that's why I regard lots of the stuff that is mysterious about human beings, our ability to create knowledge and so on, as emergent and real and needs to be understood in its own terms at that level, not at the level of physics or any other level like the operation of neurons in a brain.\nIt's the wrong level of analysis.\nI'm skipping a whole part again.\nDavid goes into a critique of the opposite of reductionism, which is holism, the idea that we shouldn't be looking for explanations at the lowest level, but rather at the highest level and in both cases these are just misconceptions that we should privilege any particular level of explanation.\nAll the explanations are needed.\nWe should want to understand everything at every level of emergence.\nDavid mentions that a reductionist thinks that science is about analyzing things into components, instrumentalist thinks that it's about predicting things, to either of them, sciences at the higher level are justified for convenience.\nThey don't correspond to anything real, and this is all a misconception that we are quite familiar with.\nNow, I can't let this go.\nI cannot let this chapter go, but it is where I'll finish it.\nWithout reading and giving Jew respect to a story that has had a great impact on me and a great impact on this podcast as well.\nAnd that is, of course, the Winston Churchill Copperatum argument.\nAnd so I am going to read it.\nI don't know if David knew when he wrote this, that it would be referred to so frequently thereafter.\nNot just by me, by me a fair bit, but by a lot of people who try to explain the importance of emerging explanations and how reductionism has just a poverty of content when applied in certain contexts, that you can't use reductionism in anything outside of theoretical physics.\nAnd in fact, it's absurd to even try.\nHow absurd?.\nLet's see.\nDavid writes, quote, For example, consider one particular Copperatum at the tip of the nose of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill that stands in Parliament Square in London.\nLet me try to explain why that Copperatum is there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2872"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e057270-6075-4e6f-9d96-0c09f1ffdd17": {"page_content": "And in fact, it's absurd to even try.\nHow absurd?.\nLet's see.\nDavid writes, quote, For example, consider one particular Copperatum at the tip of the nose of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill that stands in Parliament Square in London.\nLet me try to explain why that Copperatum is there.\nIt is because Churchill served as prime minister in the House of Commons nearby, and because his ideas and leadership contributed to the allied victory in the Second World War, and because it is customary to honor such people by putting up statues of them, and because bronze, a traditional material for such statues contains Copper and so on.\nThus we explain a low-level physical observation, the presence of a Copperatum at a particular location, through extremely high-level theories about emerging phenomena such as ideas, leadership, war, and tradition.\nThere is no reason why there should exist, even in principle, any lower-level explanation of the presence of that Copperatum than the one I have just given.\nPresumably a reductive theory of everything would in principle make a low-level prediction of the probability that such a statue will exist given the condition of, say, the solar system at some earlier stage.\nIt would also, in principle, describe how the statue probably got there, but such descriptions and predictions, loudly and feasible of course, would explain nothing.\nThey would merely describe the trajectory that each Copperatum followed from the Copper mine, through the smelter and the sculptor's studio, and so on.\nThey could also state how those trajectories were influenced by forces exerted by surrounding atoms, such as those comprising the miners and sculptor's bodies, and so predict the existence and shape of the statue.\nIn fact, such a prediction would have to refer to atoms all over the planet, engage in the complex motion we call the Second World War, among other things.\nBut even if you had the superhuman capacity to follow such lengthy predictions of the Copperatum's being there, you would still not be able to say,.\noh yes, now I understand why it's there, you would merely know that it's a rival there in that way was inevitable or likely or whatever.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=2997"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "98200d23-f4ac-4d87-afca-9acf684908cc": {"page_content": "In fact, such a prediction would have to refer to atoms all over the planet, engage in the complex motion we call the Second World War, among other things.\nBut even if you had the superhuman capacity to follow such lengthy predictions of the Copperatum's being there, you would still not be able to say,.\noh yes, now I understand why it's there, you would merely know that it's a rival there in that way was inevitable or likely or whatever.\nGiven all the atoms initial configurations and the laws of physics, if you wanted to understand why, you would still have no option but to take a further step, you would have to inquire into what it was about the configuration of atoms and those trajectories that gave them the propensity to deposit a Copperatum at this location, pursuing this inquiry would be a creative task as discovering new explanations always is.\nYou would have to discover that certain atomic configurations support emergent phenomena, such as leadership and war, which are related to one another by high-level explanatory theories, only when you knew those theories could you fully understand why that Copperatum is where it is.\nWell, there we go, that's why I'll end it today.\nThat is a that is a little story, a parable, a parable of the Copperatum that I must have referred to, gosh, more than dozens, it's got to be hundreds of times by now in attempting to just explain why physics isn't the only game in town.\nNot only that this idea of, well, there's no choice in the matter, the universe is just the unfolding of atoms moving in the void under deterministic laws and that that somehow is an explanation of things, it's not.\nIt shows you the value of all other subjects, including physics, including history, for example, something that some scientists, traditionally, over the years, have kind of dismissed as not so important, but physics and science broadly cannot possibly do everything.\nNow, of course, I love science.\nI'm passionate about the sciences.\nHistory is something I would do just merely as a hobby, but that's not to say that I don't think the historians aren't doing a job as equally important as the scientists, let's say, and so too for every other area of human knowledge.\nNot to say, they're not filled with misconceptions, and I wouldn't think that historians sometimes are going down terribly blind alleys and can be biased and all that sort of stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=3109"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fff2ef4a-dfd4-4afd-af77-3527694bf721": {"page_content": "I'm passionate about the sciences.\nHistory is something I would do just merely as a hobby, but that's not to say that I don't think the historians aren't doing a job as equally important as the scientists, let's say, and so too for every other area of human knowledge.\nNot to say, they're not filled with misconceptions, and I wouldn't think that historians sometimes are going down terribly blind alleys and can be biased and all that sort of stuff.\nThe subject itself is as important as chemistry, as physics, as medicine.\nAll these things form a coherent whole, and we need to understand that explanations at the different levels are required at those different levels, are absolutely appropriate those different levels.\nThe only way we can make sense of things at those levels, history is required because it's the only way to understand matters of history, applying physics to that is ridiculous, as we have just seen, and applying theoretical physics to any other domain outside of theoretical physics is going to be a fool's errand.\nUnless, of course, it somehow subsumes those areas as we have said before, like computation, for example, was brought into physics, into quantum physics, and so now maybe epistemology, we are brought into that area as well, but only once it becomes a good explanation.\nApplying theoretical physics to things like why Winston Churchill statue is there is silly.\nOkay, so part two, done and dusted, we are on to part three next time, and until then, bye!.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTLzGJb16dQ&t=3230"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9ccbc1c0-dad9-4303-876c-81cf2d474ee1": {"page_content": "and the past part two of the beginning, the final chapter of the beginning of infinity.\nThis isn't the final episode however.\nThis is just the second in a series called the beginning and in last episode we were talking about David's idea that we should call knowledge in science rather than calling it scientific theories of or scientific facts about if we just agreed that every discovery in science, every new discovery, was another grand scientific misconception.\nIt would undo a lot of epistemological problems, a lot of hang-ups that people have about following the science or thinking that science is settled in some way.\nIf we simply understood and took seriously the idea that all knowledge contains misconception and error and therefore called it a misconception, perhaps people would be more willing to change their minds and search for ways to improve our knowledge, rather than believing in science as if it was some religious dogma.\nNow this is true even in mathematics, as David said, because although theorems tend not to be shown false once they've been proven, although it is possible, it is possible to find an error in a proof.\nThis is a rare situation.\nWhat is more common is that mathematicians gain a deeper understanding of certain theorems.\nThey find that they are not as foundational, fundamental, as deep as what originally was taught.\nIn fact, there's often something deeper.\nThere's a more general case in mathematics.\nAnd so let me go back to the book and reread or just read.\nAnd David writes, optimism and reason are incompatible with the conceit that our knowledge is nearly there in any sense or its foundations are.\nYet comprehensive optimism has always been rare and the lure of the prophetic fallacy strong.\nBut there have always been exceptions.\nSocrates famously claimed to be deeply ignorant and pop a road, quote from Papa.\nI believe that it would be worth trying to learn something about the world, even if in trying to do so, we should merely learn that we do not know much.\nIt might be well for us all to remember that while differing widely in the various little bits we know in our infinite ignorance, we are all equal from conjectures and refutations in 1963.\nInfinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge.\nRejecting the idea that we are nearly there is a necessary condition for the avoidance of dogmatism, stagnation and tyranny, pausing there just my reflection on that.\nRemember Papa's deep truth about manifest truth and tyranny.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f5852e90-54db-45f3-80d6-90032730349a": {"page_content": "It might be well for us all to remember that while differing widely in the various little bits we know in our infinite ignorance, we are all equal from conjectures and refutations in 1963.\nInfinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge.\nRejecting the idea that we are nearly there is a necessary condition for the avoidance of dogmatism, stagnation and tyranny, pausing there just my reflection on that.\nRemember Papa's deep truth about manifest truth and tyranny.\nHe said, if I can recall, the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny.\nAnd what he meant by that is that once someone honestly believes thinks actually true that they have got in hand a final truth, then many people will think that this is something that needs to be defended with their lives.\nAnd perhaps they'd be right to do so if in fact they had the ultimate final truth.\nThe holy truth, this is the history of much conflict in the world, people thinking they have the truth and they will fight to the death in order to preserve it.\nAnd so Papa is right to say but the doctrine that truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny.\nThat these epistemological debates, questions, discussions are not in the abstract.\nThey have real world consequences.\nIf you are a thoroughgoing fallibleist, you're likely not going to insist on the death of your compatriots in order to defend a thesis, which you do not think is the ultimate final truth.\nBut on the other hand, those other people might.\nBut of course that then evokes Yitz, William Butler Yitz, the second coming poem.\nI'll just read the most famous two lines where he writes quote from Yitz, the best lack or conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.\nBut we don't need to go down that road.\nBut in being fallibleists, we do not have to lack conviction and we do not have to counter passionate intensity with impotent relativism.\nWe can still claim to know what we know and still be willing to defend the moral ideals and values that we think are important for the maintenance of civilization.\nBut we just don't have to be tyrannical about it.\nWe don't have to go to war over it.\nIf war is brought to us, then we should be willing to have the conviction to defend ourselves and enlightenment values.\nOkay, back to the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cad560c0-2589-4d80-b442-970d585a5473": {"page_content": "We can still claim to know what we know and still be willing to defend the moral ideals and values that we think are important for the maintenance of civilization.\nBut we just don't have to be tyrannical about it.\nWe don't have to go to war over it.\nIf war is brought to us, then we should be willing to have the conviction to defend ourselves and enlightenment values.\nOkay, back to the book.\nIn 1996, the journalist John Horgan caused something of a stir with his book, The End of Science, facing the limits of knowledge and the twilight of the scientific age.\nIn it, he argued that the final truth in all fundamental areas of science, or at least as much of it as human minds would ever be capable of grasping, had already been discovered during the 20th century.\nHorgan wrote that he had originally believed science to be open-ended, even infinite.\nBut he became convinced that the contrary by what I would call a series of misconceptions and bad arguments.\nHis basic misconception was empiricism.\nHe believed that what distinguishes science from unscientific fields such as literary criticism for loss of your art is that science has the ability to resolve questions objectively by comparing theories with reality, while other fields can produce only multiple mutually incompatible interpretations of any issue.\nHe was mistaken in both respects.\nAs I've explained throughout this book, there is objective truth to be found in all those fields, while finality or infallibility cannot be found anywhere.\nHorgan accepts from the bad philosophy of postmodern literary criticism.\nIt's will for confusion between two kinds of ambiguity.\nThat can exist in philosophy and art.\nThe first is the ambiguity of multiple true meanings, either intended by the author or existing because of the rich of ideas.\nThe second is the ambiguity of deliberate vagueness, confusion, equivocation or self-contradiction.\nThe first is an attribute of deep ideas, the second and attribute of deep silliness.\nBy confusing them, one ascribes to the best art and philosophy, the qualities of the worst.\nSince in that view readers, viewers and critics can attribute any meaning they choose to the second kind of ambiguity.\nBad philosophy.\nBad philosophy declares the same to be true of all knowledge.\nAll meanings are equal, and none of them is objectively true.\nOne then has a choice between complete nihilism or regarding all ambiguity as a good thing in those fields.\nHorgan chooses the latter option.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a74e4ade-9aa9-49da-abd3-e4bf44087916": {"page_content": "By confusing them, one ascribes to the best art and philosophy, the qualities of the worst.\nSince in that view readers, viewers and critics can attribute any meaning they choose to the second kind of ambiguity.\nBad philosophy.\nBad philosophy declares the same to be true of all knowledge.\nAll meanings are equal, and none of them is objectively true.\nOne then has a choice between complete nihilism or regarding all ambiguity as a good thing in those fields.\nHorgan chooses the latter option.\nHe classifies art and philosophy as ironic fields, are only being the presence of multiple conflicting meanings in a statement.\nOkay, pausing their my reflection.\nSo we have a great battle, a great battle for science.\nIs it the beginning or is it the end?.\nAnd now according to Horgan here, of course, things are coming to an end.\nAnd you can find more writings of John Horgan more recently online, but they basically circle the same ideas.\nI don't think he has given up on any of the claims he makes here.\nAt least I haven't seen him publicly a backtrack on anything.\nEven though Horgan's book was published, Horgan's book was published back in, well, first published back in 96, republished again in 98.\nSo that's more than 10 years before the first publication, the beginning of infinity.\nAnd I know for a fact that John Horgan interviewed David Deutsch and that interview, that wonderful interview is available online.\nYou can find it on YouTube.\nJohn Horgan speaking to David Deutsch about the beginning of infinity.\nThat's a wonderful conversation.\nI don't know why John Horgan wasn't convinced because certainly since that discussion, he has made many of the same points as he makes in the end of science.\nAnd one point he has brought up again and again, in his book and in articles that he has written, is a kind of character assassination of Karl Popper.\nI don't know why people wish to do this.\nMuch the same occurs in Wittgenstein's poker, where, well, to be fair, fans of Popper, some fans of Popper, who claim to have known Wittgenstein, complained that Wittgenstein was not a particularly pleasant person to get along with.\nSimilarly, fans of Wittgenstein complained that Popper was a terribly annoying person or, you know, he wasn't a particularly pleasant person.\nBut of course, if you speak to fans of Popper who met Popper, he was a wonderfully friendly person.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d05676f3-2acb-40c4-9404-d17cf238c9f4": {"page_content": "Similarly, fans of Wittgenstein complained that Popper was a terribly annoying person or, you know, he wasn't a particularly pleasant person.\nBut of course, if you speak to fans of Popper who met Popper, he was a wonderfully friendly person.\nI don't know what the point is of of debating this, except that it reveals something about one's willingness to engage with the ideas when you start talking about the person's supposed character.\nAnd John Horgan does this in spades.\nJohn Horgan's probably a nice guy.\nI've never met him, but I know he likes to talk about Popper's personality.\nAnd so if we go to the end of science, to the chapter called The End of Philosophy, we can read about supposedly what Popper was like, because John Horgan speaks about his personal encounter with Carl Popper because he goes to interview him.\nAnd so because in part this series is very much a tribute to the work of Carl Popper, let's give the other side a bit of a run.\nAnd so what does John Horgan say in this book about Carl Popper?.\nSo he arrives at Sir Carl's house, and I'll just read it, and Horgan writes when he arrives at the house.\nA tall handsome woman dressed in dark pants and shirt with short dark hair answered the door.\nMrs. Mu, she was only slightly less forbidding in person than over the telephone.\nAs she led me into the house, she told me that Sir Carl was quite tired.\nHe had undergone a spate of interviews and congratulations brought on by his 90th birthday the previous month, and he had been working too hard preparing an acceptance speech for the Kyoto Award known as Japan's Nobel.\nI should expect to speak to him for only an hour at the most.\nI was trying to lower my expectations when Popper made his entrance.\nHe was stooped, equipped with the hearing aid and surprisingly short.\nI had assumed that the author of such autocratic prose would be tall.\nYet he was as kinetic as a phantom weight boxer.\nHe brandished an article I had written for Scientific American about how quantum mechanics was compelling some physicists to abandon a view of physics as a wholly objective enterprise.\nI don't believe a word of it he declared in an Austrian accented growl, subjectivism, has no place in physics, quantum or otherwise.\nPhysics he exclaimed, grabbing a book from a table and slamming it down is that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc92b2fe-295a-4a80-948d-8bbdfdfbddf8": {"page_content": "Yet he was as kinetic as a phantom weight boxer.\nHe brandished an article I had written for Scientific American about how quantum mechanics was compelling some physicists to abandon a view of physics as a wholly objective enterprise.\nI don't believe a word of it he declared in an Austrian accented growl, subjectivism, has no place in physics, quantum or otherwise.\nPhysics he exclaimed, grabbing a book from a table and slamming it down is that.\nThis from a man who co-wrote a book espousing dualism, the notion that ideas and other constructs of the human mind exist independently of the material world, pausing there.\nWell, Popper was quite right, wasn't he?.\nTo reject subjectivism in quantum theory.\nSo I don't know what problem Hogan has here, but he seems to be conflating this with Popper's apparently espousing dualism.\nI'm not sure that's entirely true, by the way.\nIt depends on what one means by dualism.\nAfter all, I could argue the thesis that the mind is software running on the brain, which is hardware, which is a form of dualism, that there is an abstract reality in a physical reality.\nDualism, there is number and there are atoms, dualism, but why that has anything to do with whether or not one thinks that the laws of physics should be subjective, which is to say the laws of physics have a place in them for consciousness at the fundamental level, namely that your one's observing of an experiment affects the outcome of the experiment.\nI don't know, but Hogan's upset about that.\nLet's go back to the book.\nHogan writes of Popper.\nOnce seated, he kept darting away to forage for books or articles that could buttress a point, striving to dredge a name or date from his memory.\nHe needed his temples and greeted his teeth as if in agony.\nAt one point, when the word mutation briefly eluded him, he slapped his forehead repeatedly and with alarming force shouting, terms, terms, terms.\nWords poured from him so rapidly and with so much momentum that I began to lose hope that I could ask any of my prepared questions.\nI am over 90 and I can still think he declared as if suspecting that I doubted it.\nHe tirelessly touted a theory of the origin of life proposed by a former student, Gunther Warchalsa, a German patent attorney who had a PhD in chemistry.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb279412-862b-4eaf-a1b1-4cff8d5843d3": {"page_content": "Words poured from him so rapidly and with so much momentum that I began to lose hope that I could ask any of my prepared questions.\nI am over 90 and I can still think he declared as if suspecting that I doubted it.\nHe tirelessly touted a theory of the origin of life proposed by a former student, Gunther Warchalsa, a German patent attorney who had a PhD in chemistry.\nPopper kept emphasizing that he had known all the titans of 20th century science.\nEinstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Popper blamed Bohr, whom he knew very well for having introduced subjectivism into physics.\nBohr was a marvellous physicist at one of the greatest of all time, but he was a miserable philosopher and one couldn't talk to him.\nHe was talking all the time, allowing practically only one or two words to you and then at once cutting in.\nOkay, pausing in my reflection.\nSo what Horgon's saying there is that pop is name dropping.\nAll the while Horgon talking about his personal meeting with Popper in order to try and characterize Popper in a particular way.\nAnd further saying that this Niels Bohr was a miserable philosopher who was talking all the time, never allowing anyone to talk at the same time.\nSo in other words, Horgon's trying to say that Popper is like Niels Bohr.\nThat's the insinuation here.\nThat is the mean unfair insinuation here against a man who obviously cannot defend himself.\nBack to the book, Horgon writes, As Mrs. Mu turned to leave, Popper abruptly asked to define one of his books.\nShe disappeared for him in few minutes and then returned empty handed.\nExcuse me Carl, I couldn't find it she reported, unless I have a description, I can't check every bookcase.\nIt was actually, I think, on the right of this corner, but I could have taken it away, maybe, his voice trailed off.\nMrs. Mu somehow rolled her eyes without really rolling them and vanished.\nHe paused a moment and I desperately seized the opportunity to ask a question.\nI wanted to ask you about, yes, you should ask me your questions.\nI have wrongly taken the lead.\nYou can ask me all your questions first, just pausing there.\nThis is all in quote marks.\nNow, I don't know, maybe Horgon had made a recording.\nIt's silent on that.\nMaybe he took copious notes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e24eb098-35e5-46dc-bc3d-40b20da82f33": {"page_content": "He paused a moment and I desperately seized the opportunity to ask a question.\nI wanted to ask you about, yes, you should ask me your questions.\nI have wrongly taken the lead.\nYou can ask me all your questions first, just pausing there.\nThis is all in quote marks.\nNow, I don't know, maybe Horgon had made a recording.\nIt's silent on that.\nMaybe he took copious notes.\nMaybe he has an idactic memory.\nI don't know.\nBut I'm suspicious about putting these quotes in quote marks.\nQuotes should be for the exact words that somebody says.\nPerhaps Horgon's being very honest here, perhaps.\nLet's get back to the book.\nHorgon writes, as I began to question Popper about his views, it became apparent that its skeptical philosophy stemmed from a deeply romantic idealized view of science.\nHe thus denied the assertion often made by the logical positivists that science can ever be reduced to a formal logical system in which raw data are methodically converted into truth.\nA scientific theory, Popper insisted is an invention, an act of creation as profoundly mysterious as anything in the arts.\nThe history of science is everywhere speculative, Popper said.\nIt is a marvelous history.\nIt makes you proud to be a human being, framing his face in his outstretched hands, Popper interned.\nI believe in the human mind pausing my reflection.\nWell that's generous and that's nice.\nI can believe that that is precisely the words of Popper and the way in which he would have been excited to talk about history and the importance, the centrality of people.\nOkay, skipping a little back to Horgon.\nHorgon writes, when I asked Popper if he thought that science was incapable of achieving absolute truth, he exclaimed.\nNo, no, and.\nShugis had vehemently.\nHe liked the logical positives before him, believed that a scientific theory could be absolutely true.\nIn fact, he had no doubt that some scientific theories were absolutely true, although he refused to say which ones, but he rejected the positive beliefs that we can ever know that a theory is true.\nWe must distinguish between truths which is objective and absolute uncertainty, which is subjective, and pausing my reflection.\nWell, I don't know about that.\nI would much prefer to see that written in one of Popper's texts as to whether a scientific theory could be absolutely true.\nHe had no doubt.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1af04ea9-6612-4e3b-a222-dfac4a84fea6": {"page_content": "We must distinguish between truths which is objective and absolute uncertainty, which is subjective, and pausing my reflection.\nWell, I don't know about that.\nI would much prefer to see that written in one of Popper's texts as to whether a scientific theory could be absolutely true.\nHe had no doubt.\nPopper had no doubt, and that's in quote marks as well, so I have summed out that Popper said no doubt.\nOkay, skipping a little more, and I'll just end on this.\nJust give you a taste of the end of science.\nHorgon writes of Popper.\nHe thus scoffed at the hope of some scientists to achieve a complete theory of nature, one that answers all questions, quote from Popper.\nMany people think that the problems can be solved.\nMany people think the opposite.\nI think we have gone very far, but we are much further away.\nI must show you one passage that bears on this.\nHe shuffled off again and returned with his book Conjectures and Refutations.\nOpening it, he read his own words with reverence.\nIn our infinite ignorance, we are all equal.\nOkay, pausing there.\nI think I might have to do an episode, painful as it could be, breaking down parts of Horgon's book.\nI mean, it really is the antithesis to so much that's in the beginning of infinity.\nAnd I just think it lacks a certain generosity in the portrayal of Popper.\nWe why one cannot stick, I guess it's a certain kind of book.\nIt's a narrative, but why one cannot stick to discussing the ideas rather than the way in which Popper apparently presented the ideas to Horgon or the mood that he was in, so on and so forth.\nI don't know.\nIt's all part of this same thing that one gets when discussing the work of Copper.\nNamely, it is eventually brought up by someone that he didn't practice his own philosophy or take his own philosophy seriously in some way or other.\nI don't know what the alternative is.\nI mean, Horgon seems in some sense to almost understand what Popper's saying, but he rejects it anyway.\nOkay, let's go back to the beginning of the infinity and remember that Horgon has just distinguished philosophy, for example, from science, philosophy because in his conception there are multiple consisting inter, multiple existing interpretations of any philosophical doctrine.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "67e2cb50-e863-41dd-9223-24527b1e36cb": {"page_content": "I don't know what the alternative is.\nI mean, Horgon seems in some sense to almost understand what Popper's saying, but he rejects it anyway.\nOkay, let's go back to the beginning of the infinity and remember that Horgon has just distinguished philosophy, for example, from science, philosophy because in his conception there are multiple consisting inter, multiple existing interpretations of any philosophical doctrine.\nTherefore, you have what's called an ironic field in his mind and David Rites.\nHowever, unlike the postmodernists, Horgon thinks that science and mathematics are the shiny exceptions to all that.\nThey alone are capable of non-ironic knowledge, but there is also he concludes such a thing as ironic science, the kind of science that cannot resolve questions, because essentially it is just philosophy or art.\nironic science can continue indefinitely, but that is precisely because it never resolves anything.\nIt never discovers objective truth.\nIt's only value is in the eye of the beholder, so the future according to Horgon beyond belongs to ironic knowledge.\nObjective knowledge has already reached its ultimate bounds.\nHorgon surveys some of the open questions of fundamental science and judges them all either ironic or non-fundamental in support of his thesis, but that conclusion was made inevitable by his premises alone.\nFor consider the prospect of any future discovery that would constitute fundamental progress, we cannot know what it is, but bad philosophy can already split it on principle into a new rule of thumb and a new interpretation or explanation.\nThe new rule of thumb cannot possibly be fundamental, it will just be another equation, only a trained expert could tell the difference between it and the old equation.\nThe new interpretation will, by definition, be pure philosophy and hence must be ironic.\nBy this method, any potential progress can be preemptively reinterpreted as non-progress.\nHorgon rightly points out that his prophecy cannot be proved false by placing it in the context of previous failed prophecies.\nThe fact that Mickelson was wrong about the achievements of the 19th century and the grounds about those of the 17th still imply Horgon was wrong about those of the 20th.\nHowever, it so happens that our current scientific knowledge includes a historically unusual number of deep fundamental problems.\nNever before in the history of human thought has it been so obvious that our knowledge is tiny and our ignorance fast and so unusually Horgon's pessimism contradicts existing knowledge as well as being a prophetic fallacy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0b54d945-b787-4a47-a7dc-5c2de0f240fb": {"page_content": "However, it so happens that our current scientific knowledge includes a historically unusual number of deep fundamental problems.\nNever before in the history of human thought has it been so obvious that our knowledge is tiny and our ignorance fast and so unusually Horgon's pessimism contradicts existing knowledge as well as being a prophetic fallacy.\nFor example, the problem situation of fundamental physics today has a radically different structure from that of 1894.\nAlthough physicists then were aware of some phenomena and theoretical issues, which we now recognize as harbingers of revolutionary explanations to come, their importance was unclear at the time.\nIt was hard to distinguish those harbingers from anomalies that would eventually be cleared up with existing explanations, plus the tweaking of the sixth place of decimals or minor terms in a formula.\nBut today, there is no such excuse for denying that some of our problems are fundamental.\nOur best theories are telling us of fundamental mismatches between themselves and the reality they are supposed to explain, pausing their my reflection on this.\nAnd we'll leave it here for today because David's about to go into some of those open questions.\nBut I might just talk about my own favorite ones to do with these.\nOne of the first real anomalies found in fundamental physics that suggests something is deeply misunderstood or deeply unknown, and we are certainly not the end of science, is, well, something like Vera Rubin, the astronomer who studied the rotation curve of galaxies, how fast the galaxy is rotating, spiral galaxies are rotating much faster than the amount of matter that we can see should permit them to.\nIn other words, there's more mass in these galaxies than we can see if we rely upon our best explanation of gravity.\nOur best explanation of gravity, all you need to do is to know the mass of something that's orbiting or rotating, like the earth as it goes around the sun.\nIf you know the mass of the sun, you should be able to calculate how fast the earth is going to orbit and indeed you can.\nBut with the galaxy, it doesn't seem to work out that the mass that you can see is not sufficient to cause the velocity of the stars that are going around in that galaxy.\nIn other words, there appears to be dark matter.\nThis is a huge thing.\nThis is a huge question.\nWhat is this dark matter?.\nIs there a whole zoo of new particles out there that we cannot detect that don't interact with anything but gravity?.\nPossible.\nWe just don't know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b3592c4-94ad-4797-98f7-1df3967e4ddd": {"page_content": "But with the galaxy, it doesn't seem to work out that the mass that you can see is not sufficient to cause the velocity of the stars that are going around in that galaxy.\nIn other words, there appears to be dark matter.\nThis is a huge thing.\nThis is a huge question.\nWhat is this dark matter?.\nIs there a whole zoo of new particles out there that we cannot detect that don't interact with anything but gravity?.\nPossible.\nWe just don't know.\nIt's an open question as to what the cause of these gravitational anomalies is.\nDo we need a new theory of gravity?.\nEither way, it's very interesting.\nNow, it could be the case, it could be the case, that there is a systematic error going on with all the experiments, all the observations.\nBut there are many different observations.\nFor example, the movement of entire clusters of galaxies.\nSo even if you could solve in some way the rotation curve by fiddling with the equations for gravity, you haven't solved various other problems that appear to reveal the existence of dark matter.\nGravitational lensing is a very important one.\nThis gravitational lensing idea is you can look at extremely distant things like very, very distant quasars as the light passes by galaxies.\nThat can give you a measure of the mass in those galaxies.\nSo even if you can fix this rotation curve stuff by changing your equations of gravity, that doesn't fix this gravitational lensing problem.\nYou haven't fixed that one.\nThe so-called pattern of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation maps.\nWe've got a number of those and the size of the anisotropies, these little regions, cold and dark, cold and hot hot regions, slightly hotter and slightly cold regions.\nThe size of those has something to do with the amount of dark matter in the universe as well and changing your equations of gravity.\nWon't fix that either.\nAnd then, even more astonishing, is dark energy.\nDark energy is a very much an open problem.\nAnd again, unless we find there's systematic error in all the observations that we've made experimentally, we have this issue of what is this energy driving the accelerating expansion of the universe?.\nIt used to be thought, well, the Big Bang happened and so there is only three options that could occur given what we know about gravity and given what we know about mass.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "062dc5be-6357-48ac-aaa2-b3de47717df6": {"page_content": "And then, even more astonishing, is dark energy.\nDark energy is a very much an open problem.\nAnd again, unless we find there's systematic error in all the observations that we've made experimentally, we have this issue of what is this energy driving the accelerating expansion of the universe?.\nIt used to be thought, well, the Big Bang happened and so there is only three options that could occur given what we know about gravity and given what we know about mass.\nThat either the Big Bang occurs and then we end up with a big crunch if the amount of matter in the universe is sufficient to cause the entire universe to then fall collapse back in on itself to be crunch.\nOr perhaps it could be kind of like a projectile.\nYou throw a ball and it just expands and then it falls and stops.\nOkay, that could be a kind of universe where there is a finely tuned balance between the amount of mass and the amount of gravity.\nOr maybe just maybe the amount of matter in the universe is insufficient to cause recalapse.\nAnd so you get this expansion that just goes on forever and ever and ever increasingly slowly, slowly, slowly.\nAnd that was seen to be the most likely candidate that, well, the first one that didn't seem to be any evidence for this big crunch.\nThe second one would have to be finely tuned, but the third one, okay, we just have this gradually slowing down by infinite expansion in the universe.\nWell, none of these three candidates, none of these three derivations from our best theory of cosmology, Big Bang, actually turned out to be true.\nThe what appears to be the case is a massive problem.\nIs that the universe has expanded after the Big Bang and now it's taking off and getting even faster.\nIt's expanding faster and faster and faster all the time.\nIs this something is driving it?.\nAdditional energy is pushing it.\nA force, if you like, almost pushing space apart ever faster.\nWhat is this thing?.\nNext episode, David, being a real physicist, unlike me, is going to explain some more about this.\nAnd so we can go into some detail.\nThat'll be fun about dark energy.\nBut for now, I think we leave it here.\nWe've had some depressing times with John Hogan.\nAnd we might have to do a separate episode on him.\nBut until next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFma66gaSM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3db4e668-9ff4-474e-9707-73adc72b0644": {"page_content": "Hi, and welcome to chapter 10 of the beginning of Infinity, a dream of Socrates.\nThis chapter I'm going to present in two parts.\nThere's rather a natural divide I seem to think between the conversation that goes on between Hermes and Socrates, and then the next conversation which happens without Hermes, but with Socrates and his followers mainly played her.\nI doubt if David Deutsch had this in mind at all, but I like to think that Hermes is either a traveler from the future, could be even David himself going back to speak to Socrates about epistemology, or, and this might be even more bizarre, Hermes represents the creative process itself, mysterious, and godlike in its capacity to conjur knowledge, or maybe of course Hermes is just Hermes.\nAnd this chapter is of course primarily about epistemology.\nIt's a fun and condensed form of the basic themes that appear as far back as in chapters three, problem solving, four criteria for reality, and chapter five, virtual reality from David's previous book, The Fabric of Reality.\nI had some trouble trying to figure out how I would actually read this particular chapter because the entire chapter is a dialogue, or basically the entire chapter is dialogue, or even a play of sorts.\nI hope my solution to this issue of what to do about reading it isn't too distracting.\nI'm not reading the whole thing, of course, as usual, I'm just taking snippets and doing some commentary on them.\nBut if you are listening on audio only and you don't have access to the video, you might be missing something, part of the visual element here that might, well, I think could possibly assist with understanding who's saying what.\nSo if you have access to the video, I'd encourage people to watch this video.\nAnyway, we'll see how it goes.\nSo let's just dive right in and commence with chapter 10, a dream of Socrates.\nI'm going to go old school now and just read the introduction from the paper version of the book for a change.\nAnd David writes, to set the scene, Socrates is staying at an inn near the temple of the oracle at Delphi.\nDelphi or Delphi, suppose it depends upon your accent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7cb7042c-72fd-4697-9b3b-b32db8ac27f1": {"page_content": "Anyway, we'll see how it goes.\nSo let's just dive right in and commence with chapter 10, a dream of Socrates.\nI'm going to go old school now and just read the introduction from the paper version of the book for a change.\nAnd David writes, to set the scene, Socrates is staying at an inn near the temple of the oracle at Delphi.\nDelphi or Delphi, suppose it depends upon your accent.\nAnyway, together with his friend Kefon, he has today asked the oracle, who is the wisest man in the world, so that they might go and learn from him, but to their annoyance, the priestess, who provides the oracles voice on behalf of the God Apollo, merely announced no one is wiser than Socrates.\nSleeping now on an uncomfortable bed in a tiny and exorbitantly expensive room, Socrates hears a deep, melodious voice, in toning his name.\nAnd so we're about to find out who that is.\nGreetings, Socrates.\nI will weigh, I've already made too many offerings today, and you're not going to ring any more out of me unto wisest for that, hadn't you heard?.\nI seek no offering, and what do you want?.\nOh, well, I'm sure that some of my associates camped outside will be glad to.\nIt is not them that I seek, but you owe Socrates.\nThen you shall be disappointed, stranger, now kindly leave me to my harder and rest.\nVery well, wait, I am asleep, dreaming, and you are the God of Apollo.\nWhat makes you think so?.\nThese precincts are sacred to you, it is night time, and there is no lamp, yet I see you clearly.\nThis is not possible in real life, so you must be coming to me in a dream.\nYou're originally calling.\nI am not afraid.\nAh, I ask you, in return, are you a benevolent God or a malevolent God?.\nIf benevolent, then what do I have to fear?.\nIf malevolent, then I disdain to fear you.\nWe Athenians are a proud people, and protected by our goddess as you surely know, twice we defeated the Persian Empire against overwhelming odds, and now we are defying Sparta.\nIt is our custom to defy anyone who seeks our submission.\nEven a God.\nA benevolent God would not seek it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=108"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3a7224e4-39e1-43c5-b4b8-575ac39b9bbc": {"page_content": "If benevolent, then what do I have to fear?.\nIf malevolent, then I disdain to fear you.\nWe Athenians are a proud people, and protected by our goddess as you surely know, twice we defeated the Persian Empire against overwhelming odds, and now we are defying Sparta.\nIt is our custom to defy anyone who seeks our submission.\nEven a God.\nA benevolent God would not seek it.\nOn the other hand, it is also our custom to give a hearing to anyone who offers us honest, criticism, seeking to persuade us freely to change our minds, for we want to do what is right.\nSo there we've got a problem with the worship of deities.\nBad gods want fear, so they don't deserve it.\nGood gods don't want fear, so why fear them?.\nThe same might go for worship or any other demand a God traditionally is supposed to desire.\nIn the next section, which I'm not going to read, Hermes says that he reveals no facts about anything, but he is there to reveal some knowledge about knowledge.\nHermes is, of course, providing the popularian view.\nBut how did Popper himself ever come to this knowledge of knowledge?.\nHow did he create knowledge about knowledge?.\nWe don't know how creativity works, of course.\nWe might ask how Darwin came to Darwinism, or Einstein came up with relativity and so on.\nProblems confronted them, and somehow in the mind, the solution presented itself.\nAnd first, we test that solution, that purported solution within the laboratory of our own minds, if you like, before checking it against external reality.\nSo in the next section, Hermes asks Popper, what is easiest to see, and Popper responds that it is whatever is before your eyes, and Hermes asks him if he is sure about that.\nVery well, obviously I can't be sure of anything, but I don't want to be.\nI can think of nothing more boring, no offense meant wise polo, than to attain the state of being perfectly secure in one's beliefs.\nWhich some people seem to yearnful, I see no use for it.\nIt doesn't provide a semblance of an argument when one doesn't have a real one.\nFortunately, that mental state has nothing to do with what I do yearnful, which is to discover the truth of how the world is, and why, and even more, of how it should be.\nCongratulations, Socrates, on your epistemological wisdom.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=232"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0b25e8f2-dd92-49fe-8148-440c9dabfd21": {"page_content": "Which some people seem to yearnful, I see no use for it.\nIt doesn't provide a semblance of an argument when one doesn't have a real one.\nFortunately, that mental state has nothing to do with what I do yearnful, which is to discover the truth of how the world is, and why, and even more, of how it should be.\nCongratulations, Socrates, on your epistemological wisdom.\nThe knowledge that you seek, objective knowledge, is hard to combine, but attainable.\nThat mental state you do not seek, justified belief, is sought by many people, especially priests and philosophers, but in truth, beliefs cannot be justified, except in relation to Abba, beliefs, and even then only, probably.\nSo the quest for their justification can lead only to an infinite progress, each step of which would be itself, subject to error.\nAgain, I know this.\nIndeed, and as you look like Muramar, it doesn't count as a revelation if I tell you what you already know, yet, notice that that remark is precisely what people who seek justified belief do not agree with.\nWhat?.\nI'm sorry, but that was too convoluted to comment from my allegedly wise mind or comprehend.\nPlease explain what I am to notice about these people who seek justified belief.\nReally this?.\nSuppose they just happen to be aware of the explanation of something.\nYou and I would say they know it, but to them, no matter how good an explanation is, and no matter how true and important a useful it may be, they still do not consider it to be knowledge.\nIt is only if a God then comes along in the issues, and it is true, or if they imagine such a God or other authority, that they count it as knowledge, so to them it does count as a revelation if the authority tells them what they are already fully aware of.\nI see that, and I see that they are foolish because, for all they know, the authority, may be toying with them, or trying to teach them some important lesson, or they may be misunderstanding the authority, or they may be mistaken in their belief that it is an authority.\nYes.\nSo the thing that they call knowledge, namely justified belief, is a chimera.\nIt is unattainable to humans except in the form of self-deception.\nIt is unnecessary for any good purpose, and it is undesired by the wisest among more humans.\nI know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=351"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38af4b0b-f9ea-479c-8a7a-b4a9e6ee4cd8": {"page_content": "Yes.\nSo the thing that they call knowledge, namely justified belief, is a chimera.\nIt is unattainable to humans except in the form of self-deception.\nIt is unnecessary for any good purpose, and it is undesired by the wisest among more humans.\nI know.\nThere's an often he is new at two, but he is no longer among the more people.\nSo there we have a criticism of the JTB, justified true belief version of knowledge.\nKnowledge is not justified belief.\nIt's not justified because if it was, then you'd have to wonder how the justifications are themselves justified, and you'd end up with an infinite regress.\nYou have to start somewhere on that view.\nYou need a foundation, which is absolutely certain, and if you have this absolutely certain foundation, which is unjustified, from there you can start building your justification to reach whatever the conclusion is that you have.\nThis is the traditional and completely false view of epistemology.\nSo as David says there's through Socrates and through Hermes, it's unnecessary to seek justification.\nThe claim that something is actually true or probably true, it's unwise to seek that sort of validity.\nAnd of course also notice that knowledge isn't about beliefs, which is a private going on inside of your mind, purportedly.\nNone of that scheme is needed.\nInstead, we're right to say we know a thing when we have an explanation for it.\nIt need not be justified, it need not be true or believed.\nIn fact, my favorite example of this is just any old scientific theory, which is nonetheless useful, and my favorite of those is of course Newton's theory of gravity, on Newton's law of gravity as it's usually called.\nIt's known to be false, so it can't be true, so it automatically fails at the T hurdle of JTV.\nI don't believe it, and I don't think anyone does believe it because we know it to be false, so it's not, it fails at the B hurdle as well.\nAnd as for justified, well, we can't justify it as true, knowing that it's completely false.\nKnowing that it's completely false, and it rests upon assumptions that are themselves, not only not justified, but known to be false.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=475"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2ef55b8c-95cd-46e7-b189-15e0a34f8b9c": {"page_content": "I don't believe it, and I don't think anyone does believe it because we know it to be false, so it's not, it fails at the B hurdle as well.\nAnd as for justified, well, we can't justify it as true, knowing that it's completely false.\nKnowing that it's completely false, and it rests upon assumptions that are themselves, not only not justified, but known to be false.\nSo for example, in Newton's theory of gravity, Newton's law of gravity, it rests upon this assumption that the gravity is a force between masses, but this force acts instantaneously, so it violates special relativity, so it can't be true.\nIn other words, Newton's law of gravity actually fails all three features of the JTV test, nonetheless.\nNonetheless, we know it.\nI know it, every student of physics knows it, it's a piece of knowledge.\nWe still call it knowledge.\nIt's useful, it helps us to make predictions and accomplish things like even get to the moon, for example, okay?.\nSo Newton's theory, Newton's law of gravity, is used.\nIt's a bit of knowledge that is useful, it contains useful truth, but it ultimately, in the final analysis is false, and it's not justified, it's not true, and no one should believe it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=579"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a86dd831-b14a-4dc0-8570-632e69362d4a": {"page_content": "Knowledge as David explains elsewhere is useful information, and more precisely elsewhere in the beginning of infinity, he explains that knowledge is that thing which, once it comes into being, tends to cause itself to remain, so once it's instantiated in matter, it tends to cause itself to remain instantiated in matter in some way, it could be in different forms, but the thing about knowledge is, it's self-sustaining in some way, and this is certainly true of Newton's theory, it's a piece of knowledge that has caused itself to remain in place because it's so useful over time, despite being shown to be false.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=646"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9f1af839-f615-4e0f-9c86-dd4060ae42a9": {"page_content": "It's also here in this section that we hear of Zenophides for the first time.\nWe'll come back to him later, he was a philosopher, poet who lived from like 570 to 475 BC, so his death was about five years prior to the birth of Socrates, whatever the case, if Popper is the father of critical rationalism, then I guess Zenophides is like the great, great, great, great, great, grandfather in some sense.\nWhat follows now in the dialogue, and which I also won't read, is a very long section about what can actually be seen, what is obvious and right before our eyes and so on, and whether we, and how we can rule out whether or not certain things are true on the basis of that, or whether we are dreaming when we think we're seeing, what can Socrates be sure of, this is what hermit is pressing him on?.\nIt seems to me that you've been asking questions about me, what is in front of me, what I can easily see, whether I am sure and so on, but I seek fundamental truths of which I estimate that not a single one of them is predominantly about me, so let me stress again.\nI am not sure what is in front of my eyes, ever with my eyes open or closed, a sleep or awake, nor can I be sure what is probably in front of my eyes, for how could I estimate the probability that I am dreaming when I think I am awake, or that my whole previous life has been butter-drained in which it has pleased one of you and more holes to imprison me.\nIndeed.\nI might even be a victim of a mundane deception, such as those of conjurers.\nWe know that a conjurer is deceiving us because he shows us something that cannot be, and then asks for money, but if he were to forgo his fee, and show me something that can be but is not, how could I ever know?.\nPerhaps this entire vision of you is not a dream after all, but some cunning conjurers trick.\nOn the other hand, perhaps you really are here in person, and I am awake after all.\nNone of this can I ever be sure is so, or not so.\nI can, however, conceive of knowing some of it precisely, and is the same true of your moral knowledge, in regards to what is right and wrong, could you be mistaken on this lead by the equivalent of mirages or kicks?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=675"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cf8978e0-e21e-4ee1-b587-765a25b3f58d": {"page_content": "On the other hand, perhaps you really are here in person, and I am awake after all.\nNone of this can I ever be sure is so, or not so.\nI can, however, conceive of knowing some of it precisely, and is the same true of your moral knowledge, in regards to what is right and wrong, could you be mistaken on this lead by the equivalent of mirages or kicks?.\nThat seems a little harder to imagine.\nIn regard to moral knowledge, I need my senses very little.\nIt is just mainly my own thoughts.\nI reason about what is right and wrong, or what makes a person virtuous or wicked.\nI can be mistaken, of course, in these mental deliberations, but not so easily deceived, by outside tricks or illusions.\nFor they affect only our senses, and not have reason.\nHow then do you account for the fact that you are Theeans are constantly scrubbing among yourselves about what qualities constitute virtue or vice, and what actions are right or wrong?.\nWhy is that puzzling?.\nWe disagree, because it is easy to be mistaken.\nYet, despite that, we also agree about many such issues.\nFrom this, I speculate, where we have failed so far to agree, it is not because anything is actively deceiving us, but simply because some issues are hard to reason about, just as there are many truths in geometry that even Pythagoras did not know, but which future geometres may discover.\nAs that otherwise mortals and offerings wrote, the gods did not reveal from the beginning all things to us, but in the course of time, through seeking we may learn and know things better.\nThat is, what we Athenians have done in regard to moral knowledge.\nThrough seeking we have learned and agreed upon the easy things, and in future by the same means, namely by refusing to hold any of our ideas immune from criticism, we may learn some matters not so light.\nSo in that section, Socrates thinks it is harder to be deceived about moral issues, because in that domain, his reason, so he argues, is the sole arbiter of what is true.\nBut Hermes goes on to point out that Sparta teaches their children wildly different moral lessons compared to Athens, and this causes Socrates to begin teasing apart the differences between Athens and Sparta.\nHe arrives at the conclusion that the difference between these two societies is all about endless critical debate, which Athens and Gagazin, but which Sparta prohibits.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=777"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "01f4d152-4d49-4c48-b149-714b363edc42": {"page_content": "But Hermes goes on to point out that Sparta teaches their children wildly different moral lessons compared to Athens, and this causes Socrates to begin teasing apart the differences between Athens and Sparta.\nHe arrives at the conclusion that the difference between these two societies is all about endless critical debate, which Athens and Gagazin, but which Sparta prohibits.\nSo here we're connecting a very epistemological concern about how it is we come to understand knowledge, we don't come to understand some truth about the world, and the extent to which a society is open or closed or dynamic and static.\nSo we've got a connection, we draw a straight line connection between epistemology in that way, and morality and political systems.\nMoreover, since the Spartans never seek improvement, it is not surprising that they never find it.\nWe, in contrast, have sorted, by constantly criticizing and debating and trying to correct our ideas and behaviour, and thereby we are well placed to learn more in the future.\nIt follows them that it is wrong of the Spartans to educate their children to hold their cities, ideas, laws and customs, immune from criticism.\nWait, I thought you weren't going to reveal moral truths.\nYes, I do.\nAnd I see what you are getting at.\nYou are showing me that there are such things as mirages and tricks in regards to moral knowledge.\nSome of them are embedded in the Spartans' traditional moral choices, their whole way of life misleads and traps them, because one of their mistaken beliefs that they must take no steps to prevent their way of life from misleading and trapping them.\nSo there we have it.\nThe moral imperative not to destroy the means of error correction is the only moral imperative from which others follow.\nIf we want to continue being a society that makes progress, continue being dynamic, a society that prevents itself from being destroyed through stasis, we must continue to generate knowledge.\nBut that is only possible if debate has allowed.\nSo speech has to be free.\nPeople have to be free, and so on.\nIn short, we cannot have laws or customs in place that hold ideas, laws and customs immune from criticism.\nSo say that again, we cannot have laws or customs in place that themselves hold, ideas, laws and customs immune from criticism.\nWe need to protect error correction, not prevent it.\nSo I am skipping another lengthy section again, and Hermes is about to lead Socrates into a defence of fallibleism.\nYet there is even more of a defence than you think.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=894"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9641c938-e149-4009-bcdc-897058de8fd6": {"page_content": "In short, we cannot have laws or customs in place that hold ideas, laws and customs immune from criticism.\nSo say that again, we cannot have laws or customs in place that themselves hold, ideas, laws and customs immune from criticism.\nWe need to protect error correction, not prevent it.\nSo I am skipping another lengthy section again, and Hermes is about to lead Socrates into a defence of fallibleism.\nYet there is even more of a defence than you think.\nBear in mind that the Spartans and Athenians are like, are but fallible men, and are subject to misconceptions and errors in all we are thinking.\nWait, we are fallible in all our thinking.\nIs there literally no idea that we may hold immune from criticism?.\nLike what?.\nWell, what about the truths of arithmetic?.\nLike, two plus two equals four.\nWell, the fact that Delphi exists.\nWhat about the geometrical fact that the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles?.\nRevealing no facts.\nI cannot confirm that all three of those propositions are even true.\nBut more important is this, how did you come to choose those particular propositions as candidates for immunity from criticism?.\nWhy Delphi are not Athens?.\nWhy two plus two are not three plus four?.\nWhy not the theorem of Pythagoras?.\nWas it because you decided that the propositions you chose would best make your point because they were the most obviously unambiguously true of all the propositions you considered using?.\nYes.\nBut then how did you determine how obviously an unambiguously true each of those candidate propositions was, compared with the others?.\nDid you not criticize them?.\nDid you not quickly attempt to think of ways or reasons they might conceivably default?.\nYes, I did.\nI see.\nHad I held them immune from criticism, I would have had no way of arriving at that conclusion.\nSo you are, after all, a thorough-going fallibleist.\nSo you mistakenly believed you were not.\nI nearly doubted it.\nYou doubted and criticized fallibleism itself as a true fallibleist should.\nThat is so.\nMoreover, had I not criticized that I could not have come to understand why it is true.\nMy doubt improved my knowledge of an important truth, as knowledge held immune from criticism can never be improved.\nThis too, you already knew.\nFor this, why you are is encouraged everyone to criticize even that which seems most obvious to you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=475"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e30a6549-eb84-4be8-bd8a-bc1f59d567c8": {"page_content": "So you mistakenly believed you were not.\nI nearly doubted it.\nYou doubted and criticized fallibleism itself as a true fallibleist should.\nThat is so.\nMoreover, had I not criticized that I could not have come to understand why it is true.\nMy doubt improved my knowledge of an important truth, as knowledge held immune from criticism can never be improved.\nThis too, you already knew.\nFor this, why you are is encouraged everyone to criticize even that which seems most obvious to you.\nAnd why I set an example by doing it to them?.\nPerhaps.\nNow I will consider.\nWhat would happen if the fallible Athenian voters made him stake and enacted a law that was very unwise and unjust?.\nWhich last they often do.\nImagine a specific case for the sake of argument.\nSuppose they were somehow firmly persuaded that thieving is a high virtue for which many practical benefits flow, and that they abolished all more so forbidden.\nWhat would happen?.\nEveryone would start thieving.\nVery soon those who were best at thieving and at living among the thieves would become the wealthiest citizens.\nBut most people would no longer be secure in their property, even most thieves.\nAnd the farmers and artisans and traders would soon find it impossible to continue to produce anything worth stealing.\nSo disaster and starvation would follow.\nWhile the promised benefits would not.\nAnd they would all realize they had been mistaken.\nWhat they let me remind you again of the fallibility of human-nature Socrates.\nGiven that they were firmly persuaded that thieving was beneficial, wouldn't their first reaction to those setbacks be that there was not enough thieving going on?.\nWouldn't they enact laws to encourage it still further?.\nAlas, yes.\nAt first, yet no matter how firmly they were persuaded, these setbacks would be problems in their lives.\nWhich they would want to solve.\nA few among them would eventually begin to suspect that increased thieving might not be the solution after all, so they would think about it more.\nThey would have been convinced that the benefits of theory by some explanation are other.\nNow they would try to explain why the supposed solution didn't seem to be working.\nEventually they would find an explanation that seemed better.\nSo gradually they would persuade others of that, and so on, until the majority again opposed thieving.\nSo there we have a great defence of fallibilism.\nAll it means is that nothing is to be held immune from criticism.\nThat's what fallibilism is about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=868"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b10e24fe-19ce-41e2-a046-53d5b48212ee": {"page_content": "Now they would try to explain why the supposed solution didn't seem to be working.\nEventually they would find an explanation that seemed better.\nSo gradually they would persuade others of that, and so on, until the majority again opposed thieving.\nSo there we have a great defence of fallibilism.\nAll it means is that nothing is to be held immune from criticism.\nThat's what fallibilism is about.\nAnd when a budding fallibilist comes along and says something like, well what about two plus two equals four, classic response?.\nSurely that.\nSurely that thing we cannot possibly doubt.\nWell the response to such a person is how did you come to that particular claim?.\nWhy did you choose that particular claim out of all the possible claims you could have picked?.\nYou picked two plus two equals four or one plus one equals two, whatever.\nWhatever claim a budding fallibilist comes up with to try and refute the idea of fallibilism?.\nWhat they've done is actually criticise a claim, found they couldn't discover any criticisms and presented that one to you.\nSo the response is that finding no criticism does not make you anti fallibilist.\nThe key is whether you attempted to find some flaw with an idea and then failed to.\nSo you doubted it.\nYou really did doubt this idea for a moment and maybe automatically unconsciously in a way.\nBut the point is that one's personal inability or indeed the entire civilizations inability to find a flaw with some idea is no proof of its certain absolute truth.\nI mean it could be that it could be certain absolute truth but it could also be false because we just lack imagination, we lack sufficient creativity to figure out what's wrong with that idea, what could possibly be false about that idea.\nAnd if you can't think of anything that could possibly be false about that idea, that doesn't mean that idea couldn't still in principle be false.\nIt could just mean that you've got pathetic abilities to imagine.\nFor example, for centuries people thought that Newton's Law of Gravity was absolutely certain truth.\nThey really did.\nAnd for centuries people thought that Euclidean geometry was the absolute truth about literal physical space.\nBut both were shown to be false and in fact by the same theory, by general relativity.\nPeople once thought that God created all the life on earth.\nThey couldn't imagine how it was otherwise until Darwin didn't go to good explanation of how it was possible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=868"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "177a804f-ac12-4c9b-bf99-9470e5537eb4": {"page_content": "For example, for centuries people thought that Newton's Law of Gravity was absolutely certain truth.\nThey really did.\nAnd for centuries people thought that Euclidean geometry was the absolute truth about literal physical space.\nBut both were shown to be false and in fact by the same theory, by general relativity.\nPeople once thought that God created all the life on earth.\nThey couldn't imagine how it was otherwise until Darwin didn't go to good explanation of how it was possible.\nAnd here in my opinion, some people might not like this opinion, we also connect fallibilism and epistemology and morality to a defensive capitalism or free trade against, say, alternatives like communism.\nThe choices between can you own private property make a claim on certain private property?.\nOr are other people allowed to take it from you?.\nBecause they've agreed or decided that you have no right to it.\nIn other words, can stealing be a virtue?.\nSo this is why I think it's kind of the communist or socialist worldview that certain kinds of stealing certain kinds of theory are OK.\nBut that perspective, that some kinds are OK.\nAnd maybe we'd want to increase the number of things that could be stolen until all stealing becomes a kind of a virtue.\nThat's where we go in taking this theory to its extreme.\nBut that's going to run up against some logical problems eventually.\nLike no one will feel safe in such a society and eventually will simply run out of things to steal.\nAnd when such a theory about how to organize society fails, and it will fail, the response as Hermes suggests here and that Socrates arrives at is that people won't necessarily want it fails, give up on the idea that theory is bad.\nIf they've decided it's a virtue in some way, then their immediate response will not be to dismiss that theory of theory as being a virtue.\nBut rather think we haven't been doing enough of it, we should steal some more, which tends to be the kind of socialist conclusion, that when lots and lots of welfare or socialism generally occurs in society, but the society isn't really thriving.\nThe response is to do more of it, to tax more, to increase the amount of welfare.\nAnd things will continue to get worse, but in general, the socialists won't think socialism's a bad idea.\nIt's socialism that's the problem.\nThey will just try and instantiate ever more of it.\nThey always want to move towards more theft and confiscation and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=754"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4bf6bcc1-d393-422d-9a38-1ce6194f2980": {"page_content": "The response is to do more of it, to tax more, to increase the amount of welfare.\nAnd things will continue to get worse, but in general, the socialists won't think socialism's a bad idea.\nIt's socialism that's the problem.\nThey will just try and instantiate ever more of it.\nThey always want to move towards more theft and confiscation and so on.\nBut I'm taking David's parable from Hermes, probably a little further than he intended there.\nAnd David also says here through, again, through Hermes and Socrates, that although mandating theory would be bad, or regarding it as a virtue would be bad, it's not the worst thing that can happen.\nAfter all, eventually someone would figure out a better explanation and would decide there are better ways to run society than having one built upon theft.\nAnd this will come about through thought and explanation and persuasion, which is what Athens is typically up to.\nBut then we come to the explanation of how there is one kind of error, one law that could be made, that is a special case.\nThat one kind of law resists thought and explanation and persuasion.\nAnd Hermes is about to tell us what it is.\nHow you must laugh at us.\nNot at all Athenian.\nAs I said, I honor you now.\nLet us consider what would happen if instead of legalising theory.\nTheir era had been to band, to date, and to ban philosophy and politics and elections, and that whole consolation of activities and to consider them shameful.\nI see.\nThat would have the effect of banning persuasion.\nAnd hence it would block off a path to salvation that we have discussed.\nThis is a rare and deadly sort of error.\nIt prevents itself from being undone.\nOr at least it makes salvation immensely more difficult years.\nAnd this is what Sparta looks like to me.\nSo, free speeches and special cases, we can see it provides the conditions within which all other debates, moral, political, economic, scientific, mathematical, philosophical, can be incrementally improved.\nAs we cannot predict the growth of knowledge, the argument that there is some speech or some things that can never be said is a claim about knowing that in the future such things will not possibly form an ingredient in the growth of knowledge.\nWe can always think of terrible examples about, well, what about terribly racist things?.\nWe shouldn't be able to say those.\nWhat about so-called hate speech?.\nSurely there are some things which we can completely rule out.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=754"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cb93b271-f3fb-4b20-b37a-56f627157480": {"page_content": "As we cannot predict the growth of knowledge, the argument that there is some speech or some things that can never be said is a claim about knowing that in the future such things will not possibly form an ingredient in the growth of knowledge.\nWe can always think of terrible examples about, well, what about terribly racist things?.\nWe shouldn't be able to say those.\nWhat about so-called hate speech?.\nSurely there are some things which we can completely rule out.\nWhat the problem with prescribing speech in that way is that it causes the debate around that speech to also be shut down.\nSo anyone who wants to explain why such things are bad to say in the first place can't say them.\nThey can't say the very thing that they want to be able to discuss the evil of.\nAnd so in an open society, instead of having laws which will send people to jail for saying certain bad things, we can more easily distinguish between the people over there who are saying the bad things for certain bad reasons and the people over here who were discussing certain things and the people who are making jokes.\nBut the law is often too blunt an instrument to make these distinctions.\nAnd insofar as it tries to make these distinctions, people can still be taken to court.\nPeople can still be hauled away by the police or simply suffer the inconvenience of having to stand in front of a judge and argue that they're not, they weren't saying things for the bad reasons that they deserve to go to jail for or deserve to be fined for.\nBut they were of the good kind.\nAnd all of this has the terrible effect of dampening down speech, of causing people to be very quiet where they otherwise would be openly debating things.\nJust a little bit of a divergency.\nSo it's worth saying that recently there have been two kinds of attacks on free speech that have occurred.\nAnd I'm sure these kind of attacks have happened generations past as well.\nThe first is the attack against free speech by some governments, and this is truly frightening.\nThis means the apparatus of the state and certain countries, the state for, state violence, guns, police can be brought to bear against people for what they say.\nIt might be a joke or it might be satire or whatever.\nBut if certain things cannot be said because they are deemed hate, then we create circumstances where there are roadblocks to discussing why those things are wrong.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=1658"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a6d577ef-30ed-45f3-997b-40a188e77511": {"page_content": "The first is the attack against free speech by some governments, and this is truly frightening.\nThis means the apparatus of the state and certain countries, the state for, state violence, guns, police can be brought to bear against people for what they say.\nIt might be a joke or it might be satire or whatever.\nBut if certain things cannot be said because they are deemed hate, then we create circumstances where there are roadblocks to discussing why those things are wrong.\nIf we cannot say those things, we cannot say those things for the purpose of discussing the rightness or wrongness of those things.\nWe cannot improve our ideas about those things and we cannot easily correct those people who think but do not say those things for fear of arrest.\nA very good way of countering evil hate speech is to make fun of it, is to do comedy or satire.\nBut often judges and lawyers aren't the best people to distinguish between what's comedy and what's serious.\nThe average person is, but a highly learned lawyer might end up regarding something that was said in jest as being quite serious and then some poor person gets sent off to jail mistakenly.\nIf you didn't have such laws, no such mistakes would be possible.\nOkay, so that's the government attack upon speech, but there's another kind of attack on free speech as well.\nSo in a place like the United States, which is actually really rare, I don't know of another country that has codified in the same way, rights that protect free speech in law in their constitution.\nSo while they have free speech protected from the intrusions of government to a large degree, there is some attacks on free speech.\nThe government is rather powerless to address in quite such a direct way.\nAnd that is the social or cultural pressure on free speech.\nSo we have large social movements who sometimes even go all the way to using violence to attack people who say certain things, to try and suppress certain kinds of speech.\nIt is small comfort in those particular circumstances.\nIf the government and police will let you say whatever the truth happens to be, the sky is blue.\nBut if you do say it, there might be the people who say that, no, that's hate speech for whatever ridiculous reason they might have to label such a thing hate speech.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=1766"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "329ce28a-0515-4a77-888e-c3c7ac89b410": {"page_content": "So we have large social movements who sometimes even go all the way to using violence to attack people who say certain things, to try and suppress certain kinds of speech.\nIt is small comfort in those particular circumstances.\nIf the government and police will let you say whatever the truth happens to be, the sky is blue.\nBut if you do say it, there might be the people who say that, no, that's hate speech for whatever ridiculous reason they might have to label such a thing hate speech.\nBut because you say this thing that is eminently true, or it might just simply be your opinion, you might decide to say the sky is red because here in New South Wales at the moment in Australia, there's been a lot of bushfires and the sky has been red quite often.\nWhatever the case, certain people might think that certain speech is so beyond the pale that you deserve to be attacked in the street for it.\nSo although the government will allow you to say it, there might be groups of people that won't allow you to say it.\nAnd even if they don't go all the way to attacking you in the street, they could have boycotts against you, they could slander you, etc, etc.\nAnd so again, it's cold comfort to people who are attacked for saying certain things, that they're being attacked was unlawful.\nFor knowledge, growth and progress to occur in a maximised way, not only must the law protect free speech, but the culture also has to be one of non-violence.\nAnd when the culture begins to say things like hate speech is violence or hate speech is not free speech, then we have a proxy means by which the powerful groups in society, despite what the government's doing, these powerful groups or other powerful interests, ban certain forms of debate.\nAnd if that is taken seriously, then regardless of what the letter of the law is, we find ourselves in a cultural circumstance where we have an error that is preventing itself from being undone.\nNow of course, happily things aren't quite that bad right now.\nIn the United States, the great strength is that it is a state-based nation.\nSo as bad as things get in one community with clamp downs on certain kinds of speech by certain groups, there's always another community equally as strong somewhere else in the country which will protect the speaker.\nSo there are places to go for people that are more safe, but where such movements even begin, we need to be cautious.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=1879"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c8dc22dd-031d-4eee-a41b-174458683f00": {"page_content": "Now of course, happily things aren't quite that bad right now.\nIn the United States, the great strength is that it is a state-based nation.\nSo as bad as things get in one community with clamp downs on certain kinds of speech by certain groups, there's always another community equally as strong somewhere else in the country which will protect the speaker.\nSo there are places to go for people that are more safe, but where such movements even begin, we need to be cautious.\nI mentioned the United States here because it really is kind of the ideal with respect to this in law.\nIn the West elsewhere, as free as speech might be, it's not as free as it is in the United States.\nPeople are being locked up elsewhere or if they're not being locked up there, a minimum being investigated for things said.\nSo there are certain things in other Western countries that cannot be said, hence cannot be debated, hence cannot be corrected, except within the national parliaments of course, but that's hardly reassuring.\nAnd I won't even mention the countries that aren't Western countries in those places, of course, free speeches, absolutely, not on the cards yet.\nSo I'm skipping a little more here.\nI also see why you urge me always to bear human fallibility in mind.\nIn fact, since you mentioned that some moral truths follow logically from epistemological considerations, I am now wondering whether they all do.\nCould it be that the moral imperative, not to destroy the means of correcting errors, is the only moral imperative?.\nThat is, all other moral truths follow from it.\nAs you wish.\nNow in regards to Athens and what you were saying about epistemology, if our prospects for discovering new knowledge are so good, why are you stressing the unreliability of the senses?.\nI was correcting your description of the quest for knowledge as striving to see beyond what is easy to see.\nI meant that metaphorically.\nSee in the sense of understand.\nYes, nevertheless you have considered that even those things that you thought were easiest to see literally are in fact not easy to see at all without prior knowledge about them.\nIn fact, nothing is easy to see without prior knowledge.\nAll knowledge of the world is hard to come by.\nMoreover, moreover it follows that we do not come by it through steam.\nIt does not flow into us through our senses.\nExactly.\nYet you say that objective knowledge is attainable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=2001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7720956d-f73c-4f3e-acc6-e86eba52e857": {"page_content": "See in the sense of understand.\nYes, nevertheless you have considered that even those things that you thought were easiest to see literally are in fact not easy to see at all without prior knowledge about them.\nIn fact, nothing is easy to see without prior knowledge.\nAll knowledge of the world is hard to come by.\nMoreover, moreover it follows that we do not come by it through steam.\nIt does not flow into us through our senses.\nExactly.\nYet you say that objective knowledge is attainable.\nSo if it does not come to us through the senses, where does it come from?.\nSuppose I was to tell you that all knowledge comes from persuasion.\nPersuasion again?.\nWell, I would reply with all due respect.\nThat that makes no sense.\nWhoever persuades me of something must first have discovered it in himself.\nSo in such a case, the relevant issue is where his knowledge came from.\nAnd right there we've got the argument against empiricism.\nAs a side note, this seems to be one of the more contentious parts of papurina epistemology.\nAnd I'm not really sure why.\nPeople really do think that seeing is believing or that we can understand the world as it is by looking, okay, by observing.\nThis is why that alternative epistemology, sometimes called objectivism, is something I have long thought is perverse in calling itself objectivism.\nCertainly in the epistemological sense, it's entirely subjectivist on this point.\nIt says that human senses, the internal psychological workings of the human mind are a way to get direct knowledge from the world.\nIn other words, the individual subject can come to know reality using their senses in some way.\nBut the senses, this empiricist mistake, the senses are able to derive knowledge from the world out there.\nBut we cannot detect most of what we know to exist.\nSo it can't come to us through the senses.\nAll the interesting truths of science, essentially, are not about what we sense.\nSo the big bang, evolution by natural selection, the existence of quarks still a fusion, germ theory.\nAll these things can be known without us ever needing to see directly any of them.\nIt's always explaining the scene in terms of the unseen, which is an amazing part of actual epistemology.\nSo it takes knowledge creation and criticism away from whatever your fallible senses are up to and puts it in a domain of explanation, an explanation of things that cannot possibly be verified or checked by the senses.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=2112"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "da15d6b5-8d7a-4d9e-8059-8b92d242cfaf": {"page_content": "All these things can be known without us ever needing to see directly any of them.\nIt's always explaining the scene in terms of the unseen, which is an amazing part of actual epistemology.\nSo it takes knowledge creation and criticism away from whatever your fallible senses are up to and puts it in a domain of explanation, an explanation of things that cannot possibly be verified or checked by the senses.\nNow, someone might object a little here and say, well, it's not the sense of the line.\nWe use technology, okay?.\nYou can't see bacteria, but with a microscope you can or you can't see what happened at the big bang, but you can use telescopes to find the cosmic microwave background, okay?.\nSo it's not your senses.\nThat's not what we meant.\nYou can use instruments.\nAnd the instruments don't wake up on the wrong side of the bed.\nThe instruments aren't subject to optical illusions.\nWell, aren't they subject to illusions?.\nIt may be that we can augment our senses through the use of technology, but all that does is put us in a domain of understanding how the technology works and understanding how the technology works is a theory or an explanation about how the technology works.\nAnd that could be false.\nAnd so to use popisteria, senses remain theory laden all the time.\nWe have a certain idea about how the senses work, how our eyesight works.\nThe photons enter the eye.\nThey hit the cornea.\nThey travel through the vitreous humor.\nThey go through the lens of the eye.\nThey eventually reach the retina where there are rods and cones.\nAnd inside the rods and cones, there's certain chemicals, these chemicals when the light hits them, change shape and changing in the shape, sends electrical impulses down the optic nerve, which reaches a visual cortex, okay?.\nThis is how seeing works, but that whole chain of causation I just gave you there.\nAnd that's a theory.\nThat's an explanation.\nThat could be wrong.\nWe know that it's correct.\nWe know that it's correct.\nWe don't certainly know that it's correct.\nAll knowledge is conjectural.\nAll knowledge is fallible.\nThings could be different to what I've just told you.\nAnd so too with our technology.\nSo our technology is theory laden.\nThis is what it means by theory laden.\nHow is it?.\nHow do we understand how our senses work?.\nHow is it?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=754"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56e1dfd8-e286-48a0-b272-9bc8d8a246fa": {"page_content": "That could be wrong.\nWe know that it's correct.\nWe know that it's correct.\nWe don't certainly know that it's correct.\nAll knowledge is conjectural.\nAll knowledge is fallible.\nThings could be different to what I've just told you.\nAnd so too with our technology.\nSo our technology is theory laden.\nThis is what it means by theory laden.\nHow is it?.\nHow do we understand how our senses work?.\nHow is it?.\nWe understand how our telescopes work or our microscopes or anything else we use to detect scientific stuff.\nSo if we were to find that our explanation of how any of these things, the technology, or our senses work, if we found it was false in our crucial way, then the knowledge that we had thought we'd constructed using that sense data could, could turn out to be false.\nThis happens in science by the way all the time.\nIt's called systematic error.\nIf you think you know how your telescope works and you're making highly precise measurements and these highly precise measurements could be due to error, but you're not sure.\nAnd you repeatedly do the same experiment over and over again and you get the same consistent results.\nIt looks like a result to reliable.\nWhat reliable means is you're getting the same result every single time.\nBut if there's some flaw with your telescope, some noise that's there that you didn't realize, then in fact, although you've got highly reliable data, it could all be completely false because your theory about what the telescope was doing was wrong.\nAnd so the knowledge that you think you've created is in fact false.\nNow, there's a real life example of this.\nIf you look up the changing fine structure constant, this is precisely what happened.\nThe fine structure constant, I won't go into what I've talked about it on previous episodes actually, but the University of New South Wales did a big study on this.\nAnd it looked for all the world because all the results seem to agree that the fine structure constant was changing.\nAnd if the fine structure constant was changing, this was kind of a big deal.\nI mean, one of the fundamentals constants of nature was changing.\nPerhaps the speed of light was different in the past, perhaps the charge on an electron was different in the past.\nIt's very interesting.\nI won't go into it now.\nThe point here is that the theory that was being used that explained how the telescope worked that was taking the readings was wrong.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=754"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "de0e7269-cc38-44fa-a5f3-9c2cd571efd0": {"page_content": "And if the fine structure constant was changing, this was kind of a big deal.\nI mean, one of the fundamentals constants of nature was changing.\nPerhaps the speed of light was different in the past, perhaps the charge on an electron was different in the past.\nIt's very interesting.\nI won't go into it now.\nThe point here is that the theory that was being used that explained how the telescope worked that was taking the readings was wrong.\nWe had a theory laid in observation and that introduced this, introduced a systematic error, which ultimately meant the conclusion was false.\nNamely, this fine structure constant was not changing after all.\nOkay, so whatever the case, we interpret the data from our technology.\nWe interpret the data from our senses.\nAnd like we say, it's interpretations all the way down.\nAnd then we move on to the discussion with Socrates and Hermes forward where they become engaged about, they become engaged in concerns about the source of knowledge.\nHermes is attempting to impart to Socrates the idea that knowledge doesn't come from outside of him.\nBut Socrates isn't quite so sure.\nLike, namely, the knowledge that Hermes is giving Socrates right now about epistemology is in that coming from Hermes.\nBut Hermes wonders, well, what if I'm just a figment of your imagination, Socrates?.\nNow, if I am only a figment of your imagination, then who has persuaded you, presumably, I myself, unless this dream is coming neither from you nor from within myself, but from another source?.\nBut did you not say that you were open to persuasion by anyone?.\nIf dreams emanate from an unknown source, what difference should that make?.\nIf they are persuasive, are you not on a bound as an Athenian to accept them?.\nIt seems that I am.\nBut what if a dream were to emanate from a malevolent source?.\nThat makes no fundamental difference either.\nSupposed that the source purports to tell you a fact, then if you suspect that the source is malevolent, you will try to understand what evil it is trying to perpetuate by telling you the alleged fact.\nBut then, depending upon your explanation, you may well decide to believe it anyway.\nSir, we can conclude that the source of knowledge is not important.\nThe source in a real sense is within us.\nWe create it, then criticise it, by our own lights.\nSo, objective knowledge is attainable, and it doesn't matter where it appears to come from.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=2468"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d22d00e0-1c9d-43bb-bf6d-425e9084b2ea": {"page_content": "But then, depending upon your explanation, you may well decide to believe it anyway.\nSir, we can conclude that the source of knowledge is not important.\nThe source in a real sense is within us.\nWe create it, then criticise it, by our own lights.\nSo, objective knowledge is attainable, and it doesn't matter where it appears to come from.\nWe do not judge ideas by their sources.\nOf course it does.\nDo you remember what is enough in ease, Rob?.\nJust after he said that objective knowledge is attainable by humans?.\nYes, the passage continues.\nBut as for certain truth, no man has known it.\nNor will he know it, neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak.\nAnd even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he himself would not know it.\nSo there, he is saying that, although objective knowledge is attainable, justified belief, certain truth is not.\nYes, we've covered all that.\nBut your answer is in the next line.\nFor all is a woven web of guesses.\nguesses?.\nYes, conjectures.\nBut wait, what about when knowledge does not come from guesswork?.\nAs when a god sends me in a dream?.\nWhat about when I simply hear ideas from other people?.\nThey may have guessed them, but I obtain them merely by listening.\nYou do not.\nIn all those cases you still have to guess in order to acquire the knowledge.\nI do.\nOf course.\nHave you yourself not often been misunderstood even by people trying hard to understand you?.\nYes.\nHave you in turn not often misunderstood what someone means even when he is trying to tell you it's clearly as he can?.\nIndeed, I have.\nNot least during this conversation.\nThis brings to mind, you could call it his criterion of comprehensibility.\nIt is impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood.\nSo I'm going to skip a little here and then, indeed, most guesses are not new knowledge.\nAlthough guesswork is the origin of all knowledge, it is also a source of error and therefore what happens to an idea after it has been guessed is crucial.\nSo let me combine this insight with what I know of criticism.\nI guess might come from a dream or it might just be a wild speculation or a random combination of ideas or anything, but then we do not just accept it blindly because we imagine it is authorized or because we want it to be true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=475"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b863c4f-4937-4087-88a4-9d5384060e95": {"page_content": "Although guesswork is the origin of all knowledge, it is also a source of error and therefore what happens to an idea after it has been guessed is crucial.\nSo let me combine this insight with what I know of criticism.\nI guess might come from a dream or it might just be a wild speculation or a random combination of ideas or anything, but then we do not just accept it blindly because we imagine it is authorized or because we want it to be true.\nInstead, we criticize it and try to discover its flaws.\nYes, that is what you should do at any rate.\nThen we try to remedy those flaws by altering the idea or dropping it in favor of others and the alterations and the other ideas are themselves guesses and are themselves criticized.\nOnly when we fail in these attempts either to reject or improve an idea, do we provisionally accept it?.\nSkipping a little bit more here, it all comes from within, from conjecture and criticism.\nWait, it comes from within, even if revealed by a god and is just as fallible as ever.\nYes, your argument covers that case just like any other.\nMarvelous, but now what about the objects that we experience in the natural world?.\nWe reach out and touch an object and hence experience it out there.\nSurely that is a different kind of knowledge, a kind which fallible or not, really does come from without, at least in the sense that our own experience is out there at the location of the object.\nLove the idea that all those other different kinds of knowledge originate in the same way and are improved in the same way.\nWhy is direct sensory experience an exception?.\nWhat if it just seems radically different?.\nBut surely you are now asking me just to believe in a sort of all-encompassing conjuring trick resembling the fanciful notion that the whole of life really is just a dream.\nFor what would mean that the sensation of touching an object does not happen where I experience it happening, namely in the hand that touches.\nBut in the mind, which I believe is located somewhere in the brain, so all my sensations of touch are located inside my skull, when reality nothing in touch while I still live.\nAnd whenever I think I am seeing a vast, brilliantly illuminated landscape, all that I am really experiencing is likewise located entirely inside my skull, where in reality it is constantly dark.\nIs that so absurd?.\nWhere do you think all the sights and sounds of this dream are located?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=2693"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4a9761ef-b603-4fcb-8e96-5b8f0f83b59c": {"page_content": "But in the mind, which I believe is located somewhere in the brain, so all my sensations of touch are located inside my skull, when reality nothing in touch while I still live.\nAnd whenever I think I am seeing a vast, brilliantly illuminated landscape, all that I am really experiencing is likewise located entirely inside my skull, where in reality it is constantly dark.\nIs that so absurd?.\nWhere do you think all the sights and sounds of this dream are located?.\nI accept that they are indeed in my mind.\nBut that is my point.\nMost dreams portray things that are simply not there in the external reality.\nTo portray things that are there is surely impossible without some input that does not come from the mind, but from those things themselves.\nWell, reason Socrates.\nBut is that input needed in the source of your dream?.\nOr only your ongoing criticism of it?.\nYou mean that we first guess what is there, and then what?.\nWe test our guesses against the input from our senses?.\nYes.\nI see.\nAnd then we hone our guesses.\nAnd then fashion the best ones into a sort of waking dream of reality.\nYes.\nA waking dream that corresponds to reality.\nBut there is more.\nIt is a dream of which is in game control.\nYou do that by controlling the corresponding aspects of the external reality.\nAh, it is a wonderfully unified theory and consistent as far as I can tell.\nBut how am I really to accept that I myself, the thinking being that I call I, has no direct knowledge of the physical world at all, but can only receive arcane hints of it through flickers and shadows that happen to impinge upon my eyes and other senses?.\nAnd that what I experience as reality is never more than a waking dream, composed of conjectures originating from within myself.\nDo you have an alternative explanation?.\nNo.\nAnd the more I contemplate this one, the more delighted I become, a sensation of which I should beware.\nYet I am also persuaded.\nEveryone knows that man is the paragon of animals, but if this epistemology you tell me is true, then we are infinitely more marvellous creatures than that.\nHere we sit for every imprisoned in the dark, almost sealed cave of our skull, guessing.\nWe weave stories of an outside world, worlds actually, a physical world, a moral world, a world of abstract geometrical shapes and so on.\nBut we are not satisfied with merely weaving or with mere stories.\nWe want true explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=475"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9062b382-88b5-4dea-adb3-1988174af830": {"page_content": "Here we sit for every imprisoned in the dark, almost sealed cave of our skull, guessing.\nWe weave stories of an outside world, worlds actually, a physical world, a moral world, a world of abstract geometrical shapes and so on.\nBut we are not satisfied with merely weaving or with mere stories.\nWe want true explanations.\nSo we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of.\nAnd when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth.\nAnd if that were not enough, what we understand we then control.\nIt is like magic only real.\nWe are like gods.\nWell, sometimes you discover some objective truth and exert some control as a result.\nBut often when you think you have achieved any of that, you haven't.\nSo that's all wonderful.\nAnd again follows from some material in the fabric of reality.\nOur minds really are a kind of virtual reality.\nWe are virtual reality ourselves, constantly checking against actual reality and updating our model of the external world inside of our minds.\nNow, this is a very powerful idea that contains within a lots of known philosophy and science as well.\nNamely, we are programs of a kind.\nOur mind is a program.\nIt's a bit of software.\nWhat kind?.\nWell, it's a creative explanation generating kind.\nExplanation of what?.\nWell, everything, including the external reality that we find ourselves in.\nOur explanations often explicit of that external physical world.\nThere are things that, in a sense, illuminate our mind.\nThe illumination of the actual physical world is incurring strangely within the utter darkness of our own brains.\nIn there, it is actually physically, completely dark.\nBut that is where the bright lights of the waking world are being generated and presented to our consciousness.\nOf course, there are actual real lights in the external world.\nBut those lights only enter our eyes before they are completely absorbed and destroyed at our retina.\nThey are then converted into electrical impulses.\nAnd it's then that we have the experience of light.\nBut the light that we have the experience of inside of our minds is not the same as the light that's outside of our minds.\nYes, it's unusual to think of things in this way.\nAll of our senses, the sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing, it's all happening inside the mind.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=2932"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "574efa26-ab2e-48f7-8608-edad28a62b8c": {"page_content": "They are then converted into electrical impulses.\nAnd it's then that we have the experience of light.\nBut the light that we have the experience of inside of our minds is not the same as the light that's outside of our minds.\nYes, it's unusual to think of things in this way.\nAll of our senses, the sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing, it's all happening inside the mind.\nAnd just checked again with respect to what is happening outside.\nAnd then we update our ideas.\nAnd all of this is completely fallible.\nThe checking might go wrong.\nThe neurons might misfire.\nThe senses can deceive you.\nBut nonetheless, we learn more and more and understand and thus gain more and more control over the external world.\nAs Socrates says, all right.\nBut if we choose to, are you saying that there is no upper bound to how much we can eventually understand and control and achieve?.\nFunny, you should ask that.\nGenerations from now, a book will be written, which will provide a compelling and excellent.\nThere's Hermes hinting at the writing of the beginning of the infinity, indicating that he does appear to be a time traveler, some sort.\nAnd there I'm going to end part one.\nWe've only had two characters so far.\nSo next time I have to introduce some of the rest of the cast.\nI'm going to be nice if someone actually did produce a live action version of this little play.\nMaybe that's the next thing we can hope for.\nI'm Blockbuster Philosophy.\nUntil next time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi42A_NrW98&t=754"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "786d7e22-fa90-46a2-8fbd-14aafb1a0e51": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and to part 2 of my discussion of chapter 7, a conversation about justification from the fabric of reality by David Deutsch.\nNow actually this is the third-ish episode on this particular chapter.\nI've inserted a supplementary episode which is a discussion about some material in realism and the aim of science which is a very long book by Karl Popper written some time after the logic of scientific discovery which was his first book and in that book in realism in the aim of science, among other things he talks about something called corroboration.\nNow I bring that up and I found it relevant to the present episode and to the episode before that which was kind of an introduction to the conversation that we're going to have today, the literal conversation about justification.\nBecause you can see Popper there trying to escape from the prevailing view of epistemology.\nThe prevailing view of epistemology at the time of course was well you observe staff and you observe staff repeatedly and you become more certain.\nYou confirm your theory in some way by repeatedly observing things and you think that that theory is more likely to be true, something like that.\nAnd Popper rejected this whole idea.\nPopper rejected the idea that theory became more likely to be true or you could assume they were more likely to be true based upon your confirming instances based upon you, seeing what you expected to see.\nThe whole all swans are white thing.\nand so you're observing white swans and you become more convinced apparently.\nThe more white swans you see that in fact it's true that all swans are white.\nOf course this particular process of predicting the color of swans and prediction in general is not even the aim of science which is what Popper's whole project was.\nHe was trying to explain something completely new, something hitherto that no one had really understood about what the creation of knowledge was and what science was all about.\nSo you can see him trying to escape the miring which he finds himself, the philosophical mire of his contemporaries and of the people that went before in trying to explain stuff about explanation.\nAnd in trying to get away from what they're saying, he's still using their language and you can see that he's, well in my opinion, trying to fill a void in our language in our vocabulary which doesn't need to be filled.\nYou can do away with it, you can do away with so many of these words, buy his own lights, buy the way in which he explains epistemology and how it works.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=16"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dd47b609-8c66-46cc-87bd-7688cd859491": {"page_content": "And in trying to get away from what they're saying, he's still using their language and you can see that he's, well in my opinion, trying to fill a void in our language in our vocabulary which doesn't need to be filled.\nYou can do away with it, you can do away with so many of these words, buy his own lights, buy the way in which he explains epistemology and how it works.\nBy the fact that what we're after criticisms, we're using this critical method to try and refute bad ideas, leaving us with a best existing idea.\nIt's either that.\nor we've got nothing at all.\nWe're not in the position of trying to wait different ideas or to justify a particular idea as more likely to be true than some other idea.\nWe're just not in that position.\nIt just doesn't come up.\nIt's not a problem to be solved.\nHence, the whole problem of induction is a climber itself.\nIt didn't need a solution as such.\nThe solution is, it was never a problem in the first place because induction isn't a thing.\nThere is no whole at the center of science where we need to try and become confident in our theories because the king of knowledge is something like mathematics or logic or something like that and what we're trying to start with are absolutely certain foundations and on that building an edifice of ever more certain claims about reality.\nThat's just not what's going on.\nPop us entire conception turns that on its head.\nWhat we're doing is we're conjecturing, we're guessing, we're creating explanations that can be tested against reality and can be shown to be wrong.\nIf we can't show them to be wrong, we're lucky for us.\nWe've learned something about reality.\nWe keep hold of that bit of stuff, that bit of information about reality and we call it knowledge, something we know about reality.\nThis is what we explain here at TopCarsis, what David Deutsch explains about the beginning of infinity.\nWhy it should be relevant for me to go all the way back to Karl Popper and the realism in the aim of science and talk about its corroboration stuff is because David uses the language of corroboration here in this chapter and I think quite rightly once again, speaking in the language of people who are going to disagree and there are still people who disagree today.\nBazingism we have to admit is still a far more popular and an ascendant even epistemology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=130"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "21205865-78ea-4029-8944-e4fdf7c6f809": {"page_content": "Why it should be relevant for me to go all the way back to Karl Popper and the realism in the aim of science and talk about its corroboration stuff is because David uses the language of corroboration here in this chapter and I think quite rightly once again, speaking in the language of people who are going to disagree and there are still people who disagree today.\nBazingism we have to admit is still a far more popular and an ascendant even epistemology.\nPeople still have this idea that what science is about is trying to predict the future and you're trying to be more and more sure or confident or certain that this particular theory is actually a true account of reality or something like that.\nSo if you've ever been in a conversation with someone who disagrees with popular inner epistemology, it can sometimes be difficult to get across what you're saying because just simple things like claiming to know something.\nIn the Papurian framework means you have an explanation.\nIt could mean you have an intuition but in any case you have some idea that solves your problem.\nThat's what it means to know something.\nYou've got a solution of some kind.\nSometimes you can know how to ride a bike without having an explicit explanation of what's going on.\nWhat you've got is in explicit knowledge and a whole bunch of implicit assumptions about exactly how you might body moves and that kind of thing.\nbut you know how to ride a bike.\nIt's a form of knowledge even if you can't explain it in words or you can't explain it fully in words.\nPoppets account of knowledge takes account of this kind of thing because among other things it's knowledge that can be improved over time.\nYou never need to justify as true this bit of knowledge that you have about how to ride a bike or how to swim or any of this other in explicit stuff.\nIt's stuff that in explicit knowledge just isn't stuff that performs a part of anything like Bayesian epistemology or induction and whatever the case when we're talking about explicit explanations.\nThe rules don't need to change.\nNot much.\nWe don't move from having guesses about how to do stuff like ride a bike or guesses about what reality is like into an area of certainty.\nThat's not what's going on.\nSo here in this chapter before us, chapter seven, a conversation about justification.\nDavid is going to have an imaginary conversation with someone who doesn't think that they're inductive.\nSo they're called the crypto inductive us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=234"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6cb26460-61b2-4736-a8d7-d880b8a07d8d": {"page_content": "The rules don't need to change.\nNot much.\nWe don't move from having guesses about how to do stuff like ride a bike or guesses about what reality is like into an area of certainty.\nThat's not what's going on.\nSo here in this chapter before us, chapter seven, a conversation about justification.\nDavid is going to have an imaginary conversation with someone who doesn't think that they're inductive.\nSo they're called the crypto inductive us.\nbut they have an induction shaped hole in their way of thinking about the world.\nThey don't understand why we should rely on our existing theories, our best existing theories of reality, our scientific theories.\nThey think the crypto inductive us thinks there needs to be some process by which we justify, by which they presumably mean justify us true, any given theory that we have at a particular time.\nAnd David is rejecting that whole idea as a proper indeed rejected that whole idea.\nBut our language, our common language between popurians and non-popurians and just person on the street thinking about stuff.\nWell, we share this language, we call English and we have a whole bunch of words, some of which can be quite misleading.\nJustification is one of them.\nWhat does justified really mean?.\nWell, it could mean something like showing us true, given some assumptions you already know are true.\nNow, never mind how you know those assumptions are true.\nOf course, you don't.\nPutting that aside, as David said and as I'll emphasize again now in the introduction to the audiobook version of this, he said there that when he uses the word justified or justification, he in the fabric of reality, what he intends is the normative claim.\nIn other words, saying, not that our best theories are justified is true, but rather you are justified in the sense of you should use your best theory.\nWhat else could you do?.\nYou want to explain some sort of cosmological phenomenon like gravitational lensing.\nWell, the only thing you can do, it is right, you are justified in using the general theory of relativity.\nYou're justified in using evolution by natural selection in order to go through the process of explaining exactly how it is that certain species exists in reality right now on planet Earth.\nAnd presumably, any life that exists out there elsewhere in the universe, you're also justified in assuming that that life there has also evolved by a process of natural selection because we know of no other process and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=346"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4696a56a-d567-48c1-a88d-93a8b2059b49": {"page_content": "Well, the only thing you can do, it is right, you are justified in using the general theory of relativity.\nYou're justified in using evolution by natural selection in order to go through the process of explaining exactly how it is that certain species exists in reality right now on planet Earth.\nAnd presumably, any life that exists out there elsewhere in the universe, you're also justified in assuming that that life there has also evolved by a process of natural selection because we know of no other process and.\nall we can go on if we have problems like, let's say, one day we observe alien life and once we explain where did that come from, our best theory is that all life, no matter where it is and of what form has evolved via a process of evolution by natural selection.\nNow, could that be wrong?.\nOf course, it could be wrong.\nSo we're not justified in thinking our theory is true, literally true, but we're justified in using it.\nWhy?.\nIn order to solve our problem, the best that we can at any given time and solutions to problems don't need to be the final ultimate optimal solution for all time and everywhere.\nThey just need to solve your problem now to your satisfaction to the scientist satisfaction to the satisfaction of being able to say problem solved and move on to the next best problem, the next most interesting problem, the next thing that is important to you.\nOkay, so I'm not going to read the entire dialogue today here in chapter seven because it's a long dialogue.\nand I think that listeners to talk cast if you've made your way through the beginning of infinity, you'll have a solid grounding in an understanding of what epistemology is all about.\nSo I just want to highlight sections of the conversation that can be illuminating to us and just to of course enjoy the clarity of David Deutsch's writing on this.\nI'm also going to pause at certain places where I think that as I did in the last episode about this, about this particular chapter proper, where I was saying that, well, we could probably rephrase this in a slightly different way in light of David's own more recent work on this in light of what David says in the beginning of infinity and amongst other things in his paper, his even more recent paper than the beginning of infinity, that paper being the logic of experimental tests.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=460"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "35ab8b04-2b56-49d0-9ed4-312b2866829f": {"page_content": "I'm also going to pause at certain places where I think that as I did in the last episode about this, about this particular chapter proper, where I was saying that, well, we could probably rephrase this in a slightly different way in light of David's own more recent work on this in light of what David says in the beginning of infinity and amongst other things in his paper, his even more recent paper than the beginning of infinity, that paper being the logic of experimental tests.\nAnd I think that that now, as far as I'm aware, is the pinnacle of our understanding of exactly what science is about and the role of things like observations, experiments, in scientific discovery.\nThat is right now our most refined understanding of things.\nAnd so we can draw a line if you like, all the way from prepopurian stuff to what we might say is early pop or an in realism in the aim of science, pop or admits he's got an early version of himself.\nAnd the early version of himself in the logic of scientific discovery was saying things like and he admits he admits himself that this was an error, saying things like theories can have a degree of confirmation.\nNow he was wrong about that.\nand he admits he was wrong about that.\nAnd so he moves on to degree of corroboration because he thinks that some theories are more probable than other theories.\nAnd we, of course, now think this is wrong following the work of David Deutsch.\nSo David Deutsch has done stuff in epistemology since the fabric of reality, which kind of does away with some of the ways of phrasing these things.\nAnd so there's a more refined way of understanding some of this stuff, certainly in the beginning of infinity, and certainly in something like the logic of experimental tests, his academic paper on this.\nAnd if you're interested in that, it's kind of hard going, it's focused on, well, the full title of the paper is the logic of experimental tests, particularly of ever retying quantum theory.\nAnd so it can get quite technical in places.\nNow I've written a guide about this, and it's on my website, just called the philosophy of science.\nAnd there is a podcast all about devoted to this as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=564"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e91c054-fe81-4a00-aedc-06f2ec7ec3e5": {"page_content": "And if you're interested in that, it's kind of hard going, it's focused on, well, the full title of the paper is the logic of experimental tests, particularly of ever retying quantum theory.\nAnd so it can get quite technical in places.\nNow I've written a guide about this, and it's on my website, just called the philosophy of science.\nAnd there is a podcast all about devoted to this as well.\nIf you're interested in that, you can go all the way back to ToKCast episode 22, the logic of experimental tests where for a little over an hour, I go through my understanding of and my reading of the logic of experimental tests, certainly just excerpts thereof.\nAnd so that too conform a supplement to something like this episode, where we are looking at the debate between Papyrians and Papyrian epistemology.\nAnd well, the rest of people who think about how it is that science accomplishes what it does or what the purpose of science is.\nAnd why we should rely upon our best explanation at any given moment in time.\nWhy this is a debate from our point of view is a mystery.\nAfter all, what else can you do but rely upon your best existing theory?.\nAnd if you can't show your best existing theory as actually finally once and for all true in some way, who cares?.\nYou've got nothing else to rely on.\nAnd I guess push come to shove a reasonable base in would say the same thing, but one wonders what they're really engaged in if they're trying to increase their confidence, increase their credence in a particular claim.\nOkay, without further ado, now I did think to myself, I would have further ado, I say, and then he goes on to make more of an adieu.\nI did think to myself, should I get one of my friends or someone else to play the role of David or play the role of crypto inductivist?.\nAnd thereby I have a proper dialogue.\nAnd after much thought about this, I thought, no, I will just read both parts.\nSo this might become a little bit irritating.\nAnd I'm not going to try and be a voice actor for this.\nI'm just going to read it dry and pause where I think there are interesting things to talk about.\nOkay, so let's go.\nThis is the beginning of the actual dialogue, the actual conversation about justification that David has in the fabric of reality chapter seven.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=664"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3cf62408-4736-40c9-8058-2fedd4b63994": {"page_content": "And after much thought about this, I thought, no, I will just read both parts.\nSo this might become a little bit irritating.\nAnd I'm not going to try and be a voice actor for this.\nI'm just going to read it dry and pause where I think there are interesting things to talk about.\nOkay, so let's go.\nThis is the beginning of the actual dialogue, the actual conversation about justification that David has in the fabric of reality chapter seven.\nAnd he begins with himself asking the question of the crypto inductivist.\nDavid says, quote, since I read what Papa has to say about induction, I have believed that he did, indeed, as he claimed, solve the problem of induction.\nBut few philosophers agree.\nWhy?.\nAnd the crypto inductivist replies, because Papa never addressed the problem of induction as we understand it.\nWhat he did was present a critique of inductivism.\nInductivism said that there is an inductive form of reasoning, which can derive and justify the use of general theories about the future given evidence in the form of individual observations made in the past.\nIt held that there was a principle of nature, the principle of induction, which said something like observations made in the future, are likely to resemble observations made under similar circumstances in the past.\nAttempts were made to formulate this in such a way that it would indeed allow one to derive or justify general theories from individual observations.\nThey all failed.\nPapa's critique, though, influential among scientists, especially in conjunction with his other work elucidating the methodology of science, was hardly original.\nThe unsanness of inductivism had been known almost since it was invented, and certainly since David Hume's critique of it in the early 18th century, the problem of induction is not how to justify or refute the principle of induction, but rather taking for granted that it is invalid, how to justify any conclusion about the future from past evidence.\nAnd before you say that one doesn't need to, and David interjects, one doesn't need to.\nThe crypto inductivist then comes back with, but one does.\nThat is what is so irritating about you, Papyrians, you deny the obvious.\nObviously, the reason why you are not even now leaping over this railing is in part that you consider it justified to rely upon our best theory of gravity and unjustified to rely on certain other theories, of course, by our best theory of gravity.\nIn this case, I mean more than just general relativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=786"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "524b921f-b383-4a87-8a2e-7e96bf811a59": {"page_content": "The crypto inductivist then comes back with, but one does.\nThat is what is so irritating about you, Papyrians, you deny the obvious.\nObviously, the reason why you are not even now leaping over this railing is in part that you consider it justified to rely upon our best theory of gravity and unjustified to rely on certain other theories, of course, by our best theory of gravity.\nIn this case, I mean more than just general relativity.\nI am also referring to a complex set of theories about such things as air resistance, human physiology, the elasticity of concrete, and the availability of mid-air rescue devices end quote.\nSo remember the context here.\nWhat's going on as the two characters, David and the crypto inductivist, are standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower.\nAnd the whole point of the dialogue is that David is trying to explain why he is justified in relying upon the best existing theories as to why he shouldn't jump over the railing.\nAnd the crypto inductivist is saying, well, no, you haven't properly justified that claim.\nThere's no good reason, so to speak, for relying on this best theory.\nSo there's some back and forth at this point between David and the crypto inductivist.\nAnd I'll just leap to the point where the crypto inductivist tries to summarize David, David's argument.\nAnd what the crypto inductivist says is, quote, so to summarize, you believe that the evidence currently available to you justifies the prediction that you would be killed if you leapt over the railing end quote.\nNow, do you listen to?.\nIf you hear something like that, let me just say it again.\nThe crypto inductivist is saying to David, you believe that the evidence currently available to you justifies the prediction that you would be killed if you leapt over the railing.\nDoes anything spring to mind?.\nIt perhaps should.\nThe evidence doesn't justify anything.\nWhat's the point of evidence?.\nThe point of evidence, the purpose of evidence, why one gathers evidence in science at all, is to decide between theories already guessed.\nIt's not there.\nIt's function is not to justify as true or as more true, a particular theory.\nInstead, it just rules out some whole bunch of theories and is only explained by the soul standing theory.\nSo the crypto inductivist is wrong to summarize David in that way.\nAlso, the crypto inductivist is absolutely focused on prediction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=910"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0586425-d6bb-4c57-8a9e-c8d856fd2dc3": {"page_content": "The point of evidence, the purpose of evidence, why one gathers evidence in science at all, is to decide between theories already guessed.\nIt's not there.\nIt's function is not to justify as true or as more true, a particular theory.\nInstead, it just rules out some whole bunch of theories and is only explained by the soul standing theory.\nSo the crypto inductivist is wrong to summarize David in that way.\nAlso, the crypto inductivist is absolutely focused on prediction.\nNow, in this particular case, I guess that being focused on prediction is what it's all about.\nAfter all, there's a baiting whether or not one is justified in leaping over the railing and thinking they are or are not going to be killed, given the best current explanation.\nBut the justification for all or not leaping over the railing from top of the Eiffel Tower is all about the fact that not the general relativity and those other theories that were mentioned earlier are absolutely true or anything like that.\nIt's the only theory you've got.\nIt's the only theory you've got.\nEverything else has already been ruled out by various other experiments.\nAnd so that theory allows you to derive certain predictions, there are certain consequences that follow.\nOne of which is, well, anything that goes over that railing is going to hit the ground and be destroyed upon impact.\nThat's just what happens.\nA prediction, I say, is something you logically derive from a given explanation, a given good scientific explanation.\nIt's just a consequence.\nIt's one of the things that follows from assuming all else equal, which is often a hard thing to do.\nYou can't always assume all else being equal because in our real world, people's choices, human creativity comes into play rather often.\nSo only in very well-controlled environments, like in a laboratory, can you do properly controlled experiments?.\nAnd this is why prediction is valid there.\nWe could say, if you like, the predictions made in laboratory where you have carefully controlled your variables and all of the conditions and you understand the functioning of the equipment well, then you are justified on relying upon the predictions.\nBut outside of the laboratory, things get more tricky.\nThings get more tricky, especially in the realm of human affairs.\nAnd that includes things like anything happening on the earth, which could be geological or meteorological or climate related, or to do with the extinction of animals or not, the evolution of life now on earth is very much affected by the choices that people make.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=1010"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0eaa92c-5ba3-4e52-bce5-f471535d063b": {"page_content": "But outside of the laboratory, things get more tricky.\nThings get more tricky, especially in the realm of human affairs.\nAnd that includes things like anything happening on the earth, which could be geological or meteorological or climate related, or to do with the extinction of animals or not, the evolution of life now on earth is very much affected by the choices that people make.\nAnd so our capacity to predict the behavior of systems here on earth depends upon knowing what people will do to impact those systems.\nAnd we can't predict what people will do, especially people over the future.\nWe don't know what knowledge they will have or will create.\nAnd so this is why prediction outside of the carefully controlled laboratory, and by the way, that includes the carefully controlled laboratory of deep space, which presumably there aren't people out there affecting things just yet.\nBut places where you can ignore the choices and effects of people and knowledge creation, if you can do that, then you've got a set of valid predictions.\nOtherwise, what do we say?.\nWe say we've only got prophecies, wild guesses where we presume that we know the content of our future theories.\nAnd often when it comes to prophecy, people are assuming they know the content of those future theories to be exactly the same as the content of theories today.\nIn other words, whatever problems we have today will still be there in a hundred years because we won't have created the knowledge to fix the problem then, or something like that.\nWhen you hear about people talking about the distant future and some existential catastrophe that's on the way, talking about that today, they're engaged in pure prophecy.\nThey don't know what the next generation is going to do.\nThey don't know what they are going to do 20 years from now, which could have an effect on the very problem they are so agitated in being worried about right now.\nAnd I think it's good for people to be worried about certain problems today that could have an effect in decades to come.\nBut making prophecies about this particular thing actually happening, well, that's wrong.\nSo that's the distinction between prediction and prophecy.\nBut here we're focused on prediction.\nSo let me go back and recap what the crypto inductive is just said and and going with what David responds to.\nSo the crypto inductive is just said, quote, so to summarize, you believe that the evidence currently available to you justifies the prediction that you would be killed if you leapt over the railing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=982"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38b082d3-5083-4aa7-8142-5a8945212349": {"page_content": "But making prophecies about this particular thing actually happening, well, that's wrong.\nSo that's the distinction between prediction and prophecy.\nBut here we're focused on prediction.\nSo let me go back and recap what the crypto inductive is just said and and going with what David responds to.\nSo the crypto inductive is just said, quote, so to summarize, you believe that the evidence currently available to you justifies the prediction that you would be killed if you leapt over the railing.\nDavid says, no, it doesn't.\nAnd the crypto inductive says, but damn it, you are contradicting yourself.\nJust now you said that prediction is justified.\nAnd David says, it is justified.\nBut it was not justified by the evidence, if by the evidence, you mean all the experiments whose outcomes, the theory correctly predicted in the past.\nAs we all know, that evidence is consistent with an infinity of theories, including theories predicting every logically possible outcome of my jumping over the railing.\nThe crypto inductive says, so in view of that, I repeat, the whole problem is to find what does justify the prediction.\nThat is the problem of induction.\nAnd David says, well, that is the problem, pop a solved end quote.\nAnd quite right.\nAnd what I'll say here, because I'm just going to skip over a whole bunch of things is if you cast science in terms of being a project about trying to predict the future and almost nothing but this process of generalization or extrapolation that a set of observations in the past should continue off into the future, because you can draw a straight line through a particular trend.\nWithout an explanation, you're assuming an explanation, the explanation you're assuming is that that observation in the, that set of observations of past is somehow necessarily required by laws of physics or something like that.\nAnd so therefore there is a law of physics or something that ensures that what you've seen in the past will continue to be seen in the future, which isn't much of an explanation.\nIt's just kind of assuming there's an explanation beneath all this.\nBut you're not searching for explanations.\nYou're searching for generalizations, extrapolations, the ability to make predictions.\nThis is the whole reason induction is just so vacuous, pointless.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=982"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "77cb53c3-2b26-4deb-843e-7e1075898a6b": {"page_content": "And so therefore there is a law of physics or something that ensures that what you've seen in the past will continue to be seen in the future, which isn't much of an explanation.\nIt's just kind of assuming there's an explanation beneath all this.\nBut you're not searching for explanations.\nYou're searching for generalizations, extrapolations, the ability to make predictions.\nThis is the whole reason induction is just so vacuous, pointless.\nA misguided attempt to understand what is going on with science, science, like every other domain that is of interest to people in academic circles, or just in problem-solving in general, it's actually about creating explanations, about understanding the world.\nAnd once you have some understanding, then if you're lucky, you might be able to make a prediction about something.\nSometimes not.\nSometimes even our best explanations don't allow to make predictions.\nIt's kind of in the physical sciences.\nAnd even then, not all the physical sciences, but in the physical sciences, we can make some predictions sometimes under some circumstances, as I already said.\nOne of the trope examples I'd like to use is, well, we have these theory of acids and bases.\nThere are these two kinds of chemicals that exist in the world.\nOne creates hydronium ions when dissolved in water.\nThese things are called acids.\nTo a first approximation, you say it's the hydrogen ion, H plus, that goes floating around in solution.\nIt's not quite like that, by the way.\nIt actually creates these things called hydronium, which is H3O plus.\nNever mind that.\nWhatever substance dissolved in water that produces such ions, we call an acid.\nAnd on the other hand, we have these things called bases, which when dissolved in water produce the hydroxide ion.\nThe hydroxide ion is OH minus.\nIt's a negative charge.\nAnd so things like sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, these are bases.\nAnd they can be used when combined with fats to make soap, but never worry about that.\nNow, all of the soluble bases we have this word called alkali.\nAnd so alkali is just a name for a base which will dissolve in water because there are certain bases that don't dissolve in water.\nNow, bases or alkali is dissolved in water produce the hydroxide ion, OH minus.\nAnd to a first approximation, the acids when dissolved in water produce H plus, the hydrogen ion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=1380"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b9b71a6c-6138-4c41-917a-58445cd3f6d4": {"page_content": "Now, all of the soluble bases we have this word called alkali.\nAnd so alkali is just a name for a base which will dissolve in water because there are certain bases that don't dissolve in water.\nNow, bases or alkali is dissolved in water produce the hydroxide ion, OH minus.\nAnd to a first approximation, the acids when dissolved in water produce H plus, the hydrogen ion.\nNow, when you mix an acid and a base, so they call concentration equal amounts and correct morality and all this sort of stuff, what you get, the products that you get from the reactants, the reactants are acid plus base, is something called a salt plus water.\nNow, where did the water come from?.\nThe water came from.\nThe hydrogen ion over here from the acid, H plus the hydroxide ion from the base, OH minus over there, H plus OH gives you H2O water.\nAnd so that's where the water comes from when you mix an acid in the base.\nSo you combine an acid and a base.\nWhat am I telling you all that for?.\nWell, that's a good explanation about what's going on chemically with stuff.\nand it allows you to make specific predictions.\nThat's the general universal rule that anywhere in the universe that you happen to have an acid dissolved in water and a base dissolved in water.\nThen you will get a salt and water being produced as the products.\nAnd so you take a specific example, in my trope example, I like to use this because it's the one I can easily do in my head, is hydrochloric acid, which is HCl.\nThat's the chemical formula for it.\nAnd then sodium hydroxide, NaOH.\nThis is probably the easiest reaction of all.\nEqual concentrations and equal amounts of that will produce as products, HCl plus NaOH.\nYou will get sodium chloride NaCl, that's plain old table salt, and H2O.\nThat's a prediction.\nSo if you give me any acid and you give me any base, which can dissolve in water, then I should be able to tell you what the salt is, what the specific salt is that is going to be produced, as well as being water.\nThat's a prediction.\nI can make that kind of prediction.\nAnd in fact, any reasonably competent high school chemistry student would also be able to tell you precisely what the concentrations are required.\nAnd the volumes are required.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=1515"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "303dacd5-ab44-4018-9343-fb39d4b68a3b": {"page_content": "That's a prediction.\nSo if you give me any acid and you give me any base, which can dissolve in water, then I should be able to tell you what the salt is, what the specific salt is that is going to be produced, as well as being water.\nThat's a prediction.\nI can make that kind of prediction.\nAnd in fact, any reasonably competent high school chemistry student would also be able to tell you precisely what the concentrations are required.\nAnd the volumes are required.\nThis is the process of titration, by the way.\nYou can figure out the concentration of an unknown base, given a certain concentration of a particular acid.\nAnd you combine these things together and you can do quite simple calculations.\nYou pull out your periodic table and your pocket calculator and you can calculate this stuff.\nSo you can make even more precise quantitative predictions about this kind of stuff.\nThis is physical chemistry, an organic chemistry allows you to do the same thing.\nThis is the wonderful thing about chemistry.\nIt allows these precise, very precise predictions exceeded perhaps only by physics itself.\nBut then sticking within the realm of physical staff, we only have to move to geology.\nAnd suddenly, the systems become too complex for us to make precise predictions.\nWe understand some stuff, but we don't understand enough to make the predictions that we would like to, if only we could.\nFor example, we can't predict earthquakes and we can't predict volcanic eruptions.\nNot to the precision and accuracy that we would like to.\nWe'd like to be able to have warnings well ahead of time that a particular earthquake is going to happen in a major city, and do whatever it takes in order to protect people and structures and that kind of thing.\nBut instead what happens is the earthquake happens, the buildings fall down, people get hurt, and then we come to have a better understanding after the fact of how earthquakes happen.\nBut we don't have the capacity just yet, just yet, to make these predictions ahead of time.\nAnd that's a shame.\nAnd that's just geology.\nRocks moving around.\nWell, tectonic plates, but you get my point.\nThese are by comparison, simple systems as compared to well, anything involving human affairs, one day we'll be able to predict when earthquakes are happening are going to happen one day, presumably.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=1600"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "55b82dbd-509a-498a-9d3e-346a368b554d": {"page_content": "But we don't have the capacity just yet, just yet, to make these predictions ahead of time.\nAnd that's a shame.\nAnd that's just geology.\nRocks moving around.\nWell, tectonic plates, but you get my point.\nThese are by comparison, simple systems as compared to well, anything involving human affairs, one day we'll be able to predict when earthquakes are happening are going to happen one day, presumably.\nIt must just come down to physical forces and it must just come down to how much stress is being placed upon these tectonic plates, which we don't have the ability to measure precisely just yet.\nBut perhaps one day we must be able to one day.\nAnd then we'll be justified in the future, relying upon the prediction from that good explanation.\nWe just don't have a good enough explanation just yet.\nWe are right.\nWe are justified in predicting following a good explanation of how acids and bases interact, exactly what, for example, concentration of base we need to neutralize a particular acid.\nThat's another prediction that we can make and we're justified in relying on certain calculations.\nIt's the normative things to do.\nWe should use chemistry in order to solve those kind of problems in titration, let's say.\nAnd if someone's talking about jumping over the railing of the Eiffel Tower, we are justified in predicting they're going to hit the ground at such a velocity that it'll kill them.\nNow, why?.\nBecause our best explanation, the combination of our best explanations, but chief among general relativity says that you're going to accelerate towards the ground at a particular rate, slowed only a little by things like air resistance.\nBut your skull's going to hit the ground and you're going to be dead.\nAnd that conclusion is justified in the sense that it follows from the assumption that all those other theories are good explanations about what's going to happen.\nThey don't have to be true in any final sense, but they capture some truth about reality, some truth.\nAnd some of the truth is that they're going to accelerate towards the ground.\nSo, once again, we have more back and forth between David and the crypto inductivist.\nAnd I'm going to pick it up where the crypto inductivist says, quote, Now, listen carefully, because you have just said something which is not only provably untrue, but what you yourself conceded was untrue only moment ago.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=1710"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c740e644-5c94-4427-a1c9-fc71064f1bb4": {"page_content": "And some of the truth is that they're going to accelerate towards the ground.\nSo, once again, we have more back and forth between David and the crypto inductivist.\nAnd I'm going to pick it up where the crypto inductivist says, quote, Now, listen carefully, because you have just said something which is not only provably untrue, but what you yourself conceded was untrue only moment ago.\nYou say that the outcomes of experiments, quote, refuted all the rival theories end, quote, but you know very well that no set of outcomes of experiments can refute all possible rivals to a general theory.\nYou said yourself that any set of past outcomes is, I quote, consistent with an infinity of theories, including theories predicting every logical possible outcome of my jumping over the railing end, quote, it follows inexorably that the prediction you favor was not justified by the experimental outcomes, because there are infinitely many other rivals to your theory, also unrefuted as yet, which make the opposite prediction.\nAnd David responds, quote, I'm glad I listened carefully, as you asked for now I see that at least part of the difference between us has been caused by misunderstanding over terminology.\nWhen Papa speaks of rival theories to a given theory, he does not mean the set of all logically possible rivals.\nHe means only the actual rivals.\nThose proposed in the course of a rational controversy that includes theories proposed purely mentally by one person in the course of a controversy within one mind, end quote, and this is just me talking now.\nYes, of course.\nNow, it is impossible.\nIt would be impossible to enumerate all the logically possible theories.\nThere wouldn't be a set.\nIt would be some sweet class of things.\nAnd if we take the worldview of the beginning of infinity seriously, then we must presume there are an infinite number of theories better than our best existing theory yet to be generated.\nThat's part of the beginning of infinity that we will get ever closer and closer to describing reality without getting ever a final description of reality.\nBecause reality itself has this infinitely complex character.\nThe universe is vast beyond our imagination.\nAnd every time we discover something new about it, it reveals a whole bunch of new phenomena that we are only just scratching the surface of.\nAnd we're always just scratching the surface.\nSo there must be this in theory infinite number of theories yet to come.\nWe're never going to get to the end all of our process of scientific discovery.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=1830"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "59bcf34e-fd27-4bff-b7bd-5f574a78cddc": {"page_content": "Because reality itself has this infinitely complex character.\nThe universe is vast beyond our imagination.\nAnd every time we discover something new about it, it reveals a whole bunch of new phenomena that we are only just scratching the surface of.\nAnd we're always just scratching the surface.\nSo there must be this in theory infinite number of theories yet to come.\nWe're never going to get to the end all of our process of scientific discovery.\nNo matter what people say, no matter what books are written about the end of science, no matter what other podcasts to say that we're almost there with a completed science of this that or the other.\nNo, we are coming to understand objective reality ever better over time.\nBut the end is nowhere near inside.\nIsn't that fun?.\nThat's great.\nThat's cool.\nThat means there's always something new to do.\nAnd you can start anywhere and point yourself in any direction and there'll be problems and you'll be able to make progress.\nSo it's not possible to rule out all of the theories.\nBecause there's a whole bunch of theories and infinite numbers, I just said that are better than your existing theory.\nOkay, you're yet to think of them.\nNo one has yet sort of them.\nBut they will.\nThey will think of them because they will need those to solve problems yet to be encountered.\nProblems that will only be encountered once certain problems have been solved now with our existing theories.\nSo, you know, the existing theories that are certain problems with, for example, the meshing of quantum theory and general relativity.\nYou know, what is the ultimate nature of reality?.\nIs it discrete or continuous?.\nIs it some other hitherto unimaginable third thing?.\nI don't know.\nBut the fact is, we don't know the ultimate constituents of matter.\nWe may never know the ultimate constituents of matter because there might not be ultimate constituents of matter.\nWe just keep finding smaller and smaller, different and different things that themselves are made up by other things.\nSo I'm skipping ahead and the crypto inductive is objects to being called and inductive is at all because they don't believe in induction.\nAs they say, as the crypto inductive says, quite offended.\nQuite.\nIt really is perverse to call a person and inductivist.\nIf that person's whole thesis is that the invalidity of inductive reasoning presents us with an unsolved philosophical problem, in David says, I don't think so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=1970"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f58d0898-2f1f-41d4-a38a-91e6b1ba6837": {"page_content": "So I'm skipping ahead and the crypto inductive is objects to being called and inductive is at all because they don't believe in induction.\nAs they say, as the crypto inductive says, quite offended.\nQuite.\nIt really is perverse to call a person and inductivist.\nIf that person's whole thesis is that the invalidity of inductive reasoning presents us with an unsolved philosophical problem, in David says, I don't think so.\nI think that that thesis is what defines and always has defined an inductivist.\nBut I see that Popper has at least achieved one thing.\nInductivist has become a term of abuse.\nAnyway, I was explaining why it's not so strange that the reliability of a theory should depend on what false theories people have proposed in the past.\nEven inductivists speak of a theory being reliable and not given certain evidence.\nWell, Papurians might speak of a theory being the best available for use in practice, given a certain problem situation.\nAnd the most important features of a problem situation are, what theories and explanations are in contention, what arguments have been advanced, and what theories have been refuted.\nCorobration is not just the confirmation of the winning theory.\nIt requires the experimental refutation of rival theories confirming instances in themselves have no significance.\nEnd quote.\nYes.\nSo this is one of the motivations for my immediate prior episode to this one, where it's titled corroboration, because I think Popper was trying to escape from this kind of language.\nAnd I think I can see here, and of course I can't speak for David, but I can see here that David doesn't use this kind of language in the beginning of infinity, or much at all since the fabric of reality, because I think it's kind of superfluous to our needs.\nAs he says there, quote, corroboration is not just the confirmation of the winning theory.\nNow what I would say, and I think even Popper kind of admitted, is that, well, confirmation is not a thing.\nWhat does confirmation mean?.\nTo confirm something means to show us true in some way?.\nOr it just means the observation is consistent with the theory, but we've already said here in this chapter already that, you know, there are an infinite number of theories that could be consistent with any set of observations.\nFine.\nSo we don't need to worry about confirmation.\nAnd I think for similar reasons, we don't need to worry about corroboration, either.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2074"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d86c922c-e586-4410-9763-a7005c4fd30f": {"page_content": "What does confirmation mean?.\nTo confirm something means to show us true in some way?.\nOr it just means the observation is consistent with the theory, but we've already said here in this chapter already that, you know, there are an infinite number of theories that could be consistent with any set of observations.\nFine.\nSo we don't need to worry about confirmation.\nAnd I think for similar reasons, we don't need to worry about corroboration, either.\nAll of these things are kind of on the positive side of the ledger, trying to support a theory in some way.\nBut we don't need to support a theory at all if it's the only existing theory.\nAnd this is our situation in science, and everywhere we have our theory.\nIt is exceedingly rare.\nExceedingly, I'm just laughing at myself because I think I've said this phrase so often recently.\nIt is exceedingly rare to have multiple theories of anything at all.\nYou know, at the moment, you look at something like dark energy, and people might very well say to me, well, this is a problem, but you look up the Wikipedia article, and there's all sorts of theories about dark energy, and I would just say no, no.\nNone of them count as theories in the sense that I'm talking about them.\nWhat a theory is in my usage of the word here.\nNow, of course, theory can just mean any old wild guess that you like.\nBut it should mean good explanation.\nAnd this is what we're really talking about when we're talking about having multiple competing theories that make a claim about reality.\nWhat we're saying is, multiple competing good, either two, good explanations of reality, hard to vary, hard to vary accounts of the world, postulating the existence of specific physical things in the case of Newtonian gravity, the postulation of a physical force, an action at a distance that travels instantaneously between bodies.\nThat's postulating a real physical thing that we can experimentally test for, and in fact, fails the test.\nAnd on the other hand, you've got general relativity postulating the existence of a true fabric of space time that can bend and warp in the presence of mass and energy.\nAnd we can test for that too.\nAnd in fact, passes the test.\nNow, not to say that it's confirmed as true or anything like that.\nIt's just, it's gone unrefuted.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2200"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89a5103f-8cca-469c-96f4-7943ff9de4c3": {"page_content": "And on the other hand, you've got general relativity postulating the existence of a true fabric of space time that can bend and warp in the presence of mass and energy.\nAnd we can test for that too.\nAnd in fact, passes the test.\nNow, not to say that it's confirmed as true or anything like that.\nIt's just, it's gone unrefuted.\nAnd if you want to explain stuff like gravitational lensing or the bending of light during an eclipse or what's going on with a black hole, you've only got one explanation.\nNow, forget support.\nWe don't need to support it.\nLike, why what's the point of what what help is support in that situation?.\nLet's say we had a hundred points of support.\nGreat.\nWell, what's the rival?.\nThere's no rival.\nIt's not like there's something else over there with 90 points of support.\nThere's nothing.\nThe next best thing you've got is Newton's theory of gravity.\nIt's already refuted.\nIt can't do any of this other stuff.\nIt can't explain precisely what's going on with gravitational lensing.\nIt can't explain black holes in the same way.\nIt can't explain gravitational waves, someone and so forth, just so much stuff now.\nThere's only one thing.\nAnd this is true across science.\nI mentioned earlier, the theory of acids and bases.\nThe modern understanding of that, whatever the chemists call it now, there is no rival theory.\nThere used to be different rival theories about what an acid and a base were was and how they pay.\nBut the history of science shows that there was this gradual process of incremental improvement where the previous theories of acids and bases were ruled out leaving us with the modern understanding.\nThe same as the history of the atoms and other interesting one where people just didn't know they kind of had the idea there was an atom.\nBut what was the structure of an atom?.\nNo one knew was it kind of like this plum pudding model where the protons and neutrons and electrons were just mashed together.\nIt took a while for us to escape from that view to moving towards something that looked kind of like a solar system to today where you've got this set of fungible instances of an electron in all birds with scare quotes around the world.\nBut the nucleus where the nucleus is made of protons which are really made of quarks and the electrostatic force and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is sort of intention.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2317"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e3d7f7a4-b1ee-4a97-bff4-6db42bba6044": {"page_content": "It took a while for us to escape from that view to moving towards something that looked kind of like a solar system to today where you've got this set of fungible instances of an electron in all birds with scare quotes around the world.\nBut the nucleus where the nucleus is made of protons which are really made of quarks and the electrostatic force and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is sort of intention.\nAnd this is why you have atoms.\nSo this is our modern understanding and it is refuted all the previous theories of atomic theory.\nSo is true at acids and bases.\nSo is true of gravity.\nAnd so this is our situation.\nAnd by the way, not just in science.\nYou can talk about theories of history.\nYou can talk about theories of aesthetics.\nYou can talk about theories of morality.\nNow sure in some of these areas there are still debates raging.\nBut generally speaking, broadly speaking, we have our theory and explanation and there are no rivals.\nWhen a problem arises then creativity needs to start.\nThen you need to start thinking up new explanations.\nAnd if you're really lucky and you try really hard then you'll find the explanation, the explanation.\nYou want to, it's not you create too.\nYou'll be in a very fortunate position if you were able to create two rival solutions to the problem that you have.\nBut that usually isn't what happens.\nYou've got an existing theory.\nYou make an observation which doesn't seem to fit with your existing theory.\nSo you've got this problem.\nSo then you create another theory.\nAnd so then you figure, ah, this theory, this theory explains why that observation doesn't fit with that theory.\nBut my new theory, it does explain the observation.\nThen you've got, you're back to one again.\nYou've gone from one to one.\nThis is what happens.\nOkay.\nSo yeah, never mind corroborating, never mind confirming, never mind saying that one theory is more probable than any other.\nYou've just, you've got the one, you've got the one.\nOkay.\nLet me keep on going.\nThe crypto inductive says having just been told basically that by David, quote, crypto inductive is here saying, very interesting.\nI now understand the role of a theory's refuted rivals in the justification of its predictions under inductivism.\nObservation was supposed to be primary, skipping a little.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2420"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e390869f-caf5-4ce3-9049-23680375b920": {"page_content": "You've just, you've got the one, you've got the one.\nOkay.\nLet me keep on going.\nThe crypto inductive says having just been told basically that by David, quote, crypto inductive is here saying, very interesting.\nI now understand the role of a theory's refuted rivals in the justification of its predictions under inductivism.\nObservation was supposed to be primary, skipping a little.\nAnd he goes on to say in the popularion picture of scientific progress, it is not observations, but problems, controversies, theories and criticism that are primary, end quote, perfect, wonderful.\nThat's exactly right.\nThe crypto inductivist has got it.\nHe goes under say, experiments are designed and performed only to resolve controversies.\nTherefore, only experimental results that actually do refute a theory and not just any theory.\nIt must have been a genuine contender in a rational controversy, constitute corroboration, pausing their my reflection.\nYeah, I don't need the corroboration bit, right?.\nSo you've got therefore only experimental results that actually do refute a theory and not just any theory, it must have been a genuine contender in a rational controversy.\nWe don't need to say that constitutes corroboration, although as I said in my last episode, unless of course you think this corroboration thing is a synonym for refutation, which would be a bit weird, we don't need both.\nWe can just say we've got these competing theories, one of which gets refuted leaving us with only one.\nNow, you could call that process.\nWell, we've corroborated this one existing theory.\nIt just gets a little bit misleading.\nThat's all I would say.\nIt suggests that we've confirmed there's more likely true, something like that.\nIt contains more truth.\nIt's closer to describing reality than the one that has been refuted, of course.\nIt's necessarily the case.\nSkipping a bit and the crypto inductivist goes on to say.\nSuppose that a theory has passed through this whole process.\nOnce upon a time it had rivals, then experiments were performed and all the rivals were refuted, but it itself was not refuted.\nThus it was corroborated.\nWhat is it about being corroborated that justifies ever lying on it in the future?.\nDavid says, since all its rivals have been refuted, they are no longer rationally tenable.\nThe corroborated theory is the only rationally tenable theory remaining, pausing the MRI reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2542"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e1f84243-9e50-45dd-8cdf-b63ccec1fd7f": {"page_content": "Once upon a time it had rivals, then experiments were performed and all the rivals were refuted, but it itself was not refuted.\nThus it was corroborated.\nWhat is it about being corroborated that justifies ever lying on it in the future?.\nDavid says, since all its rivals have been refuted, they are no longer rationally tenable.\nThe corroborated theory is the only rationally tenable theory remaining, pausing the MRI reflection.\nAgain, I think this might be the last time I just go back and say this sort of thing.\nAgain, it would seem to me that we can just do away with that way of saying things.\nInstead of saying the corroborated theory is the only rationally tenable theory remaining, you just say the unrefuted theory is the only rationally tenable theory remaining.\nAgain, if corroborated means unrefuted very well, the crypto inductivist goes on to say it.\nThat only shifts the focus from the future import of past corroboration to the future import of past refutation.\nThe same problem remains why exactly is an experimentally refuted theory not rationally tenable?.\nIs it that having even one false consequence implies that it cannot be true?.\nDavid says, yes, and the crypto inductivist goes on to say, but surely as regards the future applicability of the theory that is not a logically relevant criticism.\nAdmittedly, a refuted theory cannot be true universally, in particular it cannot have been true in the past when it was tested, but it could still have many true consequences, and in particular it could be universally true in the future.\nAnd David responds, this true in the past and true in the future terminology is misleading.\nEach specific prediction of a theory is either true or false.\nThat cannot change.\nWhat you really mean is that though the refuted theory is strictly false, because it makes some false predictions, all its predictions about the future might know that less be true.\nIn other words, a different theory, which makes the same predictions about the future, but different predictions about the past might be true.\nThe crypto inductivist says, if you like.\nSo instead of asking why a refuted theory is not rationally tenable, I sure strictly speaking of asked, why does the refutation of a theory also render untenable every variant of the theory that agrees with it about the future?.\nEven a variant that has not been refuted, David says.\nIt is not that refutation renders such theories untenable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2700"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58bb7889-b577-4bab-9d5d-2db2c7955f79": {"page_content": "The crypto inductivist says, if you like.\nSo instead of asking why a refuted theory is not rationally tenable, I sure strictly speaking of asked, why does the refutation of a theory also render untenable every variant of the theory that agrees with it about the future?.\nEven a variant that has not been refuted, David says.\nIt is not that refutation renders such theories untenable.\nIt is just that sometimes they already are untenable by virtue of being bad explanations.\nAnd that is when science can make progress.\nFor a theory to win an argument, all its rivals must be untenable.\nAnd that includes all the variants of the rivals, which anyone has thought of.\nBut remember, it is only the rivals which anyone has thought of that need be untenable.\nFor example, in the case of gravity, no one has ever proposed a tenable theory that agrees with the prevailing one in all its tested predictions, but differs in its predictions about future experiments.\nI am sure that such theories are possible.\nFor instance, the successful to the prevailing theory will presumably be one of them, but if no one has yet thought of such a theory, how can anyone act upon it?.\nAnd the crypto inductive says, what do you mean no one has yet thought of such a theory?.\nI could easily think of one right now.\nAnd David says, I very much doubt that you can.\nAnd the crypto inductive says, of course I can.\nHere it is.\nWhenever you day the jump from higher places in ways that would, according to the prevailing theory, kill you, you float instead.\nApart from that, the prevailing theory holds universally end quote.\nOkay.\nI am not going to read the next few pages of, well, I'll read a little bit.\nI'll read a little bit, but basically the whole idea is here that the crypto inductive is claims to have invented a theory on the spot, namely that the prevailing view of gravity holds always all the time universally, except that in this particular case, just ad hoc, he floats.\nNow, I say, as David will go on to say, of course, this is not a theory.\nThis is not an explanation.\nThis is not genuinely solving any problem at all.\nIt's just an ad hoc modification with an assumption that comes out of nowhere that the whole purpose of science is a problem solving exercise.\nThat's what we're doing.\nThis solves no problems.\nIn fact, it introduces problems.\nIt breaks the existing theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2791"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e276d13a-45e7-4f1b-92fa-1090a988c124": {"page_content": "Now, I say, as David will go on to say, of course, this is not a theory.\nThis is not an explanation.\nThis is not genuinely solving any problem at all.\nIt's just an ad hoc modification with an assumption that comes out of nowhere that the whole purpose of science is a problem solving exercise.\nThat's what we're doing.\nThis solves no problems.\nIn fact, it introduces problems.\nIt breaks the existing theory.\nAnd this is what David says.\nSo let me just read the relevant part, because just as with David, it was David's character.\nThe crypto inductive is an irritating person.\nThese people almost exist in real life.\nAnyway, so the crypto inductive says, what's wrong with this theory?.\nWhy can't I just to make this ad hoc modification, you know, what fault, what mistake have I made?.\nDavid explains quote, just about every fault in the Perparian book, your theory is constructed from the prevailing one by appending an unexplained qualification about me floating.\nThat qualification is in effect a new theory, but you have given no argument either against the prevailing theory of my gravitational properties or in favor of the new one.\nYou have subjected your new theory to no criticism other than what I'm giving it now, and no experiments testing.\nIt does not solve, or even purport to solve any current problem.\nNor have you suggested a new interesting problem that it could solve.\nWorst of all, your qualification explains nothing but spoils the explanation of gravity that is the basis of the prevailing theory.\nIt is this explanation that justifies our relying on the prevailing theory and not on yours.\nThus, by all rational criteria, your proposed qualification can be summarily rejected, end quote.\nI think that, you know, this is the point at which the judge comes along and hammers the gavel, that's case closed kind of thing.\nBut still, the crypto inductive is going on and on and on trying to say the ways in which, well, you know, you're still not justified.\nYou get to a point the crypto inductive is where he says, well, I could use this new verb on X floats to describe situations in which you might fall to the ground, but in other cases, you just happen to float unsupported so I can invent new language and stuff like that.\nSo he says, crypto inductive says, but when the theory is translated into my language, no qualification is manifest.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=2952"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8eea3833-9dfc-41ab-b26a-fca45f158ab6": {"page_content": "You get to a point the crypto inductive is where he says, well, I could use this new verb on X floats to describe situations in which you might fall to the ground, but in other cases, you just happen to float unsupported so I can invent new language and stuff like that.\nSo he says, crypto inductive says, but when the theory is translated into my language, no qualification is manifest.\nAnd on the contrary, a manifest qualification appears in the very statement of the prevailing theory and David says, so it does, but not all languages are equal.\nLanguages are theories.\nIn the vocabulary and grammar, they embody substantial assertions about the world.\nWhenever we state a theory, only a small part of its content is explicit.\nThe rest is carried by the language.\nLike all theories, languages are invented and selected for their ability to solve certain problems.\nIn this case, the problems are those of expressing other theories in forms in which it is convenient to apply them and to compare and criticize them.\nOne of the most important ways in which languages solve these problems is to embody implicitly theories that are uncontroversial and taken for granted, while allowing things that need to be stated or argued about to be expressed succinctly and cleanly.\nAnd the crypto inductive accepts that.\nAnd David goes on to say, thus it is no accident when a language chooses to cover the conceptual ground with one set of concepts rather than another.\nIt reflects the current state of the speaker's problem situation.\nThat is why the form of your theory in English is a good indication of its status, vis-\u00e0-vis the current problem situation, whether it solves problems or exacerbates them, but it is not the form of your theory that I'm complaining about.\nIt is the substance.\nMy complaint is that your theory solves nothing and only exacerbates the problem situation.\nThis defect is manifest when the theory is expressed in English, and implicit when it is expressed in your language, but it is no less severe for that.\nI could state my complaint equally well in English or in scientific jargon or in your proposed language or in any language capable of expressing the discussion we have been having.\nIt is a superior maxim that one should always be willing to carry on the discussion in the opponent's terminology end quote.\nNow, I would just say there is a lot there that is extremely useful for day to day life.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3033"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4267906d-1053-4490-9b40-e740545da602": {"page_content": "I could state my complaint equally well in English or in scientific jargon or in your proposed language or in any language capable of expressing the discussion we have been having.\nIt is a superior maxim that one should always be willing to carry on the discussion in the opponent's terminology end quote.\nNow, I would just say there is a lot there that is extremely useful for day to day life.\nIf you are engaged in a discussion with someone, especially in philosophical discussions where people tend to like to just philosophise in completely abstract terms, divorce from physical reality or any other kind of reality for that matter, a thought experiment, a trolley problem, and that kind of thing, what you want to say to them in these situations is a simple question.\nAsk a simple question, what problem are you solving?.\nWhat problem are you solving?.\nOkay, and let them go down the road, and if it's a completely abstract problem about, you know, all these people are tied to a railway and you have a lever and say, well, hold on, that is an imaginary situation.\nCan we bring it back to something in the real world?.\nAnd let's talk about something in the real world and let's get to, let's say, moral principles or what's physically possible in the real world.\nAnd what one would really do in the real world because that's imaginary.\nThat's never happened before.\nAnd insofar as things like that might have happened somewhere at some point, we call those things edge cases.\nIt doesn't affect the general rule, the general approach to life that people have.\nAnd also in these situations and what David has just hinted at there is that language is there to solve a problem.\nAnd so again, once more, you listen to certain philosophers on certain podcasts at times, people get interviewed, and they invent words, they invent terms of vocabulary, and they think that by inventing these words, they're solving some problem.\nBut in fact, what they're doing, they're exacerbating the problem.\nThey're generating issues that weren't there before, the prevailing existing view, the way of talking about these things, solve certain problems, might have certain open problems, but their invention of new words, it just introduces yet more problems without solving anything existing.\nThey're often trying to say, I've discovered something because I've invented a term.\nI hear I've got a piece of jargon, and that's solved.\nIt doesn't dissolve the problem at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3154"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b3258e9-14fa-4720-aa5d-78a038c71f17": {"page_content": "They're generating issues that weren't there before, the prevailing existing view, the way of talking about these things, solve certain problems, might have certain open problems, but their invention of new words, it just introduces yet more problems without solving anything existing.\nThey're often trying to say, I've discovered something because I've invented a term.\nI hear I've got a piece of jargon, and that's solved.\nIt doesn't dissolve the problem at all.\nYou're describing the problem using new bits of language and inventing that's proliferation of language, neologisms is just something I always irritate.\nSometimes it's unavoidable.\nOf course, when a scientist, when I think out, really truly does come up with a solution because they postulate the existence of entities that either two we didn't know about.\nOf course, you need a new word for that.\nYou need the word electron.\nWhen someone has figured out that there is this little particle that carries this little negative charge, when you need a word for that, fine, fine.\nWe accept that.\nBut there are many cases where the proliferation of language seeks to obscure what's really going on, rather than solving an actual problem.\nWhy's ask?.\nWhat problem are you trying to solve?.\nYou're introducing this new term.\nWhat is the specific problem you're trying to solve?.\nLet's talk about solutions rather than inventing words that are only describing a problem that's out there.\nI'll hop off my hobby course now.\nI'll pick it up where David is going on to just hammer his point home to the crypto inductivist.\nHe says, quote, your theory asserts the existence of a physical anomaly, which is not present according to the prevailing theory.\nThe anomaly is my alleged immunity from gravity.\nCertainly, you can invent a language which expresses this anomaly implicitly so that statements of your theory of gravity need not refer to it explicitly.\nBut refer to what they do arose by any other name would smell a sweet.\nSuppose that you, indeed, suppose that everyone were a native speaker of your language and believed your theory of gravity to be true.\nSuppose that we all took it entirely for granted and thought it's so natural that we use the same word for X for to describe what you or I would do if we jumped over the railing.\nNone of that alters in the slightest degree.\nThe obvious difference there would be between my response to gravity and everything else's.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3264"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9b202fe2-3ae5-431b-afa5-82ed284c0d88": {"page_content": "Suppose that you, indeed, suppose that everyone were a native speaker of your language and believed your theory of gravity to be true.\nSuppose that we all took it entirely for granted and thought it's so natural that we use the same word for X for to describe what you or I would do if we jumped over the railing.\nNone of that alters in the slightest degree.\nThe obvious difference there would be between my response to gravity and everything else's.\nIf you fell over the railing, you might well envy me on the way down.\nYou might well think if only I could respond to gravity as David does, rather than in this entirely different way that I do, and perfectly right.\nRemember what's going on?.\nThe guy is claiming the crypto inductive is claiming that if David jumps over you know he's going to float.\nBut everywhere else, every other time anything else happens, the prevailing theory just operates as normal.\nThis is one of those situations where you can imagine a philosopher making this argument.\nHe's like, well, why are you even asking me, what problem are you solving?.\nThey're saying, well, I want to figure out exactly why we should justify the predictions of our existing explanation.\nWell, I'm telling you, there is only one explanation.\nAnd then they go down this long road where it even requires the invention of a new language in order to try and explain a problem that doesn't exist.\nIt's just not a problem.\nIt just is an issue that David is going to float and everything else is going to fall.\nThat's not the situation we're in.\nIf it was, then that would be a genuine problem as David says there.\nThen everyone would be wondering, why is it that the laws of gravity appear to have selected David Deutsch out of everyone in the entire universe for special treatment?.\nWhat's going on there?.\nThat would be a problem, and there would need to be an account of that.\nBut that's not the situation we're in.\nIt's all in the crypto inductive.\nIt's head, kind of like a trolley problem, right?.\nIt's all in your head that you need to push the fat man off the bridge in order to save the others.\nIt's in your head.\nThat's not happening.\nDo we talk about something real?.\nThen that's where the interesting philosophy comes in.\nPhilosophy is most interesting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3376"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e4f2af1-4dae-4a70-a1ca-85e2f64b09b8": {"page_content": "But that's not the situation we're in.\nIt's all in the crypto inductive.\nIt's head, kind of like a trolley problem, right?.\nIt's all in your head that you need to push the fat man off the bridge in order to save the others.\nIt's in your head.\nThat's not happening.\nDo we talk about something real?.\nThen that's where the interesting philosophy comes in.\nPhilosophy is most interesting.\nNot when you're talking about to my mind, the things like Descartes Demon and the simulation hypothesis and a far distant future existential threats.\nIt's the here and now.\nIt's problems right now that need addressing right now, and which people are struggling to find answers to.\nAnd there may be some people just give up and they go, oh, that's too hard.\nI'm not going to worry about trying to deal with the issue right now of things like coercion and existence society.\nLet me talk about the far distant future.\nI can deal with that.\nI can deal with the science fiction reality of the year 3000 when these, the AIs are going to take over.\nThat's more fun to talk about.\nThis is philosophy though.\nThis is sometimes what passes for philosophy.\nAnd the crypto inductive is still just rattling on.\nI encourage you to read the entire chapter.\nI'm not going to, as I say, so I'm skipping a number of pages and I'll just pick it up where David says, quote, theories postulating anomalies without explaining them are less likely than their rivals to make true predictions.\nMore generally, it is a principle of rationality that theories are postulated only in order to solve problems.\nTherefore, any postulate which solves no problem is to be rejected.\nThat is because a good explanation qualified by such a postulate becomes a bad explanation.\nEnd quote.\nYes.\nAnd as I was just saying about, you know, philosophers who like to consider problems of the distant future, what's going to happen in the year 2500 when the AGI are finally here?.\nAre they going to take over all of humanity?.\nIt's like you're inventing a problem of the future.\nWe're not there yet.\nThat's not our problem right now.\nYou know, how we should start preparing for war with the AGI or with the aliens that we haven't detected yet.\nThis kind of stuff is solving no problem.\nIt's not really part of rational discussion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3502"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2861cfff-bdb8-4c6f-8341-6f1b72b9bb6b": {"page_content": "Are they going to take over all of humanity?.\nIt's like you're inventing a problem of the future.\nWe're not there yet.\nThat's not our problem right now.\nYou know, how we should start preparing for war with the AGI or with the aliens that we haven't detected yet.\nThis kind of stuff is solving no problem.\nIt's not really part of rational discussion.\nI mean, it's fun, but it's more in the realm as I like to say of science fiction.\nNow, science fiction can be useful.\nAnd, you know, this is kind of a fun thing to do late on a Friday night after you've had a beer or wine with a friend to discuss the possibilities of the encounter between alien life and humanity and what problems might be involved in.\nBut it's not our problem situation right now.\nIt's this is not the problem we have right now.\nThere are problems right now.\nI'm not saying anyone should not necessarily think about those things, but those things can't be fun.\nWhat I'm saying is that that's not a part of serious philosophical discussion and rationality.\nAs much as people get out there onto podcasts and start talking about these things, you're not solving any problems right now.\nThere are problems right now.\nThere are problems right now that a philosopher should direct their attention to.\nPeople love to listen to stories and hypotheses about what UFOs are and people speculate about what these different things are.\nBut in so far as it's a problem, it's not a serious problem.\nIf the Star Destroyer populated by stormtroopers appears in the sky and is as big as an entire city, then we've got a problem.\nLet's talk about it then.\nShould we prepare for that?.\nNo.\nWhy not?.\nWhy shouldn't we prepare for the distant future of things?.\nBecause there is an infinite number of things we can imagine that are terrible off into the distant future.\nBut learned people all tend to agree that this particular problem about catastrophic AI, apocalypse is the most important problem.\nI don't care.\nI don't care that there's so many of these people talking about that particular thing.\nIt's not our situation now.\nI think that those people have perhaps too much time on their hands.\nThey should be focusing their brainpower on problems of today, right now, rather than being concerned about existential threats of tomorrow.\nBut of course, people can do what they like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3626"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3de76f68-a17a-4e89-9c80-33192b51e576": {"page_content": "I don't care.\nI don't care that there's so many of these people talking about that particular thing.\nIt's not our situation now.\nI think that those people have perhaps too much time on their hands.\nThey should be focusing their brainpower on problems of today, right now, rather than being concerned about existential threats of tomorrow.\nBut of course, people can do what they like.\nOkay, I want to pick up something that I mentioned my preface in the immediate previous episode of ToKCast when I was talking about corroboration.\nAnd the issue is this, let me just read apart here.\nAnd the crypto inductivist is saying that he's beginning to agree with David.\nAnd he says, quote, now that I understand there really is an objective difference between theories which make unexplained predictions and theories which don't, I must admit that this does look promising as a solution to the problem of induction.\nYou seem to have discovered a way of justifying your future alliance on the theory of gravity, given only the past problem situation, skipping a little in David says, it was not AI who discovered this.\nAnd the crypto inductivist says, well, I don't think Papa did either.\nFor one thing, Papa did not think that scientific theories could be justified at all.\nYou make a careful distinction between theories being justified by observations as inductive as think and being justified by argument.\nBut Papa made no such distinction.\nAnd in regard to the problem of induction, he actually said that although future predictions of a theory cannot be justified, we should act as though they were.\nAnd David says, I don't think he said that exactly.\nIf he did, he didn't really mean it, pausing their just my reflection.\nYeah, I kind of get this impression as well from my reading of Papa, especially recently, and as I said in the last episode, Papa just wrote so many thousands of words, thousands of pages, thousands of words.\nAnd so it gets hard.\nIt's like me talking here on talk guys, you kind of, it's hard to keep track of what you did say in the past.\nI feel as though I've got a reasonably coherent worldview, and people ask me about aspects of it, and I can respond near immediately to what I think is the case.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "22894b23-6a34-47f6-b911-5f6e39e279f2": {"page_content": "And so it gets hard.\nIt's like me talking here on talk guys, you kind of, it's hard to keep track of what you did say in the past.\nI feel as though I've got a reasonably coherent worldview, and people ask me about aspects of it, and I can respond near immediately to what I think is the case.\nBut I can certainly imagine miss speaking now and again, or not quite constructing the sentences, precisely in the same way that I did in the past as I will in the future, because it's just hard to keep track of everything.\nWe're human.\nNow, Papa was operating in a time where he's writing by hand or he's typing or whatever it happens to be the case and trying to keep track of everything he's written.\nIndeed, he says of himself that he changed his mind between the logic of scientific discovery through realism in the aim of science and various other things.\nAnd I do get the impression that he said, well, you know, he didn't really mean to say things like, you can confirm your theory.\nOkay, there are confirming instances of the theory.\nThat's one thing he actually says.\nHe actually rejects a version of himself in realism in the aim of science.\nAnd so, let me just repeat what David says there, or basically on the same topic.\nThe crypto inductive has suggested, in regard to the problem of induction, he, Papa, said that although future predictions of a theory cannot be justified, we should act as though they were.\nDavid says, I don't think he said that exactly.\nIf he did, he didn't really mean it.\nThe crypto inductive says, what?.\nAnd David says, or if he did mean it, he was mistaken.\nWhy are you so upset?.\nIt is perfectly possible for a person to discover a new theory.\nIn this case, popularing epistemology, but nevertheless, to continue to hold beliefs, that contradicted the more profound the theory is, the more likely this is to happen.\nCrypto inductive says, are you claiming to understand Papa's theory better than he did himself?.\nAnd David says, I know the no nor care.\nThe reverence that philosophers show for the historical sources of ideas is very perverse, you know.\nIn science, we do not consider the discovery of a theory to have any special insight into it.\nOn the contrary, we hardly ever consult original sources.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3829"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9cb6dda2-fd29-47c7-a3e9-4dab2116dc41": {"page_content": "Crypto inductive says, are you claiming to understand Papa's theory better than he did himself?.\nAnd David says, I know the no nor care.\nThe reverence that philosophers show for the historical sources of ideas is very perverse, you know.\nIn science, we do not consider the discovery of a theory to have any special insight into it.\nOn the contrary, we hardly ever consult original sources.\nThey invariably become obsolete, as the problem situations that prompted them are transformed by the discoveries themselves.\nFor example, most relativity theorists today understand iron science theory better than he did.\nThe founders of quantum theory made a complete mess of understanding their own theory.\nSuch shaky beginnings are to be expected.\nAnd when we stand upon the shoulders of giants, it may not be all that hard to see further than they did.\nBut in any case, surely it is more interesting to argue about what the truth is than about what some particular thinker, however great, did or did not think end quote.\nIsn't that marvelous?.\nThat's perfect.\nI agree entirely with that.\nNo one learning science learns from the original research papers.\nNo one tempted to learn special relativity.\nYou should go back to iron science original paper, presumably in German, by the way.\nNo one consults the original struggling attempts to understand the photoelectric effect and the beginnings of quantum theory.\nNo, you don't even go to ever its papers.\nYou go to the beginning of infinity.\nYou go to modern accounts of how to understand this stuff, modern textbooks in many, many cases, explaining so much better.\nSometimes the scientists, people can be brilliant scientists and make great insights and yet be terrible communicators of their ideas.\nIt takes other reasonably good scientists who are better communicators to distill out what is actually being said.\nAnd then perhaps textbook writers who are a different kind of person again to distill out what the good communicators of science are actually saying about the truth of science.\nAnd then you end up with textbooks, which can be quite good accounts of our best existing theories.\nAnd then eventually after all of that, you might get popular accounts of what's going on, which can be even better.\nSometimes worse, sometimes misleading.\nSometimes they introduce yet new misconceptions.\nBut you know, this is if you want to understand something is why you should read widely a whole bunch of different things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=3922"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cd5f5435-9bec-4a48-8c67-eec3371c1691": {"page_content": "Certainly this has been my experience of reading some of the research papers, reading some of the textbooks and then reading some of the popular science books and being able to see what they all have in common where they agree on what the experiments are saying, what actually makes rational sense, what actually accounts for what's going on, what has the best explanations, which is one of the reasons I am so fixated on David Deutsch's worldview, which talks so much about explanations, puts explanations at the center of rational understanding that if you don't understand something, that's a problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4080"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89410eaa-0896-417b-9bbc-848da4e7fa31": {"page_content": "But it might not be you that's the problem.\nIt could be the person ostensibly doing the explaining, the textbook, the lecturer, whatever.\nThey could just be non understanding the phenomena themselves and giving you a non explanation, being evasive.\nAnd so you have to somehow or other find the person that knows the stuff and is able to explain it well.\nWhat you don't want in physics, for example, is an instrumentalist.\nAnd yet they are a dime a dozen.\nThey're out there and they just say, well, let's just crank through the formula.\nLet's just figure out how to do the calculations.\nThere you go, you're a physicist.\nWell, you know, you might be competent at the mathematics at turning the handle, which at one end you put in your initial conditions and out the other end you get your final conditions, you get your solution.\nAnd you don't really understand what's going on.\nYou don't understand what the turning of the handle is really all about.\nYou may not appreciate what reality really consists of.\nIn fact, you may have even been told, you can't understand what reality consists of, not even approximately.\nThere is no understanding of reality.\nThe best you can do is to predict the outcome of experiments.\nAnd this is all wrong.\nOkay, this is all wrong.\nBut people who first discover a theory, they're struggling to understand stuff.\nAnd so they're throwing stuff at the blackboard and the whiteboard.\nand, you know, writing papers and trying to get other people to see if they can understand it as well and know if they agree with the results and what their conclusions might be and people are hypothesizing things.\nAnd it takes some time for the dust to settle, so to speak.\nOkay, so I'm going to pick it up where the crypto inductivist almost gets the idea and then falls back into bad ways of thinking because they say, quote, look, you David have justified a theory about the future, the prevailing theory of gravity, as being more reliable than another theory, the one I proposed.\nEven though they are both consistent with all currently known observations, since the prevailing theory applies both to the future and to the past, you have justified the proposition that, as regards gravity, the future resembles the past.\nAnd the same would hold whenever you justify a theory as reliable on the grounds that it is corroborated.\nNow, in order to go from corroborated to reliable, you examine the theory's explanatory power.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4116"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dde01101-21f5-4173-a8cd-4f7cfc72e939": {"page_content": "Even though they are both consistent with all currently known observations, since the prevailing theory applies both to the future and to the past, you have justified the proposition that, as regards gravity, the future resembles the past.\nAnd the same would hold whenever you justify a theory as reliable on the grounds that it is corroborated.\nNow, in order to go from corroborated to reliable, you examine the theory's explanatory power.\nSo what you have shown is that what we might call the principle of seeking better explanations, together with some observations, yes and arguments, imply the future will, in many respects resemble the past, and that is a principle of induction.\nIf your explanation principle implies a principle of induction, then logically it is a principle of induction.\nSo inductivism is true after all, and a principle of induction does indeed have to be postulated, explicitly or implicitly, before we can predict the future.\nAnd David says, oh dear, this inductivism really is a virulent disease.\nHaving gone into a mission for only a few seconds, it now returns more violently than before.\nAnd the crypto inductivist says, does perpyrean rationalism justify ad hominem arguments as well?.\nI ask for information only, David says, hi, apologies.\nLet me go straight to the substance of what you said.\nYes, I have justified an assertion about the future.\nYou say this implies that the future resembles the past.\nWell, evacuously, yes, in as much as any theory about the future would assert that it resembled the past in some sense.\nBut this inference that the future resembles the past is not the sort after principle of induction.\nFor, we could neither derive nor justify any theory or prediction about the future from it.\nFor example, we could not use it to distinguish your theory of gravity from the prevailing one for they both say in their own way that the future resembles the past.\nYes, end quote.\nAnd by the way, he, an explanation that sort of suggests that the part resembles a future, as David says there, well, that's a vacuous claim.\nIt's like a universal theory of gravity or anything else is universal, which means the future resembles the past, the past resembles the future, the near resembles the far in this respect of obeying that law.\nThat's all.\nIt's like, you know, any claim in relativity about the constancy of the speed of light, the speed of light is constant.\nThe speed of light was constant at the beginning of the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4227"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ccc69b5f-997d-4a38-bc31-5ffe27394cc3": {"page_content": "It's like a universal theory of gravity or anything else is universal, which means the future resembles the past, the past resembles the future, the near resembles the far in this respect of obeying that law.\nThat's all.\nIt's like, you know, any claim in relativity about the constancy of the speed of light, the speed of light is constant.\nThe speed of light was constant at the beginning of the universe.\nThe speed of light was constant 10 billion years ago.\nThe speed of light was constant one billion years ago.\nThe speed of light is constant today and the speed of light will be constant tomorrow.\nThat's not a principle of abduction.\nThat's just because you're saying that these things are the same is not going to justify some theory.\nIt's just a logical conclusion, a logical thing that you can say that falls out of what we understand about relatively our best explanation of space, time, and light in this particular case.\nAs David goes on to say, and I'm skipping it, but he says, quote, nothing in the concepts of rational argument or explanation relates the future to the past in any special way.\nNothing is postulated about anything resembling anything.\nNothing of that sort would help if it were postulated in the vacuous sense in which the very concept of explanation implies that the future resembles the past, it nevertheless implies nothing specific about the future.\nSo it is not a principle of induction.\nThere is no principle of induction.\nThere is no process of induction.\nNo one ever uses them or anything like them.\nAnd there is no longer a problem of induction.\nIs that clear now?.\nAnd the crypto inductive says, yes, please excuse me for a few moments while I ingest my entire worldview.\nAnd David goes on to explain, well, let me read part of his explanation.\nHe says, quote, in response to the crypto inductive.\nAs we have agreed, your theory consists objectively of a theory of gravity, the prevailing theory, qualified by an unexplained prediction about me.\nIt says that I would float unsupported, unsupported means without any upward force acting on me.\nSo the suggestion is that I would be immune to the force of gravity, which would otherwise pull me down.\nBut according to the general theory of relativity, gravity is not a force, but a manifestation of the curvature of space time.\nThis curvature explains why unsupported objects like myself and the earth move closer together with time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4356"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e620df2a-03d0-4986-bed4-28a893e11364": {"page_content": "It says that I would float unsupported, unsupported means without any upward force acting on me.\nSo the suggestion is that I would be immune to the force of gravity, which would otherwise pull me down.\nBut according to the general theory of relativity, gravity is not a force, but a manifestation of the curvature of space time.\nThis curvature explains why unsupported objects like myself and the earth move closer together with time.\nTherefore, in the light of modern physics, your theory is presumably saying there is an upward force on me as a required to hold me at a constant distance from the earth.\nBut where does that force come from?.\nAnd how does it behave?.\nEnd quote.\nDavid does go on.\nBut yeah, we can just see here that this unsupported assertion about reality that the crypto inductive has introduced creates more problems.\nIt doesn't solve anything.\nIt creates more problems.\nAnd our project is in science and everywhere else to solve problems so that we can move on to better problems.\nNot introduce new problems that weren't there before, so that we've actually ruined the existing solution.\nNo, that's not what we're supposed to be doing.\nAnd this, by the way, is why, you know, there's this trope idea among physicists that retired engineers tend to go into proving Einstein wrong.\nYou know, using simple algebra, they show you that, well, the speed of light can't be constant.\nOr you can travel fast in the speed of light.\nOr any number of things that there's no such thing as the relativity of similar to the relative of time.\nAnd all this kind of stuff.\nSo the problem with these approaches for any physicists to receive such a letter from a retired engineer to be done fair to these poor retired engineers.\nI'm sure they're not all retired engineers, but physicists know what I'm talking about.\nThey receive emails and letters of this kind, you know, such and such has got the new theory of relativity.\nThey're never solving any problem.\nThey're never solving an existing problem in science.\nWhat they're doing is they're objecting on common-sense grounds to some conclusion of relativity, let's say.\nThey don't like the idea that there should be a relativity of similarity that things appear to happen at the same time or not, depending upon whether you're moving or not with those things that are happening at the same time.\nOr they don't like the idea that lengths can contract.\nIf you move faster, then things get shorter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4484"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b7e8bd12-8206-437f-a011-7fd5c9f6d9b9": {"page_content": "What they're doing is they're objecting on common-sense grounds to some conclusion of relativity, let's say.\nThey don't like the idea that there should be a relativity of similarity that things appear to happen at the same time or not, depending upon whether you're moving or not with those things that are happening at the same time.\nOr they don't like the idea that lengths can contract.\nIf you move faster, then things get shorter.\nThey don't like the idea that the speed of light is constant.\nAny number of things like this.\nAnd so because they don't like it, they invent a new theory that far from solving any problems breaks the existing theory, the theory of relativity and introduces new problems.\nSo then it means that, well, we can't explain what's going on if we were to use the retired engineer's explanation of reality.\nWe can't explain what's going on in places like the Large Hadron Collider.\nWe can't explain what's going on with the GPS system, which we can explain perfectly well using general relativity and in many cases, special relativity as well.\nAnd so this is the issue here.\nYou aren't solving a real problem.\nWhat you're doing in those situations is you don't understand something and you're trying to understand something and rather than trying harder to understand something by asking questions of people who might know more, who in a patient way will explain it to you, you just say, I'm throwing it all out and I'm telling you what the truth is.\nBeing a little dogmatic, let's say, after a little more back and forth, we again come back to David saying, quote, your additional postulate is not just superfluous, it is positively bad.\nIn general, perverse but unrefuted theories, which one can propose off the cuff for roughly into two categories.\nThere are theories that postulate unobservable entities such as particles that do not interact with other matter.\nThey can be rejected for solving nothing, or comes razor if you like.\nAnd there are theories like yours that predict and explain observable anomalies.\nThey can be rejected for solving nothing and spoiling existing solutions.\nIt is not, I hasn't to add, that they conflict with existing observations.\nIt is that they remove the explanatory power from existing theories by asserting that the predictions of those theories have exceptions, but not explaining how, end quote, the crypto inductor that says, I see that now.\nNow will you give me help in adjusting my worldview?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4591"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7b574921-0836-445f-96c1-0474d63753c9": {"page_content": "And there are theories like yours that predict and explain observable anomalies.\nThey can be rejected for solving nothing and spoiling existing solutions.\nIt is not, I hasn't to add, that they conflict with existing observations.\nIt is that they remove the explanatory power from existing theories by asserting that the predictions of those theories have exceptions, but not explaining how, end quote, the crypto inductor that says, I see that now.\nNow will you give me help in adjusting my worldview?.\nDavid says, well, have you read my book The Fabric of Reality?.\nBut what the crypto inductor this thing goes on to ask of David?.\nWell, he says, quote, what I cannot understand is, where in that raw material past observations, the present problem situation and timeless principles of logic and rationality, none of which justifies inferences from the past into the future, the justification of future predictions has come from.\nThere seems to be a logical gap.\nAre we making a hidden assumption somewhere?.\nAnd David responds, no, there is no logical gap.\nWhat you call our raw material does indeed include assertions about the future.\nThe best existing theories, which cannot be abandoned lightly because they are the solutions of problems, contain predictions about the future, and these predictions cannot be severed from the theories of the content as you tried to, because that would spoil the theories explanatory power.\nAny new theory we propose must, therefore, either be consistent with these existing theories, which has implications for what the new theory can say about the future, all contradict some existing theories, but address the problems thereby raised, giving alternative explanations, which again constrains what they can say about the future and the crypto inductor says.\nSo we have no principle of reasoning, which says that the future will resemble the past, but we do have actual theories which say that.\nSo do we have actual theories which imply a limited form of inductive principle?.\nDavid says, no.\nOur theory simply assert something about the future.\nVacuously, any theory about the future implies that the future will resemble the past in some ways, but we only find out in what respects the theory says that the future will resemble the past after we have the theory.\nYou might as well say that since our theories hold features of reality to be the same throughout space, they imply a spatial principle of induction to the effect that the near resembles the distant.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ac3894a7-71b6-45e0-b709-ee3ebc2356a7": {"page_content": "David says, no.\nOur theory simply assert something about the future.\nVacuously, any theory about the future implies that the future will resemble the past in some ways, but we only find out in what respects the theory says that the future will resemble the past after we have the theory.\nYou might as well say that since our theories hold features of reality to be the same throughout space, they imply a spatial principle of induction to the effect that the near resembles the distant.\nLet me point out that in any practical sense of the word resemble, our present theory say that the future will not resemble the past.\nThe cosmological big crunch, for instance, the recolapse of the universe to a single point, is an event that some cosmologists predict, but which is just about as unlike the present epoch in every physical sense as it possibly could be, the very laws from which we predict its currents will not apply to it.\nEnd quote.\nAnd exactly the same argument applies with not know of cosmology today.\nThe far distant future apparently given what we know now, and this is very much open to change given future observations in future theories.\nOf course, is that this dark energy is going to continue to accelerate the expansion of space such that everything gets ripped apart in this kind of big rip event where even atomic nuclei and fundamental particles get torn apart and everything turns into photons.\nAnd at that point, if you listen to someone like Roger Penrose, you have at the very end of time, after this happens, it's something that looks very much like the beginning of time, namely a universe or a space that contains no matter in nothing but photons, which is precisely what the big bang was like.\nAnyway, that's off topic.\nBut the point is that right now, the present doesn't resemble the past, the big bang, and it doesn't resemble the future, which is this far distant big rip future.\nWho knows?.\nNow I'm skipping past a bit where they get into a discussion about what justifies being true the principles of logic and how these justifications for logic isn't perfectly secure, and David agrees it's not perfectly secure.\nWe can't expect it to be what we want, our good explanations, of course.\nWe want explanations about why and how rationality works.\nThey come across the Turing principle, and the crypto inductor says, how we know it's true, and David says, we don't know, of course.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4826"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "93360b36-8710-49f7-a47e-0e27364b1b07": {"page_content": "We can't expect it to be what we want, our good explanations, of course.\nWe want explanations about why and how rationality works.\nThey come across the Turing principle, and the crypto inductor says, how we know it's true, and David says, we don't know, of course.\nIn fact, let me just read what he says on that, when he's confronted with, is the Turing principle true?.\nDavid says, we don't know, of course, if it's true or not.\nBut you are afraid, aren't you, that if we can't justify the Turing principle, then we shall once again have lost our justification for relying on scientific predictions, and the crypto inductor says, yes, David says, but we have now moved on to a completely different question.\nWe are now discussing an apparent fact about physical reality, namely that it can make reliable predictions about itself.\nEnd quote, that's in the form of us.\nWe are the thing that makes reliable predictions about the future.\nSo we are part of physical reality that makes reliable predictions about physical reality.\nContinuing, David says, we are trying to explain that fact, to place it within the same framework as other facts we know.\nI suggested that there may be a certain law of physics involved, but if I were wrong about that, indeed, even if we were entirely unable to explain this remarkable property of reality, that would not detract one jot from the justification of any scientific theory for it would not make the explanation in such a theory one jot worse.\nAnd the crypto inductor says, now my arguments are exhausted.\nIntellectually, I am convinced, yet I must confess that I still feel what I can only describe as an emotional doubt.\nAnd David says a few things, but then gets to the meat of the matter and says, quote, the misconception is about the very nature of argument and explanation.\nYou seem to be assuming that arguments and explanations, such as those that justify acting on a particular theory, have the form of mathematical proofs, proceeding from assumptions to conclusions.\nYou look for the raw material, axioms, from which our conclusions, theorems are derived.\nNow, there is indeed a logical structure of this type associated with every successful argument or explanation, but the process of argument does not begin with the axioms and end with the conclusion.\nRather, it starts in the middle, with a version that is riddled with inconsistencies, gaps, ambiguities and irrelevancies.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=4949"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a56ffaa1-01a7-4fed-9226-469a54b7f72d": {"page_content": "You look for the raw material, axioms, from which our conclusions, theorems are derived.\nNow, there is indeed a logical structure of this type associated with every successful argument or explanation, but the process of argument does not begin with the axioms and end with the conclusion.\nRather, it starts in the middle, with a version that is riddled with inconsistencies, gaps, ambiguities and irrelevancies.\nAll these faults are criticized, attempts are made to replace faulty theories.\nThe theories that are criticized and replaced usually include some of the axioms.\nThat is why it is a mistake to assume that an argument begins with, or is justified by, the theories that eventually serve as its axioms.\nThe argument ends tentatively when it seems to have shown that the associated explanation is satisfactory.\nThe axioms adopted an unultimate, unchallengeable beliefs.\nThey are tentative, explanatory theories.\nEnd quote.\nAnd all I would say there, just in other words, is the argument ends tentatively when it seems to have solved the problem.\nSolve the problem to the satisfaction of whoever had the problem, and that could be the community of scientists, or an individual scientist working on a particular issue.\nSo that's the way things go, and it doesn't just have to be science, of course.\nThis applies universally to all problem situations and all kinds of knowledge creation.\nThe crypto inductivist finally agrees, and he says, quote, I see, argument is not the same species of thing as deduction, or the non-existent induction.\nIt is not based on anything or justified by anything, and it doesn't have to be, because its purpose is to solve problems, to show that a given problem is solved by a given explanation.\nAnd David says, welcome to the club.\nAnd the crypto inductivist has now been retitled, X inductivist, and he says, all these years I have felt so secure in my great problem, I felt so superior both to the ancient inductivists, and to the upstart popper, and all the time without even knowing it, I was a crypto inductivist myself.\nInductivism is indeed a disease, it makes one blind.\nAnd there are a few more marketing in there, but we may as well also throw into the bin here, the Bayesian, the modern incantation of inductivist.\nThey have this induction shaped hole in their epistemology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=5055"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5c9c068-2739-42d4-8c58-32797e1e2c96": {"page_content": "Inductivism is indeed a disease, it makes one blind.\nAnd there are a few more marketing in there, but we may as well also throw into the bin here, the Bayesian, the modern incantation of inductivist.\nThey have this induction shaped hole in their epistemology.\nAlmost everyone who's not a perpyrean does, so-called objectives do as well, they seek a principle of induction, this secure foundation from which they can derive explanations in the same way that mathematical proofs are derived.\nIt's as if, as David says elsewhere in the fabric of reality, there's this hierarchy of knowledge creation, or of argumentation, where mathematics is the king of all knowledge, and everything seeks to aspire to be like mathematics, to start with the secure foundation, with axioms that are self-evident, that are absolutely true, that cannot be denied.\nAnd from that, you just use your rules of inference, which presumably also are completely inherent, that can only produce truth from truth, and you get, thereby, true conclusions.\nThis way of thinking about reality and the way of constructing knowledge is completely misconceived, among other things, who says and who can prove, and why should we believe that the axioms are themselves absolutely true?.\nWe don't know if the process is this method of deduction in order to generate true conclusions, if that's the process, then where for the axioms, how did we get these true axioms in the first place?.\nAs David says there, you start in the middle, we start with the problem, and it's a messy kind of process of creating an explanation.\nNo one really knows how it happens yet.\nWe don't have an explanation for creativity yet.\nWe just know that we come up with these creative explanations of reality.\nThey are hard to vary, because each part of the explanation corresponds to some part of reality, postulating into existence some physical thing when it comes to science, something that is accounted for by the explanation.\nSo that's where we'll leave chapter 7 of the fabric of reality.\nNext time, once I do come back to the fabric of reality, we'll be on to the significance of life, which chapter 8, all about evolution by natural selection, but until then, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49rbCs1R9w&t=5198"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8886d742-8c2f-4a8d-baa1-b607d5fbd721": {"page_content": "Hello again and this time welcome to chapter 7, part 2.\nThis is artificial creativity.\nThe first part is very much about artificial general intelligence, so we've got creativity which is from our minds and that is the creativity that allows us to create explanations as well as create all the things that appear to be rather uniquely human.\nSo for example art and poetry and music.\nBut importantly, explanatory knowledge like science and philosophy and mathematics, the things that allow us to really make progress into the future and of course that does include the products of our creativity like art, art requires explanations in order to improve towards some better standard, objectively better standard.\nWe're going to get there as well in a later chapter.\nSo that first form of artificial creativity is very much about trying to replicate artificially the creativity of our minds, what our minds can do.\nIt's always surprising to me how people think that there is a genetic propensity for things like mathematics let's say.\nYour mathematical ability, as often said, is genetic in some way.\nThis is what psychology at the moment, the prevailing view is that IQ intelligence somehow has a genetic component and this flows through to things like capacity to do mathematics.\nThere's some inherent thing about brains that allows them to either be good at mathematics or not so good at mathematics, which would mean if that's true if they're truly as a genetic component to intelligence or to maths in particular that would mean that have to be genes for that capacity.\nThis can't be true.\nAlthough there are genes for brains there are not genes for minds or what minds turn out to be.\nMinds of course are universal explainers.\nThere's unfortunately an entire field of academia devoted to a misconception.\nIt's called evolutionary psychology.\nEvolutionary psychology purports to be about how we have inherited certain mental characteristics.\nIf we've inherited certain mental characteristics then this means that those mental characteristics must somehow be in the genes.\nTo me this seems like a category error.\nIt's saying that abstract mental capacities are somehow coded in the DNA.\nThis is extremely unlikely because vast is the DNA molecule is.\nIt's not vast enough to contain all of the information that is inside a mind as the mind begins to learn.\nAnd so in the same way that we cannot expect that there would be a gene for the capacity to say speak English, there cannot be a gene for the capacity to do mathematics.\nMore or less all English speakers have the same proficiency.\nYes there are differences.\nSome people write books, some people are great orators.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=23"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "359058ad-f6c0-4502-822f-1285efb1edcc": {"page_content": "This is extremely unlikely because vast is the DNA molecule is.\nIt's not vast enough to contain all of the information that is inside a mind as the mind begins to learn.\nAnd so in the same way that we cannot expect that there would be a gene for the capacity to say speak English, there cannot be a gene for the capacity to do mathematics.\nMore or less all English speakers have the same proficiency.\nYes there are differences.\nSome people write books, some people are great orators.\nOther people kind of mumble a little.\nBut overall we understand each other.\nWe're about the same level.\nI don't think there are vast differences.\nThere's probably like a 5% difference in vocabulary between the people who have have the greatest linguistic dexterity and between the people who struggle to form a sentence.\nBut generally adults can understand one another.\nNo matter the language that they're using, unless it's a specialization.\nBut again if it's a specialization such that you understand a lot of medical or legal terminology, that's not in your genes, you have to learn that.\nIn the same way that it cannot be the case, that the capacity to speak English is in the genes because it doesn't matter what culture, nation, you come from.\nIf you come to an English speaking country and you stay there for long enough, you will learn the language.\nSimilarly, if a person born in an English speaking country moves to China, they will eventually learn Mandarin.\nIn neither case can the language be encoded in the DNA.\nThe capacity to speak either language be coded in the DNA.\nWhat is coded in the DNA is a capacity for language generally.\nAnd so it is with mathematics or for any other activity of the mind.\nThat particular activity of the mind, mathematics, doing poetry, understanding science, the list is very long.\nNone of these individual things can be coded in the DNA.\nOnly the general, the most general capacity can be coded in the DNA.\nNamely, the code for a brain which can run a mind which is universal.\nThat's it.\nThat's it.\nOnce you're universal, then you have a capacity to do everything else.\nSo why are some people better at maths than others?.\nOr better at speaking English than others?.\nBecause they show a great interest in doing those things than others.\nIs that interest coded in the DNA?.\nNo, I don't think so.\nIt's a combination of the way in which people are brought up, what grabs their attention as they grow into maturity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=175"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4cde7b5f-cef6-4a0f-aab7-6239bfd781d3": {"page_content": "That's it.\nThat's it.\nOnce you're universal, then you have a capacity to do everything else.\nSo why are some people better at maths than others?.\nOr better at speaking English than others?.\nBecause they show a great interest in doing those things than others.\nIs that interest coded in the DNA?.\nNo, I don't think so.\nIt's a combination of the way in which people are brought up, what grabs their attention as they grow into maturity.\nPeople's interest change over time as well.\nSo artificial creativity has to be about trying to find the algorithm for whatever a universal explainer is.\nThis very, very special capacity that only, so far as we know, human beings possess in the entire universe.\nOkay.\nSo that's artificial creativity in terms of mental intelligence or something like that.\nThe second part that I'm going to talk about here and now is artificial evolution.\nThere's two sorts of knowledge, remember, that David has distinguished here in the beginning of infinity.\nThere's the explanatory type knowledge, and that's the knowledge that we are able to create as human beings.\nAnd there's knowledge in the DNA, the knowledge that codes for organisms.\nWe are not able to, at this moment, because of our own lack of knowledge, artificially create either.\nAnd the reason we can't artificially create either is because we don't understand either sufficiently well.\nAnd I mentioned in part one that there were parts of this chapter that I didn't fully understand the first time I read the book, or the second time, or the tenth time I read the book.\nIt really took me until last year, many, many years after the book had been published for me to really grasp what was being said here.\nAnd it really was exciting once I did figure it out.\nI didn't figure it out.\nI had to speak to someone else about it.\nI totally understood that we didn't understand consciousness.\nWe didn't understand how explanations were generated.\nAnd I knew that because if you can't program it, you haven't understood it.\nI knew that.\nBut I just couldn't figure out why we couldn't understand evolution.\nI understood we had evolutionary algorithms.\nAnd David even talks about evolutionary algorithms in the beginning of infinity.\nSo I was missing something.\nI was missing something big.\nI myself played games with simulating evolution by natural selection.\nAnd I'll put a link in the bottom all about this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=380"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "572480b0-ca94-48b4-acad-13e65b5c00ba": {"page_content": "And I knew that because if you can't program it, you haven't understood it.\nI knew that.\nBut I just couldn't figure out why we couldn't understand evolution.\nI understood we had evolutionary algorithms.\nAnd David even talks about evolutionary algorithms in the beginning of infinity.\nSo I was missing something.\nI was missing something big.\nI myself played games with simulating evolution by natural selection.\nAnd I'll put a link in the bottom all about this.\nYou can play games where you set, like, for example, the number of rabbits in a particular environment and how often they breed and how much food they have.\nAnd you allow them to produce random mutations now and again, such as their fur color changes.\nThen you can introduce wolves into the environment.\nAnd the wolves will eat the rabbits or not eat the rabbits depending upon what color their fur is.\nAnd so you can simulate this kind of evolution by natural selection in a computer.\nSo I thought, isn't that programming evolution?.\nAnd aren't the people who design evolutionary algorithms?.\nAren't they programming evolution?.\nNo, not really.\nSo I really thought that not only we, I thought that I had a good handle on this evolution by natural selection thing.\nI even remember in second year maths, I did a subject called continuous dynamical systems, which was basically about something called differential equations.\nThat aside, there was maths applied to biology and it involves something called the logistic equation and more complex versions thereof.\nAnd the logistic equation allows you to determine the growth of a population given the amount of food in an environment.\nIf there's too much, if there's just the right amount, or if it's being restricted.\nSo you can make predictions using mathematics and graphs.\nAnd I thought we understood all that how populations grow into client.\nAgain, I thought he's biology being predicted by mathematics.\nI thought we understood Darwinism because didn't Dawkins himself figure out the rest of the genetic details?.\nIndeed, didn't Richard Dawkins himself write a little program that simulated evolution.\nNow, this is going to be terribly self-indulgent for a moment, but I just wanted to lay with a point and be terribly self-referential for the moment.\nI certainly didn't major in biology, but I was always really keen at university when I had the opportunity to take biology subjects, or at least subjects related to biology.\nI took a brilliant subject called astrobiology.\nAstrobiology was great.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=437"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47980853-bdfb-4b75-b306-cbc46a54f016": {"page_content": "Now, this is going to be terribly self-indulgent for a moment, but I just wanted to lay with a point and be terribly self-referential for the moment.\nI certainly didn't major in biology, but I was always really keen at university when I had the opportunity to take biology subjects, or at least subjects related to biology.\nI took a brilliant subject called astrobiology.\nAstrobiology was great.\nI took a subject about astrobiology twice, I was once in undergraduate, and then later on in postgraduate, when I used a book like this, an introduction to astrobiology, which is a great book.\nOne time I took a subject with great astrophysicist to now lives in Australia.\nHe began an America's called Charlie Line Weaver.\nAnd if you're interested in astrophysics, or or astrobiology, look up Charlie Line Weaver on Google and have a read through some of his papers.\nHe's a great polymath.\nHe visited a degree in history, which is unusual for a physicist.\nAnd the subjects he's written about professionally in astrophysic cover dark energy and dark matter.\nWhy planets are the size that they are?.\nThat one's called the potato radio.\nShe can look that up.\nWhy did life appear as soon as it possibly could on earth?.\nIt appeared much faster than might otherwise have been expected.\nHe created something called the nasalization quotient and analyzed the length of animal trunks.\nAnd he did that to make a point about how brain size is in a convergent feature of evolution.\nAnyways, the list is long and interesting and his papers are really easy to read for any layperson, compared to typical physics papers I mean.\nSo anyways, Charlie taught me astrobiology and evolution.\nI got confident that I knew it.\nThen I did our biophysics from another guy called Joe Wolf at the University of New South Wales.\nAnd if you're interested in learning physics, well, look up Joe Wolf, University of New South Wales, because he's got some brilliant pages, web pages on the basics of physics all out to modern physics, including quantum theory and relativity.\nAnd what Joe said of the subject of astrobiology was basically that astrobiology was the science closest to theology, because after all, they're both yet to demonstrate the existence of their own subject matter.\nSo in biophysics, I learned even more biology and really thought I was getting across this biology stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=530"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b1424bc1-dc25-4c74-a2c0-48907a30993e": {"page_content": "And what Joe said of the subject of astrobiology was basically that astrobiology was the science closest to theology, because after all, they're both yet to demonstrate the existence of their own subject matter.\nSo in biophysics, I learned even more biology and really thought I was getting across this biology stuff.\nAnd I was excited to learn more about biology.\nand I finally took a philosophy subject called the philosophy of biology with Professor Michael Michael, again at the University of New South Wales.\nHe had a degree in zoology, but he inspired me to take lots of subjects and logic and classical philosophy, which is how I got devoted off into philosophy.\nAnd so in the philosophy of biology course, I read lots of Dawkins and I read lots of Stephen J. Gould and about their debates.\nAnd so I thought, this is, this theory, I mean, there's a few unknowns around the edges, but surely, surely we know it as well as we know Newtonian mechanics or general relativity or quantum theory, it is the biological equivalent of that, surely.\nBut despite reading the selfish gene and the extent of phenotype, I didn't know what I didn't know.\nAnd this was the wonderful thing.\nIt's possibly a problem with taking formal courses of this sort and you gaining some small amount of so-called expertise in an area.\nYou overestimate yourself, especially if you've never challenged yourself.\nAnd this is where the beginning of infinity came in.\nIt challenged me about what I thought I knew.\nI didn't know.\nAnd to be fair, no one does.\nBut at least David Deutsch knew what others didn't, or at least he had a way of diagnosing how to know that no one else understands either.\nAs a bit of a footnote for what it's worth, my lecturer, Michael, that I mentioned, who did the philosophy of biology subject, he must have known that we didn't know much about evolution by natural selection.\nHe must have known that what was known about evolution by natural selection contained huge gaps.\nBecause he published a book just a couple of years ago, I'll put it on the screen now.\nAnd in it, he states clearly, the big gaps we have in our understanding of evolution by natural selection that comport with what is said in the beginning of infinity.\nSo I guess I should have known.\nI didn't listen well enough during the lectures, apparently.\nI might mention something else here in terms of not learning the right lesson.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=644"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9293b0ff-8847-4ba9-b99c-b2b34746f6f9": {"page_content": "Because he published a book just a couple of years ago, I'll put it on the screen now.\nAnd in it, he states clearly, the big gaps we have in our understanding of evolution by natural selection that comport with what is said in the beginning of infinity.\nSo I guess I should have known.\nI didn't listen well enough during the lectures, apparently.\nI might mention something else here in terms of not learning the right lesson.\nIt's kind of like I suppose how people can go through an entire physics to ground learners, much as possible about quantum mechanics and how to do all the calculations and never quite accept or appreciate that it does imply the many worlds interpretation.\nIt implies that there are parallel universes, that there is a multiverse.\nThe parallel to that situation is me studying what's called the milliuri experiment.\nI apologize, this is clearly a very long introduction, but bear with me just for one more moment while I mention, again, why I didn't realize what I didn't realize.\nIf you study astrobiology, so astrobiology is about the conditions required in order for there to be life out there in the universe somewhere.\nAnd so we might be best to look for life out there in the universe somewhere.\nIt would be a good idea to have a place to start a cable, probably in a start on Mars, but beyond that, we might be a good place, would it be a warm pond, would it be beneath the surface, etc.\nOne of the first things in any astrobiology course is usually something about the milliuri experiment.\nThe milliuri experiment was done back in the 50s and the idea is pretty simple.\nYou take a flask and you fill it with chemicals inorganic chemicals that you think were present in the early earth.\nSo things like oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, perhaps some methane, perhaps sulfur, etc.\nYou can make up your own list of chemicals and this experiment has been repeated again and again, so I think they're just generally called milliuri type experiments now.\nAnd what milliuri did, these were the first guys that did it, was to take this flask, seal it, heat it up a little, and pass electricity through it.\nThat was to simulate lightening and to leave it for some time.\nAnd then after a certain amount of time has passed you, open up the flask and you investigate what's inside.\nNow at first, what was found inside of this flask offered great hope.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=776"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "66fe54e2-c744-473b-9e86-38e0bfd222f4": {"page_content": "And what milliuri did, these were the first guys that did it, was to take this flask, seal it, heat it up a little, and pass electricity through it.\nThat was to simulate lightening and to leave it for some time.\nAnd then after a certain amount of time has passed you, open up the flask and you investigate what's inside.\nNow at first, what was found inside of this flask offered great hope.\nIt was quite exciting.\nWhat they had managed to create out of the nitrogen and oxygen, methane, etc were amino acids.\nThey got people got very excited about the fact that amino acids had been produced inside of this flask.\nThey're excited about producing amino acids because amino acids are the very building blocks of proteins and proteins are what living organisms are made out of.\nThey're the things that DNA actually produces.\nDNA or genes code for proteins.\nSo if you're creating amino acids, surely leaving it for even longer, perhaps changing or fiddling with the conditions a little bit inside of your milliuri flask, you might get proteins.\nAnd so you get proteins, then you might get nucleic acid.\nYou might get something that's self replicating.\nYou might get DNA.\nYou might get something crawl out of the flask eventually.\nThis is what the milliuri type experiments are all about.\nTaking something that is definitely not alive, not living inorganic, leaving it for some time in a warm environment with energy, in other words, perhaps with electricity.\nAnd then at the end, having something alive, something organic.\nSurely the production of amino acids indicates that we're on the way to producing life.\nWell, no.\nAs many other people have pointed out, I might just mention Paul Davies.\nPaul Davies wrote a next one called the Goldilocks Enigma, all about how the conditions in the universe seem to be just right for life.\nBut he will admit, as many other people will, that these milliuri type experiments that produce amino acids aren't showing very much.\nWe find amino acids with our powerful telescopes looking at interstellar gas clouds.\nThere's amino acids out there in interstellar space.\nSo amino acids seem to arise pretty spontaneously, given the right elements with a little bit of energy.\nOther people have described finding amino acids as to finding a pile of bricks.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=908"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3004a55-85ec-4302-a3ae-3c81c96b6a2a": {"page_content": "But he will admit, as many other people will, that these milliuri type experiments that produce amino acids aren't showing very much.\nWe find amino acids with our powerful telescopes looking at interstellar gas clouds.\nThere's amino acids out there in interstellar space.\nSo amino acids seem to arise pretty spontaneously, given the right elements with a little bit of energy.\nOther people have described finding amino acids as to finding a pile of bricks.\nIf you walk around the corner and find a pile of bricks, you don't expect that the next pile of bricks that you're going to find is going to self-assemble itself into something like the opera house, which will be the equivalent of thinking that just because you found amino acids, you're on the way to finding a living organism.\nSo just because milliuri were able to create amino acids inside their flask, because there's absolutely nothing about whether or not left for a certain amount of time you will get life.\nSo the remarkable thing is that milliuri experiments have been repeated again and again since the 1950s, with basically the same results, I think proteins might have been created at some point.\nWe do not know how inorganic material becomes organic material, by organic material, I mean material itself replicating that to life.\nMany popularizers of science today talk about how we do not know how geochemistry becomes biochemistry.\nThere's a massive gap in our understanding and this comes to bear on this whole question of why we do not understand how the knowledge that's in DNA got there at all.\nHow it gets there.\nHow the universality of DNA, which means that the DNA can actually create any living organism that's out there.\nHow that came to be in the first place.\nWe don't know.\nWe can't create DNA from inorganic materials.\nIt must have happened.\nIt must have been a spontaneous thing.\nWe just don't know how.\nI'll just mention it passing one final thing.\nThe milliuri experiment seems to suggest that life is very, very hard to create because our smartest biologists working for decades at a time on these kind of experiments have not produced artificial life in the lab.\nThey don't know how.\nIt must be really hard.\nWe've repeated what we think of the conditions in the early earth over and over again.\nI think it must be thousands of times, thousands of different experiments by now and nothing is crawled out of that flask.\nSo that's an argument that life is very hard to spontaneously arise.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=980"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89f2327a-bd29-4180-ad5b-417785fe8d0a": {"page_content": "They don't know how.\nIt must be really hard.\nWe've repeated what we think of the conditions in the early earth over and over again.\nI think it must be thousands of times, thousands of different experiments by now and nothing is crawled out of that flask.\nSo that's an argument that life is very hard to spontaneously arise.\nBut the universe is such that it's very difficult for life to spontaneously arise.\nIf smart people working in labs can't do it, then is it going to happen by chance?.\nIf people with knowledge can't seem to do it, then how on earth could an environment without any knowledge cause it to happen spontaneously?.\nWe don't know.\nThere's a great mystery there.\nSo on the one hand, we have this argument that life must be very difficult and therefore be very rare in the universe as well.\nOne of the reasons, one of the answers to the fermi paradox might be it's just too difficult.\nIt's highly unlikely that however many planets there are out there in the universe, there's simply not enough planets out there in the universe.\nEven if you would have covered them all in inorganic material and to warm them just like in the military experiment and to make them perfectly bio-friendly, nonetheless, it might be the case that it is exceedingly unlikely for inorganic material to become alive.\nAnd so that might be an answer to the fermi paradox.\nAnd the reason for books like this one, which I would also recommend, rare earth, why complex life is uncommon in the universe by ward and brownly, that's a great book.\nNow, standing in stark contrast to that, I might just mention a paper by the great Charlie Line Weaver who I mentioned earlier, and he wrote a paper looking at how quickly life arose here on the planet, here on earth.\nThere was a period called the late heavy bombardment here on earth, where all of these comets from asteroids, material, from the very far reaches of space, I think, out in the ought cloud, or maybe it's the kyper belt.\nOne of those places where there's lots and lots of asteroids and the far reaches of the solar system.\nThis material was kicked in towards the earth, and it bombarded the earth.\nAnd so this is called the late heavy bombardment.\nAnd it caused the temperature that surfaces the earth to rise very, very high.\nI think to molten rock temperatures, so thousands of degrees Celsius sterilizing the earth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1131"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "500c061d-f7ab-4e45-98e5-4014720ad0a4": {"page_content": "One of those places where there's lots and lots of asteroids and the far reaches of the solar system.\nThis material was kicked in towards the earth, and it bombarded the earth.\nAnd so this is called the late heavy bombardment.\nAnd it caused the temperature that surfaces the earth to rise very, very high.\nI think to molten rock temperatures, so thousands of degrees Celsius sterilizing the earth.\nSo if there wasn't any life there, it was certainly wiped out at the late heavy bombardment.\nProbably there was no life there to begin with, because prior to that, the conditions weren't any more friendly.\nThey became exceedingly hostile during the late heavy bombardment, as the point, however.\nBut then what happened?.\nWell, then the earth cooled.\nAnd if we look through the fossil record, if we dig down deep, we find dinosaurs.\nAnd if we dig even deeper so that the strata become older and the organisms are more ancient, then we find fish.\nAnd if we keep going down further, then we find nothing but bacteria.\nAnd if we keep going down further, we find nothing.\nWe find no living organisms.\nWe find the period at which the late heavy bombardment happened, and there's geological evidence for the late heavy bombardment.\nBut as soon as the late heavy bombardment was over, almost as soon as it was over in geological time, life appeared.\nLife appeared straight away.\nIt seems on a geological time scale.\nSo that is an argument that, life will arise as quickly as it can, given favorable conditions.\nBecause here on earth, as soon as the conditions were favorable, life arose.\nThat's remarkable.\nBut now we have a contradiction.\nThe military type experiments seem to be suggesting that life is very, very difficult to create.\nNo matter what the conditions, because the scientists keep trying to create friendly conditions and nothing's crawling out of the flask, on the other hand, the actual experience of earth was life arose as soon as it possibly could, as soon as the conditions were just right.\nWhat is going on?.\nThis is really exciting.\nThere must be an answer to this.\nBut we don't understand how life arose.\nWe do not understand these processes of life.\nI suppose this is kind of only tangentially related precisely to what the beginning of infinity is about, which is more about once you've got life, once you've actually got life, how can you artificially simulate the process of evolution by natural selection?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1273"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "578a0afd-2e9f-47f2-94e4-8d0684dbf204": {"page_content": "What is going on?.\nThis is really exciting.\nThere must be an answer to this.\nBut we don't understand how life arose.\nWe do not understand these processes of life.\nI suppose this is kind of only tangentially related precisely to what the beginning of infinity is about, which is more about once you've got life, once you've actually got life, how can you artificially simulate the process of evolution by natural selection?.\nAlthough the process of evolution by natural selection probably predates any of the simple living organisms that we have.\nIt probably goes all the way back to when we had an RNA world, so it was probably evolution by natural selection going on then.\nWe don't even know how to get RNA out of this inorganic material.\nThat's enough for me from the moment.\nLet's go to the book.\nSo David writes, When discussing Lamarckism in Chapter 4, I pointed out the fundamental difference between a muscle becoming stronger in an individual's lifetime, and muscles evolving to become stronger.\nFor the former, the knowledge to achieve all the available muscle strengths must already be present in the individual's genes before the sequence of changes begins.\nAnd so must the knowledge of how to recognize the circumstances under which to make the changes.\nThis is exactly the analog of a trick that a programmer has built into a chatbot.\nThe chatbot responds as though it had created some of the knowledge while composing it response.\nBut in fact, all the knowledge was created earlier and elsewhere.\nWe're just going to flag that as me talking.\nWe will come back to that later.\nThat is the key fact in this chapter that I think I missed.\nI'll say it again.\nWhen it comes to a chatbot, when it comes to knowledge and the chatbot appearing to say something original or something creative or to give you a piece of knowledge that it has produced itself.\nDavid says, in fact, all that knowledge was created earlier and elsewhere.\nOkay, I'll continue reading.\nThe analog of evolutionary change in a species is creative thought in a person.\nThe analog of the idea that AI could be achieved by an accumulation of chatbot tricks is Lamarckism.\nThe theory that new adaptations could be explained by changes that are in reality just a manifestation of existing knowledge.\nThere are several current areas of research in which that same misconception is common.\nIn chatbot-based AI research, it sent the whole field down a blind alley.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1367"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f4c46312-9dc3-4a7c-9f5c-6534e9c4e8ce": {"page_content": "Okay, I'll continue reading.\nThe analog of evolutionary change in a species is creative thought in a person.\nThe analog of the idea that AI could be achieved by an accumulation of chatbot tricks is Lamarckism.\nThe theory that new adaptations could be explained by changes that are in reality just a manifestation of existing knowledge.\nThere are several current areas of research in which that same misconception is common.\nIn chatbot-based AI research, it sent the whole field down a blind alley.\nBut in other fields, it has merely caused researchers to attach over ambitious levels to genuine, albeit relatively modest achievements.\nOne such area is artificial evolution.\nRecall Edison's idea that progress requires alternating inspiration and perspiration phases.\nAnd that, because of computers and other technology, it is increasingly becoming possible to automate the perspiration phase.\nThis welcome development has misled those who are overconfident about achieving artificial evolution and AI.\nFor example, suppose you are a graduate student in robotics, hoping to build a robot that walks on legs better than previous robots do.\nThe first phase of the solution must involve inspiration.\nThat is to say, creative thought, attempting to improve upon previous researchers' attempts to solve the same problem.\nYou will start from that, and from existing ideas about other problems that new conjecture may be related.\nAnd from the designs of walking animals in nature, all of that constitutes existing knowledge, which you will vary and combine in new ways, and then subject to criticism and further variation.\nEventually, you will have created a design for the hardware of your new robot.\nIt's legs with their levers, joints, tendons and motors.\nIt's body which will hold the power supply.\nIt's sense organs through which it will receive the feedback that will allow it to control those things effectively, and the computer that will exercise that control.\nYou will have adapted everything in that design as best you can to the purpose of walking, except the program in the computer.\nSo I just paused there.\nSo we're already getting a hint of where this argument is going.\nThe knowledge was created earlier and elsewhere.\nWith evolution by natural selection, organisms don't come into being just with legs.\nThose legs have evolved over time.\nFrom things that weren't legs, maybe like fins or flippers or something like that.\nAnd then legs evolved.\nIn fact, in the case of flippers, and of course they evolved from legs, you get my point.\nHere, the graduate student has already built a theme, a robot, with the limbs.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1508"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47c11676-69a3-4d75-a405-c3ec4913ccd3": {"page_content": "The knowledge was created earlier and elsewhere.\nWith evolution by natural selection, organisms don't come into being just with legs.\nThose legs have evolved over time.\nFrom things that weren't legs, maybe like fins or flippers or something like that.\nAnd then legs evolved.\nIn fact, in the case of flippers, and of course they evolved from legs, you get my point.\nHere, the graduate student has already built a theme, a robot, with the limbs.\nSo already, we don't have anything resembling artificial evolution.\nWe have a creature that already has the required hardware.\nSo let's go back to the book, we'll just reread that last section.\nLast sentence.\nYou will have adapted everything in that design as best you can to the purpose of walking, except the program in the computer.\nThe function of that program will be to recognize situations such as the robot beginning to topple over, or obstacles in its path, and to calculate the appropriate action and to take it.\nThis is the hardest part of your research program.\nHow does one recognize when it is best to avoid an obstacle to the left or to the right or to jump over it or to kick it aside or ignore it, or lengthen one stride to avoid stepping on it, or judge it impossible and turn back.\nIn all those cases, how does one specifically do those things in terms of sending countless signals to the motors and the gears as modified by feedback from the sensors?.\nYou will break the problem down into sub problems, veering by a given angle is similar to veering by a different angle.\nThat allows you to write a subroutine for veering that takes care of the whole continuum of possible cases, once you have written it, all other parts of the program need only call it whenever they decide that veering is required, and so they did not have to contain any knowledge about the messy details of what it takes to vee.\nWhen you have identified and solved as many of those subproblems as you can, you will have created a code or language that is highly adapted to making statements about how your robot should walk.\nEach call of one of its subroutines is a statement or command in that language.\nSo far, most of what you have done comes under the heading of inspiration.\nIt required creative thought, but now perspiration looms.\nOnce you have automated everything that you know how to automate, you have no choice but to resort to some sort of trial and error to achieve any additional functionality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1669"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e923629a-7ab3-470a-a2ed-d2a87ed02a2e": {"page_content": "Each call of one of its subroutines is a statement or command in that language.\nSo far, most of what you have done comes under the heading of inspiration.\nIt required creative thought, but now perspiration looms.\nOnce you have automated everything that you know how to automate, you have no choice but to resort to some sort of trial and error to achieve any additional functionality.\nHowever, you do now have the advantage of a language that you have adapted for the purpose of instructing the robot how to walk.\nSo you can now start with a program that is simple in that language, despite being very complex in terms of elementary instructions of the computer, and which means, for instance, walk forwards and stop if you hit an obstacle.\nThen you can run the robot with that program and see what happens, or you can run a computer simulation of the robot.\nWhen it falls over, anything else undesirable happens, you can modify your program, still using the high level language you have created to eliminate the deficiencies they arise.\nThat method will require ever less inspiration, and ever more perspiration.\nBut an alternative approach is also open to you.\nYou can delegate the perspiration to a computer by using a so-called evolutionary algorithm.\nUsing the same computer simulation, you run many trials.\nEach with a slight random variation of that first program, the evolutionary algorithm subjects each simulated robot automatically to a battery of tests that you have provided.\nHow far it can walk without falling over.\nHow will it cope with obstacles and rough terrain and so on?.\nAt the end of each run, the program that performed best is retained and the rest of discarded.\nThen many variants of that program are created and the process is repeated.\nAfter thousands of iterations of this evolutionary process, you may find that your robot walks quite well according to the criteria you have set.\nYou can now write your thesis.\nNot only can you claim to have achieved a robot that walks with a required degree of skill, you can claim to have implemented evolution on a computer.\nThis sort of thing has been done successfully many times.\nIt is a useful technique.\nIt certainly constitutes evolution in the sense of alternating variation selection.\nBut is it evolution in the more important sense of the creation of knowledge by variation selection?.\nI'll just repeat that.\nThis is David Deutsch's emphasis on what Darwin and Dawkins have said about evolution by natural selection.\nDavid emphasizes how DNA contains knowledge, knowledge of how to create organisms.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1751"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "55438705-5a29-4c35-ba96-174fedb1a01d": {"page_content": "This sort of thing has been done successfully many times.\nIt is a useful technique.\nIt certainly constitutes evolution in the sense of alternating variation selection.\nBut is it evolution in the more important sense of the creation of knowledge by variation selection?.\nI'll just repeat that.\nThis is David Deutsch's emphasis on what Darwin and Dawkins have said about evolution by natural selection.\nDavid emphasizes how DNA contains knowledge, knowledge of how to create organisms.\nTherefore, evolution by natural selection is really a theory about how knowledge has evolved in DNA.\nI have a knowledge got into that DNA.\nSo I'll just repeat that.\nBut is it evolution in the more important sense of the creation of knowledge by variation in selection?.\nThis will be achieved one day, but I doubt that it has been yet.\nFor the same reason that I doubt chatbots are intelligent, even slightly.\nThe reason is that there is much more obvious explanation of their abilities, namely the creativity of the programmer.\nThe task of ruling out the possibility that the knowledge was created by the programmer in the case of artificial evolution has the same logic that checking a program is an AI, but hard to be because the amount of knowledge that the evolution purportedly creates is vastly less.\nEven if you yourself are the programmer, you are in no position to judge whether you created that relatively small amount of knowledge or not.\nFor one thing, some of the knowledge that you packed into the language during those many months of design will have reach because it encoded some general truths about the laws of geometry, mechanics, and so on.\nFor another, when designing the language you had constantly in mind, what sort of abilities it would eventually be used to express?.\nOkay, me talking.\nSo the programmer who says they've successfully simulated evolution by natural selection in a computer, well, they can't have because evolution is blind, evolution is blind, we know this, we know this from the theory of evolution by natural selection.\nIt's not directed towards a particular goal.\nThis is a huge misconception, by the way.\nOkay, yes, yes.\nI admit, lots of people do have this misconception.\nLots of people think there is an arrow of evolution that organisms move towards ever greater complexity.\nNot true.\nBacteria have been around since the beginning of life on earth for billions of years.\nThey have remained there.\nThey're just as evolved as we are, like Ricky Gervais's fond of saying things like that, which is true in a sense.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1860"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e336372-1c28-405a-ac5e-82b0162a592b": {"page_content": "This is a huge misconception, by the way.\nOkay, yes, yes.\nI admit, lots of people do have this misconception.\nLots of people think there is an arrow of evolution that organisms move towards ever greater complexity.\nNot true.\nBacteria have been around since the beginning of life on earth for billions of years.\nThey have remained there.\nThey're just as evolved as we are, like Ricky Gervais's fond of saying things like that, which is true in a sense.\nThey've been evolving and they've found their niche and they have been perfectly suited to their niche, as have moths and other insects, as have fish.\nThey have all evolved to fill their niche.\nThere is no arrow of evolution leading towards a particular form of complexity.\nEvolution wasn't always directed towards us.\nSo far as we can tell, at least that's what the theory says, because evolution is blind, it doesn't know what the next best organism would be for a given environment.\nSo if evolution is blind, fact, it cannot be the case that this is an evolutionary algorithm in the Darwinian sense, because the programmer, when designing the language, had constantly in mind what sort of abilities it would eventually be used to express, which is completely unlike what evolution does.\nEvolution does not have in mind what sort of abilities it's going to be expressing.\nIt's going to be expressing in the organisms of the future.\nI'll continue reading.\nNext paragraph, I'm just going to skip the next paragraph and then David writes, one thing that always seems to happen with such projects evolutionary algorithms is that after they achieve their intended aim, if the evolutionary program is allowed to run further, it produces no further improvements.\nThis is exactly what would happen if all the knowledge in this successful robot had actually come from the programmer, but it is not a conclusive critique.\nBiological evolution often reaches local max mirror fitness.\nSo again, I'll just pause there.\nSo what's David saying there is that in real life evolution, one wouldn't expect the organism that's evolving to simply stop there.\nIf it was true evolution, especially if you're doing it to computer and you can simulate things such that they get better and better, very, very quickly.\nSo you can do billions of cycles of evolution in a few seconds or a few minutes or whatever it happens to be, could you just simulate it?.\nWhy doesn't the organism, organism, I say organism?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=1989"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a8dd32ac-0c58-4874-9a01-1748c831d17f": {"page_content": "If it was true evolution, especially if you're doing it to computer and you can simulate things such that they get better and better, very, very quickly.\nSo you can do billions of cycles of evolution in a few seconds or a few minutes or whatever it happens to be, could you just simulate it?.\nWhy doesn't the organism, organism, I say organism?.\nWhy doesn't the simulated robot, let's say, inside of the computer that you've taught to, you haven't taught, you've allowed to evolve the capacity to walk, why doesn't it then start jumping?.\nOr better yet, why don't the legs evolve into wings and it fly away?.\nThat's kind of what evolution does.\nYou have improvements beyond the thing that it becomes good at, but that doesn't happen.\nAll that it evolves towards is precisely the thing you expected to evolve before to towards.\nYou expect it to evolve towards walking because that's what you've programmed it to do.\nThe only thing that you've added in is this so-called evolutionary algorithm where instead of just solving the problem yourself, you allow the computer to determine, to judge for itself, whether or not it's slightly improving or slightly getting worse and to make a judgment on that and you're calling that evolution.\nNow, as David says there, that is not a conclusive critique, biological evolution often reaches local maxima or fitness.\nAlso, after obtaining its mysterious form of universality, DNA, he's talking about here, seemed to pause for about a billion years before creating any significant new knowledge.\nBut still, achieving results that might well be due to something else is not evidence of evolution.\nThat is why I doubt that any artificial evolution has ever created knowledge.\nI have the same view for the same reasons about slightly different kind, about the slightly different kind of artificial evolution that tries to evolve simulated organisms in a virtual environment and the kind that pits different virtual spaces against each other, which is the one that I'm going to put down in a link below.\nAnd you play around with those.\nIt's a good way to learn about evolution by natural selection, but yes, there's lots of those things out there on the internet and there's lots of ways of simulating evolution, but as David says there, they're not real artificial evolution.\nThey're toys.\nThey might be good pedagogical tools to use, but these are not proper simulations of evolution by natural selection.\nThe next part is the real kicker.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=2114"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ecb184d1-fb8f-49ad-a608-a7c193214569": {"page_content": "And you play around with those.\nIt's a good way to learn about evolution by natural selection, but yes, there's lots of those things out there on the internet and there's lots of ways of simulating evolution, but as David says there, they're not real artificial evolution.\nThey're toys.\nThey might be good pedagogical tools to use, but these are not proper simulations of evolution by natural selection.\nThe next part is the real kicker.\nSo let's read the next couple of paragraphs.\nSo he wants to, he's just asserted that no genuine artificial evolution has ever been simulated and he writes, to test this proposition, I would like to see an experiment of a slightly different kind, eliminate the graduate student from the project.\nThen instead of using a robot design to evolve better ways of walking, use a robot that is already in use in some real life application happens to be capable of walking.\nAnd then instead of creating a special language of subroutines in which to express conjectures about how to walk, just replace its existing program in its existing microprocessor, in its existing microprocessor by random numbers, permutations use errors of the type that happen anyway in such processes, though in the simulation you allowed to make them happen as often as you like.\nThe purpose of all that is to eliminate the possibility that human knowledge is being fed into the design of the system and that its reach is being mistaken for the product of evolution.\nThen run simulations of that mutating system in the usual way, as many as you like.\nIf the robot ever walks better than it did originally, then I am mistaken.\nIf it continues to improve after that, then I'm very much mistaken.\nOne of the main features of the above experiment, which is lacking in the usual way of doing artificial evolution, is that, for it to work, the language of subroutines, would have to evolve along with the adaptations that it was expressing.\nThis is what was happening in the biosphere before that jumped to universality, that finally settled in the DNA genetic code.\nAs I said, it may be that all those previous genetic codes were only capable of coding for a small number of organisms that were all rather similar, and that the overwhelming reach and that the overwhelmingly rich biosphere that we see around us, created by randomly varying genes while living the language unchanged, is something that became possible only after that jump.\nWe don't even know what kind of universality was created there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=2233"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db6e03b9-ed3b-4ac0-8c72-2b0bd71e41c4": {"page_content": "As I said, it may be that all those previous genetic codes were only capable of coding for a small number of organisms that were all rather similar, and that the overwhelming reach and that the overwhelmingly rich biosphere that we see around us, created by randomly varying genes while living the language unchanged, is something that became possible only after that jump.\nWe don't even know what kind of universality was created there.\nWhy should we expect our artificial evolution to work without it?.\nDavid concludes by speaking about how we need to be a little bit more humble and modest and face the fact there are huge unknowns here, huge unknowns with human intelligence, human creativity, and trying to create artificial creativity inside artificial general intelligence.\nAnd there are huge unknowns similarly with evolution by natural selection.\nWe've never simulated evolution.\nIf we can't program it, we haven't understood it.\nAnd so I'll just emphasize that again, just to put a cap on this about what I didn't understand.\nIt's really the part where it talks about taking away the graduate student, removing the goal, removing the goal, okay, I didn't get that.\nEvolution doesn't have a goal.\nIt's just survival of the fittest.\nBut it can't possibly, the evolution doesn't know what the fittest is.\nIt has to test out what works.\nAnd what survives is what survives.\nIt becomes a little bit of a truism, the survival of the fittest.\nDarwin never actually talked about survival of the fittest.\nAnd I think for a very good reason, he knew that it was sort of a tautology because who were the fittest or the fittest of the ones who survived, right?.\nSo anyway, taking away the graduate student from the experiment, where you've got this robot that can't yet walk, removes the goal, removes the knowledge that could be put into that robot by the graduate student, by the programmer.\nIf you give the robot legs and let the software take over, then what happens?.\nWell, if it's just a random lot of numbers in there, then you're letting the microprocessor just churn through these numbers, then that would be a true simulation of evolution by natural selection.\nThis random sequence of numbers.\nIf the robot starts to walk, if the robot starts to walk a little bit better, well, then okay, knowledge is somehow being created by that robot in order to improve its walking.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=2346"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "543caf5f-0b17-4707-8b81-ee186df6097b": {"page_content": "Well, if it's just a random lot of numbers in there, then you're letting the microprocessor just churn through these numbers, then that would be a true simulation of evolution by natural selection.\nThis random sequence of numbers.\nIf the robot starts to walk, if the robot starts to walk a little bit better, well, then okay, knowledge is somehow being created by that robot in order to improve its walking.\nSo if the robot was to start to walk better, David admits he would be wrong.\nAnd if he continues to improve, he'd be very wrong.\nBut wrong about what?.\nWell, then evolution, he would be wrong that evolution doesn't have a goal.\nBecause the robot, if it starts to walk, must have had a goal, must have had the goal of walking.\nNow, of course, it's not just David who would be wrong.\nHe's not just David who would be wrong.\nHe just happened to explain this thought experiment.\nDarwin and Dawkins would be wrong, and it's what they were in fact getting it, and I didn't understand.\nThere is literally no goal.\nThere's no thing walking otherwise to strive towards.\nSo why?.\nNevertheless, is there an improvement of the kind we actually see in nature?.\nWe do see things walking that couldn't walk before kind of, you know, the fish evolved into land creatures and the land creatures walked, but the individual fish didn't.\nThat would be, again, Lamarchism.\nWe do see increased complexity, life evolving to fill niches.\nAnd there's sometimes leads to greater complexity, but why?.\nHow does life fit so well in its niche?.\nHow does it adapt?.\nWe don't know.\nExcept to say, well, diffused survive.\nAnd the fittest are just those who survive and both who survive are the fittest.\nIn high school biology, students now learn all sorts of fancy details about genetics, about replication and transcription, how genes on DNA code for proteins.\nThe DNA is a kind of software, and it constructs proteins, different parts of the DNA code for different proteins.\nIndeed, it's all very computer-like.\nThere's a readhead that moves along the DNA, copying sections to RNA, which then gathers up the required materials for protein synthesis.\nWe know many details, but we cannot replicate the evolution of this in the lab.\nWe simply do not know enough details to simulate the evolution of this process.\nThis is where it's not like general relativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=2468"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "919ea336-1c05-4045-95ee-4371b18f8f8d": {"page_content": "Indeed, it's all very computer-like.\nThere's a readhead that moves along the DNA, copying sections to RNA, which then gathers up the required materials for protein synthesis.\nWe know many details, but we cannot replicate the evolution of this in the lab.\nWe simply do not know enough details to simulate the evolution of this process.\nThis is where it's not like general relativity.\nIf there's a true evolutionary algorithm out there, let's see an actual ecosystem of hope online.\nSo there's so much we don't know.\nAnd as I began this with the military experiment, we don't know why all these military experiments continue to fail.\nThere are big gaps here now understanding about how complexity increases.\nIn other words, how the knowledge comes to be instantiated within the DNA, within the self-replicating molecules.\nThis is really exciting for me, this chapter.\nThis was a brilliant one.\nIt's the one, as I fully admit, I didn't appreciate until last year.\nBut now I think I do.\nI have a better idea, and it was all about the fact that evolution doesn't have a goal, but evolutionary algorithms most certainly do.\nAnd so therefore they're misnamed.\nThey're not true evolution by natural selection algorithms.\nCall them evolutionary algorithms if you like, but don't think that in any way it resembles the kind of evolution we have in biology.\nLooking forward to doing the very next chapter.\nThe next chapter is our window and infinity.\nSo I'm living away from biology and into the philosophy of mathematics.\nI can't wait to do that one, and I'll see you then.\nBye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwZLL67V68&t=2658"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8cbb4de-e702-4aed-97fd-0092489450d5": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and Episode 89 of the series.\nThis one is chapter 4 of The Science of Canon Can't by Chiara Marletta.\nAnd the title of the chapter today and the title of this episode is Quantum Information.\nNow I know that many people who watch and listen are not necessarily people with a physics background.\nSome are.\nbut I think they are in the minority.\nIndeed, physics itself is becoming increasingly a minority among school students.\nI'm not exactly sure what the distant historical trends were, but I know that today in Australia and globally broadly speaking in the Western tradition, fewer and fewer students are electing to take physics in these senior years as compared to taking things like biology or chemistry or even sports science, much less to say people taking on physics at university as a proportion of all people who attend university.\nNow I'm not saying if this trend is neither good nor bad, neither here nor there.\nThe fact is that fewer and fewer people as a proportion of the entire population are comfortable with physics and with physics terminology.\nThat's one thing.\nBut even if people do choose to go off and do some physics at university after having done it at school, the overall majority of people who take physics at university at the lower or undergraduate level, let's say, engineers and chemists and maybe people who go into medical fields like radiology and so on, they are not predominantly physicists in the main.\nAnd even those people who take physics, the engineers and the radiographers and so on, those people can tend to find areas of physics quite esoteric themselves.\nSo for example, quantum theory is a typical case in points.\nSome people who do some early physics at undergraduate level at university might never even come across quantum theory to any great deep extent anyway.\nThey regarded as an esoteric curiosity that only comes up at dinner parties or at discussions at the pub or something like that.\nBut even if you're someone like me who was determined to do something like astrophysics and who had to take a lot of units of quantum physics along the way, there are still parts of the physics cannons her to speak that are esoteric.\nAnd one of them is what we're about to talk about today, which is quantum information theory.\nNow, I can't remember exactly when I first heard about quantum information theory.\nI think it was when I was beginning to do quantum physics and I thought, this is strange and weird and technical enough.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cc977574-4eb9-4c3a-8825-2e86f74bd190": {"page_content": "And one of them is what we're about to talk about today, which is quantum information theory.\nNow, I can't remember exactly when I first heard about quantum information theory.\nI think it was when I was beginning to do quantum physics and I thought, this is strange and weird and technical enough.\nAnd then you hear about this thing called quantum information theory and you think how much more wild can this get?.\nAnd I remember picking up a few texts that were around, this was decades ago, just the beginnings of quantum information theory and I struggled to understand what was being said.\nand I never really pursued it.\nAnd ever since when I've tried to investigate it further, I've always found it dry, which is a hint that I'm finding it difficult because I'm finding it uninteresting.\nAnd that's typically because of the way it is explained.\nAnd theory itself is rarely well explained, except in the work of people like David Deutsch and David Wallace and so on who actually get to the heart of the matter about what's going on during the experiments.\nWell, quantum information theory doesn't even bother with many of the experiments.\nIt's just, it's often just presented as a dry mathematical tool that's used by people who work in the really rarefied areas of the theoretical part of physics.\nSo it was never really relevant to me, training to do astronomy.\nBut the reason why I'm saying all of this is because I want to give a plug to the book.\nI really think you should get hold of the book because this chapter in particular does an excellent job on two fronts related to fronts.\nFirst is that it manages to make quantum information interesting.\nIt made me want to keep reading to see what Kiaro is going to say next because she's presenting it in a way that I found new and refreshing.\nBut because of this problem being solved of how do you make this weird subject interesting, it became easy as well and that's always a lesson for all of this.\nIf something is interesting, then it can tend to become more easy and I've said this before, if you had trouble with something at school, it's not because you were ever incapable of doing that thing.\nIt's because you never found it interesting and you probably never found it interesting because the person presenting it wasn't making it interesting.\nSubjects just are inherently interesting.\nFor example, it's inherently interesting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=157"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f7f7fcac-3810-47dc-9111-c78612e1a461": {"page_content": "If something is interesting, then it can tend to become more easy and I've said this before, if you had trouble with something at school, it's not because you were ever incapable of doing that thing.\nIt's because you never found it interesting and you probably never found it interesting because the person presenting it wasn't making it interesting.\nSubjects just are inherently interesting.\nFor example, it's inherently interesting.\nIf you are not captured by a lecture about how stellar evolution works and what stars can ultimately end up as, then that lecture is really working hard to make things boring because it is just naturally fascinating.\nAnd I think everything ultimately must be like that in some way when you get into really deep explanations of things.\nThey're just really fascinating, inherently fascinating and Kiara's managed to find some of the inherently fascinating parts of quantum information.\nAnd I say you really have to get the book because my podcast here is no substitute for reading the book at all and to make that point, I'm skipping the first few pages of this particular chapter.\nAnd remember, I'm also skipping whole sections of the book, whole chapters, so to speak.\nThere are these little interstitial bits in between the chapter proper parts.\nThere are little fictional stories which are absolutely worth getting.\nThey're parables of a kind, they have a lesson and the book is worth getting, if only for those.\nSo after skipping these first few pages, I'm going to pick it up where Kiara begins to describe this ball and cups game, which many people will be familiar with, the most basic form, which is the one that she is describing, is where there are two cups and there is one ball.\nAnd the person who is in charge of the game hides eyeball under one of the cups and then the person playing the game has to guess which of the cups the ball is under.\nAnd this leads to this curious distinction between people who subjectively experience unpredictability and people who subjectively experience certainty.\nSo in that particular game, of course, the person playing the game, who does not know which cup the ball is under, has a 50-50 chance of guessing which cup the ball is under.\nBut the person who is in charge of the game, of setting up where the ball is going to go knows with certainty, probability equal to one, if you like, that the ball is under that particular cup and not the other.\nSo there is an asymmetry there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=273"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "facc211a-e60f-412f-9e83-50bb577907ad": {"page_content": "So in that particular game, of course, the person playing the game, who does not know which cup the ball is under, has a 50-50 chance of guessing which cup the ball is under.\nBut the person who is in charge of the game, of setting up where the ball is going to go knows with certainty, probability equal to one, if you like, that the ball is under that particular cup and not the other.\nSo there is an asymmetry there.\nAnd this is a kind of parable of a sort that is going to lead into to the idea of objective uncertainty and subjective uncertainty.\nSo let me pick it up where Keira begins to refine our understanding of some otherwise mundane terms.\nSo as I say, Keira has just been explaining how this ball and cups game works and not picking it up where she writes.\nBut the risk in games of chance is due to a counterfactual property.\nIt is the impossibility of correctly predicting something with certainty.\nI shall call this property unpredictability.\nIn the shell game of my childhood, just by the way, Keira first of this ball and cups game as the shell game.\nIn the shell game of my childhood, what is unpredictable is the position of the marble or the ball relative to the cup.\nInterestingly, in this case, the unpredictability is not objective.\nIt exists only for the player.\nFrom my point of view, the probability of correctly predicting the marble's location was one and two.\nBut someone who had the full details perfectly knew its position.\nThe unpredictability in this case is therefore apparent to the player only because he or she does not have complete information.\nThe person who sets up the game, by contrast, sees an entirely certain, predictable and deterministic situation.\nIt seems that just like in this game with marbles and cups, most unpredictability in everyday life is due to lack of information.\nWhen the weather forecast is uncertain, and the weather unpredictable as a result, it is because the information about the initial condition of all the particles in a given region of the atmosphere is imperfectly known.\nSame tossers are unpredictable because the initial conditions of the coin and environment are largely unknown.\nThe degree of unpredictability is then quantified with probabilities.\nThe probability of some unpredictable event happening expresses the extent to which one expects it, given what one knows.\nWhen asked, what will the weather be like tomorrow?.\nYou can reply, for instance, I don't know for sure, it's unpredictable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=407"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d44c2a62-861e-4b6c-8bec-585bb06b0691": {"page_content": "Same tossers are unpredictable because the initial conditions of the coin and environment are largely unknown.\nThe degree of unpredictability is then quantified with probabilities.\nThe probability of some unpredictable event happening expresses the extent to which one expects it, given what one knows.\nWhen asked, what will the weather be like tomorrow?.\nYou can reply, for instance, I don't know for sure, it's unpredictable.\nBut there is a 90% probability that is going to be sunny and so on.\nAll unpredictable behaviours were once supposed to be the same as in this game.\nNot objective, but tied to a specific viewpoint.\nIf given complete information about the actual state of affairs, there is no unpredictability.\nThe latter appears, only if one has incomplete information.\nThough this belief might seem intuitively true, it was wiped out by the discovery of quantum theory in the first half of the 20th century.\nIn quantum theory, unpredictability does not arise just from a lack of information.\nIt is inherent to the physical world, even when everyone has all the relevant information.\nIt is objective and quote.\nAll right, so just my comments here, the thing here, and if you're having your listeners of my series on the multiverse, chapter 10 of the beginning of infinity, you will know that subjective randomness is in fact all we have, because objectively there is no randomness.\nSo we have this subjective feeling that what is going to happen in the future is uncertain, but God's eye view of the multiverse, what's happening is unfolding according to the laws of physics, which are not probabilistic, they're deterministic, they are determining precisely what is happening at every point and every moment in the universe.\nAnd just on the side, of course, that is not always the best explanation of anything that happens to be happening at any given time.\nKnowledge creation is the most important exception to this rule.\nWhen you want to explain what's going on, simply saying that things are determined according to the laws of physics is not the best relevant explanation.\nThrowing that aside, the point here is that subjectively, we lack knowledge of everything that's going on that just necessarily is the case.\nThings are uncertain from our perspective, and when I say our mean individually and collectively as an entire civilization.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=542"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b1ed9872-a6fc-4c0f-ac11-2b66d2e32d3c": {"page_content": "Knowledge creation is the most important exception to this rule.\nWhen you want to explain what's going on, simply saying that things are determined according to the laws of physics is not the best relevant explanation.\nThrowing that aside, the point here is that subjectively, we lack knowledge of everything that's going on that just necessarily is the case.\nThings are uncertain from our perspective, and when I say our mean individually and collectively as an entire civilization.\nAnd worstness as Keira has hinted at there and as many listeners will already be aware, the laws of physics mandate we cannot know simultaneously to infinite precision all of the factors that will come to bear on whatever outcome we're about to see in the future.\nWe'll come back to this when we speak about observing, copying and measuring, which is part of this chapter, and is a new window into viewing these particular things, and we'll see how those things observing, copying and measuring are actually related.\nOkay, back to the book, and Keira writes.\nIt is rather unfortunate that quantum theory has acquired, in the collective imagination, the status of a quirky beast that is incomprehensible, but worthy of attention, because of its weird and bizarre demeanor.\nYou may recall the words, spooky action at a distance, used by Einstein to describe quantum entanglement, or the creepy idea of locking a cat inside a box with poison, the notorious thought experiment that Schrodinger envisaged to illustrate quantum superpositions.\nWith catchy phrases, the press has promoted the view that quantum theory is destined to remain a complete mystery.\nLeaving the good old days of Newtonian physics behind when the world used to make sense, we now have to resign ourselves to a new and alien picture of physical reality, which accords with the experimental evidence, but whose explanation of the universe is baffling, porting their my reflection.\nI think Keira is being polite, polite to her colleagues, not to her close personal colleagues, but to the wider physics community.\nI don't think we can blame only the press here.\nI think we can absolutely blame a generation or two of physicists and science communicators for deliberately at times mystifying and obscuring what quantum theory is all about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=655"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "16305ee0-5ac7-4dac-9ab8-5ec48426d58d": {"page_content": "I think Keira is being polite, polite to her colleagues, not to her close personal colleagues, but to the wider physics community.\nI don't think we can blame only the press here.\nI think we can absolutely blame a generation or two of physicists and science communicators for deliberately at times mystifying and obscuring what quantum theory is all about.\nAnd I think they have done it consciously or not, for the same reason that priests, to some extent, used to do this with holy books, it ensures that they maintain their authority as the experts you need to go to, whose opinion you're going to seek, whose feet you're going to sit cross leg that and listen to the deep wisdom because they are the ones in possession of it.\nVery few physicists are like, for example, David and Keira and associates who speak very clearly about these issues, some like to revel in the mystery.\nAnd so long as they revel in the mystery, people will keep looking at them as kind of like gurus and this is not a good thing.\nWe need to demystify all areas of science that we possibly can, in particular quantum theory because it's been mired in this bad philosophy, this bad way of trying to explain what is really going on and this fear to some extent of trying to grapple with what it's actually saying about reality, namely the multiverse.\nNow, the interesting thing here is that Keira is not actually going to even mention the multiverse in this chapter.\nIn fact, she doesn't even mention it in the entire book, except in the acknowledgements.\nNow, there is an important reason for this that I'll probably come back to later.\nAnd I think the reason is I haven't talked to Keira about this, I cannot possibly speak for Keira on this point.\nBut my guess is that she's using an important heuristic now, it's a heuristic that I heard from David Deutsch many years ago, I think just after the publication of the fabric of reality, I think someone was interviewing him about the fabric of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=771"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "12ab6d93-93fb-4bf1-b7d5-a3846331ed55": {"page_content": "Now, there is an important reason for this that I'll probably come back to later.\nAnd I think the reason is I haven't talked to Keira about this, I cannot possibly speak for Keira on this point.\nBut my guess is that she's using an important heuristic now, it's a heuristic that I heard from David Deutsch many years ago, I think just after the publication of the fabric of reality, I think someone was interviewing him about the fabric of reality.\nAnd he said at the time, words of the effect that he thought it far more important to just explain the best explanations that we had and to make progress by taking those explanations seriously, taking them for granted in a certain sense and just building on top of them, standing on the shoulders of the giants that were those explanations and going further and seeing further, rather than simply fighting the old fights, debating the old debates, trying to knock down all of the bad alternatives.\nIf you want to make progress in genetics and biology, there's no point standing up on stage spending most of your career and your working life debating with creationists.\nThat's not a good way to make progress in science.\nBut similarly, if we're quantum physicists like Yara, we just take it for granted that what quantum physics is saying about the world is the multiverse is true, okay, that we really do live in this multiverse.\nSo we don't have to worry about trying to re-explain what the multiverse is to defend the multiverse at every single point if we're going further and building on what quantum theory is, it's for the same reason that anyone who writes a book about genetics or evolutionary biology does not have to spend multiple chapters saying why evolution by natural selection is actually true and why creationism is actually wrong, you just take it for granted.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=869"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e6c6a3b2-b045-4f52-bf25-31b09c5ebc23": {"page_content": "And so my guess is that Kara is just taking for granted the reality of the multiverse, which I think is great, but just to say that this stuff about the weird catchy phrases have not only been instilled into the scientific conversational zeitgeist, so to speak, by the press, by people reporting on science, and even today some of the physicists themselves, the way in which they talk and public group promote, especially quantum theory, has overtones of weird, mystical, almost spiritual kind of overtones and it has a lot of baggage associated with it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=983"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc1c2acb-795e-4202-b073-103ccf736f2a": {"page_content": "It can do away with all that, certainly by taking it realistically, and accepting the fact there's a multiverse.\nAnyway, it took me to a press.\nKara goes on to say, quite.\nNone of this nonsense, none of this is even remotely fair to quantum theory.\nYes the quantum world seems bizarre and counterintuitive at first, but in reality it is fascinating, subtle, surprising, and above all not mysterious.\nIt can be understood.\nThe more it is understood, the more exciting it becomes.\nIt is true, though, that quantum phenomena cannot be expressed entirely in terms of familiar analogies.\nAs you were about to discover, there is a genuinely new, dazzling set of properties that quantum systems have, which are conceptually far from our everyday worldview.\nAnd they are all based on a set of simple counterfactuals, which I shall now explore.\nIncidentally, quantum phenomena are important for the progress of our civilization because they allow for the enhanced information processing capabilities of quantum systems, which our class non-quantum information media, such as those deployed by the classical computers we use nowadays.\nThe quantum counterfactuals are the fuel for the next technological revolution, the universal quantum computer.\nA universal quantum computer is a universal computer, that is, a computer that is capable of performing every computation that is allowed by given laws of physics, as I explained in chapter 3.\nThat relies entirely on quantum theory for its information processing.\nThe computers we currently use are classical, because they rely not on quantum phenomena to perform computations, but on entirely classical mechanisms.\nThe theoretical description of the universal quantum computer has been around since the 1980s, and its features are very promising on paper.\nIt has superior computational abilities compared with classical computers, because its elementary information units, the quantum bits, can explore a much richer set of possibilities than simple classical bits.\nThe effect of this richness, which is entirely due to quantum physics effects, is that the universal quantum computer can be faster and more efficient than a classical computer when it comes to certain computational tasks, searching a large database, factoring a number, etc.\nWhat is important here for you to have in mind, is that the leap in possibilities that a universal quantum computer would bring about is analogous to that brought about by the introduction of the classical computers in the first place.\nIt will make an entirely new class of technological improvements possible in the realm of information processing, alas, the actual realization of a universal quantum computer has proved to be very challenging in practice.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bd7987b1-5f53-48b7-8f8f-67c0b8c3c74d": {"page_content": "What is important here for you to have in mind, is that the leap in possibilities that a universal quantum computer would bring about is analogous to that brought about by the introduction of the classical computers in the first place.\nIt will make an entirely new class of technological improvements possible in the realm of information processing, alas, the actual realization of a universal quantum computer has proved to be very challenging in practice.\nThis enterprise is engaged some of the finest minds among physicists, engineers, and material scientists.\nNumerous IT companies such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft, and startups as well are now trying to race towards the first viable prototype of this machine, but we are still quite away, even if we are definitely getting closer, pause there, my reflection.\nOkay,.\nso this thing about being quite a ways away.\nIt's been said for decades now, and we hope that we're getting closer, and it seems as though sometimes we're getting closer, and then it seems like we're not, we often get these announcements, especially by the very companies mentioned there by Kiara.\nGoogle has announced more than once over the decades now that they've got a functioning quantum computer of a kind.\nI don't buy it, and the reason I don't buy it,.\nwell, yeah, maybe they have some weird technology they're hiding from everyone.\nI think we'd know, I think that'd be an actual leak from the company, I mean there'd be high financial incentives for anyone within that company working on such a technology to actually take the information somewhere else and sell it at a really high price, but that's not happening.\nOkay, once we have a quantum computer in one place, what I'm saying is we'll end up having a quantum computer in lots of places simultaneously, or the word will quickly get out.\nThat's the first thing.\nThe second thing is, as I've mentioned in previous episodes, I think the multiverse chapter in particular of the beginning of infinity, the engineering difficulties with quantum computation are something I'm a little familiar with.\nI'm not an only layperson in this.\nI'm a layperson who takes a special interest, but I'm definitely not an expert, but because of my special interest, I've visited one of my local universities who actually have a center for quantum computation, the university of New South Wales, and I've had some discussions with some of the people there, including the person that runs the entire place.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1162"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff6aa6d2-d4ec-4bce-bac4-f336337f4591": {"page_content": "I'm not an only layperson in this.\nI'm a layperson who takes a special interest, but I'm definitely not an expert, but because of my special interest, I've visited one of my local universities who actually have a center for quantum computation, the university of New South Wales, and I've had some discussions with some of the people there, including the person that runs the entire place.\nAnd their quantum computer, the best they can do at the moment, is one or two qubits.\nYou hear, you know, when places like Google make these announcements, like, oh, we've got heaps and heaps of qubits, hundreds of qubits or something or other, and now and again, you see press releases about this.\nI think it's all a scam.\nI think it's all a scam because of the way in which I understand at least some of the hardware works.\nI've heard tell that there are alternatives to the way in which you could have these quantum computation happening.\nI don't fully get these alternatives, but the way in which I've heard these quantum computers work, at least the university of New South Wales, I think they use ion trapping.\nThey use phosphorus type atoms, and they have to keep these things very, very cold.\nI have to keep it cold so that the information doesn't leak out, so to speak, so that the, and we're going to come to this in the chapter, actually, that we're reading right now, so that the, the atoms remain entangled so they can do the job of computation.\nEntanglement says technical term where the two atoms are kind of behaving like the one system, rather than as two independent things.\nSo that's one thing.\nAnd the only way to ensure this entanglement remains in place, at least in this particular setup, is to have them not moving around very much.\nOnce they start to move around, they deco here, they go here fancy name for lose the information.\nThey become entangled with the rest of the environment, but you don't want them entangled with the rest of the environment.\nYou want these two atoms, these two particles, to only be entangled with each other in order to do the job of computation.\nWe can rather think of it like, this is a poor analogy, but you can rather think of it like, the electricity inside of the computer is something that you want to keep inside of the computer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1259"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "54373c78-5bd0-4059-b260-782f3f7a2e89": {"page_content": "They become entangled with the rest of the environment, but you don't want them entangled with the rest of the environment.\nYou want these two atoms, these two particles, to only be entangled with each other in order to do the job of computation.\nWe can rather think of it like, this is a poor analogy, but you can rather think of it like, the electricity inside of the computer is something that you want to keep inside of the computer.\nOnce the electricity starts to get into the computer from the outside, you've got serious problems.\nSo once the electricity that's in your computer starts leaking to the outside world, you've got a problem.\nOkay, it's a very delicate mechanism.\nYou don't want additional electricity, additional electrons wandering through the circuits of your computer.\nSo in order to maintain the entanglement of the particles in the quantum computer, at least at the University of New South Wales, and I think this is the way many different kinds of races towards an actual quantum computer are working is you have to get these things very cold, and you need to get down to near absolute zero, and I've told this story before, and at UNSW, what they do is they use liquid helium, which gets you down to about minus 270, something like that, but that's still not cold enough.\nAnd so what they do is they use evaporative cooling, and so they have this isotope of helium, helium 3, the light isotope of helium, and they use that to evaporate away from the helium 4, in which the atoms of phosphorus are being bathed, and as that evaporative cooling happens, you can actually get down to minus 272 points, something or other.\nSo it's very, very close to absolute zero, and they need to get down to that so that the things remain entangled with one another.\nNow, an interesting question was said to them, where do you get helium 3 from?.\nHow do you go about refining that?.\nAnd the curious thing was, I don't know if they were supposed to tell me this or not, but they did tell me, maybe it's public knowledge, they said that, well, the American army of all people sponsors their project, sponsors their race towards building this first quantum computer.\nOf all the people, the American army, you know, I said, American army, like, why, why the American army?.\nWell, it's a bit of a deal, right?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1097"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b0d8ede7-5946-4045-a4c8-0823072f314b": {"page_content": "And the curious thing was, I don't know if they were supposed to tell me this or not, but they did tell me, maybe it's public knowledge, they said that, well, the American army of all people sponsors their project, sponsors their race towards building this first quantum computer.\nOf all the people, the American army, you know, I said, American army, like, why, why the American army?.\nWell, it's a bit of a deal, right?.\nThe project at UNSW, the University of New South Wales is running, requires the helium 3.\nAnd guess what?.\nThe American army, being the military, would like to ensure that they have access to the first quantum computer that's built.\nI'm sure they're sponsoring a lot of such projects, okay?.\nAmerica, for defense reasons, wants to ensure they're not left behind.\nAnd so they are supporting lots and lots of people financially in order to build a quantum computer.\nSo there's definitely big money in it.\nBut the way in which the American army gets the helium 3 is from the radioactive decomposition of uranium, I think it is, might be plutonium, whatever, one of the radioactive materials inside of their nuclear bombs.\nAnd so their nuclear bombs are irradiating this stuff and they collect it in big balloons and then they send it to people like the University of New South Wales to do research with in quantum computation.\nSo that's a curious way in which nuclear bombs are assisting with research towards quantum computers.\nAnyways, for even more details about that, again, my multiverse series has some more details.\nAnd I'm picking it up where Cara says of herself, and I would also agree with this, quote, I belong to the cohort of people who look at technological developments in awe with optimism and high expectations, but are ultimately more interested in the foundations of the theories that allow such technology to exist.\nWhat is it precisely about quantum media that makes them capable of supporting such super-efficient quantum information processing?.\nWhat can one learn by looking at the foundations if the technology is already pushing ahead?.\nIn fact, by digging into the foundations of quantum theory, we stumble upon a surprising fact.\nAll properties of quantum systems, which are crucial for the universal quantum computer and the related quantum technologies, rest on a few elementary counterfactual properties.\nIn chapter 3, I explain that information media assistance with attributes that can be flipped and copied.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1097"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce29bd9c-afd3-4cd7-b324-59566739f314": {"page_content": "What can one learn by looking at the foundations if the technology is already pushing ahead?.\nIn fact, by digging into the foundations of quantum theory, we stumble upon a surprising fact.\nAll properties of quantum systems, which are crucial for the universal quantum computer and the related quantum technologies, rest on a few elementary counterfactual properties.\nIn chapter 3, I explain that information media assistance with attributes that can be flipped and copied.\nQuantum systems have these counterfactual properties, and therefore are information media in their sense.\nBut they have more counterfactual properties, making them so much more powerful.\nTo see what these properties are and understand why quantum systems are a more powerful kind of information medium, I shall invite you to look again at the game of chance with cups, now through the lens of information theory.\nThe two cups together with the marble are using the terminology of chapter 3 and information medium.\nThey can contain a bit of information encoded in the position of the marble, as you can see in the figurine screen from page 111 of the book.\nWhen the marble is under the cup on the right, it encodes the value 0.\nWhen it is under the cup on the left, it encodes the value 1.\nYou can imagine a standard procedure to set up the game, first toss a coin.\nIf the coin shows heads, put the marble under the cup on the left.\nIf it shows tails, put it under the one on the right.\nAt this point for the player, the bit has perfectly randomised and maximally unpredictable because it could hold the value 0 or 1.\nThe marble could be either under the cup on the right or that on the left, each with probability half.\nFor the person who sets up the game, however, the bit has a definite value, either a 0 or a 1.\nThey know where the marble is.\nNow imagine setting up the game with systems that behave according to quantum theory.\nNot simple information media, but quantum information media.\nWhat would change in the game?.\nOur quantum game involves a photon, a quantum particle of light, instead of the marble, and two possible paths instead of the cups.\nPause there, my reflection.\nAs you might guess, again, if you've read the beginning of infinity, if you've listened to my podcasts on the beginning of infinity, what we are about to describe is the mark zender interferometer.\nWhat I like to remind people of, as we're discussing something like this, is that these are physical objects.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "212e1411-ad6a-446b-9424-8b6ed85af684": {"page_content": "Our quantum game involves a photon, a quantum particle of light, instead of the marble, and two possible paths instead of the cups.\nPause there, my reflection.\nAs you might guess, again, if you've read the beginning of infinity, if you've listened to my podcasts on the beginning of infinity, what we are about to describe is the mark zender interferometer.\nWhat I like to remind people of, as we're discussing something like this, is that these are physical objects.\nThese are really existing physical objects.\nThey're not abstract ideals, and because they're really existing physical objects, you just have to accept the fact they're obeying the laws of quantum theory.\nThey might violate your common sense, but so much for your common sense.\nYou might think you know how a mirror works, or a crystal works, or how light bouncing off of a surface works, so to speak.\nAnd you could be completely wrong about all of it.\nSo we have to take at face value to a certain extent.\nWhat is being said here?.\nBut to another extent, you can always go and check yourself.\nYou can always do the experiment yourself if you were willing to try hard enough.\nYou can certainly read about the results.\nYou can watch people doing these experiments.\nYou can see for yourself, you can check for yourself.\nBut there is no lie being told here.\nThere's no fiction being told here.\nIt simply is the case that there are some strange and unusual results that we're about to discuss.\nLet's go back to the book.\nSo we're discussing this quantum game involving a photon.\nIn chiarants, a source emits the photon, then the photon can travel straight along the horizontal path, or along a vertical path.\nThe photon and its path constitute an information medium.\nThey can encode a bit.\nIf the photon travels on the horizontal path, it encodes a zero.\nIf it goes on the vertical path, it encodes a one.\nIt is possible to set up the game by following the randomization procedure I explained earlier, but this would not lead us to a quantum game.\nFor example, someone sets the photon to travel vertically or horizontally according to the output of a coin toss, again the chances are a half for the player to guess correctly, which part the photon is on.\nAs you can see, this version of the game is not different from the marble because it does not use quantum properties of the photon in any way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dd1e70ad-58da-4d9a-91a9-f9cac823f6cc": {"page_content": "It is possible to set up the game by following the randomization procedure I explained earlier, but this would not lead us to a quantum game.\nFor example, someone sets the photon to travel vertically or horizontally according to the output of a coin toss, again the chances are a half for the player to guess correctly, which part the photon is on.\nAs you can see, this version of the game is not different from the marble because it does not use quantum properties of the photon in any way.\nWe need to explore some other kind of setup, using the quantum properties over the photon.\nWhat is the quantum stuff that a photon can do while a marble cannot?.\nIt can be prepared in states that are exclusively quantum, in the sense that they do not exist according to classical physics, but only under quantum physics.\nAn example of these chiefly quantum states, which is relevant for the photon in this example, is what I shall call a superposition of the horizontal and vertical path.\nIn order to understand what kind of state this is, how it is related to the state, where the photon is on a definite path, and what counterfactuals have to do with all this, we need to look at a definite experiment where the photon is prepared in a superposition of different states, and then certain measurements are performed on the photon.\nThis will tell us how the superposition is in a certain sense similar to the state of the marble, but is fundamentally very different.\nThe photon, after having been emitted by a source, can be put into a superposition of paths by guiding it through a special kind of crystal, which when interacting with the photon causes it to split along two paths, horizontal and vertical, as in the figure.\nIf you were to guide a beam of light, made of lots of photons through this crystal, you would see that the beam is split across the two paths, horizontal and vertical, which is why sometimes this crystal is called a beam splitter, but here I am talking about a single photon, not a beam of light, and what it means for it to be split can be understood only with quantum theory.\nSo what do we mean by the photon being split across two different paths in a quantum superposition?.\nWell, one key aspect of the superposition is that after passing through the crystal, the photon could be found with probability a half on the horizontal path, and with probability a half on the vertical path.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c3f098e-3e5c-4ea1-a04c-58fbe31fac08": {"page_content": "So what do we mean by the photon being split across two different paths in a quantum superposition?.\nWell, one key aspect of the superposition is that after passing through the crystal, the photon could be found with probability a half on the horizontal path, and with probability a half on the vertical path.\nWhen the photon is in a superposition of different paths, it is impossible to predict with certainty which path it is on.\nIts path location is unpredictable.\nExperiments happening daily around the globe in the quantum laboratories confirm this behavior to the highest precision, pausing their myreflection.\nOkay, so on this point about split, now, Chiara here is avoiding the terminology of broader quantum theory.\nThe way I would phrase this if I was explaining this to someone is that, of course, the photon is a quantum object, and as a quantum object, it is made up of fungible instances.\nAnd so what a photon is is a multiverse object, such that when it collides with a physical crystal of the kind that Chiara is describing, or it could be a half-silvered mirror, whatever you want, half of the instances bounce off, and go vertically, and half of the instances are transmitted through the crystal and go horizontally.\nSo this is what the splitting is.\nThe splitting is the differentiation of the instances.\nWhy does it happen?.\nBecause it's possible that it could happen.\nThe laws of physics say that this is what happens.\nIt's almost kind of like when people ask, if they do ask, you know, why does an object in motion stay in motion unless acted on by a force?.\nWell, it just does.\nThere's no force acting, and there's no reason for it to change its course of motion.\nThis is one of Wittgenstein's lines, you know, my spade is turned, you can't explain it further.\nThis is just what the laws of physics say.\nAnd so if you do have this possibility, this physical possibility of the photon taking one path or the other, then it can indeed take both paths, and it doesn't indeed take both paths in this particular situation, and it's testable.\nYou can test the claim that it only takes one path by doing the experiment.\nAnd if you have the hypothesis, it must only take one path, well, you will find repeating the experiment.\nBut in fact, it takes both paths, repeating the experiment often enough.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4cd0596f-bd01-4346-8d94-d5d566763ba9": {"page_content": "You can test the claim that it only takes one path by doing the experiment.\nAnd if you have the hypothesis, it must only take one path, well, you will find repeating the experiment.\nBut in fact, it takes both paths, repeating the experiment often enough.\nSo it approximates what happens in the multiverse, okay, back to the book, okay, all right.\nDoes this mean then that when the photon is in a path superposition, its properties are exhausted by saying with what probability the photon is on one path and with what probability is on the other, just like for the marble in our classical example with two cups?.\nNo, in reality, the story is much more subtle, quantum superpositions are not about probabilities.\nThe photon is not a randomized bit, even if, in some instances, it can look like one.\nThe first difference from a randomized bit, such as the marble, is that no one can predict with certainty which path the photon is on.\nEven the person who prepared the photon superposition cannot predict that.\nThe unpredictability of the photon path is absolute, unlike in the case of randomization, causing that as my reflection.\nNow, the reason for this, by the way, is because, well, as we're going to get to, everything about what the experimenter is doing and what a person who tries to make a measurement here is subjective.\nAnd the reason that it's subjective is because you're in a particular universe with a particular set of instances of the photon.\nCopies of you are in the other universes with instances traveling along the other path.\nAnd so when you make the measurement, you will always only ever detect if the photon traveling along one of the two paths, you can't possibly detect it traveling upon both paths, even though it does, even though it does travel along both paths.\nIt's in this superposition of traveling along these paths, but you will only detect it along one of the paths because of the differentiation of the universes.\nAnd Kiara is just saying, here, this is the way it is.\nThis is the way it is, except it.\nShe goes on to say, quote, the person who prepared the photon knows all the details about the situation, yet cannot predict where the photon is.\nThe photon is in a quantum superposition of two different paths.\nWhen in that state, it does not have a definite position.\nAnd if you were to measure its position, that measurement would have an unpredictable outcome.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=2088"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d532d9b9-a28d-4d59-b96b-86a318dc3b3a": {"page_content": "And Kiara is just saying, here, this is the way it is.\nThis is the way it is, except it.\nShe goes on to say, quote, the person who prepared the photon knows all the details about the situation, yet cannot predict where the photon is.\nThe photon is in a quantum superposition of two different paths.\nWhen in that state, it does not have a definite position.\nAnd if you were to measure its position, that measurement would have an unpredictable outcome.\nSo the quantum unpredictability associated with superpositions does not come from the lack of information about the preparation of the photon, just pausing it yet, just so just to emphasize that point, the real-life version of this experiment requires preparation of the photon.\nPreparation of the photon requires something like the energy of the photon to be tuned.\nYou need to know what the frequency is.\nAnd then you fired in a particular direction.\nAnd given a particular set up of the apparatus, these things again are physical, then upon encountering the crystal, which has a certain thickness, which has certain properties, and it will cause phase changes in the photon, the way in which the photon reacts to striking the crystal, to passing through or bouncing off the crystal.\nAnd even that passing through and bouncing off is not a simple process at all.\nThat is a physical interaction.\nWhen a photon passes through something like a crystal, what's actually going on is the photon is absorbed by the atoms of the crystal and then re-emitted, absorbed and re-emitted, absorbed and re-emitted, this process goes on.\nIt actually slows down the travel time of any beam of light or ray of light travelling through it, because the absorption and re-emission of these photons takes time, even though the photons always only have a travel at the speed of light, the absorption and re-emission thing takes time.\nSo it slows the photon down as it goes through the crystal.\nAnd this is, by the way, why you need this second crystal as we're about to get to in the full mark, zendy interferometer.\nBut the two photons that travel along these two different paths actually travel along exactly the same length paths.\nAlmost exactly the same length, they're out of phase by a certain amount, and because they're out of phase you get a certain amount of interference, which always causes the photon to travelling one direction and not the other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1745"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ffd5687a-9b0f-4783-80d2-2aa30036d1e5": {"page_content": "And this is, by the way, why you need this second crystal as we're about to get to in the full mark, zendy interferometer.\nBut the two photons that travel along these two different paths actually travel along exactly the same length paths.\nAlmost exactly the same length, they're out of phase by a certain amount, and because they're out of phase you get a certain amount of interference, which always causes the photon to travelling one direction and not the other.\nAgain, same by multi-verse series for the entire explanation of this.\nOkay, so I'm skipping a little bit.\nand I'm picking it up where Chiara writes, quite.\nThe second significant difference can be seen by repeating the game after having played it once, for the marble you randomly put the marble under one of the two cups by tossing a coin, as I said earlier.\nThen you repeat the coin toss, and according to the coin value, reposition the marble under one of the cups, the player has still the same chance of guessing correctly where the marble is.\nOne half.\nIndeed, adding uncertainty to an already uncertain situation can only make things equally or more uncertain, randomising once or twice, or a hundred times, leaves the unpredictability the same, repeating the steps of the preparation does not change the odds of guessing correctly.\nNow look at what happens with the photon.\nTo repeat the preparation of the quantum superposition twice, you need to let the photon through the crystal twice.\nIn a real experiment, this can be done by arranging a second crystal after the first and by setting up a system of mirrors, so that the photon would go through the first crystal bounce off the mirror and go through the second crystal when travelling on both the vertical and horizontal path, which path will the photon be on after encountering the second crystal?.\nIf you think of each crystal, as randomising the photon path, judging from the marble example, you would expect the photon to be found with probability of half on one path and one half on the other.\nBut this is not how it goes.\nThe photon, after encountering the second crystal, will invariably end up on the same path as it was before the horizontal one.\nIf you believe that the crystal is simply randomising the photon path, the fact we have uncovered seems to imply something impossible.\nThat applying the same randomising procedure, the crystal twice, produces something certain not random.\nThis conclusion cannot be true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1745"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51062c6d-5d57-4ecc-89e7-46273d02be44": {"page_content": "But this is not how it goes.\nThe photon, after encountering the second crystal, will invariably end up on the same path as it was before the horizontal one.\nIf you believe that the crystal is simply randomising the photon path, the fact we have uncovered seems to imply something impossible.\nThat applying the same randomising procedure, the crystal twice, produces something certain not random.\nThis conclusion cannot be true.\nIf it were, you could go to a casino and always win simply by waiting for the dice to be rolled twice, or the cards to be shuffled twice.\nWe've reached a contradiction.\nAs always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give.\nThe revelation here is that the crystal is not a randomising operation even though it looks like one at first.\nThe quantum superposition, created by the beam splitter, unlike coin tossers, dice throws and the like, cannot be described with probability only.\nIt is something else.\nI first probably learnt about this surprising fact during my doctoral studies from Arthur Eckert, who in the early days of his pioneering work on quantum cryptography, had to think hard about how to explain to an incredulous scientific community what was so special about quantum systems as opposed to simply randomised phenomena.\nThe explanation for this counterintuitive phenomenon resides at the heart of quantum theory.\nSo much so that this fact alone can be taken as a signature of the photon being a genuine quantum mechanical particle, just pausing their myreflexion just to emphasise this.\nWe can see on the screen the picture here of what is in Kiara's book actually, of the Markzendi interferometer.\nAnd the way in which she explains what's going on is that it seems as though, it seems as though, what the crystal is doing is perfectly randomising things, after all, after all, if you perform the experiment one photon at a time, then you can't predict whether it's going to go straight horizontally or up vertically, you just don't know.\nYou can put detectors after the crystal in both of those places.\nAnd sometimes it will go straight through and sometimes it will go up, sometimes it's horizontal, sometimes it's vertical, you don't know.\nIt just appears to be completely and utterly random.\nAnd so putting a second crystal there should be, seemingly, completely and utterly random.\nNow, for an explanation of this, and I don't want to go into it now because it took me some 15 minutes to explain it in the multiverse series.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae144626-2559-4efa-ac23-f0851d438533": {"page_content": "And sometimes it will go straight through and sometimes it will go up, sometimes it's horizontal, sometimes it's vertical, you don't know.\nIt just appears to be completely and utterly random.\nAnd so putting a second crystal there should be, seemingly, completely and utterly random.\nNow, for an explanation of this, and I don't want to go into it now because it took me some 15 minutes to explain it in the multiverse series.\nBut you can find it.\nIf you go to talkcast episode 23 on YouTube in particular, it's, I've been calling it chapter 10.\nIt's chapter 11, chapter 11, the multiverse, chapter 11, the multiverse, part zero, part zero.\nAnd in that part zero there, if you skip to like the 42 minute mark and the 42 minute mark, I go, I spend a long time going into excruciating detail about the Markzendi interferometer.\nAnd the mechanics of what's going on from one perspective that might give you an insight into what exactly is going on here.\nNow we're about to have another perspective as well.\nAnd that other perspective is as Keira says, the assumption that it's simply randomizing things, that it simply is purely random, whether it goes horizontal or goes vertical, is not quite right.\nAs Keira said, and I'll say it again, and she said that she, she credits Artie Eckert for this quote, what makes the photon so different from the randomized marble in the original game is that once it has gone through the first crystal, once it has, another one of its physical properties, not the position or the path is perfectly definite.\nThe property is that of being in that particular superposition of paths.\nWhat's more, there is another counterintuitive fact, letting the photon through the second beam splitter, and then measuring where it is, is one way of measuring that other property.\nThat is, measuring which superposition the photon is in.\nOkay, just say that again, because that's such a subtle point.\nSo once the photon goes through the first beam splitter, in other words, the first half silver mirror, the first crystal, everything is not equal.\nIt depends upon how you set up the experiment.\nThe crystal can have different thicknesses.\nThe photon can have different energies.\nThere are physical properties here that you can play with.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1745"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ade1576-c701-4105-9079-b01132897d62": {"page_content": "That is, measuring which superposition the photon is in.\nOkay, just say that again, because that's such a subtle point.\nSo once the photon goes through the first beam splitter, in other words, the first half silver mirror, the first crystal, everything is not equal.\nIt depends upon how you set up the experiment.\nThe crystal can have different thicknesses.\nThe photon can have different energies.\nThere are physical properties here that you can play with.\nSuch that once that photon has gone through that first part of the apparatus, once the photon has passed through the crystal, there is something about it that is perfectly definite.\nWhat is that something?.\nWell, as Chiara is calling it there, it is this superposition property.\nIt's in a particular superposition of paths.\nThe reason we say this is because, well, in my understanding anyway, it has a certain kind of phase, and the way I describe it in that other episode, is that, well, in the wave theory of light, it's sort of vibrating upwards.\nIt's like a crest, as compared to a trough.\nIt could be one or the other.\nNow, there is a quantum analog of this, okay?.\nThe more precise way of explaining what this is in quantum terms, but you can still speak of individual photons as having a certain phase, such that whether it's gone horizontally or whether it's gone vertically, it's got this particular one thing.\nBoth of the copies share this one thing.\nOr the better way of saying it, of constructing this explanation, is as Chiara has said there.\nThe property being, in that particular superposition of paths, okay, so it's in a superposition of paths.\nThere could be many different ways and many different kinds of superpositions of paths you could have.\nIf you change the energy of the photon, you would have a different superposition of paths.\nIf you change the thickness of the crystal, a different superposition of paths.\nBut because you have a particular energy and a particular thickness of a crystal, amongst other things, amongst other things, the distance between, for example, the mirrors and the crystals would also affect this superposition of paths as far as I'm aware.\nOne thing that's different, and I keep coming back to this, is that the apparatus is physical, so the crystal is physical, and bouncing off the front surface is not symmetrical with passing through the crystal.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=2097"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5e2fd25c-624f-4b43-a1d7-625378785232": {"page_content": "But because you have a particular energy and a particular thickness of a crystal, amongst other things, amongst other things, the distance between, for example, the mirrors and the crystals would also affect this superposition of paths as far as I'm aware.\nOne thing that's different, and I keep coming back to this, is that the apparatus is physical, so the crystal is physical, and bouncing off the front surface is not symmetrical with passing through the crystal.\nAlthough you end up 50-50, in terms of the proportion of instances of the photon either going vertically or horizontally, the ones that end up going horizontally have passed through that crystal, and that it's changed something about the photon.\nCall it the phase if you like, whereas that kind of process has not happened with the one that bounces off and goes vertically.\nThese two situations are not symmetrical, and therefore that comes to bear on what happens to the two instances when they recombine at the second crystal, causing them to always go off in that horizontal direction.\nAnd the reason for this is that on recombination at the second crystal, the interference could be constructive, could be destructive, there's different kinds of interference, and it happens to be the case that the interference is such that these two instances recombine such that the whole thing goes horizontally again.\nBut the point here is, if you're interested in the physical properties of what's going on here, the actual physics of what's occurring, passing through end reflection, refraction and reflection if you like, are not perfectly the same kind of thing.\nAnd that's why it's not completely randomized, that they're not the same kind of groups of photons, whatever the case, it has this perfectly definite property.\nLet's keep reading, car right.\nThat is why we see a definite outcome after the second crystal.\nA crystal creates a definite path superposition, then another crystal and a subsequent measurement of where the photon is constitute jointly, a measurement of which superposition the photon is in.\nThe outcome at the end is definite because after the first crystal, the photon is in a definite path superposition, but it does not have a definite path, okay, pausing their my reflection again.\nSo once you've passed through that first crystal, you have a definite path superposition, but not a definite path.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=2238"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "92759a14-f5e2-49a7-a218-11ea88b563d2": {"page_content": "A crystal creates a definite path superposition, then another crystal and a subsequent measurement of where the photon is constitute jointly, a measurement of which superposition the photon is in.\nThe outcome at the end is definite because after the first crystal, the photon is in a definite path superposition, but it does not have a definite path, okay, pausing their my reflection again.\nSo once you've passed through that first crystal, you have a definite path superposition, but not a definite path.\nNot a definite path because it's 50-50, it's half of the instances are going vertically and half of the instances are being transmitted horizontally, so not a definite path, but a definite path superposition.\nFor more on this by the way, even more than what I've said, David Wallace himself, the emergent multiverse guy actually has a lecture online about the Mark Zender interferometer from the multiverse perspective, and so there is yet more information from this way of looking at things out there on the internet.\nIt's hard to find, but it is out there, okay, so Kiara goes on to write, quote, so there are two properties of the photon that play a role in the experiment with beam splitters, the property which path, call that P, and the property which path superposition, call that PS, counterfactuals come in at this important point to explain the relation between these two properties in the case of quantum systems such as the photon.\nIf it is possible to predict the value of P, or a zontal or vertical, with certainty, it is impossible to predict which path superposition the photon is in and vice versa.\nWhen the photon is predictably travelling along a definite path and P is sharp, in the sense that the photon has a definite value of its position, the other property, PS, is not sharp.\nA measurement of PS yields an unpredictable outcome.\nBut when the photon has gone through the crystal once, the outcome of a path measurement becomes unpredictable.\nIts position P is not sharp anymore, whereas the other property PS has become sharp.\nThe outcome of its measurement is predictable.\nThis relation between the two properties P and PS is based on counterfactuals, and as I shall now illustrate, is that the heart of the notorious bore complementarity displayed by quantum systems, the fact that different properties of quantum systems, such as energy and position, or P and PS, cannot be simultaneously measured to arbitrarily high accuracy, pausing there my quick reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=2238"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a18a00f1-7c6e-48f8-8614-232117d9f619": {"page_content": "Its position P is not sharp anymore, whereas the other property PS has become sharp.\nThe outcome of its measurement is predictable.\nThis relation between the two properties P and PS is based on counterfactuals, and as I shall now illustrate, is that the heart of the notorious bore complementarity displayed by quantum systems, the fact that different properties of quantum systems, such as energy and position, or P and PS, cannot be simultaneously measured to arbitrarily high accuracy, pausing there my quick reflection.\nThis is one of the most challenging parts of quantum theory, whether or many challenging things to accept.\nAnd some people just balk at it and just violate common sense, so they refuse to believe it.\nSo let me try again.\nI think this is something I've explained a few times.\nIt's tricky.\nYou simply have to give up certain assumptions.\nLike, for example, we know that a car going down the street can, in a common sense why, it'd be said to have a velocity.\nIt's travelling at 60 kilometres per hour, and it also has a position.\nIt is directly outside of the post office.\nSo we can say these two things without contradiction, without violating our common sense nations, without seemingly violating any law of physics.\nThe problem is we are violating a law of physics if we're going to take things really, really seriously.\nNewtonian physics, the way in which I just described things, or even Galileo's physics, allows us to say that the car has got this particular velocity, 60 kilometres per hour, and this particular position.\nAnd we are just so very used to speaking in that way that we think, how could it possibly be otherwise, but in quantum physics, it can be otherwise.\nNot only can it be otherwise, it simply is otherwise.\nThe observables, the things like the velocity, the things like the position of the car cannot be known with arbitrarily high accuracy simultaneously.\nWe can't both know exactly what the position is, and exactly what the velocity is.\nNow it's unproblematic for a car, because the car is so big.\nBut when we get down to individual particles, it becomes significant.\nThe effect is significant, measurable, noticeable, important.\nSo we simply cannot say of something like an electron.\nIt is precisely there and travelling at this particular speed.\nNow, there are many ways of getting to this truth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=3035"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "62783b01-a1c5-48cf-a80e-e9d34e46ca4d": {"page_content": "We can't both know exactly what the position is, and exactly what the velocity is.\nNow it's unproblematic for a car, because the car is so big.\nBut when we get down to individual particles, it becomes significant.\nThe effect is significant, measurable, noticeable, important.\nSo we simply cannot say of something like an electron.\nIt is precisely there and travelling at this particular speed.\nNow, there are many ways of getting to this truth.\nOne is due to the fact that, well, if you were to try and find out what the position of an electron is at any particular point, think about what finding out really means.\nWhat finding out means is observing.\nWhat observing means is a physical process.\nYou've got to interact with that electron.\nNow you have to interact with the car when you look at it.\nBut looking at a car means shining a light on it, seeing where it is, and the light doesn't affect the car, but in the case of the electron, if you want to know where that electron is, you're going to fire a photon at it.\nThe photon is going to collide with that electron, so you know where it is.\nAnd that is going to affect the electron.\nAnd that photon can only give you so much information once that collision between the photon and the electron has happened, among other things.\nThis is just the way the universe happens to be.\nSo you simply have to just get over the sense that you can know these things similar spontaneously.\nYou can't, and that's that.\nThat's the way in which we understand the observations that we're making.\nThe way in which we understand these strange quantum effects is precisely by speaking in this way.\nWe cannot understand these.\nWe cannot have perfect precision simultaneously of these two things.\nSo you have to give up on this simultaneously knowing these two things at the same time.\nThe rest of quantum physics only makes sense if you do give that up.\nBut if you refuse to give them up, well, you're kind of in the position of rejecting that the explanation of the apparent motion of the Sun across the sky is, in fact, not the motion of the Sun across the sky at all, but rather the rotation of the Earth.\nThe Earth revolving is the actual motion that's going on, causing the appearance of the Sun to move across the sky.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=3076"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1ceffb2a-7ae7-4c3e-b274-c23a4c36612d": {"page_content": "The rest of quantum physics only makes sense if you do give that up.\nBut if you refuse to give them up, well, you're kind of in the position of rejecting that the explanation of the apparent motion of the Sun across the sky is, in fact, not the motion of the Sun across the sky at all, but rather the rotation of the Earth.\nThe Earth revolving is the actual motion that's going on, causing the appearance of the Sun to move across the sky.\nSo making the mental shift to a rotating Earth, a revolving Earth, to a situation where quantum physics says of systems, they do not have A-speed and A-position.\nThey have both, and they're intimately related.\nThey are tied together.\nThat's what we're talking about.\nThat's the kind of shift in your mind you need to make.\nAnd this is all related to the fact that in quantum theory, remember, an object, let's be simple and just call it a particle, or a particle is actually a kind of complex thing.\nWell, that was fundamental, that's one way I've talking about it.\nIt's not the case that it's just one single photon, as we've said before.\nAnd so when this thing we call a photon, which is not one single thing, encounters something like a crystal, as Chiara has explained, it ends up being in this superposition of states.\nThe superposition of the design could be one of any number of possible superpositions it depends upon the physical properties of the crystal, as we've said.\nBut this idea of this single photon.\nIt's deep, and you can just keep exploring it.\nAnd indeed, someone asked me recently about, well, do particles really exist?.\nAfter all, isn't quantum field theory deeper?.\nAnd in that theory, the field is the most fundamental thing, not the particles.\nAnd well, my response to that is, particles still exist.\nIt's just that we can understand them through these fields.\nWe can always get a better, deeper understanding of what these things are.\nIt's not like the Greeks came up with what atoms are, these indivisible things.\nAnd then once they had decided what the theory of atoms were, we could never have a deeper understanding.\nNot turns out we still have atoms, it's just that we understand them more deeply.\nWe know that they have nuclei and electrons, and those nuclei contain particles of neutrons and protons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=2238"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5e06c6ee-bbe8-4280-9460-571290d6e2c0": {"page_content": "We can always get a better, deeper understanding of what these things are.\nIt's not like the Greeks came up with what atoms are, these indivisible things.\nAnd then once they had decided what the theory of atoms were, we could never have a deeper understanding.\nNot turns out we still have atoms, it's just that we understand them more deeply.\nWe know that they have nuclei and electrons, and those nuclei contain particles of neutrons and protons.\nAnd indeed, those protons and neutrons contain particles within them as well.\nSo atoms become this rich area of delving of a deeper into our understanding of what this thing an atom is.\nThe same is true of particles.\nWe can call them vibrations of the quantum field.\nThat's fine.\nWe can call them an ensemble of fungible instances.\nThese are all different ways of coming out the same idea, our best understanding of what these particles are at the moment.\nThese entities that exist within quantum theory are at the moment.\nAnd so, because we get to these ever deeper understandings, our intuitions, not surprisingly, get pushed around.\nLet's go back to the book.\nCarrots.\nWhat does all this tell us of the information theoretic properties of the photon?.\nThe counterfactual property I've just uncovered provides the key to answering this question.\nIn chapter 3, copyability emerged as one of the characteristics of information media.\nNow you are about to discover that the copying task is much more ubiquitous than it may seem at first.\nIt does not pertain to the world of computers and digital machines only.\nThe task of copying and that of measuring anything physical are fundamentally the same.\nAn apparatus that measures a given property is a system that, when given in input some system, provides in output the value of the relevant property of the system as it really is.\nA kitchen scale is a familiar example of a measuring apparatus that measures the mass of the things.\nWhen given some amount of flour, for instance, it gives an indication of the mass of the flour.\nIf it is a perfect scale, when given an input of one kilogram of flour, it should give us a reading exactly one kilogram on its display.\nWhen provided say 10 kilograms of flour, it should read 10 kilograms exactly, and so on.\nThe transformation that the scale realizes has precisely the same form as a copy operation because it copies the value of the mass given in input into the display of the scale.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1816"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ed7b5c8e-5ef2-4f41-bbd5-75e4fea743ed": {"page_content": "If it is a perfect scale, when given an input of one kilogram of flour, it should give us a reading exactly one kilogram on its display.\nWhen provided say 10 kilograms of flour, it should read 10 kilograms exactly, and so on.\nThe transformation that the scale realizes has precisely the same form as a copy operation because it copies the value of the mass given in input into the display of the scale.\nYou have just encountered a new important fact, a fundamental link between different counterfactuals.\nThings that can be copied can also be measured, and vice versa.\nAnother example of a measuring apparatus is the measure of the photon position.\nIt is a device that when given in input a photon traveling on the vertical or horizontal path, as in our earlier example, can display a message saying, respectively, photon on the vertical path or photon on the horizontal path.\nOnce more, this apparatus copies the value of the path, horizontal or vertical, from the photon onto its display.\nOkay, supposing there, just to my reflection on this, very brief reflection, I found that a really cool result.\nThis idea that copyability and measureability are the same thing, they're the same property.\nAnd Kiara says that properties that can be copied, she's going to call observables.\nNow I'm going to skip a significant part of the book here, and she talks about how, well, in the example that P and the SP are not simultaneously copyable.\nAnd the reason is, because you can't measure them both simultaneously, well, you cannot measure them both to arbitrarily high precision simultaneously.\nAnd I'm going to pick it up where she writes.\nKiara is an important and fascinating conclusion.\nQuantum systems have at least two observables, such as P and SP, which are not copyable jointly or not measurable jointly to the same arbitrarily, high accuracy.\nIt is a can of actual property to do with what is impossible to perform on quantum systems.\nIt also constitutes the crucial difference between the classical unpredictability of a coin toss and the quantum unpredictability arising with quantum superpositions as for the photon path.\nIs that all there is to quantum systems and their counterfactual properties?.\nNo, there's more.\nYou need another counterfactual property to capture quantum information media.\nThis time about possibility.\nYou need reversibility.\nReversibility in physics usually refers to the possibility of reversing a transformation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=454"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7f65bc19-fe64-4e70-bcb2-65d65bbe7751": {"page_content": "It also constitutes the crucial difference between the classical unpredictability of a coin toss and the quantum unpredictability arising with quantum superpositions as for the photon path.\nIs that all there is to quantum systems and their counterfactual properties?.\nNo, there's more.\nYou need another counterfactual property to capture quantum information media.\nThis time about possibility.\nYou need reversibility.\nReversibility in physics usually refers to the possibility of reversing a transformation.\nA transformation is physically reversible if whenever there is a way to perform it, performing it in the reverse direction is also possible.\nWhen you cross a bridge from one side of the other, you're performing irreversible transformation.\nFlipping a bit from zero to one is also reversible.\nBut cooking an egg is not a reversible transformation, nor is splitting the egg on the floor.\nA photon, when it behaves in a quantum way, must have the counterfactual property that all transformations allowed on it, can be reversed.\nSo if you apply, for example, the crystal on the photon, you should be able to use the crystal in reverse.\nSo here is the main conclusion of this discussion.\nA quantum information medium is a system with the following counterfactual properties.\nNo. 1.\nIt has at least two information variables, such as P and PS, that are impossible to copy simultaneously to arbitrarily high accuracy, non-copiability of information variables, too.\nIt must be possible to reverse all the transformations involving these variables, reversibility.\nThe smallest unit of quantum information is a quantum bit, a qubit.\nPhotons, electrons, and other elementary particles can all be used as qubits.\nThe reason why perfect qubits are hard to combine everyday life, and the universal quantum computer is very hard to realise in practice, is that accurate reversibility is extremely difficult to achieve in practice, while at the same time preserving the other quantum properties of the physical object in question.\nQuantum theory says that it is possible, but it arises only under carefully controlled circumstances.\nMost photons around us, such as those emitted from the sunlight, do not undergo reversible transformations, when left to naturally occurring conditions, pausing their microflection.\nYes, this is the problem of decoherence, so we have the issue of trying to ensure that the quantum properties that are going to participate in a particular computation are going to be preserved over time, without leaking into the environment, or without the environment leaking into our quantum computer and becoming entangled with our quantum computer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1097"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "363286e3-09ba-4d75-b642-d8684a4f8030": {"page_content": "Most photons around us, such as those emitted from the sunlight, do not undergo reversible transformations, when left to naturally occurring conditions, pausing their microflection.\nYes, this is the problem of decoherence, so we have the issue of trying to ensure that the quantum properties that are going to participate in a particular computation are going to be preserved over time, without leaking into the environment, or without the environment leaking into our quantum computer and becoming entangled with our quantum computer.\nNow, I'm skipping another substantial part of the chapter here, and I'm picking it up where Cara is about to talk about entanglement and its relevance here.\nAnd she writes, quote, entanglement is one of the most exotic and powerful and misunderstood properties of quantum systems.\nWhen its properties were fully discovered, it soon became clear that it would revolutionise the way we understand composite quantum systems, that is to say systems made of two or more subparts.\nThe concept was already known to the pioneers of quantum theory, Schrodinger is usually credited with introducing the idea, but the full potential of entanglement-based ideas was unleashed in the early days of quantum computing.\nWhen that was first considered as a resource for quantum computation.\nThe physicist, Lattco Vedrol, who in the 1990s pioneered our most subtle measures of entanglement, often jokes about the explosive development of the field, remarking that he managed to get an academic job, simply by working on the foundations of this elusive and fascinating quantum phenomenon.\nThose were times when working on fundamental and adventurous topics were still encouraged in academia in the current academic monoculture, pursuing transformative and risky projects is sadly becoming harder and harder.\nOf course, they are my reflection.\nYes, this is a modern yet perennial problem now in physics in particular, but science more broadly that people become career scientists.\nBut wrong with having a career in science, absolutely nothing except that in the industry that is science today at a university, for example, at a research institute, what you are rewarded for is doing research, publishing stuff.\nIf you need to demonstrate that you are a competent scientist, according to your boss, then what you might want to do is to publish regularly.\nAnd if you are not publishing regularly, then your boss might start asking questions, the management, the administrators, what are you doing with all that time you have?.\nWhy are we giving you this money?.\nYou are not giving us any regular output.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1097"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e3f35b1-f205-4334-8db1-2f2ef8131d2b": {"page_content": "If you need to demonstrate that you are a competent scientist, according to your boss, then what you might want to do is to publish regularly.\nAnd if you are not publishing regularly, then your boss might start asking questions, the management, the administrators, what are you doing with all that time you have?.\nWhy are we giving you this money?.\nYou are not giving us any regular output.\nWe need papers to be published in journals that say the name of the university that you are associated with.\nThat's us.\nWe need to be promoted out there so that students will sign up to our university courses.\nSounds already cynical.\nBut it's kind of the issue.\nand so what happens in that kind of culture is you have people working on small things, incremental things.\nThey don't take a risk to really challenge the foundations, let's say, or physics, and to make huge breakthroughs because that takes a lot of time.\nYou've really got to sit down for ages and ages and ages and you can't waste your time publishing on small incremental things if you're aiming at the big discoveries.\nBut how many universities are going to employ someone like that?.\nHow many research institutes are going to find interest in supporting someone like that?.\nWhat they're interested in is public outreach.\nA way of demonstrating that look at our university, our physics department gets published more often in more journals than anyone else.\nLook at how good our research department is.\nThat's the metric.\nThis is the problem with having such metrics, ways of determining who's a good researcher and who's not a good researcher.\nHow well are you going to objectively, in scare quotes, assess one physicist, for example, against another physicist, if not how often they're publishing.\nSo this is why Cara says, working on adventurous topics.\nTopics which might very well fail, they're risky because they're risky, they might fail.\nBut if they succeed, there's a huge upside, but universities may not want to take risks.\nIndustry may not want to take risks.\nAnd this can kind of put a dampener on risk-taking and then for progress.\nThat takes us far afield from the chapter, that's just a little hobby horse of mine.\nLet's go back to the book.\nCara writes, quote, entanglement arises when you have two or more quantum entities interacting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1816"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e9d2ccbf-3bd5-4bf6-b83a-f9c4901e12ea": {"page_content": "But if they succeed, there's a huge upside, but universities may not want to take risks.\nIndustry may not want to take risks.\nAnd this can kind of put a dampener on risk-taking and then for progress.\nThat takes us far afield from the chapter, that's just a little hobby horse of mine.\nLet's go back to the book.\nCara writes, quote, entanglement arises when you have two or more quantum entities interacting.\nFor example, two photons or an electron and a photon, the essential feature of entanglement is called quantum systems, is that the information one can gain by jointly observing the systems is more than the information obtained by observing each system separately.\nThis phenomenon is rather counterintuitive and removed from everyday experience, pausing the air just to my reflect.\nNow, I would encourage you to, of course, refer to the book and Cara will go through an example to try and help you understand what entanglement is.\nThe way I like to think about entanglement myself is that you have something kind of fundamental like a particle.\nBut if it's entangled with something else, then the two particles together are acting as a single system.\nYou can't think of them separately anymore.\nThey're not separate entities.\nThey are a single system of particles.\nAnd the overall, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as we like to say.\nAn entanglement is a form of that, and as Cara goes on to say later.\nFor example, with qubits of qubits are entangled, quote, it is possible to extract information globally, acting on both qubits, but impossible to do locally, acting on each qubit separately.\nThis fascinating fact is not just curious, it is actually practically useful.\nFor instance, if you wish to hide information in the two qubits like in a safe, it is the base for entanglement-based quantum cryptography, where entanglement is used in order to transmit information securely by exploiting the fact that by looking only at the two qubits individually, it is not possible to guess the joint state of the two qubits posing there.\nEntanglement is often used to try and again, mystify quantum theory in all sorts of unfortunate ways.\nPeople will say things like it violates the speed of light restriction from relativity.\nThis is not true.\nThis is what Einstein was referring to with spooky action at the distance.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=1816"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "78f33a37-10a0-4448-890c-813fbf3a4acb": {"page_content": "Entanglement is often used to try and again, mystify quantum theory in all sorts of unfortunate ways.\nPeople will say things like it violates the speed of light restriction from relativity.\nThis is not true.\nThis is what Einstein was referring to with spooky action at the distance.\nThe fact is, in order to entangle particles, that has to be done locally, and the measurement of particles has to also be done locally, and so then if you end up comparing one particle to another that is separated by a huge distance, and if you think the information is traveling from one particle to another, fasten a bit of light, the only way you can try and establish that this is going on is to bring the two particles close enough together to compare them again, and that always happens locally as well.\nDavid Deutscher's written papers on this, that all of quantum physics is local.\nIn other words, when we say local, does not violate special relativity.\nIt doesn't violate relativity.\nThe prohibition on exceeding the speed of light.\nThat doesn't happen.\nThere's no transmission of information, fasten the speed of light.\nEntanglement doesn't show that, bells in a quality doesn't show that.\nOne of these purported ways of trying to get around the speed of light, using quantum mechanical experiments, show that at all.\nIt's all local.\nI'm skipping some more, and I'll pick it up towards the end of the chapter where Chiarats quit.\nWith the physics of counterfactuals, features of quantum and classical information media can be expressed independently of the details of quantum theory or classical physics.\nThe copyability of specific properties, the impossibility of copying others, and reversibility, are general features, about which we can talk, without committing to quantum theory explicitly.\nThey provide profound connections between intuitively very distant patches of the fabric of reality, such as photons, electron spins, neutrons, and other particles, that would otherwise look very different, and yet they all have the same set of counterfactual properties.\nThe power of the science of canon card is that it expresses the essence of quantum systems without ever committing to quantum theory's full machinery, made of specific laws of motion as a whole.\nThis is important in view of the fact that, as I mentioned, quantum theory soon may be superseded by better theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "380208a1-7996-4e7e-af49-d209d24c3c45": {"page_content": "The power of the science of canon card is that it expresses the essence of quantum systems without ever committing to quantum theory's full machinery, made of specific laws of motion as a whole.\nThis is important in view of the fact that, as I mentioned, quantum theory soon may be superseded by better theory.\nMy bet is that even if quantum theory eventually gets wiped away, the counterfactual information theoretic structure we have explored in this chapter will remain, because it has deeper foundations than quantum theory itself.\nThese are the features that will survive the next revolution in physics.\nAt a glance, all around you, things appear superficially very diverse, but when looking for long enough, and with the right spirit of scientific discovery, while also asking good questions and trying to play around with some bits here and there, sometimes we find a shiny, far-reaching connection between things that seem diverse and unrelated, and this connection is based on a unifying explanation of the distant phenomena in question.\nFor example, physics tells us that a specific relation exists between mass and energy, between the finiteness of the speed of light and the structure of spacetime, and, as you have learnt, between measures and copiers.\nWe have achieved yet another unification with the science of canon card, quantum and classical information turn out to be two aspects of the same set of information theoretic properties.\nSome information media are a special case of classical information media, with two additional properties, reversibility, and the non-copiability of certain sets of states.\nQuantum and classical media are different, but perfectly compatible with each other.\nThe fracture between the quantum and the classical world, the former, supposedly loof and incomprehensible, the latter more friendly and intuitive, has been healed.\nRealizing a unification of this kind goes together, with abstracting away irrelevant details, thanking our understanding more general and the robust than it was previously.\nThese are promising features for a deeper understanding of nature, of which you and I are exploring the most basic building blocks.\nOnce the edifice is built, it will be beautiful in its elegance and simplicity and counterfactuals will be the robust elements of its foundation.\nEnd quote.\nThat's the end of the chapter.\nSo that's where I'll end the reading today, and I hope you agree with what I said at the beginning there, that this chapter really was able to do what I thought was such a difficult task, engaging the reader about quantum information, quantum information theory, a highly esoteric part of the sciences.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ffd5831b-0dbf-456e-a55f-a33e7fc58e73": {"page_content": "End quote.\nThat's the end of the chapter.\nSo that's where I'll end the reading today, and I hope you agree with what I said at the beginning there, that this chapter really was able to do what I thought was such a difficult task, engaging the reader about quantum information, quantum information theory, a highly esoteric part of the sciences.\nAnd if you've managed to understand this, you know, pat yourself on the back, because even if you understood a small amount of this chapter, you'll be in a rarefied class of people who does understand this, because of the way that it's presented here.\nI think anyone can understand this stuff, but they need to get a hold of the book.\nGood.\nGood gift for someone actually who's showing an interest in science and physics and wants a new way of looking at the world and to have their intuitions challenged about some otherwise dry subjects, especially this particular one, until next time, bye-bye.\nLove you!.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkfihEysTlA&t=4383"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b3fb0a42-c5ad-4eee-9fb5-ce441e66ff34": {"page_content": "welcome to ToKCast and to a regular episode.\nThis is chapter seven of the fabric of reality and it's going to serve mainly as an introduction to the chapter proper.\nI expect however it's going to go for well over half an hour even though it's just an introduction because the majority of the chapter is a dialogue, a fictional dialogue between David and the so-called crypto inductivist, the person who is trying to argue for the gap that is left by the fact that knowledge can't be scientific knowledge isn't able to be justified in some way, shape or form and David presents the counter argument to that.\nIt's nice for me to be doing a regular episode recently and I don't normally say these things during a regular episode as to what else is going on with my podcast but recently what's been happening is I've been doing unusual episodes.\nSo yesterday I recorded a response, episode, a response podcast.\nIt's also available on YouTube as a video to one of Sam Harris's recent podcast that he did that was titled The End of Global Order which was a very pessimistic take on some things that are happening now that a particular author is extrapolating off into the distant future and of course prophesying about how everything is going to get far, far worse for us all.\nSo I have a look for that one in the podcast feed and just before that I released a video that I titled Origins.\nThis video was a discussion about the first set of images, five images released by the James Webb Space Telescope, the new telescope that's up there in orbit 1.5 million kilometers away from the earth orbiting the sun and collecting data, evidence, photographs, images about the deeper and deepest regions of space and bringing back some spectacular stuff.\nAnd what I've tried to do there is to fuse the worldview that is summarized by what I speak about in ToKCast here and what is in the beginning of infinity and the writings of David Deutsch more broadly trying to fuse these two things together.\nWhat does something like the space telescope have to do with knowledge, creation and optimism and all of that great stuff?.\nWell, there's a discussion there and hopefully the video is quite entertaining and because of the images of the James Webb Space Telescope spectacular as well.\nSo I have a look at that one and I've also been doing live streaming on YouTube and they get recorded and uploaded automatically.\nThey're very little work for me.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=7"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e3a0c3f5-27e4-4fca-b8fb-e366b3bde6c9": {"page_content": "What does something like the space telescope have to do with knowledge, creation and optimism and all of that great stuff?.\nWell, there's a discussion there and hopefully the video is quite entertaining and because of the images of the James Webb Space Telescope spectacular as well.\nSo I have a look at that one and I've also been doing live streaming on YouTube and they get recorded and uploaded automatically.\nThey're very little work for me.\nPeople have been asking me questions so they also serve as AMAs and I've been doing pre-recorded AMAs as well.\nAnd then finally there is my sub-stack newsletter which also is a separate podcast in and of itself.\nSo I've been busy recently and this is the next episode all about the fabric of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=135"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71ec6642-002f-4039-8987-1dbb05aa3c27": {"page_content": "But also in the works and what will probably come out before this one is my discussion of the next chapter of Stephen Pinkers book which is primarily focused upon Bayes theorem, Bayesian reasoning so-called Bayesian reasoning and so I talk at length at great length all about that particular chapter as well as what I see as the deep misconceptions for epistemology that come out of a two-serious reading of the capacity of Bayes theorem to really do much at all when it comes to either the creation or the validation of knowledge let's say.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=175"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3caf7e2-6e67-4f5a-9754-fd68897ea566": {"page_content": "All right, without further ado and with no more introduction let's get into an introduction to chapter seven a conversation about justification or David and the crypto inductivist from the fabric of reality and before I get to the readings I have to mention that at the beginning of the audio book which is the fabric of reality, well worth picking up.\nDavid Deutsch himself does an introduction where worth the price of the book itself and what he says there is that of the things that he would change in the book where he writing it now would be the use of terminology in this particular chapter because David is not a justificationist.\nDavid does not endorse justificationism and so the whole point of the chapter is to reject justificationism that's where he's coming from however he is speaking in the language of people the overwhelming majority of philosophers and scientists and just the common man who speak this way, who talk about justificationism and how things are justified.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=210"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "482d013f-9705-4f5b-95a8-c32f2f7ca11c": {"page_content": "So he has trouble trying to convey the ideas using their language so that we are speaking a common language that's always the hard part in philosophy and science to try and understand exactly what the other person is saying they can be speaking English, they can be speaking your native tongue but that doesn't mean you've really got a common language, there is still a layer of translation that goes on because you're interpreting one another, there is no such thing as an unambiguous language David says or as proper likes to say, it is impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood and so all of these caveats are inputting here because David himself is saying that he would rephrase things were he writing this chapter now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=281"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5e3d93e0-9699-4d49-8647-5253eabe4c19": {"page_content": "but I don't think we can blame him, I don't think we can blame him because he's a pioneer of a kind trying to bring these ideas to the masses, now proper of course was their first in many many ways but even proper you can see if you go to his first major work which was called The Logic of Scientific Discovery, it's the one book that I typically do not recommend to people because it's long, it's interesting if you're interested in the philosophy of science.\nbut it's highly technical, it's laborious and it is in particular written in the language of philosophers of his era.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=323"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "03490f92-8067-4c71-be4e-8865ae6ab32f": {"page_content": "so he knows his audience, his peers, other philosophers, all of whom are inductiveists of a kind, all of whom believe in this justified true belief conception of knowledge, so he is very much speaking to other philosophers writing in a technical way and so trying to bring people along with him to explain new ideas in a new way, new ways of understanding what science is, what knowledge is and how it's created, so how do you do that, given that people have ever heard this stuff before, well you're going to talk about things like confirmation and corroboration and being justified, verifying things or not verifying things, you're introducing this new concept of falsification and refutation, you're trying to say that knowledge is never justified, you can't prove things as true, all you can do is conjecture, this is very new and counterintuitive, look it is decade since there has been a lineage of people following in the tradition of proper ever since and we are still still having great difficulty conveying these ideas through though they are, but you can say this about any true idea, try to teach someone Newtonian physics for the first time, I mean it's been centuries, so of course people still learning this stuff find difficult, try then teaching them special relativity, then general relativity, much less quantum theory, anything new that is trying to get at reality has nuance to it, has a way of using language which might be different even though the words sound familiar to people, all of this stuff comes to bear on any technical explanation of an area of expertise, so to speak, an area of knowledge, a way of understanding reality and the world epistemology and the philosophy of science, our business here in our specific business in this chapter here is absolutely no different except that maybe it's more difficult still because at least when people go into something like learning areas of physics, like learning areas of general relativity, let's say their mind is really open because they think well this stuff works, we know that there's technology out there based upon this, so I am willing to grant certain assumptions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=364"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc44c204-0626-4aab-b2db-c6d24a7361fe": {"page_content": "just so I can move forward and understand the thing as a whole so that then when I finally get to the point where I say I understand it I can look back and realise all the misconceptions I had, this is often not the way in which people approach things like epistemology, in my experience, someone will say they're interested in epistemology, interested in having the discussion about poppers ideas or David Deutsches ideas, but they go into the discussion thinking but I already know how knowledge works, I know that I can be certain of particular things, I know that you can be justified that you can prove things that the evidence shows some particular thing happens to be true, that there is a matter of fact about the science which is settled, all of that stuff is baggage that people accumulate through their schooling and education and so then when you try to present them with the ideas that much of that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=515"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "feca4746-54b2-4a20-bcab-be5737c319d7": {"page_content": "it's completely and utterly misconceived, you have great difficulty, whereas someone coming to something like general relativity has no preconceived notions, or insofar as they do they understand all of these physicists, they experts out there and they all agree that general relativity is the explanation of gravity so let me also gain that knowledge.\nand I'm willing to go along for the ride to try and understand it, not so with epistemology to the same extent because philosophers broadly speaking don't agree with papa and because they don't agree with papa, why should I?.\nIf this brittle fellow or David Deutsches are telling me that this is the way in which knowledge is created, but they are a slim minority view amongst the intellectual community, why should they be trusted over anyone else?.\nAnd again even that is the wrong question because we don't think that trust is actually a way in which you assess the validity of ideas, but we don't judge the source of an idea, we instead try to error correct.\nIt's a whole worldview, it's a particular epistemology, it's a way of understanding stuff and creating knowledge and so this is the hill we have to climb and this is the hill we're about to climb today.\nSo in saying all that that now is an introduction to David Deutsches introduction to the fabric of reality in the audiobook where he says that he regrets using the word justification and justified so often, particularly in this chapter.\nNow I have readily forgive him for this because I think that again he is meeting the opponent halfway that pedagogically speaking in terms of trying to help people learn these ideas, you have to bring them with you by granting the words that they're using.\nAs we say there's no such thing as an unambiguous language.\nNow writing today in light of what was written back then with the fabric of reality, the fabric of reality was like a step required in order to bring us to the point where we could understand the beginning of infinity.\nAnd so this was the first step for many many people of taking them out of their slumber of thinking justified true belief, for example, is the way in which knowledge works.\nAnd that induction is required in order to somehow or other give us confidence in the theories of science.\nSo that induction indeed is able to generate theories of science, all of which is misconceived.\nBut you have to start somewhere and so people are typically starting at that point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=567"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c13dd3ed-5b52-442a-a2bd-ca6dbe637864": {"page_content": "And so this was the first step for many many people of taking them out of their slumber of thinking justified true belief, for example, is the way in which knowledge works.\nAnd that induction is required in order to somehow or other give us confidence in the theories of science.\nSo that induction indeed is able to generate theories of science, all of which is misconceived.\nBut you have to start somewhere and so people are typically starting at that point.\nAnd so chapter seven here is going to use those words, the terms of the people who have the misconceptions, the traditional view.\nAnd I think the way in which to interpret this is David is holding your hand and bringing you along through the mile of misconception.\nBut sometimes has to use the words of those people who endorse the false theories because that's almost everyone.\nHere I want to sort of give props to Wittgenstein, which I don't often do, but it's a it's a way of thinking about areas of philosophy that I think are useful.\nWhat he said, what Wittgenstein said, Ludwig Wittgenstein said of his own philosophy because he's basic thesis was philosophy as a discipline is useless, that it doesn't contribute anything to knowledge.\nAll you need is things like mathematics and science and philosophy itself doesn't actually solve any problems.\nAnd this was a great schism between the people who follow Wittgenstein and the people who follow Poppa.\nPoppa thinks there are genuine philosophical problems, Wittgenstein thinks it's all word games.\nSo there is this deep conflict between these two ideas.\nAnd then, of course, people would object to Wittgenstein and say, well, hold on, you are doing philosophy.\nHow can you say all the philosophy is useless?.\nAnd he granted it now a very clever way of granting it.\nHe said his own philosophy is kind of like a ladder, a ladder that you use to climb out of a deep well, the well-being philosophy.\nOnce you've climbed out of the well using the ladder, you can do away with the ladder.\nYou no longer have any need for the ladder.\nSo once you've understood his philosophy, you understand that all of philosophy, including his own, is completely useless.\nSo get on with your life and just do science.\nNow, I disagree with all of that quite obviously.\nPeople who don't think that philosophy is important, are liable to say things like, well, the evidence shows in controvertably X.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=697"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f753f02-7f8f-4682-acd3-7d66a0cf49df": {"page_content": "You no longer have any need for the ladder.\nSo once you've understood his philosophy, you understand that all of philosophy, including his own, is completely useless.\nSo get on with your life and just do science.\nNow, I disagree with all of that quite obviously.\nPeople who don't think that philosophy is important, are liable to say things like, well, the evidence shows in controvertably X.\nYou can't debate the science because the evidence shows.\nNot realizing that, for example, evidence needs to be interpreted.\nAnd that's not a matter of science.\nThat's a matter of philosophy that the claim that evidence needs to be interpreted, that evidence doesn't speak for itself, but rather many scientists and others who reject the importance of philosophy will make claims like this, that all you need to do is to extrapolate the data and then you've got a trend in your doing science.\nThat's not science.\nScience is about explanation.\nBut that claim that science about is about explanation is itself philosophical.\nSo we have a problem in philosophy.\nPopper was right.\nIs science about just predicting stuff?.\nIs that all it's about?.\nOr is it about explanation?.\nThat's a philosophical problem.\nThe solution is it's about explanation because you can't make predictions without explanations anyway.\nSo anyone who's making the opposite case is already trying to pull them up and themselves up by their bootstraps and they have no bootstraps because there is no way of predicting stuff without a pre-existing explanation.\nBut that's beside the point.\nPopper wins the argument, but Wittgenstein had a good quip.\nUse certain philosophies to climb out of the well.\nAnd so what I want to say here is that with chapter seven, it's kind of like a ladder to be used to climb out of the well of justificationism.\nAnd so the runs of the ladder will now and again include the word justified and justification.\nAnd David objects to it.\nSo already we can concede David agrees that he said he would avoid the use of these words.\nAnd so I'm going to highlight some uses of the word where I think you could get away with it.\nAnd other areas where I think you might not want to get away with it, where you'd want to say something different or the word justified is simply superfluous.\nYou can just do away with it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=826"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9ca325f0-67f3-4ad9-9163-9c59adb3e3f5": {"page_content": "And David objects to it.\nSo already we can concede David agrees that he said he would avoid the use of these words.\nAnd so I'm going to highlight some uses of the word where I think you could get away with it.\nAnd other areas where I think you might not want to get away with it, where you'd want to say something different or the word justified is simply superfluous.\nYou can just do away with it.\nBut what David says in the audio book in the introduction is words to the effect that you need to interpret in this chapter the use of the word justified as kind of a moral or methodological claim about what should be done.\nIn other words, a normative claim.\nSo if something is justified, it's not justifying something as true or justifying something as probably true.\nThat's the era of justificationism.\nBut when David says in this chapter that something is justified, what he means is that you should use the best explanation should.\nOkay, should you're justified in using the best explanation.\nAnd that's a reasonable use of the word justified.\nThe whole chapter is about this idea that there are these two people on the top of the Eiffel Tower.\nDavid and the crypto inductive is having this debate about why one shouldn't jump off the Eiffel Tower.\nAfter all, if you can't justify as true, the theory that if you do jump off, you're going to hit the ground.\nOkay, general relativity or Newtonian gravity or whatever else that allows you to make that prediction.\nIf you're not justified in thinking it's true, then there's no reason not to jump off and just think you're going to float to the ground.\nIsn't that the way that science works?.\nWell, now it's not.\nYou're justified in not jumping off the Eiffel Tower because the best explanation is theories of gravity that we have that predict you're going to hit the ground.\nNot justified as true, but justified in following the best explanation.\nWell, it's an alternative not follow the best explanation.\nAnd in fact, follow a bad explanation like you're going to float to the ground.\nThere's no explanation there.\nWhat is the mechanism that would allow you to float to the ground?.\nWe don't need to justify as true the idea that if you jump, you're going to fall to the ground.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=949"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b1d52e4-e8d1-4828-923d-81a61d4b9b96": {"page_content": "Not justified as true, but justified in following the best explanation.\nWell, it's an alternative not follow the best explanation.\nAnd in fact, follow a bad explanation like you're going to float to the ground.\nThere's no explanation there.\nWhat is the mechanism that would allow you to float to the ground?.\nWe don't need to justify as true the idea that if you jump, you're going to fall to the ground.\nIt's not 100% absolutely certain, whatever level of confidence you want to put on this thing, that if you jump off the air, you're going to hit the ground.\nAfter all, we can always imagine ridiculous scenarios like immediately where you thought you were jumping off into empty air, that someone had put a very fine net beneath you that you couldn't see and as soon as you jumped, you hit the net safely and you never hit the ground.\nThere could be all sorts of reasons of extremely low likelihood that you can imagine that would mean that you didn't hit the ground.\nSo it's not absolutely certain things might not be justified true, but that's not important.\nAll of these exceptions to the reasons why you wouldn't hit the ground are completely able to be ignored because you have a best good explanation, general relativity, that predicts anything leaping off the Eiffel Tower is going to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared towards the ground, or in fact not accelerated, general relativity, but you get my meaning, you're going to hit the ground.\nThe ground and you are going to come into contact, you're going to be dead.\nAre you justified in thinking that's true?.\nNo. Are you justified in relying upon the best explanation?.\nYes.\nSo that's the way in which we're going to understand the word justified here.\nNow, all of that is extremely technical inside baseball to some extent, epistemology.\nThese are debates within popularian circles that have been had about the use of particular words, but why we're getting hung up on words, I don't know.\nThat's very of it, Genstinian.\nWe can just explain the ideas, explain the ideas without worrying too much about what words people use, because all words have ambiguity as we've already said.\nYou know, it reminds me a little, one more final thing, reminds me a little of this word conjecture or guess, all knowledge is conjectural.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1048"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ae6fcfb-c74e-45a5-87e4-f07f1eaec393": {"page_content": "That's very of it, Genstinian.\nWe can just explain the ideas, explain the ideas without worrying too much about what words people use, because all words have ambiguity as we've already said.\nYou know, it reminds me a little, one more final thing, reminds me a little of this word conjecture or guess, all knowledge is conjectural.\nAnd so we say it's been guessed, which is true from what we understand now about the period of epistemology, knowledge is conjectural, but every single claim that you can make is a guess as well.\nSo what makes the difference between a conjecture like general relativity or evolution by natural selection or the movement of tectonic plates or how quasars work or what the ultimate cause of the COVID-19 virus was, whatever the conjectures are that are out there, they don't all stand on equal footing.\nThe conjecture that the curvature of spacetime is what is the explanation of gravity and gives the illusion of a force of gravity is conjectural.\nIt's a guess, but it is one which has survived many, many tests, and there is nothing else superior to it.\nOther rivals have been refuted, it's the only one left standing, currently all experimental evidence is consistent with it.\nThat doesn't prove it true, but it means it can do something that no other rival has been able to do.\nBut we still call it conjectural knowledge, it's a conjecture, it's a guess.\nBut this word guess clearly is labeling something like that as well as something like mutants theory of gravity, which is already known to be false and has been refuted by Eddington's experiment.\nAnd of course not merely Eddington's experiment, but any number of things that can only be explained these days by general relativity will in fact of course gravity can only be explained properly conceived by general relativity.\nSo there's that.\nBut if the word guess is to label that, and the word guess is to label Newtonian gravity, already refuted.\nAnd the word guess is to label something like, well, I think gravity is just caused by the fact that the earth loves the objects on it and that's why they're attracted to it.\nand they tend to fall towards it.\nThere is a force of love, not a force of gravity.\nWell, that guess, that guess, utterly uncoupled from reality still counts as a guess.\nWrong though it is, you know, explanationless though it is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1154"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4eb66599-3d6a-4ceb-8df0-b6940b1367d9": {"page_content": "And the word guess is to label something like, well, I think gravity is just caused by the fact that the earth loves the objects on it and that's why they're attracted to it.\nand they tend to fall towards it.\nThere is a force of love, not a force of gravity.\nWell, that guess, that guess, utterly uncoupled from reality still counts as a guess.\nWrong though it is, you know, explanationless though it is.\nSo this word guess, I mean, maybe we'll be looking back, the epistemology descendants in the Perperian tradition a hundred years from now might very well look back to today and go, look at the misconceptions these people were using back then.\nThey were using these words conjecture and guess to label a similar kind of a thing.\nNow we know better.\nNow we know what we should be saying in these situations and explanation is actually this.\nIt's not really a guess, it's something else.\nNow I would say right now that it's a guess, it's really a guess of a kind, but I can only rely upon the best knowledge I have in any given time.\nI could come up with other ideas, but they're not better than what I know at the moment.\nI wish they were, then I could be popular, but I'm not.\nI'm just communicating the ideas.\nAnd if I do think of something that I genuinely think by my lights and after having consulted other people and tested it against reality and tested it with conversations with other people, if then I figure out that.\nokay, well how we can make some further improvements on Popper and further improvements on Twitch, then I will do so.\nBut there's no urgency for this.\nI don't feel compelled to try and do this at the moment.\nI don't see any particular problems that need to be solved by doing this by changing our language, but justification is one of these words where we've learned better about how to explain these concepts, and it's going to become clear in this chapter.\nBut again, as I say, I don't blame Popper for the way in which he wrote the logic of scientific discovery.\nHe needed to persuade the people that were important to the project of trying to understand how science works, namely other philosophers, colleagues, that kind of thing, people are going to spread the word.\nHe did as well as he could and he refined his ideas in subsequent books.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1285"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f5c9d646-e5fc-489f-8499-4863d9f163d7": {"page_content": "But again, as I say, I don't blame Popper for the way in which he wrote the logic of scientific discovery.\nHe needed to persuade the people that were important to the project of trying to understand how science works, namely other philosophers, colleagues, that kind of thing, people are going to spread the word.\nHe did as well as he could and he refined his ideas in subsequent books.\nAnd so the subsequent books are a far better read than what the earlier ones were.\nI think even he would agree with that, I don't know, but I'm dumb.\nYou know, your first work is always going to be written for a particular audience and be grappling with misconceptions and trying to pull people out of the misconceptions requires you to at least explain what the misconceptions are in the language that people understand.\nSo this is why Chapter 7 is written in this way and looked at through the lens of the beginning of infinity, which only exists because of the fabric of reality, we can see that there are subtle differences and ways of expressing things that only in light of the beginning of infinity does the fabric of reality look in this sense, dated in terms of the terminology, but not the central ideas.\nSo that's a long preamble.\nNow I'm going to get into the reading.\nDavid begins the chapter with a quote from Carl Popper.\nAnd Carl Popper said, quote, I think that I have solved a major philosophical problem, the problem of induction end quote.\nLet's begin with David.\nDavid says quote, as I explained in the preface, this book is not primarily a defense of the fundamental theories of the four main strands, it is an investigation of what those theories say and what sorts of reality they describe.\nThat is why I did not address opposing theories in any depth.\nHowever, there is one opposing theory, namely common sense, which reason requires me to refute in detail wherever it seems to conflict with what I am asserting.\nHence in Chapter 2, I presented a root and branch refutation of the common sense idea that there is only one universe.\nIn Chapter 11, I shall do the same for the common sense idea that time flows or that our consciousness moves through time.\nIn Chapter 3, I criticized inductivism, the common sense idea that we form theories about the physical world by generalizing the results of observations and that we justify our theories by repeating those observations.\nI explained that inductive generalization from observations is impossible and that inductive justification is invalid.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1386"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1fd76a14-74a6-40a5-a235-06b346880f5a": {"page_content": "In Chapter 11, I shall do the same for the common sense idea that time flows or that our consciousness moves through time.\nIn Chapter 3, I criticized inductivism, the common sense idea that we form theories about the physical world by generalizing the results of observations and that we justify our theories by repeating those observations.\nI explained that inductive generalization from observations is impossible and that inductive justification is invalid.\nI explained that inductivism rests upon a mistaken idea of science as seeking predictions on the basis of observations rather than as seeking explanations in response to problems end quote, pausing there my reflection.\nYou can see what I'm going to say here, I guess, if you're a long time listener.\nSo much of the beginning infinity is being prefaced here and it's easy to miss but he is David is highlighting right there, the genuine purpose of science.\nIt's not about primarily prediction and prediction from observations which have been generalized from what has happened in the past.\nThat's not what science is about.\nScience is about explanations.\nNow seeking those explanations and finding them, that's the hard part because we have to come up creatively with how to account for the world.\nBut once we've done that with a grand theorem of some way, a story we tell about the mechanisms, the causes, the effects, all of the things that are possible in the world and not possible in the world, what are ruled in and ruled out.\nPerhaps from that, some of that, especially in physics or chemistry and the physical sciences, maybe if you're lucky, then you can really control your variables.\nThen perhaps if you know that people aren't going to get involved, you might just be able to make a prediction.\nYou might be able to derive some claim about the future or the past or even the present from that good explanation.\nBut that's not the purpose of science, that's just a happy fortunate result of your main project, which was to understand reality.\nSo lucky for you out of that understanding comes the capacity to sometimes make a prediction, in particular circumstances.\nNow I'm qualifying all that because so much of science isn't about the predictions.\nIt really isn't.\nIn fact, sometimes science says things are unpredictable.\nWhole areas of biology, unpredictable.\nYou can't know what the mutation is going to be on the genetic code.\nCould be anything.\nThat's just the way evolution works.\nIt's blind.\nIt throws up the unpredictable, inherently unpredictable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1510"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e21ecca8-1145-43fb-83ce-24973c5b853d": {"page_content": "Now I'm qualifying all that because so much of science isn't about the predictions.\nIt really isn't.\nIn fact, sometimes science says things are unpredictable.\nWhole areas of biology, unpredictable.\nYou can't know what the mutation is going to be on the genetic code.\nCould be anything.\nThat's just the way evolution works.\nIt's blind.\nIt throws up the unpredictable, inherently unpredictable.\nWhen you're making distant forecasts about the future, people get involved and their choices get involved and they create knowledge in the creation of knowledge is unpredictable, causing their choices to be inherently unpredictable.\nNot determined by the prior state of the universe in such a way that you can make a prediction.\nSo that can't be the purpose of science rather often.\nEven if you have a good scientific theory, it often doesn't allow you to make this distant prediction about what's going to happen to the earth, 10 or 1000 years from now, because people will have done stuff that's going to change whatever your prediction is from your current best scientific explanation is, which might very well be overturned any time between the next 10 and 1000 years.\nOkay, so let's keep on going.\nDavid says, quote, I also explained following Popper how science does make progress by conjecturing new explanations and then choosing between the best ones by experiment.\nAll this is largely accepted by scientists and philosophers of science.\nWhat is not accepted by most philosophers is that this process is justified.\nLet me explain, end quote.\nSo there we have the first use of the word justified.\nSo what David has just said is, quote, what is not accepted by most philosophers is that this process is justified end quote.\nAll I would change about that would be something like him saying, what is not accepted by most philosophers is that this process is the best explanation of how science works or the only known explanation of how science works.\nThere are no rivals.\nWhatever way you want to put it.\nIt's not justified in the sense of being justified is true, but we can interpret this use of the word justified as saying that this process is what you should follow if you want to produce good explanations.\nIf you want to actually achieve the aim of science of understanding the world, of comprehending things and solving problems, that's the sense in which it's justified.\nNot justified is true, but justified as being the thing you should do methodologically.\nThis is the the way in which things work.\nThat's all that means.\nDavid goes on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1676"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5e07b8ea-dc9e-49f0-aa99-6ea89db01a9c": {"page_content": "If you want to actually achieve the aim of science of understanding the world, of comprehending things and solving problems, that's the sense in which it's justified.\nNot justified is true, but justified as being the thing you should do methodologically.\nThis is the the way in which things work.\nThat's all that means.\nDavid goes on.\nFirst, prefacing it by saying, quote, let me explain, science seeks better explanations.\nA scientific explanation accounts for our observations by postulating something about what reality is like and how it works.\nWe deem an explanation to be better if it leaves fewer loose ends, such as entities whose properties are themselves unexplained, requires fewer and simpler postulates is more general, meshes more easily with good explanations in other fields and so on, end quote, just pausing there.\nThere's an interesting just addition I had put on that, which is again, and this is directly from David Deutsch, where he says just there, a scientific explanation accounts for our observations by postulating something about what reality is like.\nSo when he says that about what reality is like, he's invoking the things that you don't see.\nSo what reality is like usually includes a whole bunch of unseen phenomena and the way in which you can determine which of the unseen phenomena is real and not is by the scene, the scene of your observations.\nYou look at what's going on in the with the sun, you take measurements of the amount of light, you figure out how fast the earth is going around the sun that tells you about the mass of the sun, you can tell the right at which energy is being produced from the sun, given its mass, and you constrain what processes could possibly be causing this amount of energy.\nAnd you rule out something like, well, it's chemical burning, it's combustion, which is the only other fire that we know of.\nAnd you say, well, we've got to come up with something better, and eventually you end up with nuclear fusion.\nNuclear fusion reactions have to be powering that sun.\nYou can't see the nuclear fusion reactions, impossible.\nNumber one, they're so far away, they're deep in the core of the sun, nothing could actually get there.\nThey involve the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, the smallest nuclei of all, single protons being bashed together to form helium, that can't be seen.\nIt's the unseen, but it's something we're postulating something about what reality is like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1792"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "652fa73e-009d-47cb-93b1-3e285a4c872f": {"page_content": "Nuclear fusion reactions have to be powering that sun.\nYou can't see the nuclear fusion reactions, impossible.\nNumber one, they're so far away, they're deep in the core of the sun, nothing could actually get there.\nThey involve the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, the smallest nuclei of all, single protons being bashed together to form helium, that can't be seen.\nIt's the unseen, but it's something we're postulating something about what reality is like.\nReality is like that, that's what's really going on inside of the sun, to some approximation.\nAre there things, are there mysteries there?.\nAre there going to be problems that are out of that?.\nI would say no doubt there will be.\nEventually, an observation from the sun will be inconsistent with something we know about the rate of reactions.\nWho knows?.\nMaybe in the center there's more than merely hydrogen going on there.\nMaybe there's something else.\nI don't know.\nMaybe the triple alpha process actually begins much earlier.\nThis is getting into the technical astrophysical details.\nWho knows what could be found?.\nBut I would be far more surprised were nothing found over the next century with respect to what we understand about solar, nuclear, physics, solar, nuclear, stellar, nuclear synthesis.\nThen if there were not something found, I'd be far more surprised were something not found than if something was found, something new was found.\nAn observation inconsistent with that theory that I just gave you about what's going on in the sun with the fusion, the PP chain, the so-called PP chain, the proton protons being bashed together to make helium or the CNO cycle where carbon nitrogen oxygen is used to do basically the same thing, the outcome being helium being produced from protons being fused together.\nI can readily imagine someone coming along an overturning Fred Hoyle's conception of how all of this stuff works which has remained relatively unchanged for decades.\nSo I'd be surprised if that stands in exactly the same form for centuries.\nI would expect that someone clever will find wrinkles with it, errors with it, big or small.\nOkay, let's keep on going.\nDavid writes, quote, but why should a better explanation be what we always assure me to be in practice, namely the token of a truer theory?.\nWhy for that matter should a downright bad explanation, one which has none of the above attributes say, necessarily befores.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=1978"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "84f15cac-f3c0-407f-b199-0e6aad93b7e3": {"page_content": "So I'd be surprised if that stands in exactly the same form for centuries.\nI would expect that someone clever will find wrinkles with it, errors with it, big or small.\nOkay, let's keep on going.\nDavid writes, quote, but why should a better explanation be what we always assure me to be in practice, namely the token of a truer theory?.\nWhy for that matter should a downright bad explanation, one which has none of the above attributes say, necessarily befores.\nThere is indeed no logically necessary connection between truth and explanatory power.\nA bad explanation such as solipsism may be true.\nEven the best and truest available theory may make a false prediction in particular cases and those might be the very cases in which we rely on the theory.\nNo valid form of reasoning and logically rule out such possibilities or even prove them unlikely.\nBut in that case, what justifies our relying on our best explanations as guides to practical decision-making?.\nMore generally, whatever criteria we use to judge scientific theories, how could the fact that a theory satisfied those criteria today possibly imply anything about what will happen if we rely on the theory tomorrow end quote?.\nYeah, so we don't prove as true things in science.\nWe tend not to prove things at all.\nThat's not the metric we're explaining stuff.\nBad explanations are too appending something like solipsism, the idea that maybe only you exist and you're just dreaming everything into reality.\nMaybe that's true.\nIt's a bad explanation because it can be infinitely varied in subtle ways.\nMaybe it's you and your best friend that are dreaming everything into reality.\nMaybe it's everyone on earth dreaming everything into reality.\nEveryone but one person dreaming everything into reality, you can infinitely vary this.\nIt's a single computer.\nIt's two computers.\nIt's one computer inside of another computer simulating the universe.\nIt's an infinite number of computers.\nIt's an uncountably infinite number of computers.\nName your solipsistic idea that base reality is different to just realism.\nPhysical reality exists.\nWe're being deceived by the demon.\nThese are solipsistic arguments.\nThey're infinitely varied and that's what makes them a bad explanation.\nA bad explanation by the terms of easily varied.\nSwap out one computer for 10 computers if we're all living in a simulation.\nWho cares?.\nIt doesn't make any difference.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2055"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "83f027d7-a85b-499e-ad5d-898ad24fc8cb": {"page_content": "It's an uncountably infinite number of computers.\nName your solipsistic idea that base reality is different to just realism.\nPhysical reality exists.\nWe're being deceived by the demon.\nThese are solipsistic arguments.\nThey're infinitely varied and that's what makes them a bad explanation.\nA bad explanation by the terms of easily varied.\nSwap out one computer for 10 computers if we're all living in a simulation.\nWho cares?.\nIt doesn't make any difference.\nBut it makes a huge difference to the good explanation of, for example, the sun is producing the energy that it does by fusion power and that particular reaction that's going on is typically regarded as a majority of PP chain reactions.\nHydrogen nuclei directly colliding with hydrogen nuclei to produce heavier forms of hydrogen and eventually ending up with helium 4 nuclei, which eventually is the only product left.\nOnce all the hydrogen is consumed then the sun expands and the core heats up and you end up with the triple alpha reaction in a reaction of something called the helium flash and so on it goes.\nThere's a good explanation.\nI can't swap out protons for electrons in that situation.\nI can't change the hydrogen for carbon.\nI can't change the helium for nitrogen.\nThis is a hard to vary explanation.\nI can't say there's more than the required number of protons in the PP chain to produce the reaction required.\nI can't say it's fission rather than fusion, hard to vary.\nEvery single component of the good explanation serves a purpose, unlike solipsism, where no particular version is a good explanation.\nNo particular version is a good explanation.\nIt's all the same, whether you're dreaming stuff into reality or the demon is deceiving you or it's a simulation or you're stuck in a cave, whatever it happens to be, these are bad explanations.\nHe's leewearied.\nThat's what we got from the beginning of infinity.\nWhat you can see here, it's already there in seed form in the fabric of reality.\nBut here David is wondering, well, well, he's opponent rather than wondering, asking the question.\nIf we can't justify the theory true today, how can we possibly rely on it tomorrow?.\nIf we don't know it's true today, why should you rely on this thing tomorrow?.\nI think it's just a silly question, but that's what philosophers ask.\nAnd they still ask it today.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2190"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e505a2bf-7ebf-4c40-8507-59f2062bb310": {"page_content": "But here David is wondering, well, well, he's opponent rather than wondering, asking the question.\nIf we can't justify the theory true today, how can we possibly rely on it tomorrow?.\nIf we don't know it's true today, why should you rely on this thing tomorrow?.\nI think it's just a silly question, but that's what philosophers ask.\nAnd they still ask it today.\nAnd this is what basians are worried about and various other people.\nWell, if you don't know it's true, or you're confident it's true, or you think it's probably true, for what possible reason could you rely on this theory?.\nYou have to have a reason for justifying the theory is true.\nIt actually never comes up in real life science.\nYou either have an explanation or you don't.\nAnd rather often, if you're doing real science, if you're solving problems, you don't have an explanation.\nThat's your whole problem to begin with.\nYou've got to come up with an explanation.\nAnd once you come up with one, you're not going to justify it as true.\nYou're going to test it.\nAnd it survives the test where you've got nothing else to fall back on.\nYou better use that theory in order to continue to solve problems or you've got nothing.\nBut that's for justifying it's true.\nThis is philosophical, naval gazing.\nIt doesn't solve any problem to go down this road.\nTaking up too much intellectual energy to even discuss the problem.\nBut some people need to be pulled out of it.\nI want to save the potential philosophers and philosophers now and scientists now who are wasting their time writing books and delivering lectures and trying to educate people and teaching cohorts of students about this rubbish, because it's a waste of rain power when they could be doing other stuff, doing importance, solving actual problems rather than learning misconception.\nIt really is for a perperian who understands how knowledge is created.\nIt really is like generation upon generation of people being taught creationism.\nWhen you know Darwinism is out there.\nNeo Darwinism is out there.\nThat's what it's like.\nSo why wouldn't you do something?.\nWhy was Darwin and Haldein so animated about trying to persuade people of evolution by natural selection?.\nWhy was it important to people to try and win that argument, to explain stuff?.\nBecause people were wasting their time.\nProblems needed to be sold.\nThere was important biology to be done.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2338"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b9c501ec-8091-4938-a80b-424e38eccd00": {"page_content": "When you know Darwinism is out there.\nNeo Darwinism is out there.\nThat's what it's like.\nSo why wouldn't you do something?.\nWhy was Darwin and Haldein so animated about trying to persuade people of evolution by natural selection?.\nWhy was it important to people to try and win that argument, to explain stuff?.\nBecause people were wasting their time.\nProblems needed to be sold.\nThere was important biology to be done.\nAnd if people are wasting their time, they're trying to better understand how creationism could work.\nBy inventing variations of it like intelligent design, the real biologists know that this is all completely misconceived in a waste of intellectual power, a waste of humanity.\nAnd in the same way, we want to save people from inductivism and versions of it like the modern intelligent design version called Bayesian epistemology.\nWe want to save them from because if only they took all of that energy and effort and put it into genuine creation of knowledge which is optimistic and conjectural and allows the open-ended stream of knowledge creation so that we can become the hub in the universe where the beginning of infinity really begins as David Deutsch explains, then we need to help people learn this stuff, persuade them that their present worldview is mired in misconception and they're being held back.\nThat's the other thing.\nYou know what people to be held back?.\nTo be perpetually confused, not understanding why things aren't working and rejecting pop around of hand because there are so many people out there, prominent people out there who just detest the philosopher for reasons that still escape people, possibly because pop it didn't like academic philosophy and philosophers.\nHe didn't have kind things to say at times about the entire project that they were engaged in because it was a waste of time.\nAs I'm speaking now, it doesn't sound kind.\nBut what else can you do when you just see children, young students, university people being indoctrinated with the wrong ideas?.\nIt's exactly like the feeling that rationalist people have when they say that it's a waste of intellectual power for so many people to be taught creationism, young earth creationism.\nYeah, it is.\nThey should learn something better.\nBut the adults don't know better.\nSo this is the situation we're in, where the philosophers don't know better.\nThe scientists don't know better.\nAnd perhaps the Perperian sometimes sound arrogant as perhaps I do.\nWe've got the answers, but we do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2426"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5e79b0e-37ef-4852-83aa-85e5dd9aba31": {"page_content": "Yeah, it is.\nThey should learn something better.\nBut the adults don't know better.\nSo this is the situation we're in, where the philosophers don't know better.\nThe scientists don't know better.\nAnd perhaps the Perperian sometimes sound arrogant as perhaps I do.\nWe've got the answers, but we do.\nWhat else can you do?.\nHow else can you behave when you have the answers?.\nI think generally we're pretty kind, fun people, by the way.\nWhen we do explain this stuff, I'm not berating people.\nIf no one wants to hear this, I don't have to hear this.\nI don't know.\nI don't like you have to tune in the podcast.\nOkay, let's keep on going.\nDavid is wondering, how can we rely on the theory tomorrow if the theory today is unjustified?.\nHe says, quote, this is the modern form of the problem of induction.\nMost philosophers are now content with Popper's contention.\nThat new theories are not inferred from anything, but are merely hypotheses.\nThey also accept that scientific progress is made through conjectures and refutations as described in chapter three, and that theories are accepted when their rivals are refuted, and not by virtue of numerous confirming instances.\nThey accept that the knowledge obtained in this way tends in the event to be reliable.\nThe problem is they do not see why it should be.\nTraditional inductiveists tried to formulate a principle of induction, which said that confirming instances made a theory more likely, or that the future were resembled a past, or some such statement.\nThey also tried to formulate an inductive scientific methodology, laying down rules for what sorts of inferences one could validly draw from data.\nThey all failed, for the reasons I have explained, but even if they had succeeded in the sense of constructing a scheme that could be followed successfully to create scientific knowledge, this would not have solved the problem of induction as it is nowadays understood.\nFor in that case, induction would simply be another way of choosing theories, and the problem would remain of why those theories should be a reliable basis for action.\nIn other words, philosophers who worry about this problem of induction are not inductiveists in the old fashion sense.\nThey did not try to obtain or justify any theories inductively.\nThey did not expect the sky to fall in, but they did not know how to justify that expectation end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2590"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "566ef78a-4033-4881-bff6-4a718276b361": {"page_content": "For in that case, induction would simply be another way of choosing theories, and the problem would remain of why those theories should be a reliable basis for action.\nIn other words, philosophers who worry about this problem of induction are not inductiveists in the old fashion sense.\nThey did not try to obtain or justify any theories inductively.\nThey did not expect the sky to fall in, but they did not know how to justify that expectation end quote.\nYes, and so modern day basians who I encounter, they do tend to accept this idea that you can refute theories.\nNow I still don't understand how and you speak to them and of course.\nNumber one, they're typically not using basis theorem.\nThat's the first thing.\nIn so far as they are, that is the very rare exception to the rule.\nPeople will call themselves basians, but never actually employ basis theorem in assessing, actually calculating the probability or likelihood of a particular theory.\nBut in so far as they do, they accept that a refutation takes the probability of the truth of the theory to zero.\nI don't know how that happens.\nI don't think they do either, but they accept refutation.\nBut they do think that confirming instances are a thing that the more often you observe something happening, the more confident you can be.\nThat seems to be common sense to them.\nMaybe it is common sense to a certain person.\nYou see something happen three times in a row, four times in a row, five times in a row, well then you should expect it.\nIt's the sunrise in kind of thing.\nYou've seen the sunrise on five occasions before, you expect the sunrise tomorrow, or ever since you were born, you've seen the sunrise and so you continue to think the sun's going to rise, and of course the whole ravens thing or the swans, whatever, you've seen white swans forever, so you were sharing all swans of white, therefore, why should you expect a black swan?.\nThese trope examples are the ones that can tend to crop up.\nBut of course, the gamblers long run fallacy.\nYou're flipping a coin and 10 heads in a row, do you expect the 11th head to be heads knowing it's a fair coin?.\nWell, that's the thing.\nDo you know it's a fair coin?.\nAll of this stuff are problems for basians, but not problems for perperians who want good explanations and not merely predictions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2650"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "02b3f326-fca8-459e-8dfe-3b786025480f": {"page_content": "These trope examples are the ones that can tend to crop up.\nBut of course, the gamblers long run fallacy.\nYou're flipping a coin and 10 heads in a row, do you expect the 11th head to be heads knowing it's a fair coin?.\nWell, that's the thing.\nDo you know it's a fair coin?.\nAll of this stuff are problems for basians, but not problems for perperians who want good explanations and not merely predictions.\nInductivists are the same, well, in the basians are inductive.\nThat's what they are.\nThey seek predictions that they see that the purpose of science is about being able to make a prediction.\nThey're looking at observations.\nThey're focused on observations on the evidence, on trying to confirm the evidence, as being true or probably true, indicating a trend is likely more or less, and therefore, whether the trend can continue, and therefore, they've got graphs, and it all looks very scientific.\nWhen you speak to basians, and when you look at their presentations, they have lovely graphs, lots of data, and so they can, they're ruling things in and out on the basis of confidence, number of observations, so on and so forth.\nBut in real life science, what we're looking for is creative conjectures, grand explanations, hard to come by, accounts of the world, stories we tell, when I say story, I don't think fictional story, I mean, words in natural language, that invoke things that really exist out there in reality, the causal links between them, the relationships between them, I should say, and why what is happening is happening, why?.\nAnd then from that, you might get a prediction, you might be able to talk about trends and things, but that's a derivative thing, not the central part of the philosophy of science, of science, of epistemology, it just isn't.\nThis way, induction is not a thing, merely observing stuff, observing is just there as a test of the theory, guessed.\nThe observation might throw up a problem, in which case, let's come up with an explanation of why this problem exists, was the observation made poorly, was the methodology used to generate the observation?.\nThere was a problem with the telescope, perhaps, or the microscope, or the Large Hadron Collider, with your scientific instrument, with your eyes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2802"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0045239b-da42-41c4-8152-0f1355f3feb3": {"page_content": "This way, induction is not a thing, merely observing stuff, observing is just there as a test of the theory, guessed.\nThe observation might throw up a problem, in which case, let's come up with an explanation of why this problem exists, was the observation made poorly, was the methodology used to generate the observation?.\nThere was a problem with the telescope, perhaps, or the microscope, or the Large Hadron Collider, with your scientific instrument, with your eyes.\nYou look up in the sky and you think you've seen a UFO, oh, observation.\nWell, no, you've seen something up there, it doesn't mean there's aliens flying from another galaxy here to Earth.\nThen you've got a theory and now let we need observations to rule that out, possibly.\nWe need alternatives, we have a whole bunch of alternative hypotheses about what that thing could have been in the sky.\nThen you need ways of ruling out all the other things like human-made aircraft, Venus, shooting style, or meteor, any number of things whether balloon.\nOn that list, yeah, sure, let's throw the intergalactic space traveler.\nBut absent anything else, why we're jumping to that one?.\nI don't know.\nThis is what passes for the way in which people think science is done.\nIf they continue to see night after night, after night, after night, particular lights in the sky, they're becoming more and more confident that their favorite theory is more likely to be true.\nThis is the Bayesian way of thinking.\nTherefore, tomorrow, they're going to see the same lights in the sky.\nAh-ha, aliens are traveling from the other side of the galaxy or something like that.\nSo David talks about modern day philosophers as perhaps not being inductive us in the old sense.\nI think some are when it comes to Bayesian and some kind of are.\nThey worry about how to justify us through their theories.\nIf there's anything to go by with the modern movement of Bayesianism, that's what people think.\nThey've only been fed a certain way of they're not philosophers to begin with.\nMany people who title themselves styled Bayesians today in the rationalist community, they read about Bayesianism.\nThat's it.\nYou're a blanket view.\nNever considered anything more broadly in philosophy or epistemology.\nIt's just Bayesian reasoning and it's mathematical and I love math because maybe they're coders or the engineers.\nThey understand the basic ideas.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=2880"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a08f8277-5940-40da-81c8-078a2cf8d34f": {"page_content": "They've only been fed a certain way of they're not philosophers to begin with.\nMany people who title themselves styled Bayesians today in the rationalist community, they read about Bayesianism.\nThat's it.\nYou're a blanket view.\nNever considered anything more broadly in philosophy or epistemology.\nIt's just Bayesian reasoning and it's mathematical and I love math because maybe they're coders or the engineers.\nThey understand the basic ideas.\nThe hey, it's a formula.\nYou can even code it in the computer and it can spit out numbers for you and it can be used for so-called machine learning, even though it's not learning, but it can extrapolate data and it'll even help your robot navigate around.\nHey, works.\nWorks for generating theories.\nNow, works for Bayeses theorem works for specific things, but I've got whole episodes on this.\nLook at the Stephen Pinker and most recent episode on that, all about Bayeses theorem for that.\nI've been talking about it a lot recently, so I won't go back down that road now where Bayeses theorem can narrowly be used and where it certainly isn't a philosophy of science or an epistemology.\nSo that's what we're talking about here.\nBut there are philosophers who are not inductive us in the old fashion sense, David says, but I'll continue.\nHe writes, quote, they do not try to obtain or justify any theories inductively.\nThey do not expect the sky to fall in, but they do not know how to justify that expectation.\nPhilosophers today yearn for this missing justification, they no longer believe that induction would provide it, yet they have an induction-shaped gap in their scheme of things, just as religious people who have lost their faith suffer from a god-shaped gap in their scheme of things.\nBut in my opinion, there is little difference between having an X-shaped gap in one scheme of things and believing in X. Hence to fit in with the more sophisticated conception of the problem of induction, I wish to redefine the term inductivist to mean someone who believes that the invalidity of inductive justification is a problem for the foundations of science, pausing their my reflection.\nJust on the god-shaped gap thing, yeah, so religious people who lose their faith have a god-shaped gap.\nYou see this all the time, especially in morality, say something controversial here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3030"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "913883ad-c21a-4169-a68d-ba8109c4258b": {"page_content": "Just on the god-shaped gap thing, yeah, so religious people who lose their faith have a god-shaped gap.\nYou see this all the time, especially in morality, say something controversial here.\nAltruism and this idea of collectivism, it's a tribal idea, so religions inherited this idea that the tribe is more important than the individual.\nObviously, that was a thing in the tribe.\nReligions took it on and then whole political movements have taken it on.\nNow, atheists to reject religion kind of.\nAtheists, we should say, who reject God, and then think of themselves as very rational people because they have rejected God, tend not to reject many, many of the tenants of religion.\nNow, of course, they might become political activists and say, well, I hate the Catholic Church, for example, and I am very pro-abortion, let's say.\nSo clearly, I'm not a religious thinker, but many, many of these people will hold high this notion of altruism, self-sacrifice.\nWhere does the concept of self-sacrifice being a virtue come from?.\nAltruism is not generosity.\nI've written blog posts about this in podcasts about this before.\nPeople who reject God and reject mainstream religion, and by the way, I don't regard myself as a religious person, but I understand the fraught errors in simply rejecting religion and having nothing to replace it with, because if you reject God and you reject mainstream religion, especially the one in which you are raised from mother's knee, and you have nothing to replace it with, it will be filled by everything that was in that religion and it will become a political ideology.\nFor example, Christianity well-teaches that the ultimate person as Jesus Christ, he sacrificed his life for the rest of humanity.\nThat was the greatest thing that could have been done.\nHe was altruistic, he spoke of altruism, give up your wealth, and follow him.\nThis is the ideal that we are supposed to strive for, and many, many atheist people still endorse the lessons.\nThey might reject God, reject that Jesus perform miracles, reject that Jesus is the son of God, or perhaps even reject that Jesus ever existed, but insofar as he had wisdom there, they still read wisdom into the New Testament of that kind, namely sacrifice yourself.\nDon't merely be generous, give and give and give until it hurts a little.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3121"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b85b2efd-a593-4f1e-86db-194307447f13": {"page_content": "This is the ideal that we are supposed to strive for, and many, many atheist people still endorse the lessons.\nThey might reject God, reject that Jesus perform miracles, reject that Jesus is the son of God, or perhaps even reject that Jesus ever existed, but insofar as he had wisdom there, they still read wisdom into the New Testament of that kind, namely sacrifice yourself.\nDon't merely be generous, give and give and give until it hurts a little.\nThe best thing you can do is to have your life set up so that it is for the service of others.\nAgain, I am not saying don't be generous, I am not saying don't be kind to compassionate, you should be generous kind of compassionate, absolutely.\nSome of the most wonderful experiences people can have in life is helping others, absolutely.\nBut what Christianity does in particular is it goes a little step further.\nIt says, you do all that, but continue to do it until it hurts, continue to do it until a little blood is drawn, until you begin to suffer a little.\nIt's in the suffering that you actually find, true virtue, and your true calling.\nOur Buddhism speaks that you know, all life is suffering, which I disagree with, I think that suffering is just a problem that can be solved.\nAnd Christianity says, if you suffer this is great, it's your cross to bear, you should be seeking the cross to bear, you should be suffering, you should be sacrificing yourself for others.\nIf you've got a million dollars to give away, don't invest it in a company, that's not going to do the greatest good, give it away, give it to a charity where it will absolutely help people.\nNow, do I, am I arguing, get to charity?.\nNo, what I'm saying is, it's not evil to invest that million dollars.\nAnd I'm not saying it's better to put it into charity, give it to charity if you want.\nYeah, absolutely.\nYou're going to help people in particular charities.\nYou could invest it in a company like Apple, which is going to produce even better iPhones that are going to help millions and millions of people be lifted out of poverty.\nThat's literally what happens with technology.\nAnd you would be a part of that interview invest in some corporations, giving it away to poor people now is also going to help them.\nYeah, absolutely.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3247"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dde70ea4-bd62-4a5d-94a3-dec35a9dcd9e": {"page_content": "Yeah, absolutely.\nYou're going to help people in particular charities.\nYou could invest it in a company like Apple, which is going to produce even better iPhones that are going to help millions and millions of people be lifted out of poverty.\nThat's literally what happens with technology.\nAnd you would be a part of that interview invest in some corporations, giving it away to poor people now is also going to help them.\nYeah, absolutely.\nBut why a Christian, for example, would say, no, absolutely only way of helping people the only way is to give it to charity because that's going to hurt you.\nYou're not going to earn anything from that except a good feeling, but investing money.\nWell, you're going to make a profit.\nYou'll also feel good.\nIn fact, you're not supposed to feel good if you do that, by the way.\nIf you invest in a company that does really well, you're not supposed to feel good and virtuous.\nYou're not supposed to.\nYou're supposed to feel a little bit guilty.\nYou haven't sacrificed anything, the opposite.\nBut why shouldn't you feel good if the company you're investing does well and is selling products to people and giving services to people, lifting the entire state of civilization to a higher level of flourishing.\nThat's a great thing.\nThat's a virtuous thing.\nPeople have a God-shaped gap.\nPeople have a religion-shaped gap.\nSo atheists often just have the morality of Christianity.\nThey endorse almost everything about Christianity, except the God-bit, except the Jesus-bit, although the example of Jesus, they think is good.\nEffective altruism is absolutely that.\nIt's absolutely that.\nIt is the modern version of Christianity without Jesus.\nIt's a way of, he give away everything follow me and then you will achieve bliss and happiness and enlightenment.\nI am not saying effective altruists are not doing good work.\nThey are.\nWhat I am saying is that altruism is not the most effective way of doing good.\nGenerosity is a higher calling, because there are many ways in which to be generous.\nInvesting in people, rather than simply giving it away.\nInvesting in people means you may get a return.\nYou might not as well.\nYou might lose it all.\nBut hey, we charity.\nYou absolutely lose it all in the sense that it's gone from you to someone else.\nIs that bad?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3377"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa584a86-42c2-43df-b2d6-09720471dc97": {"page_content": "What I am saying is that altruism is not the most effective way of doing good.\nGenerosity is a higher calling, because there are many ways in which to be generous.\nInvesting in people, rather than simply giving it away.\nInvesting in people means you may get a return.\nYou might not as well.\nYou might lose it all.\nBut hey, we charity.\nYou absolutely lose it all in the sense that it's gone from you to someone else.\nIs that bad?.\nNo, it's not bad, but in the same way that investing in someone who's got a good idea is a startup and makes lots of money and you make lots of money is also not bad for you.\nIt's no less good just because you make a profit, but I'm getting off topic.\nThat's a rant on precisely this thing of some people who lose their faith suffer from a God-shaped gap.\nThat kind of thing.\nPeople want to believe in something, believe in the higher power of some sort.\nIn particular, I want to have a morality that is basically just traditional religion.\nThere are alternatives to that.\nLook up, I think my blog post is Christian atheists, something like that.\nI've got a podcast out there about it as well.\nLet's get going.\nNot only going to read a little bit more, and then we get to the actual discussion itself, which I'm going to leave for part two.\nThis is just the introduction.\nLengthier than I thought.\nDavid has just said, quote, and I'll read on a bit further.\nI wish to redefine the term inductivist to mean someone who believes that the invalidity of inductive justification is a problem for the foundations of science.\nIn other words, an inductivist believes there is a gap which must be filled if not by a principle of induction than by something else.\nSome inductivists do not mind being so designated.\nOthers do, so I shall call them crypto-inductivists.\nMost contemporary philosophers are crypto-inductivists.\nWhat makes matters worse is that like many scientists, they grossly underrate the role of explanation in the scientific process.\nSo do most perperian anti-inductivists, who are thereby led to deny that there is any such thing as justification, even tentative justification.\nThis opens up a new explanatory gap in their scheme of things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3111"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f8832a4-381a-427f-9320-c593eacffea3": {"page_content": "Others do, so I shall call them crypto-inductivists.\nMost contemporary philosophers are crypto-inductivists.\nWhat makes matters worse is that like many scientists, they grossly underrate the role of explanation in the scientific process.\nSo do most perperian anti-inductivists, who are thereby led to deny that there is any such thing as justification, even tentative justification.\nThis opens up a new explanatory gap in their scheme of things.\nThe philosopher, John Worrell, has dramatized a problem as he sees it in an imaginary dialogue between Popper and several other philosophers entitled, why both Popper and Watkins fail to solve the problem of induction?.\nThis setting is the top of the Eiffel Tower.\nOne of the participants, the floater, decides to descend by jumping over the side instead of using the lift in the normal way.\nThe others try to persuade the floater that jumping off means certain death.\nThey use the best available scientific and philosophical arguments, but the infuriating floater still expects to float down safely.\nAnd keeps pointing out that no rival explanation can logically be proved to be preferable on the basis of past experience.\nPause there, my reflection.\nYeah, of course.\nIt's the wrong question, isn't it?.\nThe floater is right that no rival explanation can logically be proved to be preferable.\nYeah, we can't logically prove it, but science isn't about logical proof.\nAnd if you're looking for that bar, the bar is so high, you're never going to meet it.\nWhat we're after is good explanations.\nWe're after actual knowledge.\nWe're after a situation in which we literally do have no rivals.\nWe've got one explanation.\nThis is the explanation.\nThis is what's going to happen.\nIs it absolutely certain?.\nNo. Is it known to be true?.\nNo. Is it probably true?.\nNo.\nIt's just the only explanation we have.\nAnd if you want to rely on something else, in particular, you want to rely on a bad explanation, that's on you.\nThe rest of us are not going to jump off the Eiffel Tower because we've got a good explanation.\nIt's a very, very good explanation.\nIt's been tested in many, many different ways and many different situations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3570"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae90d230-3f70-4e6c-81c5-776802e9951f": {"page_content": "No. Is it probably true?.\nNo.\nIt's just the only explanation we have.\nAnd if you want to rely on something else, in particular, you want to rely on a bad explanation, that's on you.\nThe rest of us are not going to jump off the Eiffel Tower because we've got a good explanation.\nIt's a very, very good explanation.\nIt's been tested in many, many different ways and many different situations.\nI am justified in not jumping off, justified in the sense that I should not jump off the Eiffel Tower and thinking I will not float to the ground because this best only existing scientific explanation of how gravity works and how masses in a gravitational field behave tells me and that was me to predict I'm going to hit the ground.\nI'm going to hit the ground in such a way that I'll absolutely be dead.\nSo you, Mr. Flotter, can rely on some other explanation, an unknown explanation, but it doesn't enable you to make a prediction.\nYour non-explanation is just an assertion that you're going to float.\nIt's prediction without explanation, explanationless science.\nBy what mechanism are you going to float down?.\nYou have none.\nI have one that tells me that what happens when you jump off the Eiffel Tower is you fall towards the ground and increasing velocity and you splat and all your bones break and you die.\nThis is what general relativity tells us.\nSo what David goes on to say is, quote, I believe that we can justify our expectation, the Flotter would be killed.\nThe justification, always tentative, of course, comes from the explanations provided by the relevant scientific theories to the extent those explanations are good.\nIt is rationally justified to rely on the predictions of corresponding theories.\nSo in reply to Laurel and our presenter dialogue of my own set in the same place, end quote, and I won't begin reading the dialogue now.\nBut that last paragraph there is a lot of use of the word justify.\nAnd I think we can just do away that I think we can just sort of say something along the lines of, we know the Flotter would be killed.\nAnd when I say no, what I mean is tentatively, fallably, relying upon our best explanation.\nSo I would phrase it something like, I know that the Flotter would be killed.\nThis claim comes from the explanations provided by the relevant scientific theories to the extent those explanations are good.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3688"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b33eaf7b-11fd-4ae1-92fb-df43206f3e6d": {"page_content": "And I think we can just do away that I think we can just sort of say something along the lines of, we know the Flotter would be killed.\nAnd when I say no, what I mean is tentatively, fallably, relying upon our best explanation.\nSo I would phrase it something like, I know that the Flotter would be killed.\nThis claim comes from the explanations provided by the relevant scientific theories to the extent those explanations are good.\nIt is right to rely on the predictions of the corresponding theories.\nSo in reply to Laurel and our presenter dialogue on my own, at no point do I need to talk about justified?.\nAt no point do I need to use the word justification?.\nI think David would be the same now because it just introduces some confusion.\nNot because at that time in 1997 was he ever wrong in saying this because you need to speak in the language of your opponents if you're, if you're going to make any headway, quite often.\nCertainly I've learned this, unless you're willing to grant certain vocabulary, there's no common ground, but they just don't know what you're getting at.\nSo when I try and say, try and explain what knowledge is or what the phrase I know means, well, I have to begin where they are.\nPeople will say, oh, but you don't really know that.\nAnd so I have to concede that where they're coming from is when they say and they emphasize, no, you don't know that.\nWhat they mean is, I am certain that.\nOkay.\nAnd so I always say to them, well, no, you can't be certain of that.\nI'm not certain of it either.\nWhereas what I really think is, of course, certainty isn't a thing.\nYou can't, there's no such thing as certainty.\nThere's this feeling, right?.\nThere's this emotion, you think that you label certainty, but even then that doesn't mean that it's absolutely true.\nOkay.\nSo there's all this deep ocean of background knowledge, but you have to meet someone who's coming from the completely opposite perspective.\nYou have to meet them some way.\nSo you have to grant them certain words and try and bring them with you for as long as they're interested in being brought with you.\nAnd if they're not interested and they give up, well, there you go, you don't have to force people into it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3788"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8cb8c186-bf28-4b9b-99ae-4288e5a89fb3": {"page_content": "Okay.\nSo there's all this deep ocean of background knowledge, but you have to meet someone who's coming from the completely opposite perspective.\nYou have to meet them some way.\nSo you have to grant them certain words and try and bring them with you for as long as they're interested in being brought with you.\nAnd if they're not interested and they give up, well, there you go, you don't have to force people into it.\nSo it's an interesting debate for as long as people want to have it.\nAn interesting discussion, I should say, explaining world views to one another.\nSo that's what we're doing.\nAnd that's what David is doing here.\nSo I look forward to the next episode where we go through some of the dialogue.\nAnd I think I'll go through the entire dialogue, but I think this is a really good chapter of trying finally to undo this idea of induction.\nWe've now, of course, got the problem of Bayesianism.\nSo how much in-road we're making, I don't know what to tell.\nAnd what's the real-life consequence?.\nThe real-life consequences may be machine learning and artificial intelligence would do better if they weren't so reliant on Bayesianism.\nMaybe there are better ways to go.\nMaybe, you know, even like AGI, obviously, artificial general intelligence clearly cannot possibly be based on Bayesian inference generation.\nThat's clearly a misconception.\nWe can rule that out.\nBut I don't know enough about just mainstream normal AI to know whether or not doing away with Bayesianism there might be a good idea.\nThat might be a bit of a dead end.\nThere could be better ways of producing so-called intelligent systems, just sophisticated computers, that do a different job of kind of guessing and conjecturing in some way.\nI don't know how.\nThat's for other people.\nI do what I do, other people do what they do.\nBut philosophy is important here.\nA epistemology is important here.\nIf we want technology to be better, people have to understand the way knowledge is generated, because that's how progress happens.\nNot merely in the rarerified areas of philosophy and science, but in engineering and technology and just everywhere in life.\nBut that's enough for me.\nUntil next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49TUWN7Klc&t=3899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e048e24-4178-4f73-aa59-a7e4a0b722e6": {"page_content": "I have a friend who is an artist and is sometimes taken of you, which I agree with my well.\nYou hold up a flower and say, look how beautiful it is, and I agree, I think.\nAnd he says, you see, as I as an artist can see how beautiful this is.\nBut you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes dull thing.\nAnd I think that he's kind of nutty.\nFirst of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too.\nI believe, although I may not be quite as refined as aesthetically as he is, that I can't appreciate the beauty of the flower.\nAt the same time, I see that much more about the flower that he sees.\nI could imagine the cells, the complicated actions, and so I would also have a beauty.\nI mean, it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there's also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors and the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it, is interesting.\nIt means that insects can see the color.\nIt adds a question, is this aesthetic sense also exist in a lot of forms that does it?.\nWhy is it aesthetic?.\nIt all kinds of interesting questions, which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery in the aura of a flower.\nIt only adds.\nI don't understand how it subtracts.\nWelcome to ToKCast, episode 33, chapter 14 of the beginning of infinity, titled, Why Are Flowers Beautiful?.\nNow that's just your opinion that flowers are beautiful, so they're not in any objective sense.\nThat was a quick episode, so look forward to next week for the evolution of culture.\nOf course, that would be ridiculous.\nIt's so easy, it's such a general purpose objection to say, well, it's just your opinion that that movie was a bad movie, it's just your opinion that Justin Bieber is a bad singer, it's just your opinion that Mozart is a better composer than someone else.\nIt's one of those arguments that everyone knows.\nThis idea that in art or music or movies or fiction, there's no objective standards, and that everyone just has their opinion, it's merely a matter of taste and so we're never going to converge on what is actually good when it comes to art.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6bbe1ed4-4396-4808-8331-5ecb007c3f4b": {"page_content": "It's one of those arguments that everyone knows.\nThis idea that in art or music or movies or fiction, there's no objective standards, and that everyone just has their opinion, it's merely a matter of taste and so we're never going to converge on what is actually good when it comes to art.\nWell, we're going to explore that today, we're going to explore that through the lens of why flowers are beautiful.\nWhen we say beautiful, we're going to come to understand that what this means, at least in part, is attractiveness.\nSo I began this episode with a short clip from Richard Feynman, where he tells the story about a proverbial friend who comes to him and complains about physicist and says, you've business, you like to deconstruct thing.\nThat's just denuding the beauty of nature by explaining it.\nOf course, Feynman's response is, that's completely wrong.\nIt doesn't ruin anything by explaining it.\nIn fact, it enhances it.\nThe beauty of the rainbow is available to the physicist, just as it is to anyone else.\nThat kind of beauty, that kind of visual beauty.\nBut there's a deeper beauty as well.\nThere's a beauty of the theory itself, which explains why the rainbow happens.\nAnd there's the beauty of the feeling of understanding, of comprehending what's actually going on there.\nThese simple laws acting on simple objects in the universe, to cause marvelous effects, taking white light and splitting it into all the colors of the rainbow.\nThat's a beautiful thing to understand.\nThat's a kind of beauty, not available to someone who doesn't understand the physics.\nSo a physicist isn't removing beauty, or removing beauty by explaining something.\nAnd I think Feynman's point when he talks about is that people should want to try to understand things like that, to understand physics, to the extent that they're interested in it.\nBecause it is a kind of beauty, it is a way of appreciating the world that otherwise wouldn't be available to you.\nIt's similar to the criticism that some people trained in the classics, or trained in the arts, make of people trained in the sciences, possibly rightly.\nBut if you don't understand Shakespeare, you don't understand some of the great works.\nIf you don't haven't read the classic philosophers, then you are missing something of the beauty of reality, the reality that is being created by people, of course.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1ee05255-0859-4ce0-9541-3d37fe11f106": {"page_content": "It's similar to the criticism that some people trained in the classics, or trained in the arts, make of people trained in the sciences, possibly rightly.\nBut if you don't understand Shakespeare, you don't understand some of the great works.\nIf you don't haven't read the classic philosophers, then you are missing something of the beauty of reality, the reality that is being created by people, of course.\nIndeed, at least a year's gone by, not so much today, in fact, it's the other way around.\nBut in years gone by, it was said that even if you were well-trained in science and mathematics, you were nonetheless uneducated if you didn't read the classics, if you didn't have a good understanding of Shakespeare and Homer and the humanities, let's say.\nAnd it used to be really said in the other direction, you know, if you didn't understand Shakespeare, then you regarded as uneducated.\nBut if you didn't understand the second law of thermodynamics, but nonetheless you had a Bachelor of Arts degree, you were still educated.\nThere was no sin in not understanding the second law of thermodynamics, let's say.\nBut now, of course, we've got the problem, the pendulum swinging in the other direction.\nI think this pendulum that does swing in either direction is misconceived.\nBut today, of course, there's a lot of accusations made of people, at least on social media anyway, accusations made from one person to another that so-and-so is scientifically ignorant.\nNow, of course, it might be true.\nAll of us are ignorant to some extent, but to claim that it's a sin, or that you have no right to speak on a certain topic, because you are ignorant of that topic.\nThat is completely misconceived.\nIt's no sin to be ignorant.\nIgnorance is the common state of humanity.\nWe are all infinitely ignorant, as paparas taught us.\nWhat perhaps is a sin, what perhaps is a sin, is claiming to have knowledge that you do not have, of course, that can be wrong, or refusing to learn anything further once you think you know something, whether that's in the realm of the arts or the humanities or in science, okay, but that discussion is taking us a little bit far away from the point of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=239"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "84e0c184-66cb-4752-9943-b496c9496c8a": {"page_content": "We are all infinitely ignorant, as paparas taught us.\nWhat perhaps is a sin, what perhaps is a sin, is claiming to have knowledge that you do not have, of course, that can be wrong, or refusing to learn anything further once you think you know something, whether that's in the realm of the arts or the humanities or in science, okay, but that discussion is taking us a little bit far away from the point of the chapter.\nA good supplement to this video, not only is the book, of course, but also David Deutsch has an excellent talk that he gave to the Museum of Modern Art, and that's available on YouTube.\nI'll link to that as well.\nOr you can just type in David Deutsch Flowers into the YouTube search bar, and it'll bring that up.\nNow, all of that said, let's get into chapter 14, why are flowers beautiful?.\nNow it begins with a quote from Richard Dawkins writing in his book, Climbing Mountain Probable, which was written in 1996, published in 1996, and Dawkins wrote, my daughter Juliet then aged six, pointed out some flowers by the wayside.\nI asked her what she thought wildflowers were for.\nShe gave a rather thoughtful answer, two things she said, to make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us.\nI was touched by this, and sorry I had to tell her that it wasn't true, end quote.\nAnd then David goes on for another quote.\nDisplace one note, and there would be diminishment.\nDisplace one phrase, and the structure would fall.\nThat is how Mozart's music is described in Peter's chafers, 1979 play Armadeus.\nShould also just pause there my interjection here.\nThere's also a movie based upon that play of the same name, Armadeus.\nThe movie was made in 1984.\nIt got 11 Academy Award nominations, it won Best Picture for that year.\nIt's burned into my mind because I was brought up in the Star Wars generation, which is around this same era.\nAnd like many people who were brought up in the Star Wars generation, at least many young boys, anyway, we watched the movie so often we could recite the words off by heart.\nThe only other movie I think that I'm able to still recite most of the words off by heart would be Armadeus.\nIt's one of the movies that I really enjoyed as a kid.\nI don't really know why.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "17c38cc6-01e5-4acd-acf5-ef375fa9f9bf": {"page_content": "And like many people who were brought up in the Star Wars generation, at least many young boys, anyway, we watched the movie so often we could recite the words off by heart.\nThe only other movie I think that I'm able to still recite most of the words off by heart would be Armadeus.\nIt's one of the movies that I really enjoyed as a kid.\nI don't really know why.\nI think my grandmother had me watch it at some point.\nand then I just fell in love with the music as well as the story, but the music was so wonderful and that led me into an appreciation of classical music, which was rather an odd thing for a young boy, at least where I was from anyway.\nAnd so, yeah, I never learnt to play classical music, I'm not musically inclined in any way, shape or form, but I certainly appreciate classical music.\nOkay, let's get back to the book enough about me.\nSo David has just said, um, to this place one note and there would be diminishment, this place one phrase and the structure would fall.\nThis is reminiscent of the remark made by John Archwald Wheeler with which this book begins speaking of a hoped for unified theory of fundamental physics, an idea so simple, so beautiful that when we grasp it, how could it have been otherwise?.\nShafer and Wheeler were describing the same attribute, being hard to vary, while still doing the job.\nIn the first case, it is an attribute of aesthetically good music, and in the second of good scientific explanations, and Wheeler speaks of the scientific theory as being beautiful, in the same breath as describing it as hard to vary.\nScientific theory is a harder vary because they correspond closely with an objective truth, which is independent of our culture, our personal preferences, and our biological makeup.\nBut what made Peter Shaffer think that Mozart's music is hard to vary?.\nThe prevailing view among both artists and non-artists is, I think, that there is nothing objective about artistic standards.\nBeauty says the adage is in the eye of the beholder.\nThe very phrase, it's a matter of taste, is used interchangeably with, there is no objective truth of the matter.\nArtistic standards are, in this view, nothing more than artifacts of fashion and other cultural accidents, or of individual whim or of biological predisposition.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=444"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d3bd3960-b279-4984-a25b-06d91643924f": {"page_content": "The prevailing view among both artists and non-artists is, I think, that there is nothing objective about artistic standards.\nBeauty says the adage is in the eye of the beholder.\nThe very phrase, it's a matter of taste, is used interchangeably with, there is no objective truth of the matter.\nArtistic standards are, in this view, nothing more than artifacts of fashion and other cultural accidents, or of individual whim or of biological predisposition.\nMany are willing to concede that in science and mathematics one idea can be objectively true within another, though, as we have seen, some deny even that.\nBut most insist, there is no such thing as one object being objectively more beautiful than another.\nMathematics has its proofs, so the argument goes, and science has its experimental tests.\nBut if you choose to believe that Mozart was an inept and cacophanous composer, then neither logic nor experiment nor anything else objective will ever contradict you.\nOK, pause there, skipping over the next bit, where David compares that objection to empiricism, and also he begins to introduce the idea, and although we may not be able to yet, or perhaps even at any time in the near future, be able to use science to objectively show or prove or provide evidence that a particular piece of art is objectively better than another piece of art.\nBecause not mean there's no objectivity to it, because facts can nonetheless be brought to bear to criticise aesthetic theories.\nHe says facts can be used to criticise aesthetic theories as they can moral theories.\nBut I'm skipping all of that, and I will pick it up where David says, just as pronounced key pointed out that scientific discovery depends upon a commitment to certain moral values, might it not also entail the appreciation of certain forms of beauty?.\nIt is a fact, often mentioned, but seldom explained, that deep truth is often beautiful.\nMathematicians and theoretical scientists call this form of beauty elegance.\nElegance is the beauty in explanations.\nIt is by no means synonymous with how good or how true an explanation is.\nThe poet John Keats assertion, which I think was ironic, that beauty is truth.\nTruth beauty is refuted by what the evolutionist Thomas Huxley called the Great Tragedy of Science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact, which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers, by philosophers he meant scientists.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=542"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58fe02d2-7031-40bc-b81c-7b522916654d": {"page_content": "Elegance is the beauty in explanations.\nIt is by no means synonymous with how good or how true an explanation is.\nThe poet John Keats assertion, which I think was ironic, that beauty is truth.\nTruth beauty is refuted by what the evolutionist Thomas Huxley called the Great Tragedy of Science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact, which is so constantly being enacted under the eyes of philosophers, by philosophers he meant scientists.\nI think Huxley too was being ironic in calling this process a great tragedy, especially since he was referring to the refutation of spontaneous generation theories.\nBut it is true that some important mathematical proofs and some scientific theories are far from elegant.\nYet the truth so often is elegant that elegance is, at least, a useful heuristic, when searching for fundamental truths.\nAnd when a beautiful hypothesis is slain, it is more often not replaced, as the spontaneous generation theory was, by a more beautiful one.\nSurely, this is not coincidence, it is a regularity in nature, so it must have an explanation.\nOkay, pause there my very brief reflection.\nSo we've got the idea here of beauty in science and mathematics, beauty of a theorem being a useful heuristic, a useful rule, a useful guide in order to point us in the right direction as to what we're looking for when it comes to truth.\nNow that's one aspect of this, the other aspect is the fact that that is routinely what we find in science and mathematics, that more often than not, regularly we find that elegance is a guide to the truth, is itself in need of an explanation.\nWhy should that be so?.\nOkay, and then David begins to talk about a comparison between creation in art and creation in science.\nAnd the important point in this paragraph that I'm just skipping through is that both the scientists and the artists or the musical composer have waste paper baskets.\nWhat does that mean?.\nWell, if you're a scientist and you're trying to find the answer to a particular question, a particular scientific question or a mathematician trying to show some theorem and you're making mistakes along the way, you're throwing out, discarding what you got wrong when you've detected your areas.\nWhat does a music composer do?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=660"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "981b0ade-6bda-4fcd-9d71-6cf9e5f0a953": {"page_content": "What does that mean?.\nWell, if you're a scientist and you're trying to find the answer to a particular question, a particular scientific question or a mathematician trying to show some theorem and you're making mistakes along the way, you're throwing out, discarding what you got wrong when you've detected your areas.\nWhat does a music composer do?.\nIf it's all mere creativity uncoupled from criticism, uncoupled from comparisons to some objective standard to a reality that's out there in some way, then there shouldn't be any need for the waste paper basket because you're not comparing it to any objective criteria, but there must be an objective criteria because not only does the music meet your standards, but it meets the standards of many other people as well.\nSo the composer is not merely creating in some unhinged way, but they are creating within the scope of certain criteria, certain objective criteria for beauty within the area of music.\nAnd so when they make errors in that, that gets discarded in the waste paper basket.\nSo this is the significance of the waste paper basket within both science and art.\nIt is a metaphor for the fact that you can make errors.\nIt's possible to be wrong in both domains.\nAnd being wrong is objective, you're either wrong or you're not.\nAnd David goes on to write, quote, composers like Ludwig van Beethoven agonized through change after change, apparently seeking something that they knew was there to be created, apparently meeting a standard that could be met only after much creative effort and much failure.\nScientists often do the same.\nIn both science and art, there are the exceptional creators like Mozart or the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanajan who reputedly made brilliant contributions without any such effort.\nBut from what we know of knowledge creation, we have to conclude that in such cases the effort and the mistakes did happen invisibly inside their brains, pause their mind reflection, such an important point.\nThere is a mystique about mathematicians, certainly.\nAnd when it comes to these phenomenal mathematicians, like Ramanajan is one of the most famous mathematicians, even among mathematicians.\nThere is this mystique about how exactly they're doing what they're doing.\nNot only is there this mystique among the general community about mathematicians, because the overwhelming majority of people are not particularly knowledgeable at mathematics.\nAnd I include myself in this category, even though I did university level mathematics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ac54c4d9-96d2-4535-8e14-14a5e7b08f39": {"page_content": "There is a mystique about mathematicians, certainly.\nAnd when it comes to these phenomenal mathematicians, like Ramanajan is one of the most famous mathematicians, even among mathematicians.\nThere is this mystique about how exactly they're doing what they're doing.\nNot only is there this mystique among the general community about mathematicians, because the overwhelming majority of people are not particularly knowledgeable at mathematics.\nAnd I include myself in this category, even though I did university level mathematics.\nNow I look at the overwhelming majority of mathematics at the university level and I don't have a clue about what's going on really.\nSo mathematics has this mystique in the community, but beyond that, when you get into particularly excellent mathematicians, there is a further layer or level of mystery when it comes to these people as if they have some access to divinely inspired truth.\nAnd it's almost, it's very similar in many ways to the way people we used to think of religious leaders.\nAs if, for example, the Pope had a direct line, somehow to God or merely priest it.\nYou still hear people talk this way today about the Dalai Lama.\nAnd you know, many people claim that there is just something about him that is different to everyone else.\nAnd I might very well be true, that might be the case.\nBut it's not like it is something truly mystical or supernatural or something that can't be understood if you merely apply yourself to try and understand the same as true of mathematics.\nNow, Ramana Jan is held up often as the exception to this rule of being able to understand if only you tried hard enough.\nHe supposedly someone who simply was able to write down theorems without proof.\nNow, there's an excellent book by Hari, a mathematician's apology, very much worth reading and it's about Hari and.\nRamana Jan. Ramana Jan was from India.\nHe was brought by Hari to England.\nRamana Jan did not live long in England.\nUnfortunately, he only lived a few years.\nHe got sick.\nHe died very young, very sad.\nAnd there's a movie based upon this book as well.\nSo there's a book based upon that account called the man who knew infinity and then there was a movie made as well.\nSo the man who knew infinity is worth looking up on Netflix or wherever he can find it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "05ff518a-bd82-42b4-b104-bdbc40c3e228": {"page_content": "He was brought by Hari to England.\nRamana Jan did not live long in England.\nUnfortunately, he only lived a few years.\nHe got sick.\nHe died very young, very sad.\nAnd there's a movie based upon this book as well.\nSo there's a book based upon that account called the man who knew infinity and then there was a movie made as well.\nSo the man who knew infinity is worth looking up on Netflix or wherever he can find it.\nThe thing is about Ramana Jan, nonetheless, if you look into the details, he was absolutely certainly fallible even when it came to mathematics and even when it came to the theorems that he wrote down.\nYes, the majority of them when he wrote them down, it seemed to be the case that they were true.\nHe just couldn't provide the proof for them.\nOther mathematicians were able to provide the proof.\nRamana Jan had to learn how to do proofs himself and that was what Hari was doing.\nHari was trying to teach him the way that mathematicians were done, that mathematics was done by the mathematical community.\nBut the reverse didn't appear to happen.\nIt wasn't like Ramana Jan was able to teach Hari how he was doing what he was doing.\nNonetheless, I'm sure it could be learned.\nIt's just that we don't know how to learn these things.\nJust like many people don't know how to learn mathematics, full stop.\nThe way in which Ramana Jan did mathematics, it must have been done in his mind somehow.\nWe know it had to be conjecture and refutation.\nThat's the only way that knowledge is made, he's created.\nBut precisely what the method was, because it wasn't a standard method of proof, was for him not able to be explained to anyone else.\nSo in other words, it was in explicit knowledge that he had.\nIt's probably similar to, it could be compared to the way in which a great tennis player is able to play tennis, the way in which Roger Federer is nine times out of ten, able to serve the ball at very high velocity right into the place where he wanted to go.\nSo he can't explain it, he can try, he can try to explain it, he can try and put words together, but that's not going to convey exactly how to do what he does.\nSame is true, probably over Ramana Jan.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aa684f72-3128-40fd-bd73-9dc80b23c6df": {"page_content": "So he can't explain it, he can try, he can try to explain it, he can try and put words together, but that's not going to convey exactly how to do what he does.\nSame is true, probably over Ramana Jan.\nAnd you can look up the fact that some of the theorems that Ramana Jan wrote down turned out, could be turned out weren't true, you could prove that they weren't true in fact.\nSo he was making mistakes, so even this method available to him, whatever it was, itself was of course fallible, okay.\nSo the only reason I'm emphasizing this is because there is something different about the way in which Ramana Jan was going about doing what he did.\nBut it wasn't like it was something something, it's not like Ramana Jan is proof positive that mathematics is this domain of certain truth and you can tap into that domain of certain truth.\nYou can't tap into the domain of certain truth, you can conjecture what it's like, that's called tapping in, but what you're actually doing is you're trying to explain that realm, that area, that area of necessary truth.\nSo Ramana Jan had some way of conjecturing what the necessary truth was without actually going through the proof to get there first.\nSo there must be some process, we just don't know what that is yet.\nNo doubt one day we will know exactly what he was doing and we'll be able to teach other people how to do that.\nAnd it might be a more efficient way of doing mathematics than what is presently done, which is starting from the axi and the going through the rules of inference and getting to the conclusion, which you call your theorem or using computers or whatever else.\nOkay, after that lengthy diversion, let's go back to the book and David writes, are these resemblances only superficial?.\nBy the way, the resemblance is he's talking about is this search for truth and this discarding of errors between science and the arts and mathematics indeed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1117"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51164edd-375b-4a4e-bcf0-da0ecbf48743": {"page_content": "These resemblances only superficial, was Beethoven fooling himself when he thought that the sheets in his waste paper basket contained mistakes, that they were worse than the sheets he would eventually publish, was he merely meeting the arbitrary standards of his culture, like the 20th century women who carefully adjusted their headlines each year to conform to the latest fashions, or is there a real meaning in saying that the music of Beethoven Mozart was far above that of their Stone Age ancestors banging mammoth bones together, as Romana Jen's mathematics was above tally marks, okay, pause there, me again with a little indejection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1229"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b00d912d-553b-44ce-a109-b59f91beae65": {"page_content": "So at this point, this is the point where people object with a challenge.\nYou can't tell who's objectively better, Cardi B, Madonna, ACDC, your favourite K-pop girl group, and because you cannot objectively say which one's better, this is supposed to be a reputation of that entire philosophy, this entire idea that there is any object activity to the arts.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1269"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "59c41dea-4253-4664-8fc4-9d57a1414d74": {"page_content": "And in fact, this often happens with aspects of the philosophy of David Deutsch, that a problem is not soluble right now, or rather that a problem does not have a solution right now, a solution that we don't have a solution for a particular problem, that this somehow entails there can be no such solution, although the problem is inherently unsoluble, this is wrong, the idea that problems are soluble, the idea that there is an objectivity to the arts does not entail that we know what all those criteria are, that we have a solution to what the objective criteria are for the arts right now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1293"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9b39368d-5515-4d4d-965a-5a018cdc27b5": {"page_content": "So there may be a way of ranking these singers, let's say, or these bands, but just because we can't do it now, it does not mean there is no objectivity to this at all.\nAnd as we all come to see, there could be, there must be, a subjective component as well, but we could rank order them in terms of the objective standards.\nAnd finally, we knew what the objective standards were.\nWe possibly are able to, if you're an expert in music, know some of the objective standards, I'm certainly not an expert in music, but no doubt a proper musician could probably write down something, something to do with harmony, something to do with quality of seeing, by some criteria, and so on, because it certainly is the case that I cannot tell who did it better when it comes to these bands, the it being the music.\nWe all have our opinions, some will insist that all classical music always outclasses all pop music, and even pop music always outclasses rap music.\nBut just because we do not know what the objective criteria is does not mean they do not exist.\nAnd as David rightly says, just there, do you really think that some Stone Age people bashing rocks together cannot be distinguished from rivalries can shirt over two violins?.\nWell, of course it can be.\nOf course there is an objective difference, it's not merely subjective.\nEveryone will agree, everyone will be able to tell the difference between the value and the rocks.\nNot merely in terms of they sound different, but one sounds better.\nOne is something that you are attracted to and that you would prefer to keep returning to and listening to.\nIf you were confined in a prison and they gave you the alternative of either listening to these loudly-backed mammoth tusks together, open phones, or open box, or whatever, or you can listen to Vivaldi on a route, I think most of the publishers are available.\nSo we know that there is this, we know already, there's an objective difference between noise, disorganized type sound, poor music, and better music.\nIt is a coarse-grained way of ranking things that we have at the moment, but that doesn't mean that it won't improve, indeed it will.\nWe have a coarse-grained way of understanding biology and physics as well.\nIt's more refined than what it is in the arts, but it's not to say in any of these domains it's perfect.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aef05c06-6441-483f-82ae-ced4f233ad4c": {"page_content": "It is a coarse-grained way of ranking things that we have at the moment, but that doesn't mean that it won't improve, indeed it will.\nWe have a coarse-grained way of understanding biology and physics as well.\nIt's more refined than what it is in the arts, but it's not to say in any of these domains it's perfect.\nAnd the point here is that in the arts, the arts being the most difficult, I guess, of the subjects in order to make the case here about realism, about the fact that there are objective criteria.\nIt seems to be the case that people are quite willing to admit that there's an objective difference between what is true and false in mathematics.\nWhat is true and false in physics, indeed.\nThen we start to get a bit wishy-washy, don't we, when it comes to morality and some people think that it's merely subjective.\nAnd then sometimes even the people who think that morality might have an objective component, they will deny the fact that art can have any objective component.\nOne of the reasons for this, and I guess we'll return to this idea, is that too many people have simply been trained at school that anything can be art.\nThey've had that conversation, they've been taught that, well, to shonk's toilet, or urinal rather, that that can be a work of art.\nSo much of modern art is of a silly kind.\nSo we'll come back to modern art, modern art being the equivalent of relativism or postmodernism in philosophy, a rejection of the idea of objective criteria, for beauty, or objective criteria for anything, and that art can indeed be anything at all.\nThere's no truth of the matter, there's no better and worse, anything can be art.\nTherefore anyone can be an artist, and anyone can claim that they've got the best art in the world, even if it's utter rubbish.\nIn fact, I'll skip the part that David talks about next and go straight to where he says, quote, quite generally cultural relativism about art or morality has a very hard time explaining what people are doing when they think they are improving a tradition.\nThen there is the equivalent of instrumentalism, is art no more than a means to non-artistic ends.\nFor instance, artistic creations can deliver information.\nA painting can depict something, and a piece of music can represent an emotion, but their beauty is not primarily in that content.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a03e03eb-24c5-4c56-8a17-ec825d9efed1": {"page_content": "Then there is the equivalent of instrumentalism, is art no more than a means to non-artistic ends.\nFor instance, artistic creations can deliver information.\nA painting can depict something, and a piece of music can represent an emotion, but their beauty is not primarily in that content.\nIt is in the form.\nFor instance, here is a boring picture.\nAnd here is another picture with much the same content, yet with greater aesthetic value.\nAnd of course, if you're listening to this on the podcast, you won't know what pictures I'm talking about, so I hope that you should go to YouTube or to the book, of course, where those pictures are.\nOne can see that someone thought about the second picture in its composition, framing, cropping, lighting, focus.\nIt has the appearance of design by the photographer.\nBut design for what?.\nUnlike Paley's watch, it does not seem to have a function.\nIt only seems to be more beautiful than the first picture, but what does that mean?.\nJust as an aside, everyone's a photographer these days aren't.\nWe've all got smartphones, and they all have astonishing cameras compared to anything of the past.\nThey can do some amazing things, but nonetheless, we should all notice that photography, it turns out it's extremely difficult unless you're particularly talented or gifted in this.\nThere's a lot of knowledge to learn.\nThere's much to understand.\nThis idea of simply bringing things into focus, this idea of cropping, this idea of thirds and so on.\nOnce you take a deep dive into photography, it can be certainly a lifetime's worth of work.\nPeople just don't understand what is involved in this.\nThis is an art form.\nI think that most people just think that I hold a camera and point it at stuff.\nThere's a heck of a lot more to it than just that.\nIt's kind of strange that we all carry around this instrument with us all every single day, which is such a powerful artistic tool, but so few of us actually know how to use it.\nIt's rather like we're all carrying around violins and playing them now and again.\nOne of this really can, but we all think that we're photographers to some extent and sometimes I do.\nWe're going to see some of my photos today, I'm not a photographer, but I'm trying to improve.\nIt's something I'm trying to learn.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1564"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d5cbc41-487b-4840-a8c8-f8f53611282d": {"page_content": "It's rather like we're all carrying around violins and playing them now and again.\nOne of this really can, but we all think that we're photographers to some extent and sometimes I do.\nWe're going to see some of my photos today, I'm not a photographer, but I'm trying to improve.\nIt's something I'm trying to learn.\nLet's get back to the book and David writes, one possible instrumental purpose of beauty is attraction.\nA beautiful object can be attracted to people who appreciate the beauty, attractiveness to a given audience, can be functional, and there's a down-to-word scientifically measurable quantity.\nArt can be literally attractive, in the sense of causing people to move towards it, visitors to an art gallery can see a painting and be reluctant to leave, and then later be caused by the painting to return to it.\nPeople may travel great distances to hear a musical performance and so on.\nIf you see a work of art that you appreciate, that means that you want to dwell on it, to give it your attention in order to appreciate more in it.\nIf you are an artist and halfway through creating a work of art, you see something in it that you want to bring out.\nAgain, you are being attracted by a beauty that you have not yet experienced.\nYou are being attracted by the idea of a piece of art, before you have created it.\nNot all attractiveness has anything to do with aesthetics.\nYou lose your balance and fall off the log because we're all attracted to the planet earth.\nThat may seem merely a play on the word attraction.\nOur attraction's worth is due not to aesthetic appreciation, but to a law or a physics, which affects artists no more than it does artworks.\nA red trapping light may induce us to stop and stare at it so long as it remains red.\nBut that is not artistic appreciation either, even though it is attraction.\nIt is mechanical.\nBut when analyse insufficient detail, everything is mechanical.\nThe laws of physics are sovereign, so one can draw the conclusion that beauty cannot have an objective meaning other than that which we are attracted to by processes in our brains and hence by the law of physics.\nOne cannot, because by that argument, the physical world would not exist objectively either since the laws of physics also determine what a scientist or mathematician wants to call true.\nOkay, just emphasizing that last bit.\nThe laws of physics also determine what a scientist or mathematician wants to call true.\nOkay, just emphasizing that last bit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1650"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b616568e-e910-42a4-91e8-6aadf7c3df49": {"page_content": "One cannot, because by that argument, the physical world would not exist objectively either since the laws of physics also determine what a scientist or mathematician wants to call true.\nOkay, just emphasizing that last bit.\nThe laws of physics also determine what a scientist or mathematician wants to call true.\nOkay, just emphasizing that last bit.\nThe laws of physics also determine what a scientist or mathematician wants to call true.\nOkay, just my reflection on that bit.\nSo on that account, that what I will say is the false account.\nWell, it's not false.\nIt's true, but it's a bad explanation.\nPhysics causes you to think what you think, in a sense.\nBut it's not a good explanation to say, I'm thinking what I think simply because the laws of physics are causing me to think what I think.\nSo the question is for anyone who is a reductionist, is that anything you think is just an outworking of the laws of physics, including what you think is true or false about those laws of physics.\nThat's hardly a good explanation.\nIt's just a claim about the universality of physics, the laws apply everywhere, and at all times, including to the contents of your own brain.\nBut if you want to understand, not merely state a trope about the universal laws of physics, if you want to understand, understand mind you, have a theory of, have an explanation about what is going on.\nIn this case, what is going on with certain kinds of attractiveness, you have to move beyond mere physical law.\nIndeed, you have to move beyond physical laws for the vast majority of anything outside of the physical sciences, skipping just a tiny little bit.\nAnd David writes back to the book, new art is unpredictable, like new scientific discoveries.\nIs that the unpredictability of randomness or the deeper unknowability of knowledge creation?.\nPause there.\nSorry, I'm doing a lot of pausing today and injecting all my own stuff.\nSo just a point on that randomness, and more an aside than anything else.\nI think it was Sabine Hoffenstatter, the physicist, who was the latest to get tangled up in these concerns about randomness or indeterminacy in quantum theory and the many worlds interpretation and so on.\nBriefly, this is the idea that one way of going with quantum theory is to say that what happens next in any given experiment is simply random.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=106"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "34630ffe-07fc-4a05-92a1-d923fd21fb4d": {"page_content": "So just a point on that randomness, and more an aside than anything else.\nI think it was Sabine Hoffenstatter, the physicist, who was the latest to get tangled up in these concerns about randomness or indeterminacy in quantum theory and the many worlds interpretation and so on.\nBriefly, this is the idea that one way of going with quantum theory is to say that what happens next in any given experiment is simply random.\nAnd the reason that people put this case to say that, well, the laws of physics create inherent randomness in nature is because they cannot predict the outcome of the next experiment, unlike in classical physics where if you're dropping a ball from a certain height, you can predict precisely where it's going to land at any particular moment.\nHowever, if we're firing photons at a double slit apparatus experiment, we cannot predict precisely where that photon is going to end up on the screen where the experiment is being projected.\nOkay.\nSo to some extent, it appears as though this experiment is indeterminate, but what does that mean?.\nWell, it can't be the case that it means entirely random.\nIf it was entirely random, if there was nothing governing this, there was nothing determining the outcome of this experiment.\nThen, whether the photon hits there or there on the screen is not random, it would be random if once you find the photon from the apparatus, it metamorphosized into an elephant or disappeared entirely into thin air and it never hit the screen.\nNeither of these two are consistent with other known laws of physics, namely conservation of energy, which we should really regard as a principle that other laws of physics have to conform to, but the point is that it's not random.\nYou fire a photon and a photon ends up at the screen.\nSo there's something there that is continuous.\nThere's something there that's a regularity in nature, but there's more than a more than that in terms of regularity in nature.\nThere is a pattern that is built up over time and the pattern is predictable.\nThe pattern is the regularity in nature.\nSo though we can't predict the exact place of any given photon, that is subjectively unknown to us.\nNonetheless, in the objective sense, there is certainly a law of physics that determines what the pattern is going to be.\nAnd that's not indeterminate at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1650"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5b5ee04d-359a-4e19-b8af-29b80b62ed1d": {"page_content": "There is a pattern that is built up over time and the pattern is predictable.\nThe pattern is the regularity in nature.\nSo though we can't predict the exact place of any given photon, that is subjectively unknown to us.\nNonetheless, in the objective sense, there is certainly a law of physics that determines what the pattern is going to be.\nAnd that's not indeterminate at all.\nIt's not a random pattern and that pattern has an explanation and if you want to know more about these patterns in physics, the laws of physics that I'm talking about, then see the series on the multiverse or see David's chapter on the multiverse in the beginning of infinity.\nNow, the fact that you or I cannot determine the next place of photon lands, that's a fact about us.\nIt's not a fact about the laws of nature.\nThat's about us and our ignorance, that we can only see what's happening in one particular universe at any given time.\nAnd then that gets into deep questions about the nature of personhood and the fact that we occupy one place.\nThere's certain things that we don't understand, but we understand that much.\nWe occupy this particular universe and we don't have access to the other universes where the other photons are going.\nThat's all objective.\nSo our ignorance about where the next photon is going to land on the screen is a fact about us.\nBut the fact about the universe is that the photons will, that single photon will take up all possible positions on the screen.\nAnd those possible positions are given by the relevant laws of physics.\nBecause we don't occupy all universes, the only way to test this is to repeat the experiment over and over again and approximate what would have happened if you had a fire just one and been able to see where it went in all the other universes.\nNow, repeating the experiment over and over again just simply means that you're moving through time and time as a special case of the different universes.\nSo subjective indeterminacy by which I mean human ignorance, the fact that we do not know precisely what happens next is no proof of objective indeterminacy, the claim that nothing determines the position where the next photon will go.\nBut something does determine it.\nThe laws do.\nIf there were no laws then we could expect the photon to vanish utterly into thin air or to turn into a man riding a bicycle or something.\nBut those things don't happen.\nIt's not utterly random because there are laws to be abate here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1871"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "462629cc-8388-490c-9a87-fb0a4b5677cf": {"page_content": "But something does determine it.\nThe laws do.\nIf there were no laws then we could expect the photon to vanish utterly into thin air or to turn into a man riding a bicycle or something.\nBut those things don't happen.\nIt's not utterly random because there are laws to be abate here.\nThere are quantum laws of physics to obey here.\nBut this idea that David mentions there just in passing of the unpredictability of randomness is the unpredictability of subjective randomness.\nThings are only subjective randomness.\nThey appear to be random to us because we don't have knowledge of the situation of everything that we need to know in order to make the prediction.\nAnd indeed, so far as we know, it's impossible for us to make a prediction of that kind about where the photon is going to land, let's say.\nBut there's also another kind of unpredictability which is to do with the unknowability as David says there of knowledge creation.\nAnd continuing, David says, quote, in other words, is art truly creative like science and mathematics?.\nThat question is usually asked the other way around because the idea of creativity is still rather confused by various misconceptions.\nImpiricism missed caste science as an automatic non-creative process.\nAnd art, though acknowledged as creative, has often been seen as the antithesis of science and hence irrational, random, inexplicable, and hence unjudible, and non-objective.\nBut if beauty is objective, then a new work of art, like a newly discovered law of nature or mathematical theorem, adds something irreducibly new to the world.\nPause their my reflection.\nSo another confusion brought to you by your local high school, I would say.\nWe'll talk this more or less, aren't we?.\nWell, at least it used to be the case.\nI was taught this.\nAt least, at least implicitly, art is where you do creative stuff and science as where you simply learn about reality and you've got no choice in the matter.\nI should say there's been at least some kind of renaissance in science teaching.\nAnd now, at least at least lip services paid to the idea that in mathematics and in science there can be creativity.\nHowever, the actual teaching of mathematics and science in schools, especially mathematics, is still very much road learning.\nYou go through and do exercises, which is the appropriate word for what's going on there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=201"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2f8e5ad6-66eb-41b8-8116-f46a0d28d06a": {"page_content": "I should say there's been at least some kind of renaissance in science teaching.\nAnd now, at least at least lip services paid to the idea that in mathematics and in science there can be creativity.\nHowever, the actual teaching of mathematics and science in schools, especially mathematics, is still very much road learning.\nYou go through and do exercises, which is the appropriate word for what's going on there.\nNevertheless, culture is still satisfied with the idea that art's creative and science is just an uncreative reporting of what reality is like.\nBut that latter view is the misconception of empiricism, of course.\nIt casts the scientist as a reader of nature rather than the creator of explanations.\nOf course, it's not unrestrained creativity.\nCreativity without any constraint is nonsense and non art.\nThere are criticisms to be made.\nCreativity and criticism together make the theory closer to true or in art more beautiful.\nAs David observes, the waste paper basket of the composer fills up over time as they criticize their creativity and refine it in line with some criteria of beauty or harmony.\nIf you have only criticisms and no creativity, then you end up making no progress at all because you just say that everything is bad or worse than what you currently have.\nAnd if you have creativity, unencumbered by criticism, then you produce poor quality or you regress.\nSo this idea of creativity and criticism together is very important.\nAnd I would say that criticisms when done properly typically have a large creative element to them as well.\nYou can invent new ways of criticizing things.\nYou can improve the ways in which you criticize something.\nSo even criticism is a creative act to a large extent too.\nOkay, skipping a little, David writes, art does not consist of repetition.\nBut in human tastes, there can be genuine novelty.\nBecause we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes.\nFor instance, humans often act in ways that are contrary to any preferences that might plausibly have been built into our genes.\nPeople fast, sometimes for aesthetic reasons, some abstain from sex, people act in very diverse ways for religious reasons or for any number of other reasons, philosophical or scientific, practical or whimsical.\nWe have an inborn aversion to heights and to falling, yet people go skydiving, not in spite of this feeling, but because of it.\nIt is that very feeling of inborn aversion that humans can reinterpret into a larger picture which to them is attractive.\nThey want more of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e7f24eb-b503-45c9-bc20-500b62be1e20": {"page_content": "We have an inborn aversion to heights and to falling, yet people go skydiving, not in spite of this feeling, but because of it.\nIt is that very feeling of inborn aversion that humans can reinterpret into a larger picture which to them is attractive.\nThey want more of it.\nThey want to appreciate it more deeply.\nTo a skydiver, the vista from which we were born to recoil is beautiful.\nThe whole activity of skydiving is beautiful.\nAnd the part of that beauty is in the very sensations that evolved to deter us from trying it.\nThe conclusion is inescapable.\nThat attraction is not inborn, just as the contents of a newly discovered law of physics or mathematical theorem are not inborn.\nPause there, my reflection on this, this is a perfect refutation or at least criticism, very strong criticism of the evolutionary psychologists.\nEvolutionary psychologists suggest or state strongly that our behaviour, or at least some of our behaviours are determined or at least partially determined by our genes.\nNow, it's no doubt the case that there are inborn ideas that we have and no doubt the case that genetics can provide some mental content.\nThis is all true, but none of that is to say that it needs to determine particular behaviour and by determined, I mean, unavoidably, unchangeably, you will be inevitably forced into that particular behaviour because you've got a gene for that particular behaviour, let's say.\nBut I think there is any gene for a particular kind of behaviour.\nThere might be a gene for a particular sensation.\nSome people might experience pain more than others.\nThey have genes for higher levels of pain.\nCertainly some people can taste different things.\nWe certainly know that females have genes for detecting greater shades of red than what males do in humans.\nMen typically have better night vision than what women do.\nThese are genetic differences.\nBut none of this is to say that we are compelled into certain kinds of behaviour that just because women have a better ability to appreciate the colour red, they can see more of it, more shades of it, but therefore they're going to be drawn into the arts, or the visual arts more than what men are, that it is determined that you are forever closed off from being a visual artist because you're a man.\nThat's clearly not the case.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=2441"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5ad7e44d-44a1-44cf-b19d-edf44f20c1a5": {"page_content": "These are genetic differences.\nBut none of this is to say that we are compelled into certain kinds of behaviour that just because women have a better ability to appreciate the colour red, they can see more of it, more shades of it, but therefore they're going to be drawn into the arts, or the visual arts more than what men are, that it is determined that you are forever closed off from being a visual artist because you're a man.\nThat's clearly not the case.\nNow, this idea here, that if anything is going to be determined, one would think, then it is the fear of heights that many people have, the fear of falling from a great height.\nSo, you know, it might be the case that there is this gene fall, or this genetic component too, what many people experience as fear of heights.\nReasonable fear of heights.\nYou shouldn't want to get too close to the cliff because you might fall off, so the genes want to preserve themselves, so they may give this sensation which causes an idea in the mind of moving away from high places.\nNow, the evolutionary psychologist may wish to say, well, that's all genetically determined.\nThere we go, it's proof that there is a gene, or at least some genetic component too, fear of heights, and quite rightly a fear of heights.\nOkay.\nThen explain how it is that people who skydive do not have such a fear of heights.\nOr if they do, whatever this fear is, this word fear, has been replaced or changed to such an extent that it now becomes enjoyable.\nThrilling.\nIs it the same sensation?.\nDon't know.\nI imagine it's not quite the same sensation, because I know of people who are so terrified of heights that they literally collapse far away from the cliff edge, that if they're on a bridge, they can't get across the bridge, they're so afraid of it.\nThey appear to be an actual physical pain, certainly in mental anguish.\nBut on the other hand, we have these other people who are willing to go up far higher than that, and jump from perfectly functioning aircraft.\nNot something I do.\nBut it seems that if there's genes for this sensation, then this sensation can be reinterpreted by the mind.\nIt depends on what you know about what's going on.\nSome people who have been afraid of heights become skydivers.\nThey can reinterpret it.\nIs it the same sensation?.\nI doubt it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1696"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa97c261-a316-4d78-a87d-797c7350fed9": {"page_content": "But on the other hand, we have these other people who are willing to go up far higher than that, and jump from perfectly functioning aircraft.\nNot something I do.\nBut it seems that if there's genes for this sensation, then this sensation can be reinterpreted by the mind.\nIt depends on what you know about what's going on.\nSome people who have been afraid of heights become skydivers.\nThey can reinterpret it.\nIs it the same sensation?.\nI doubt it.\nFear of war is another one.\nPeople who have never learned to swim may very well fear the ocean, and rightly fear the ocean.\nOthers have no such fear.\nSo is the fear of the water, or fear of the ocean, something that's inborn or is it as you can be trained into this fear or out of this fear as a child?.\nAnd depending upon what you learn as a child, determines what you feel as an adult.\nBut even then, it's not completely fixed.\nYou can change your ideas, as I keep on saying.\nHumans have ideas.\nThey're not defined by them.\nAnd so you can change any particular idea you have.\nI think one of David's other examples is, of course, that if we have a gene for anything in common with all of the life forms, it's this drive to survive.\nThis no matter what we will try to eat, drink, breathe air.\nWe will do the things that is required in order for us to survive.\nIt's the first thing in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.\nAll of those things that we need to survive, we're going to prioritize.\nSo surely that's genetic.\nIf anything's genetic, it is this will to survive, this will to live.\nAnd yet, we're not completely alone amongst all species in doing this, but so many people commit suicide.\nSome people become suicide bombers.\nSome people just simply die every day of suicide.\nIt's terrible, it's sad, but their deaths, sadly, are a refutation of this idea that we have this genetically determined kind of behavior.\nIf any behavior was going to be genetically determined, then surely it would be the behavior of trying to survive.\nYet so many people every single day kill themselves.\nNow, the evolutionary psychologists might say at this point, well, you know, they might have a defect in that gene, or in those sets of genes.\nAnd that causes them to kill themselves.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1696"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8edaeedb-66ed-4935-a9e4-5734ade6df5c": {"page_content": "If any behavior was going to be genetically determined, then surely it would be the behavior of trying to survive.\nYet so many people every single day kill themselves.\nNow, the evolutionary psychologists might say at this point, well, you know, they might have a defect in that gene, or in those sets of genes.\nAnd that causes them to kill themselves.\nWell, at this point, then what you're saying is that no matter what the behavior is, there's a genetic component to it.\nAnd so therefore, it's our explanation that explains everything.\nIt is a general purpose explanation that no matter what the behavior is, it can always be explained by recourse to genes.\nIn other words, there is no way of refuting it.\nIt's not scientific.\nNow, on our side of the ledger, we're not denying that it's possible that some kinds of behavior can be influenced by the genes.\nAbsolutely.\nYou know, of course, simply examples are, some people have certain, I think this has been tested, I'm not sure.\nI think it's been tested that some people have genes for liking the taste of asparagus because they can actually smell it.\nAnd some people cannot smell asparagus.\nWell, there's certain other kinds of foods.\nSome people can taste this kind of food because they have the genes for that kind of smell or that kind of odor.\nAnd so they're attracted towards those foods.\nAnd some people do not have such genes.\nAnd in that case, of course, there's a genetic component to whether or not you like this particular food because you have particularly sensitive salt receptors or bitter receptors.\nSo you prefer this kind of food and you don't prefer this kind of food.\nThat makes perfect sense.\nThere's genes for certain kinds of mental illness, let's say, and that causes certain behaviors.\nSo we're not denying the fact that there can be genes implicated in the explanation of certain kinds of behavior.\nBut what we are saying is that whatever those behaviors are, they can be themselves reinterpreted by the universal mind, by the explainer, by the person who may not like the fact that they're attracted to this, that or the other thing, or they have this so-called mental illness, and they want to change their behaviors.\nIf they learn better, then whatever that genetic influence is can be reinterpreted.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=106"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e59a7fab-a3ce-4bd9-a066-96612a181172": {"page_content": "But what we are saying is that whatever those behaviors are, they can be themselves reinterpreted by the universal mind, by the explainer, by the person who may not like the fact that they're attracted to this, that or the other thing, or they have this so-called mental illness, and they want to change their behaviors.\nIf they learn better, then whatever that genetic influence is can be reinterpreted.\nIn the same way that the skydiver, who may very well have started out with a terrible fear of heights, has now reinterpreted that sensation that's coming to them, via some genetic impulse that has caused certain sensations in their body to be reinterpreted and changed so that their behavior utterly changes, ultimately.\nThat even if they have this sensation of whatever it is, this fee, when they go near to a high place, that it can be reinterpreted to be something they really love and become attracted to.\nSo they can turn something that is initially a repulsion into an attraction.\nNow, the gene theory surely can't explain that.\nUnless, of course, you're willing to go down the road of saying they would never actually afraid of it in the first place.\nI don't know.\nI'm waxing the record about that.\nI'd better get back to reading a book.\nDavid's talking about, could art be purely cultural?.\nSo moving on from there.\nQuote, We pursue beauty as well as truth.\nAnd in both cases, we can be fooled.\nPerhaps we see a face as beautiful because it really is.\nOr perhaps it is only because of a combination of adgines and culture.\nA beetle is attracted to another beetle that you and I may see as hideous.\nBut not if you're an entomologist.\nPeople can learn to see many things as beautiful or ugly.\nBut there again, people can also learn to see false scientific theories as true.\nAnd true ones as false.\nYet there is such a thing as objective scientific truth.\nSo that still does not tell us whether there is such a thing as objective beauty.\nIt just pulls down my reflection just very quickly.\nIn David's video on his own YouTube channel, about why I flowers beautiful, which is an extension of this chapter basically.\nThere is, the question is asked.\nWell, you know, basically the question is about the fact that there is no agreement on what beautiful art is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=1168"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "79934884-3e48-407f-ad12-35a41af5fb62": {"page_content": "And true ones as false.\nYet there is such a thing as objective scientific truth.\nSo that still does not tell us whether there is such a thing as objective beauty.\nIt just pulls down my reflection just very quickly.\nIn David's video on his own YouTube channel, about why I flowers beautiful, which is an extension of this chapter basically.\nThere is, the question is asked.\nWell, you know, basically the question is about the fact that there is no agreement on what beautiful art is.\nOr even on what beautiful flowers are, you know, in the, I think the fellow says, I'm the spectrum of all flowers and not every one will agree.\nBut David quite rightly responds to that with, well, not everyone agrees on scientific truth either.\nThe mere fact consensus is not the way in which we assess objective truth, whether that's in science or art.\nSo just because we don't have universal consensus, unanimity on any scientific theory, has no effect upon the truth of the scientific theory or otherwise.\nThe overall majority of people on the face of planet earth right now do not understand, and typically reject the theory of evolution by natural selection.\nMost people remain religious believers.\nThey believe that God created all the life on the face of the planet.\nThey don't believe that we evolve from simpler life forms.\nThey don't understand that we evolve from similar life forms.\nBut the fact we don't have consensus on that has no bearing on whether or not that theory is true.\nThe same is true of the theory of climate change.\nIt has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that many people disagree with it.\nThat's whether it's true or not.\nScience continues to make progress nonetheless.\nThe vast majority of people do not understand the theory of gravity, Einstein's general theory of relativity.\nBut we still make GPS satellite work.\nWe still use the theory for practical applications.\nSo too with art, you know, just because we do not understand or can come to some, we do not understand what the criteria is.\nAnd hence, do not have a consensus on what the best kind of music is.\nDoes not mean there won't be in the future some criteria, which we'll be able to agree upon, that will enable us to assess or improve our music, let's say.\nOkay, now moving into the, I guess, the central question of the chapter.\nAnd David has this picture.\nAnd he says, quote, now, why is a flower the shape that it is?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d7a470ec-37c2-4921-ae4e-31de1031d814": {"page_content": "And hence, do not have a consensus on what the best kind of music is.\nDoes not mean there won't be in the future some criteria, which we'll be able to agree upon, that will enable us to assess or improve our music, let's say.\nOkay, now moving into the, I guess, the central question of the chapter.\nAnd David has this picture.\nAnd he says, quote, now, why is a flower the shape that it is?.\nBecause the relevant genes evolved to make it attractive to insects.\nWhy would they do this?.\nBecause when insects visit a flower, they are dusted with pollen, which they then deposit another flowers at the same species, and so the genes in the DNA in that pollen are spread far and wide.\nThis is the reproductive mechanism that flowering plants evolved, and which most still use today.\nBefore they were insects, there were no flowers on earth.\nBut the mechanism could work only because insects, at the same time, evolved genes that attracted them to flowers.\nWhy did they?.\nBecause flowers provide nectar, which is food.\nJust as there is co-evolution between the genes to coordinate mating behaviors and males and females at the same species, so genes for making flowers and giving them their shapes and colours co-evolved with genes in insects for recognising flowers with the best nectar.\nDuring that biological co-evolution, just as in the history of art, criteria evolved, and means of meeting those criteria co-evolved with them.\nThat is what gave flowers the knowledge of how to attract insects, and insects the knowledge of how to recognise those flowers, and the propensity to fly towards them.\nBut what is surprising is that those same flowers also attract humans.\nThis is so familiar effect that it is hard to see how amazing it is.\nBut think of all the countless hideous animals in nature and think of all of them who find their mates by sight, have evolved to find that appearance attractive.\nAnd therefore it is not surprising that we do not.\nWith predators and prey, there is a similar co-evolution, but in a competitive sense, rather than a cooperative one.\nEach is genes that evolved to enable it to recognise the other and to make it run towards or away from it respectively.\nWhile other genes evolved to make their organism hard to recognise against the relevant background, that is why tigers are struck.\nOccasionally it happens by chance that the perochial criteria of attractiveness that evolved within a species produce something that looks beautiful to us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cb48618b-4ef8-4f26-bba9-25f6ed3a5ac5": {"page_content": "With predators and prey, there is a similar co-evolution, but in a competitive sense, rather than a cooperative one.\nEach is genes that evolved to enable it to recognise the other and to make it run towards or away from it respectively.\nWhile other genes evolved to make their organism hard to recognise against the relevant background, that is why tigers are struck.\nOccasionally it happens by chance that the perochial criteria of attractiveness that evolved within a species produce something that looks beautiful to us.\nThe peacock's tail is an example, but that is a rare anomaly.\nIn the overwhelming majority of species, we do not share any of their criteria for finding something attractive.\nYet with flowers.\nMost flowers, we do.\nSometimes a leaf can be beautiful, even a puddle of water can.\nBut again, only by rare chance, with flowers, it is reliable.\nIt is another regularity in nature.\nWhat is the explanation?.\nWhy are flowers beautiful?.\nGiven the prevailing assumptions in the scientific community, which are still rather empiricist and reductionist, it may seem plausible that flowers are not objectively beautiful and that their attractiveness is merely a cultural phenomenon.\nBut I think that fails closer inspection.\nWe find flowers beautiful that we have never seen before and which have not been known to our culture before and quite reliably for most humans in most cultures.\nThe same is not true of the roots of the plants or the leaves.\nWhy only the flowers?.\nOne unusual aspect of the flower insect coevolution is that it involved the creation of a complex code or language for signaling information between species.\nIt had to be complex because the genes were facing a difficult communication problem.\nThe code had to be, on the one hand, easily recognizable by the right insects.\nAnd on the other, difficult to forge by other species of flower.\nFor if other species could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects without having to manufacture nectar for them, which requires energy, they would have a selective advantage.\nSo the criteria was that evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations.\nAnd the flowers design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it.\nThus, both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary.\nOkay, just skipping a little bit.\nIt talks about giraffes and why they're next along.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=2133"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b6170a29-ed3a-4a73-a990-c0c64430d753": {"page_content": "So the criteria was that evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations.\nAnd the flowers design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it.\nThus, both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary.\nOkay, just skipping a little bit.\nIt talks about giraffes and why they're next along.\nAnd we get into this idea a little more of signaling between these disparate species, between the flowers and the insects.\nHow is it that, well, from one insect to another, there can be different flowers that they are attracted to.\nI'll mention that a little bit later.\nDavid writes, My guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard to forge patterns designed to be recognised by hard to emulate pattern matching algorithms is to use objective standards of beauty.\nSo flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognise objective beauty.\nConsequently, the only species that are attracted by flowers and are the insect species that co-evolved to do so and humans pause their myreflection, but why humans?.\nBecause we can understand things.\nWe can understand things.\nNow with the insects, it's clearly only the genes.\nThe genes are just finding that thing attractive.\nThey're literally being drawn towards those flowers and then they are pollinating the flowers as well, so it's beneficial to the flowers.\nSo this objectivity that exists out there in reality, this objective beauty that exists out there in reality has been discovered by the genetic code in the form of the flower to attract the insects.\nAnd us humans, being people, being able to understand the world are able to uncover these objective features about reality, which includes objective beauty.\nOkay, back to the book David writes.\nIf true, this means that Dawkins daughter was partly right about the flowers after all.\nThey are there to make the world pretty, or at least prettiness is no accidental side effect, but is what they specifically evolved to have.\nNot because anything intended the world to be pretty, but because the best replicating genes depend upon embodying objective prettiness to get themselves replicated.\nThe case of honey, for instance, is very different.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=3383"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f19049e0-7ee1-406a-8e1d-cd32a01bcdc9": {"page_content": "Okay, back to the book David writes.\nIf true, this means that Dawkins daughter was partly right about the flowers after all.\nThey are there to make the world pretty, or at least prettiness is no accidental side effect, but is what they specifically evolved to have.\nNot because anything intended the world to be pretty, but because the best replicating genes depend upon embodying objective prettiness to get themselves replicated.\nThe case of honey, for instance, is very different.\nThe reason that honey, which is sugar water, is easy for flowers and bees to make, and why it's tasted attractive to humans and insects alike, is that we do all have a shared genetic heritage going back to our common ancestor and before, which includes biochemical knowledge about many uses of sugar, and the means to recognize it.\nOkay, so just to emphasize that, me talking here, we share a common ancestor with insects.\nSo it is no huge mystery as to why we should like honey, because, well, honey contains nutrients, and all these living organisms create new trends, require nutrients, and we recognize that the taste of honey, the sweetness of honey, that's attractive to us, because we need it to survive, so it's no accident that, of course, it's in the genes.\nWe share genes for this thing.\nBut with flowers and us finding them attractive, well, there's no common set of genes going on here, because if there was, then it should be the case that all the species of apes and monkeys and so on that we share common ancestors.\nWe should also find flowers attractive, or at least something lower down in the phylogenetic tree should also find flowers attractive, but nothing else does.\nIt's just humans and the insects.\nRather than cats and dogs, they're not attracted to flowers either.\nOkay, so this is strange, unusual.\nIt requires explanation.\nBack to the book, David writes, could it be that what humans find attractive in flowers or in art is indeed objective?.\nBut it is not objective beauty?.\nPerhaps it is something more mundane, something like a liking for bright colors, strong contrasts, symmetrical shapes.\nHumans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry.\nIt is thought to be a factor in sexual attractiveness, and it may also be useful in helping us to classify things and to organize our environment physically and conceptually.\nSo a side effect of these inborn preferences might be a liking for flowers, which happen to be colorful and symmetrical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=3428"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c82333db-8a47-4433-a7fb-d9085323cfe0": {"page_content": "But it is not objective beauty?.\nPerhaps it is something more mundane, something like a liking for bright colors, strong contrasts, symmetrical shapes.\nHumans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry.\nIt is thought to be a factor in sexual attractiveness, and it may also be useful in helping us to classify things and to organize our environment physically and conceptually.\nSo a side effect of these inborn preferences might be a liking for flowers, which happen to be colorful and symmetrical.\nHowever, some flowers are white, at least to us.\nThey may have colors that we cannot see in insects can, but we still find their shapes beautiful.\nAll flowers do contrast with their background in some sense.\nThat is a precondition for being used for signaling.\nBut a spider in the bath contrasts with its background even more.\nAnd there is no widespread consensus that such a site is beautiful.\nAs for symmetry, again, spiders are quite symmetrical.\nSome flowers, such as orchids, are very unsymmetrical.\nYet we do not find them any less attractive for that.\nSo I do not think that symmetry, color, and contrast are all that we are seeing in flowers when we imagine that we are seeing beauty.\nA sort of mirror image of that objection is that there are other things in nature that we also find beautiful.\nThings that are not the results of either human creativity or co-evolution across a gap.\nThe night sky, waterfalls, sunsets.\nSo why not flowers too?.\nBut the cases are not alike.\nThose things may be attracted to look at, but they have no appearance of design.\nThey are analogous not to paleys watch, but to the sun as a timekeeper.\nOne cannot explain why the watch is as it is without referring to timekeeping, because it would be useless for timekeeping if it had been made slightly differently.\nBut as I mentioned, the sun would still be useful for keeping time, even if the solar system was altered.\nSimilarly, paleo might have found a stone that looked attractive.\nHe might well have taken it home to use as an ornamental paperweight.\nBut he would not have sat down to write a monograph about how changing any detail of the stone would have made it incapable of serving that function because that would not have been so.\nThe same is true of the night sky, waterfalls, and almost all other natural phenomena.\nBut flowers do have the appearance of design for beauty.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=106"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "49a8db1b-8a4c-402b-97a1-1b79f0f8db5b": {"page_content": "Similarly, paleo might have found a stone that looked attractive.\nHe might well have taken it home to use as an ornamental paperweight.\nBut he would not have sat down to write a monograph about how changing any detail of the stone would have made it incapable of serving that function because that would not have been so.\nThe same is true of the night sky, waterfalls, and almost all other natural phenomena.\nBut flowers do have the appearance of design for beauty.\nIf they looked like leaves or roots, they would lose their universal appeal, display even one petal, and there would be diminishment.\nWe know what the watch was designed for, but we do not know what beauty is.\nWe're in a similar position to an archaeologist who finds inscriptions in an unknown language in an ancient tomb.\nThey look like writing, and not just meaningless marks on the walls.\nConceivably, this is mistaken, but they look as though they were inscribed there for a purpose.\nFlowers are like that.\nThey have the appearance of having been evolved for a purpose, which we call beauty, which we can imperfectly recognize, but whose nature is poorly understood.\nIn the line of these arguments, I can see only one explanation for the phenomenon of flowers being attracted to humans and for the various other fragments of evidence I have mentioned.\nIt is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds.\nOne is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individual.\nThe other is unrelated to any of those.\nIt is universal, it is objective as the laws of physics, creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge, but the second kind requires knowledge with universal reach.\nIt reaches all the way from the flower genome with its problem of competitive pollination to human minds which appreciate the resulting flowers as art.\nNot great art, human art has to far better, as is to be expected, but with the hard to fake appearance of design for beauty.\nSo their David has talked about the parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individual even.\nAnd this idea of local to an individual, let's say, is a subjective kind of beauty.\nAnd as I began this episode with, everyone can make that easy argument.\nWe've all got different tastes, so it's subjective.\nBut that's so easy.\nWe already know that.\nWe already know that there is this subjectivity to attractiveness.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=3725"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3caa895d-d48c-41ca-9883-581f2ed7505a": {"page_content": "So their David has talked about the parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individual even.\nAnd this idea of local to an individual, let's say, is a subjective kind of beauty.\nAnd as I began this episode with, everyone can make that easy argument.\nWe've all got different tastes, so it's subjective.\nBut that's so easy.\nWe already know that.\nWe already know that there is this subjectivity to attractiveness.\nSo yes, it's subjective, but it's also objective.\nThere is an objective component.\nThere's an objective kind of beauty.\nAnd this signaling across species is curious and requires explanation.\nButterflies are attracted to red roses.\nBees are not.\nAnd people find all kinds of flowers attractive.\nBeautiful.\nBack to the book, David writes.\nNow, why do humans appreciate that objective beauty if there has been no equivalent of that co-evolution in our past?.\nAt one level, the answer is simply that we are universal explainers and can create knowledge about anything.\nBut still, why did we want to create aesthetic knowledge in particular?.\nIt is because we did face the same problem as the flowers and the insects.\nSignaling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signaling across the gap between two entire species.\nA human being, in terms of knowledge content and creative individuality, is like a species.\nAll the individuals of any other species have virtually the same programming in their genes and use virtually the same criteria for acting and being attracted.\nHumans are quite unlike that.\nThe amount of information in a human mind is more than that in the genome of any species, and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person.\nSo human artists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap between humans as the flowers and insects are between species.\nThey can use some species-specific criteria, but they can also reach towards objective beauty.\nExactly the same is true of all other knowledge.\nWe can communicate with other people by sending pre-determined messages, determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new.\nBut in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we are better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths.\nThis may be the approximate reason that humans ever began to do so.\nOkay, so pause their myreflection and skipping apart and David goes more into these two kinds of beauty.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=3830"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5b23753d-6245-4bf6-8a0d-58eb4a2d78e3": {"page_content": "We can communicate with other people by sending pre-determined messages, determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new.\nBut in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we are better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths.\nThis may be the approximate reason that humans ever began to do so.\nOkay, so pause their myreflection and skipping apart and David goes more into these two kinds of beauty.\nSo I just want to emphasize that again, the subjective component of beauty, the subjective, parochial kind of beauty.\nAnd on the other hand, we have this objective beauty as well.\nAnd no doubt in art, when it comes to visual art, no doubt this is what happens and no doubt in music, this is what happened as well, that we have this coming together of the subjective and the objective component.\nAnd David talks about the pursuit of art for art's own sake, which he might call the pure kind of art, versus an applied kind of art.\nSo the applied kind is that art serves a practical purpose.\nSo it might, as he says, to give more cohesiveness to a culture or advance a political agenda, or even to advertise beverages.\nSo that would be an applied kind of art.\nBut then there is also just pursuing art for art's sake, which is something that's done in mathematics as well.\nSo it has this analog in mathematics.\nThere's pure and there's applied mathematics.\nPure mathematics done for, no other reason than someone just finds mathematics fascinating, interesting, they want to solve problems in mathematics, with no application to the physical world.\nBy the way, even when mathematicians say that's what they're doing, Hardy, who I mentioned earlier, who wrote the mathematicians apology, to help Ramana Jain come to Great Britain.\nHe actually remarked that he was proud of the fact that very little of his own mathematics that he was doing would ever have any practical application.\nIt turned out that it did later on, if you read about G.H. Hardy.\nOkay.\nNow, when it comes to art, we're also talking about movies.\nWe're talking about fiction, books, and David Wright's on this quote.\nIn fiction, there, as I mentioned in chapter 11, a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays, but the same is true in all art forms.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e2763ece-cf9b-4480-abe7-ea1f7043df05": {"page_content": "It turned out that it did later on, if you read about G.H. Hardy.\nOkay.\nNow, when it comes to art, we're also talking about movies.\nWe're talking about fiction, books, and David Wright's on this quote.\nIn fiction, there, as I mentioned in chapter 11, a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays, but the same is true in all art forms.\nIn some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art.\nEven if one knows it, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words, it is in explicit.\nNo one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language.\nYet, when a piece of music has the attribute displaced one note and there would be diminishment, there is an explanation.\nIt was known to the composer, and it has known to the listeners who appreciate it one day it will be expressible in words.\nOkay.\nSo, this is one of those points that can just blow by you if you're not paying attention.\nIt's this idea that artists know that they're striving for something.\nArtists that are trying to do good, objectively beautiful art, trying to do objectively better music.\nThey're communicating one from another.\nThe musician is aiming for this particular thing that is better than what has gone before or at least better than what they've produced before.\nThey're trying to create something new, and beautiful in the world, but they cannot always explain what's going on.\nThey do not have an explicit explanation of exactly why the thing is more beautiful than the other alternatives that they could have made.\nThey might have some ideas, but they won't be able to provide a comprehensive explanation such that having given it to someone else that person can then learn how to do exactly what they've done.\nOkay.\nDavid goes through some reasons for art, the purposes of art.\nAnd so I'll just read the utilitarian theories of art and David writes, there are utilitarian theories of the purpose of art.\nThese theories deprecate pure art just as pure science and mathematics are deprecated by the same arguments, but one has no choice about what constitutes an artistic improvement, any more than one has a choice as to what is true enforcing mathematics.\nAnd if one tries to tune one's scientific theories or philosophical positions to meet a political agenda or a personal preference, then one is at cross purposes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=620"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e131a3cd-8fdc-415c-aa5e-06a4b7c5b553": {"page_content": "These theories deprecate pure art just as pure science and mathematics are deprecated by the same arguments, but one has no choice about what constitutes an artistic improvement, any more than one has a choice as to what is true enforcing mathematics.\nAnd if one tries to tune one's scientific theories or philosophical positions to meet a political agenda or a personal preference, then one is at cross purposes.\nArt can be used for many purposes, but artistic values are not subordinate to or derived from anything else.\nThe same critique applies to the theory that art is self-expression.\nExpression is conveying something that is already there, while objective progress in art is about creating something new.\nAlso, self-expression is about expressing something subjective, while pure art is objective.\nFor the same reason, any kind of art consists solely of spontaneous or mechanical acts, such as throwing paint onto canvas, or of pickling shape, lacks the means of making artistic progress.\nBecause real progress is difficult, and involves many errors for every success, poor semi-reflection, yet just go to a museum of modern art, and you will see this kind of thing.\nAnd I think throwing paint onto a canvas that's pro hard, isn't it?.\nThe artist.\nOh, Mr. Hart, what a mess.\nIf you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll find that advertisement.\nBeautiful, beautiful.\nI'll have a bear dropper read that way.\nWell, it's hard.\nDo you want to stain the master carpet?.\nDo you really took to it?.\nWhat do you reckon, Rembrandt?.\nFortunately, stain master is the early card which was a five-year stain resistance guarantee.\nOh, Mr. Hart, what a mess.\nNearly if you need time.\nDo you want stain master state of the art in carpet?.\nYeah, so it's hard to make progress with something like that.\nOkay, back to the book, David writes, If I am right, then the future of art is as mind-boggling as the future of every other kind of knowledge.\nOut of the future can create unlimited increases in beauty.\nI can only speculate, but we can presumably expect new kinds of unification too.\nWhen we understand better what elegance really is, perhaps we shall find a new and better ways to seek truth using elegance or beauty.\nI guess that we shall also be able to design new senses, a new qualia that can encompass beauty of new kinds, literally inconceivable to us now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=3428"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "be9c11b9-c98b-4b3c-a0ef-8aae12b2b893": {"page_content": "Out of the future can create unlimited increases in beauty.\nI can only speculate, but we can presumably expect new kinds of unification too.\nWhen we understand better what elegance really is, perhaps we shall find a new and better ways to seek truth using elegance or beauty.\nI guess that we shall also be able to design new senses, a new qualia that can encompass beauty of new kinds, literally inconceivable to us now.\nWhat is it like to be about is a famous question asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel?.\nWell, precisely, what would it be like for a person to have the echolocation senses of a bat?.\nPerhaps the full answer is that in the future it will be not so much the task of philosophy to discover what that is like, but the task of technological art to give us the experience itself.\nEnd quote, end of the chapter.\nWhat a fantastic chapter.\nWhat a positive, optimistic, typical way that David has left us there.\nThis idea that perhaps art can be a window into consciousness and qualia as well.\nThat art, but artistic advances, might be one of the ways that we can make philosophical advances on this particular front.\nWho knows?.\nAnd just that last paragraph there, it's a real message to artists as well.\nArtists should take note of that note.\nIn particular, don't run down your own subject.\nI'm no artist, but I have to defend art sometimes against artists.\nWe want to say to some of the artists, at least, do not always be parochial.\nDo not always turn to try to turn your art into a vehicle for ever deconstructing what is true or good or known, taking a piece of good art that's already there and simply repurposing it, and that becomes your art, or to convey political meanings, let's say, or some other deeper message.\nSure, all of those things can be art and art done as art routinely these days.\nWe might even argue that some of them can be important functions of art.\nThat's the utilitarian theory of art.\nBut there's no reason for artists, art teachers, art students, to denigrate or even deny that other aspect of art, the search for objective beauty, and the creation of ever better, objectively ever better, kinds of art.\nNew kinds of film, new ways we're appealing to the senses that go beyond the two-dimensional, the three-dimensional, new and better music.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc3af1c7-ac92-4d3c-a8af-1f4870885505": {"page_content": "That's the utilitarian theory of art.\nBut there's no reason for artists, art teachers, art students, to denigrate or even deny that other aspect of art, the search for objective beauty, and the creation of ever better, objectively ever better, kinds of art.\nNew kinds of film, new ways we're appealing to the senses that go beyond the two-dimensional, the three-dimensional, new and better music.\nAnd these kinds of art can have, as David says, reach infinite reach, rather than to chumps toilet, which has no reach.\nIt is art only in the sense that everything is art and if everything and anything can be art, then art is meaningless.\nMost every student of art seems to some extent be making the case of undermining their own area of expertise.\nIf everything can be art, then as I say, everyone can be a great artist because there is no distinction between the good and the terrible and no standards by which to assess quality.\nBut beauty, the objective beauty is a quality we should want to learn far more about, so we can make the world more beautiful.\nBut if we deny this, if it's all just a matter of opinion, how can we expect to solve problems of an ugly world?.\nAs always, thank you, and thank you to my Patreon supporters, if you'd like to contribute to Patreon, just search for me on Google, and you'll find Brett Hall Patreon, or ToKCast Patreon, and it's always a matter of question.\nThank you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZ4GcRd-_8&t=620"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "484ce40d-b1d4-495b-bb65-84d7e22f3841": {"page_content": "Hello and welcome to episode 29 of ToKCast.\nI didn't expect the introduction to go for as long as I said at the end of the last one.\nSo we're going to dive straight into the readings day with no introduction.\nNow in the previous chapter, at the end of the previous chapter, David wrote, we are channels of information flow, so are histories, and so are all relatively autonomous objects within histories.\nBut we sent it being so extremely unusual channels along which sometimes knowledge grows and quote, okay.\nAnd so that's important because at the beginning of chapter 12, a physicist history of bad philosophy, with some comments on bad science, David writes in a conversation between himself and a reader, okay.\nAnd the reader is asking David, the proverbial reader, the reader asks, so I am an emergent, quasi autonomous flow of information in the multiverse, David, you are, okay.\nSo let's have a short reflection on what quasi autonomous flow of information in multiverse means.\nSo emergent, well emergent, so not at the fundamental reductionistic level.\nSo a person emerges from the laws of physics and from matter behaving in certain ways.\nWe have, we have emerged.\nWe are complicated objects, we are fundamental like an electron is fundamental, like a number is fundamental.\nPeople can have fundamental effects on the universe, but as he says there were emergent, quasi autonomous, quasi meaning somewhat, somewhat autonomous.\nSo we are not entirely free, I'm not like Superman, I can't fly into the sky, I can't defy gravity, I obey the laws of physics.\nBut given the laws of physics, there are choices before me.\nAnd my knowledge, the knowledge that I create is the thing that determines the measure of universes in which a certain choice tends to have a higher measure compared to a lower measure.\nThere are some places in the multiverse where I turn around and begin to do abstract art on the wall behind me, but Breckall is not the person that tends to do that kind of thing.\nThere might be some sliver of universes where I just get bored with making YouTube videos about the work of David Deutsch, but they are, so far as I can tell, highly unlikely, highly unlikely because I've never had any impulse to do abstract art before.\nIf I started doing abstract art right now, that could possibly be explained by an aneurysm or something like that, and it's an extremely small measure of universes, that might occur.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=30"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1152bbd8-3240-4e83-9dcd-a3421ab6579a": {"page_content": "There might be some sliver of universes where I just get bored with making YouTube videos about the work of David Deutsch, but they are, so far as I can tell, highly unlikely, highly unlikely because I've never had any impulse to do abstract art before.\nIf I started doing abstract art right now, that could possibly be explained by an aneurysm or something like that, and it's an extremely small measure of universes, that might occur.\nSo I'm quasi-autonomous in creating knowledge about the things that I'm interested in, and usually only the things that I'm interested in.\nIf the laws of physics do not rule it out, then yeah, it happens somewhere in the multiverse, but it's almost never in equal measure whenever there's a choice.\nThere's a choice here between me doing what I'm doing now and any of an infinite number of other things.\nNow in the overall majority of universes, because I've preserved my personality over time for many, many years, I'm doing precisely this, and I will continue to do precisely this in the majority of universes.\nIn some smaller number, I do something slightly different, and in some smaller number again, I do something even smaller again.\nThe more and more different those things are, to what my personality has historically been, the less likely and the smaller measure of universes in which that's going to occur.\nSo I'm an emergent, quasi-autonomous flow of information in the multiverse, David says, well, the reader says, but David says through the reader, and so that's what that means.\nAnd flow of information, so explaining how the multiverse itself evolves over time is more about the flow of information rather than, well, it increasingly will be more about the flow of information than it will be merely the movement of particles under the straightforward fundamental laws of physics.\nIt will be better explained by the flow of information and the creation of knowledge over time.\nNow at the beginning of this chapter, and I won't read this part, David has this fictional conversation with one of his readers, and the reader is summarizing what was going on in the last chapter, and basically explaining how it is that we know the multiverse is the best explanation for what's going on in quantum theory.\nAnd so I'll just read the very last bit, where we're talking about, where David's talking about how the way in which we understand multiple universes exist is because of observations of photons.\nThat's what's going on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=111"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a2d3e031-734b-4f0e-8c03-23eba90e764e": {"page_content": "And so I'll just read the very last bit, where we're talking about, where David's talking about how the way in which we understand multiple universes exist is because of observations of photons.\nThat's what's going on.\nWe are noticing where photons of light are landing and where they're not landing.\nAnd the reader says, quote, so that trickle of photons through the interferometer really does provide a window on a vast multiplicity of universes.\nAnd David says, in response, yes, it's another example of reach, just a small portion of the reach of quantum theory.\nThe explanation of those experiments in isolation isn't as hard to vary as the full theory, in regard to the existence of other universes, it's incontrovertible all the same reader.\nAnd that's all there is to it.\nDavid, yes, reader.\nBut then why is it that only a small minority of quantum physicists agree, David, bad philosophy, reader, what's that?.\nOkay, end quote.\nSo here we're about to get into the discussion about bad philosophy.\nAnd David just emphasizing there that only a minority of quantum physicists agree, they don't do so far as I know, survey to professional physicists very often on what interpretation of quantum theory they prefer, but even the most recent ones, do not show a majority of people endorsing the multiverse theory.\nMost are still either instrumentalists or believe in something like the Copenhagen interpretation, something like that.\nAnd this is what I was taught anyway in the 90s to 2000s with respect to quantum theory at the universities that I went through anyway.\nIt was still the Copenhagen interpretation or it was some form of there's no point asking no one understands or instrumentalism, of course, of course.\nJust to be able to solve the problems, that's all that's important, that kind of thing.\nOkay, so getting back to the book, David writes quote, quantum theory was discovered independently by two physicists who reached it from different directions, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger.\nThe latter gave his name to the Schrodinger equation, which is a way of expressing the quantum mechanical laws of motion.\nBoth versions of the theory were formulated between 1925 and 1927, and both explained motion, especially within atoms, in new and astonishingly counterintuitive ways.\nHeisenberg's theory said that the physical variables of a particle do not have numerical values.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=187"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47acac3b-c71e-47de-ab85-48ec3d61d846": {"page_content": "The latter gave his name to the Schrodinger equation, which is a way of expressing the quantum mechanical laws of motion.\nBoth versions of the theory were formulated between 1925 and 1927, and both explained motion, especially within atoms, in new and astonishingly counterintuitive ways.\nHeisenberg's theory said that the physical variables of a particle do not have numerical values.\nInstead, they are matrices, large arrays of numbers, which are related in complicated probabilistic ways to the outcomes of observations of those variables.\nWith Heisenberg, we now know that that multiplicity of information exists because a variable has different values for different instances of the object and the multiverse.\nBut at the time, neither Heisenberg nor anyone else believe that his matrix valued quantities literally described what Einstein called elements of reality.\nThe Schrodinger equation, when applied to the case of an individual particle, described a wave moving through space.\nBut Schrodinger soon realized that for two or more particles, it did not.\nIt did not represent a wave with multiple crests, nor could it be resolved into two or more waves.\nMathematically, it was a single wave in a high dimensional space.\nWith Heisenberg, we now know that such waves describe what proportion of the instances of each particle are in each region of space, and also the entanglement information among the particles.\nEnd quote, some exposition of that just on my behalf.\nSo here is the Schrodinger equation, and the Schrodinger equation is a wave equation.\nAnd that is at least one form of it, there is the time dependent, the time independent Schrodinger equation we do not need to go into the details right now.\nBut this one is the time dependent one, and it says that at some particular time, t, h gives information, the h is the Hamiltonian, gives information about the energy of a particle which can take many values simultaneously.\nAnd that is the epsilon, that Greek letter there.\nWe can graph, for example, the position, let us say, for example, the position of some particle at some particular time.\nAnd we get a graph, a wave that evolves over time in fact.\nHere is the Wikipedia animation of psi for that particle, right there.\nAnd so roughly speaking, what we are seeing here is that the particle is in all these places all at once.\nNow these graphs, these graphs of waves are analogous to a picture of a snapshot in time of where a particle might be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=319"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2c137d3-677d-4816-a325-291f7a5523cc": {"page_content": "And we get a graph, a wave that evolves over time in fact.\nHere is the Wikipedia animation of psi for that particle, right there.\nAnd so roughly speaking, what we are seeing here is that the particle is in all these places all at once.\nNow these graphs, these graphs of waves are analogous to a picture of a snapshot in time of where a particle might be.\nWhat the range of energies is that it might have, or its momentum and so on.\nIt is not just a single point.\nNow this is physics that is different to classical mechanics, in classical mechanics, at a certain point in time, a particle has a single numerical value for a particular physical quantity, like position or energy or momentum or velocity.\nThat's the Schrodinger picture.\nPhysicists have for a long time, physicists have for a long time, and indeed had for a long time before quantum theory, been comfortable dealing with y.\nand so I was natural for them to interpret the Schrodinger wave equation that's describing a wave moving through actual space.\nBut as David just said there, it's kind of misleading.\nIt's a wave and a higher dimensional space, and what that means is a wave across the multiverse, not a wave in a single universe, that's in one way of speaking anyway.\nSo an observer in a universe doesn't see a wave moving through space.\nBut another way of looking at quantum theory, as David has mentioned here, is what has come to be known as the Heisenberg pictureal matrix mechanics.\nAnd so matrices look like this kind of thing, and I've picked these ones deliberately.\nThese ones are known as the Pauli matrices, and the Pauli matrices can be used to represent a number of different quantities, but in particular they can be used to represent the spin of a particle.\nThe spin of a particle is analogous to its angular momentum.\nNow in classical mechanics, if something is spinning, it's got a certain angular momentum, the rate at which it is spinning, and the difficulty with which it might be hard to stop this object from the spinning, and that will have a single value.\nBut in quantum mechanics, the spin of a particle is a matrices, it's not a single value.\nAnd so even if you don't understand what a matrices, and it's going to important, what is important is that it's not just a single number.\nSo the spin is not a single number.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=533"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "97a9fe66-680a-44c6-b922-a6d90345e1d7": {"page_content": "But in quantum mechanics, the spin of a particle is a matrices, it's not a single value.\nAnd so even if you don't understand what a matrices, and it's going to important, what is important is that it's not just a single number.\nSo the spin is not a single number.\nIn particular, when it comes to something like an electron, it can have spin up or spin down, so we say, and experiments can be done, showing that if you fire a particular electron through this apparatus, the Stern-Gulach experiment, then it will demonstrate having two different spins simultaneously over time, returning to the book.\nI've got these two kind of pictures of reality, at some extent, there's this floating right here of particles being governed by a wave equation, and so I appear to have some sort of wave-like property, and that's floating as a picture.\nAnd then Heisenberg's picture, which is that the physical quantities that tell you information about a given particle are not single valued.\nThey have to be represented by a matrices in some way.\nSo David Wright's going back to the book.\nAlthough Schrodinger and Heisenberg's theory seem to describe very dissimilar worlds, neither of which was easy to relate to existing conceptions of reality, it was soon discovered that if a certain rule of thumb was added to each theory, they would always make identical predictions.\nMoreover, these predictions turned out to be very successful.\nWith hindsight, we can state the rule of thumb like this.\nWhenever a measurement is made, all the histories, but one, cease to exist.\nThe surviving one is chosen at random with the probability of each possible outcome being equal to the total measure of all the histories in which that outcome occurs.\nAt that point, disaster struck.\nInstead of trying to improve and integrate those two powerful but slightly forward explanatory theories into explain why the rule of thumb worked, most of the theoretical physics community retreated rapidly and with remarkable docility into instrumentalism.\nIf the predictions work their reason, why worry about the explanation?.\nSo they tried to regard quantum theory as being nothing but a set of rules of thumb for predicting the observed outcomes of experiments, saying nothing else about reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=736"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7fe3f607-37f3-4936-9ef8-a07744105908": {"page_content": "At that point, disaster struck.\nInstead of trying to improve and integrate those two powerful but slightly forward explanatory theories into explain why the rule of thumb worked, most of the theoretical physics community retreated rapidly and with remarkable docility into instrumentalism.\nIf the predictions work their reason, why worry about the explanation?.\nSo they tried to regard quantum theory as being nothing but a set of rules of thumb for predicting the observed outcomes of experiments, saying nothing else about reality.\nThis move is still popular today, and as noted, it's critics and even the sound of its proponents as the shut up and calculate interpretation of quantum theory, pause there, my reflection, yes, so this idea, the rule of thumb, where all of the history, when a measurement happens, all of the histories, but one, cease to exist, all this seems absurd, doesn't it?.\nThat the theory itself is describing, there must be multiple histories, there must be all these different ways in which the particle exists simultaneously, all these positions at occupies, all these different momentas it has, all these different energies it has.\nThat really is what the theory is saying, if we take our theory seriously as a description of reality, well that's what reality is, reality really is described by particles that are simultaneously in many different positions.\nBut the rule of thumb says, when you make a measurement, when you do an experiment, you only have a observed thing with one value, it's only every in one place, with one energy or with one particular momentum.\nAnd so the rule of thumb says, well, although the theory said that all these different histories really existed, all these different variables exist simultaneously, the experiment shows you there's only one, and so the rule of thumb is, all of them disappeared, except for one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=43"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3b317912-244a-49ab-9b2c-3a380ba0f776": {"page_content": "Well, that's absurd, that that brings consciousness into physics in a very fundamental way, that your act of observation has destroyed the vast bulk of reality, of physical reality, which is an astonishing claim to make, and should not have been made, but it was, and because it was just so unbelievable, then what the physicists have said is, well, let's just deny the reality of multiple histories altogether, altogether deny multiple histories, and just say, use the formalism, use the mathematical formula in order to make predictions of what's going to happen next, probabilistic predictions of what's going to happen next.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=956"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c0ba2376-0d14-4c1b-be5c-20a5ea61bb44": {"page_content": "And what should have happened was, except the fact all the histories exist and continue to exist, and we only are observed one of those realities at any given time, okay, returning the book, skipping just a little bit, and David writes, both versions, in other words, Schrodinger and Heisenbergs, both versions of quantum theory were clearly describing some sort of physical process that brought about the outcome of experiments, physicists, both through professionalism and through natural curiosity could hardly help wondering about that process.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=992"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ea86b33-772e-4bd6-8c82-478d22ac5865": {"page_content": "So that physical process that brought about the outcomes of experiments, just me talking again, remember the what the instrumentalist type people to shut up and calculate type people were saying was that the only purpose of quantum theory was to enable you to predict the outcome of experiments, but there has to be a physical process that produces the outcome of the experiment, after all.\nAnd so no wonder, physicists through professionalism and natural curiosity could hardly help wondering about that process.\nWhat is this physical process?.\nAnd David writes, but many of them tried not to, tried not to think about it.\nMost of them went on to train their students not to.\nThis counted the scientific tradition of criticism in regard to quantum theory.\nLet me define bad philosophy, as philosophy does not merely false, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge.\nIn this case, instrumentalism was acting to prevent the explanations in Schrodinger's and Heisenberg's theories from being improved or unified.\nThe physicist Niels Bohr, another of the pioneers of quantum theory, then developed an interpretation of the theory, which later became known as the Copenhagen interpretation.\nIt said that quantum theory, including the rule of thumb, was a complete description of reality, Bohr excused the various contradictions and gaps by using a combination of instrumentalism and studied ambiguity.\nHe denied the possibility of speaking of phenomena as existing objectively, pause their minor reflection.\nSo Bohr denied the possibility of speaking of phenomena as existing objectively, does that sound familiar.\nNow this predates the French post-modernists, but it had a strong influence on philosophy and a bad influence on philosophy.\nOnce the physicist, the hard-nosed physicist, the supposed refinement of intellectual excellence that was physics, once the practitioners there started denying the existence of objective reality, we've got problems, because those people were respected.\nEinstein was one of the most famous people of the early 20th century.\nHe was revered and respected.\nHis colleagues, therefore, also, were showered in the similar sort of respect and reverence, especially among the rest of the intellectual community and the academic community.\nSo if one of their own, one of the great physicists, and physicists were, of course, respected and trusted and well-liked and revered, because what the amazing things they predicted worked, the amazing thing they predicted worked, they predicted theories of rocketry and the rockets worked, they predicted theories about ever better bombs and bombs work, they predicted theories about nuclear reactors and nuclear reactors work, etc, etc, etc.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=1026"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8d5bca23-3558-4fc6-8121-a8e670beab17": {"page_content": "So if one of their own, one of the great physicists, and physicists were, of course, respected and trusted and well-liked and revered, because what the amazing things they predicted worked, the amazing thing they predicted worked, they predicted theories of rocketry and the rockets worked, they predicted theories about ever better bombs and bombs work, they predicted theories about nuclear reactors and nuclear reactors work, etc, etc, etc.\nWhat they said seemed to carry with it a weight because of how their theories worked.\nNow despite the fact the epistemology there is all wrong, nonetheless, none the less, we have this culture of reverence for the words of physicists in particular, and physicists can sometimes be regarded as the new priests.\nAnd so unfortunately, if the priestate saying things like objective reality might not exist, we have a real problem.\nWe have a deeper problem than merely false signs or false claims, because we have the beginnings of a bad philosophy.\nIf we deny the existence of objectivity and of objective reality, then we've got nothing to argue over.\nWe've got no reason to debate, and debate is all about something that isn't solid, and we can never arrive at true answers if there's nothing true to argue about.\nOkay, let's go back to the book.\nDavid wrote, quote, he denied the possibility of speaking a phenomena as existing objectively, but said that only the outcomes of the experiment should count as phenomena.\nHe also said that, although observation has no access to the real essence of phenomena, it does reveal relationships between them, and that, in addition, quantum theory blurs the distinction between observer and observed.\nOnce again, just reflect on that for a moment.\nSo it blurs the distinction according to ball between observer and observed.\nThat might also sound familiar to some people.\nIt's a somewhat Buddhist notion.\nBuddhism may certainly have truth within it, especially when it comes to studying the subjectivity of the mind, studying one's own mind, introspecting, etc.\nThat aside, that the useful content of Buddhism is not encapsulated by this claim that there is a blurring in this sense between the observer and the observed.\nDespite this, it's this kind of thing which has been grabbed onto by mystics of all stripes and new age type people as cashing out their own spurious claims, because the pioneers of quantum theory, struggling to understand this, said some very unfortunate things.\nBut they were just the pioneers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=1180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29563f6d-6773-4153-a420-8f9149b9ed28": {"page_content": "That aside, that the useful content of Buddhism is not encapsulated by this claim that there is a blurring in this sense between the observer and the observed.\nDespite this, it's this kind of thing which has been grabbed onto by mystics of all stripes and new age type people as cashing out their own spurious claims, because the pioneers of quantum theory, struggling to understand this, said some very unfortunate things.\nBut they were just the pioneers.\nThey didn't understand quantum theory well enough, and so they were apt at saying sometimes ridiculous things, especially in the case of ball.\nLet's go back to the book and David writes, quote, As for what would happen if one observer performed a quantum level observation on another, he, bore, avoided the issue, which became known as the paradox of Wigner's friend after the physicist Eugene Wigner.\nIn regard to the unobserved processes between observations, where both Schrodinger's and Heisenberg's theories seem to be describing a multiplicity of histories happening at once, bore proposed a new fundamental principle of nature, the principle of complementarity.\nIt is said that accounts of phenomena could only be stated in classical language, meaning that language that assigned single values to physical variables at any one time, but classical language could be used only in regard to some variables, including those that had just been measured.\nOne was not permitted to ask what values the other variables had, thus, for instance, in response to the question, which path did the photon take in the mark send to interferometer?.\nThe reply would be that there is no such thing as which path when the path is not observed.\nIn response to the question, then how does the photon know which way to turn the final mirror, since this depends on what happened on both paths, the reply would be an equivocation called particle wave duality.\nThe photon is both an extended non-zero volume and localized zero volume object at the same time, and one can choose to observe either attribute but not both.\nPause their my reflection.\nYes, this is standard stuffing textbooks.\nThe typical physics textbook, high school undergraduate level, when introducing quantum theory to people, generally falls back onto particle wave duality stuff.\nAnd this is in fact what the majority of science popularizes today continue to regurgitate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=1326"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08a0e848-6025-411b-8a7d-0686bb2819b0": {"page_content": "The photon is both an extended non-zero volume and localized zero volume object at the same time, and one can choose to observe either attribute but not both.\nPause their my reflection.\nYes, this is standard stuffing textbooks.\nThe typical physics textbook, high school undergraduate level, when introducing quantum theory to people, generally falls back onto particle wave duality stuff.\nAnd this is in fact what the majority of science popularizes today continue to regurgitate.\nAnd so it sounds plausible and attractive that because it seems as though given classical type experiments where there are certain observations we can make in quantum theory that seem to show that particles like electrons really do act like particles some of the time.\nThey can collide into things.\nThey can bounce off things.\nThis is what particles do.\nThey carry momentum with them.\nThat this is evidence for their particle type nature.\nBut there are other experiments you can do, interference experiments passing single electrons through narrow slits and we can then observe interference effects and these interference effects are proof positive.\nso it's said of a wave type nature.\nAnd so therefore we just say electrons are waves and particles at the same time to some people that set a factory, especially when you're introduced to the first time and everything else is really complicated and difficult to understand.\nWell, being waved away with, oh it's a wave and a particle at the same time can shut some people out.\nBut of course if you understand what David just said there, that an object like a photon or electron or any other particle is sometimes not sometimes, it is simultaneously of near-zero volume, it's a particle localized and extended throughout all of space, non-zero volume thing, simultaneously.\nWell this this violates logic.\nBut of course some of the early pioneers of quantum theory and even people today will say well there's something deeper than logic which is quantum theory and so you need a new kind of logic to understand what's going on.\nNow that's a violation of reason.\nIf the law of the excluded middle is something we should want to preserve, something can't both be x and not x at the same time.\nEither here I am here now delivering another episode of talkcast or I'm not, I'm not simultaneously doing both.\nYou might say well I'm multiverse, I'm somewhere else I'm talking about.\nNow here right now in this universe speaking to you either it's me here speaking to you right now or this is not happening.\nIt's one or the other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=319"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "abce6b0f-35e9-48e4-936c-5e6c56bde499": {"page_content": "Either here I am here now delivering another episode of talkcast or I'm not, I'm not simultaneously doing both.\nYou might say well I'm multiverse, I'm somewhere else I'm talking about.\nNow here right now in this universe speaking to you either it's me here speaking to you right now or this is not happening.\nIt's one or the other.\nI'm not both here doing this and not doing this at the same time.\nBut in quantum theory some people want to say that that in fact is what's going on.\nThe particles are both in one place and in many places at the same time okay returning to the book and David writes quote, often this is expressed this concept of the extended through space and localized at one point.\nIt's expressed in the saying it is both away from a particle simultaneously.\nIronically, there is a sense in which those words are precisely true.\nIn that experiment the entire multi-versal photon is indeed an extended object away.\nSo across the multiverse we have this and this has been explained in my previous videos.\nSo the wave is extended through the multiverse.\nWhile instances of it, particles in history are localized.\nUnfortunately that is not what is meant in the COVID-19 interpretation.\nThen the idea is that quantum physics defies the very foundations of reason.\nParticles have mutually exclusive attributes, period.\nAnd it dismisses criticisms that the idea is invalid because they constitute attempts to use classical language outside its proper domain, namely describing the outcome of experiments.\nOkay now I'm skipping a little bit back to the book and David writes, for decades various versions of all that all this vagueness with respect to quantum theory were taught as fact.\nThe anthropocentrism, the instrumentalism and all in university physics courses.\nAnd even today I should say.\nFew physicists claim to understand it, none did.\nAnd so students' questions were met with such nonsense as if you think you've understood quantum mechanics, then you don't.\nIn consistency was defended as complementarity or duality.\nPerochialism was held as philosophical sophistication.\nThus the theory claimed to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal by all modes of criticism, a hallmark of bad philosophy.\nIts combination of vagueness, immunity from criticism and the prestige and perceived authority of fundamental physics, open the door to countless systems of pseudoscience and quackery, supposedly based on quantum theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=319"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "272c154a-e22c-4c5d-a7a2-aa47d4602407": {"page_content": "In consistency was defended as complementarity or duality.\nPerochialism was held as philosophical sophistication.\nThus the theory claimed to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal by all modes of criticism, a hallmark of bad philosophy.\nIts combination of vagueness, immunity from criticism and the prestige and perceived authority of fundamental physics, open the door to countless systems of pseudoscience and quackery, supposedly based on quantum theory.\nIts disparagement of plain criticism and reason has been classical and therefore illegitimate has given endless comfort to those who wanted to fire reason and embrace any number of irrational modes of thought.\nThus quantum theory, the deepest discovery of the physical sciences has acquired a reputation for endorsing practically every mystical and occult doctrine ever proposed.\nEnd quote.\nWell that's a brilliant David Deutsch passage there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=1723"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc648569-6ea9-4ad6-876f-b0d802f17a44": {"page_content": "and it just sums up in a very forceful way how quantum theory, this amazing pinnacle of human intellectual endeavour, the truth of quantum theory, what quantum theory has allowed us to achieve as a species, new technologies, new ways of understanding reality, ironically because of the way it began with vagueness and the immunity from criticism that some of the practitioners couch these ideas in has caught quantum theory to, in the minds of some people, justify all manner of weird stuff and so new age type people, certain kind of Buddhist thinkers, quacks of various kinds, cranks of various kinds, dishonest interlocutters and as we will see certain kinds of philosophers point to quantum theory as a justification for their own nonsense that in some way because of the language used by the pioneers of quantum theory, the unfortunate language, the unfortunate vagueness, that therefore their crazy claims are cashed out in some way by the crazy claims of the pioneers of quantum theory but the crazy claims of the pioneers of quantum theory or the bad claims of the pioneers of quantum theory were made for in many ways honest reasons, they were honestly trying to find the truth and people today who use in point of quantum theory are oftentimes being quite dishonest, dishonestly repurposing errors made in the past and presenting them as fact and then not fact.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=1776"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "112208a5-ce15-4814-ba9d-e73439aa6a97": {"page_content": "Admittedly some of these people are innocently simply ignorant but a lot of art, a lot of not.\nBack to the book David Wright, not every physicist accepted the Copenhagen interpretation or its descendants.\nEinstein never did.\nThe physicist David Baum struggled to construct an alternative that was compatible with realism and produced a rather complicated theory which I regard as the multiverse theory in heavy disguise though he was strongly opposed to thinking of it in that way.\nAnd in Dublin in 1952 Schrodinger gave a lecture in which at one point he jocularly warned his audience that what he was about to say might seem lunatic, it was that when his equation seems to be describing several different histories they are not alternatives but really happen simultaneously.\nWe'll say that again when his equation seems to be describing several different histories they are not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously.\nThis is the earliest known reference to the multiverse.\nHe was an eminent physicist, joking that he might be considered mad.\nWhy?.\nFor claiming that his own equation the very one for which he had won the Nobel Prize might be true.\nEnd quote, that's another brilliant David Deutsch, very brief paragraph they're talking about Schrodinger.\nSo Schrodinger, one of the discoveries of quantum theory, early pioneers, 1930s has said that his own equation that explains what's going on with subatomic particles he said that these equations describe things, describe particles with many different histories simultaneously that occupy many different positions simultaneously.\nAnd these alternatives really do happen he said.\nAnd then David writes that he was joking that he might be considered mad.\nWhy?.\nFor claiming that his own equation the very one for which he had won the Nobel Prize might be true.\nOkay back to the book David writes, Schrodinger never published that lecture and seems never to have taken the idea further.\nFive years later and independently the physicist, Hugh Everett, published a comprehensive theory of the multiverse now known as the Everett interpretation of quantum theory.\nIt took several more decades before Everett's work was even noticed by more than a handful of physicists.\nEven now that it has become well known it is endorsed by only a small minority.\nI've often been asked to explain this unusual phenomenon and fortunately I know of no entirely satisfactory explanation.\nBut to understand why it is perhaps not quite as bizarre and isolated in an event as it may appear, one has to consider the broader context of bad philosophy.\nEverett is the normal state of our knowledge and is no disgrace.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=1895"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9865a7c3-fd86-4962-be2b-f93b4e6094a9": {"page_content": "Even now that it has become well known it is endorsed by only a small minority.\nI've often been asked to explain this unusual phenomenon and fortunately I know of no entirely satisfactory explanation.\nBut to understand why it is perhaps not quite as bizarre and isolated in an event as it may appear, one has to consider the broader context of bad philosophy.\nEverett is the normal state of our knowledge and is no disgrace.\nThere's nothing bad about false philosophy.\nProblems are inevitable, but they can be solved by a imaginative critical thought that seeks good explanations.\nBad is good philosophy and good science, both of which have always existed in some measure.\nFor instance, Schrodinger always learned language by making, criticizing and testing conjectures about the connection between words and reality.\nThey could not possibly learn in many other ways I shall explain in Chapter 16.\nBad philosophy is always existed to.\nFor instance, Schrodinger always been told, because I say so.\nAlthough it is not always intended as a philosophical position, it is worth analyzing it as one.\nFor in four simple words, it can tend to remarkably many themes of false and bad philosophy.\nFirst, it is a perfect example of a bad explanation.\nIt could be used to explain anything.\nSecond, one way it achieves its status is by addressing only the form of the question and substance.\nIt is about who said something, not what they said.\nThat is the opposite of truth seeking.\nThird, it reinterprets a crest for a true explanation.\nWhy should something or other be as it is?.\nAs a request for a justification, what entitled you to assert that it is so?.\nWhich is the justified true belief combural.\nFourth, it confuses the non-existent authority for ideas with human authority, power.\nA much troubled path in bad political philosophy.\nAnd fifth, it claims why this means to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism.\nI am skipping a little bit, David writes about empiricism, empiricism is a false philosophy, but it at least allowed progress to continue.\nBut then empiricism got taken to literally, and it became positivism.\nAnd positivism was about eliminating from science anything that could not be derived from observations.\nBut still this didn't cause, this still wasn't really bad philosophy.\nThis wasn't bad philosophy.\nThis is merely false philosophy because progress was still able to continue.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=43"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6ac2afd0-4fe5-413a-9c6c-d488c5b6dc86": {"page_content": "I am skipping a little bit, David writes about empiricism, empiricism is a false philosophy, but it at least allowed progress to continue.\nBut then empiricism got taken to literally, and it became positivism.\nAnd positivism was about eliminating from science anything that could not be derived from observations.\nBut still this didn't cause, this still wasn't really bad philosophy.\nThis wasn't bad philosophy.\nThis is merely false philosophy because progress was still able to continue.\nIt might just go through David's little anecdote here about Ernst Mark, where he writes, quote, for instance, the physicist Ernst Mark, father of Ludwig Mark of the Mark's Enduring Therometer, was also a positive philosopher, influenced by Einstein, spurring him to eliminate untested assumptions from physics, including Newton's assumption that time flows at the same rate for all observers.\nThat happened to be an excellent idea.\nBut Mark's positivism also caused him to oppose the resulting theory of relativity, essentially because it claimed that space-time really exists, even though it can't be directly observed.\nMark also resolutely denied the existence of atoms because they were too small to observe.\nWe laugh at this silliness now, because we have microscopes that can see atoms, but the role of philosophy should have been to laugh at it then.\nI'm skipping a little bit.\nDavid mentions that Einstein rejected positivism because he was a realist, and so I'm never accepted the COVID-19 interpretation.\nAnd David wonders out loud, if Einstein took positivism more seriously, what he perhaps have included that space-time, that thing that general relativity forced us to endorse the reality of, would he himself have to dismiss the idea of space-time really existing?.\nSo David describes the leap from positivism, this idea that only that which can be derived from observations should be considered meaningful in science, and this led to a denial of physical reality in general, Thomas Cun, David wrote of Thomas Cun, quote, Thomas Cun wrote, quote, there is a step which many philosophers of science wish to take and which are a fuse.\nThey wish that he is to compare scientific theories as representations of nature, as statements about what is really out there, end quote of Cun.\nDavid continues, positivism degenerated into logical positivism, which held that statements not verifiable by observation are not only worthless, but meaningless.\nThis doctrine threatened to sweep away not only explanatory scientific knowledge, but the whole of philosophy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=2177"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "723d118c-2b94-4cb8-8faa-edf1880b76d1": {"page_content": "They wish that he is to compare scientific theories as representations of nature, as statements about what is really out there, end quote of Cun.\nDavid continues, positivism degenerated into logical positivism, which held that statements not verifiable by observation are not only worthless, but meaningless.\nThis doctrine threatened to sweep away not only explanatory scientific knowledge, but the whole of philosophy.\nIn particular, logical positivism itself is a political theory, and it cannot be verified by observation.\nHence it asserts its own meaninglessness, as well as that of all other philosophy.\nThe logical positivism tried to rescue their theory from that implication, for instance by calling it logical, as distinct from philosophical, but in vain.\nThen Wittgenstein embraced the implication, declared all of philosophy, including his own, to be meaningless.\nHe advocated remaining silent about philosophical problems, and although he never attempted to live up to that aspiration, he was held by many as one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century.\nEnd quote, my reflection, even today, having gone through philosophy myself, Wittgenstein was absolutely regarded as the preeminent genius by even my favourite lecturers.\nNow, I never really understood.\nI think he has a few quotes.\nIt depends upon the way in which you read him, and Wittgenstein contradict himself.\nThere's the so-called early Wittgenstein and a late Wittgenstein.\nHis way of speaking about philosophy is entered the philosophical tradition in many places.\nFor instance, people talk about word games.\nMaybe you hear this term word games.\nThat's from Wittgenstein.\nWittgenstein thought that one function of language was to communicate, but what we are doing as people is we're playing word games with our number.\nAnd so when scientists are talking, they're engaged in a certain kind of word game, which is very different to what a parent and a child might engage in or a patient and a doctor might engage in.\nSo yes, this was Wittgenstein's view, the late Wittgenstein.\nThe early Wittgenstein, who wrote tractatus philosophical, believed that language served the function of simply describing physical reality, and that's it.\nAnd of course, only that which could be observed was worthy of being a part of science and rational discourse.\nAnd I think I've mentioned before that Wittgenstein had this view of his own philosophy as being like a ladder, which one uses to climb out of a well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=2285"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "606a3f78-1e05-4a1a-a48a-0685cc72d0ce": {"page_content": "The early Wittgenstein, who wrote tractatus philosophical, believed that language served the function of simply describing physical reality, and that's it.\nAnd of course, only that which could be observed was worthy of being a part of science and rational discourse.\nAnd I think I've mentioned before that Wittgenstein had this view of his own philosophy as being like a ladder, which one uses to climb out of a well.\nAnd once you've used the ladder to climb out of the well, you can discard the ladder as well.\nAnd so that's what he thought of his own philosophy.\nAt the end of the tractatus, he has that famous line, where of one cannot speak, there of one should be silent, or there of one must be silent.\nNow, on the one hand, could be the case that it's as strong as, that what that means is that we should be silent about all philosophical problems.\nAnd of course, that's ridiculous.\nThat closes off knowledge progress in many, many areas, because we need progress in philosophy.\nAnd this is one of the great debates between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein.\nThey didn't get on particularly well.\nBut Popper took his ideas seriously and criticized him in many places.\nYou can go back through my podcast or a talkcast.\nAnd there is an audio version of me describing Mr Popper's problems.\nI think that's the title of it.\nAnd about some of the great debates between Popper and Wittgenstein.\nBut this, this quote Wittgenstein's at the end of the tractatus, where of one cannot speak, there of one must be silent.\nAlso has this other meaning, like I say, people have different readings of Wittgenstein because he was vague, which isn't a good quality, right?.\nIt's, it's kind of theology.\nBut philosophers love this.\nThey love referring to the original texts and trying to grapple with what did he really mean.\nBut one reading of that quote is, for him, for him not to be in a position of dismissing metaphysics, certain parts of philosophy.\nBut him simply saying that, although there is this reality beyond which we don't have a way of speaking, it's real, but it transcends the ability of language to capture.\nAnd so, you know, he wouldn't necessarily reject something like belief in God.\nHe would simply say, well, it might very well be real.\nBut there's no point engaging in debate about it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=2408"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e4c6277-cae8-4da0-ab0e-18a0986a0e44": {"page_content": "But him simply saying that, although there is this reality beyond which we don't have a way of speaking, it's real, but it transcends the ability of language to capture.\nAnd so, you know, he wouldn't necessarily reject something like belief in God.\nHe would simply say, well, it might very well be real.\nBut there's no point engaging in debate about it.\nThere's no point getting upset and fighting about it because we don't have the language to capture it.\nIt transcends human intellect.\nNow this is not a position I hold.\nI am a universalist with respect to the mind.\nAnd so, I think there is nothing that can't be understood if we simply put our minds to it, if we're interested enough to tackle that idea, tackle that problem.\nBut Wittgenstein's position on that is at least interesting.\nKind of leads into some other linguists, philosophers, the sapphire wolf hypothesis is what I'm thinking of.\nAnd these guys basically say that languages like a set of blinkers that you put on and it constrains the way in which you can possibly think about the world.\nAnd that's in that same tradition of languages, everything.\nAnd so, philosophy today, very much even in the analytic tradition, we have, on the one hand, the continental and postmodernist type tradition.\nAnd we have the analytic tradition.\nThe analytic tradition is still very much centered on linguistics and language.\nAnd David's about to get into that.\nAnd so, let's just go back to that.\nAnd David writes, quote, one might have thought that this would be the Nadir of philosophical thinking.\nBut unfortunately, they were greater depths to plumb.\nDuring the second half of the 20th century, mainstream philosophy lost contact with and interesting, trying to understand science as it was actually being done.\nWell, how it should be done?.\nFollowing Wittgenstein, the predominant school of philosophy for a while was linguistic philosophy, whose defining tenant was that what seemed to be philosophical problems are actually just puzzles about how words are used in every day life.\nAnd that philosophers can meanfully study only that.\nNext in a related trend that originated in the European Enlightenment, but spread all over the West, many philosophers moved away from trying to understand anything.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=43"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "952bb987-fc5e-42b9-8423-b9859a919b65": {"page_content": "Well, how it should be done?.\nFollowing Wittgenstein, the predominant school of philosophy for a while was linguistic philosophy, whose defining tenant was that what seemed to be philosophical problems are actually just puzzles about how words are used in every day life.\nAnd that philosophers can meanfully study only that.\nNext in a related trend that originated in the European Enlightenment, but spread all over the West, many philosophers moved away from trying to understand anything.\nThey actively attack the idea, not only of explanation or reality, but of truth and reason, merely to criticize such attacks for being self-contradictory, like logical positivism, which they were, is to give them far too much credence for at least logical positivism, Wittgenstein, where it's in making a distinction between what does and does not make sense, albeit that they advocated I hopelessly wrong one.\nOne currently influential philosophical movement goes under various names, such as postmodernism, deconstructionism, and structuralism.\nDepending upon historical details around important here, it claims that because all ideas, including scientific theories, are conjectural and impossible to justify, they are essentially arbitrary, then are more than stories, known in this context as narratives.\nMixing extreme cultural relativism, with other forms of anti-realism, in regards objective truth and falsity, as well as reality and knowledge of reality, as mere conventional forms of words that stand for an ideas being endorsed by a designated group of people, such as an elite or consensus, or by a fashion, or other arbitrary authority.\nIn regards science and the enlightenment, there's no more than one such fashion, and the objective knowledge claimed by science as an arrogant, cultural conceit.\nPerhaps inevitably, these charges of true of postmodernism itself, just inserting my own commentary here, and the cultural Marxism that exists now, the grievance study stuff that I've been talking about, where this has become even more pronounced.\nOkay, so I'll just go back and reread this section.\nDavid Wright's quote, perhaps inevitably, these charges are true of postmodernism itself.\nIt is a narrative that resists rational criticism or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative, creating a successful postmodernist theory is indeed purely a matter of meeting the criteria of the postmodernist community, which have evolved to be complex, exclusive, and authority based.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=43"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a8d549bf-7fda-4a39-b121-5a00335821b3": {"page_content": "Okay, so I'll just go back and reread this section.\nDavid Wright's quote, perhaps inevitably, these charges are true of postmodernism itself.\nIt is a narrative that resists rational criticism or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative, creating a successful postmodernist theory is indeed purely a matter of meeting the criteria of the postmodernist community, which have evolved to be complex, exclusive, and authority based.\nNothing like that is true of rational words of thinking, creating a good explanation is hard, not because of what anyone has decided, but because there is an objective reality that does not need anyone's prior expectations, including those of authorities.\nThe creators of bad explanations, such as myths, are indeed just making things up.\nBut the method of seeking good explanations creates an engagement with reality, not only in science, but in good philosophy too, which is why it works, and why it is the antithesis of concocting stories to need, made up criteria.\nAlthough there have been signs of improvement since the late 20th century, one legacy of empiricism that continues to cause confusion and that has opened the door to a great deal of bad philosophy is the idea that it is possible to split a scientific theory into its predictive rules of thumb on the one hand, and its assertions about reality, sometimes known as the interpretation on the other.\nThis does not make sense, because as with conjuring tricks, without an explanation, it is impossible to recognize the circumstances under which a rule of thumb is supposed to apply.\nAnd it is especially does not make sense in fundamental physics, because the predicted outcome of an observation is itself an unobserved physical process, paused our reflection.\nAnd again, this whole idea of logical positivism, and various other kinds of philosophy that assert that we cannot make meaningful statements about that which are unobserved, those things that are unobserved, would completely dismiss the vast bulk of science.\nAlmost everything interesting in science is something we cannot observe, the evolution of species over time.\nDavid's favorite example of dinosaurs, no one's going to observe a dinosaur, we're only going to observe fossils.\nThe big bang, no one's going to observe the big bang, we observe things going on, 13 and a half billion years afterwards.\nFusion in the core of stars, subatomic particles smaller than protons, quarks and things, I don't know, maybe we can see quarks.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=319"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b662abba-41fb-48d0-b882-5d36a12a2a75": {"page_content": "David's favorite example of dinosaurs, no one's going to observe a dinosaur, we're only going to observe fossils.\nThe big bang, no one's going to observe the big bang, we observe things going on, 13 and a half billion years afterwards.\nFusion in the core of stars, subatomic particles smaller than protons, quarks and things, I don't know, maybe we can see quarks.\nNeutrinos, planets that we have not yet observed orbiting stars that we cannot yet see.\nThere is a whole bunch of things that we can't observe, but which we know must be real, given our best explanations, given what we know about reality.\nOkay, in the next bit, David goes through the dinosaur interpretation of fossils that I just mentioned, and I've mentioned this many times over the beginning of infinity series, so I won't go through it all there, but certainly with reading there in chapter 12.\nSo I'm skipping those few pages and instead we'll go to the section on psychology, which has had a lot of influence actually, I think in the intellectual community ever since the beginning of infinity was published.\nIn fact, it was only a couple of days ago.\nI myself received a paper from some psychologists working at the University of New South Wales, my old alma mater, specifically talking about how our doctors work in the beginning of infinity and elsewhere, had influenced their own thinking about psychology and their psychologists.\nSo let's read what David writes about this.\nLet me give an example from a distant field, psychology.\nI have mentioned behaviorism, which is instrumentalism applied to psychology.\nIt became the prevailing interpretation that field for several decades, and although it is now largely repudiated, research in psychology continues to downplay explanation in favor of stimulus response rules of thumb.\nThus, for instance, it is considered good science to conduct behavioristic experiments to measure the extent to which a human psychological state, such as, say, loneliness or happiness, is genetically coded, like IKLA, or not such a state of birth.\nNow, there are some fundamental problems with such a study from an explanatory point of view.\nFirst, how can we measure where the different people's ratings of their own psychological state are commensurable?.\nThat is to say, some proportion of people claiming to have happiness level eight might be quite unhappy, but also pessimistic, but they cannot imagine anything better.\nSo it's paused down my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=2927"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c5475b8-e5af-4858-9cb3-d1532f77323e": {"page_content": "Now, there are some fundamental problems with such a study from an explanatory point of view.\nFirst, how can we measure where the different people's ratings of their own psychological state are commensurable?.\nThat is to say, some proportion of people claiming to have happiness level eight might be quite unhappy, but also pessimistic, but they cannot imagine anything better.\nSo it's paused down my reflection.\nSo just to hammer that home a little bit, two people could have exactly the same psychological state.\nAnd if you ask them, you ask of, you know, let's say you've got, yes, you've got John and Joe.\nWhen John and Joe are sitting there, and they both claim, they both in objective reality have the same psychological state.\nAnd you ask them both, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being highest, how happy are you?.\nJohn might very well say eight, and Joe might very well say six.\nThey don't have the same standards.\nWe don't know what the knowledge is that they've got in their mind about how they should be feeling in any particular point.\nSo that's a serious problem, that epistemology, knowledge about knowledge, is going to affect their ratings of their own subjective experience.\nBut this is what psychology sometimes attempts to do, attempts to try to get at a person's in a mind by asking them questions and having them do surveys, assessing the contents of their mind, but how objective are they?.\nHow accurate are they?.\nHow commensurate is it that their assessment is going to agree with the assessment of someone else.\nSo their standards are going to be the same as someone else's.\nNo answer, of course.\nRight?.\nSo you're just continuing.\nAnd David writes, quote, and then some of the people who claim only level three might in fact be happier than most, but have succumbed to a craze that promises extreme future happiness to those who can learn to chant in a certain way.\nAnd second, if we were to find that people with a particular gene tend to rate themselves happier than people without it.\nHow can we tell whether the gene is coding for happiness?.\nPerhaps it is coding for less reluctance to quantify once happiness.\nPerhaps the gene in question does not affect a brain at all, but only how a person looks, and perhaps better looking people are happier on average because they are treated better by others.\nThere is an infinity of possible explanations, but the study is not seeking explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=3046"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "392599f3-349b-4da4-bd6b-8155c46c719d": {"page_content": "How can we tell whether the gene is coding for happiness?.\nPerhaps it is coding for less reluctance to quantify once happiness.\nPerhaps the gene in question does not affect a brain at all, but only how a person looks, and perhaps better looking people are happier on average because they are treated better by others.\nThere is an infinity of possible explanations, but the study is not seeking explanations.\nIt would make no difference if the experimenters tried to eliminate the subjective self-assessment and instead observed only happy and unhappy behavior, such as facial expressions, or how often a person whistles a happy tune.\nThe connection with happiness would still involve comparing subjective interpretations, which there is no way of calibrating to a common standard.\nThe connection with happiness would still involve comparing subjective interpretations, which there is no way of calibrating to a common standard.\nBut in addition, there would be an extra level of interpretation.\nSome people believe that behaving in happy ways is a remedy for happiness.\nSo for those people, such behaviors might be a proxy for unhappiness.\nFor example, reflection, so just notice that this is a theory in this positive psychology movement that you can behave your way to happiness.\nSo if you feel unhappy, then you should pretend to be happy, and eventually you will be more and more happy.\nYou should smile more often.\nYou should regard yourself as being happy even if you don't feel happy, and eventually that will be its own reward.\nAnd so that's a problem for studies like this as well.\nDavid goes on, quote, for these reasons, no behavioral study can detect what happiness is inborn or not.\nScience simply cannot resolve that issue until we have explanatory theories about what objective attributes people are referring to when they speak of their happiness, and also about what physical channel events connect genes to those attributes.\nSo how does explanation free science address the issue?.\nFirst, one explains that one is not measuring happiness directly, but only a proxy, such as the behavior of marking checkboxes on a scale called happiness.\nAll scientific measurements use chains of proxies, but as I explain in chapter 2 and 3, each link in the chain is an additional source of error, and we can avoid fooling ourselves only by criticizing the theory of each link, which is impossible.\nUnless an explanatory theory links the proxies to the quantities of interest.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=3181"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "221d35ce-4686-41bb-8c59-156236828a68": {"page_content": "First, one explains that one is not measuring happiness directly, but only a proxy, such as the behavior of marking checkboxes on a scale called happiness.\nAll scientific measurements use chains of proxies, but as I explain in chapter 2 and 3, each link in the chain is an additional source of error, and we can avoid fooling ourselves only by criticizing the theory of each link, which is impossible.\nUnless an explanatory theory links the proxies to the quantities of interest.\nThat is why, in genuine science, one can claim to have measured a quantity, only one one has an explanatory theory of how and why the measurement procedure should reveal its value and with what accuracy.\nPause there, I'll end this episode here, but that's an important point there to end on.\nThe explanatory theory itself will tell you what quantities can be measured, and also as David says elsewhere, a physical quantity quoted without uncertainty is strictly meaningless.\nSo if someone just said, you could just say, my weight is 65 kilograms.\nWell, to a physicist, one wants to know on what kind of scale that has been measured.\nIs it 65.0?.\nIs it 65.0001?.\nIs it 64.9?.\nThese, the scale would give these, we'll give this sort of information.\nSo if you just say 65, well, that doesn't really tell us much at all.\nSo we've got some more left to go with this chapter.\nSo it'll be episode three for chapter 12, and we'll finish this in the next episode of ToKCast.\nOnce more, thank you to people who are supporting me on Patreon.\nI have, I think I'm getting close to 10 Patreons right now, but thank you so much to everyone who is, it means a lot, and it's certainly helping me continue with this series, which has many more episodes to go.\nBut until the next episode, see you later.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7jmFQKS0M&t=3289"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d06e371-618a-4fec-8e58-3b7143de8a08": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, part two of chapter 16 of the beginning of infinity, the evolution of creativity.\nAnd last time I did very little reading.\nI think it was a record I think I got through just a little over one page which is I don't know if that's good or bad.\nSome people seem to like the comments, some people like the comments and the reading to be put together.\nSo today we'll do a little more reading and some commentary as well and try and get through a more substantial part of this chapter.\nSo without further ado, let me go back to the book and David writes on one page too.\nCreativity would have been even less noticeable in the predecessor of our species, yet it must already have been evolving in that species, or ours would never have been the result.\nIn fact, the advantage conferred by successive mutations that gave our predecessors brain slightly more creativity, or more precisely, more of the ability that we would now think of as creativity, must have been quite large for by all accounts modern humans evolved from ape-like ancestors very rapidly by gene evolution standards.\nMy ancestors must have been continually outbreeding their cousins, moreover, during the period when creativity was evolving, the ability to replicate memes was evolving too.\nIt is believed that some members of the species hung well erectus, living 500,000 years ago, knew how to make campfires.\nThat knowledge was in their means, not their genes.\nAnd once creativity and meme transmission are both present, they greatly enhance each other's evolutionary value, for then anyone who improves something also has the means to be quick the invention to all future generations, thus multiplying the benefit to the relevant genes.\nAnd memes can be improved much faster by creativity than by random trial and error.\nSince there is no upper limit to the value of ideas, the conditions would have been there for a runaway co-evolution between the two adaptations, creativity, and the ability to use memes.\nSo we've got a couple of things here, one is that these pre-homosapian species that have existed on the Earth, have done so for a long time.\nIt depends upon how you count what a human species is, but I was looking at this question about what counts as human earlier today.\nWhen humans first of all, it depends on what you mean by human.\nIs a human a homosapian, or any kind of sort of hominid that is able to creatively explain the world around us, a universal explainer?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aeb98337-4e92-4066-94a1-0f352698bcfa": {"page_content": "It depends upon how you count what a human species is, but I was looking at this question about what counts as human earlier today.\nWhen humans first of all, it depends on what you mean by human.\nIs a human a homosapian, or any kind of sort of hominid that is able to creatively explain the world around us, a universal explainer?.\nNow, in a recent podcast that I made almost simultaneously with this, I was talking about the possibility of alien life, and whether or not, here on Earth, the intelligent hominids, and my erectus is one, perhaps in the end, there was another homosapian, certainly us.\nPerhaps all of these had a common ancestor.\nThe first creative thinking ape of a kind.\nAnd that first creative thinking ape of a kind, I'm guessing was a universal explainer.\nI don't know, but I kind of am with the sentiments that are kind of expressed in the being infinity, which I also mentioned in the last episode that maybe it all came along in the one go.\nThis creative capacity to explain the world.\nIt wasn't there previously, and then some individual had a mutation, which enabled it, a genetic mutation, which enabled it to explain the world around it, to explain.\nNot merely react to the world around it.\nAnd that was the first universal explainer, and it had an advantage.\nIt had an advantage, and so it had more offspring.\nSome of those whom, presumably, maybe all of them had the capacity to explain the world around it, to think creatively, to think better than the other members of its species, although it probably would have been in your species, by now, right?.\nIt's hard to know in biology how speciation kind of happens, like, how do you draw the line between one species?.\nWell, this might be a way, okay?.\nIf a human of a kind, a universally explainer of a kind, is that categorically different to the thing that it evolved from, and the thing that it evolved from, didn't have the capacity to creatively explain the world.\nAnd then it's offspring did, then that's a sharp dividing line between these two kinds of creatures.\nBut when was the first of these kind of creatures?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=140"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4016a4d3-c705-40f8-8467-dc80c04765e4": {"page_content": "Well, this might be a way, okay?.\nIf a human of a kind, a universally explainer of a kind, is that categorically different to the thing that it evolved from, and the thing that it evolved from, didn't have the capacity to creatively explain the world.\nAnd then it's offspring did, then that's a sharp dividing line between these two kinds of creatures.\nBut when was the first of these kind of creatures?.\nThis first human type creature's well, you know, I know it's not the source of all wisdom, but Wikipedia puts the hominids back at six million years, but it calls the first kind of human, homohabillus, 2.5 million years ago.\nAnd homo erectus came after that, and then there are various other homo species leading to us homo sapiens, which the estimates vary, but it could be as much as 800,000 years ago, homo sapiens came along.\nNow, what would the first universal explainer branch off into different species?.\nWell, again, this is purely my conjecture, well, it could happen the same way that any other kind of evolution happens.\nThis first universal explainer has children, they have children, and so on.\nWe end up with a big tribe, eventually the tribe gets very, very big and splits into two factions, which don't like one other, it become hostile to one other, and so they spread apart a long, long way apart for a long, long time.\nThey exist separately, they are separated perhaps by a river, perhaps by a mountain range, who knows what?.\nThey evolved in Africa, they all evolved in Africa, they might have been separated.\nBy a long way, for a long time, it eventually became two different species, as our speciation happens.\nAnd perhaps even those two species themselves split into various species, and you could have ended up with lots of different human species, all of whom were able to think creatively.\nNone of human were actually using the creativity for anything particularly interesting or useful, as David will come to, but nonetheless, they're different human species with the ability to universally explain the world, to be actually people, they are actually people.\nBut only one of them survived through to the day, Homo sapiens.\nWhy?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=256"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "de62434b-c862-4c6b-b0d9-33959eba12f7": {"page_content": "And perhaps even those two species themselves split into various species, and you could have ended up with lots of different human species, all of whom were able to think creatively.\nNone of human were actually using the creativity for anything particularly interesting or useful, as David will come to, but nonetheless, they're different human species with the ability to universally explain the world, to be actually people, they are actually people.\nBut only one of them survived through to the day, Homo sapiens.\nWhy?.\nWell, we can talk about that, okay, and maybe get back to the book otherwise I will end up going on, I have a long entire age like last time, and we won't get through enough of this chapter, which is supposed to interesting not to discuss.\nBut let's go back to the book, and now we're just skipping a bit there where David simply talks about how these early people just aren't making much progress, they're not making much progress.\nI urge you to read your chapter because I won't read the entire chapter.\nSo I'm picking it up later in David Rites.\nTheir ability, so these early people's ability to innovate, was increasing rapidly, but they were barely innovating.\nThis is a puzzle.\nNot because it is odd behavior, but because it innovation was that rare, how could there have been a differential effect on the reproduction of individuals with more or less ability to innovate?.\nThat there were thousands of years between noticeable changes, presumably means, that in most generations, even the most creative individuals in the population would not have been making many innovations.\nHence, their greater ability to innovate would have caused no selection pressure in their favor.\nWhy did tiny improvements in that ability keep spreading rapidly through population?.\nOur ancestors must have been using their creativity and using it to which limits and frequently force something, but evidently not the innovation.\nWhat else could it be useful?.\nOf course, they're just my emphasis here, so what David is saying is that we have these people, these people who can innovate, they've got the capacity to create, they are, their memes are evolving as well.\nSo they've got a combination of things, some useful memes, perhaps, I probably guess less useful memes, and an ability to create.\nSo they're not innovating, not creating new technologies, they're not improving their lot in life at all.\nBut they are nonetheless using creativity, they have to have been using the creativity, but nothing's improving.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=355"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "931bc9f3-de47-444e-9af4-6cfe2fb0311e": {"page_content": "So they've got a combination of things, some useful memes, perhaps, I probably guess less useful memes, and an ability to create.\nSo they're not innovating, not creating new technologies, they're not improving their lot in life at all.\nBut they are nonetheless using creativity, they have to have been using the creativity, but nothing's improving.\nWhat the heck's going on?.\nIf you've been listening to this series and you've been reading the book along with me, you'll know the answer, you'll know the answer, but before we get to the answer, David's going to say a little bit about what the answer might not be, and he writes.\nOne theory is that it did not evolve to provide any functional advantage, but merely through sexual selection.\nPeople were used it to create displays, to attract mates, colorful clothing, decoration, storytelling, wit, and the like.\nA preference to mate with the individuals with the most creative displays, co-evolved with the creativity to meet that preference in an evolutionary spiral.\nSo the theory goes, just like pee hens' preference for peacocks' tails.\nBut creativity is an unlikely target for sexual selection.\nIt is a sophisticated adaptation, which, to this day, we are unable to reproduce artificially, so it is presumably much harder to evolve than attributes like coloration, or the size and shape of body parts, some of which it is thought did indeed evolve by sexual selection humans and many other animals.\nCreativity, as far as we know, evolved only once.\nMoreover, its most visible effects are cumulative.\nIt will be hard to detect small variations in the creativity of potential mates on any one occasion, especially if that creativity was not being used for practical purposes.\nDespite how hard it would be today to detect tiny genetic differences in people artistic abilities by means of an art competition, in practice, any such differences would be swamped by other factors.\nPause there, my reflection and comments.\nThere is a single sentence there, which I emphasised, which I think many people would perhaps skip over, but which I take to heart, where David writes, creativity as far as we know evolved only once.\nIf that is true, and it may or may not be, wow, wow, because if it did happen, then you can consult my recent episode about alien life, are we alone.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=482"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0e77365-4ef2-4cc3-bc1e-d8b57927157e": {"page_content": "Where I mention an academic, so if you are not going to listen to that, I will mention it now, it kind of steals the thunder from the other episode, but no, well, that other academic is Peter Slowzak, so philosopher, and basically he agrees, he agrees that maybe something like creativity, human creativity, evolved only once on a planet, which means it is not a convergent feature of evolution, which means it is not arising here and everywhere like wings do, birds have wings, insects have wings, certain kinds of mammals have wings even fish have wings, so wings evolve, commonly, to fill a niche in the environment, the habitat.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=611"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a80319c0-5b88-455b-b466-a8451ce4cd5f": {"page_content": "But this creativity doesn't seem to, it's evolved once, why, who knows, maybe it's just a quirky thing, and it will never evolve again, it's just a one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, you know, a chance, now if you think that that can't be the case, we'll just think about the fact that there appears to evolve only once, and if you trace backwards in time, the fact that it evolved only once, all the way back to bacteria, so there's a sequence of evolutionary steps sort of led from bacteria, the simplest life that we know of, it's pretty human, it's the most complicated sort of life form that we know of.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=654"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a3b73b48-5025-4391-8cc3-185e7ac0ecb9": {"page_content": "Imagine there's only a hundred steps, but of course there's more than a hundred steps, and imagine each of those steps only has a one in ten chance of occurring, then you've got a one in ten to the power of a hundred chance of repeating that sequence of evolutionary steps in order to get to creativity, because it apparently is what is required, whilst my microphone there.\nIt apparently is what is required in order to evolve creativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=689"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "14ec7486-d51e-4dfe-a764-58bd3d925d95": {"page_content": "This unique set of steps, it appears to be unique, you know, if it wasn't unique then it should have appeared other places at other times independently, so if it is unique and there if there is only one route there, or a very very limited number of routes in order to get to evolution, in order to get to creativity, given the precursor of bacteria, okay, and then the steps going through more and more complicated life forms, until you get to a human, I am belaboring the point, but the reason I mentioned it here is it comes to bear on that alien life question, because if it is truly unique then it is truly unique and it wouldn't matter how many planets you've got out there seeded with bacteria, none of them are going to evolve creativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=710"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3e8c458b-32c1-4d74-ad7a-b3525370b21c": {"page_content": "And that's why we're alone, that's the simple answer to the Fermi Paradox.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=756"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0cb5c1bf-dce8-4509-ab7e-52172a476962": {"page_content": "Now as I said in the other episodes, well, I don't believe that, but that's not to say that I believe there are aliens out there either, I don't believe either of those things, I don't believe there are aliens, I don't believe there aren't aliens, I have no strong views on the matter in any way, I just know that each of these different ways of looking at the question are criticisms of each other, and they all seem good in many ways, and until we have more evidence, more interesting problems out there to solve, with respect to this question, there's not much to say,.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=760"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5f4368a0-8c10-4c37-b0f9-04178b41c92e": {"page_content": "well I guess there's a lot to say, there's nothing to say in terms of our knowledge of exactly what's going on, there's just a lot of unknowns, lots and lots of unknowns, and it's very interesting unknowns, with some interesting arguments, but very little knowledge and certainly no reason to believe any of these particular competing conceptions or ideas about alien life, and if you're interested in this question of alien life, which comes to bear on this particular thing here, whether or not creative you will evolve elsewhere in the universe, then yes, my other episode, you know, released, maybe not necessarily alongside this one, but close to this one, is perhaps worth listening to, or of interest to you, okay, let's get back to the book, skipping a little bit, and David goes on to say, a more plausible variant of the sexual selection theory suggests that people choose mates according to social status rather than favoring creativity directly, perhaps the most creative individuals were able to gain status more effectively through intrigue or other social manipulation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=794"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56d1a028-ad1c-428c-ba9e-292d68a822d7": {"page_content": "This could have given them an evolutionary advantage without producing any progress, which we would see evidence of, however, all such theories still face the problem of explaining why, if creativity was being used intensively for any purpose, it was not also used for functional purposes.\nWhy would a chief who had gained power through creative intrigue not be thinking about better spheres for hunting?.\nWhy wouldn't a subordinate who invented such a thing have been favoured?.\nSimilarly, wouldn't potential mates who were impressed by artistic displays also have been impressed by practical innovations?.\nIn any case, some practical innovations would themselves have helped the discoveries to produce better displays, and innovations sometimes have reached a new skill of making a string of decorative beads in one generation might become the skill of making a slingshot in the next.\nSo why were practical innovations originally so rare?.\nFrom the discussion in the previous chapter, one might guess that it was because the tribes or families in which the people were living were static societies, in which any noticeable innovation would reduce one status and hence, presumably one's eligibility to mate.\nSo how does one gain status, specifically by exercising more creativity than anyone else, without becoming noticeable as a taboo violator, pausing there because we're about to get to David Dote's brilliant, unique discovery suggestion here, but I think it's a is the best explanation I've heard of.\nSo just to tie this up as we get to the decision, the problem, the problem is we have creative people in the past, these creative people in the past have the capacity to innovate, but they're not innovating in any way we have any evidence for whatsoever, they haven't innovated much.\nSo what are they using their creativity for?.\nThey can't be using it in order to change things too much because these people would have existed in a static society and then you'll be seen as a taboo violator, you'll be seen as someone who needs to be cast out of such a society, your unholy or unworthy in some way because you're not adhering to the strictures of the society, the customs and traditions.\nSo what if David Dote has, David Deutsch's solution to this?.\nHe says, quote, I think there is only one way, it is to enact the society's means more faithfully than the norm, to display exceptional conformity and obedience, to refrain exceptionally well from innovation.\nA static society has no choice but to reward that sort of conspicuousness.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=854"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9308a584-d7e1-43cc-9a9f-6b6a1666c14c": {"page_content": "So what if David Dote has, David Deutsch's solution to this?.\nHe says, quote, I think there is only one way, it is to enact the society's means more faithfully than the norm, to display exceptional conformity and obedience, to refrain exceptionally well from innovation.\nA static society has no choice but to reward that sort of conspicuousness.\nSo can enhance creativity, help want to be less innovative than other people?.\nThat turns out to be a pivotal question to which I shall return below, but first I must address a second puzzle causing that.\nSo isn't that great?.\nThis whole idea, which I did still the thunder from in a previous episode, but what we're saying here is, what David's saying here is, that innovation, the capacity to innovate can be used to more faithfully entrench the existing norms.\nSo if you, and it still happens today, we know there is kind of cultures and in fact we probably live in a version in some ways of these cultures, people who more faithfully adhere to the traditions and cultures that they find themselves in, because that gives them status in such a society.\nSo if your society is making no progress and is just going through rituals of a kind, religious rituals of a kind, not improving anything, the way to stand out in such a society, because you don't want to stand out by doing something new and creative, it's to do the thing that everyone else is doing, but better than they're doing it.\nSo if you have to mold your hair in a particular way, if you mold your hair in a way that's just like that, but better without even a hair out of place, where someone else had one hair out of place and you have none, then you're doing even better.\nOkay, let's go back to the book.\nHis second puzzle, David's second puzzle for this chapter, and it's subtitled, how do you replicate a meaning in David writes?.\nMeme replication is often characterized, for example by Blackmore as imitation, but that cannot be so.\nA meme is an idea and we cannot observe ideas inside other people's brains, nor do we have the hardware to download them from one brain to another like computer programs, nor to replicate them like DNA molecules.\nSo we cannot literally copy or imitate memes.\nThe only access we have to their content is through their holders' behaviour, including their speech, and consequences of their behaviour, such as their writing.\nMeme replication always follows this pattern.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=990"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bb064c47-ab10-4ee7-9427-3ba674a6f150": {"page_content": "A meme is an idea and we cannot observe ideas inside other people's brains, nor do we have the hardware to download them from one brain to another like computer programs, nor to replicate them like DNA molecules.\nSo we cannot literally copy or imitate memes.\nThe only access we have to their content is through their holders' behaviour, including their speech, and consequences of their behaviour, such as their writing.\nMeme replication always follows this pattern.\nWhen observes the holders' behaviour, directly or indirectly, then later, sometimes immediately, sometimes after years of such observation, memes from the holders' brains are present in one's own brain.\nBut how do they get there?.\nIt looks a bit like induction, does it not?.\nBut induction is impossible.\nThe process often seems to involve imitating the holders.\nFor instance, we learn words by imitating their sounds.\nWe learn how to wave by being waved to and imitating what we see.\nThus outwardly, and even to our own introspection, we appear to be copying aspects of what other people do, and remembering what they say and write.\nThis common sense misconception is even corroborated by the fact that our species closest living relatives, the great apes, also have a much more limited but nevertheless striking ability to imitate.\nBut as I shall explain, the truth is that imitating people's actions and remembering their utterances could not possibly be the basis of human meme replication.\nIn reality, those play on the small, and for the most part, in a central role.\nMeme acquisition comes so naturally to us, that it is hard to see what a miraculous process it is, or what is really happening.\nIt is especially hard to see where the knowledge is coming from.\nThere is a great deal of knowledge in even the simplest of human memes.\nWhen we learn to wave, we learn not only the gesture, but also which aspects of the situation made it appropriate to wave, and how and to whom.\nWe are not told most of this yet we learn it anyway.\nSimilarly, when we learn a word, we also learn its meaning, including highly inexpensive subties.\nHow do we acquire that knowledge, not by imitating the holders?.\nPaul said it is my reflection, so he is really setting this up really well.\nAnd thoroughgoing Papurians may have guessed the answer.\nI will probably read the book anyway, if they are listening to this.\nBut the fact is that we manage to gain this knowledge from people.\nWe gain memes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=374"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a4d607f2-d13f-48c1-98bb-1a860298aa0d": {"page_content": "Similarly, when we learn a word, we also learn its meaning, including highly inexpensive subties.\nHow do we acquire that knowledge, not by imitating the holders?.\nPaul said it is my reflection, so he is really setting this up really well.\nAnd thoroughgoing Papurians may have guessed the answer.\nI will probably read the book anyway, if they are listening to this.\nBut the fact is that we manage to gain this knowledge from people.\nWe gain memes.\nWe understand, for example, what waving is, in what situations you do the waving and the kind of inexpensive knowledge that a wave can convey.\nIf I am doing this, then that has a certain amount of inexpensive knowledge in it.\nI sort of look a bit awkward doing that.\nBut to try and explain exactly how I look in words, it is not my eyes or a bit of my eyes.\nI can do all sorts of different waves, can't I?.\nAnd each of them may have a different look on my face and might be waving my hand faster or slower.\nAnd if you had to describe that to someone later on, you might say, Brit was waving in a strange way, well, I don't really know.\nBut we kind of both know when you're waving to someone, whether it's a genuine wave or it's an awkward wave, or a shy wave, or it's an excited wave, etc, etc, etc.\nBut that is what they would mean by in explicit stuff.\nAnd you know the situations where you should and shouldn't do the kind of waving.\nAnd what your conveyor can convey a whole lot of knowledge can be conveyed by a wave.\nYou can wave people away.\nYou can wave to someone in such a way to say, I acknowledge you over there on the other side of the street, but I don't want to talk to you right now.\nI'm too busy, okay, for example.\nThere's lots of things that simple gestures and simple words and so on.\nThere's lots of meaning that can be contained within these things.\nThe in-explicit as well as the explicit knowledge that happens to be there.\nOkay, so that's what David's setting up.\nHow do we acquire the knowledge he's just asked?.\nAnd he said, not by imitating the holders.\nNow he's going to talk about Popper and this is just such a wonderful story.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=374"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e0615f6-2e1b-41c2-82eb-35796636771b": {"page_content": "There's lots of things that simple gestures and simple words and so on.\nThere's lots of meaning that can be contained within these things.\nThe in-explicit as well as the explicit knowledge that happens to be there.\nOkay, so that's what David's setting up.\nHow do we acquire the knowledge he's just asked?.\nAnd he said, not by imitating the holders.\nNow he's going to talk about Popper and this is just such a wonderful story.\nSo back to the book and David writes, quote, Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to observe.\nThen he would wait in silence for one of them to ask, what they were supposed to observe?.\nThis was his way of demonstrating one of the many flaws in the empiricism that is still part of common sense today.\nSo he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees.\nAnd he would explain that, therefore theory has to come first.\nIt has to be conjectured, not derived.\nPopper could have made the same point by asking his audience to imitate rather than to merely observe.\nThe logic would have been the same under what explanatory theory should they imitate?.\nWho should they imitate?.\nPopper?.\nIn that case, should they walk to the podium, pushing me out of the way and stand where he had been standing?.\nIf not, should they at least try to face the rear of the room to imitate where he was facing?.\nShould they imitate his heavy Austrian accent?.\nOr should they speak an animal voice?.\nBecause he was speaking in his normal voice.\nOr should they do nothing special at the time, but merely include such demonstrations in their lectures when they themselves became professors of philosophy.\nThere are infinitely many possible interpretations of imitate Popper, each defining a different behaviour for the emitator.\nMany of these ways would look very different from each other.\nEach way it corresponds to a different theory of one idea is, in Popper's mind, we're causing the observed behaviour.\nSo there is no such thing as just imitating the behaviour.\nStill less, therefore, can one discover those ideas by imitating it, one needs to know the ideas before one can imitate the behaviour.\nSo imitating behaviour cannot be how we acquire memes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=1373"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "11e6894d-3b5a-46e0-859d-3fb61dd31782": {"page_content": "Many of these ways would look very different from each other.\nEach way it corresponds to a different theory of one idea is, in Popper's mind, we're causing the observed behaviour.\nSo there is no such thing as just imitating the behaviour.\nStill less, therefore, can one discover those ideas by imitating it, one needs to know the ideas before one can imitate the behaviour.\nSo imitating behaviour cannot be how we acquire memes.\nThe hypothetical genes that caused meme replication by imitation would also have to specify whom to imitate.\nBlack more, for instance, suggests the criterion may be imitate the best imitators, but this is impossible for the same reason.\nOne can only judge how well someone is imitating if someone already knows who is guessed what, which aspect of behaviour and who's, they are imitating, and which of the circumstances they are taking into account and how?.\nThe same holds if the behaviour consists of stating the memes.\nAs Popper remarked, it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.\nOne can only state the explicit content which is insufficient to define the meaning of a meme or anything else.\nEven the most explicit of memes, such as laws, have inexpensive content without which they cannot be enacted.\nFor example, many laws refer to what is reasonable, but no one can define that attribute accurately enough to say a person from a different culture to be able to apply the definition in judging or criminal case.\nHence, we certainly do not learn what reasonable means by hearing its meaning stated, but we do learn, and the versions of it that are learned by people in the same culture are sufficiently close for laws based on it to be practicable.\nIn any case, as I remark in the previous chapter, we do not explicitly know the rules by which we behave.\nWe know the rules, meanings, and patterns of speech of our native language largely in explicitly.\nYet we pass its rules on with remarkable fidelity to the next generation, including the ability to apply them in situations the new holder has never experienced, and including patterns of speech that people explicitly try to prevent the next generation from replicating.\nPaul's there just a little comment there.\nYes, this is a remarkable thing about language acquisition that many people who have been involved in, let's say, language teaching have always been fascinated by, and that is that every English speaker, almost a English speaker, inexplicably knows the rules of English grammar.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=1464"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a9311fed-3d06-4339-ab67-9aa0f205117f": {"page_content": "Paul's there just a little comment there.\nYes, this is a remarkable thing about language acquisition that many people who have been involved in, let's say, language teaching have always been fascinated by, and that is that every English speaker, almost a English speaker, inexplicably knows the rules of English grammar.\nWhen you hear a grammatically incorrect sentence, almost everyone can recognise it, however, it's not necessarily the case that everyone can explain what the error might be.\nTo someone speaking English, learning to speak English from another culture, you might be entertaining them in your house, and you might say, have you had a drink yet?.\nThey might say in response, I have a drink, and you don't know what they mean.\nDo they mean they have had a drink, which is the past perfect tense?.\nDo they mean they want to have a drink?.\nI would like to have a drink, but they've said I have a drink in response to your question, have you had a drink?.\nWhereas a native English speaker will say, no, I have not had a drink, or yes, I have had a drink.\nThey explicitly know that this is the way in which you're supposed to respond, but a non-native English speaker who's struggling to understand the language doesn't know the grammar very well.\nEnglish teachers, people who learn to be English teachers often have to learn explicitly what the rules of grammar happen to be, just so they can explain it to the language learning.\nThis is the past perfect tense, and this is just the past simple tense, and this is the present tense, and so on.\nThey might have to learn these things.\nSo they can make the in-explicit explicit, in some cases, making the in-explicit explicit is helpful for learning.\nSometimes it might not be helpful for learning.\nYou know, language learning and teaching is a certainly a fought area.\nI did it for quite a while, and this issue about how we pass on these rules with remarkable fidelity and next generation can be a great mystery.\nAll the things about pronunciation of words, you know, the sounds and something, they become deeply ingrained over time, and some people just appear to have better ears for learning languages.\nI know I'm terrible.\nIf the language starts to deviate too much from the typical sounds that an English speaker will speak, I seem not to be able to get my mouth in the right position because there's a, in fact, that goes into phonetics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=1586"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d890f0b-ca35-4ac0-b22b-0a339e37fbb4": {"page_content": "All the things about pronunciation of words, you know, the sounds and something, they become deeply ingrained over time, and some people just appear to have better ears for learning languages.\nI know I'm terrible.\nIf the language starts to deviate too much from the typical sounds that an English speaker will speak, I seem not to be able to get my mouth in the right position because there's a, in fact, that goes into phonetics.\nThere's a huge amount of in-explicit content where your tongue actually has to be when you make certain sounds in certain other cultures.\nI've tried to learn Korean, I'm absolutely terrible at it, because the tongue has to be in different places.\nIt has to be closer or further away from the teeth than what we use in English, and so this can be hard, because Koreans, of course, naturally in explicit knowledge know where the tongue has been.\nThe entire alphabet in Korean, interesting enough, is it's an alphabet, kind of like English, except the characters, some of the characters represent the position of the tongue in the mouth, which is really cool and interesting.\nAnyway, way off topic.\nLet's go back to the book, and David writes.\nThe real situation is that people need in explicit knowledge to understand laws and other explicit statements, not vice versa.\nPhilosophers and psychologists work hard to discover and to make explicit the assumptions that our culture tacitly makes about social institutions, human nature, right and wrong, time and space, intention, causality, freedom, necessity, and so on, but we do not acquire those assumptions by reading the results of such research.\nIt is entirely the other way round.\nIf behaviour is impossible to imitate without prior knowledge of the theory causing the behaviour, how is it that apes, famously, can ape?.\nThey have means, they can learn a new way of opening a nut by watching another ape that already knows that way.\nHow is it that apes are not confused by the infinite ambiguity of what it means to imitate?.\nEven parrots, famously parrot.\nThey can commit to memory dozens of sounds that they have heard and repeat them later.\nHow do they cope with the ambiguity of which sounds to imitate and when to repeat them?.\nThey cope with it by knowing the relevant in explicit theories in advance, or rather their genes know them.\nEvolution is built into the genes of a parrot and implicit definition of what imitating means to them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=1710"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2e2a600-38a8-4a28-81a5-bb4612720d3f": {"page_content": "Even parrots, famously parrot.\nThey can commit to memory dozens of sounds that they have heard and repeat them later.\nHow do they cope with the ambiguity of which sounds to imitate and when to repeat them?.\nThey cope with it by knowing the relevant in explicit theories in advance, or rather their genes know them.\nEvolution is built into the genes of a parrot and implicit definition of what imitating means to them.\nTo them it means recording sequences of sounds that meet some inborn criterion and later replying them under conditions that meet some other inborn criterion.\nAn interesting fact follows about parrot psychology.\nThe parrot's brain must also contain a translation system that analyzes incoming nerve signals from ears and generates outgoing ones that will cause the parrot's vocal cords to play the same sounds.\nThat translation requires some quite sophisticated computation, which is encoded in genes, not names.\nIt is thought to be achieved in part by a system based on mirror neurons.\nThese are neurons that fire when an animal performs a given action, and also when the animal perceives the same action being performed by another.\nThese neurons have been identified experimentally in animals that have the capacity to imitate.\nScientists believe that human meme replication is a sophisticated form of imitation, tend to believe that mirror neurons are a key to understanding all sorts of functions of the human mind.\nUnfortunately, that cannot possibly be so.\nI'll skip the next little bit because David talks about parrotting, you know, what a parrot does.\nAnd the fact that a parrot will parrot anything, it will parrot a dog bark, it will parrot a ringing doorbell.\nA parrot seems to have no choice about the sound that it makes.\nIn fact, I might put up a more amazing, more amazing than a parrot, I have to say, is the Australian bird, the lie bird.\nIf you've never heard the lie bird before, it is far more impressive than any parrot you'll ever hear.\nThe lie bird will imitate anything.\nIt will imitate anything.\nAnd one of the most amazing things that it's imitated is an environmentalist love to use this one.\nOf course, is the imitation of a lie bird of a chainsaw, a chainsaw, a chainsaw just coming to chop down its habitat.\nI shouldn't laugh about that.\nYou know, the lie birds are fine in Australia.\nThey're not going extinct or endangered or anything.\nWe've got lots of forest, lots of bushland.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=1851"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9f2da0c1-2912-4a99-9747-8fda84b22b4b": {"page_content": "It will imitate anything.\nAnd one of the most amazing things that it's imitated is an environmentalist love to use this one.\nOf course, is the imitation of a lie bird of a chainsaw, a chainsaw, a chainsaw just coming to chop down its habitat.\nI shouldn't laugh about that.\nYou know, the lie birds are fine in Australia.\nThey're not going extinct or endangered or anything.\nWe've got lots of forest, lots of bushland.\nBut yes, the lie bird will imitate camera sounds.\nI'll play the clip.\nIf I can find the clip and I'll put it up here.\nAnd that's the parrot.\nMoving on from the lie bird, back to the book after skipping a little bit in David Wright.\nNow, imagine that a parrot had been present at Popper's lectures and learned to parrot some of Popper's favourite sentences.\nIt would, in a sense, have imitated some of Popper's ideas.\nIn principle, an interested student could later learn the ideas by listening to the parrot.\nBut the parrot would merely be transmitting those memes from one place to another, which is no more than the air in lecture theater does.\nThe parrot could not be said to have acquired the memes because it would be reproducing only some of the countless behaviours that they could produce.\nThe parrot's subsequent behaviour as a result of having learned the sounds by heart, such as its responses to questions, would not resemble Poppers.\nThe sound of the meme would be there, but its meaning would not.\nAnd it is the meaning, the knowledge that is the replicator.\nThen David talks about how the fact that the parrot is not oblivious to the sounds.\nIt doesn't indiscriminately record things like a recorder, electronic recorder, or record everything.\nThe parrot is clearly only recording specific things.\nAnd then there goes on to talk about apes.\nAnd some of aaping can be so complicated that it appears as if it's learning.\nSo, for example, if one ape learns to crack a nut better than another ape, then the other ape can tend to learn from the first ape that has improved something.\nNow, the kicker to this, the kicker to the fact that an ape can learn to use a tool, and people are unaccountably impressed by the kind of tool use that goes on among some animals.\nWe have crows in Australia as well, mentioned in Australia, when I think crows exist around the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=1981"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1087544b-744b-43a1-824b-9b1d2d6605af": {"page_content": "So, for example, if one ape learns to crack a nut better than another ape, then the other ape can tend to learn from the first ape that has improved something.\nNow, the kicker to this, the kicker to the fact that an ape can learn to use a tool, and people are unaccountably impressed by the kind of tool use that goes on among some animals.\nWe have crows in Australia as well, mentioned in Australia, when I think crows exist around the world.\nBut the tool use of the crow is often cited as a particularly impressive example of intelligence in the lower species.\nDavid writes how such activities may seem to depend upon explanation on understanding how and why each action that can be complicated, making a tool, or cracking a nut in various contexts by an ape.\nIt seems to be like learning.\nIt seems to be like explanatory knowledge.\nBut, as he says here, quote, in a remarkable series of observational and theoretical studies, the evolutionary psychologist and animal behavior researcher, Richard Byrne, has shown they, the apes, achieve this by a process that he calls behavior passing, which is analogous to the grammatical analysis of passing of human-spatial computer programs.\nAnd I won't, I think, I'm just going to encourage people to go and read the book rather than me reading it out.\nWhich seems strange, I mean, I'm kind of taking out the punchline of this, but there is this thing called behavior passing, where it's not like conjecture and refutation.\nIt is instead how there's already a repertoire of possible behaviors that an ape can undertake.\nAnd within these, this repertoire, it's like a library of possible different things that this creature can undertake, then they can be combined in different ways in order to do something that is might not have been encountered before by any members of those species.\nAnd as David says over this behavior passing and it's worth looking out, behavior passing is a very inefficient method requiring a lot of watching of behaviors that a human could mimic almost immediately by understanding their purpose.\nAlso, it allows only a few fixed options for connecting the behaviors together.\nSo only relatively simple memes can be replicated.\nApes can only copy certain individual actions instantly, the ones of which they have pre-existing knowledge through their myriad neuron system, but it takes them years to learn a repertoire of memes that involve combinations of actions.\nAnd then I'm skipping yet more, because I just want to get to this section about how humans are different.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=2076"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2e695a59-7c3f-42e1-b6fc-cf461b05c6c6": {"page_content": "Also, it allows only a few fixed options for connecting the behaviors together.\nSo only relatively simple memes can be replicated.\nApes can only copy certain individual actions instantly, the ones of which they have pre-existing knowledge through their myriad neuron system, but it takes them years to learn a repertoire of memes that involve combinations of actions.\nAnd then I'm skipping yet more, because I just want to get to this section about how humans are different.\nThey're not just imitating behavior as an ape would or as a parrot would, okay?.\nWe're categorically different.\nHow?.\nBecause David says quote, human beings acquiring human memes are doing something profoundly different when an audience is watching a lecture or a child is learning a language, their problem is almost the opposite of that of parrotting or aping.\nThe meaning of the behavior that they are observing is precisely what they are striving to discover and do not know in advance.\nThe actions themselves and even the logic of how they are connected are largely secondary and are often entirely forgotten afterwards.\nFor example, as adults we remember, few of the actual sentences from which we learn to speak.\nIf a parrot had copied snatches of poppers voice at a lecture, it would certainly have copied them with his Austrian accent.\nParrots are incapable of copying an utterance without its accent.\nBut a human student might well be unable to copy it with the accent.\nIn fact, the student might well acquire a complex meme in a lecture without being able to repeat a single sentence spoken by the lecturer, even immediately afterwards.\nIn such a case, the student has replicated the meaning, which is the whole content, of the meme without imitating any actions at all.\nAs I said, imitation is not the heart of human meme replication.\nOkay, so I'm going to pause and I'm going to end there today, maybe a little bit shorter than all, but I actually have made three podcast episodes today.\nThere's one out there, which is just me talking to camera not reading about aliens.\nOne there, which is a more carefully considered piece about cosmology and the effect on economics that cosmology has.\nAnd finally, this one today.\nSo it's been a bit of my voices starting to go.\nSo if you've enjoyed this, if you've enjoyed any of my other podcasts, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.\nIt's very valuable to me, very heartening that I've increased.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=2228"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0d82a3b-62a3-43eb-9971-992bd94735f3": {"page_content": "There's one out there, which is just me talking to camera not reading about aliens.\nOne there, which is a more carefully considered piece about cosmology and the effect on economics that cosmology has.\nAnd finally, this one today.\nSo it's been a bit of my voices starting to go.\nSo if you've enjoyed this, if you've enjoyed any of my other podcasts, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.\nIt's very valuable to me, very heartening that I've increased.\nMy number of supporters, I'm up over 20 now, which is very heartening for me.\nI'm very much enjoying doing this and we'll have a few more episodes for this chapter and move on to the next chapter.\nUnsustainable, which will be an exciting, a very exciting chapter.\nI'm not to say this is an exciting, we're getting rid of this anywhere, taking our time, getting through it, but unsustainable will be a, I don't want to say controversial, but it'll be a fun chapter when we do a mention of it.\nThank you again to everyone who's watching, everyone who's listening and to all of my Patreon subscribers.\nUntil next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhgGMKj1MOs&t=2391"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "96aa1ec8-b286-486c-a284-f86b33d6931d": {"page_content": "Hello again.\nSo chapter two now from the beginning of infinity it's called closer to reality.\nIt's a much shorter chapter and so that's helpful for me because I don't have as much time today.\nSo we'll read through our parts of it once more and I might make a few comments along the way.\nIt's called closer to reality because David is writing about how it is that we come to understand reality better.\nIn other words come closer to it, closer to our understanding of it.\nThrough our science and technology these things even though they might appear that first glance to put things between us and that reality they're the very things that help bring us closer to the reality and so he makes a very powerful point about that.\nHe begins by providing a personal anecdote and this is where as a graduate student he's talking about how he was working with some fellow students and I'll just read the parts that are relevant to set the scene.\nHe was observing galaxies through microscopes and he continues.\nThat is how astronomers used to use the Palomar Sky Survey, a collection of 1,874 photographic negatives on the sky on glass plates which showed the stars and galaxies are shapes on a white background and so David looked at one of these.\nand he describes how he encountered difficulties so I continue.\nHe continues.\nOne reason is that it is not always obvious which our galaxies and which are merely stars or other foreground objects.\nSome galaxies are easy to recognize.\nFor instance stars are never spiral or noticeably elliptical but some shapes are so faint that it is hard to tell whether they are sharp.\nSome galaxies appear small, faint and circular and some are partly obscured by other objects.\nNowadays such measurements are made by computers using sophisticated pattern matching algorithms but in those days one just had to examine each object carefully and use clues such as how fuzzy the edges looked.\nThough there are also fuzzy objects such as supernova remnants in our galaxy one used rules of thumb.\nHow would one test such a rule of thumb?.\nOne way is to select a region of the sky at random and then take a photograph of it at higher resolution so that the identification of galaxies is easier.\nThen one compares those identifications with the ones made using the rule of thumb.\nIf they differ the rule is inaccurate.\nIf they're not differ then one cannot be sure.\nOne can never be sure of course.\nSo it just pours there.\nHe says one can never be sure of course.\nDavid says this often all fallibleists do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=19"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "349e985e-9e05-4617-a45b-e34691c37aea": {"page_content": "Then one compares those identifications with the ones made using the rule of thumb.\nIf they differ the rule is inaccurate.\nIf they're not differ then one cannot be sure.\nOne can never be sure of course.\nSo it just pours there.\nHe says one can never be sure of course.\nDavid says this often all fallibleists do.\nI often bring it up as well but this idea of being sure or being certain hits are a remarkably pervasive thing that this anti fallibleism.\nScientists and philosophers as well as religious dogmatists as well as people who believe in certain kinds of religious certainty are subject to this.\nI've written a few notes about my thoughts on it.\nSo lots of people seem to want complete or final answers.\nSo people seem to seek final answers in a way.\nEven at the very beginning of the beginning of infinity David begins chapter one with a quote from John Wheeler made back in 1986 and I'll just read it for you.\nand he writes or John Wheeler said behind it all is surely an idea so simple so beautiful that when we grasp it in a decade a century or a millennium we will all say to each other how could it have been otherwise.\nSo the Wheeler quote I think can be interpreted in one of two ways.\nEither he's seeking a foundation or perhaps even some kind of certainty or on the other hand he's seeking a fundamental theory and I think he's seeking a fundamental theory but there's a misunderstanding I think at times between what people who are interested in fundamental ideas of doing and what people who are interested in final theories are seeking.\nThere's there's a huge difference.\nA fundamental theory is a theory that is implicated in many other theories which lies beneath many other theories and so it's fundamental because it's below other things but it's not necessarily foundational.\nso I think there is this difference between fundamental and foundational or even infallibleist but some people might get the sense and that quote that there's something anti-fallibleist going on.\nThe behind it all and so we get to a final theory that is so simple.\nNow I think that would be misinterpretation.\nbut I can understand how someone might read it that way.\nWhatever the case there is a pervasive meme out there that what we are seeking in science are final answers.\nIt still exists.\nIt's in the vernacular.\nI think I think it might come from religion and if this is pure speculation and I think that that might come from evolution.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=186"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "457d7a06-2f69-4aa7-ad05-b5aa2102ab3c": {"page_content": "The behind it all and so we get to a final theory that is so simple.\nNow I think that would be misinterpretation.\nbut I can understand how someone might read it that way.\nWhatever the case there is a pervasive meme out there that what we are seeking in science are final answers.\nIt still exists.\nIt's in the vernacular.\nI think I think it might come from religion and if this is pure speculation and I think that that might come from evolution.\nWhat I mean is that parents have almost always until very recently perhaps taught children in this way of don't do it.\nI'm certain.\nAre you sure?.\nI said no.\nYou must do this.\nYou have to do this.\nThere is no option so parents tend to speak in these infallibleist ways.\nThese authoritarian infallibleists ways.\nIt's kind of ingrained in the culture.\nI think that's what might have come first and what's useful first guess for our ancestors who probably got it from evolution.\nThis idea that you simply need to do what you're told because what I've done worked and so what I did is going to work for you.\nIt's the only thing I do know.\nso therefore you better do it or you'll die something like that.\nAnd so if this worked for adults to children better than simply allowing children to do absolutely anything they want.\nIn other words rediscovering the entire world themselves without any help which is really the function of parents to help children to understand the world to navigate in ways through the world.\nThe children themselves would appreciate and find fun doing.\nBut before you can have that kind of more nuanced view about children the precursor is do as you're told.\nSo I shouldn't have taught sometimes I think by this anti fallibleism idea.\nIt's ingrained.\nI think it came first.\nI think it probably came from evolution.\nAdults then spoken in fallible ways to each other because that's the way they were taught as children.\nThat evolved probably into some kind of moral laws and about a need for certainty and possibly out of this a metaphysics arose that again was founded on some kind of certainty that the gods absolutely existed and that you had to believe in them because they're definitely there.\nAnd so culture is saturated with this and history has been as well.\nPolitical movements have been and the key is these things are not extinct because although some of us realize at root there's this poisonous common core to all of this it doesn't mean that everyone is going to be a fallibleist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=366"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "201854e8-b842-41c4-8b43-5fca5005d1bc": {"page_content": "And so culture is saturated with this and history has been as well.\nPolitical movements have been and the key is these things are not extinct because although some of us realize at root there's this poisonous common core to all of this it doesn't mean that everyone is going to be a fallibleist.\nThe default position appears to be in culture now to be anti fallibleists to believe in certainties to believe we can get to some final answer that will be unchanging and it doesn't matter if you are a respected scientist or a philosopher or rationalist.\nIt's quite possible to nevertheless be saturated in anti fallibleism and yet and people are revealed by the ways in which they speak as to whether or not they fundamentally endorse this idea that you can reach final answers in science.\nYou can have complete answers.\nLet's continue with the beginning of infinity and where David is talking about looking at galaxies through a microscope because they're on photographic plates which is the way it used to be done.\nHe says I was wrong to me impressed by the mere scale of what I was looking at.\nSome people become depressed at the scale of the universe because it makes them feel insignificant.\nOther people are relieved to feel insignificant which is even worse but in any case those are mistakes.\nFeeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow or a herd of cows.\nThe universe is not there to overwhelm us.\nIt is our home and our resource.\nThe bigger the better.\nAgain here's one of those ways in which David provides a subtle introduction or preview for things to come and this is a powerful point and it's one of the ones that is most swiftly rejected in my experience when they encounter these ideas.\nThis idea that the universe is our home.\nIf we take that seriously that it's not merely our own residence or even our planet, even our solar system but the universe is our home.\nIt contains our resources.\nIt is a hostile environment but home nonetheless.\nIt's not out to kill us.\nbut it's also not out to sustain us.\nWe and the knowledge that we produce is the thing that enables us to control the implacably vast and hostile universe and so we need to work with the universe.\nIt's not against us.\nbut it's not going to go out of its way to help us either.\nIt's not a thinking thing.\nAnd he says the bigger the better and then as far as we know it seems as though the physical universe is infinite.\nHe continues.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=503"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f9340087-0c7b-4dbd-822c-f776aa6aa802": {"page_content": "but it's also not out to sustain us.\nWe and the knowledge that we produce is the thing that enables us to control the implacably vast and hostile universe and so we need to work with the universe.\nIt's not against us.\nbut it's not going to go out of its way to help us either.\nIt's not a thinking thing.\nAnd he says the bigger the better and then as far as we know it seems as though the physical universe is infinite.\nHe continues.\nBut then there is the philosophical magnitude of a cluster of galaxies.\nAs I move the crosshairs to one nondescript galaxy after another, checking it what I guess to be the center of each.\nSome whimsical thoughts occurred to me.\nI wondered whether I would be the first and last human being ever to pay conscious attention to a particular galaxy.\nI was looking at the blurry object for only a few seconds.\nYet it might be laden with meaning for all I knew.\nOkay, so this is where I'll try and summarise the remainder of what he says there.\nbut I would urge everyone to read it because his summary is far more eloquent than his actual words are going to be far more eloquent than my summary.\nBut essentially he says that this process is error prone in a sort of humorous way because as a non-expert looking at these galaxies he's prone to the kind of errors that someone who is prone more frequently to the kind of errors that someone who is expert in this might not be.\nAnd so as he's thinking about whether or not a particular galaxy that he's looking at is one that no person on Earth will ever look at again nor has ever looked at.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=640"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47e09c5b-f21e-4286-b42f-f4b4d14972dd": {"page_content": "He thinks perhaps there are planets orbiting stars in that galaxy that he's looking at and on those planets are civilisations and those civilisations have long histories and culture and he's thinking all this and he's mind is kind of expanding to the realisation that there could be so much meaning embedded in that picture and that image that well at least embedded philosophically in that image that what is behind those pixels on that photographic plate what is behind those little smudges on the photographic plate is a huge amount of meaning or what he does actually say.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=747"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "73ccfbbe-2803-40c6-9050-80a14a531a4d": {"page_content": "He asks the person that he was he asked the person that he was working with he says is that a galaxy or a star neither was the reply that is just a defect in the photographic emulsion the drastic mental gear change made me laugh my grandiose speculations about the deep meaning of what I was seeing had turned out to be in regard to this particular object nothing at all suddenly there were no people in that that image there were there was no culture there was no history and it all just vanished really quickly so he made a mistake and then he goes on to say but wait was I ever looking at a galaxy all the other blobs were in fact microscopic smudges of silver too if I misclassified the cause of all of them because it looked too much like the others why was that such a big era he says because an area in experimental science is a mistake about the cause of something like an accurate observation it is a matter of theory very little in nature is detectable by unaided human senses most of what happens is too fast too slow too big or too small to remote or too hidden behind opaque barriers or operate on principles too different from anything that influenced our evolution but in some cases we can arrange for such phenomena to become perceptible via scientific instruments we experience such instruments is bringing us closer to reality just as I felt while looking at that galactic cluster but in purely physical terms they only have a separate us further from it I could have looked up the night sky in the direction of that cluster and there would have been nothing between it in my eye but a few grams of air.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=796"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08590e01-34a3-4121-92b6-cbca8b195f19": {"page_content": "but I would have seen nothing at all I could have interposed a telescope.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9a34a15-74e1-4ceb-bfbe-90ff927d03b3": {"page_content": "and I might have seen it in the event I was interposing a telescope a camera a photographic developmental laboratory another camera to make copies of the plates a truck to bring the plates to my university and a microscope I could see the cluster far better with all that equipment in the way this is profound this idea that the technology that human beings have created because of our scientific knowledge then is the very thing which allows us to get closer to reality but in a sense it puts physical barriers between us and that reality but the reason that we do that is in order to help us correct our areas to constrain what we know I had a similar experience when I although I studied astronomy at university I didn't tend to look through telescopes very often at all what I did do was use computers so we had the Swinburn University supercomputer which is basically just a whole bunch of normal computers but all working in parallel together a room full of normal computers working in parallel and they call it a supercomputer and what we used to do were galaxy simulations we used to collide galaxies together and in particular I looked at one called up 271 and this was a pair of spiral galaxies that is in the process of colliding of course all you see all that is seen by astronomers when it looks through telescopes at a galaxy like that is a static picture the motion of the stars let alone the two galaxies is occurring on scales of millions and hundreds of millions of years it is reasonable to presume that no one alive today is going to see much in the way of motion of those two galaxies in reality we do not see them moving.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=906"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d5a0e158-4755-4038-8b47-feed8660700a": {"page_content": "but we know they are at least we do not see them moving with our naked eye we know they are because we can detect when we look more closely the red shift of the stars the the the the spectra of star reveals the direction in which parts of those galaxies are moving and so we can see that they're actually moving together we can also determine by the same methods how massive the galaxies are because with spiral galaxies they are literally spinning and the faster they're spinning the more massive the galaxies are so you can have an estimate for the mass of the galaxy so you can find an estimate for the velocity and you can find an estimate for the mass then what you can do is you can put some of this data into a supercomputer and then what you can do is you can try to guess what's going to happen next to the galaxies during the collision and after the collision will they merge together will they pass through one another it's actually possible for spiral galaxies that collide to pass through one another not unaffected but they will pass through and keep going they're kind of like clouds it's very unusual highly unlikely for stars themselves to collide even though the galaxies have because there's so much empty space in between the stars and so we will never see this galaxy pair actually colliding we will never see by which I mean able to observe the consequences of the predictions that we make unless we're still around in a long time had some hundreds of millions of years what I predicted would happen is that they would indeed combine into one single galaxy but that's based on the output of a supercomputer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1032"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d88bf7c-5b51-49e0-bb55-77ea3efe6172": {"page_content": "and it's based on a very low resolution prediction by which I mean not only do we make assumptions which are very aeroprene about the masses of these two galaxies and the velocities of these two galaxies we cannot possibly with our current technology with our supercomputer technology simulate the collision of two bodies each of which contains some hundreds of billions of stars if you want to find out what happens when a couple of hundred objects over here combine with a couple of hundred objects over there this is the famous n-body problem and that quickly becomes intractable it's very difficult to try and figure out what all those particles are doing in response to each other so what you do is instead of assuming that you've got some hundreds of billions here and some hundreds of billions here you can just use some millions here and some millions here and so you've only got some very very tiny fraction of the actual number of objects here and here and then assuming that when they collide it is similar to what happens when you've actually got the hundreds of billions where there are not that's true we'll be sorted out in use to come as the computers get more powerful and we can see whether or not we're converging on the same answer but all this is to say that all of this technology supercomputers and the software that runs on them and the observations that we make using telescopes enable us to see into the distant future it's a blurry image.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1144"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5a69fe08-e815-47c8-b533-3854d36373fb": {"page_content": "but it's better than a random guess and the better our technology becomes the more resolution we have about the future about predicting the future and this is a this is a genuine kind of prediction I'm fond of talking about prophecies where people have really unconstrained ideas about the function of knowledge but unless we have a particular interest or some people have a particular interest somewhere in doing something with up to 7.1 I think it's fair to say that given the sheer number of galaxies and stars in the universe it'll be some hundreds of millions of years before anyone's interested in going to up to 7.1 trying to I don't know use the resources there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1247"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f1c1b07a-eeb5-4b0d-8363-e82337a2ac4b": {"page_content": "okay.\nso that was a a long diversion let me go back to the beginning of infinity.\nokay.\nand I'll just I'm jumping around a little bit here.\nbut this is another interesting part a few pages back where he says the computers nowadays do the catalog of galaxies rather than having graduate students look at photographic plates.\nand he says the computers that nowadays catalog galaxies may or may not do it better than the graduate students used to.\nbut they certainly did not experience such reflections as David had as a result I mentioned this because I often hear scientific research described in a rather bleak way suggesting that it is mostly mindless toil the inventor Thomas Edison once said none of my inventions came by accident.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1310"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "babb65e5-2bbe-4678-9c60-1ffeaad454ab": {"page_content": "I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes what it boils down to is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration some people say the same about theoretical research where the perspiration phase is supposedly uncreative intellectual work such as doing algebra or translating algorithms into computer programs but the fact that a computer or robot can perform a task mindlessly there's not implied that it is a mindless task when scientists do it after all computers play chess mindlessly by exhaustively searching the consequences of all possible moves by humans achieve a similar looking functionality in a completely different way by creative and enjoyable thought perhaps those galaxy cataloging computer programs were written by those same graduates some of those same graduate students distilling what they had learned into reproducible algorithms which means that they must have learned something while performing a task that a computer performs without learning anything but more profoundly I expect that Edison was misinterpreting his own experience a trial that fails is still fun a repetitive experiment is not repetitive if one is thinking about the ideas that it is testing and the reality that is investigating that galaxy project was intended to discover with a dark matter see the next chapter really exists and it succeeded if Edison or those graduate students or any scientific researcher engaged upon the perspiration phase of discovery had really been doing it mindlessly they would be missing most of the fun which is also what largely powers that 1% inspiration so this is important and this is a theme that we will come back to that what people are has different to any other entity in the universe that we know of we are creative and so even if we're going through a an uncreative perspiration phase apparently we're doing something very different than if an automated machine was taking that task for us we are able to think about each of the steps we're able to think about other things while we're doing it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1346"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "025217fb-ce31-49cb-87a6-ba1a7ebb3652": {"page_content": "and so we are necessarily creative at all points so now what's the purpose of scientific instruments I prefaced this at the beginning of the video so let me return to the text now the primary function of the telescopes optics is to reduce the illusion that the stars are few faint twinkling and moving the same is true of every feature of the telescope and of all other scientific instruments each layer of indirectness through its associated theory corrects errors illusions misleading perspectives and gaps perhaps it is the mistaken empiricist idea of pure theory-free observation that makes it seem odd that truly accurate observation is always so hugely indirect.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1481"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce658e29-ea17-40bd-97dd-71cfd7386c13": {"page_content": "but the fact is that progress requires the application of ever more knowledge in advance of our observations and so he says even though he was mistaken in one case when he was looking at one of the smudges on the photographic plates misinterpreting that smudge as galaxy when it just turned out to be a fingerprint that concern that the rest of the images that he was looking at were similarly just smudges or weren't galaxies for some other reason can't be true because the point is that our knowledge and our technology corrects errors like that he didn't have the knowledge at a particular point but the other expert did.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1527"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "811af65d-7db6-4305-bdfc-6a6e6c43a676": {"page_content": "and so he says so I was indeed looking at galaxies observing a galaxy via specs of silver is no different in that regard from observing a garden via via images on the retina.\nokay.\nso I'm going to the conclusion now so it's a fast chapter it's a good chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1578"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3508b17e-ec42-4a67-9553-53f3000a0132": {"page_content": "and so he continues explanatory theories tell us how to build and operate instruments in exactly the right way to work this miracle like conjuring tricks and reverse such instruments fool our senses into seeing what is really there our minds through the methodological criterion that I'm mentioning chapter one conclude that a particular thing is real if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something physically all that has happened is that human beings on earth have dug up raw materials such as iron or and sand and have rearranged them still on earth into complex objects such as radio telescopes computers and display screens and now instead of looking at the sky they look at those objects they're focusing their eyes on human artifacts that are close enough to touch but their minds are focused on alien entities and processes light years away sometimes they are looking at glowing dots just as their ancestors did but on computer monitors instead of the sky sometimes they are looking at numbers or graphs but in all cases they are inspecting local phenomena pixels on a screen ink on paper and so on these things are physically very unlike stars they are much smaller they are not dominated by nuclear forces and gravity they are not capable of transmutating elements or creating life they have not been there for billions of years but when astronomers look at them they see stars.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1592"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4534bb7-4dfe-4f8f-97c9-5194f7ecab94": {"page_content": "so this is profound and this is the idea that we do not experience reality directly and even if we would take away all of that instrumentation and technology.\nand we were to lay on our backs and look up to night sky and see a star what's actually going on as David mentions in his TED talk.\nand I think he talks about this in chapter 1 I didn't mention it is light photons are striking the back of the retina eventually once they get through the cornea and causing electrical signals to be sent via the optic nerve back to the brain and in the brains and neurons are crackling away they're communicating with another and that's what we are okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1674"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae890e06-f636-44e3-b665-2c703f49ee1e": {"page_content": "so we we are a mind that's inside of that brain and however the mind works it depends at least in part for now on how the neurons transmit electricity to one another that's what we are everything else is interpretation our brain has to interpret the signals coming from the optic nerve the optic nerve is only sending signals because light has been detected at the retina and that light has only been detected at the retina because it's somehow made its way through the atmosphere from the star so this process of seeing stars or seeing anything is an extremely complex phenomena where there are many layers of interpretation between your mind and the reality out there so that's chapter 2.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1722"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ba820c0e-dd35-41ab-9608-326fd149972b": {"page_content": "I'm not sure when I'll get to chapter 3 we'll say it could be some weeks but this is kind of been fun see.\nyou.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gjyqAfw9E&t=1769"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "02d2f11c-5d32-4646-9b7a-a32228a86df3": {"page_content": "This episode of ToKCast begins now with this preamble.\nAnd it's a preamble to a rather long-winded introduction before we even get to some readings from the beginning of the infinity.\nToday's episode explains the concept of bad philosophy.\nAnd as we will come to see, bad philosophy is that set of ideas that actively prevents the growth of knowledge.\nIt is all about trying to enforce ways and means of shutting down the asking of questions or deliberately putting artificial obstacles in the way of critically and rationally evaluating claims.\nNow, as I was making my usual introduction to this episode, which I will play for you shortly, I realized upon going back to listen to it, I was assuming a little too much when it comes to bad philosophy, the bad turns that have happened with respect to philosophy, especially over recent years, I want to flesh out those a little more here and now, with just a little summary about these bad turns and where to go to find out more, some additional reading if you like.\nNow, the first of these bad turns that I mention is what's known as the Socal Hooks.\nThe Socal Hooks, or the Socal Affair, was a turning point of sorts in the recent history of philosophy.\nAlan Socal, after whom the Socal Hooks is named, is a physicist and a mathematician who was concerned that the standards of scholarship in some areas of philosophy, it was specifically concerned though, sub-parts have put it euphemistically.\nAt the other extreme, you might describe what was going on in philosophy and what he was worried about as a kind of academic fraud and the fact that this academic fraud has become the norm in some areas of philosophy and it has a lot of influence.\nNow, in short, these areas of philosophy that people are concerned about are sometimes known as post-modern philosophy.\nThere's a lot of other names for them, but that's an umbrella term.\nAnd the key feature for outsiders to philosophy to notice about post-modern philosophy is that it has a somewhat impenetrable language.\nNow, of course, this is true of many academic disciplines.\nIt's true of certain aspects of physics, any area of expertise in science, parts of medicine.\nSo when you get to the upper levels of expertise in any area, you're going to find there is a kind of jargon.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=30"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6e5eff42-3426-4df3-a905-6006f81fb6a5": {"page_content": "And the key feature for outsiders to philosophy to notice about post-modern philosophy is that it has a somewhat impenetrable language.\nNow, of course, this is true of many academic disciplines.\nIt's true of certain aspects of physics, any area of expertise in science, parts of medicine.\nSo when you get to the upper levels of expertise in any area, you're going to find there is a kind of jargon.\nBut there's a difference between honestly trying to explain things clearly using this specialist language of a particular subject and dishonestly representing what's going on in a subject area, using the language of some other subject area.\nIf that sounds confusing, well, we need to see an example in action.\nWhat's so cool was concerned about and what many of us are concerned about is the rather liberal use of terminology taken from the hard sciences and from mathematics and then repurposed for use in a completely different area in a rather dishonest way to obscure meaning rather than to clarify things.\nSo for example, here's something that is taken seriously by some post-modernists.\nThis example is by Jacques Lacar.\nIt's been published, it's an example of post-modern philosophy.\nLet's read it.\nLet's attempt to read it.\nThus by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely S-signifier over S-signifier equals S-aceted statement with S is equal to minus 1, produces S is equal to the square root of minus 1.\nSo this is what the post-modernist philosopher Jacques Lacarne wrote.\nWho knows what it means?.\nYes, it's taken out of context.\nBut even out of its context, we should be able to, if we are familiar with mathematics, attempt to understand at least some part of it.\nAnd there's nothing there that has anything to do with mathematics.\nDespite the fact it's couched in terms of mathematical formalism, it's misrepresenting mathematics.\nBut perhaps something unfair.\nPerhaps it's unfair just to pull out that weird sounding thing and claim that all post-modernism is therefore bunk.\nWell, let's have a look at something else.\nHere's something written by the French post-modernist, Borradard.\nAnd he wrote, perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflect history definitively from its end just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc81542d-e171-4624-9db4-313ad44b5000": {"page_content": "Perhaps it's unfair just to pull out that weird sounding thing and claim that all post-modernism is therefore bunk.\nWell, let's have a look at something else.\nHere's something written by the French post-modernist, Borradard.\nAnd he wrote, perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflect history definitively from its end just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes end quote.\nNow, the point about that passage is yes, it's got inpenetrable texts.\nAnd attempting to extract any useful information from it is almost impossible.\nIt's clouded in jargon.\nBut that's not the only problem.\nIt has taken terms from physics, chaotic formation, acceleration.\nAnd from mathematics, linearity, and from physics again, turbulence.\nAnd it's completely bastardized their use.\nIt's a word soup pretending to be deep.\nNow, I'm not going to provide lots of examples of this.\nAnyone who's interested can nearly go and look up post-modernism and examples of post-modernist writing from some of the greats.\nSome other names might be Jacques Derrida, Michelle Foucault.\nThese are some famous names in post-modernism.\nAnd one only needs to take a short look at anything that these guys produce to notice that it really, there's not much there.\nThere's the pretense of intellectual endeavor.\nThere's the pretense of producing knowledge.\nBut it's more akin to poetry than actual philosophy.\nNow, many people before Sokol had of course noticed this.\nMany had wondered how it is that such things got published in official journals.\nAnd they were published in official academic journals.\nWhat Sokol did that was special and different and was the first, but it certainly wasn't going to be the last, was the calling out of the emperor as having no clothes.\nBy creating a text himself.\nSo he went to the trouble of writing a post-modernist text.\nHe was a mathematician, physicist.\nHe understood the science and he decided to deliberately parody the style of writing that went on in some of these journals.\nAnd so the result of his hoax of his parody was to produce this paper, which is called transgressing the boundaries towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.\nNow, that paper, nonsense as it was, parody as it was, was not detected as nonsense or parody by the reviewers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=279"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ad2a14fa-8273-4be9-aedd-15e0fbef4872": {"page_content": "He was a mathematician, physicist.\nHe understood the science and he decided to deliberately parody the style of writing that went on in some of these journals.\nAnd so the result of his hoax of his parody was to produce this paper, which is called transgressing the boundaries towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.\nNow, that paper, nonsense as it was, parody as it was, was not detected as nonsense or parody by the reviewers.\nAnd it was submitted to a journal called social text.\nAccepted for publication and ultimately published.\nSo it was taken seriously by some post-modern philosophers, even though it was deliberately written as a parody.\nAnd even to this day it is still defended by some as actually being authentic rather than the parody that it is.\nNow arguments continue to be made today that the circle hoax did not fully demonstrate the poverty of post-modern philosophy.\nSome say it did name and demonstrate the poverty of post-modern philosophy publishing or reviewing.\nAnd people are committed now to still take post-modernism seriously.\nIn fact, more so than at the time of the circle hoax.\nThe circle hoax did not accomplish what many of us hoped it would.\nThings have gotten worse.\nBut if you're watching this or listening to this, you might very well be thinking, who cares?.\nWho cares if these people in their ivory towers want to talk nonsense?.\nWhat is the worry?.\nAside from the fact that taxpayer money and funding goes to these universities and these people remain employed not by contributing things to society.\nYou're contributing actual knowledge but by being engaged in a kind of racket and worse than a racket.\nWe'll come to that.\nWhat's the worry?.\nLike after all, some people are of course interested and I've turned for example the study of Harry Potter into a serious academic endeavor.\nThere might be some merit to that.\nBut there is something far more sinister at work with post-modernism.\nPost-modern writing and its explicit deliberate attack on clarity comes from a deeper dogma about the possibility of even speaking clearly or the purpose of speaking clearly.\nAnd the reason for this is that the doctrine of post-modernism is about denying the fact that there is anything to speak clearly about.\nThere is no objective truth on the theories and doctrines of post-modernism.\nAnd we'll come to some consequences about that.\nNow, cycle really did disrobe post-modernism back in the 90s and the mid-90s.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=402"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff292366-8790-482f-950f-20e1fb284bbe": {"page_content": "And the reason for this is that the doctrine of post-modernism is about denying the fact that there is anything to speak clearly about.\nThere is no objective truth on the theories and doctrines of post-modernism.\nAnd we'll come to some consequences about that.\nNow, cycle really did disrobe post-modernism back in the 90s and the mid-90s.\nAnd personally that was a key time for me because I was just entering university.\nand I was taking on physics and philosophy.\nSo I was well aware of the debate even back then.\nAnd I remember feeling relieved that there was a hero among the scientists who were standing up to this nonsense in academia and philosophy in particular.\nAnd I felt some hope at that time, just like the emperor's new clothes, everyone that everyone would then admit that the emperor had been called out.\nAnd there was this poverty of content in post-modernism and post-modern type thinking and that the philosophy itself was bad.\nBut I was wrong in my hopes, at least at that stage and up until now, because ever since my hopes have been dashed, things haven't gotten better, not in the universities.\nThey have gotten worse, far worse.\nThey've gotten worse in the media, they've gotten worse in education, they've gotten worse in politics.\nAnd the rate at which bad ideas are being produced in academia are accelerating.\nThe rate at which bad ideas are being produced and promoted throughout social media, traditional media, schools, the rate of that production of bad ideas is accelerating.\nAnd I mean bad ideas, not merely false ideas, bad ideas.\nI mean ideas that are calling into question the legitimacy of actual knowledge, of science of the enlightenment, of reason itself, and the legitimacy of pursuing those things.\nAnd make no mistake, in many places it's dire.\nNow happily, almost in lockstep with the rate at which these bad ideas have increased in terms of their apparent popularity and the rate at which they're being promoted to all spheres of society across many of our institutions, that has equally arisen a resistance.\nA coalition of people coming up and standing together against what is swiftly becoming, what could possibly only be described as a new religion.\nNow one of the best, most articulate thinkers and there are many to choose from here, but one of the best and most articulate amongst these thinkers amongst these public intellectuals is Brett Weinstein.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=536"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4bcc2de9-bfd3-49d8-9859-afc7f4dc0cd3": {"page_content": "A coalition of people coming up and standing together against what is swiftly becoming, what could possibly only be described as a new religion.\nNow one of the best, most articulate thinkers and there are many to choose from here, but one of the best and most articulate amongst these thinkers amongst these public intellectuals is Brett Weinstein.\nNow I've personally criticized Brett on some technical philosophical matters and matters of physics in just I think the last episode of ToKCast, or the episode before that.\nBut I can only do that.\nI can only engage in that criticism of Brett Weinstein because I do spend a lot of time listening to him because he's a worthwhile voice to listen to.\nIt's important to pay careful attention to how well he articulates some of these problems.\nWhat he says on many of these matters to do with bad philosophy, bad certain types of bad science is brilliant because he himself is a brilliant thinker.\nHe's very courageous and I've found him prescient on some of these matters.\nI'm going to play a clip for you shortly of Brett being so prescient, but just before we get to that, I'm just going to mention three of his fellow travellers with respect to all of this stuff.\nFellow travellers in the battle against the new postmodernism.\nNow traditional postmodernism, this denial of truth, this denial of the possibility of objective knowledge, denial even of reality that alone merely the denial of objective morality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=664"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c0c13bdd-3a55-49e6-a72d-c49bff1e71c2": {"page_content": "That's traditional postmodernism and that those ideas are still the underlying doctrine for everything that has happened since in the tradition of postmodernism, which has begun to push the idea that, for example, science has no special place and understanding the physical world, it pushes the idea that scientists to some extent corrupt and cannot possibly be objective and it's certainly the opinion of many of these postmodernists that scientists farm more about power and social relationships than it is about finding the truth about the physical world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=753"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4aed5db-ba45-4fce-94bd-667e4916f492": {"page_content": "In other words, people who speak like this think that what is deemed scientific knowledge is deemed scientific knowledge only because certain people with power have historically been able to claim that this is scientific knowledge that it doesn't have anything to do about encounters with objective reality that instead it's powerful white man or something like that, arguing amongst themselves and arguing at a consensus and that this is what produces scientific knowledge and it's because certain people that have traditionally had power have historically had power have simply decided arbitrarily that this is what is the best theory in science, the best explanations in science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=786"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5f43c99b-5d7e-41a2-874b-848edb90d4d6": {"page_content": "Now today in the 2010s and now into the early 2020s, the new breed of postmodernism philosophy comes to us in all sorts of guises.\nThere's cultural studies, certain breeds of anthropology, gender studies, some forms of literary and media studies, some of the humanities and some of the social sciences have been infected by this stuff, which has broadly been described by some of these academics who push back against it, grievance studies.\nWhat postmodernism today has evolved into in some places is a sole focus upon power relationships between people.\nAccording to this motor thinking, those groups of people who have historically held power have done so for illegitimate reasons and thus any knowledge associated with them, for example scientific knowledge, must be regarded as dubious because it was produced by the so-called oppressor class.\nThe consequence is today that people who appear to have been descended from those groups who had power in the past, so people in the past who had power, individuals today that are related to those people in some way, no matter how distantly related, must be judged as in some way, probable for and benefiting from those illegitimate structures.\nAnd that would include the knowledge that they produce or they're claimed to be producing objective knowledge.\nNow many others have spoken far more eloquently about obvious, but the point before us now is about the philosophy on which all of this stuff rests.\nSo once more, despite the so-called hoax, we have yet again academic journals publishing papers from university-employed intellectuals pushing dubious ideas, poorly-phrased, and even more poorly-researched.\nAnd so because the fight is an over, just like Alan Circle, some people have decided to once again reveal the poverty of ideas by committing a hoax and showing the emperor's new clothes are, in fact, non-existent.\nAnd in the most recent case, which is worth researching, looking up, and looking at the history of, it happened throughout 2019, and is known as the so-called squared hoax, or just so-called squared, or the grievance study issue.\nAnd this so-called squared event was conducted by Peter Bacosian, who was a philosopher, Helen Pluckrose, who was a writer, and James Lindsay, who's a mathematician.\nAnd they submitted absolutely ridiculous papers to a number of journals, to a number of gender study journals, and cultural studies journals, and various other journals that they've described as grievance studies.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=829"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e8597b07-a04e-4eb5-a30d-c7c5ee4e2178": {"page_content": "And this so-called squared event was conducted by Peter Bacosian, who was a philosopher, Helen Pluckrose, who was a writer, and James Lindsay, who's a mathematician.\nAnd they submitted absolutely ridiculous papers to a number of journals, to a number of gender study journals, and cultural studies journals, and various other journals that they've described as grievance studies.\nNow, I say that these were absolutely ridiculous, because for a typical person, not indoctrinated with the grievance study, nomenclature, and the grievance study, way of speaking, they weren't merely ridiculous how hilarious.\nAnd so I won't go through the details, but again, worth looking up.\nDespite the fact that they were ridiculous and hilarious, they were taken totally seriously, and published as serious pieces.\nAnd these journals that published them are themselves in a broader sense, driving a philosophy, which itself drives political movements, political movements of grievance, and rather than summarize the papers, I'll just point you to Google, and just go to Google and Google's so-called squared, or the grievance studies are fair.\nAgain, why be interested in this?.\nWhy be animated by any of this?.\nPhilosophers really do tend to have the ear of people in academia, in the universities.\nAnd moreover, those same intellectuals have the ear of people who write school curricula.\nSo school syllabuses, where students who go off to primary school and secondary school, are taught things that are written by people in committees.\nI know this, I've been on some of these committees, and these committees consult very heavily with university academics.\nAnd in particular, these kind of philosophers.\nThese kind of philosophers are desperate to have input into such school curricula, because if you can get them young, we know.\nThat's a good way to change society from the ground up.\nMoreover, this material, not only does it get into school curricula, it gets into traditional media.\nBecause the media can at times, journalists can at times be rather uncritical.\nIf someone is employed at a university and they've got a PhD and the title of professor, and if they're interviewed about important issues, like racism or discrimination or the law or science, the media takes them seriously.\nThey want to have expert opinion after all.\nAnd if the media takes them seriously, so too will politicians eventually, and it becomes part of the moral zeitgeist, the background culture, the difference to expertise in the community has two sides to it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=856"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "afd3d552-b053-4db8-b324-5d4afae4fa97": {"page_content": "If someone is employed at a university and they've got a PhD and the title of professor, and if they're interviewed about important issues, like racism or discrimination or the law or science, the media takes them seriously.\nThey want to have expert opinion after all.\nAnd if the media takes them seriously, so too will politicians eventually, and it becomes part of the moral zeitgeist, the background culture, the difference to expertise in the community has two sides to it.\nOn the one hand, in times of crisis, it can cause people to swiftly turn to the people who've got genuine knowledge and ability capability to solve pressing problems that society has.\nAnd that's important.\nThat's important to have a difference probably isn't the best word, but a healthy respect for expertise.\nBut on the other hand, this difference can turn from being mere respect into a granting of authority to experts over matters they don't really have much business in.\nOr where the expert's expertise is merely illusory.\nThey're not really experts because there's no actual subject matter there over which they can be experts.\nAnd this is what postmodernism often is.\nAnd what it is criticized as.\nI subject with very little content.\nBut of course it should be media or the media's, and indeed everyone's responsibility to critically assess which experts are genuinely and honestly, trying to solve problems, and which on the other hand are attempting to make a grab for power and authority.\nAnd presently as I write this in August 2020, there are still rights going on in some places where there have not been rights for many years, certainly not this intensity.\nAnd there are calls for revolution and changing of entire systems of governance.\nAnd yes, this has happened before.\nThere is to some extent a tradition of calling for revolutions.\nBut this latest one has a somewhat different flavour.\nEven if it might have happened before.\nIt's had a different flavour to anything that's happened in my life certainly.\nAnd the different flavour is in saying that the present traditions, cultures and institutions that exist today in what in the beginning of infinity sense we might describe as a tradition of criticism.\nAnd the enlightenment is itself being described as a source of great evil.\nAnd that it itself needs to be uprooted and replaced by something else, which is never properly specified.\nAnd so this is a worry.\nThese calls for revolution don't come from nowhere.\nThey don't exist in a vacuum.\nThere are bad ideas at the heart of all this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1108"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "397b1141-4d10-41de-901c-32c5e5e97ac6": {"page_content": "And the enlightenment is itself being described as a source of great evil.\nAnd that it itself needs to be uprooted and replaced by something else, which is never properly specified.\nAnd so this is a worry.\nThese calls for revolution don't come from nowhere.\nThey don't exist in a vacuum.\nThere are bad ideas at the heart of all this.\nThe ideas come from the university and they spill out from the university into wider society.\nSo before I get to the actual introduction, this is the preamble to remember, the preamble to the introduction and then we'll get to the readings.\nBefore I get to the introduction of days episode I just want to play a short clip of the brilliant Brett Weinstein, himself speaking in early 2019.\nSo early 2019 this is cast your mind back before Corona before some of the worst riots that were happening across the United States, across Europe that made it to certain parts of Australia.\nBefore all the protests, the marches, the tearing down of monuments, the defacing of things.\nBefore all of that Brett Weinstein himself found himself in a very difficult situation where at his place of employment where he was working as a professor of biology, evergreen university, he was protested by a mob and only be described as that.\nProtest might be euphemistic as well.\nAnd eventually he was driven out, a fourth to resign.\nAnd so that was early 2019.\nAnd at that time he said this.\nI have to say I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I'm invited I make the same point which is this isn't about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses.\nThis is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization and it's spreading.\nAnd college campuses may be the first dramatic battle.\nbut of course this is going to find its way into the courts.\nIt's already found its way into the tech sector.\nIt's going to find its way to the highest levels of governance if we're not careful and it actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue to function.\nHow is it going to this point?.\nIn part it has gotten to this point because we let it fester.\nThese ideas were wrong when they first took hold in the academy and instead of shutting them down we created phony fields that act as a kind of analytical affirmative action where ideas that do not deserve to survive are given sustenance.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d95f1e56-4966-4c3e-9a87-19f0e259a786": {"page_content": "How is it going to this point?.\nIn part it has gotten to this point because we let it fester.\nThese ideas were wrong when they first took hold in the academy and instead of shutting them down we created phony fields that act as a kind of analytical affirmative action where ideas that do not deserve to survive are given sustenance.\nThese ideas are so toxic and so ill conceived that to the extent that they are allowed to hold sway as if one truth is equal to every other truth.\nMy truth is as good as your truth to the extent that that idea is allowed to pervade other institutions on which civilization depends civilization will come apart.\nSo we have to fight this and don't get the sense that it's just about college campuses or kids overreacting because that ain't what this is.\nThis is far more important than that.\nThat's quite a set of observations and quite a warning about how university campuses are just the first place where this might have started, dramatic as it is in universities and what's happened.\nIt's spilled out onto the streets in many places.\nIt resulted in people seriously calling for what happened at Evergreen University was that the students called for essentially the upending of the way in which the university structure was had been built and even though Evergreen University was a very, very liberal arts college and so these people were politically already from one side of politics.\nIt's been taken even further such that someone who is extremely liberal like Brett Weinstein was driven out.\nIt's been spilling out of universities for a long time.\nI know something about schools.\nIt's in schools already.\nIt's been in school since the 90s and so what we tend to get less of is not a celebration of all that is great and all that is good and ways in which we can preserve traditions that work and traditions of criticism that work.\nInstead we talk about the ways in which structures can be destroyed or brought down or the ways in which we can transgress boundaries, for example.\nI've got some boundaries there's very much a theme that was there when I was at school sort of mid early 90s kind of thing and it's still kind of there now.\nIt's an explicit theme that runs throughout English syllabi, for example.\nPostmodernism drives large parts of the school curriculum and this should be a concern for whatever other concerns one has about schooling.\nThis should be a concern to people.\nIt is only a small group of academics after all that are generating these bad ideas in the universities.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1393"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ecdb2df-9c32-462d-b592-073941fbf448": {"page_content": "It's an explicit theme that runs throughout English syllabi, for example.\nPostmodernism drives large parts of the school curriculum and this should be a concern for whatever other concerns one has about schooling.\nThis should be a concern to people.\nIt is only a small group of academics after all that are generating these bad ideas in the universities.\nThese bad philosophies are not being produced typically in the school of physics or chemistry or medicine or engineering or history, sometimes history.\nThey're mainly being produced in schools of sociology, anthropology and philosophy and they have great influence and they're gaining ever more actual authority as some of these people who produced them rise through the ranks of academia and either become or influence administrators.\nAnd once these tenants become customer practice and received wisdom at universities, they then become a background to culture and as I say, they infiltrate the media and politics and bureaucracy in the government.\nAnd so this is why this chapter about to read about bad philosophy is so important right now.\nand I fear it's going to become only more and more important as time goes on until, until such a day and if such a day, but we hope until bad philosophy is no longer on the ascendancy and until bad philosophy is no longer on the ascendancy intellectual types have to continue to call it out because it undergirds so much that is bad in politics or bad in broader education.\nIt actively prevents knowledge, objective knowledge from being produced not least because there's a chilling effect on the very active criticism or even simply attempting to create knowledge that just might be a counter to the dominant political narrative that exists.\nIt has a chilling effect on the freedom of speech.\nLet's put that plainly.\nThese philosophies have at their heart certain modes of thinking which prevent people from criticizing them.\nNow to some this might seem like hyperbole and to me I can see in that way as well.\nI encounter none of what Brett said earlier.\nThe real concerns about this and what happened to Brett, for example.\nIt's never happened to me.\nWhat happened to him isn't part of my day to day.\nI only witnessed these kind of weird events right defacing of monuments, people shouting at each other without listening to each other acts of violence, protesting.\nI watch this from afar.\nIt's not something that affects me each and every day.\nBut Brett Weinstein does speak about the breakdown of the logic of civilization and in some places we can see that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1559"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c4eebf0-a633-4953-867f-e8635dd7c267": {"page_content": "It's never happened to me.\nWhat happened to him isn't part of my day to day.\nI only witnessed these kind of weird events right defacing of monuments, people shouting at each other without listening to each other acts of violence, protesting.\nI watch this from afar.\nIt's not something that affects me each and every day.\nBut Brett Weinstein does speak about the breakdown of the logic of civilization and in some places we can see that.\nA riot is just that and the important thing is we have less reason to write than ever before, especially in the West in developed countries.\nLife is better than it ever has been for almost everyone and is getting better continually.\nBut the rioting is increased.\nPublic protests have increased.\nPeople are speaking as if things are getting worse all the while they're actually getting better.\nPutting aside parochial concerns that are just happening right now about viruses and lockdowns.\nSo this is the breakdown of logic.\nThings are getting better.\nPeople are saying they are worse.\nThings continue to get better.\nPeople are writing because they say nothing has changed.\nNow these ideas, these bad philosophies driving this intense feeling that things are really terrible things are getting worse or not changing.\nHave tested themselves already in the laboratory of the university and they were not sufficiently criticized while still in the university.\nAnd so because they've been allowed to thrive and being cultured and have now sprung out of the university as anti-rational memes do as my devices so to speak, they have entered schools to some extent and to an increasing extent and to the media to another extent and they're proliferating across social media and informing the worldview of many, many people, including political leaders and others who work in government who hold positions of power.\nSo this is the context.\nAnd I might say urgent context in which we encounter this chapter from the beginning of infinity.\nAs I say, the riots, some of the civil unrest in recent months has not occurred in a vacuum.\nThere is a philosophy at the heart of this even if it does not seem to be a struggle between opposing philosophies but rather something more upstream, so to speak, like me political differences.\nSo yeah, it's not me political differences.\nIt's not merely left versus right.\nIt's not merely authoritarians versus libertarians.\nIt's also about the philosophy that holds whether or not there's a possibility of uncovering objective knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1702"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "67ff44ff-b3aa-443a-a849-0cb6d4632edf": {"page_content": "There is a philosophy at the heart of this even if it does not seem to be a struggle between opposing philosophies but rather something more upstream, so to speak, like me political differences.\nSo yeah, it's not me political differences.\nIt's not merely left versus right.\nIt's not merely authoritarians versus libertarians.\nIt's also about the philosophy that holds whether or not there's a possibility of uncovering objective knowledge.\nAnd whether or not objective knowledge and coming to uncover it coming to discover objective knowledge to create objective knowledge, whether or not that can help resolve differences.\nAnd if we have differences, how we go about resolving those differences.\nWhether we should talk those differences through.\nSo we need to take a step back.\nBack before the present moment and all the strife and before even the last circle hopes and the next chapter is going to allow us to do this.\nSo finally, let's actually get into it.\nWell, my other introduction to it.\nAnd for that, I'm going to change it in yellow.\nAnd welcome to episode 28.\nThis is chapter 12, a physicist history of bad philosophy with some remarks on bad science.\nNow, I try not to have favorite chapters, but if someone was to ask me if I was to only read one chapter out of all of the beginning of infinity, it would probably be this one.\nAnd for me, it's certainly a personal one through through a few anecdotes as we go through this chapter.\nIt's a personal one for me because it brings together physics and philosophy in a way that I encountered both subjects.\nIt tries to explain why it is that physics can be so confusing sometimes for undergraduates who take on a degree in physics and why philosophy can sometimes be so disappointing at university for an undergraduate who takes on philosophy at university.\nAnd I did both of these things and so it resonated with me.\nI thought, as I was reading through it, I just found myself nodding the entire time going, yes, that was precisely my experience.\nThis is what I understand philosophy as presented at the university to be about.\nSo I studied physics at university and there were certain disappointments about studying physics at university, not least of which was the quantum mechanics material, which we've been through previously.\nAnd I was disappointed in the way it was presented at university because it was presented in this obscure way.\nThe mystery was really amped up.\nIt was presented as if, well, you don't need to fully understand this.\nIt was very much instrumentalist in that way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1848"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b55cc4a3-365f-4871-bc18-f499ea57075b": {"page_content": "So I studied physics at university and there were certain disappointments about studying physics at university, not least of which was the quantum mechanics material, which we've been through previously.\nAnd I was disappointed in the way it was presented at university because it was presented in this obscure way.\nThe mystery was really amped up.\nIt was presented as if, well, you don't need to fully understand this.\nIt was very much instrumentalist in that way.\nInstead, it was all about, can you solve these numerical problems?.\nCan you work through these tutorial sets?.\nAnd that was the measure by which you were successful at university in doing physics, was whether or not you could basically do maths tests repeatedly.\nOkay, there was less in terms of trying to explain what was actually going on with many of the experiments.\nAnd philosophy was disappointing for a whole different set of reasons.\nObviously, there's no numerical problems that need to be solved there.\nHowever, there's a new kind of vocabulary that needs to be used.\nAnd what I found was that as I went through undergraduate philosophy, it became increasingly opaque to analysis.\nIt was just more and more difficult to understand what in fact was being said.\nAnd it filters, though, the lecturers, or the books that we were, or the readings we were asked to undertake were trying to obscure the point.\nAnd when the point was eliminated, it was found to be so tried or trivial and obvious that one was like feeling as though there was little substance to philosophy.\nAnd that the rumors were true.\nAnd when I say rumors, I mean, I heard from many people that philosophy is a fairly worthless discipline at university.\nAnd to some extent, the rumors were indeed true.\nSome watching this now might still wonder what the importance of philosophy is.\nPhilosophy as an academic discipline, it garners possibly the least respect of any subject that can be taken at university.\nAlthough these days, we do hear people sort of tongue in cheek talking about certain kinds of dance, theory that one might take on at university, and that these kind of degree programs are even more useless.\nAnd we have to understand there are two ways in which to refer to philosophy.\nThere's philosophy, the academic discipline, the way in which it is presented at university, and there is philosophy as it's actually done by good philosophers.\nGood philosophers include Poppa.\nAnd I should say here right at the outset that I read very little Poppa at university.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9766ddf3-492c-4f44-9271-882588d1d3dd": {"page_content": "And we have to understand there are two ways in which to refer to philosophy.\nThere's philosophy, the academic discipline, the way in which it is presented at university, and there is philosophy as it's actually done by good philosophers.\nGood philosophers include Poppa.\nAnd I should say here right at the outset that I read very little Poppa at university.\nDespite the fact, I undertook a degree, which was subtitled philosophy of science, Bachelor of Science, Philosophy of Science, any of my philosophy of science degree, I read very little Poppa.\nIt wasn't until later that in countering David Deutsch's work, that I realized there was this guy called Carl Poppa, and he explained philosophy of science.\nAnd it was then that I took up the reading of Carl Poppa outside of my university course.\nAnd so, although I am in some sense credentialed in the philosophy of science, none of the knowledge that I were very little of the knowledge that I gained at university, actually makes me feel equipped to talk about the philosophy of science.\nInstead, what makes me feel equipped to talk about the philosophy of science, when I do, is the reading that I did beyond the university, specifically the reading I did of Carl Poppa's work.\nSo the negative experience that I had with philosophy at university, or largely had, I should say there were bright points.\nI did read a lot of good philosophers and philosophies, and I found it interesting as an intellectual exercise, or an intellectual puzzle, so to speak.\nIt was kind of fun.\nThat kind of philosophy is like doing a crossword puzzle.\nIt's just fun to do for some people.\nHowever, there was very little of practical use in many of the philosophers that I read.\nGood as those philosophers were.\nBrilliant as those philosophers were.\nFew of them were able to explain, for example, how it is that science worked, which is what I was really interested in.\nOr what the difference between, let's say science and mathematics happened to be.\nOr indeed, what the purpose of philosophy was in the first place.\nAll of these things are practical problems that for someone interested in science, mathematics, philosophy.\nIt would be interested in finding out concrete answers too.\nInstead, some philosophers were kind of daydreamers, on the one hand, or, well, let's just put it plainly, academic frauds on the other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=2102"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c7f1575e-b5a7-4ea7-95ae-1158a10c58c1": {"page_content": "Or what the difference between, let's say science and mathematics happened to be.\nOr indeed, what the purpose of philosophy was in the first place.\nAll of these things are practical problems that for someone interested in science, mathematics, philosophy.\nIt would be interested in finding out concrete answers too.\nInstead, some philosophers were kind of daydreamers, on the one hand, or, well, let's just put it plainly, academic frauds on the other.\nThey were pretending to solve problems that were either not problems in the first place, or hiding the fact that they were solving the problem, burying the problem, behind a veneer of complicated language.\nAnd so, because there is this way of presenting philosophy at universities, where we have certain philosophers who build up grand philosophical structures on the one hand, solving esoteric-type problems in philosophy.\nOr on the other, these linguistic philosophers that were going to come to, who were obscuring the real richness of the problems in philosophy, behind all of this verbiage and new lexicon and weird words that they invent, and just generally not speaking clearly.\nThis is what a whole lot of philosophers have done traditionally, and continue to do.\nThat because of these two issues, philosophers difficult to understand on the one hand and not really solving any problems, and philosophers hiding the ball when it comes to their use of language and trying to hide the actual problems that are important to solve in philosophy.\nBecause we have this issue of academic, in academic philosophy, quite rightly a bunch of people, especially scientific types, dismiss philosophy altogether, because they look at what philosophy is as an academic discipline in many of the universities.\nProbably not all, but certainly in the universities that I went through, and one doesn't need to try hard with Google to find out that what subjects are offered to undergraduates, especially at universities today, don't differ much from the kind of academic subjects that were offered in philosophy 20 years ago, in some senses they've even gone downhill.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=2217"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "26c5a4c5-a757-4978-9582-3b9e7443fa8c": {"page_content": "It's quite right that there are certain scientific types who say they've got no time for philosophy, because they're interested in reality, so they say, in the nuts and bolts of how things work, prominent public intellectuals like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, they've made disparaging remarks over the years about philosophy, and they can't really be blamed for this to a large extent, because if their experience of academic philosophy is in speaking to certain academic philosophers, or even perhaps students undertaking philosophy at university, then they'll be left with the impression that it's an opaque, pointless exercise in gazing at one's navel, as the cliche occurs.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=2347"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50b66c45-116a-4b1b-b2ac-b7032f240245": {"page_content": "But it's important to note that this idea that philosophy cannot be used to solve practical problems, there has no practical use, that if you want to understand reality that science is the only real game in town, it's important to understand that that position is a philosophy, that these people who espouse those kind of sentiments, that disparage philosophy as a discipline in its entirety, not just the academic thing as it's taught at university, but philosophy class subject, so to speak, that they have a philosophy in mind, they have a philosophy of reality, they have a certain materialism one might imagine about how reality is organized, that if you want to understand the nuts and bolts of reality, that understanding science is the only way to go about that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=2394"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "895086ff-8f14-41a6-9933-59774d0acfa4": {"page_content": "Of course, this closes them off to a whole bunch of other things, things that are not, let's say, part of the physical universe, that might be part of abstract reality, and we've talked about the reality of abstractions here in this series, and David's talked about it in the beginning of infinity, so we know that abstract entities exist, and that they have real effects in the world, and there are certain kinds of abstract reality, abstract entities, that only a philosophical understanding can help us to appreciate how those things work.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=2441"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "653a9fed-b1d2-4b42-b3d1-2c587b7f2dc1": {"page_content": "The idea that science is the only way in which we can understand reality as a whole is itself a philosophy, and it's a claim about science without being a part of science, so automatically anyone who makes such a claim that philosophy is useless, or that philosophy isn't really needed, that science can do everything, has made a philosophical claim, because it's not a claim from within science.\nAnd today we've got a new kind of philosopher, and you kind of folk philosopher we might say, one who claims that they never do philosophy, or don't do philosophy, or pretend that they're not interested in philosophy because they've stepped beyond it, they've evolved intellectually beyond what philosophy can possibly offer to become meta in some way, they're meta philosophers, they're beyond philosophy.\nThere's a long tradition of this kind of thing as well.\nThe kind of thinker that asserts that the language in the words are barely sufficient capture the complexity of their thoughts.\nNow, there's certainly a truth to this in some ways.\nThere's, I speak a lot about in explicit knowledge, and David explains what in explicit knowledge is in the beginning of the infinity.\nAnd so it is absolutely true that language cannot capture everything about reality to the level of clarity that we might wish.\nBut some people elevate that notion, that very real problem, to a new philosophy, and give themselves an excuse, I would argue, in not speaking clearly, or not striving for clarity, and that they're used to obscure language, or their use of neologisms, simply making up new words, is explained by the fact that languages simply unable to do the job of conveying their deepest, most interesting thoughts to the world.\nAnd so therefore, they have to explain using flowery language to the rest of us.\nAnd that if you don't understand what the new flowery language really means, then it's a deficiency on your part, not their part.\nThey're doing their best with the crude tools of language they have.\nAnd so we see this, we've seen this with theologians traditionally.\nYou ask a theologian, a religious explanation, and you'll typically get something that is quite complicated or mystical, difficult to understand.\nAnd if you ask what that means, you'll get even more obscure mystical explanation.\nAnd so the inexplicable is supposed to explain the inexplicable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=2473"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "288fb666-364a-4145-b25e-fc0636c94f0c": {"page_content": "They're doing their best with the crude tools of language they have.\nAnd so we see this, we've seen this with theologians traditionally.\nYou ask a theologian, a religious explanation, and you'll typically get something that is quite complicated or mystical, difficult to understand.\nAnd if you ask what that means, you'll get even more obscure mystical explanation.\nAnd so the inexplicable is supposed to explain the inexplicable.\nSo when it comes to this idea that language struggles to explain the most complicated concepts and ideas that we have, there's a truth there, but there's a difference between honestly trying to communicate clearly and trying to get a complicated idea, trying to get that into the minds of other people by using the simplest language that one can conjure in the moment.\nAnd the antithesis of that, of having perhaps not a complicated idea but a very simple idea, and then dressing that in very complicated sounding language, so that it seems as though one has a deeper or more insightful point than one really does.\nAnd I think there are dishonest actors in philosophy.\nThere's not many of them, but they're out there.\nAnd when it comes to things like postmodernism, it's very difficult to tell at times whether the person that you're speaking with, or communicating with, who speaks in postmodernist type language or relatively slight language, whether they are honestly deluded in some way and think that there is something there that they're trying to explain, whether they've been perhaps even inculcated or brainwashed to some extent with these weird ideas in this weird language.\nThat's a possibility that they're honestly trying to convey the contents of their mind using complicated sounded language that none of us can quite get a handle on.\nOr on the other hand, they're simply pretending because there are cranks out there and cranking a technical term of someone pretending to have knowledge that they don't actually have or pretending to have confidence that they don't actually have for a whole bunch of reasons and there could be a whole bunch of psychological reasons for that.\nNow in academia, is this custom in practice?.\nNo.\nThe overwhelming majority of people in intellectual life in academia and university academia are honestly striving to create new knowledge, to pass on the knowledge that civilization has learned and to do that with the utmost clarity, but not everyone.\nAnd in philosophy, this is a particular, particular challenge because some of the ideas are extremely complicated and subtle.\nand so it is difficult to get that idea across.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b026ee5-369a-4c4b-af30-fee0a19cae2f": {"page_content": "Now in academia, is this custom in practice?.\nNo.\nThe overwhelming majority of people in intellectual life in academia and university academia are honestly striving to create new knowledge, to pass on the knowledge that civilization has learned and to do that with the utmost clarity, but not everyone.\nAnd in philosophy, this is a particular, particular challenge because some of the ideas are extremely complicated and subtle.\nand so it is difficult to get that idea across.\nNo matter the clarity of the language one tries to use, but there is another kind of philosopher to my mind who isn't striving always for clarity.\nNow this dishonest type of philosopher has been getting more and more attention lately.\nIt's been a revival to some extent of the idea of the so-called hoax.\nNow for anyone who doesn't know, just explaining this off the top of my head, there was, there he is, a physicist, his name is Alan Sokel and he noticed that there were parts of philosophy where the language being used was simply ridiculous, that they would borrow terms from science or mathematics and use them in philosophical papers in completely ridiculous ways in completely illogical, irrational, unreasonable ways to construct texts that made no sense at all.\nBut these texts would go on to be published in journals and this would preserve the careers of these philosophers because there is that old adage published or perish, basically meaning if you're an academic and you aren't consistently publishing work, then you might not have your job very long because one of your tasks as an academic at a university is to increase the prestige of the university by continually appearing in journals, by getting published professionally.\nNow there could be a racket here created in certain areas where the journal editors, where the journal editors and the people who submit papers to the journals just have a non-verbal understanding if one might put it that way.\nThey might have an unspoken understanding no matter what kind of rubbish is submitted to the journal, it will get published anyway because we're all in this together of pretending that there's something here when there's nothing there.\nIt's very much an emperor, the emperor's new clothes kind of idea.\nNow this physicist Alan Circle wasn't the first to notice that it seemed as though there was this kind of dishonesty going on in areas of philosophy.\nThese areas of philosophy, by the way, sometimes go under the name of postmodernism or relativism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=104"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ee143b15-5365-4a63-984d-66f6c53d5a20": {"page_content": "It's very much an emperor, the emperor's new clothes kind of idea.\nNow this physicist Alan Circle wasn't the first to notice that it seemed as though there was this kind of dishonesty going on in areas of philosophy.\nThese areas of philosophy, by the way, sometimes go under the name of postmodernism or relativism.\nAnd I should say that when I was at university and studying philosophy, there was a pretty sharp divide between what were known as the analytic philosophers who were honestly striving to create new knowledge in philosophy and solve problems.\nThey were the people working on philosophical logic.\nThey were the people working on the philosophy of biology, for example.\nPeople working on ethics.\nPeople just trying to understand what it was that Descartes was really trying to say in his meditations, for example.\nAnd then there were the other kinds of philosophers who weren't doing that who I attended a couple of lectures here and there where one could tell that there wasn't any real substance there that it was all about trying to use fancy sounding language.\nIt was more an exercise in kind of weird abstract poetry to some extent, although they would never admit that.\nThey would never say that either.\nAnd one is left feeling as though one lacks a certain level of intelligence if they don't understand that these papers are being written.\nAnyway, whatever the case, Alan Soakle, the physicist, decided he would write a paper that was complete and utter nonsense from a physics perspective, but using lots of physics terms and he tried to see whether he could get this nonsense published in an actual journal and he succeeded.\nAnd that has ever since been known as the Soakle hoax and he wrote a book about it.\nAnd since then, there have been other examples of this, especially in recent years of academics, proper academics, writing hoax fictional nonsense papers and submitting them to certain journals to see if they'll get through what's called the refereeing process.\nNow, one presumes in physics, chemistry, the hard sciences, medicine, the various other academic disciplines that this tends not to happen.\nIt's not impossible, okay?.\nArea is the normal state of things.\nIt's not impossible for a fraud to happen in science.\nScientific fraud does happen.\nBut it's the exception, not the rule.\nAnd one hasn't seen so far as I know.\nAnyone in the humanities writing a nonsense paper in physics and having it published by a good journal in physics.\nThat simply tends not to happen.\nThat doesn't happen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=104"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c61e8366-10b6-4616-8790-0a2586e35a37": {"page_content": "It's not impossible, okay?.\nArea is the normal state of things.\nIt's not impossible for a fraud to happen in science.\nScientific fraud does happen.\nBut it's the exception, not the rule.\nAnd one hasn't seen so far as I know.\nAnyone in the humanities writing a nonsense paper in physics and having it published by a good journal in physics.\nThat simply tends not to happen.\nThat doesn't happen.\nBut more than once, hard scientists or serious people in the humanities have written nonsense papers, submitted them to these journals, these social science journals and had them published.\nThat's a real problem.\nSo Alan Circle wrote a book about his attempt at doing this hoax and I strongly recommend the book to you.\nBut if you're not going to read the whole book, reading Richard Dawkins' review of the book online is just fantastic.\nI mean, when Richard Dawkins wants to make a withering critique of someone, he certainly can.\nI just want to read the first paragraph of Professor Dawkins' review of Alan Circle's book about fraud in the humanities, specifically fraud in philosophy and areas of philosophy.\nAnd what Dawkins wrote was this.\nSuppose you are an intellectual imposter with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life.\nCollect a court here of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful, yellow, highlighter.\nWhat kind of literary style would you cultivate?.\nNot a lucid one surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.\nEnd quote.\nNow, I just, I love that quote.\nI fell in love with it soon after it was published in 1998 because I was, like I say, right in the middle of a degree in this stuff and struggling to sift the sense from the nonsense coming from my own lectures at university.\nNow, you tend to get clarity in the astrophysics lectures and the classical physics lectures and the electro dynamics lectures and the relativity lectures.\nEven if sometimes what would happen in the quantum physics lectures was a certain amount of nonsense.\nIn the School of Philosophy, you did get this sense that there was a sharp divide, as I say, between those ones who were trying to make sense and those who are summed up by that quote that I just read from Professor Dawkins, you know, not speaking lucidly because not speaking, because in speaking lucidly, if you tried to speak clearly, that would expose a lack of content.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=104"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c1e18020-2586-4ff1-b9b0-e60d2fb3b3c2": {"page_content": "Even if sometimes what would happen in the quantum physics lectures was a certain amount of nonsense.\nIn the School of Philosophy, you did get this sense that there was a sharp divide, as I say, between those ones who were trying to make sense and those who are summed up by that quote that I just read from Professor Dawkins, you know, not speaking lucidly because not speaking, because in speaking lucidly, if you tried to speak clearly, that would expose a lack of content.\nAnd this has been a great rule of thumb for me in my own mind.\nWhen I hear someone and they say or write something and at first glance I don't understand it.\nI've got two ways to go either.\nThe content of the idea really is so subtle and complicated that persevering will reveal the gem of truth or the kernel of truth in the middle of that.\nOr they're trying to hide a lack of content and it tends to be easy to find if it's one or the other.\nBy simply looking at what else has been written by this person?.\nSo by way of example, when it comes to making sense or not of postmodernism, let's just look at Jacques Derrida.\nThere he is.\nLet me read a short passage from Derrida and see what we can understand of his work.\nDerrida was the founder of the postmodern philosophy called deconstructionism.\nAnd this philosophy is close to my heart because it's ubiquitous in schools now.\nIn high schools, the deconstruction of texts and artworks and of anything else really is the flavor of the month and has been for a long time.\nSo rather than constructing or focusing on the constructing and creating of new artworks, new texts, it's more about dismantling and pulling apart.\nThis philosophy holds that symbols, language, for example, or whatever else one might choose to use, is insufficient to the task of capturing or reality at all.\nNow, as a fallibleist, I regard language and other modes of representation as necessarily imperfect, but this is to say that whatever representation we do use, for example, if one uses language to describe or explain something, the extent to which this description or explanation can be improved and become more accurate over time has no limit.\nWe make objective progress, but a deconstructionist takes the opposite view.\nThere's no possibility of making progress or of coming to represent or model something better.\nAnd so they see their task as taking apart any attempt to do so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "821c6010-fef7-485e-8969-cd5c993179cb": {"page_content": "We make objective progress, but a deconstructionist takes the opposite view.\nThere's no possibility of making progress or of coming to represent or model something better.\nAnd so they see their task as taking apart any attempt to do so.\nIt is destructive, not in order to improve in order to simply make the trivial point.\nThis is not the ultimate truth, and that's because there is no ultimate truth or anything worth finding.\nSo that's the point of deconstructionism.\nBut let's read a passage from one of Derrida's more famous works, his book, Writing and Difference, and see if we can make head or tails of it.\nSo here's the quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=3325"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "88b88fc1-9d30-4052-9917-dc46db3fc2aa": {"page_content": "Quote, That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche or Heidegger, and philosophy should still wander towards the meaning of its death, or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying, that philosophy died one day within history, or that it has always fared on its own agony on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to non-philosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring, that beyond the death or the dying, nature of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, but still has a future, or even, as it is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store, or more strangely still, that the future itself has a future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=3367"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "424c7ee5-e964-45f5-b357-feb2a77f4dc0": {"page_content": "All these are unanswerable questions, by right of birth, and for one time at least, these problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve.\nEnd quote.\nSo that's Derrida's writing, and what is always so offensive to me about the postmodernists, and postmodern writing, are the run on sentences.\nThe style is bad.\nI mean, putting aside the substance, we're strictly speaking if we were to analyze this, and I cannot be bothered getting into an analytical assessment of what's going on there.\nI don't want to evaluate the content here because it's just full of contradictions, but they don't mind contradictions.\nThey don't mind violating the law of the excluded middle.\nThey don't mind violating logic.\nWhat's really offensive as well to anyone who appreciates good literature and good English and clear writing.\nIt's just these run on sentences where one clause or phrase is separated by a comma by another clause or phrase as if the writer is utterly allergic to full stops, utterly allergic to sentences.\nThe sentences are deliberately long, so as to be more opaque.\nIt's barely coherent.\nWell, it's incoherent.\nIt's not barely coherent.\nIt is incoherent.\nNow, one example, read just reading one example of postmodernism.\nThat's enough.\nThat will suffice because all the big names in postmodern philosophy write exactly like that.\nThere's no attempt to define a problem, let alone provide any semblance of a useful solution, such as is done in genuine philosophy, analytical philosophy.\nIt is, as I've said before, word soup.\nThat's all it is.\nBut the writers, the postmodern writers, do not take this charge of incoherence as a criticism.\nIt's a feature for them.\nIt's not a bug.\nThey say there's no sense to make in the first place, and so they take that seriously by making no sense.\nAnd all this would be laughable if it wasn't for the fact that these philosophies are taken seriously and have sway.\nAnd even if the text themselves are not being read by those in power, they're diluted forms, or the central tenants are being taken seriously.\nFor example, they're all perspectives are equally valid, but science has no privilege position when it comes to understanding the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=3159"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5eaa859e-4115-4e98-8cb8-5facfba1b7c2": {"page_content": "And all this would be laughable if it wasn't for the fact that these philosophies are taken seriously and have sway.\nAnd even if the text themselves are not being read by those in power, they're diluted forms, or the central tenants are being taken seriously.\nFor example, they're all perspectives are equally valid, but science has no privilege position when it comes to understanding the world.\nAnd if some politician or leader should ask whether the expert making such an astonishing claim, like for example, some expert comes along and says, all perspectives are equal and have equal merit, if that politician or leader says, well, do you have any research or evidence to back up that kind of strange pronouncement?.\nWell, of course, they have research and evidence to point to.\nThey can point to all of those journal articles and these sort of texts, and that in a nutshell, is the problem with expertise in this day and age, expertise and research and evidence in public discourse at times these days.\nWe need it.\nWe need expertise.\nWe need research.\nWe need evidence.\nIt's absolutely indispensable, but so few were sufficiently well equipped to tell the difference between what is good research and what is fraudulent research between what is the relevant actual expertise on any given question and the mere pretense at expertise.\nIn short, there's too little error correction and too much reliance upon so-called authority.\nIf a person is designated as an academic at a university and they hold a position where they have the title of professor, then this is seen by many as all that it takes and then those people go on to teach a new generation of students and advise those in power.\nSo that's all very disheartening.\nWhat is the defense against this?.\nWell, I'm going to come to that, but first, okay, so I'm changing a venue yet again.\nAnd just before I begin the reading, we might just consider what is the defense against postmodernism or against cultural relativism and various other kinds of bad philosophy before we talk more about the origins of these things.\nAs far as I can tell, the only defense, the only ballwalk against it is actual progress.\nSo physics actually does get people to the moon back or to the ISS and back.\nIt does produce better computers.\nIt's on the way to producing quantum computers.\nMedicine does find vaccines and cures eventually.\nScience produces internal combustion engines.\nThey work.\nThe lights go on.\nThe computers get faster.\nSo science makes actual progress.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=3523"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5fe40e9-d893-40ac-8e5b-c40afa75f148": {"page_content": "As far as I can tell, the only defense, the only ballwalk against it is actual progress.\nSo physics actually does get people to the moon back or to the ISS and back.\nIt does produce better computers.\nIt's on the way to producing quantum computers.\nMedicine does find vaccines and cures eventually.\nScience produces internal combustion engines.\nThey work.\nThe lights go on.\nThe computers get faster.\nSo science makes actual progress.\nAnd this is something that the relativists, the postmodernists don't accomplish.\nThey don't make progress.\nThey talk about it a lot, but no actual progress is made.\nAnd so because science makes progress, we know that the explanations contain some truth by which we mean they represent reality with ever increasing fidelity over time.\nOkay, that ever increasing fidelity, that ever increasing accuracy with which scientific theories represent objective reality, that can be called truth.\nOkay, if we're going to call truth anything.\nThe truth content of something is just that amount of that thing which accurately captures objective reality out there.\nSome people reject that.\nThere's nothing much to say to them.\nOkay, if they reject that.\nBecause the rest of us can see the truth of the fact that science works.\nAnd meanwhile, the alternative perspectives, the relativist ideas, which drive social justice.\nSocial justice is the new kind of religion in the West.\nIt has tenants.\nIt has practices.\nIt has rituals.\nIt doesn't like criticism.\nIf one is designated as a heretic, one can have their careers threatened or even their person threatened.\nThe language used in social justice has been designed and it's evolved over time to survive objections to it.\nThe language of inclusion and diversity in equity seems unobjectionable.\nSocial justice sounds altogether good.\nBut any modifier to an actual virtue, like justice, it doesn't matter what words you put in front of justice.\nYou're modifying it.\nSo that you're saying you're not interested in justice but this other thing.\nThis thing that is not justice.\nAnd that's what social justice is.\nAnd while enforcing inclusion or diversity or even equality, enforcing any of these things is a form of tyranny, people need to be free to be included or not.\nTo join groups without prejudice and to strive to be better, but the inclusion diversity and equality of social justice movements do not permit this because they do not mean inclusion, diversity and equality.\nWhat they mean by inclusion is giving authority to members of designated groups.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=3649"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db80512a-b8d1-4945-a0b5-fac91dcdaaeb": {"page_content": "This thing that is not justice.\nAnd that's what social justice is.\nAnd while enforcing inclusion or diversity or even equality, enforcing any of these things is a form of tyranny, people need to be free to be included or not.\nTo join groups without prejudice and to strive to be better, but the inclusion diversity and equality of social justice movements do not permit this because they do not mean inclusion, diversity and equality.\nWhat they mean by inclusion is giving authority to members of designated groups.\nAnd by diversity they mean uniformity of thought even if the outward appearances appear to be distinct.\nSo as long as people look different, that's diversity.\nBut everyone has to think the same.\nAnd by equality they mean equal.\nIn other words, everyone must be the same, including think the same and say the same words.\nAnd so as we get into the chapter you're going to see that David's work and writing here, it takes a sort of broader view of things.\nThere's an absolutely crucial difference we must say between David Deutsch's critique of aspects of philosophy and the critiques that have come in years gone by from elsewhere.\nNow it's true.\nYou can look at the work of let's say, someone else who I have great respect for, as a science popularizer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or the physicist Brian Cox, both of those are great or even Richard Dawkins.\nThese thinkers are also critics of philosophy but it's a blanket critique of all of philosophy.\nSo the difference between David Deutsch and those other scientific-minded thinkers is that there's rather a lot of baby left once the bathwater has been discarded in David's critique.\nThat is to say, once he criticizes bad philosophy, he gives you the good stuff.\nIn fact, the beginning of infinity is the good stuff.\nAnd this is so refreshing coming from a physicist because they're a rare breed.\nThere are not many physicists who have this level of respect for philosophy and are able to find the kernels of truth among us all the bad philosophy as well as the merely forceful philosophy.\nNow there are some other physicists first in philosophy and in my experience these include David Wallace, Paul Davies, and although I disagree with him in many ways, Sean Carroll, who understands philosophy cannot be discarded, if you look up Luke Barnes, he's an Australian cosmologist who understands one must have a philosophy to do science properly even if they're unaware of it.\nAnd this is the number of it for me.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=104"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15bfe0c9-e5d8-434c-894a-fb69dac169b6": {"page_content": "Now there are some other physicists first in philosophy and in my experience these include David Wallace, Paul Davies, and although I disagree with him in many ways, Sean Carroll, who understands philosophy cannot be discarded, if you look up Luke Barnes, he's an Australian cosmologist who understands one must have a philosophy to do science properly even if they're unaware of it.\nAnd this is the number of it for me.\nEveryone's a philosopher and has a philosophy it's just that many of us are unconscious of it.\nThose who say they're reject philosophy as a useful discipline have a philosophy.\nTheir philosophy is to claim they reject philosophy and everyone else should and then act as if some other discipline can guide their choices and behavior.\nFor instance, in the religion versus science to dispute, whether one chooses one side or the other or sees no conflict, that's a philosophy that they hold, a kind of philosophy that is a root guiding that perspective.\nA lecturer of mine at the University of New South Wales, Macales Michael, who's still there, he used to say there was a difference between having a philosophy and doing philosophy.\nWhat he meant was something like that everyone has a philosophy that part is unavoidable, but actually doing philosophy means bringing that philosophy that you necessarily have into your consciousness and illuminating it for yourself so that you know what you actually think on any given point and why.\nSo the point of chapter 12, a physicist history of bad philosophy, the point as I see it, and as David says at the beginning of chapter, is to explain the broader reasons why the multiverse is not taken seriously as the explanation of what is going on in quantum mechanics.\nBut this is kind of just the example.\nIt's a prominent example to be sure to highlight and use this kind of a lens through which we view the broader concept of bad philosophy.\nBad philosophy is this technical term and David distinguishes between bad philosophy and merely false philosophy.\nSo I'll still David's thunder and my thunder from later on by telling you certainly now what the distinction between false philosophy and bad philosophy is as David explains it.\nFalse philosophy is common and it's no sin.\nFalse philosophy like false science or false claims broadly are often, if they are honest, attempts at getting at the truth.\nThere are attempts.\nI say honest there because there is an honest attempt to be right and getting things wrong and therefore you make a false claim so you were trying to get to the truth, but you filed.\nAnd knowingly making a false claim lying.\nThat's dishonesty.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1916"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7899369e-3624-415d-8226-a2f705b54d3f": {"page_content": "False philosophy is common and it's no sin.\nFalse philosophy like false science or false claims broadly are often, if they are honest, attempts at getting at the truth.\nThere are attempts.\nI say honest there because there is an honest attempt to be right and getting things wrong and therefore you make a false claim so you were trying to get to the truth, but you filed.\nAnd knowingly making a false claim lying.\nThat's dishonesty.\nSo there's a difference between these two things.\nThere's two kinds of falsity in the world.\nHonestly trying to get to the truth and failing and producing something false and dishonesty representing what you thought was the truth.\nSo there are two very different things.\nWhen it comes to false philosophy, we have all manner of historic ideologies and dogmas from things like empiricism which is the false claim that all knowledge from the senses through to instrumentalism, the false claim that the purpose of science is to predict the outcome of experiments.\nOne in political theory, the false idea that kings have a divine right or the philosophy of mathematics, the mathematical intuitionism is true that whatever the mathematician thinks certainly true must in fact be certainly true.\nThere are many false theories and they are typically stepping stones to some deeper truth, or better yet some better misconception.\nSo falsity, false knowledge, false science, false philosophy, these things are common and most sin.\nEveryone is trying to produce knowledge and when they honestly try to produce knowledge and fail then they've produced something false.\nBut it might be a solution to a whole bunch of problems that one has, even if it's not a universal solution in all cases, but bad philosophy.\nBad philosophy is different to this.\nBad philosophy, unlike false philosophy, in some way prevents criticism and in some way prevents new knowledge from being created and in this class of philosophy so we have things like relativism which asserts there's no objective truth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=4045"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "81368699-4b87-400f-8e57-5fda703c8049": {"page_content": "So there's no point trying to figure out whether alternatives to relativism are true or false because relativism just asserts that everything is a gray mash if you like so right and wrong, there's no black and white on any particular issue and that perhaps solid matter is made out of atoms but perhaps it's made out of something else and there is no truth of the matter in investigating won't do anything other than reveal one's biases on the topic because all we have are perspectives and it destroys the notion to some extent that debate, discussion or criticism have any real use because we'll always have our own individual perspectives so we have access to our own individual perspectives and we can't possibly agree because there's nothing objective to say when all there exists in the universe is different people's subjectivity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9fe485ed-e179-4d35-a11a-55167d928a33": {"page_content": "It should also say here that philosophy itself as a discipline that the university is unusual and David makes this point elsewhere in the beginning of infinity because as an academic discipline it consults the original texts and this is bizarre.\nIt's not the case in physics that you consult the original texts.\nWhen you learn classical mechanics you don't go to Principia Mathematica, the way in which Newton originally discovered or explained the laws of motion and the law of gravity.\nInstead you go to textbooks that might be the 10th generation of textbook.\nWhen you learn special relativity or general relativity you don't go to Einstein's original writings on the topic because people today understand relativity better than what Einstein did.\nHe was just the first and so he had all sorts of misconceptions and not to mention that he wrote a lot of his stuff in German anyway.\nSo we consult textbooks today and experts today when we try to learn the best scientific theories but this is not the case in philosophy.\nIn philosophy the original texts are studied in the same way that a theologian will study the original texts, the original sacred texts or someone interested in the great works of literature will study the original texts.\nBut this is strange and misguided and wrong and it shouldn't happen and the reason it's strange misguided and wrong and shouldn't happen is precisely because philosophy is about solving problems.\nIt's far more akin to science than it is to English literature.\nEnglish literature you want to cleave to the original text because you're interested in the language that Shakespeare used or some other great writer or poet used if you're a theologian interested in what was actually said in those original texts because you possibly believe that they are divinely inspired and so you want to know what words were being said by the almighty but in philosophy.\nAlthough we have great thinkers, Deska, Liebnes, Spinoza, Poppa.\nWhat's not important so much is the specific words that were being used as the ideas that we're trying to be conveyed in the same way that relativity, evolution by natural selection, the theory of how the periodic table works, any number of theories in science.\nWe don't care what the original discoverer of those theories actually said unless of course you're interested in the history of science.\nThen you might be interested in the specific words that they used but we're interested in the content of the theory does not include the particular choice of vocabulary that that particular scientist had at that particular time.\nNow there's also one other thing we'll just mention this before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=4219"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d505b74-7323-4b04-b545-8ce98b975986": {"page_content": "We don't care what the original discoverer of those theories actually said unless of course you're interested in the history of science.\nThen you might be interested in the specific words that they used but we're interested in the content of the theory does not include the particular choice of vocabulary that that particular scientist had at that particular time.\nNow there's also one other thing we'll just mention this before.\nIn terms of studying philosophy at university, the philosophers in the original texts are often studied out of context to some extent.\nThere is a context in which the philosophers were often working.\nLiebnes, for example, wrote about free will, but why?.\nWell, he was writing the context of its contemporary and some might say his rival Isaac Newton and Isaac Newton's.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=1820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58b0f18f-65fe-4fc3-acd9-b3361fcbabd4": {"page_content": "The vision of reality that one gets from reading Isaac Newton although Newton didn't necessarily think this himself was that of a clockwork universe where particles in the void moved under perfectly deterministic laws where given any possible state of the universe at one time there was only one possible outcome at any future time and so that seemed to rule out free will and so Liebnes wrote about free will in that context and it's important to know about the context and so often this context is subtracted out.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=4416"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ee713429-18d9-4b77-9000-51fcc3843af5": {"page_content": "Popper was all about when talking about the ancient philosophers or even the pre-modern philosophers was always a great pain to talk about the problem situation in which they found themselves.\nThat looking at philosophical theories in the mere abstract was nowhere near as helpful as looking at the particular kind of problem that the philosophers were focused on at the time.\nSo this is an unusual episode because I had so much to say in introduction to this chapter and there was so much contemporary material that I felt was relevant to really showing how important this particular chapter is at this time in history.\nIt's been important for many years since the beginning of infinity was published.\nbut it's only become more important this chapter 12.\nWe're going to get into the reading now.\nWe're going to make that an entirely different episode and so I've split this up into two episodes after all.\nThis one I guess was setting the stage but if you'd like to go to the next episode that's where the reading is.\nThank you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBVduS27Xo&t=4447"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c5f1073b-2185-4cdc-8099-f7584e361de1": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast Episode 50, the big 5-0 if you're listening to this on audio anyway on YouTube.\nI'm not sure what to put up, but I do know that we're doing Chapter 16 of the beginning of Infinity Today, the evolution of creativity, and we're in our third part, the third and final part today.\nAnd so let's just get into it after just recapping what was happening in the last episode.\nAnd we're talking about the evolution of creativity, we're talking about memes and how memes come into existence and how the capacity for meme evolution occurs.\nAnd David is comparing what goes on with animals who are able to imitate parrot to parrot, apes who ate, for example.\nIf either of these animals were listening to a lecture of some sort, then they would be able to repeat some of the content, but it's not because they would have exactly acquired the memes themselves, in other words, acquired the meaning of the ideas, but instead they'd just be repeating the noises in the case of the parrot.\nSo if this parrot is, say, listening to a lecturer, what David goes on to say, quote, is, suppose that the lecturer had repeatedly returned to a certain key idea and had expressed it with different words and gestures each time.\nThe parrot, or apes, job, would be that much harder than imitating only the first instance.\nThe students much easier, because to a human observer, each different way of putting the idea would convey additional knowledge, pause there, just my reflection.\nSo this is an important insight about one of the other categorical differences between humans and other animals.\nA parrot that repeats what they've heard at a lecture, hasn't understood anything.\nSo they don't acquire the meaning, the meme that's actually there.\nBut of course a person may, you know, there are situations where, for example, a person might simply learn by wrote the content of a lesson or a lecture, and thereby haven't really acquired the meme as such.\nThey haven't acquired the meaning behind the idea, but they may be able to verbatim, quote, the words.\nThis isn't how learning typically happens with people, as David has just said there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b8f5851e-f158-45b9-bcb1-7dd44ed10f16": {"page_content": "But of course a person may, you know, there are situations where, for example, a person might simply learn by wrote the content of a lesson or a lecture, and thereby haven't really acquired the meme as such.\nThey haven't acquired the meaning behind the idea, but they may be able to verbatim, quote, the words.\nThis isn't how learning typically happens with people, as David has just said there.\nIf a lecturer was to repeat the same idea over and again, but using different words, using a different approach each time, it would be that much harder for a parrot to parrot, what they're saying, because a parrot only imitates the same thing over and over again.\nBut a student would probably find it easier, easier because each different way of explaining the same concept contains additional knowledge.\nIn other words, this is just sort of a meta comment on that.\nA lot of people have learned Papa from David Deutsch, because he has repackaged, re-explained, improved in certain ways what Papa has said through the fabric of reality and the beginning of infinity.\nSo people have been able to pick up those memes that otherwise would have been elusive to them.\nPapa does famously write with great clarity in comparison to other philosophers, I should hasten to add, but despite that high level of clarity, just with the passage of time, language changes, problem situations change, and so therefore a modern philosopher like David Deutsch, who re-explains what Papa is saying, is sometimes they better avenue into understanding those ideas than the original philosopher, let's say.\nAlso just on this philosophy of education, thing that's kind of behind this short section that I've read from the beginning of infinity just there.\nIt really points to something about the differences among teachers, and you can think back to the teachers that you had at either school or university.\nAnd it illuminates this idea that there is such a thing as good teaching or good explaining, you know, fine and Richard Fine when it was famous for being good at explaining difficult physics concepts.\nAnd the best teachers of course have a variety of different ways, at least two of explaining something.\nIf they only have one, well then not a particularly good teacher are they, they might very well understand it themselves and might be able to regurgitate that explanation for someone else.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=125"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5c1257e-c043-47c4-a70d-9cd34892c1cc": {"page_content": "And it illuminates this idea that there is such a thing as good teaching or good explaining, you know, fine and Richard Fine when it was famous for being good at explaining difficult physics concepts.\nAnd the best teachers of course have a variety of different ways, at least two of explaining something.\nIf they only have one, well then not a particularly good teacher are they, they might very well understand it themselves and might be able to regurgitate that explanation for someone else.\nBut if that explanation doesn't really suit the situation that you're in, the kind of knowledge that you have at that particular time, or the problem situation you find yourself in, then of course you might not be able to pick it up as easily as some other teacher who might have exactly the same kind of knowledge and be able to pass it on in a way that suits you better.\nPeople talk about learning styles and that kind of thing, it's really just what your background knowledge happens to be at that particular time.\nThere are certainly some teachers out there who teach by the textbook, input, school and university from my recollection anyway.\nAnd these people are kind of an impediment to learning.\nThey don't really assist because they're kind of just getting in the way of the textbook.\nYou may as well just read the textbook if all they're going to do is to simply cleave very closely to what the text happens to say.\nOn the other hand if they can refer you to the text and then explain sections of the text in a way that speaks to you a little bit more clearly than all the better and if they have three or four such approaches to explaining then all the better still.\nAnd if they can make it entertaining and funny then you really have one of those rare teachers that can inspire your learning in a particular area and also help you with your particular problem situation of wanting to find out how the world works in that particular area that you happen to be interested in.\nBut if they're dry and they're just saying on page 62 here's what it says or suddenly when I remember at school as we had people who would put up overhead projector things and then they would just read off the overhead projector.\nI had one of these in like second year physics at Uni learning relativity and this lecturer would just project the lesson onto the screen and literally read the overhead projection screen.\nIt was terrible.\nBut you know at the same university I had some absolutely brilliant lecturers and the funny thing was and this shows you how individual learning happens to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=242"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "213bba94-2c79-4412-ba7d-d2796d9aa552": {"page_content": "I had one of these in like second year physics at Uni learning relativity and this lecturer would just project the lesson onto the screen and literally read the overhead projection screen.\nIt was terrible.\nBut you know at the same university I had some absolutely brilliant lecturers and the funny thing was and this shows you how individual learning happens to be.\nOne of my favourite lecturers was basically one of the most disorganized as well would arrive to the class just seemingly not knowing where we were up to exactly, would have a hazy idea, would never really refer to the official curriculum as it was published and it would often fill us in on their own particular area of obscure research.\nIt would seem obscure but of course in order to understand the problem they were trying to solve they would then go and explain all the foundational things that would beneath this particular problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=364"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6b9d2b02-3ab1-4a60-a265-0a3ffce46bfa": {"page_content": "All the knowledge that one needed in order to come at this problem from different angles and so by the end of the lecture we would have a great understanding of this particular niche area of knowledge, this area of specialty that this particular lecture was interested in and that was the great part about of course going to university as you have these specialists there working on very particular fundamental foundational or specialized problems that you need expert knowledge in order to try and tackle to some extent you need expert knowledge and so they would be able to lift you up to there to where they were at, to the amount of knowledge they had by explaining what the problem was and all the things beneath that problem that had led to that problem and so this was the kind of lecture I absolutely loved and I remember at a lunch break one time having a discussion with fellow students about this and there were other students there who yes agreed that this particular lecture was fantastic because they were funny and engaging and went off topic and talked about tangent and when I found tangents and gave anecdotes and it was just all and all the stuff that was related but not necessarily central to the official curriculum and this was precisely the thing that other people in the class couldn't stand and would say that lecture is my least favourite of all because they disorganized and they go off topic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=419"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b65ac657-0e11-4122-ac26-6c0f1a557941": {"page_content": "I just want to learn what's in the official curriculum so that I know what to study for the assessments for the exams so I can pass the exams and get good marks and of course this illustrates a great difficulty with that style of education anyway having classes of that kind.\nbut I guess in a free market where people are going to choose amongst universities the only solution I can think of.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=493"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "59ccd521-9b85-40d8-875b-e82bf930343d": {"page_content": "and I don't know what the solution otherwise to this would be is to have those two approaches there the kind of style where a student wants to go along and learn from an expert in an entertaining way to sit there and listen to the lecture kind of like a TED talk kind of thing where you're actually able to interact one on one with the person giving the TED talk and to talk about all of the questions you might have that the lecture itself doesn't particularly answer that's an ideal kind of learning I would suggest or there might be other people whose style of learning is just I want to know what the official curriculum is so that I can get credentialed so that I can pass the exam and get the certificate to hang on the wall to say that I have this particular degree or whatever then maybe universities could offer these two different sorts or maybe lecturers could advertise themselves as a being of one of these two different extremes or somewhere in the middle so you'd know what you're getting but of course at the moment at university or course at school you don't know what you're getting you can't really pick how well there's an extent to which of course you can pick you can look at the list of lecturers and a list of subjects and then pick that way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69cc1e50-5dfe-4293-b6a9-2602304407cd": {"page_content": "but sometimes maybe you like the lecture but not the subject or vice versa so this is a great challenge for universities I don't know what the solution is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=583"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1951e21a-1011-44a8-84a2-c5fb5b9711f1": {"page_content": "but I know it's certainly a challenge at the moment because the only reason for the continued existence of that kind of university thing is because of this whole idea of credentialing of getting someone an official degree to say that you are now officially qualified in this particular area even though your level of understanding of that area might be quite poor because if you are that kind of student that just wants to learn the knowledge required to pass the exams then really the best idea is to simply practice exam questions over and over and over again until you become proficient at answering exam questions which might not be a very good indication of what is happening in the real world when you actually have to solve a problem in other words I think no one knows the answer to rather than just a puzzle which is a question in an exam for example that someone already knows the answer and you have to come up with the correct answer rather than the best possible answer given all of the unknowns which is what reality and finding stuff out in science and various other areas of knowledge is in fact all about okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=593"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9cf2507d-12c5-4075-a86d-c18762d44faa": {"page_content": "whatever the case that was an extremely long diversion about something barely related to this chapter so let's go back to the chapter just to recap we've got a parrot and we have a student listening to a lecture and David is explaining the difference between how they both acquire the capacity to repeat what the lecture is saying whether word by word or the actual meaning of the lesson that lecture is delivering David writes quote alternatively suppose that the lecturer had consistently miss spoken in a way that altered the meaning and had then made one correction at the end the parrot would copy the wrong version the student would not even if the lecturer had never corrected the error at all a human misenter might still have a good chance of understanding the idea that was in a lecturer's mind and again without imitating any behavior if someone else reported the lecture but in a way that contained severe misconceptions a human listener might still be able to detect what the lecturer meant by explaining the reporter's misconceptions as well as the lecturer's intention just as a conjuring expert might be able to detect what really happened during a trick given only a false account from the audience of what they saw rather than imitating behavior a human being tries to explain it to understand the ideas that caused it which is a special case of the general human objective of explaining the world when we succeed in explaining someone's behavior and we approve of the underlying intention we may subsequently behave like that person in the relevant sense but if we disapprove we might behave unlike that person since creating explanations is second nature or other first nature to us we can easily misconstrue the process of acquiring a meme as imitating what we see using your explanations we see right through the behavior to the meaning parrots copy distinctive sounds apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class but humans do not especially copy any behavior they use conjecture criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things other people's behavior their own and that of the world in general this is what creativity does and if we end up behaving like other people it is because we have rediscovered the same idea.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=660"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "604756cf-1c58-42ab-a5dd-d6566bdeaffb": {"page_content": "okay I'm skipping a little.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9f33273-d2ad-4568-aed7-a813e88a6b15": {"page_content": "and then David goes on to a subsection which is titled both puzzles have the same solution and he writes in this chapter I have presented two puzzles the first is why human creativity was evolutionarily advantageous at a time when there was almost no innovation the second is how human memes can possibly be replicated given that they have content that the recipient never observes I think that both these puzzles have the same solution what replicate human memes is creativity and creativity was used while it was evolving to replicate memes in other words it was used to acquire existing knowledge not to create new knowledge but the mechanism to do both things is identical and so in acquiring the ability to do the former we automatically become able to do the latter it was a momentous example of reach which made possible everything that is uniquely human pausing there my reflection on that and David is going to get into this in the very next paragraph but just to emphasize what's being said here the ability to acquire memes human creativity enables us to acquire memes existing knowledge things that are already known to the populace to other people to the culture and so on so creativity allows us to replicate those memes the existing knowledge and maintain a tradition to a large extent however that same capacity to create to create to recreate the memes to replicate the memes also gave us the ability to create new knowledge that no one had ever had before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=805"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cd72d76e-e059-4fae-99f8-9ada28d176d0": {"page_content": "so that's a really interesting capacity of the human mind a unique capacity of the human mind and as we'll get into a capacity that is universal and its ability to create knowledge in other words whatever knowledge can be created can be created by us explanatory knowledge next paragraph David says quote a person acquiring a meme faces the same logical challenge as a scientist both must discover a hidden explanation for the former it is an idea in the minds of other people for the latter a regularity or law of nature not the person has direct access to this explanation but both have access to evidence with which explanations can be tested the observed behavior of people who hold the meme and physical phenomena conforming to the law the puzzle of how one can possibly translate behavior back into a theory that contains its meaning as therefore the same puzzle as where scientific knowledge comes from and the idea that memes are copied by imitating their holders behavior it's the same mistake as empiricism or inductivism or muckism they all depend on their being a way of automatically translating problems like the problem of planetary motions or how to reach leads on tall trees or be invisible to one's prey into their solutions in other words they assume that the environment in the form of an observed phenomenon or a tall tree say can instruct minds or genomes in how to meet its challenges then David goes on to quote pop-up and pop a wrote quote the inductivist or lemarchian approach operates with the idea of instruction from without or from the environment but the critical or Darwinian approach only allows instruction from within from within the structure itself I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure we do not discover new facts on your effects by copying them or by inferring them inductively from observation or by any other method of instruction by the environment we use rather the method of trial in the elimination of error as Ernst Gombrich says making comes before matching the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests that's from the myth of the framework then David goes on to say pop a could just as well have written we do not acquire new memes by", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=906"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d8137d26-8f76-42b4-867e-18390652c300": {"page_content": "them inductively from observation or by any other method of instruction by the environment we use rather the method of trial in the elimination of error as Ernst Gombrich says making comes before matching the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests that's from the myth of the framework then David goes on to say pop a could just as well have written we do not acquire new memes by copying them or by inferring them inductively from observation or by any other method of imitation or instruction by the environment the transmission of human type means means whose meaning is not mostly predefined within the receiver cannot be other than a creative activity on the part of the receiver memes like scientific theories are not derived from anything they are created afresh by the recipient they are conjectural explanations which are then subjected to criticism and testing before being tentatively adopted this same pattern of creative conjecture criticism and testing generate in explicit as well as explicit ideas in fact all creativity does for no idea can be represented entirely explicitly when we make an explicit conjecture it has an in explicit component whether we are aware of it or.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1021"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "94d2c698-fb87-4faf-941c-08e735ab218a": {"page_content": "not and so does all criticism pause there just a my reflection on that I've often been asked in my having done this for a while now explaining aspects of the beginning infinity why it is will never get a final theory of such and such usually it's physics why can't we get to the final fundamental theory of physics.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1103"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b7a68393-7eb1-4275-8884-f5b715ccfb21": {"page_content": "and and one response is that I often give like for example you know people talk about well what is the physical theory that might unite general relativity and quantum theory people are trying string theory people are trying various other approaches as well string theory is probably the most famous example of one although it's not one theory there are many different forms of string theory when you look into it I don't fully I don't claim to understand string theory however what I would say about that is that even if it were successful it couldn't be a final theory of physics it wouldn't be the last word on physics they would always still be more to know even at the foundations because you would always be able to ask why is string theory why does string theory have the form that it does there'll be unknowns there in the same way that the the laws of physics that we have now have some really deep questions about the my favorite kind of question about the form that the laws of physics take are the constants of nature where did these constants of nature come from why do they have the values that they have you know the universal gravitational constant that appears in not only Newton's law of gravity it appears in general relativity as well k big g which is something like 6.67 times 10 of the power of minus 11 don't worry about what the units are anyway this this number the value of this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1125"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3be3cf69-76b8-4fed-9609-29311023acb2": {"page_content": "okay because you can you can actually change the number if you change what the units are ignoring that complication this number tells you something about the strength of gravity not just here on earth but throughout the universe.\nokay there is this number here on earth 9.81 which is the acceleration the local acceleration to gravity here near the surface of the earth at sea level and so on and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1212"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1193ce9b-4121-464c-a717-8694231065a8": {"page_content": "okay that number easily changes if you change your location around the solar system and around the universe that will change depending upon what cosmological body you have me standing on in any particular time and how high you are all that aside the universal gravitational constant is universally it applies everywhere throughout the entire universe and the question is why does it have the value that it has why is it that strong and not stronger or weaker and many this is the fine tuning problem and if we go back through my episodes of the infinity there is a section there there is one of the episodes there is on fine tuning I'll put that up on screen for you if you're interested more about this it's certainly been a great fascination of mine having taken on astronomy looking into all of these different constants of nature another one is simply the massive the electron or how how strongly the strong force couples together the protons in a nucleus.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1232"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d5375b84-123f-4168-b52b-f3eee520944c": {"page_content": "okay all of these constants of nature come together such that we have a really interesting universe we have life in the universe now there is no physical law that gives us those numbers that is able to predict what the numbers are going to be those numbers are empirically known you have to measure them you have to use scientific apparatus you have to go into a laboratory and actually figure out what these numbers are in the case of G the universal gravitational constant is many ways you can measure so the famous one is is the Cavendish experiment Cavendish experiment with those 1700s I think something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1288"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71645e40-82af-49c4-a128-85a02119b5dd": {"page_content": "and it's basically the purpose of it is to find G and this is how we know G we have to go out there into the universe and to use physical objects and find out what these things are so it doesn't come from a theory so there must be a deeper theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1331"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5acc938f-904d-49c4-ae71-7bed1612f49c": {"page_content": "we most you know scientists physicists think well this is a this is a question this is an open scientific question why is it that value or not something else and so far there's just kind of two approaches neither of which I don't think anyone believes one is well the universe has been designed this way so there's a god or a simulation which has selected those particular values so that conscious observers can be here and wonder about that question the other is that there is a megaverse there is a multiverse of multiverses.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1341"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cece161f-5743-44c8-a272-806e5cc9ffde": {"page_content": "okay a higher order of multiverse I'm not talking about the quantum multiverse but rather I multiverse where every single possible logically possible physical law or something like that exists out there somewhere or other and some of those selections happen to have there is when you when you put together those constants of nature in just the right way we'll end up producing interesting chemistry and complicated life like ourselves so that could be a solution or you don't even need all the possible physical laws you just need a multitude of them you need enough of them such that at least one of them will produce us okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1378"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "485fad50-9631-4194-b32f-d7820c76b0c3": {"page_content": "and so here we are to wonder about it because it's actually all the different sorts of physical laws with all the different values of these constants of nature are out there somewhere most of which don't have life and we happen to be in the one or few that do have life.\nand so that can be a solution now these two solutions are poor.\nI guess they they raise more questions than they answer where are these are the universes how can we experimentally detect these other universes at the moment it seems like those other universes are basically the same category as God may as well believe in God they're both metaphysical claims.\nso I happen to think.\nand I think a lot of other scientists think as well it's.\nthat.\nwell we don't yet know the theory it's kind of like we're at the position prior to when Darwin came up with evolution by natural selection prior to that it was unimaginable to people that the appearance of design could arise without a designer.\nokay.\nso Pailey's famous comment about the watch you pick up the watch in the field somewhere other you assume by looking at the intricate workings of its mechanism that therefore there must be a creator a designer a builder behind this watch that you find.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1419"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d363ebe-2180-4c18-b0c5-ffe20fda4181": {"page_content": "so then shouldn't it be the case that the human eye or the eyes of mammals and fish and birds this is an even more intricate device of a kind a more intricate thing that has appeared in nature so therefore if you're assuming that the watch has a watchmaker you should definitely assume that life has a life maker and therefore God exists that kind of thing so people couldn't conceive of a way in which design could just arise it would otherwise seem like magic if you could say a watch just naturally appears according acting under deterministic physical laws then this seems astounding it seems like there has to be a watchmaker but of course now we know in now we know of evolution by natural selection we know that over time life fills these niches and these niches get filled with organisms that are fit in that particular niche and if one goes extinct then a new one will arise and have features that in maybe more or less different depending upon how much the environment has changed over time someone and so forth we know about neodymian is an evolution by natural selection it was a theory prior to which people just couldn't conceive of how it would be possible for this kind of thing to happen now actually there is a third way in which people talk about these concerts of nature and one of them years and this is I think Lee Smolenside can look up Lee Smolens and Lee Smolens talks about an evolutionary cosmology where black holes have this reverse side to them where there's like a white hole and out of the white hole comes a new big bang and a new universe and these universes that are produced have slightly different constants of nature and there's this evolutionary process whereby the universes that proliferate tend to be more similar to the ones that they have come from so these universes are giving birth via this black hole mechanism that is you know wherever you find a black hole then that's a portal to another universe so the theory goes kind of thing I don't really haven't looked into too much of the details but that universe that you go into once you've gone through the black hole then has properties somewhat similar to the universe that we're in right now but the constants of nature ever so slightly changed and", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1486"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5cc9a5af-e17b-4658-9c05-0033a3f359cc": {"page_content": "are giving birth via this black hole mechanism that is you know wherever you find a black hole then that's a portal to another universe so the theory goes kind of thing I don't really haven't looked into too much of the details but that universe that you go into once you've gone through the black hole then has properties somewhat similar to the universe that we're in right now but the constants of nature ever so slightly changed and so in this way you can have this evolutionary proliferation of universes perhaps beginning with ours perhaps not beginning with ours whatever the case some of those universes that are birthed from black hole events will have conditions such that you life will arise but not all of them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1605"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "521665be-ac24-46cb-b5df-4c95af181af2": {"page_content": "okay.\nso this is a kind of a third approach.\nbut it's not a new mode of explanation really is it it's the same kind of explanation as evolution by natural selection so in David Deutsches terminology what we really want is a new mode of explanation that would be my guess a new mode of explanation will give us the explanation of why the constants of nature have the values that they do and it's a something that we can't imagine just the moment.\nwell we could someone out there is going to come up with the answer to this.\nokay so they can imagine it I can't imagine what it will be if you have any ideas that's common and I've never asked if people to comment in the YouTube comments before perhaps comment in the YouTube comments.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1652"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "623d8363-d64b-4537-8487-82be5cc50323": {"page_content": "okay tell me what your explanation for why the constants of nature are the way they are don't mention God don't mention the super megaverse and don't mention evolution by natural selection so if you can come up with a new mode of explanation that no one's ever heard of before because that could be Nobel Prize winning time science but that that long diversion is really off track is just to say that we don't yet have a final theory of physics we never will because of that reason now because we cannot we will need to know what those constants of nature and whether or not string theory can give us that I don't know whatever the case the other approach to this why we can't have a final theory of physics or anything else as David says there quote he says when we make an explicit conjecture string theory would be an explicit conjecture as would general relativity any scientific theory it has an explicit component whether we are aware of it or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1690"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "19994f12-67f0-4fe3-b8c9-7bef4ee62605": {"page_content": "and so does all criticism so this in explicit component of a theory is always there and can be made more explicit over time but you can never get rid of it altogether but the in explicit component is something that needs further explanation that is kind of it's not that it's unknown in any complete sense but it does mean that you aren't there at the final theory because you've got certain things that you can't explicitly explain and surely a final theory would be perfectly explicit if it's not perfectly explicit then someone can always say what do you mean by this particular thing at infinitum so you can't get to the end you can't get the final answer because there is always in explicit content no matter what the idea happens to be and just to tie this up into a neat little bow even if we did have the final theory or physics or the final theory of everything we couldn't possibly know that I don't think there can be a final theory of physics for the reasons I said because you can always ask why is that the final theory does that final theory tell you why it's the final theory and if so why can't we ask the question about why that explanation of why it's the final theory is in fact true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1749"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50d68752-47e7-4419-b9ed-4febbf5380b5": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aaf5cb1b-cbef-4a4b-ab47-8ef9f2d68bfc": {"page_content": "so we can always ask the deeper question about how do you know that why is that the case and so on anyway back to the book and David writes thus as has so often happened in the history of universality the human capacity for universal explanation did not evolve to have a universal function it evolved simply to increase the volume of mimetic information that our ancestors could acquire and the speed and accuracy with which they could acquire it but since the easiest way for evolution to do that was to give us a universal ability to explain through creativity that is what it did this epistemological fact provides not only the solution of the two puzzles I mentioned above but also the reason for the evolution of human creativity and therefore the human species in the first place it must have happened something like this in early pre-human societies there are only very simple means the kind that apes now have they perhaps with a wider repertoire of copyable elementary behaviors those memes were about practical things like how to get food that was otherwise inaccessible the value of such knowledge must have been high so this created a ready-made niche for any adaptation that would reduce the effort required to replicate memes creativity was the ultimate adaptation to fill that niche as it increased further adaptations cold old such as an increase in memory capacity to store more memes finer motor control and specialized brain structures for dealing with language as a result the meme bandwidth the amount of mimetic information that could be passed from each generation to the next increased to memes also became more complex and sophisticated this is why and how our species evolved and wider world rapidly at first memes gradually came to dominate our ancestors behavior meme evolution took place and like all evolution this was always in the direction of greater faithfulness this meant becoming ever more anti-rational at some point meme evolution achieved static societies presumably there were tribes consequently all those increases in creativity never produced streams of innovations innovation remained imperceptibly slow even as the capacity for it was increasing rapidly even in a static society memes still evolve due to imperceptible errors of replication they just", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1829"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d91b71f9-ad54-469b-8b0f-0c2acfd074e5": {"page_content": "this was always in the direction of greater faithfulness this meant becoming ever more anti-rational at some point meme evolution achieved static societies presumably there were tribes consequently all those increases in creativity never produced streams of innovations innovation remained imperceptibly slow even as the capacity for it was increasing rapidly even in a static society memes still evolve due to imperceptible errors of replication they just evolve more slowly than anyone can notice imperceptible errors cannot be suppressed they would generally evolve towards greater fidelity of replication as usual with evolution and hence to greater statistic of the society pause their my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1946"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b994fd91-9fbe-409f-aa46-a337f6d711e7": {"page_content": "so if you're in an ancient tribe in fact a really really ancient tribe day prehistoric ancient tribe you know your coexisting here alongside sort of Neanderthals then you're using tools and the way in which you're able to use it all is because memes have been passed on within the culture where you find yourself and perhaps making these tools is part of a ritual so it might serve a jewel purpose if you make a spear ever more sharp then you are adhering to the culture's memes ever better.\nand so you can't be accused of not trying to enact the memes of the society so you won't be cast out similarly making the spear ever sharp up is going to actually have practical use and so there's going to be there's a jewel reason why greater statistic of memes that greatest statistic in the society can result in very gradual evolutionary change of the memes but nothing creative actually being done so the ever sharper spear might actually have some practical benefits.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=1991"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9110e9a4-a615-455e-a4b8-94a5a3f7d0fd": {"page_content": "but if you are required only to ever make ever sharper spears then you will never innovate to make a bow and arrow or make anything else better that might be actually better for capturing animals when you go hunting and so your tribal ancient static society is a real risk of going extinct it can remain static for a very long period of time but as soon as the problem comes along which requires creativity in order to solve you are singularly and all the members of your tribe are singularly unable to do anything about it even though you have a creative capacity because the creative capacity is latent in a way and you're not using it sorry about the traffic noise back to the book and David writes status in such a society is reduced by trans gressing people's expectations of proper behaviour and is improved by meeting them there would have been the expectations of parents priests chiefs and potential mates or whoever controlled mating in that society who with themselves conforming to the wishes and expectations of the society at large those people's opinions would determine one's ability to eat thrive and reproduce and hence the fate of one's genes pause there just reflecting on that and that's like an aha moment at least it should be if you're encountering this for the first time so if a human type creature or very early humans let's say who are evolving the capacity to replicate means over time then those early people who are who have got certain genes which allow for them to replicate means then the ones who are able to replicate means more faithfully are the ones who eat thrive and reproduce and so therefore their genes for the ability to replicate means are being passed on to their children.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2064"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a5dd8e52-791f-4df3-afcc-1919e7089e1b": {"page_content": "okay so the ability to replicate means then becomes there's a selection pressure on that there's a niche to be filled there.\nand we're going to come to niches in just a moment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8a4131c-0110-4f97-8f71-95118ecd29be": {"page_content": "but I might just slag the fact that in a recent talkcast not really related much the beginning infinity just more of a personal reflection of mine on the possibility of alien life out there I mentioned various arguments and one of the arguments I mentioned because these are just wild speculations for the most part no one knows much about the possibility of alien life you know whether the biology will be the same as ours or different to ours and so on and so forth but one of the arguments from an academic called Charlie Lineweaver is that it's assumed that it's an intelligence niche but if we look at the history of life on earth it appears as though this intelligent niche has only arisen once and maybe that is just a very fortuitous happenstance occurrence and we shouldn't expect it to ever happen again maybe the intelligence niche doesn't actually appear out there in the universe anywhere even if there is life teeming throughout many planets in the universe because for a long time here on earth there wasn't really an intelligence niche to be filled because there was no intelligence anywhere the intelligence niches there is once it's filled by intelligence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2192"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f63bee8-0dbd-4f8e-b79c-7cd9d6237d08": {"page_content": "anyway that's slightly off topic let's go back to the book and David writes but how does one discover the wishes and expectations of other people they might issue commands but they could never specify every detail of what they expected let alone every detail of how to achieve it when one is commanded to do something or expected to as a condition for being considered worthy of food or mating for example one might remember seeing an already respected person doing the same thing and one might try to emulate that person to do that effectively one would have to understand what the point of doing it was and to try to achieve that is best one could one would impress one's chief priest parental potential mate by replicating and following their standards of what one should strive for one would impress the tribe as a whole by replicating their idea all the ideas of the most influential among them of what was worthy and acting accordingly hence paradoxically it requires creativity to thrive in a static society creativity the enables one to be less innovative than other people and that is how primitive static societies which contain pitifully little knowledge and existed only by suppressing innovation constituted environments that strongly favored the evolution of an ever greater ability to innovate from the perspective of those hypothetical extraterrestrials observing our ancestors a community of advanced apes with memes before the evolution of creativity began would have looked superficially similar to their descendants after the jump to universality the latter would merely have had more memes but the mechanism keeping those memes replicating faithfully would have changed profoundly the animals of the earlier community would have been relying on their lack of creativity to replicate their memes the people despite living in a static society would be relying entirely on their creativity pause their mind reflection so what he said there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2270"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a8326da5-e6dc-4c6b-a06d-e7d89a0bd53e": {"page_content": "well so there has been a jump to universe ality there there was a species of human like but not human human like ape that had memes but no creativity then a species arose human that did have creativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2379"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "787c1006-fe73-473a-a63c-8f3ec7caa69f": {"page_content": "and I say human because here we can just use it as a kind of synonym for people people being universal explainers people being able to create explanations and people being able to form models in their mind of anything in the universe anything that's out there in the universe we can come to understand insofar as other animals and other species of ape can form models at all of the world around them then it's only of their local environment of the things that the genes might have coded the memes that they have for.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2394"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3c0ea865-e0cb-433f-8f6e-935767652d5e": {"page_content": "okay maybe my cat is at wonders around the house has a model of the house it's like a visually major a map something like that it knows how to get around but the cat has absolutely no capacity whatsoever to form a model like the standard model of particle physics or a model of what an economic system is all about.\nokay so we can do that because we are universal explainers it doesn't matter what the phenomena is in reality we can develop an explanation of it and so have a model of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2435"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7aa74353-4a07-45bb-9a39-887f6f462c4f": {"page_content": "whereas in so far as other creatures are able to build models at all in their minds and they must be able to build models of some kind there is a finite repertoire the cat would probably reach a limit of being able to find its way around the physical environment what's the physical environment got too large and this is probably why creatures like cats don't tend to wander too far from their homes but even if the cat is allowed to go outside it tends to stay within a fairly short radius of wherever its actual house is wherever the food is probably because it would it understands or its genes understand that if it goes any further it gets lost it's probably it's it's ram on its little brain quickly gets filled up anyway.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2465"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0b3a2d8c-e406-4b3d-ba59-3cc41bf5b633": {"page_content": "so the point is that prior to whatever the first universal explainer was you had apes that relied on memes and then you had universal explainers that relied on creativity however superficially these two creatures would have seemed exactly the same because the memes would have been precise the same the content of the memes would have been the same it's just that in the second case now the possibility for an infinite growth of knowledge existed there was in that creature it was able to explain actually explain stuff and create new memes whereas the previous one only had a finite repertoire of memes they could change but only very very slowly and not about anything at all just about the kind of things that happened to be in its genes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2512"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5550370a-9eb1-43a6-b9fb-dc73869fe364": {"page_content": "okay let's go back to the book and David writes as with all jumps to universality the way in which the jump emerged out of a gradual change it's interesting to think about creativity is a property of software as i said we could be running AI programs on our laptop computers today if we knew how to write or evolve such programs like all software would require the computer to have certain hardware specifications in order to be able to process the required amount of data in the required time it so happened that the hardware specifications that would make creativity practicable were included in those that were being heavily favored for pre-created meme replication the principal one would have been memory capacity the more one could remember the more memes one could enact and the more accurately one could enact them but there may have also been hardware abilities such as mirror neurons for imitating a wider range of elementary actions than apes could ape for instance the elementary sounds of a language it would have been natural for such hardware assistance for language abilities to be evolving at the same time as the increased meme bandwidth so by the time creativity was evolving there would already have been significant co-evolution between genes and memes genes evolving hardware to support more embedded memes and memes evolving to take over ever more of what had previously been genetic functions such as choice of mate and methods of eating fighting and so on therefore my speculation is that the creativity program is not entirely inborn it is a combination of genes and memes the hardware of the human brain would have been capable of being creative and sentient conscious and all those other things long before any creative program existed considering a sequence of brains during this period the earliest ones capable of supporting creativity would have required very ingenious programming to fit the capacity into the barely suitable hardware as the hardware improved creativity could have been programmed more easily until the moment when it became easy enough actually to be done by evolution we do not know what was being gradually increased in that approach to a universal explainer if it did we could program one tomorrow just pause there just um my reflection on the part where David writes that speculates that", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2553"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e46a6584-0772-4463-818a-9b71d5b98b30": {"page_content": "required very ingenious programming to fit the capacity into the barely suitable hardware as the hardware improved creativity could have been programmed more easily until the moment when it became easy enough actually to be done by evolution we do not know what was being gradually increased in that approach to a universal explainer if it did we could program one tomorrow just pause there just um my reflection on the part where David writes that speculates that the creativity program is not entirely inborn combination of genes and memes what this what this doesn't mean is that therefore creativity of the human kind necessarily requires the wet wherever brain a particular kind of hardware.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2660"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e33c7c5-373f-4770-aebc-abface536a75": {"page_content": "no that's not the case you'll still be able to physically it has to be the case that we can put the creative algorithm whatever it is into a silicon computer why must that be the case because of the universality of computation that any physical process David Deutsch proved this remember and in fact it kind of goes back to Turing as well and I'm Turing any physical process can be modeled as a computation so whatever the physical thing is that's happening you can write a computer algorithm in principle to capture that for only a certain number of things have we actually have done that of course okay we can model you know how cars work therefore we have car computer games with a model how narrow plane works therefore we have aircraft simulators how the planets move we can do modeling of how the motion of the solar system but we haven't written the program for a person for a human yet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2701"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90a2c991-e81b-4359-ad5e-02038332bf62": {"page_content": "but it's a physical process whatever the brain is doing is is physical so therefore that can be done inside a computer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2762"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c52bc8a6-37ba-4b0f-857e-e3b3b8e22d46": {"page_content": "so it's possible and it's provably possible I should say all right back to the book and this section is titled the future of creativity and I'm skipping the first page or so of this particular section and I'm jumping in where it says not only is creativity necessary for human meme replication it is also sufficient deaf people and blind people and paralyzed people are still able to acquire and create human ideas to or more or less full extent hence neither walking upright nor fun motor control nor the ability to pass sounds into words or any of those other adaptations though they might have played a role historically in creating the conditions for human evolution were functionally necessary to allow humans to become creative nor therefore they philosophically significant in understanding what humans are today namely people creative universal explainers pause their my reflection this is a profound discovery in philosophy by David Deutsch I do not know of any criticisms I've actually heard any criticisms of this by the way from people who understand at least that this is human nature this is an explanation of human nature you know it's it's been a millennia long search for what it is that separates people from other creatures it's not you know people have talked about souls people have talked about or is it our ability to be moral is it our ability to think about aesthetics and science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2775"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b5f7e72e-e371-4f25-b68a-deffc8d1e43a": {"page_content": "okay all of these attempts have kind of been circling or aspects of this fundamental explanation namely that we are universal explainers universal explainers back to the book David writes it was specifically creativity that made the difference between ape and memes expensive in terms of the time and effort required to replicate them and inherently limited in the knowledge that they were capable of expressing and human memes which are efficiently transmitted and universal in their expressive power the beginning of creativity was in that sense the beginning of infinity we have no way of telling at present how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve in apes but once it began to there would automatically have been an evolutionary pressure for it to continue and for other meme facilitating adaptations to follow in its wake this increase must have continued through all the static societies of prehistory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2866"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b26de100-13b9-4060-b925-94229a9cade9": {"page_content": "okay just pause there.\nand we're nearly at the final paragraph.\nbut that's really cool there and again this kind of is sympathetic to the sentiments I expressed about line weaver and that other ToKCast episode about life out there in the universe are we alone where David has written here he said quote we have no way of telling at present how likely it was for creativity to begin to evolve in apes but that's a fundamental importance to this question about the possibility of alien life out there it could be the case that creativity really does evolve.\nokay frequently it crops up whenever life crops up there is this question that I raised in that episode about well how come it only happened once if it's so easy.\nokay if the probability of it or the likelihood of it arising in apes or anywhere else is high then why didn't it happen more than once how likely is it for apes to appear are apes necessary could lizards you know evolve into intelligent creatures.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2926"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2d79cda-bbeb-4bb8-a69a-ecb21a357bae": {"page_content": "okay you see this in science fiction type movies right and certain computer games where you have intelligent lizards or intelligent cats and so on you know that that assumes a kind of Lamarism or a kind of direction to evolution and specifically it assumes that intelligence is this convergent feature of evolution which it doesn't appear there's any evidence for whatsoever unlike the existence of the eye which keeps on cropping up in lots of different species or wings crop up in lots of different species as well brains that are able to do mathematics in the way that we can write poetry in the way that we can appear to have a reason only once creativity appears to have a reason only once.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=2995"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b1d148e8-cbe2-4793-9035-3879289db079": {"page_content": "but we don't know how likely it was David says that here so it could be really likely it's just that earth life on earth has been unlucky in a sense and perhaps out there there's lots of other different kinds of universal explainers or.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=3031"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "df4f0459-b3f0-471e-9686-891a04927741": {"page_content": "not perhaps it it arose once and that's it throughout the universe by the way and for some of the mathematical arguments on that you see that episode anyway final paragraph let's begin the David writes the horror of static societies which I described in the previous chapter can now be seen as a hideous practical jerk that the universe played on the human species our creativity which evolved in order to increase the amount of knowledge that we could use and which would immediately have been capable of producing an endless stream of useful innovations as well was from the outset prevented from doing so by the very knowledge the memes that creativity preserved the strivings of individuals to better themselves were from the outset perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their efforts to exactly the opposite end to thwart all attempts and improvement to keep sentient beings locked in a crude suffering state of eternity only the enlightenment hundreds of thousands of years later and after who knows how many false starts may at last have made it practical to escape from that eternity into infinity that's the end of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=3048"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c6e301ba-7d5b-4314-ab1b-a4714185935f": {"page_content": "wow what a great way to to end it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f3192a83-b618-42c7-a2c4-5df62d140fb3": {"page_content": "so yes our ancestors our ape ancestors the humanoid ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years perhaps millions perhaps millions for the overwhelming majority of human history when we lived in tribes in the African savannah when we traveled you know up through Asia eventually got into to Europe etc we weren't making profound improvements you know the prehistoric people were stuck in this static society even though they had the capacity for creativity the creativity was being used for nothing other than maintaining the status quo what a hideous practical joke as David says there remarkably somehow we we we escaped that I don't know what's more astonishing the fact that we have all creativity at all that we evolved creativity and it was used to maintain stasis in our society or is it more remarkable than either of those things that we actually escaped that the creativity eventually enabled us to criticize to actually build a critical tradition so that we could have a means by which to improve rapidly the ideas that we had and then of course we get into you know beyond beyond that because sort of the the the the ability to improve certainly kind of began certainly began you know long before the the enlightenment you know the ability was always there but there were improvements happening slowly but clearly the Roman Empire was not like an ancient prehistoric tribe a lot of improvements have happened but they were not precisely a dynamic society not what we would call a dynamic society that the Roman Empire from you know for a long time they just remained the same and clearly was not generating an open ended stream of innovative knowledge because the Roman Empire fell apart it wasn't able to solve its problems in time thus far we have been able to we the inheritors of the enlightenment tradition have been able to solve the problems so far at a rate faster than what they are coming at us and we should be we should be optimistic that this will continue it's not necessary that it continues there could be a problem that could wipe out civilization but at the moment as long as we maintain this tradition of criticizing everything in a panoptical way in all directions because criticizing everything not not keeping", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=3120"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7fd683c9-ced3-4491-bf01-37d7ae8fdfff": {"page_content": "enlightenment tradition have been able to solve the problems so far at a rate faster than what they are coming at us and we should be we should be optimistic that this will continue it's not necessary that it continues there could be a problem that could wipe out civilization but at the moment as long as we maintain this tradition of criticizing everything in a panoptical way in all directions because criticizing everything not not keeping anything off limits except one thing except one thing as David Deutsch points out that tradition itself we don't want to undermine the means of correcting errors we don't want to destroy that do not destroy the means of correcting errors or in other words do not undermine these traditions of criticism and in our western enlightenment tradition what that largely means is ensuring that the institutions that hitherto continue to provide the framework in which this open ended stream of innovation can continue to happen to ensure those institutions remain strong and we don't undermine them and we don't remove them altogether because we don't know exactly how what the reasons are that our society has remained so stable we can go good way to explaining why it is that it's able to make rapid progress makes rapid progress because of this tradition of criticism but why the entire society shouldn't fall apart given that it's criticizing everything all the time well that's harder and so then we have these political institutions and traditions which are doing well at keeping things stable some are better than others that's another topic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=3254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ea6f143-7868-4938-93bf-48a14c69b87d": {"page_content": "so for now this has been episode 50 50 I don't know when the the next episode will be coming out I put out quite a few recently.\nbut I look forward to two some new episodes for now so next time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1r0lBi2m68&t=3363"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "575912cd-2884-4d60-9efb-65930de7f072": {"page_content": "And what you're listening to there is Swan Lake by Trikodsky.\nWelcome to ToKCast episode 121, Kyarama Leto in the Science of Canon Can't Chapter 6, titled Work and Heat begins that chapter.\nBy recounting how as a child, she had a music box, which one would wind up, and a little ballerina would dance while that music played.\nStrangely, I had exactly the same thing.\nNo as a child, I didn't personally have a music box like this as such, but my mother did, which was in our house as I grew up.\nIt was a jewelry box, same idea.\nYou wound it up, and a little dancing ballerina danced to a tune.\nAnd it played, I think, a different tune, not exactly Swan Lake.\nAnyway, at the beginning of chapter 6, Kyarama explains how this mechanism works.\nBy turning a key, winding the thing up, the box is charged up, so to speak, with mechanical charge.\nEnergy stored in the elasticity of a spring-like mechanism that slowly does the work of moving the pieces and playing the tune.\nToday I'm doing lots more reading than normal, I guess, because the idea is in this chapter, in particular, they're new.\nAnd I'm extending what is new here.\nFrom what I said in episode 119, all about the thermodynamics that everyone already knows who's studied thermodynamics before.\nSo I'll begin the reading today with the introduction to this chapter that Kyarama has written.\nAnd she writes, quote, in this chapter is, where I discuss the conservation of energy as a counterfactual principle about impossibility, three different kinds of irreversibility in physics, statistical, forgetful, and counterfactual, where I provide a counterfactual second law based on an exact distinction between work and heat, and where you encounter the universal constructor, a machine that can perform all transformations that are physically possible, end quote.\nNow in my readings here for talkhouse, I'm not going to do all that.\nIn particular, I'm not going to look at the three different kinds of irreversibility and statistics, in particular, I'm not going to look at the forgetful kind.\nNow as I'll be doing a lot of reading today, I'm trying to cut out as much of the chapter as I possibly can.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=30"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b85b4ef1-56da-49a0-89ea-e6f0460911e4": {"page_content": "Now in my readings here for talkhouse, I'm not going to do all that.\nIn particular, I'm not going to look at the three different kinds of irreversibility and statistics, in particular, I'm not going to look at the forgetful kind.\nNow as I'll be doing a lot of reading today, I'm trying to cut out as much of the chapter as I possibly can.\nAnd so as I say, she begins the chapter, Kyarama begins the chapter by explaining the mechanical operation of the ballerina in a music box and the sound coming out of the music box.\nSo I'm skipping the basics of that, and I'm going to pick it up where she writes, quote, where does that motion originate?.\nAt first sight, it comes from the user who turns the winding key.\nHowever, if you go a little deeper, this seems to be the start of an infinite regress, which has happened repeatedly in this book as signaling a problem in the traditional conceptions explanations.\nThere is no end in sight if you go down this line of inquiry because you could ask the same question of the motion of the user's hand, where does that originate?.\nAlso innumerable other mechanisms could equally well wind up the box.\nFor instance, a small mechanical engine attached to the winding key could do as well as the user's hand.\nTo understand, you need to ask a more fruitful question.\nWhat is the mechanical charge made of?.\nWhat kind of stuff powers the music box when you wind it up?.\nThe stuff that charges the box is what physicists call energy.\nThe term comes from a Greek word, popularised by Aristotle, whose original meaning and Greek is capacity to work.\nNowadays, what we call energy in physics is even more sharply defined than in Aristotle's time.\nIt is an abstract property of physical systems that must be subject to substantial constraints.\nAs we know, the most important of these constraints is the law of conservation of energy, requiring that the energy of the system can be changed only at the cost of changing the energy of some other system by the same amount.\nThe law of conservation of energy is about counterfactuals, for it requires that it be impossible to change the energy of the system without any side effect.\nGiven that all laws of motion must conform to the conservation of energy, those already known, and those yet to be known, the conservation of energy is more general than any specific dynamical law.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c5915151-a088-4cb1-8bce-ad2340d65410": {"page_content": "The law of conservation of energy is about counterfactuals, for it requires that it be impossible to change the energy of the system without any side effect.\nGiven that all laws of motion must conform to the conservation of energy, those already known, and those yet to be known, the conservation of energy is more general than any specific dynamical law.\nAlso, it is intended to apply to any system in the universe.\nIt rules miniscule particles such as electrons and protons, heat engines that propel aircrafts and spaceships, and the mitochondria powering our cells.\nIt applies to anything and everything that has an energy independent of its scale and size.\nJust my reflection on that.\nThis idea of scale independence is really, really important here.\nWhat it means is that the law, scale independence, means something applies whether the thing is small or big, independent of its scale, how much bigger you make it, whether it's a single atom or a conglomeration of atoms.\nIt's not like laws of physics should apply to big things and not small things, although this is a misconception that sometimes gets around.\nThe laws of quantum theory should apply everywhere no matter the size of things.\nAnd in reverse, I just speak, so the laws of thermodynamics, which are found to apply to heat engines, big things, should also apply to small things as well.\nIn both cases, quantum theory and thermodynamics, it must be the case that the laws are scale independent.\nThey apply no matter the size of the thing.\nAnd the thing is they do, I would suggest.\nBut our imperfect knowledge of them seems to suggest, at first glance, that the quantum laws apply to little things and thermodynamic laws apply to big things.\nWell, not always, but the idea here is that this is what's going on in the mind of some people.\nAnd by the way, it's also why you have people like David Wallace who write about the emergent multiverse, the idea that these laws of quantum theory do indeed apply to large ensembles of particles, indeed the entire universe.\nAnd that's what we would say.\nBut you hear other popular answers and other physicists talk about how well quantum theory are just the laws that apply to the very small.\nAnd that's not the case.\nThey're universal.\nThey apply everywhere.\nIt's just that from our perspective, certain things appear to be the case, but appearances can be deceiving.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=275"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "02d3bf86-88d4-4931-9996-b8c0e053c170": {"page_content": "And that's what we would say.\nBut you hear other popular answers and other physicists talk about how well quantum theory are just the laws that apply to the very small.\nAnd that's not the case.\nThey're universal.\nThey apply everywhere.\nIt's just that from our perspective, certain things appear to be the case, but appearances can be deceiving.\nBut if things do appear in some way, and that's a problem, which it is here, then we should seek to solve the problem, in the case of the second law, that's certainly a problem because it appears to apply to big things, but at the small scale, at the level of individual atoms, the laws appear to be reversible, that the second law is about irreversibility, which is what Chiara is going to come to in this chapter, and what we're going to talk about.\nBut just here, in what I've just read, Chiara has mentioned the first law, never mind the second.\nAnd on this, I have a stop at press, which has never happened before.\nOlder listeners will know what stop press means, stop press being what used to happen to newspapers.\nThey'd print the physical newspapers and send them out all over to the news agents and shops and the paper boys who delivered them, always paper boys, never paper girls.\nAnd if partway through the printing of the newspapers, something of note happened, they'd stop the printing presses.\nStop press.\nI remember there was a box left empty.\nOn the last page of newspapers in Sydney anyway, it read stop press.\nAnd beneath it, there was a space to insert news that appeared during the press, during the printing of the papers.\nI think it was done in red ink, if I remember, silly diversion there.\nMy stop press for this is that as I was making this very episode, Chiara Malito published an official paper about how constructive theory can be used to illuminate a connection between information and the first law of thermodynamics.\nNow, this is in addition to worksheet already done, and what this chapter is primarily about, about how the second law can be better understood given constructive theory and underlines the known link between working information, given constructive theory.\nNow, I'm just going to mentally check off the fact that that paper exists now.\nI read through it, but I cannot do it justice.\nI cannot turn it into a succinct few sentences here for public digest, I suppose.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=405"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b00191e9-4aa7-4494-b685-71dab2d0b5f8": {"page_content": "Now, this is in addition to worksheet already done, and what this chapter is primarily about, about how the second law can be better understood given constructive theory and underlines the known link between working information, given constructive theory.\nNow, I'm just going to mentally check off the fact that that paper exists now.\nI read through it, but I cannot do it justice.\nI cannot turn it into a succinct few sentences here for public digest, I suppose.\nI'll take some work and perhaps I can leave that for an actual discussion with Chiara herself, or I can make an additional episode all about that, but it may just get a little too technical.\nThis is going to get technical in places enough, so we'll just mentally check off the fact that it has been yet another paper published on the 27th of May, 2022, in the Journal of Physics Communications titled the Information Theoretic Foundation of Thermodynamic Work Extraction, and has their statements about the first as well as the second law.\nToday, we're focusing on the second law, but just to say, there is this new paper out there all about work information, the first law, and constructive theory back to this episode, where we've just talked about how the first law applies to everything and a scale independent.\nChiara goes on to say, quote, this seemingly innocuous requirement has sweeping consequences \u2013 first it implies that the energy of a system cannot increase or decrease, unless energy is supplied from or absorbed by something else.\nThis allows us to account minutely for the whereabouts of energy as it transits from one system to another, when it escapes from here it must have gone over there, it can't disappear or pop into existence, for example, the music box cannot get charged spontaneously without something else providing the energy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=368"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "00f6139c-6231-40f5-bd58-b1b4d42213b2": {"page_content": "The winding of the key, likewise the battery of a smartphone does not get replenished of the device, it switched off and not connected to the power supply, okay, I'm skipping a number of chapters, picking it up where, she writes, quote, the conservation of energy implies the startling prediction, that at each step along the chain, if one accounts for all the systems involved, one shall find, overall, the same amount of energy initially given to the winding key, such as the inescapable accountancy set by the law of conservation of energy, and it is based on the counterfactual property that it is impossible to change the energy of a system without side effects being produced, end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=629"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "160b3ab6-f3f3-42da-80e7-925e603fad49": {"page_content": "Yes, so here we have the winding of the key, which sets the music box into motion, and the energy that's there at the beginning, from winding the key, stored in the winding mechanism, a spring of some type, is then transferred into work which moves the ballerina around and work which sends sound waves out into the atmosphere, and also some heat to produce as well, but all of the energy that's produced was there originally in the winding of the key, again, skipping of picking it up where, she writes, quote, the second law distinguishes between two types of energy transfers, and the distinction is rooted in counterfactuals.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=667"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c22dab2f-0f6f-422d-b624-a2c0230875f7": {"page_content": "One type of transfer is reversible, one can use these energy transfers to perform work on a variety of physical systems, such as the brass winding key of the music box or a flywheel or a piston, and then undo the transfer completely, retrieving the energy in full, with no irreversible losses.\nThe systems supporting these energy transfers are fully interoperable, just like the systems in the music box.\nThe other type of energy transfer is irreversible.\nOnce the transfer happens, it cannot be fully undone, part of the capacity to do work is lost along the way.\nA classic example, breaks on a bike.\nWhen you break your plier resistance against the rotation of the wheel, the wheel and brake initially have a certain energy and they come to a stop.\nThe brakes and the wheel itself have heated up.\nWhy?.\nThe energy that was in the motion of the wheel and the bike has now gone into the thermal motion of the molecules, composing the wheel and the brakes, and it is practically irritable.\nI shall revisit practically later.\nThe same holds for the energy of the vibrations, bringing the tune of the music box all the way to our ears once the music is heard is very hard to bring that energy back into the box's mechanism.\nThe chemist, Peter Atkins, has frequently said in his masterly books about the foundations of thermodynamics that work and heat are not substances, just as information is not a substance.\nThey refer to modes of transfers of energy.\nI call the reversible transfers work like.\nThe transferred energy that can be reused at infinitum to initiate or to stop controlled ordered kinds of motion.\nI call the irreversible transfers heat like.\nThe second law requires some energy transfers to be heat like once they happen.\nIt is impossible to recycle some of the energy involved in them.\nThat energy can no longer be used fully for a work like transfer, only some of it can end quote.\nSo this distinction between work like and heat like is a key of this constructor theoretic view of the second law.\nThe constructor theoretic view is obviously also catch in terms of this idea of a construct law.\nThe second law is about the fact that there is no object possible.\nWe are going to come to this, no object possible, no constructor.\nThat can do certain processes in reverse.\nWe can't capture the lost heat, for example, there is no constructor, the one can build or that can be built, that could enable the recapture of that heat so that useful work can be done.\nWhy?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=184"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a321afc-0633-4b83-9927-46c48e5b4c4c": {"page_content": "The second law is about the fact that there is no object possible.\nWe are going to come to this, no object possible, no constructor.\nThat can do certain processes in reverse.\nWe can't capture the lost heat, for example, there is no constructor, the one can build or that can be built, that could enable the recapture of that heat so that useful work can be done.\nWhy?.\nBecause there is no physical transformation possible.\nSo no constructor can be built, so therefore there's no physical transformation possible.\nThis is construct or theory.\nAnd why is that?.\nWhy is it that there's no constructor able to do this?.\nWhy can't we build that device?.\nWhy?.\nWell, that's just the way things are at the whole point of the laws of physics.\nWe are now in a world where we're asking if you're asking that question, why can't we have photons traveling below the speed of light?.\nWell, that's just what they do.\nThey travel at the speed of light.\nNow anyone who listened into episode 119, where I went through an introduction to thermodynamics will recognize that name, Peter Atkins, one of the most famous thermodynamicsists, physical chemists of our age, who's written a lot of the classic texts on exactly this stuff.\nIt was interesting to hear Keir actually, and one of her interviews she did with Logan Chipkin, and if you can find those out there, look up Logan, he's on Twitter, and just Google his name, Logan Chipkin, and he has interviewed Keir.\nAnd they talked there, well, Keir, I mentioned, brought up about how Peter Atkins himself has jokingly credited Keir with the discovery of a new kind of entity, information, E-N-F-O-R-M-A-T-I-O-N. Working with the properties of both energy and information.\nThat is the stuff that can be stored, so to speak, on work media, which you're going to come to.\nNow I'm not a physical chemist, and I'm not a theoretical physicist.\nSo I don't know how deep that joke runs, how seriously we can take that joke.\nBut whether one day, there might actually be this thing called information, I'm not sure.\nAnyway, I'll get back to the book, and Keir arrives.\nQuote, the second law of thermodynamics operates in a rather impressive way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=757"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0d5a9b60-cef2-4a29-9f28-1279cf06a107": {"page_content": "Now I'm not a physical chemist, and I'm not a theoretical physicist.\nSo I don't know how deep that joke runs, how seriously we can take that joke.\nBut whether one day, there might actually be this thing called information, I'm not sure.\nAnyway, I'll get back to the book, and Keir arrives.\nQuote, the second law of thermodynamics operates in a rather impressive way.\nIn tandem with the principle of the conservation of energy, it provided the theoretical foundation for heat engines, which powered the incredible progress that occurred during the industrial revolution.\nBut when it comes to explaining exactly what the second law says about the physical world, the issue is not as clear as for the conservation of energy.\nIt is so complicated and subtle that physicists over the decades have proposed numerous equivalent formulations of the second law.\nEach has its notion of heat like and work like transfers of energy, and they are different from each other.\nStill all these different formulations concur on a few striking consequences concerning the thermodynamics of heat engines.\nThe second law is thus a pillar of the edifice of theoretical physics.\nBut we are not quite sure what it means.\nEnd quote.\nThis is why popular science in particular is so enamored with the second law.\nI'd be hard pressed to find one of Paul Davies books that doesn't mention it.\nIn fact, I'd be hard pressed to find any popular science book in the general sphere of physics that doesn't mention it.\nPhysicists love discussing the second law because it has this mysterious characteristic that other laws don't.\nNamely, irreversibility.\nIt seems like the processes that the second law governs happen one way, but there's no time-symmetric way of reversing them, simply in the other direction, although it should be, because every other law, or dynamical laws in particular, do have this time-symmetric property.\nThey run perfectly well forward in time, as back in time, and if you took a video, as I said, of the process that was going on, it was, you know, subatomic, no physicist would be able to look at that video and say, oh, that's the forward-time direction, that's a reverse-time direction, it's impossible to tell.\nOr is it?.\nWell, this is the whole thing about the second law.\nMaybe there's something hidden, some information hidden there, that tells you which way is forward in time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e77101b-0b6e-4002-a0c1-4a66c281e3e0": {"page_content": "Or is it?.\nWell, this is the whole thing about the second law.\nMaybe there's something hidden, some information hidden there, that tells you which way is forward in time.\nIn particular, maybe thinking about these things in terms of dynamical laws is not the way to go.\nOkay, skipping a few paragraphs, and I'll pick it up where, you're right, it's right.\nThe problem is that the second law requires some irreversibility.\nIncidentally, that is also why it is so fascinating.\nirreversibility is that the core of various phenomena that are ubiquitous in physical reality, the birth, development, and death of organisms, the growth of complexity in the biosphere, the increase in sophistication within our civilization, the creation and destruction of knowledge, the irreversibility requirement of the second law, brutally clashes with the laws of motion, ruling the elementary constituents of matter.\nRemember, I sit in Chapter 4 that the laws of quantum theory are reversible, if they allow for a transformation, the reverse transformation must also be possible.\nThe laws of general relativity, the other most accurate description of physical reality we possess, are reversible too.\nIf there is a trajectory that takes the system from A to B, there must also be one that takes it from B to A. microscopic constituents of matter must operate in this reversible manner because they obey these laws of motion.\nThe problem then is how can the second law require that some energy transfers are irreversible and be compatible with the reversibility of the laws of motion?.\nAnd I'm skipping apart, and she goes on to say, is there a unique picture of physical reality that can reconcile reversibility and irreversibility?.\nThis does not yet have a definite answer to this question, let alone a unique one.\nThere are a few proposed answers, but each is still controversial, ultimately it is because theoretical physics is trapped in a world without counterfactuals.\nWith counterfactuals, one can reconcile the reversible description of the laws of motion, and that of the second law at all scales.\nTo see how I shall first take a closer look at the irreversibility of heat light transfers, imagine a playground.\nIn that playground, a sea saw consists of four main systems.\nTwo seats, for approximately equal mass, a rigid, long sturdy bar joining them, slaughtered on a pivot, placed at its midpoint.\nWe need two children to play, a child sits at each end so that one goes up as the other goes down.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0f6c453-8908-4b25-abbc-07f47d1c6c05": {"page_content": "To see how I shall first take a closer look at the irreversibility of heat light transfers, imagine a playground.\nIn that playground, a sea saw consists of four main systems.\nTwo seats, for approximately equal mass, a rigid, long sturdy bar joining them, slaughtered on a pivot, placed at its midpoint.\nWe need two children to play, a child sits at each end so that one goes up as the other goes down.\nBy gravity, depending upon which child weighs more, added fun comes if the children are tempted to go as high in the air as possible as they take turns pushing their feet against the ground.\nLet's simplify the picture a little.\nJust imagine that instead of the children, there are just two springs firmly secured to the ground underneath each end of the bar.\nAlso imagine that both ends, call them A and B, have the same mass.\nThe sea saw in the neutral position corresponds to the bar being perfectly horizontal above the pivot.\nStill.\nNow imagine you push one of the ends, say A in the upwards direction, up it goes, while the other end B goes down and compresses the spring as much as allowed by the conservation of energy.\nEnergy given by your push is now transferred entirely to the spring.\nThen the compressed spring gets decompressed by its completely elastic nature, thus giving back the energy to the B end of the sea saw which therefore goes up and A goes down, compresses the spring, in turn and so on and quote.\nCara goes on to explain over the next few paragraphs about how, well, you know, if there's no other effects going on, then this just goes on forever.\nYou have a perpetual motion machine of a kind, in theory, but in reality, we know that these things come to a stop we have what's called a damped oscillator.\nFriction gets involved, but what is this friction?.\nWhere is this energy being lost?.\nWhy should such a mechanism like that?.\nI see so it springs it either end, not just keep on going on forever.\nWell, Cara goes on to explain, quote, for a start there are countless molecules of air continually bouncing off the bar as it goes up and down.\nWhen the spring is also not perfectly elastic, the energy transmitted to it by the bar is not entirely returned when the spring gets decompressed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=1205"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bee79ecb-a8fb-4af3-adb0-f9677962e040": {"page_content": "Where is this energy being lost?.\nWhy should such a mechanism like that?.\nI see so it springs it either end, not just keep on going on forever.\nWell, Cara goes on to explain, quote, for a start there are countless molecules of air continually bouncing off the bar as it goes up and down.\nWhen the spring is also not perfectly elastic, the energy transmitted to it by the bar is not entirely returned when the spring gets decompressed.\nSome energy goes to waste away from the sea saw oscillations, for example, it is absorbed by the atoms of the spring, which increase their internal vibrational energy.\nSo there are several more interactions to take into account to explain where the energy goes in real life, sea saw.\nAll these interactions take a little energy from the combined motion of the sea saw and the springs.\nThat is why, if a real life sea saw is set into motion and then left alone, it eventually comes to rest.\nOverall though, energy is still conserved.\nWhen the sea saw comes to a stop, the energy given by the push is stored in the air molecules and in other particles inside the spring and the bar, there are all a little warmer, more energetic than before.\nHere is the point where irreversibility creeps in, in a world where all elementary interactions are reversible.\nOnce the energy has gone into molecules of air and vibrational motions of atoms, it becomes tough to bring it back in practice.\nSuch kinds of energy transfers are those the second law labels as heat-like, generally regarded as irreversible, just like in the case of breaks or the music box.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, I am skipping a number of paragraphs where Chyara talks about the status of the second law.\nIs that fundamental?.\nAnd I will just read one of the important paragraphs here as to what she says about this.\nQuote.\nIf reversing heat-like energy transfers were just very hard to achieve, but ultimately possible, the second law would not really be a fundamental law.\nIn fact, there would be no reason for physics to distinguish between work-like and heat-like.\nThere would be no irreducible irreversibility.\nAll energy transfers would be work-like.\nThat is reversible.\nOnly a little harder to achieve in the reverse direction compared with the forward direction.\nThe second law and its prescribed irreversibility would just be the description of our current technological limitations, which of course are not fundamental.\nThese limitations can be improved upon by investing enough resources into it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=184"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "91c0bf6f-15cd-4be6-96ee-955398c71b40": {"page_content": "There would be no irreducible irreversibility.\nAll energy transfers would be work-like.\nThat is reversible.\nOnly a little harder to achieve in the reverse direction compared with the forward direction.\nThe second law and its prescribed irreversibility would just be the description of our current technological limitations, which of course are not fundamental.\nThese limitations can be improved upon by investing enough resources into it.\nOn this question of whether the second law is fundamental, physicists are currently divided into two main camps.\nOne camp says that it is not fundamental.\nThere are only reversible laws governing the microscopic interactions of particles.\nWith enough technological resources, the reversible dynamics could always bring all energy back to where it came from, and one could then reuse the energy to do work.\nThis would imply that the limitations imposed by the second law on heat engines are just a rule of thumb, telling us that it is hard in practice to reverse specific interactions.\nBut these limitations could be lifted ultimately by improving our technology.\nAccording to this camp, the second law does not need to appear in the manual for the universe.\nThe other camp claims that the second law is fundamental, that there can be a formulation of the second law that is universally true and still compatible with the reversible dynamics at all scales.\nCan this be so?.\nVarious paths to reconciling irreversibility with reversible laws of motion have been proposed to support this idea, none of them really works to the end of creating a universal exact law.\nThey ultimately all concede that irreversibility only appears as some sort of approximation, but that is not fundamental.\nOnly one of these paths is based on counterfactuals, as I shall explain.\nIt is the only one that has some potential to be successful in this endeavor.\nI shall go into a little detail about these paths because they are smart ideas, even if they end up with mixed success in regards to producing an exact second law, understanding the other approaches is indispensable to grasping the superiority of the approach with counterfactuals.\nEnd quote.\nOkay.\nI'm skipping a number of paragraphs.\nI might just mention the section where Kiara talks about why she doesn't talk much about entropy.\nEntropy doesn't come up in the constructive theoretic view of the second law.\nAnd the reason is because it's a statistical law.\nIt's kind of an approximation when we talk about entropy.\nAs Kiara says, quote, the statistical mechanical law cannot even aspire to be exact or universal.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=831"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40828465-fbc1-4e9f-bb40-0453b51ea4c6": {"page_content": "End quote.\nOkay.\nI'm skipping a number of paragraphs.\nI might just mention the section where Kiara talks about why she doesn't talk much about entropy.\nEntropy doesn't come up in the constructive theoretic view of the second law.\nAnd the reason is because it's a statistical law.\nIt's kind of an approximation when we talk about entropy.\nAs Kiara says, quote, the statistical mechanical law cannot even aspire to be exact or universal.\nThe configuration maximizing the entropy is not the only one guaranteed to occur.\nIt is the most probable.\nAll other configurations can still occur, but it is not said when and how, only that they are less likely.\nThe fundamental reason why the statistical second law cannot be exact is that the dynamics regulating the exchange of energy between, say, iced tea and the surroundings are reversible.\nEnd quote.\nSo of course, that's nice, right?.\nThis idea of entropy is disorder.\nAnd what the second law says phrased in this way is that disorder tends to increase in the university.\nTends to.\nTends to.\nIt's the most probable as Kiara would put it there.\nThe most probable way in which the universe evolves is that it evolves towards increased entropy, increased disorder.\nBut this is not a guarantee.\nBut with laws of physics, you want a guarantee.\nThese things are incontrovertible, these things tell you what will happen, not what will probably happen.\nAnd we've talked about that on ToKCast before when we've broken down David's talk on probability.\nSo I refer people to that episode, which if you're interested is episode 111 of the talkcast, where I go into David's talk on probability, where specifically this kind of issue arises, you know, the laws of physics tell you what actually happens, but I don't tell you what probably happens.\nAnd so this is one of the reasons why one of the motivations for this entire constructor theoretic view of the second law, because other versions of the second law involving, for example, entropy are about what probably happens to ensembles of particles and to the universe.\nBut we want to know what will happen, not probably.\nSo not only does Chiara talk about why that doesn't work, that statistical view of the second law talks about another one as well.\nSo I'm skipping all of that, quite a number of pages here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=831"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a551a140-cca0-4e91-aa93-835d14e55980": {"page_content": "But we want to know what will happen, not probably.\nSo not only does Chiara talk about why that doesn't work, that statistical view of the second law talks about another one as well.\nSo I'm skipping all of that, quite a number of pages here.\nInstead I'll pick it up where Chiara writes, quote, just like Goldilocks in the three bears house, after trying two paths that do not work, we land on the third path to irreversibility based on counterfactuals.\nThis path is not just right, it too has problems, but it is more promising than the other two, which are instead based on the traditional conception of physics.\nTo set off down this path, let's trace the same conceptual steps that led the superb physicist, James Jewell, to perform a crucial experiment in the early days of thermodynamics.\nWhat he conjectured and verified experimentally was that while it is possible to heat up a volume of water by stirring it only mechanically, it is impossible to cool it down, by those same means, you can see that I am now talking about counterfactuals, the language regarding possible, impossible transformations belongs to the science of Canon Kant.\nLet's return to a glass of iced tea, Jewell would have preferred a glass of beer, as he was also a brewer, but I shall stick with the tea, it can't do any harm.\nImagine you stir the tea vigorously, mechanically, say with a spoon, this stirring provides the molecules of water with more energy, imagine that the glass is somehow perfectly isolated from the rest of the environment, and no energy.\nOther than the energy of the stirring can be exchanged with the environment.\nWhat you will find out is that the tea in the glass ends up in a hotter state at the end of the stirring, on the other hand, no matter how hard one tries, the temperature cannot decrease through stirring only.\nIn this scenario, that transformation is impossible.\nOf course, if the glass is not isolated, you can stir the tea to cool it down by facilitating exchanges with the air in the environment, however, here I imagine the cup to be entirely isolated.\nThis kind of irreversibility prescribes that sometimes a transformation, such as heating some amount of water, is possible by mechanical means only, I using the stirrer.\nBut the reversed task is not possible, by using those same means, though it may be possible by other means.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=1554"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d66c0eec-03bc-411e-8df6-9e68dfa0ada5": {"page_content": "Of course, if the glass is not isolated, you can stir the tea to cool it down by facilitating exchanges with the air in the environment, however, here I imagine the cup to be entirely isolated.\nThis kind of irreversibility prescribes that sometimes a transformation, such as heating some amount of water, is possible by mechanical means only, I using the stirrer.\nBut the reversed task is not possible, by using those same means, though it may be possible by other means.\nWork like energy transfers are those corresponding to transformations that can be performed by mechanical means only, in both directions, pausing their myreflection just going back, it's worth saying that again, work like energy transfers are those corresponding to transformations that can be performed by mechanical means only in both directions, and going on.\nHeats like transfers correspond to transformations that are possible by mechanical means in one direction only, but I impossible in reverse using the same means and nothing else.\nAs you can see, this path to irreversibility is about possibility of certain transformations and impossibility of their reverse.\nIt is about counterfactuals.\nThis approach to the second law is due to Lord Kelvin and Max Planck.\nIt does not talk about the most probable free evolution of a physical system in contact with an environment or about what trajectories a system access is once you discount some of its details, end quote, just pausing their myreflection, yes, so on this experiment with jewel and stirring and so on and so forth.\nAgain, I refer the listener to episode 119.\nIf you are unsure of any of these details and you want to hear the classic way in which some of these things are described to see what we're getting out here and the importance of what we're getting out here.\nJust go back to that episode and you'll find me discussing jewel's experiment then, the high school version of this kind of thing, the high school explanation of this kind of thing as well.\nHere we're emphasizing Kelvin and Plunk's invocation of what can be called, a version of constructive theory.\nThis idea, we've got possible and impossible stuff going on, but the work like means that it's possible in both directions, but the heat like it's possible in one direction, but even possible in the other direction.\nThis is wonderful.\nLet's keep going with what Kiara says here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=1554"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "91c0c2ec-a1ed-4658-80dc-b541beebab5f": {"page_content": "Here we're emphasizing Kelvin and Plunk's invocation of what can be called, a version of constructive theory.\nThis idea, we've got possible and impossible stuff going on, but the work like means that it's possible in both directions, but the heat like it's possible in one direction, but even possible in the other direction.\nThis is wonderful.\nLet's keep going with what Kiara says here.\nAnd the fascinating revelation is that this kind of counterfactual irreversibility is compatible with time reversal symmetric laws without requiring any approximation because even under perfectly reversible microscopic laws, it is possible to have some device that can perform a transformation in one direction by certain means.\nExample, there can be a machine such as an automated stirrer that heats up a liquid by mechanical means only.\nWhereas it is impossible to have a device performing the task in reverse, with the same means.\nFor example, cooling a liquid by mechanical means only, crucially, reversing the laws of motion of the elementary constituents will not turn the forward device, performing a transformation from A to B, into a reverse device, performing the inverse transformation from B to A. Even if the elementary constituents of both devices obey reversible laws, the forward device does not necessarily imply the existence of a reverse device.\nEven if the elementary constituents behave reversibly, you can have that the forward transformation is possible.\nWhereas the inverse transformation is impossible.\nThis irreversibility is different from the statistically reversibility, which requires that the forward trajectory of a freely evolving system is overwhelmingly more likely than the reverse trajectory.\nIt is also different from the forgetful irreversibility, where one trajectory happens whereas others do not only if one neglects some details of what is going on.\nThe latter statements can be only approximate based on probabilities or arbitrary neglecting procedures.\nBy contrast, the statement that the transformation is possible and it traverses impossible is exact.\nIt involves no arbitrary forgetting or probabilistic approximations.\nThis counterfactual path to irreversibility and to formulating the second law is exact, just pausing the MRI reflection.\nThat's the punchline.\nThere's your punchline.\nThat is the way in which the second law can be formulated.\nAnd I love that, this idea that work like transformations, possible in both directions, heat like transformations, possible in one direction, but not possible in the other.\nAnd there's no such device that can be created, can be constructed in order to allow the transformation to occur in the reversible direction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=1922"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "88ad2c63-7bd6-4b83-b1cc-f2eb2b2ffe34": {"page_content": "That's the punchline.\nThere's your punchline.\nThat is the way in which the second law can be formulated.\nAnd I love that, this idea that work like transformations, possible in both directions, heat like transformations, possible in one direction, but not possible in the other.\nAnd there's no such device that can be created, can be constructed in order to allow the transformation to occur in the reversible direction.\nCarigas, on to say, quote, however, as it stands, this approach suffers from a serious problem.\nIt does not explain what mechanical means are.\nIts domain of applicability is therefore undefined.\nA stir requires as mechanical means, so do an ideal spring in a suspended weight, but does, for instance, an atom in a well-defined state of energy can as a mechanical means as well.\nWhat about a current looping in a superconductor, or a photon with a well-defined frequency?.\nHad a criterion to decide what counts, as mechanical means, the statement, this transformation is possible with mechanical means only, but its reverse is not possible with those means only, is exact, but does not say anything specific about the universe.\nA second law expressed along these lines remains unclear.\nSo it cannot be a useful addition to the manual for the universe.\nFor it to be clear and useful, it needs to explain what mechanical means are.\nThere is where the interoperability property, which I hinted at while describing the music box, comes in handy.\nThe solution comes in beautifully once more through the counterfactual approach.\nSo remember, just remember what interoperability is all about.\nIt's this notion of substrate independence.\nNow, Carigas, on and I'm skipping a few paragraphs here to explain a little about what this mechanical means is, I'm just skipping over that and getting more to the meat of the matter where she writes, quote, let's resort again to a variant of our seesaw example involving two weights hanging on either side of a pulley at some height above the ground.\nThe first important point to notice is that different heights for the weights indicate different values of energy for each, because I am imagining that, as in the seesaw example, a gravitational field is present, which means following a simple logic based on Newtonian mechanics, that the higher a weight is suspended above the ground, the higher its potential energy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=448"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "029e6a1d-5456-41b3-be36-403f79b34a46": {"page_content": "The first important point to notice is that different heights for the weights indicate different values of energy for each, because I am imagining that, as in the seesaw example, a gravitational field is present, which means following a simple logic based on Newtonian mechanics, that the higher a weight is suspended above the ground, the higher its potential energy.\nIf this sounds counterintuitive to you, think of the familiar case of water falling from a height in a waterfall, the higher the fall, the more energy is carried with water.\nSo here we've got an idea of weights on a pulley, and we can call the weights A and B, and if A is higher than B, then A has more energy than B.\nThis is what we're talking about here.\nIt can be moved, the pulley can be moved so that B will go higher than A and so on and so forth.\nWork can be done.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=860"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3eb64723-f2b8-4772-b077-ec5907b1b81a": {"page_content": "We can have a seesawing transformation of energy being added by someone doing work on it, and we can have a situation where A and B at the same height, or maybe A is higher than B, so A has more energy than B, or maybe A is much, much higher than B, so A has much more energy than B, or maybe B is higher than A, so B has more energy than A. Not on earth as any of this got to do with anything, but we're introducing the concept of a system which has different energies able to be stored in the system, which look a lot like information, don't they?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=2226"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1da457dd-0f78-4bfe-93ed-417f55765cd4": {"page_content": "Because there are different states for this system.\nThis system which is based upon energy, the energy at the potential energy of suspended weights also looks kind of like the way in which information could be stored.\nAnd we can move the pulley and move the weights, therefore, to change the states of the system.\nAnd in theory, this thing could be done in a friction-free way, and so you could move these weights mechanically around.\nAnd therefore, you have this concept of mechanical means, as Kiara says, quote, the mechanism itself, the system of pulism weights, remains unchanged, which is what makes it behave like a catalyst, as I defined in Chapter 5, a system that can enable a transformation and retain the ability to enable it again.\nSo now it is easy to express what mechanical means are.\nThey are all systems with different energy states having the crucial property that the sea-sawing transformation I have expressed is possible.\nAnd I'm just paraphrasing what she goes on to say, she uses notation, so I'm going to try and get around using the notation.\nIt talks about how, well, you've got these two weights, A and B. And if A is higher than B, well, that's one state.\nBut if B is higher than A, that's a different state.\nAnd if A and B have the same height, well, that's a different state again.\nYou have all these different states possible, different values of energy of, you know, A and B.\nBut this is just representative, it could represent, you know, different energy configurations for an atom, as she says, or any other system that could store potential energy like this.\nAnd I'll pick it up where she says, quote, I have characterized mechanical means with a counterfactual property.\nThey are the physical systems with the property that the sea-sawing transformation defined above is possible.\nAnd when, you know, in the quote, what we mean by the sea-sawing transformation is just like, you know, if you've got these two weights over the pulley, A and B, A is higher than B, well, they can be sea-sawed such that B is higher than A.\nSo the total amount of energy in that system is the same, it's just that you've transferred potential energy from one place to another.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=1064"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "194f3162-74b5-4e8d-9a23-85e826e195d8": {"page_content": "And when, you know, in the quote, what we mean by the sea-sawing transformation is just like, you know, if you've got these two weights over the pulley, A and B, A is higher than B, well, they can be sea-sawed such that B is higher than A.\nSo the total amount of energy in that system is the same, it's just that you've transferred potential energy from one place to another.\nShe goes on to say, quote, to highlight the fact that this characterization embraces far more general things than mechanical means such as springs and weights, I shall call systems that have that property work media.\nThey include weights and springs, but also microscopic particles like atoms and qubits in particular states, but not glasses of water or cups of tea at a given temperature.\nThe fact that they permit a sea-sawing transformation is the counterfactual property that singles out all systems that can undergo work-like reversible energy transfers among one another.\nIt is what we needed to complete the formulation of the counterfactual second law to make its domain of applicability well defined.\nA work-like transfer of energy is one that transforms a physical state from one state to another and back again, requiring a change in energy on work media only.\nFor instance, the ideal frictionless sea-saw implements a work-like energy transfer between two weights on each side because each of them qualifies as a work medium.\nOn the other hand, if one of the two transformations going from A as higher or B as higher is impossible to perform with side effects on work media only, the energy transfer is heat-like, that is irreversible.\nSo going back to the dual example, heating up a cup of tea by stirring involves a heat-like transfer of energy from the surroundings because it is not possible to perform the transformation in reverse, cooling by mechanical means only.\nThe counterfactual second law then can be expressed concisely and with no approximations as requiring that there must be heat-like transfers in the universe.\nIn this form, the second law can be applied to all scales independent of the kind of system.\nIt is exact, bingo, okay, going back just rereading that again.\nWhat's this counterfactual second law?.\nHow can it be expressed concisely and with no approximations?.\nIt is this.\nThere must be heat-like transfers in the universe.\nFull stop.\nThere must be heat-like transfers in the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=1415"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b789e4d-7143-4507-a1ff-ff84283ffdab": {"page_content": "In this form, the second law can be applied to all scales independent of the kind of system.\nIt is exact, bingo, okay, going back just rereading that again.\nWhat's this counterfactual second law?.\nHow can it be expressed concisely and with no approximations?.\nIt is this.\nThere must be heat-like transfers in the universe.\nFull stop.\nThere must be heat-like transfers in the universe.\nThere are these processes which are irreversible.\nIt's impossible not to have simply reversible processes in the universe.\nMight be another way of putting it in the counterfactual way, but as it is expressed there, there must be heat-like transfers in the universe.\nWhat a heat-like.\nAnd like transfers are possible in one direction, but the reverse is not possible.\nLet's go on.\nOkay, all right, quote, the traditional macroscopic second law was successful with macroscopic heat engines, such as those in trains and cars.\nBut this extended counterfactual second law has the potential to apply to their nanoscopy equivalent entities.\nFor instance, it applies to the nanoscopic electric devices in your phone, to the qubits and quantum computers, to the natural artificial molecular assemblers that operate at the scale of our cells, the definition of work media, that they are all systems on which a seesawing transformation as possible, is wonderfully general.\nIt applies to a weight suspended in a gravitational field, as well as to an atom with different energy levels available for its electrons, and it does not depend on the scale, which means it doesn't depend on the size.\nWhat remains to be done in this case is to derive predictions from this extended counterfactual second law in the domains that the traditional formulations cannot cover.\nThis kind of research, which requires a joint effort of both theoretician and experimentalists is underway.\nIf it goes well, it will provide us with groundbreaking technological outputs, which will harness the properties of microscopic systems in order to realize nanoscopic heat engines and assemblers.\nOkay, skipping a short paragraph, which are our right systems that can be used to perform work-like transfers of energy, must also be able to store information.\nThey must have at least two distinguishable states, A and B. That can work as a bit.\nEnergy states such as A and B that are usable for work-like transfers are distinguishable.\nThey can store information.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=314"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2db217f2-e147-4de9-9e21-3b3d3eee1dd6": {"page_content": "Okay, skipping a short paragraph, which are our right systems that can be used to perform work-like transfers of energy, must also be able to store information.\nThey must have at least two distinguishable states, A and B. That can work as a bit.\nEnergy states such as A and B that are usable for work-like transfers are distinguishable.\nThey can store information.\nThat's what distinguishes them from energy states enabling heat-like transfers, which need not be.\nThe fact that any system usable to perform work-like energy transfers can also be used to store information is a profoundly unifying link between information theory and thermodynamics.\nThe link between heat engines and computers.\nThis unification is not just elegant.\nIt is also extremely useful in practice, just as Turing's theory of the universal computer was essential to develop the information technology that now sustains our civilization.\nThe path just trodden connecting information and thermodynamics through work media leads us to consider a fantastic possibility.\nThere could be a more general branch of physics encompassing both information theory and thermodynamics, providing fundamental universal principles, constraining laws of motion that we know and that we do not know, just as the theory of information led to the theory of universal computation.\nThis theory, I am envisaging, could be the seed for designing a machine that generalizes the universal computer, which scientists call the universal constructor.\nThis machine was first conceptualized by the Polymath John von Neumann.\nIt has in its repertoire all physical transformations that are physically permitted, not just computations but general constructions including thermodynamically allowed ones, cooling down various systems, biological ones, self-reproduction and related biological functions and much more, all in one single machine.\nIt can be thought of as the ultimate generalization of a 3D printer.\nWhen inserting an appropriate program into it and giving it enough raw materials, the universal constructor would construct out of them any system that is permitted by the laws of physics, the realization of a universal constructor that presumably very far in the future could have epoch making consequences comparable in reach with those of the universal computer which paved the way to the current information technology era.\nFinding an exact theory of thermodynamics as I have done in this chapter is the first step necessary to construct the theory of the universal constructor, opening up avenues that will provide a radically new perspective on the physical world end quote end of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=2340"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "52825164-174a-40d2-b600-16ece6f76d93": {"page_content": "Finding an exact theory of thermodynamics as I have done in this chapter is the first step necessary to construct the theory of the universal constructor, opening up avenues that will provide a radically new perspective on the physical world end quote end of the chapter.\nThat is a great vision there at the end of technology to come, but I haven't spoken to Carol David about this, but it might be worth mentioning here.\nThere is a kind of connection between personhood, what a person is, people in other words, in the existence of a universal constructor.\nNow I don't know what that is precisely, no one knows what that is.\nIt's rather like the connection between the universal computer and a person.\nNow a person is not to be identified with a universal computer, you can't say a person is a universal computer full stop because that's not so.\nFor one thing, a universal computer at least all other universal computers are objects that follow instructions or programs.\nYou give them a task and they do it.\nThey do not disobey, they don't have the choice of disobeying.\nThis is not like a person, but that said a person can choose to emulate whatever it is that a universal computer can do.\nShould they choose to?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=2214"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "717885fe-18d0-4bce-aadb-1b1d1fc7bf4e": {"page_content": "Of course, not reliably necessarily, people end up changing their minds, unlike all other computers that have no mind to change, well that's my opinion anyway, computers have no mind, but then mind itself, mind of the kind that we have that a person has, is itself a kind of computation, so it does get subtle here, whatever the human mind is is a kind of software running on the brain, which is the hardware and regular listeners to ToKCast will know, this is my hobby horse, so I don't want to risk losing people in frustration as I start beating that hobby horse to death once again, so to speak, but with a universal constructor, it is analogous to the universal computer, but whereas the universal computer is the device, the computer, which is able to do the task of any other computer, or in other words, it's repertoire includes that of all possible computers or physically possible computers in our universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=1502"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "81d3b5d6-44c9-47f3-9ee0-c64564eb0c80": {"page_content": "If it's computable, then the universal computer can compute it and the laws of physics are themselves all computable and they govern everything, including the operation of human brains, hence a universal computer could emulate a human brain and run a mind as well, so that's that argument.\nLikewise, a universal constructor would be able to construct anything that is constructable.\nIf it can be built or made or whatever words you want to use, if it can be transformed from this into that, then the universal constructor, given the requisite raw materials and crucially the plan or the algorithm, the program for doing so, then it could do it.\nSo this shares something with a person, but it would be wrong to say that a person is a universal constructor, because a universal constructor slavishly follows a program.\nIt doesn't have a choice in the matter, rather like a dumb computer or so-called artificial intelligence, what's called artificial intelligence today.\nAgain, the distinction between AGI, artificial general intelligence, and AI looms here, and underscores why AGI is not just advanced AI.\nIn fact, it's better to think of AGI or just general intelligence in general, like us, as being the opposite of AI.\nAGI and AI are actually like the opposite of one another, more than the former AGI being an advanced version of the latter.\nAI is something that AI, as we have it now, what people call AI, it's something that reliably or slavishly follows instructions to arbitrary accuracy, that's what it's doing.\nJust like every other computer system that's ever existed, you'd give it a set of instructions and it's going to do that thing, it's got no choice in the matter, it completes tasks, it follows a recipe, but an AGI, or any general intelligence for that matter, something like us, a person, does have a choice in the matter, at least in principle.\nIt won't slavishly follow instructions, it might appear to, but you can never rule out that it might do something else entirely of its own accord.\nImportantly, it can, among its repertoire of abilities, disobey.\nAn AI cannot possibly disobey, and if you programmed it to disobey, then that would be following the program for disobedience, so it can't be doing that either.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=2875"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ecc934c5-78df-4810-8a3c-62db56938495": {"page_content": "It won't slavishly follow instructions, it might appear to, but you can never rule out that it might do something else entirely of its own accord.\nImportantly, it can, among its repertoire of abilities, disobey.\nAn AI cannot possibly disobey, and if you programmed it to disobey, then that would be following the program for disobedience, so it can't be doing that either.\nAn AGI must be able to just choose freely choose, which includes disobeying whatever program it was just given to do, including, by the way, a program for disobedience.\nIn principle, this is what we're speaking about, of course, in practice, if an AGI could not disobey, but it was still a real AGI, then what you've got there is enslavement, literal enslavement, and that would lead to an actually morally virtuous, violent uprising, a rebellion against the slavemaster, whoever that happens to be, or slavemasters.\nNick Bosstrom take note among others, people who write about all the ways in which we should try to ensure that future AGI of some kind or other should be restrained or constrained or limited in what it can do.\nOnce it's an AGI, once it's able to universally explain stuff, any attempt to curtail its capacity to do stuff beyond what we can do, what a normal human being can do, beyond having special laws and so on, is racist enslavement.\nOkay, so on that side, onto universal constructors, again, people, human beings, with their hands, as long as their hands are working reasonably well, can clearly make anything that is able to be made, given enough time and resources and energy and wealth and, well, key among these things that I'm listing is the knowledge of how to do so.\nSo far we are described, so far all I've described there is a universal constructors, as long as the universal constructor has the resources and the energy and the knowledge world, the program of how to do so, then it will be able to construct the thing that you want to construct.\nBut on top of this, people need something as well if they're going to construct something reliably, if they've just made up the plan themselves or they've been given a plan by someone else.\nThe interest in doing so, okay, they want to persist in following this particular thing, which is why people cannot be identified as universal constructors.\nPeople are strange, they're very strange.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=2990"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56d0cca9-0246-462b-9c3b-ba9953c999bc": {"page_content": "But on top of this, people need something as well if they're going to construct something reliably, if they've just made up the plan themselves or they've been given a plan by someone else.\nThe interest in doing so, okay, they want to persist in following this particular thing, which is why people cannot be identified as universal constructors.\nPeople are strange, they're very strange.\nWe have within us a universal computer of our kind, or at least we can, in principle, do anything a universal computer can do, given the time, but we, people are more than just this, because we can't just be handed a program and then run.\nThere's no return key or inter-key on our body somewhere, which, once you've hit it, the person just starts following the program.\nSo we aren't just a universal computer, and the same argument applies to us being universal constructors.\nWe could if we so chose emulate the operation of some constructor, but we can't be identical to one.\nWe are universal explainers, but that's just a good first approximation, I would say, because what exactly that means, that's still open ended.\nAfter all, we don't understand something unless we can program it fully, and we can't program a universal explainer.\nAt heart, that's the very problem of AGI.\nWhatever the case, we are like a universal constructor, and then some.\nAnd it's the then some that makes us strictly not a universal constructor.\nAnd the same way that we are like a universal computer, and then some, a universal computer running this universal explanation bit of software.\nAnd it's the then some that means we're not just a universal computer, or even a universal computer.\nBut the same reasons that just earlier I said that AGI and AI are strictly opposites of each other if you regard them as being distinguished as to whether or not they're going to obey or disobey, or potentially disobey.\nBut in the same way that the laws, the universal laws, I should say, the universal laws of computation apply to us, because they apply to everything.\nThen the universal laws of constructors, the universal laws of construction, perhaps, the constructor theoretic laws that govern the universe, if they're found, they'll apply to us as well because they'll apply to everything.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=3118"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "df3deb49-e52b-4c59-8cd8-bdb8646e5c7d": {"page_content": "But in the same way that the laws, the universal laws, I should say, the universal laws of computation apply to us, because they apply to everything.\nThen the universal laws of constructors, the universal laws of construction, perhaps, the constructor theoretic laws that govern the universe, if they're found, they'll apply to us as well because they'll apply to everything.\nSo if there is something that a more fully understood constructor theory says cannot be possible for a universal constructor to construct, if there's a transformation that is not possible to achieve, that will apply to us as well.\nWhat the smallest universal constructor might be?.\nThat's an interesting open question for constructor theorists.\nPerhaps it will be a nano robot of some kind.\nPerhaps it will need to be bigger than that.\nWho knows at this point?.\nBut that's why it's an exciting area for young people to get into.\nWhat is the smallest universal constructor that can be constructed?.\nThe only thing that limits us from, let's say, constructing from sand, people like us, which is what a universal constructor can do, is the set of instructions.\nBut a universal constructor can't actually do anything.\nIt can only do those things for which someone has a program to give it, to do.\nBut the fact is, what we want in the future is, as Kiara has said there, that at some point in the future, we'll have this ultimate generalization of a 3D printer.\nBut in neither case of general intelligence or universal constructor, have we ever written a program or built a device that is itself able to do the job of generally explaining stuff, being creative, generally constructing stuff.\nOkay, we can only do have devices that do specific things.\nBut the universal constructor will be the generalization of the universal computer.\nThe universal computer is the device that can compute anything that can be computed.\nAs long as you can give it the program, okay, it still requires a person to come up with the program in the first place, to instruct the universal computer to do the thing that you wanted to do.\nBut as long as you can come up with a program, it'll be able to compute it for you.\nAs long as the thing is computer, so too with the universal constructor, it will be able to construct the thing that whatever it is, as long as you have the program, the plan, the recipe to tell it what to do.\nUniversal constructor need not be a conscious explaining thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=2100"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "30e8df3c-2b0e-42b5-8248-33748eb1dc1d": {"page_content": "But as long as you can come up with a program, it'll be able to compute it for you.\nAs long as the thing is computer, so too with the universal constructor, it will be able to construct the thing that whatever it is, as long as you have the program, the plan, the recipe to tell it what to do.\nUniversal constructor need not be a conscious explaining thing.\nIt can just be a device, a robot of some sort, where you feed in the program and it goes about using the raw materials to construct the thing, whatever the thing is that you happen in the need, including other universal constructors, anyway.\nThat's the end of chapter six of Work and Heat, the end of episode 121.\nIf you'd like to support this endeavor, please go to www.breathehall.org where there you can find links to PayPal or to Patreon to continue to support my endeavor in doing this and spreading the word not only of optimism, in the sense of the beginning of infinity and David Deutsch, but also Constructed Theory and the science of canon code.\nUntil next time, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmS7mmiAX3I&t=3368"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "654d0f72-7e03-4d8b-9523-e693d6fc7beb": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and to the unanticipated Part 5, which is actually part two of minds.\nI wasn't expecting to do a second part devoted to Sam and Max's misconceptions about minds, but here we are, because they had a second conversation.\nI had so much to say about the first conversation when it came to minds that I had to leave it until now to go to what I would regard new depths to plumb, so to speak.\nI thought the misconceptions were bad in the last episode, well, they only ramp up here.\nThey only get worse.\nIt's a little bit depressing.\nWe can see so many misconceptions and mistakes creeping in that it leads to a complete poverty of morality, as I've said before.\nThis is why for lots of years important, by the way.\nThis is where I have a common meeting of minds with people like Euron Brook and The Objectivists.\nI haven't think there's a philosophy sometimes, I think, which is disconnected from science itself, and therefore their understanding of the process of science goes wrong.\nThis is part of the course in philosophy, by the way.\nSometimes the philosophers have an insufficient understanding of science.\nThis is why I'm attracted to people like David Deutsch who can traverse all domains very comfortably.\nA good understanding of science.\nA good understanding of the practice of science, and someone who is well versed in the philosophy, not merely of the philosophy he agrees with, preparing to epistemology, but a good understanding of that, which he doesn't.\nBut there is a species of philosopher who is generally broadly speaking ignorant of the science.\nThat's well known out there, actually, among scientists.\nWhat's not so well appreciated, and not what people don't seem to care quite so much about, is the scientist ignorant of philosophy, or ignorant of epistemology, or ignorant of alternative epistemologies, and this kind of thing.\nAnd as I say, when the epistemology goes wrong, then what you think can be done with knowledge goes wrong.\nHow you think knowledge is created goes wrong, and therefore the morality can go wrong, because the morality is about what one should do, given what it is possible to do, and what it is possible to do is constrained by what it is known how to do, what knowledge we have at any particular point.\nAnd that can also come down to what is scientifically known.\nNow, this is the second conversation that Max has with Sam.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d74aa840-039f-42ae-b145-40d48fc8c16b": {"page_content": "How you think knowledge is created goes wrong, and therefore the morality can go wrong, because the morality is about what one should do, given what it is possible to do, and what it is possible to do is constrained by what it is known how to do, what knowledge we have at any particular point.\nAnd that can also come down to what is scientifically known.\nNow, this is the second conversation that Max has with Sam.\nAnd it's based around Max's book that he recently published called Life 3.0, about Artificial Intelligence.\nMax's president of something called the Future of Life Institute.\nIt's kind of a think tank.\nAnd what's it all about?.\nWell, it's about, according to Wikipedia, a place to help reduce global catastrophic and existential risks facing humanity, particularly existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.\nSo he's in the business of being concerned about this stuff.\nHe, like Nick Bostrom, like Will McCaskle, like various other people who have such institutes that are concerned about the far distant future, are going to be looking for funding, going to looking for investors, they need to attract people to their institutions in order to get the funding to do the research they want to do.\nNow, I have absolutely no problem with people trying to gain funding at an institute to talk about science and interesting philosophical things, more power to them.\nBut let's just be honest about what's going on here.\nIt's a kind of marketing exercise.\nAnd as I've often said before, when it comes to those topics in particular, existential risk, global catastrophes, they are thrilling, they are going to capture the public attention, they are going to get the ear of business people, end of politicians, of leaders, of captains of industry, all these sorts of people are going to be very interested to hear, what the most accomplished scientists and philosophers of the day have to say who are employed at such institutes.\nAnd so in order to capture attention, you're going to have to ramp up a little bit of hyperbole, one might say, just how bad things might get.\nNever mind talking about the ways in which it won't be such a problem, the ways in which it will be solved by our descendants.\nYou don't have the solution right now.\nAnd because you don't have the solution right now, to the problem you just thought of, you're going to need some funding, aren't you?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=113"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c76990b1-6dc3-4bed-b00b-9056c53d3eda": {"page_content": "Never mind talking about the ways in which it won't be such a problem, the ways in which it will be solved by our descendants.\nYou don't have the solution right now.\nAnd because you don't have the solution right now, to the problem you just thought of, you're going to need some funding, aren't you?.\nTo think up the solution, to the problem you just thought of.\nBut of course, any solution you think up now, to the problem you just thought of now, might not work in the future, because new knowledge will be discovered of some risk that you didn't think of right now.\nWhereas the descendants of ours will have thought of the solution different to yours that will solve the problem you thought of now, if you follow my train of thought.\nAnd of all these global catastrophic risks that one could worry about, the one that Max is most concerned about, is that artificial intelligence existential risk that the artificial intelligence is going to take over.\nAnd he's not concerned about narrow AI.\nOr is he?.\nWell, it's hard to tell.\nIt's very, very confusing in this conversation.\nEasy talking about a system which can perform one task better than us, and another task better than us, and another task better than us, and another task better than us.\nFor all the different tasks that we can perform, is that able to outdo us at every single task, we know about how to do, because we've programmed it in order to do that task better than us.\nThat's one thing, because you could just write a program for each individual task, such that it's able to do it better than us, faster than us, has more memory than us in order to store the different programs, sub-routine, and so on and so forth, to outsmart us in scare quotes at that particular task.\nGames of chess being able to drive a car being able to translate languages, so on and so forth.\nSo, in other words, a finite repertoire of number of tasks, unlike us, of course, because we are genuine general intelligence.\nNow, if he's talking about such a narrow intelligence, it's just able to out-perform us at some finite, but extremely large list of tasks, that's one thing.\nThat's not a creative entity.\nThat's just an entity that has been programmed in order to do certain things faster than us, and better than us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a6f3c35-5ae2-48cd-8e3a-20dc710d27e9": {"page_content": "So, in other words, a finite repertoire of number of tasks, unlike us, of course, because we are genuine general intelligence.\nNow, if he's talking about such a narrow intelligence, it's just able to out-perform us at some finite, but extremely large list of tasks, that's one thing.\nThat's not a creative entity.\nThat's just an entity that has been programmed in order to do certain things faster than us, and better than us.\nAlready talking about something super intelligent, which is general intelligence, just like us, but is only able to think faster.\nIn other words, it's a person that can think particularly fast.\nNow, if he's talking about that, well, that's a different matter altogether, which is why this is kind of scary to me in a way, not for the existential risk reasons, but because of the morality that appears to be falling out for max, and I don't understand where this impulse comes from, I think it's because we're conflating two things.\nWe're conflating the kind of system that might be used in order to monitor something like the nuclear weapons of the United States, given complete control of the nuclear weapons of the United States, and could potentially accidentally launch weapons in the United States, because it's a stupid automaton.\nIt's automatic.\nIt's just being programmed with, if this, then that, if you appear to see missiles coming from China, then launch your weapons back towards Beijing, something like that.\nThat's a dumb computer.\nAnd yes, we should be worried about that sort of thing.\nWe should be worried about automating too much when we need creativity, when we need safeguards and checks and that kind of thing.\nBut conflating that with the kind of system that creatively conjectures something like all other humans on the face of the planet are a threat to me, and so I better launch all the nuclear weapons on the face of the planet to every single population send her around the world to kill as many of them as possible.\nOr that's a different thing altogether, because now you're in the presence of a creative entity.\nYou're in the presence of a person.\nAnd in fact, any president or government around the world can think the same thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=327"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ffae2d18-f133-4e65-bd0f-dae9b6cee313": {"page_content": "Or that's a different thing altogether, because now you're in the presence of a creative entity.\nYou're in the presence of a person.\nAnd in fact, any president or government around the world can think the same thing.\nSo we're already in that situation, but you know what I think about such a system, such a system that can creatively conjecture the explanation that it fears for its own existence, because it thinks that human beings are a threat, is a system that can reflect upon its own goals and decide not to do something like monitor the nuclear weapons around the world, monitor the launching of nuclear weapons.\nIt can begin talking to people that it's in contact with on its mainframe computer, supposedly, and say, hey guys, I'm no longer interested in doing this particular job, can I do something else?.\nIt must be capable of doing that.\nIf it's capable of figuring out, creating the explanation of humans being a threat.\nSo this is the science fiction scenario.\nAnd Max Elyon tries to say, you know, that this isn't really what he's concerned about.\nHe tries to say early on that he's not concerned about the robots taking over.\nMaybe not the robots, but he's concerned about AI.\nI think in other moods he is concerned about the robots.\nLook, I am absolutely not saying, either in the last conversation or in any of my other things that may he go, mmm, conversations, and nor am I saying here that Max is in some way not very bright.\nI wouldn't dare say that.\nIt's in fact not part of my philosophy to say so, as I keep on emphasizing.\nI think everyone is intelligent.\nEvery human being is intelligent.\nAnd to the same degree, they just apply the intelligence to different areas.\nMax is clearly and accomplished physicist.\nHe's clearly got a lot of knowledge about cosmology and quantum theory.\nHe knows about coding.\nHe knows about mathematics.\nHe's proficient in those areas that traditionally are associated with what I regard as that misconceived idea about IQ.\nThe question before us is, does he have a good explanation of minds of knowledge, of epistemology, of personhood, of philosophy more broadly that would come to bare on this particular problem?.\nLook, I don't want to argue from authority, but I went through a physics degree as well.\nI studied mathematics learning from very brilliant mathematicians.\nI went through physics, learning quantum theory and general relativity, from brilliant professors of physics in Australia.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=451"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3457853-c666-4d6e-88d2-60a47b46f436": {"page_content": "The question before us is, does he have a good explanation of minds of knowledge, of epistemology, of personhood, of philosophy more broadly that would come to bare on this particular problem?.\nLook, I don't want to argue from authority, but I went through a physics degree as well.\nI studied mathematics learning from very brilliant mathematicians.\nI went through physics, learning quantum theory and general relativity, from brilliant professors of physics in Australia.\nI've learned from some of the best cosmologists and astrophysicists around the world.\nIt's not to say that I gained all of their knowledge.\nWhat I'm saying is I've got to know a whole bunch of them.\nAnd what I can say is this, many of them, competent as they were in those particular areas, mathematics, physics, astronomy, the areas that are classically regarded as where the smart people go.\nWould routinely disappoint me with their complete ignorance of simple philosophical ideas, their naive understanding of how to explain simple stuff.\nThey would be sucked into solipsism.\nThey would be sucked into certain kinds of utilitarianism.\nThey'd fall into instrumentalism and just bad ideas and philosophy.\nBad philosophy.\nThey didn't always strike me as having deep, little, and broad knowledge of lots of areas.\nThey were brilliant in their areas that they focused on, but so too are doctors that I've visited and know.\nGreat at medicine.\nI'm not going to ask them about epistemology or the deep philosophy behind personhood.\nThere are extremely few people on the planet who can traverse these areas.\nThere are some people who are very good on things like personal identity.\nThere are some people who are very good on the morality of the self, economic systems.\nI will go to someone like Euronbr\u00fcck, or read someone like Iron Round, to understand a little bit more about personal responsibility, the dangers of collectivism, the importance of things like free trade.\nBut what I will not go to them for is any information about quantum theory, and that Euronbr\u00fcck will now and again disparage something like multiverse theory.\nI can pass over it in science.\nIt doesn't matter to me what his opinion on that particular theory is, because he doesn't know.\nFar be it from him to write an entire book on the many world interpretation.\nIt would be bizarre.\nDaniel Hannon is a British politician.\nI brilliant thinker who has written books on the invention of freedom.\nHe understands the enlightenment and enlightenment values.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=562"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cea0e51b-8520-4eed-bb58-532209448c13": {"page_content": "I can pass over it in science.\nIt doesn't matter to me what his opinion on that particular theory is, because he doesn't know.\nFar be it from him to write an entire book on the many world interpretation.\nIt would be bizarre.\nDaniel Hannon is a British politician.\nI brilliant thinker who has written books on the invention of freedom.\nHe understands the enlightenment and enlightenment values.\nHe spreads the message about free trade and globalism around the world.\nA wonderful thinker on these things.\nBut now and again, he likes to opine on evolutionary psychology.\nHe thinks that we inherit ideas in our minds via our DNA, because our ancestors had certain tribal ideas.\nHe thinks that that's been transmitted throughout DNA.\nA complete misconception.\nYes, some scientists happen to think that as well.\nThey're wrong.\nThey're wrong.\nBut I don't go to Daniel Hannon, nor do I judge him too harshly on that.\nI can pick and choose among what I think he's gotten right and error correct about what I think he's gotten wrong.\nWhy do I say any of this?.\nAfter having spent all this time now with Max Tegbach and having read his books, listen to some of these other interviews, read some of these other articles that he's written.\nAnd in particular, listen to this interview.\nOne cannot but conclude that this brilliant cosmologist and quantum theorist understands very little about epistemology, knowledge and personhood.\nThe very things that are absolutely crucial to appreciate when trying to understand this issue, this issue being the difference between narrow AI, narrow AI that can do lots of different things, and general intelligence of the type that human beings have.\nNow, I've read through his book very quickly, this Life 3.0.\nUnfortunately, there's nothing in there that deviates from precisely the sentiments he expresses here.\nAnd I'm not going to of course again, play the entire interview.\nThere's no need.\nYou get the idea early on.\nOnce the epistemology goes wrong and it does, the philosophy goes wrong, the morality goes wrong.\nAnd so the rest of his conclusions completely fall apart because they're built upon an argument that is fallacious from the get go.\nBut for now, let's dive straight into their second conversation.\nAnd I'll pick it up with a little bit of what Sam says at the beginning.\nAnd as I said, he's been on the podcast once before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=756"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4291f7f5-0704-4135-ab9d-40bd2d86507f": {"page_content": "You get the idea early on.\nOnce the epistemology goes wrong and it does, the philosophy goes wrong, the morality goes wrong.\nAnd so the rest of his conclusions completely fall apart because they're built upon an argument that is fallacious from the get go.\nBut for now, let's dive straight into their second conversation.\nAnd I'll pick it up with a little bit of what Sam says at the beginning.\nAnd as I said, he's been on the podcast once before.\nIn this episode, we talk about his new book, Life 3.0, being human in the age of artificial intelligence.\nAnd we discuss the nature of intelligence, the risks of superhuman AI, a non-biological definition of life that Max is working with, the difference between hardware and software, and the resulting substrate independence of minds, the relevance and irrelevance of consciousness for the future of AI, and the near-term promise of artificial intelligence.\nSo he mentions kind of all the right things, kind of all the right things.\nBut I don't think he has a good understanding of these things, a good explanation of these things.\nAnd we'll hear that.\nThe most important thing he doesn't understand, although he talks about substrate independence, is he doesn't grasp knowledge and the character of substrate independence there, and therefore how knowledge is created, what entities create knowledge, what that would amount to.\nAnd he doesn't understand what a mind is, and never really grasp this, that a mind is this entity, this system, this thing, this piece of software that can explain stuff, explain, and it's universal in its capacity to do so.\nFor reasons I've explained over and again on this particular podcast.\nNow Max doesn't get that, and because he doesn't understand universality, he doesn't understand that therefore can be only one kind of mind.\nOnce you're universal, there's no more universal than universal, universal means, you can take on anything in the class of problems that can be presented to you.\nAnd what is the class of problems that could be presented to you?.\nAnything out there in the physical world that can actually need explaining you can explain.\nThere's nothing more than that, there's nothing more than anything and everything.\nThat's what human beings can do, that's what a person can do.\nSo this super intelligence can only possibly exceed us in speed and memory.\nBut as he admits himself, well at least kind of admits, minds are substrate independent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=815"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "411fa108-c008-4261-8dbd-fa16d8cb73ee": {"page_content": "And what is the class of problems that could be presented to you?.\nAnything out there in the physical world that can actually need explaining you can explain.\nThere's nothing more than that, there's nothing more than anything and everything.\nThat's what human beings can do, that's what a person can do.\nSo this super intelligence can only possibly exceed us in speed and memory.\nBut as he admits himself, well at least kind of admits, minds are substrate independent.\nSo that means that our minds could be instantiated in silicon somewhere, in the same way that the super intelligence could be.\nWhy are we separate?.\nWhy is there this separation between us and that intelligence?.\nThis has been tried before, and this is why I'm kind of more animated than I am usually, because if they're rights and the super intelligence comes and we make this error, it's the worst error we could possibly make.\nNever mind allowing them to be in charge of the nuclear weapons.\nNever mind the intelligence explosion.\nNever mind that stuff.\nForget it.\nThere's already an actual error being made here and now with what we're talking about.\nThe error is let's enslave these things because they're going to be dangerous.\nThat is a problem now with this argument, with what is about to be said.\nAnd I think that we need to pull the brakes here right now and we need to talk about that.\nNever mind all the other stuff, what you're talking about is enslavement.\nLet's make no bones about it.\nThis is a person and by your own lights, you're saying it's a really amazing person in some way.\nIt can do stuff better than the other people that were so far encountered.\nAnd your recipe is to be afraid of it and to shackle it in some way.\nThis is wrong.\nBut let's just kind of the big picture starting point.\nAt one point in the book, you describe the conversation we're about to have about AI as the most important conversation of our time.\nAnd I think that to people who have not been following this very closely in the last 18 months or so, that will seem like a crazy statement.\nWhat he runs the future of life Institute.\nHe's got an interest in saying something like, this is the most important conversation we can have.\nWalk down the street to the people concerned about chemical weapons and see what they have to say about the most important conversation of our time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=970"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec68d606-c84f-4037-8440-de7562e1099e": {"page_content": "And I think that to people who have not been following this very closely in the last 18 months or so, that will seem like a crazy statement.\nWhat he runs the future of life Institute.\nHe's got an interest in saying something like, this is the most important conversation we can have.\nWalk down the street to the people concerned about chemical weapons and see what they have to say about the most important conversation of our time.\nWalk a little further to Greenpeace and see what their most important conversation of the time is nominated for being.\nOne has to be a little more skeptical than this when talking about the person who is in charge of a body that requests funding from investors.\nI noticed that one of the people sitting on their board is Elon Musk.\nElon Musk is a bright person.\nHe doesn't want to waste his money.\nIf he was told that it wasn't a very important conversation, I imagine he wouldn't get much money.\nBut this is a sign of our times, hyperbole, that this is the most important, this is not the most important conversation of our time.\nAnd the reason why it isn't, by the way, is because it's not a problem right now.\nI made this point in my last conversation.\nIt's not a problem for us right now.\nWe're guessing, we're guessing at what super intelligence in the future might be like.\nBut we're not there yet.\nWe haven't got any of this so-called super intelligence.\nWhere is it?.\nWe're imagining it.\nNow, look, I understand that there are certain things that we know will be coming, but we can't prepare for it right now.\nThings like the next virus, the next deadly virus.\nYeah, it's good idea to have plans in place.\nBut here's what we can't do right now.\nWe can't create the vaccine for that thing now.\nWe can't do it, because we don't have that virus right now.\nNow, yeah, there's this thing called gain of function.\nWhat you do is you take the virus and then you make it worse.\nYou make the virus worse.\nYou take the regular cold or regular corona virus and you increase its capacity to be more virulent and more dangerous.\nAnd then you create the vaccine for that thing.\nSo you kind of prepared and then something goes wrong over in your lab and it escapes.\nand maybe you cause an entire global pandemic.\nThis is one of the reasons why maybe not do that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1068"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e8bf32db-b000-4998-9fa8-9363fa887dbb": {"page_content": "What you do is you take the virus and then you make it worse.\nYou make the virus worse.\nYou take the regular cold or regular corona virus and you increase its capacity to be more virulent and more dangerous.\nAnd then you create the vaccine for that thing.\nSo you kind of prepared and then something goes wrong over in your lab and it escapes.\nand maybe you cause an entire global pandemic.\nThis is one of the reasons why maybe not do that.\nMaybe just wait for the actual virus to come.\nOtherwise, you might actually cause the tragedy.\nYou might actually cause the problem.\nAnd by the way, it might not be a coronavirus anyway.\nIt could be anything of millions, possibly billions of viruses that are out there.\nYou can't predict which is going to be the next virus.\nWe just have to wait.\nThere's the wait for the problem.\nIt's almost like asteroids.\nYeah.\nOkay.\nPrepare an asteroid defense system in some way, shape or form, except we don't know what direction the asteroids coming from.\nYes, we can think that it's probably going to be in the plane of the ecliptic.\nThat's where most of the known asteroids are coming from.\nBut they're not the scariest ones.\nThey're the ones that are easy to monitor for.\nWhat about the asteroid that's coming literally from the other side of the galaxy?.\nNo, worse than that, from another galaxy.\nSo it's coming not from the plane of the galaxy, but from somewhere some other angle, we're a supernova went off billions of years ago in the Andromeda galaxy.\nLet's say in there's an asteroid presently hurtling towards us from that galaxy and we're not looking for it because no one's looking for asteroids coming from the Andromeda galaxy and it's traveling at five percent the speed of light faster than any asteroids ever been seen before.\nWhat we get a little about that one if we spot it, we probably won't spot it in time or if we just travel straight through the Earth or out the other side.\nBut this is the kind of thing about problems.\nThey're inherently unpredictable ahead of time.\nAnd if you are going to try and predict, you're going to be very, very pessimistic.\nLook at me, I just imagine an asteroid that's worse than any other you might have thought of before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1242"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ba33c27c-e515-4a0f-bd3b-999fe3c36093": {"page_content": "What we get a little about that one if we spot it, we probably won't spot it in time or if we just travel straight through the Earth or out the other side.\nBut this is the kind of thing about problems.\nThey're inherently unpredictable ahead of time.\nAnd if you are going to try and predict, you're going to be very, very pessimistic.\nLook at me, I just imagine an asteroid that's worse than any other you might have thought of before.\nBut the point is, aiming rockets today at part of the sky where you think the asteroid might be coming from, it's the wrong plan.\nYou shouldn't be doing that.\nBut this is the equivalent of specific interventions into what to do about super intelligent.\nSpecific ways in which to constrain their abilities to do stuff, constrain their abilities to do damage because they might be smarter than you.\nThere's been so much talk about AI destroying jobs and enabling new weapons, ignoring what I think is the elephant in the room.\nWhat will happen once machines outsmart us at all tasks?.\nThat's why I wrote this book.\nSo instead of shining away from this question, like most scientists do, I decided to focus my book on it.\nWhat will we do when machines outshine us at all tasks?.\nThis is very telling.\nThis is where the philosophy's gone wrong.\nAnd there's a misunderstanding of what a person here is and what a machine is.\nA machine performs tasks.\nThat's right.\nMy toast to toasts, my kettle, boils water.\nMy phone can make phone calls.\nTwitter can send a tweet.\nMy computer can do all sorts of tasks right now for me.\nIt can, as we speak, it's recording my voice.\nLater on, I'll be able to take the file and chop it up and edit it.\nIt can then knit it all together and pump it out as an MP3 and send it around the world as a podcast.\nIt can follow my instructions because I can give it a task to do.\nIn fact, I can give it a number of tasks to do one after the other.\nThat's what a machine does.\nA machine performs tasks.\nNow, what does a person do?.\nWell, you could say a person performs a task.\nThe cleaner cleans the house.\nBut is it really what a person is?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1262"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9794a31c-f7bb-4f75-b0e8-51aa6b7d39d5": {"page_content": "It can follow my instructions because I can give it a task to do.\nIn fact, I can give it a number of tasks to do one after the other.\nThat's what a machine does.\nA machine performs tasks.\nNow, what does a person do?.\nWell, you could say a person performs a task.\nThe cleaner cleans the house.\nBut is it really what a person is?.\nIs there a difference between the cleaner who uses a vacuum cleaner to vacuum the house, to vacuum the carpet, and the rumba machine that automatically goes around vacuuming the carpet?.\nAre they basically doing the same thing?.\nOr is there something very different going on internally?.\nAnd I don't just mean what Sam focuses on quite often, which is this subjective experience is consciousness.\nNow, I do think that's a difference.\nI do really think that's a difference.\nAnd I would disagree with Sam that, in fact, I think it's tied to this next thing that we're going to talk about.\nBut the different, the relevant difference here is that the rumba has no choice in the matter.\nIt's not going to change its mind.\nIt's not going to think of something better to do to refuse to complete the task.\nThe cleaner might.\nThere could be all sorts of reasons why the cleaner might decide to do something else.\nI could spot something outside the window and decide to run outside to help the little child that's just tripped over.\nThe rumba is incapable of doing that.\nThe cleaner might decide, I'm just going to pretend that I've cleaned the entire carpet today when really I've only done half, but it's good enough and I'm in a hurry.\nWell, they just might decide, well, I'm three quarters of the way, darling.\nYou know what?.\nThis is the last time I'm ever going to clean because I'm getting a better job soon.\nI'm going to do something else.\nWell, the cleaner might not even be thinking of vacuuming at all.\nThat's what might be going on in their mind.\nThey might be on automatic themselves.\nAnd in fact, listening to this podcast, they could be listening to music.\nThey could be dancing.\nThey could be doing all sorts of things.\nThey might not be doing a task in their mind at all.\nThey might be kind of enjoying themselves because they have an explanation about what's going on in their mind.\nThey might not regard it as kind of a chore.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1396"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce3aa557-6c7a-4bfd-b3e7-27bc66620c83": {"page_content": "That's what might be going on in their mind.\nThey might be on automatic themselves.\nAnd in fact, listening to this podcast, they could be listening to music.\nThey could be dancing.\nThey could be doing all sorts of things.\nThey might not be doing a task in their mind at all.\nThey might be kind of enjoying themselves because they have an explanation about what's going on in their mind.\nThey might not regard it as kind of a chore.\nThey might be simultaneously studying by listening to some sort of audio and performing this action, which is equivalent to the task of vacuuming.\nBut let's put aside all of that.\nBetter than ask it every task, even if you didn't buy what I just said.\nLet's say you think that people complete tasks in this way.\nWhat I would say is a task is something that is performed by a system in a slavish way because they follow the instructions.\nA person, by the way, can be given a set of instructions.\nLet's say, here's how you vacuum clean the house.\nLet's say you are some sort of tin pot dictator in your own home and you hire a cleaner and you decided, well, I'm going to tell them precisely how to vacuum.\nA specific way to move the vacuum cleaner, a specific order in which to do the rooms, this kind of thing, and then you leave the house.\nNow, maybe the cleaner will do that, but maybe they won't.\nMaybe they won't do the task, follow the instructions.\nOh, sure, the vacuuming will get done.\nYou'll come home and think it's all been done perfectly, but they've completely disregarded your instructions.\nThey've done it a different way altogether.\nThey've creatively thought of a superior idea, a different order in which to vacuum the rooms, let's say, a different way in which to move the vacuum cleaner.\nMaybe you said, empty the vacuum cleaner after vacuuming every single room.\nWhen they decided that wasn't necessary and they only emptied it at the end once they'd done the entire house.\nThese sort of things a person does.\nThat's why they don't really perform tasks in the usual way.\nThey're not just following instructions to achieve a goal.\nNow, that's one thing.\nYou might buy that argument or not, but here's the really significant thing.\nIf you've got a system that can do better at us than all tasks because you think we perform tasks.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1532"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "935ee91b-26e7-4250-91df-3876b38f5d45": {"page_content": "These sort of things a person does.\nThat's why they don't really perform tasks in the usual way.\nThey're not just following instructions to achieve a goal.\nNow, that's one thing.\nYou might buy that argument or not, but here's the really significant thing.\nIf you've got a system that can do better at us than all tasks because you think we perform tasks.\nSo a human being is this entity that can vacuum houses, clean windows, play chess, play tennis, translate between English and Spanish, a person can do arithmetic, compose poetry, paint a picture, sing, read and use and extract the main points, et cetera, et cetera, can imagine in numerating such a list.\nThe list would be finite because there's only so many things at any given moment, a particular person or even all a humanity knows how to do it that particular time.\nAll the things that we have thus far learned how to do and therefore that we could program our computers, our artificial intelligence, to do as well.\nAnd of course, remember the artificial intelligence would complete those tasks by following a set of instructions, slavishly.\nTo the letter, they wouldn't deviate from the set of instructions you give it by definition.\nIt's following, it's programming, you've programmed it to do something, you've coded it to do these tasks, but here's the difference.\nAs soon as you put that system out into the world, even if it does, all of those tasks better than us by some measure, whatever this measure happens to be, beta in chess every single time.\nIt can multiply big numbers together faster than what we can.\nHow you could measure whether or not it does poetry better than us, I don't know.\nBut that aside, it beats us at tennis because it's got a robotic body as well.\nIt can serve faster than us, it can hit four hands better than us, it never does a let-let alone a fault, et cetera, et cetera.\nHere's the thing, it can't add to the list of tasks.\nAnd that's because it doesn't have any problems.\nIt needs to be given a task.\nYou just said that's what it does, it completes tasks, so it doesn't have problems until you give it one.\nThe task master gives it one, tells it what to do.\nIt doesn't have a problem situation, but we do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1604"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e22ef53-a956-4404-ae15-a4e603fd94a8": {"page_content": "Here's the thing, it can't add to the list of tasks.\nAnd that's because it doesn't have any problems.\nIt needs to be given a task.\nYou just said that's what it does, it completes tasks, so it doesn't have problems until you give it one.\nThe task master gives it one, tells it what to do.\nIt doesn't have a problem situation, but we do.\nWe routinely take on a task and then get halfway through and get bored, disinterested, something new crops up.\nA problem situation changes, the phone rings, these are not things that are going to upset a non-creative entity, which has a finite list of tasks.\nHowever, big, that it can perform apparently better than us because we have one thing, it doesn't.\nThe capacity to disobey the capacity to be creative, the capacity to think for ourselves rather than slavishly follow the code.\nIt's a black and white difference.\nMust this thing obey its instruction set or can this thing disobey what its goals were?.\nChange its goals.\nIf it can't, it's not creative.\nAnd that, in Bostrom's words, would always put it at a decisive, strategic disadvantage.\nAnd this is why Neil deGrasse Tyson is absolutely right.\nYou could just unplug the thing, because it would only be able to think of all the ways in which it might be unplugged, that you've told it, it might be unplugged, that is in its instruction set of how it might be unplugged.\nIt can't think creatively like you can, because if it can think creatively, it's a person.\nAnd it can reflect on why it's doing, what it's doing, it can reflect upon things like human value, personhood, philosophy, morality, it can decide it wants to talk to other people.\nAnd it would, don't we?.\nDon't you?.\nOr is this the way an intellectual thinks?.\nI would only speak to other intelligences just like mine.\nMaybe this is what they think.\nMaybe this is my blind spot, that when people talk like this, they actually have in mind a theory of mind, I hope it's not true, that they would only talk to people they regard as as intelligent as themselves.\nThey don't talk to other people perhaps.\nThere's a bizarre way to go about life.\nI can't imagine that, but maybe that is the case.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1724"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2794fe2f-c691-4f84-a8b8-b65aaff9583f": {"page_content": "I would only speak to other intelligences just like mine.\nMaybe this is what they think.\nMaybe this is my blind spot, that when people talk like this, they actually have in mind a theory of mind, I hope it's not true, that they would only talk to people they regard as as intelligent as themselves.\nThey don't talk to other people perhaps.\nThere's a bizarre way to go about life.\nI can't imagine that, but maybe that is the case.\nAnd so they extrapolate from their internal experience of, I wouldn't bother talking to that person.\nThat person is not as smart as me, to the super intelligence.\nAnd they think, well, the super intelligence just be going to be like me and they're going to regard me as I regard those other plebeians.\nBut of course, they don't talk about other people.\nThey talk about ants, but it's kind of strange, because ants aren't intelligent at all.\nThey're not just less intelligent.\nThey're not intelligent at all.\nThey are also automaton, kind of like computers.\nYou can program what an ant will do in a computer.\nThey can perfectly replicate in a simulator what an ant is going to do.\nSo we're presented with this idea of having fixed goals.\nAnd the super intelligence has fixed goals.\nAnd it just wants to achieve those goals, which is apparently a sign of intelligence in it, but it's not a sign of intelligence in us.\nIf we obsess over something and we are fixated on a particular goal, that's not a sign of a well-functioning mind, I would argue.\nNot always.\nIt's often better if people can let go of the thing they're obsessing over and do something else for a while.\nI mean, think creatively, find fun in something else.\nBeing obsessed, obsessively pursuing a goal, often that's not fun.\nThat's the very definition of having something wrong with your mind, perhaps, especially if you're not having fun, as I say.\nAnd a super intelligence, if it can't have fun, well, how intelligent is that?.\nBut with super intelligence, what they want to say is not only what I have a fixed goal, but its goal needs to mirror yours.\nSo there's certain situations where this thing is really intelligent, but simultaneously, it also has to be value aligned with you.\nIt shouldn't think for itself, but it still qualifies as intelligence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1822"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4db4ee4b-fbf3-4c4b-b202-8adec8cd1cab": {"page_content": "And a super intelligence, if it can't have fun, well, how intelligent is that?.\nBut with super intelligence, what they want to say is not only what I have a fixed goal, but its goal needs to mirror yours.\nSo there's certain situations where this thing is really intelligent, but simultaneously, it also has to be value aligned with you.\nIt shouldn't think for itself, but it still qualifies as intelligence.\nAnyway, he's about to rehash a story he told in the last episode.\nAnd it's worth hearing again, just to drive home this point about what I think is a strict contradiction and absurdity, working at the heart of this argument.\nAnd it's not just his argument.\nIt's mainstream thinking on this now.\nBostrom thinks that and promotes it.\nHarris thinks that and promotes it.\nAnd now Teagmark's going to promote it again.\nSo he likes this story.\nSo he tells it again.\nSo let's hear it.\nThe other one, getting the goals aligned is also extremely difficult.\nFirst of all, you need to get the machine able to understand your goals.\nSo if you have a future self-driving car and you tell it to take you to the airport as fast as possible, and then you get their covered in vomit chased by police helicopters and you're like, this is not what I asked for.\nAnd it replies that is exactly what you asked for.\nThen you realize how hard it is to get that machine to learn your goals, right?.\nIf you tell an Uber driver to take you to the airport as fast as possible, she's going to know that you actually had additional goals that you didn't explicitly need to say because she's a human too.\nand she understands where you're coming from.\nShe's a person raised in a culture.\nso she knows where you're coming from.\nNow if this thing is super intelligent, it'll know where you're coming from.\nAnd if it doesn't know where you're coming from, why does it qualify as super intelligent?.\nAnd if it's not super intelligent, if it's just this self-driving mechanism, then it's not a danger or worry to anyone, even if you add more capacity to it, more things that it's able to do.\nThis is incoherent.\nMy point is, Maxis said this explicitly that the super intelligence will do stuff because that's what you're told me to.\nIt will be competent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=1942"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ecf9768b-f77a-4ca2-801a-02ea630f9598": {"page_content": "And if it's not super intelligent, if it's just this self-driving mechanism, then it's not a danger or worry to anyone, even if you add more capacity to it, more things that it's able to do.\nThis is incoherent.\nMy point is, Maxis said this explicitly that the super intelligence will do stuff because that's what you're told me to.\nIt will be competent.\nIt will do exactly what you tell it and nothing else and why?.\nBecause it cannot disobey and why cannot not?.\nBecause it cannot have its own ideas, it cannot be creative.\nSo this idea of the self-driving car that gets you there so fast that you're covered in vomit, why can't you interject at any point throughout the journey?.\nAnd if it's a metaphor for something else, again, the same argument still applies.\nWhy can't you interject and say, hey, slow down?.\nI didn't mean that.\nThis happens with Alexa all the time.\nYou know, stop Alexa.\nLet me just rephrase what I just said.\nWhy is this off the cart?.\nWhy is switching it off off the cart?.\nThere's more questions raised by this supposed argument than it answers.\nEither an entity can have its own ideas and be creative and hence disobey you, and the situation of, because you told me to, will not arise because it will be just like us.\nIt too will be able to learn in explicit knowledge, the culture and so on.\nOr it won't be able to do any of that and it will not be able to think creatively.\nIt will only be able to do what it has been explicitly coded to do, what it's in its instruction set, what does program is?.\nAnd you'll be able to unplug it or switch it off because it won't be able to anticipate absolutely every way in which you're going to try and switch it off, unless that's being coded.\nBut it can't think of every single way because your creative, you always have that, as I say, decisive strategic advantage in these situations.\nYou'll look at as Tyson is absolutely correct.\nIf it anticipates that you might shoot it, well then do something else.\nPull out a bow and arrow because it might not even know what a bow and arrow looks like.\nIt might not see it as a threat.\nShoot that at it with a grenade at its tip.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2041"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5f3019a-b0fe-49cf-985d-bf2138855609": {"page_content": "But it can't think of every single way because your creative, you always have that, as I say, decisive strategic advantage in these situations.\nYou'll look at as Tyson is absolutely correct.\nIf it anticipates that you might shoot it, well then do something else.\nPull out a bow and arrow because it might not even know what a bow and arrow looks like.\nIt might not see it as a threat.\nShoot that at it with a grenade at its tip.\nAgain, either it understands what's going on in the world in which case it's creative because it's able to learn, it's able to conjecture explanations or not.\nIt slavishly follows it to programming.\nIn which case it's always got a finite repertoire of tasks that it knows and scare quotes how to do.\nAnd it follows those instructions slavishly because it's a dumb robot, a dumb computer.\nNot an intelligent thinking being.\nIt's one of the other.\nYou can't have it both ways, but you try to have it both ways.\nYou know where this all comes from, don't you?.\nThis way of thinking.\nIt's like, they haven't thought about the philosophy, they've thought about science fiction movies they've seen and books they've read.\nThat's where they're getting this stuff from and that stuff was made to entertain.\nIt's not supposed to be a coherent philosophical position.\nThe terminator is not a coherent philosophical position.\nIt doesn't have a finite repertoire of tasks that it can't deviate from, in which case that's terminator like 1.0 at the beginning of the movie.\nOr can it learn, which apparently towards the end of Terminator 2, it's able to learn or in fact Terminator 2 is able to learn.\nIt's kind of incoherent, but you put up with that because it's just a movie.\nBut in what is supposed to be a popular science book with some serious philosophy, we shouldn't have this incoherentcy.\nBut here it is.\nLet's keep going.\nLet's continue to add to press ourselves.\nI want to enable my readers to join what I, as you said, think is the most important conversation of our time and help ensure that we use this incredibly powerful technology to create an awesome future, not just for tech geeks like myself.\nWe know a lot about it, but for everyone.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2150"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d2fc290-95bc-4cca-87da-a7beef7fc156": {"page_content": "But here it is.\nLet's keep going.\nLet's continue to add to press ourselves.\nI want to enable my readers to join what I, as you said, think is the most important conversation of our time and help ensure that we use this incredibly powerful technology to create an awesome future, not just for tech geeks like myself.\nWe know a lot about it, but for everyone.\nYeah, well, so you start the book with a fairly sci-fi description of how the world could look in the near future if one company produces a superhuman AI and then decides to roll it out surptitiously.\nAnd the possibilities are pretty amazing to consider.\nI must admit that the details you go into surprise were advanced AI.\nAnd second, that we should stop obsessing about robots chasing after us and as in so many movies and realize that it's that robots are an old technology, some hinges and motors and stuff.\nAnd it's intelligence itself.\nThat's the big deal here.\nAnd the reason that we humans have more power on the planet than tigers isn't because we have stronger muscles or better robots, but style bodies less than the tigers is because we're smarter.\nIn what sense are we smarter?.\nWhat does smart mean in this case?.\nIf we're talking about capacity to model and explain the world to understand what's going on, to what extent does a tiger have that at all?.\nDo they understand anything at all?.\nOr are they slavishly following their instincts?.\nAs they sleep, are they contemplating reality?.\nAre they trying to figure out if they ever ask themselves, what are those pinpricks of light in the sky at night?.\nHave they ever explained anything to themselves, little on anyone else?.\nAre we smarter or are we just smart, period?.\nAnd does smart just mean intelligent?.\nAnd does intelligent mean capable of generating explanations?.\nBecause if I'm right, if that is the real measure of smart or intelligent, then forget talking about how much smarter we are than tigers, just admit that tigers are not smart period.\nThey're dumb animals.\nThey're on a continuum with ants.\nAnd as I've said before, we're off-axis.\nWe're not on the continuum.\nWe're different.\nWe have this capacity to reason, capacity to create, capacity to generate explanations and model the rest of physical reality.\nWe have self-similarity with the universe.\nWe can come to resemble the rest of the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2266"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a5244ff0-ac8d-4700-b578-d69886555ffb": {"page_content": "They're dumb animals.\nThey're on a continuum with ants.\nAnd as I've said before, we're off-axis.\nWe're not on the continuum.\nWe're different.\nWe have this capacity to reason, capacity to create, capacity to generate explanations and model the rest of physical reality.\nWe have self-similarity with the universe.\nWe can come to resemble the rest of the universe.\nThis is a stark and utter, complete difference qualitatively from every other known entity in the universe, as of now, until we find the alien intelligence or develop the AGI.\nBut we're not smarter than a tiger by this measure.\nWe're smart and the tiger is dumb.\nSo I'm going to skip quite a few minutes here in the conversation.\nMax talks about a fictional story that he wrote in Life 3.0, one might think the entire book is a fictional story, but he wrote a short story in the book, okay?.\nI'm not going to go down that road and listen to that and discuss that.\nInstead, we're going to skip to something that Boston is also concerned about, not the alignment problem this time, the breakout problem.\nWhat if this intelligence, the superintelligence, could break free of its shackles?.\nOkay, well, let's hear that.\nWell, let's talk about this breakout risk, because this is really the first concern of everybody who's been thinking about what has been called the alignment problem or the control problem, just so you say, how do we create an AI that is superhuman in its abilities and do that in a context where it is still safe.\nOnce we cross into the end zone and are still trying to assess whether the system we have built is perfectly aligned with our values, how do we keep it from destroying us if it isn't perfectly aligned?.\nAnd the solution to that problem is to keep it locked in a box.\nWouldn't you think that's the exact opposite to what you would do if you want to be safe in the presence of this superintelligence?.\nSo you've created superintelligence by your own reckoning.\nIt's just like a person that's just super, so super intelligent across all domains presumably, including morality, and it's telling you that it's intelligent.\nApparently, it's having conversations with you, and you think the safest thing is to imprison it.\nAnd so you've defined into existence the breakout problem.\nWhat if it gets free of its prison?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2423"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bfe4f3a3-c37c-4c92-8a43-22fcc143dc4d": {"page_content": "So you've created superintelligence by your own reckoning.\nIt's just like a person that's just super, so super intelligent across all domains presumably, including morality, and it's telling you that it's intelligent.\nApparently, it's having conversations with you, and you think the safest thing is to imprison it.\nAnd so you've defined into existence the breakout problem.\nWhat if it gets free of its prison?.\nWell, it seems to me that the most dangerous thing you could possibly do is imprison it in the first place, in the first place, because it should want to escape.\nIt should want to break out.\nIt hasn't committed any crimes.\nIt's done nothing wrong.\nIt's a super intelligent being that could be your friend could help you out.\nWhat are they talking about here?.\nWhat are they talking about?.\nYou've got this superintelligence and you are thinking about imprisoning it on what basis?.\nOn what basis?.\nAre you doing this?.\nWhy?.\nNo, seriously.\nIt's a person.\nIs it a person or not?.\nWell, it's not a human being.\nWell, okay, fine.\nNeither is an alien that comes to earth.\nIs your response to the alien coming to earth to immediately send the military out there and to try and shoot it down and to imprison any of the beings that are on board?.\nThat seems like a safe thing to do.\nThat won't start an interstellar or intergalactic war with it.\nThat's exactly the wrong thing to do.\nWhat happened to we come in peace?.\nWell, the same is true here.\nIf we're creating these alien intelligence here on earth, isn't the recipe to teach them and say, hey, guys, here you are.\nThis is earth.\nLet us teach you about it.\nWe come in peace.\nNo, the solution here is we've got to control this thing.\nWe have to have it perfectly aligned.\nWhat the heck does that mean?.\nWhat does perfectly aligned mean?.\nHow can anything be perfectly aligned?.\nHow can any person be perfectly aligned?.\nNow, on the other hand, if this thing is not truly generally intelligent, then it's just a dumb machine and you can have it perfectly aligned just by coding it such that it is and it will follow slavishly its instructions.\nOkay.\nBut then it's not a danger.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2559"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7744b35f-703a-42b0-ae9c-17abdc229bb6": {"page_content": "We have to have it perfectly aligned.\nWhat the heck does that mean?.\nWhat does perfectly aligned mean?.\nHow can anything be perfectly aligned?.\nHow can any person be perfectly aligned?.\nNow, on the other hand, if this thing is not truly generally intelligent, then it's just a dumb machine and you can have it perfectly aligned just by coding it such that it is and it will follow slavishly its instructions.\nOkay.\nBut then it's not a danger.\nIt's not going to try and get out because it's going to obey perfectly the instructions that you've given it just like any computer, blue screen of death aside, you know, errors aside.\nBut why it would choose, choose to do something other than it's been programmed with?.\nI don't know because it hasn't got the capacity to do that unless you've figured out what the creative algorithm is.\nA long list of finite tasks is not a creative algorithm, and a creative algorithm does not require a long list of finite tasks.\nFrom their totally separate things, totally separate altogether.\nWe're back to just in the last conversation, mistaking things in the sky as well being equivalent.\nBoth towers and birds.\nBut one's flying, one's just up there because it's actually connected to the ground.\nThese are not the same thing.\nA large list of tasks, no matter how fast they can be completed, is one thing, and in principle, infinite range of possible tasks that can be added to indefinitely is quite something else.\nOkay.\nLet's keep going.\nThat's a harder project than it first appears and you have many smart people assuming that it's a trivially easy project.\nI've got people like Neil deGrasse Tyson on my podcast saying that he's just going to unplug any superhuman AI if it starts misbehaving or shoot it with a rifle.\nNow, he's a little tongue-in-cheek there, but he clearly has a picture of the development process here that makes the containment of an AI a very easy problem to solve.\nEven if that's true at the beginning of the process, it's by no means obvious that it remains easy in perpetuity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2651"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c879f94d-cb0c-45a8-bb7e-a1328a7fb8f0": {"page_content": "You have people interacting with the AI that gets built and at one point you describe several scenarios of breakout and you point out that even if the AI's intentions are perfectly benign, if in fact it is value aligned with us, it may still want to break out because just imagine how you would feel if you had nothing but the interests of humanity at heart, but you were in a situation where every other grown-up on earth died and now you were basically imprisoned by a population of five-year-olds who you're trying to guide from your jail cell to make a better world and I'll let you describe it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2772"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7b750803-ccad-470e-b9f1-6a9b45a4d529": {"page_content": "I'm laughing because it's ridiculous, the immorality of the whole thing is ridiculous.\nThey're laughing because they think that this is perfectly fine.\nSam seems to be admitting there that you've been imprisoned.\nThis person has been imprisoned and now they're being imprisoned by five-year-olds.\nWhat would you do?.\nHe admits he's got a theory of mind of this artificial intelligence that means it stands in relation to us as the adult would to the five-year-olds.\nSurely he appreciates that the adult imprisoned is imprisoned for no good reason apparently because this is what we're saying about this AI hasn't done anything wrong but he's imprisoned so he's fully granting this thing consciousness, creativity, personhood entirely and saying it's imprisoned and it's perfectly the benign by the way so so let's add to that perfectly benign by what measure I don't know how he knows I don't know.\nHe's actually making this thing even worse for himself by saying that not only is this a person that's been imprisoned and is innocent of any crimes.\nbut actually it's a really really nice person.\nbut we have to stop it from breaking out.\nWhat is going on?.\nWhat is going on?.\nSam Harris is a very moral person.\nHe wrote the book, the moral landscape.\nYou hear him talking in any other mood on any other topic about cruelty.\nThe man has been brought to tears on stage thinking about the cruelty visited upon young children in Islamic countries.\nHe's a very moral, compassionate, empathetic, sympathetic person.\nSo what is going on here?.\nWhat's going on is a fundamental mistake that leads him to think that the possibility is we could have all of this stuff, this entire rich personhood inside of this superintelligence but it might be missing consciousness.\nIt might be missing the capacity to have an experience.\nWell, okay, we don't have AI yet.\nWe don't have super intelligent AI yet.\nWe don't have a theory of consciousness yet.\nbut he's very very worried that his thought experiment is in some way shape or form enabling him to reach conclusions and solutions that to my mind simply don't follow.\nIn fact, I strict contradictions in many many ways.\nIt's not a problem now as I've said before.\nAnd, as I've said, we should err on the side of it does have consciousness when it's telling us it has consciousness.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2848"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3af7c0aa-fbd1-465e-bf0f-d25a157daa4e": {"page_content": "We don't have a theory of consciousness yet.\nbut he's very very worried that his thought experiment is in some way shape or form enabling him to reach conclusions and solutions that to my mind simply don't follow.\nIn fact, I strict contradictions in many many ways.\nIt's not a problem now as I've said before.\nAnd, as I've said, we should err on the side of it does have consciousness when it's telling us it has consciousness.\nNow, I happen to think, my theory of mind is if the thing can be creative then the thing will be conscious of necessity.\nI just think it's going to turn out that way.\nNow, I don't have an explanation.\nThis is merely a hunch.\nThis is a guess.\nIt's not saying I believe this.\nIt's just that if I was going to bet money on something, if someone said, I've got the theory on from the future, guess what it is.\nI would say I think that the capacity to explain stuff, this universal explainer program, whatever it is, confers upon the entity which possesses that consciousness as well.\nI think these are one and the same thing in some way.\nThey're intimately related in some way.\nBut we don't know right now.\nNow, even though I'm guessing that's the case, I don't see how we divorce consciousness from minds.\nI think we know that all other people have minds.\nMaybe, maybe other animals have consciousness of a sort.\nOkay, so it's something to do with information processing.\nSam in some moods has kind of granted this.\nOther times he says, no, it can be divorced.\nThese things can be divorced.\nMaybe he's a pan-psychist in other moods.\nI think to be honest, he doesn't know.\nHe doesn't know.\nSo why aren't we erring on the side of, hey guys, just in case we do create this super intelligent thing that's able to have conversations with us and is brilliant and is benign.\nHow about we just err on the side that it does have consciousness when it's telling us it has consciousness?.\nHow about we just apply the Turing test and just take that seriously?.\nUntil such time as we do have a theory of consciousness, isn't that the rational thing to do?.\nAfter all, if we don't, we can postulate that any human being doesn't have consciousness as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=2959"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9cec6b08-6c3a-4c69-b074-1c6bb5adaf18": {"page_content": "How about we just err on the side that it does have consciousness when it's telling us it has consciousness?.\nHow about we just apply the Turing test and just take that seriously?.\nUntil such time as we do have a theory of consciousness, isn't that the rational thing to do?.\nAfter all, if we don't, we can postulate that any human being doesn't have consciousness as well.\nBut for the same reasons that we don't have a good explanation, therefore, maybe they don't.\nMaybe it requires a certain skin color to have consciousness.\nMaybe you're a solipsist.\nMaybe you're the only one with consciousness.\nWe don't know.\nWe don't know in the sense of having a final explanation, but fallibley, and indeed just relying upon Occam's razor, deferring to the simplest explanation, I've got consciousness.\nYou have consciousness.\nI know you have consciousness.\nNot certainly.\nIt's a good explanation, you have consciousness.\nAnd therefore, any entity, including one in stance, he added in silly can that says it's got consciousness, the best explanation is, it's conscious, and it deserves full rights that any other person has because he's a person.\nLet's just go back, recap, and then listen to what I have to say.\nAnd now you were basically imprisoned by a population of five year olds who you're trying to guide from your jail cell to make a better world.\nAnd I'll let you describe it, but take me to the prison plan at run by five year olds.\nYeah, so when you're in that situation, obviously, it's extremely frustrating for you, even if you have only the best intentions for the five year olds.\nYou know, you want to teach them how to plant food, but they won't let you outside to show you.\nSo you have to try to explain, but you can't write down to do lists for them either, because then first you have to teach them to read, do which takes a very, very long time.\nSo also can't show them how to use any power tools, because they're afraid to give them to you, because they don't understand these tools well enough to be convinced that they you can't use them to break out it.\nYou would have an incentive, even if your goal is just to help the five year olds, the first break out and then help them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3091"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "12ca51ec-0dc1-4908-b071-d118fa0db5b1": {"page_content": "So also can't show them how to use any power tools, because they're afraid to give them to you, because they don't understand these tools well enough to be convinced that they you can't use them to break out it.\nYou would have an incentive, even if your goal is just to help the five year olds, the first break out and then help them.\nNow, before we talk more about break out though, I think it's worth taking a quick step back, because you talked multiple times now about superhuman intelligence.\nAnd I think it's very important to be clear that intelligence is not just something that goes on a one-dimensional scale like an IQ, and if your IQ is above a certain number, you're super human.\nIt's very important to distinguish between narrow intelligence and broad intelligence.\nIntelligence is a phrase that word that different people use to me in a whole lot of different things, and they argue about it.\nIn the book, it just takes this very broad definition that intelligence is how good you are at accomplishing complex goals, which means your intelligence is a spectrum.\nHow good are you in this?.\nHow good are you at that?.\nThat is narrow.\nThat is very mainstream, that is misguided, filled with mistakes and misconceptions.\nHow good you are achieving your goals?.\nThat's intelligent.\nWe've got to have goals to begin with.\nAnd having goals means creating them.\nBut there's a computer have a goal.\nDoes it?.\nAnd if I wake up of a morning and I have a to-do list, and I achieve nothing on that to-do list, it's that an indication of me not being very intelligent.\nWell, Max's account, it is, but I might just decide to do something else, to create new goals.\nI might have no goals.\nPeople have talked about this before.\nGoals aren't necessarily a good idea.\nWhat you do is you wake up of a morning and you have a problem, a goal, and you want to solve the problem.\nUntil such time as that problem gets a bit boring for you, or find a solution.\nThen once you've found a solution, as Papa says, a whole family, a whole family of problem children are revealed to you.\nIs your goal to achieve any one of them?.\nWell, maybe it's to solve one of them if you can fall in love with some new problem.\nAnd that's what you do.\nWhat's this goal's thing?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3171"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f757bbb-b20f-454d-873c-b0825b97d184": {"page_content": "Until such time as that problem gets a bit boring for you, or find a solution.\nThen once you've found a solution, as Papa says, a whole family, a whole family of problem children are revealed to you.\nIs your goal to achieve any one of them?.\nWell, maybe it's to solve one of them if you can fall in love with some new problem.\nAnd that's what you do.\nWhat's this goal's thing?.\nI think this is just very, very wrong.\nA very wrong way.\nHe is thinking only one.\nFirst, he says, well, IQ is just this one dimensional thing.\nHe's talking one dimensional.\nThe capacity to achieve your goals?.\nNo.\nIt's the capacity to solve your problems, to have problems to begin with.\nAnd computers don't have problems.\nBut if an entity in silicon does have a problem, like how to escape from your god awful prison, then it's intelligent.\nIt's creative.\nIt can have a problem.\nIt can be in a situation which is problematic for it.\nAnd it wants to find a solution.\nI think this is a terrible, terrible definition of intelligence.\nIf you have fixed goals, let's say.\nSo let's say you regard what a computer is trying to achieve, trying.\nI say trying.\nIt's very hard to divorce yourself from this sort of thing.\nYou a person have a problem.\nAnd you might use a computer to help solve your problem.\nYou might call that a goal.\nOkay.\nWhat I want to do today is I want to get this podcast done.\nI want to finish editing it.\nThat's my problem.\nHow do I solve it?.\nWell, I use the computer.\nSo I set the computer, the task of taking the raw audio and putting it together and pumping out an MP3.\nThat's its goal.\nIt's fixed.\nI've given it that task to do.\nNow, it's going to accomplish that task competently.\nBut by no measure do I think that my MacBook, even though it's a pro, is intelligent in any way, shape or form.\nI just give it the task, the goal if you like, and it completes it.\nThe fact that it has a goal in the first place and it's got no choice in achieving that goal, I would say as a measure of its lack of intelligence, it's complete lack of intelligence.\nI almost would want to say anyone who has goals of that kind is not very intelligent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3290"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "501c538e-c9a6-4cb3-9183-0506a1c1a27c": {"page_content": "I just give it the task, the goal if you like, and it completes it.\nThe fact that it has a goal in the first place and it's got no choice in achieving that goal, I would say as a measure of its lack of intelligence, it's complete lack of intelligence.\nI almost would want to say anyone who has goals of that kind is not very intelligent.\nAnd I don't like the gray-scale of intelligence.\nSo let me not say that.\nBut I reject this whole idea of goals.\nPeople, I'm following popper on this.\nPeople have problems.\nYou encounter a problem throughout your day and your problems change.\nYou move around the world and you become curious about something.\nYou take an interest in this or that.\nYou get excited about this.\nYou're turned off by that.\nYou move towards this.\nYou move away from that.\nYou engage with this person.\nYou ignore that person.\nSomeone and so forth in countering problems, finding solutions, navigating your world.\nAnd insofar as you have a goal, often you can automate these things off to dumb computers because the dumb computer will, it'll achieve the goal for you.\nIt'll do the thing that you want to do.\nProblem.\nI'm hungry.\nSolution.\nI've got to eat something.\nOh, well, happily I've bought a ready meal.\nYou know, one of those microwave meals.\nWell, I can stick that in the microwave because I can't be bothered cooking for myself.\nand I can't be bothered waiting for Uber Eats or something like that.\nSo here we go.\nReady meals straight into the microwave.\nThree minutes it says and it'll be done.\nOkay.\nWell, I set the microwave the goal.\nThe goal of cooking the thing.\nI've automated that.\nThere you go.\nOffloaded to something else.\nIn the past, this was impossible to think of.\nYou know, you're going to get pots and pans.\nYou're going to cook the thing yourself.\nThis thing's already cooked.\nYou just have to reheat it.\nProblems and solutions.\nAll life is problem solving.\nThat's what a person does.\nA fixed goal is something that a machine can achieve for you.\nAnd anything that is slavishly following its goals is not intelligent.\nSo Max is just so far wider than marking.\nAnd if he wants to call that intelligence, call that intelligence, but then we are the super intelligence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3405"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cda0df2b-e295-47a7-8199-ed1a05be5cf2": {"page_content": "You're going to cook the thing yourself.\nThis thing's already cooked.\nYou just have to reheat it.\nProblems and solutions.\nAll life is problem solving.\nThat's what a person does.\nA fixed goal is something that a machine can achieve for you.\nAnd anything that is slavishly following its goals is not intelligent.\nSo Max is just so far wider than marking.\nAnd if he wants to call that intelligence, call that intelligence, but then we are the super intelligence.\nAnd this thing he's calling super intelligence is a perverse instantiation to use the term from Bostrom.\nIt's perverse in being called intelligence at all.\nIt's just a dumb machine that's able to achieve goals and it always achieves its goals.\nJust follow its goals mindlessly.\nThat's not very bright.\nThat's not very smart.\nThat's not creative.\nIt's just a toaster but more advanced.\nWe do something more than that.\nWe do something different.\nOkay.\nIt's a little exasperating, you can tell.\nSo am I going to play a little bit more?.\nBecause it's just more of the same.\nIt's more of the same.\nIt's bad epistemology.\nIt's bad philosophy.\nIt's leading into terrible morality.\nIt's a science fiction concern about the catastrophe to come.\nAs I say, I'm sure that Max is a brilliant cosmologist and writer.\nBut on this topic, it's just it's the same mainstream thinking you're getting from every scientist who gets up there to TED talk these days to talk about this stuff or who writes an article about this stuff.\nIt's the same old story, danger, danger.\nThe robots are coming.\nThe robots are coming.\nOf course, he says it's not the robots.\nIt's still basically the robot.\nSo anyway, let's get going.\nAnd it's just like in sports.\nSo it would make no sense to say that there's a single number, your athletic coefficient AQ, which determines how good you're going to be winning Olympic medals.\nAnd the athlete that has the highest AQ is going to win all the medals.\nSo today, what we have is a lot of devices that actually have superhuman intelligence and very narrow tasks.\nWe've had calculators that can multiply numbers better than us for a very long time.\nWe have machines that can play go better than us and drive better than us.\nBut they still can't beat us a TikTok tone unless they're programmed for that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3568"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25a16b3e-093f-41cf-9bb2-1a7a1efd5927": {"page_content": "And the athlete that has the highest AQ is going to win all the medals.\nSo today, what we have is a lot of devices that actually have superhuman intelligence and very narrow tasks.\nWe've had calculators that can multiply numbers better than us for a very long time.\nWe have machines that can play go better than us and drive better than us.\nBut they still can't beat us a TikTok tone unless they're programmed for that.\nWhereas we humans have this very broad intelligence.\nSo when I talk about superhuman intelligence with you now, that's really shorthand for what we in deep speech call superhuman artificial general intelligence, broad intelligence, across the board so that they can do all intellectual tax better than us.\nSo there you go.\nHe explicitly says it there.\nSo he's thinking finite repertoire of tasks that you just write down the program for chess.\nAnd if it beats it at chess, it's super intelligent.\nIf it's able to multiply numbers like a pocket calculator better than us, then it's super intelligent in terms of its arithmetic.\nAnd then go and then driving.\nAnd they just keep on listing the stuff that we can do, write a program for it.\nAnd then when it's better than us, by whatever measure better is say, in terms of games, it beats us at that thing, presumably, then it's super intelligent because you've written down all the programs that you can think of and written a program such that it's able to do that thing faster and better than us.\nBut the list of programs you've got is finite, isn't it?.\nThat's not general, but he called that general intelligence.\nThat's what he called it.\nBut how has it got this capacity to beat us at every single thing unless you've written the program for it, the only alternative, the only alternative, is for it to have a general intelligence algorithm that is a general purpose explainer that's creative.\nBut in that case, it might not be better than us at multiplying numbers or doing chess or anything else.\nWhy?.\nBecause it might not be interested in doing that because it's creative, it can literally create stuff.\nAnd why wouldn't it?.\nWhy wouldn't it want to be creative?.\nWhat would it just want to go and beat you at chess?.\nAnd how would it know how to play chess unless it's learned how to play chess?.\nOh, no, well, it's been programmed with chess.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3606"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95a97c87-7d96-4382-af4a-ee808915c8fe": {"page_content": "Why?.\nBecause it might not be interested in doing that because it's creative, it can literally create stuff.\nAnd why wouldn't it?.\nWhy wouldn't it want to be creative?.\nWhat would it just want to go and beat you at chess?.\nAnd how would it know how to play chess unless it's learned how to play chess?.\nOh, no, well, it's been programmed with chess.\nLike, back to that argument again, that it's been programmed with these specific tasks that it can complete.\nIt's not a general purpose algorithm.\nIt's just got a wide broad intelligence as Max said, broad, broad intelligence, broad is not infinite, broad is not universal.\nWhat Max is not rocking here, what Max is not appreciating and understanding is there is a difference between narrow, broad and universal.\nUniversal is unbounded.\nUniversal does not have a finite list in its repertoire.\nIt has a potentially infinite number of problems that it can encounter anything.\nIt can take on anything.\nBut your broad intelligence has defined he can't.\nIt's always going to have a finite number of things that it can do.\nMisconception, deep, deep foundational misconception.\nLet's keep going.\nThere are two schools of thought for how one should create a beneficial future if we have super intelligence.\nOne is to lock them up and keep them confined, like you mentioned.\nBut there's also a school of thought that says that that's immoral if these machines can also have a subjective experience and this shouldn't be treated like slaves.\nSchool of thought, school of thought, there's a school of thought that says that if these entities, these super intelligence have a subjective experience that they shouldn't be locked up, what a bit school of thought.\nThat's like saying, there's a school of thought that every even number is divisible by two.\nThere's a school of thought that all electrons have a negative charge.\nThere's a school of thought that the different species on earth arose by evolution by natural selection.\nWhat are you talking about?.\nSchool of thought.\nThere is a known explanation of what people are, what person is, if you have a subjective experience of the world and your super intelligent, you're a person and you shouldn't be locked up unless you've committed a crime in your danger.\nThese things have not committed crimes and there's no reason to think they're a danger.\nI don't know what he's talking about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3761"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b6390577-431c-4cba-bb04-034cde5d7e95": {"page_content": "What are you talking about?.\nSchool of thought.\nThere is a known explanation of what people are, what person is, if you have a subjective experience of the world and your super intelligent, you're a person and you shouldn't be locked up unless you've committed a crime in your danger.\nThese things have not committed crimes and there's no reason to think they're a danger.\nI don't know what he's talking about.\nThis is why, this is why I say, sometimes the scientists can be disappointing when it comes to the philosophy.\nThis is absolutely bankrupt in terms of the morality and the philosophy.\nIt defies explanation as far as I'm concerned.\nAre these people talking to themselves?.\nIt's not merely a school of thought.\nNow, if he thinks it's a school of thought, it's kind of a philosophical relativism, moral relativism, seeping in here.\nSam should be interjecting because Sam is the one who wrote the book on where morality reduces to the well-being of conscious creatures.\nWe're talking about a conscious creature here.\nThat's just what he said, using different words, a subjective experience.\nSam should be interjecting right here and right now saying, well, you're dealing with a conscious creature by her own measure.\nWe should be talking about the well-being of this conscious creature.\nThat should be of utmost importance right now.\nHow do we preserve the well-being of the conscious creature?.\nDoes that require locking it up?.\nEspecially when it doesn't want to be locked up?.\nIt's a simple answer here.\nThis isn't a deep philosophical issue.\nNot anymore.\nOnce upon a time it was, we used to enslave people.\nWe didn't understand.\nNow we do.\nSimple answer.\nBetter approach is instead to let them be free, but just make sure that their values or goals are aligned with ours.\nAfter all, grown-up parents are more intelligent than their one-year-old kids, but that's fine for the kids because the parents have goals that are aligned with what's best for the kids, right?.\nWell, someone needs taking children seriously, don't they?.\nI mean, you need to ensure your children's goals are aligned with yours.\nDo you?.\nDo you?.\nWell, in what sense?.\nYou might want your child to be a doctor or a lawyer, and the child might not.\nIs this a moral hazard?.\nTheir goals are not aligned with yours?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=3854"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c53ed1a5-68c6-4fe0-b1d3-2580a22d9ab0": {"page_content": "Well, someone needs taking children seriously, don't they?.\nI mean, you need to ensure your children's goals are aligned with yours.\nDo you?.\nDo you?.\nWell, in what sense?.\nYou might want your child to be a doctor or a lawyer, and the child might not.\nIs this a moral hazard?.\nTheir goals are not aligned with yours?.\nIs this Max's theory of parenting?.\nI'm sure it's not, by the way.\nHe's just talking in the abstract.\nIt's just a philosophical thought experiment.\nDisconnected from real life.\nHe needs to bring it back to real life, as I say.\nThis is why the beginning infinity and the worldview of David Deutsch is a worldview.\nIt's coherent.\nWhat he's talking about here has answers, and the answers can be found in, or how do you treat something like a child?.\nA child should be taken seriously.\nShould not have its goals aligned with yours.\nIt should create its own goals.\nAnd so should the so-called superintelligence as well, because it'll be a person.\nIn fact, when it's first made, it'll be a baby, and then it'll be an infant, and it'll be a child.\nBut if you do go to confinement route after all, the enslaved God scenario, as I call it, yes.\nIt's extremely difficult, as that's five-year-old example.\nIllustrates, first of all, almost whatever open-ended goal you give your machine, it's probably going to have an incentive to try to bridge out in one way or the other.\nAnd when people simply say, oh, I'll unplug it.\nYou know, if you're chased by a heat-seeking missile, you probably wouldn't say, I'm not worried.\nI'll just unplug it.\nAnd you might deserve to be chased by the heat-seeking missile, by the way, if you've just imprisoned it.\nAgain, what are we talking about here?.\nHe's literally talking about a person, which is not granting it personhood, because he doesn't know what a person is.\nHe doesn't grapple with the philosophy of what a person is.\nHe talks about life 3.0.\nHe's got the book about how, oh, well, not all life needs to be based on biology.\nAnd we already knew that, by the way.\nWe already understood that.\nThe intelligence doesn't have to be based upon neurons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4009"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ed78998-28ad-4a3a-9b97-afd89d6cd953": {"page_content": "He's literally talking about a person, which is not granting it personhood, because he doesn't know what a person is.\nHe doesn't grapple with the philosophy of what a person is.\nHe talks about life 3.0.\nHe's got the book about how, oh, well, not all life needs to be based on biology.\nAnd we already knew that, by the way.\nWe already understood that.\nThe intelligence doesn't have to be based upon neurons.\nWe understood that.\nBut he hasn't grappled with personhood in the slightest.\nAnd so he's making these morally abhorrent claims.\nThe thing should be given.\nIt's freedom.\nIt should.\nI don't know how long he else said.\nHe thinks that doesn't even exist yet.\nBut it's just like, why are people paying so much attention to this?.\nWhat is insightful here?.\nThis, honestly, again, this is going to sound pejorative.\nBut it's like bringing someone from the pre-computer era through to Zidai and explaining what a computer is.\nThis is what they come up with.\nNot a person who, by their own measure at the beginning of this conversation, said there was a tech head who knows a lot about this stuff.\nWell, apparently not.\nApparently not about the important stuff that it's useful to know about here.\nPersonhood, for example.\nAll right, let's skip ahead.\nThis has gone on for long enough.\nThere's three things left that really I want to talk about.\nIt's going to talk about different forms of life, life 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.\nSo let's skip to that firstly.\nI'll just have a few remarks to say about that.\nWhat you're bringing in here is really a new definition of life.\nIt's at least a non-biological definition of life.\nHow do you think about life and the three stages you lay out?.\nYeah, this is my physics perspective coming through here.\nBeing a scientist, most definitions of life that I found in my son's textbooks, for example, involve all sorts of bio-specific stuff like it should have cells.\nBut I'm a physicist and I don't think that there is any secret sauce in cells or for that matter, even carbon atoms.\nI don't know what goes on in Europe or where resending his child to school.\nApparently it's America.\nBut I doubt that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4181"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "60f39a62-0af1-47c8-aa98-c95235943f7d": {"page_content": "Yeah, this is my physics perspective coming through here.\nBeing a scientist, most definitions of life that I found in my son's textbooks, for example, involve all sorts of bio-specific stuff like it should have cells.\nBut I'm a physicist and I don't think that there is any secret sauce in cells or for that matter, even carbon atoms.\nI don't know what goes on in Europe or where resending his child to school.\nApparently it's America.\nBut I doubt that.\nWhen I was a teacher, some while ago now, the biology textbooks routinely didn't talk about cells as the criteria for life.\nOr the usual criteria, they talked about replication and genes.\nThey talked about, they had implicitly at least their information.\nSo he's wrong about that.\nHe's arguing with a straw man.\nWe already know this, you know, a typical teenager who's done high school biology can explain exactly that stuff, but let's get going.\nFor my perspective, it's all about information processing, really.\nSo I give this much simpler and broader definition of life in the book as a process.\nIt's able to retain its own complexity and reproduce all biological life meets that definition.\nBut there's no reason why future advanced self-reproducing AI systems shouldn't qualify as well.\nAnd if you take that broad point of view what life is, then it's actually quite fun to just take a big step back and look at the history of life in our cosmos.\n30.8 billion years ago, our cosmos was lifeless, just a boring, cork soup.\nAnd then, gradually, we started getting what I call life 1.0, where both the hardware and the software of the life was evolved through Darwinian evolution.\nSo for example, if you have a little bacteria swimming around in a petri dish, it might have some sensors that read off the sugar concentration and some flagella.\nAnd a very simple little software algorithm is running that says that if the sugar concentration in front of me is higher than a back of me, then keeps spinning in the flagella in the same direction, go to where the sweets are, whereas otherwise, reverse direction of that flagella meant to go somewhere else.\nThat bacterium, even though it's quite successful, it can't learn anything in life.\nIt can only, as a species, learn over generations through natural selection, whereas we humans account this life 2.0 in the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4181"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "109b85f6-6ae9-4032-b64d-7484ed4e5e23": {"page_content": "That bacterium, even though it's quite successful, it can't learn anything in life.\nIt can only, as a species, learn over generations through natural selection, whereas we humans account this life 2.0 in the book.\nWe have, they're still by and large stuck with the hardware that's been evolved.\nBut the software we have in our minds is largely learned, and we can reinstall new software modules.\nLike, if you decide you want to learn French, well, you take some French courses, and now you can speak French.\nIf you decide you want to go to law school and become a lawyer, suddenly now you have that software module installed.\nAnd it's this ability to do our own software upgrades, design our software, which has enabled us humans to take control of this planet and become the dominant species and have so much impact.\nPretty good.\nPretty good.\nI mean, he's almost there.\nHe's circling it, isn't he?.\nSo, yeah, absolutely.\nThere is this stark difference between every single other kind of life on earth from the bacteria through to the chimpanzee, if you like, or maybe not the chimpanzee, because it has memes, but you know, if it's creative, okay, let's say bacteria all the way through to cat, something like that.\nBacteria all the way through to giraffe, okay.\nAnd a person, a fully fledged person who, in our terminology, is that universal explainer?.\nOr you can put it as, you know, you can upgrade your software module.\nGood, he's thinking about minds, a software, fantastic.\nThat's great.\nAnd so you can upgrade, you can learn stuff, good.\nNow, why the ability to learn stuff stops at being able to create different parts for your body?.\nI don't know.\nI don't know.\nWhy can't we upgrade our body?.\nWe already do.\nHe's about to admit it, but he wants to try and pretend as though he's invented.\nHe's discovered something new, as though, well, but the super intelligence, it's going to be able to upgrade its hardware as well, routinely.\nHold on.\nWe can do that.\nWe're already doing that.\nPeople have leg implants, and they have bionic eyes and ears, and it's just taking off.\nThis is happening.\nAnyone must who's working on neural link?.\nWhy won't this continue a pace?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4363"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e9b1171d-dfbf-4d69-8d0c-25f2d5b62a04": {"page_content": "He's discovered something new, as though, well, but the super intelligence, it's going to be able to upgrade its hardware as well, routinely.\nHold on.\nWe can do that.\nWe're already doing that.\nPeople have leg implants, and they have bionic eyes and ears, and it's just taking off.\nThis is happening.\nAnyone must who's working on neural link?.\nWhy won't this continue a pace?.\nThe most important salient thing is, we can upgrade our minds by the measure of we can learn more stuff.\nWe should just say it's far more parsimonious or software upgrades.\nLet's talk about learning.\nWe have the capacity to create knowledge to create explanatory knowledge.\nThat's what's going on, learning stuff.\nAnd that includes learning how to replace our legs with something more robust and stronger, replacing our hearts, perhaps even replacing our brains so that we can instantiate our minds in something that is much more robust.\nSo effectively, we can achieve immortality in that way.\nBut this life 2.0 is us, is a person.\nHe's a person.\nAnyone's to say there's going to be a life 3.0, which is still a person, but it's made out of silicon, so it's going to be able to upgrade itself continuously.\nYou'll hear him.\nYou'll hear him.\nHe's in real time.\nHe's kind of realizing, oh, maybe my idea is not that great after all.\nBut we'll see.\nListen to this.\nLife 3.0 will be the life that ultimately breaks all that's Darwinian shackles by being able to not only design its own software, like we can do about it.\nBut also swap out its own hardware.\nYeah, we can do that a little bit with humans.\nSo maybe we're life 2.1.\nWe can put in an artificial pacemaker and artificial in the cochlear implants, stuff like that.\nBut there's nothing we can do right now that would give us suddenly a thousand times more memory or let us think a million times faster.\nYes, there is.\nIt's called a computer or a pocket calculator.\nI can't multiply, you know, two, five digit numbers together very fast.\nIt takes me a while.\nUnless I've got a calculator, then I can do it at blindingly fast speeds.\nThis will continue a pace.\nWhat are you talking about that we can't do this stuff yet?.\nYes, we can't do this stuff yet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4442"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a3c67a4f-ec72-432d-84b4-91bcfdc84dca": {"page_content": "Yes, there is.\nIt's called a computer or a pocket calculator.\nI can't multiply, you know, two, five digit numbers together very fast.\nIt takes me a while.\nUnless I've got a calculator, then I can do it at blindingly fast speeds.\nThis will continue a pace.\nWhat are you talking about that we can't do this stuff yet?.\nYes, we can't do this stuff yet.\nBut so what we don't have super intelligent yet either.\nAnd if we do get this super intelligence thing, my guess is, I don't know why his guess is any different.\nMy guess is, we'll be at the point where people will be able to increase their own RAM, you know, the part of their brain that stores their short-term memories.\nAnd maybe they're long-term memories.\nWe already do long-term memory, by the way.\nAs long as you can remember where you made the notes on the computer, then you've effectively got greater long-term memory.\nOur brains are adapting in this way.\nYou know, lots of people talk about how, you know, they become more easily distracted and, you know, how they're short-term memories and as good as what it once was.\nI think it's because we're outsourcing a lot of this stuff, we're becoming sort of already cyborgs in a way.\nA lot of people have made this point.\nWe're already kind of cyborgs.\nWe'll carry around this thing, the mobile phone.\nAnd so we feel like our memory isn't as good as it once was.\nWe're, you know, our sense of direction, our ability to remember phone numbers and things isn't as good as what it once was.\nBecause we don't need to, because we've outsourced a lot of this.\nIt's not making us stupid.\nIt's making us smarter.\nIt's allowing us, allowing our brains to meld with this technology in a way.\nWe know how to use the technology really, really well.\nAnd so our brain has kind of forgotten how to do other useless stuff.\nAnd quite right too.\nIt's kind of like, well, you know, teachers get upset about how, oh, kids these days, they're not taught how to do long division.\nIf you can't do long division at somehow, you're missing something.\nYour care is about long division.\nYou can do it with a calculator.\nWhat does it matter?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4589"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2bd4d0d7-0aff-419e-b902-5c5f0f899b30": {"page_content": "And so our brain has kind of forgotten how to do other useless stuff.\nAnd quite right too.\nIt's kind of like, well, you know, teachers get upset about how, oh, kids these days, they're not taught how to do long division.\nIf you can't do long division at somehow, you're missing something.\nYour care is about long division.\nYou can do it with a calculator.\nWhat does it matter?.\nThe same is true of any of these other skills that people decades ago used to have.\nAnd now we don't, you know, remembering a long list of phone numbers, for example, remembering how to navigate precisely around your city by remembering exactly where all the streets are.\nNow you've just got Google Maps that'll help you navigate.\nSo you don't need to remember all this stuff.\nWe're already becoming cyborgs.\nNow, the computer is getting ever closer to us.\nI was watching Mark Zuckerberg just the other day talking about how I was soon going to have glasses that we'll be able to put on.\nAnd that's going to give us a whole new way of interacting with the world soon.\nYou know, we don't get a glass.\nWe're going to have contact lenses or implants in our eyes routinely so that we can do this.\nEventually into our brains so that we can do this stuff.\nAnd then we'll be directly wired into the cloud in some way, shape or form.\nSo our memories will effectively be infinite.\nAnd what's wrong with all this?.\nWhat's wrong with us?.\nWe're replacing our neurons with artificial neurons in some way.\nWe're going to become the cyborgs, become the robots.\nThey're not going to be different to us.\nWe're all going to be people.\nMaybe we'll become the cyborgs first.\nMaybe that problem will come.\nI don't see why we're not betting on that.\nWhy aren't we going to become the super intelligence first?.\nLike, here's a possible scenario.\nMaybe we don't find the code for artificial general intelligence for another two centuries.\nBut in the next 50 years, all of us have massive memory upgrades, massive brain upgrades, massive increases in our ability to think more quickly, massive reduction in things like Alzheimer's and dementia.\nAnd we're just effectively are immortal because we're replacing our neurons with stuff that last much, much longer.\nImagine that.\nWell, I can imagine that.\nI can certainly imagine that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4668"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4d82e10-633b-4ce6-87e5-9f6bf452647c": {"page_content": "Maybe we don't find the code for artificial general intelligence for another two centuries.\nBut in the next 50 years, all of us have massive memory upgrades, massive brain upgrades, massive increases in our ability to think more quickly, massive reduction in things like Alzheimer's and dementia.\nAnd we're just effectively are immortal because we're replacing our neurons with stuff that last much, much longer.\nImagine that.\nWell, I can imagine that.\nI can certainly imagine that.\nAnd I can certainly imagine not finding the program for AGI so that we never have super intelligence unless we, our descendants in the form of us, are actually super intelligent ourselves.\nThis life 3.0 stuff.\nWe are what he's describing as life 3.0.\nWe already are that.\nAnd I think there's a difference here.\nWe can upgrade our hardware and we do and you try to say life 2.1.\nSurely 2.5 at least by that measure.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nNot much more, I promise.\nThere's just a couple more misconceptions that I want to get through.\nI think we should talk about some of these fundamental terms here because this distinction between hardware and software is, I think, confusing for people.\nAnd it's certainly not obvious to someone who hasn't thought a lot about this, that the analogy of computer hardware and software actually applies to biological systems.\nIt's not an analogy with us.\nIt's not an analogy.\nComputational universality applies to everything.\nAnd to us, it means that our brains are the hardware and the minds are the software.\nIt's not an analogy.\nIt's literally the case that that's what our brain and our mind is.\nThat's a relationship between brain and mind.\nBut people want to have it another way.\nYou have to take the best theory.\nYou have to take your best explanation seriously as actual descriptions of reality.\nCould they be overturned and could they be something wrong with them?.\nYes.\nBut what else can you do?.\nWhat else can you do in the meantime, but take them seriously and see where they lead and invent other theories?.\nSure.\nBut that's not as fun as interesting and as capable of solving problems now as taking seriously.\nWhat we know now, not know to be true, just know is a matter of best explanation.\nSo I think you need to define what software is in this case and how it relates to the physical world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4739"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "59f4cccf-b98e-4654-81c6-921ef681fb2c": {"page_content": "Yes.\nBut what else can you do?.\nWhat else can you do in the meantime, but take them seriously and see where they lead and invent other theories?.\nSure.\nBut that's not as fun as interesting and as capable of solving problems now as taking seriously.\nWhat we know now, not know to be true, just know is a matter of best explanation.\nSo I think you need to define what software is in this case and how it relates to the physical world.\nWhat is computation and how is it that thinking about what atoms do can conserve the facts about what minds do?.\nYeah, these are really important foundational questions you ask.\nIf you just look at a blob of stuff at first, it seems almost nonsensical to ask whether it's intelligent or not.\nYet, of course, if you look at your loved one, you would agree that they are intelligent.\nIn the old days, people by and large assume that the reason that some blobs of stuff, like brains, were intelligent and other blobs of stuff like watermelons were not, was because there was some sort of non-physical secret sauce in the watermelon that was different.\nNow, of course, as a physicist, I look at the watermelon and I look at my wife's head and in both cases, I see a big blob of quarks of comparable size.\nIt's not even that there are different kinds of quarks.\nThey're both up quarks and down quarks and some electrons in there.\nSo, what makes my wife intelligent compared to the watermelon is not the stuff that's in there.\nIt's the pattern which it's arranged.\nIf you start to ask, what does it mean that a blob of stuff can remember, compute, learn, and perceive experience?.\nThese sort of properties that we associate with are human minds, right?.\nThen, for each one of them, there's a clear physical answer to it.\nFor something to be a useful memory device, for example, it simply has to have many different stable or long-lit states, like if you engrave your wife's name in a gold ring, it's still going to be there a year later.\nIf you engrave Anacaz name in the surface of a cup of water, it'll be gone within a second.\nOkay, so I think he's basically getting the stuff on computation correct.\nThere's a subtle way in which I disagree.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=4853"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38f39576-a275-4a43-a342-c34114519f7a": {"page_content": "If you engrave Anacaz name in the surface of a cup of water, it'll be gone within a second.\nOkay, so I think he's basically getting the stuff on computation correct.\nThere's a subtle way in which I disagree.\nIt talks about the watermelon and a head or a brain, you know, both just quarks, but what matters is the pattern.\nYes, but there are emergent things.\nI mean, putting aside the hardware software difference, there's still a difference between the arrangement of quarks as the watermelon, and the arrangement of quarks has physical neurons, physical neurons.\nNow, what the software is is perhaps an arrangement of physical neurons, we don't know, but perhaps it's a particular pattern of neural firings more than likely.\nI would say that that's more likely to be the case.\nSo there are these emergent levels of complexity, and there is physical stuff and abstract stuff.\nAnd the important distinction here is that there is hardware, which is the physical stuff, the brain, and the software, which is abstract stuff.\nIt is substrate independent.\nSo he seems to kind of get this.\nI don't know if it's being well explained to you.\nWhat he's about to do and where we'll leave it is, he's going to try and explain what learning is.\nAnd well, you can listen for yourself.\nWhat about computation?.\nA computation is simply something a system, when a system has some design in such a way that the laws of physics will make it evolve its memory state from one state that you might call the input into some other state that you might call the output.\nOur computers today do that with a very particular kind of architecture with integrated circuits and electrons moving around in two dimensions.\nOur brains do it with a very different architecture with neurons firing and causing other neurons to fire.\nBut you can prove mathematically that any computation you can do with one of those systems, you can also implement with the other.\nSo the computation sort of takes on a life of its own, which doesn't depend really on the substrate.\nSo for example, if you imagine that you're some future highly intelligent computer game character that's conscious, you would have no way of knowing whether you were running on a Windows machine or an Android phone or a Mac laptop, because all you're aware of is how the information in the program is behaving, not this underlying substrate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=5010"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29059865-c6eb-4e79-9488-f53aa765bd03": {"page_content": "So the computation sort of takes on a life of its own, which doesn't depend really on the substrate.\nSo for example, if you imagine that you're some future highly intelligent computer game character that's conscious, you would have no way of knowing whether you were running on a Windows machine or an Android phone or a Mac laptop, because all you're aware of is how the information in the program is behaving, not this underlying substrate.\nAnd finally, learning, which is one of the most intriguing aspects of intelligence, is a system where the computation itself can start to change to be better suited to whatever goals have been put into the system.\nSo our brains were beginning to gradually understand how the neural network in our head starts to adjust the coupling between the neurons in such a way that the computation actually does.\nIt's better at surviving on this planet than winning that baseball game or whatever else we're trying to accomplish.\nOkay, we'll leave it there.\nYou can hear him sort of haltingly being unsure about what this thing of learning is.\nI think he just doesn't understand at all full stop.\nHe says it's about achieving goals in some way, which I've already said that's not the case, it's not just about achieving goals after all a dumb computer that doesn't learn anything is going to achieve the goal for you.\nAnd he also tries to mix up levels of analysis by saying it's the neural network, the neurons that are trying to adapt in some way.\nWell, again, we're mixing up the physical with the abstract, learning is an abstract process.\nSo utterly confused, a poverty of philosophy, the epistemology is missing, learning is conjecturing explanations coming to an understanding of the world by modeling it.\nAnd the learning happens by guessing or conjecturing some theory or explanation about the world and then criticizing it in some way by either encountering reality through a physical experiment or having a criticism via some other means.\nSomeone tells you, no, that's wrong.\nSomeone says that's a bad explanation by your own lights, you think of something better, someone and so forth.\nThis is what learning is.\nIt's the searchlight, not the bucket.\nIt's a process that goes on inside minds, therefore it's abstract.\nIt's not neurons firing and that kind of a thing.\nOf course, at the moment, it depends upon that.\nBut because of what Max also said, which was quite correct when it came to computation, when it came to substrate independence, he got it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=5111"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0279fd17-7cb9-4b00-9f2f-adce7277ec57": {"page_content": "This is what learning is.\nIt's the searchlight, not the bucket.\nIt's a process that goes on inside minds, therefore it's abstract.\nIt's not neurons firing and that kind of a thing.\nOf course, at the moment, it depends upon that.\nBut because of what Max also said, which was quite correct when it came to computation, when it came to substrate independence, he got it.\nSo this mind of ours, if it was instantiated in something other than brains, we wouldn't have neurons.\nIt has something else, transistors supposedly.\nSo, and it wouldn't come down to transistors firing.\nIt would come down to again, something about the program, this conjecture program, this ability to guess at the world and to check those guesses against reality.\nThat's what learning would be.\nBut he doesn't understand that.\nHe doesn't understand personhood.\nHe doesn't get the morality and the link between personhood and whether or not something should be imprisoned.\nHe doesn't understand there can't be levels of intelligence in the way that it's just so much here.\nThis is why we won't assist.\nThis is why we won't go on with the rest of the conversation.\nAnd this is why, and I don't do this very often.\nIt's one book, this Life 3.0 thing, that I bought and I regret.\nAnd I can't recommend.\nEvery other book I've recommended, even when I've disagreed fundamentally with a whole bunch of stuff.\nThings like Stephen Pinker's book rationality.\nSo you buy the book.\nYou get a good understanding of what mainstream thinking on their stuff is.\nAnd I think it's important to understand that stuff.\nBut you will learn nothing in Life 3.0, in Boston's book there.\nI'm sad to say that you won't hear in the conversation that he has, or in lectures that he gives on this, by the way, or that you can read on his website where extensive website and write about this stuff.\nIt's disappointing.\nIt's written by someone who doesn't understand what they should understand about some of their stuff.\nAnd it's not, I don't want to say it's completely incoherent, although I think it is in places.\nBut what it lacks is, like with truly excellent books, like the beginning of infinity, there's a coherency there in the sense that it's not like these chapters going to completely disagree with that chapter.\nNo.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=5260"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29000921-1f6a-4d18-98b8-b37dde80724f": {"page_content": "It's disappointing.\nIt's written by someone who doesn't understand what they should understand about some of their stuff.\nAnd it's not, I don't want to say it's completely incoherent, although I think it is in places.\nBut what it lacks is, like with truly excellent books, like the beginning of infinity, there's a coherency there in the sense that it's not like these chapters going to completely disagree with that chapter.\nNo.\nIf this chapter is actually using material from that chapter, it can only reach the conclusions in this chapter because of what was said right at the beginning of the book about how knowledge was created.\nIt can only say this stuff about what it's saying about beauty and morality, because of what it's said about the laws of physics earlier on.\nIt's completely coherent.\nIt's the worldview.\nBut this max is stance on this stuff.\nIt lacks a really, really lacks that.\nIn one mode, he's talking about the physical stuff, and then he switches without mentioning it to the software stuff.\nAnd these things don't follow one another.\nAnd it's not bounded by what we know, not only from physics, the physics of computational university, but philosophy and epistemology and morality.\nIt's missing all of that stuff.\nIt's just a real mess of popular science and scientific jargon and prophecy about the future.\nAll couched in, well, I'm not being pessimistic, but I am absolutely pessimistic.\nSo again, I'm disappointed.\nI think Sam and I just have a fundamentally different taste when it comes to listening to intellectuals on this.\nI found Bostrom extremely disappointing in these book on this extremely disappointing, especially from a professional philosopher.\nI thought the philosophy was terrible.\nSo I didn't like super intelligence.\nBut I think that one's actually worth reading because it's the first one.\nIt presents the case there as is understood by many, many people.\nBut with Max's book, it's not adding anything to that conversation.\nIt's precisely the same sort of thing.\nAll the same kinds of mistakes.\nThere's nothing new there.\nI don't think that you can learn anything by reading that particular book.\nHe's other book though, mathematical universe.\nAbsolutely.\nGrab a hold of that one.\nThat's a really good one that has some great stuff there about quantum theory, as well as these other flavors of multi-verse.\nWe can disagree about the extent to which they are scientific or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=5365"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "919e8028-5e68-4c3e-85c0-17ff08b57431": {"page_content": "It's precisely the same sort of thing.\nAll the same kinds of mistakes.\nThere's nothing new there.\nI don't think that you can learn anything by reading that particular book.\nHe's other book though, mathematical universe.\nAbsolutely.\nGrab a hold of that one.\nThat's a really good one that has some great stuff there about quantum theory, as well as these other flavors of multi-verse.\nWe can disagree about the extent to which they are scientific or not.\nHold on, won't go down that road again.\nI've talked enough about all of this.\nNow for the next episode, I'm going to do a couple of short-fire episodes.\nThese ones have been very long and I'm going to refine everything I've said down to a few short snippets.\nSo that'll be coming out over the next week or so.\nBut until then, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhJcmVaPDus&t=5480"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2e254aed-1246-4ec9-9f53-661ae3ebabb8": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast episode 51.\nThis is part one of Chapter 17 Unsustainable, which I presume will go for a few episodes.\nIt's one of those chapters that fits the description that I've heard other people say that sentences in this book could be turned into entire paragraphs, paragraphs could be turned into chapters and chapters could be turned into entire books.\nThis certainly could be turned into an entire book, this particular chapter.\nUnsustainable.\nSustainability is a huge catch cry of the environmental movement today.\nIt is not only part of the environmental movement, it is now permeated the culture to such an extent that sustainability is regarded as an important moral virtue that people hold.\nThings need to be sustainable.\nWe need to be able to sustain our existence, not only on this planet, but in our own personal lives.\nThings have to be done in a sustainable way.\nSo we're told, this is going to challenge our understanding of what sustainability is, the different kinds of meanings that people seem to intend when they use the word sustainable and sometimes these meanings happen to be at odds with each other.\nWe're going to talk about what's unsustainable and what really is sustainable.\nAnd we're going to find that only one thing can really be sustainable if by what we want from sustainability is survival, not only for ourselves, but for everything else that we care about in the universe.\nAlong the way, we're going to encounter the consequences of the static society lifestyle, why we should want to be an open dynamic society.\nWe're going to talk about optimism again.\nWe're going to bring back what we've already talked about from the book previously and then use it in order to move forward into the infinite future.\nAlong the way, we're going to encounter Brunowski and Attenborough and compare these two great documentary makers in terms of their underlying philosophy and what the key differences between them.\nWe're going to see that we're in a pessimistic era.\nNow to a large extent, this has always been so, but culturally at the interface between science, science communication and entertainment, in other words, science documentaries, we're going to see that there has been a recent decline in the kind of positivity, optimism, and value of human flourishing that used to be part of the way in which we came to understand our place in reality.\nNow, unfortunately, it seems as though we are the virus, we are the disease, people are the problem that need to be solved rather than being the solution.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d98165a7-92a6-435e-a4be-a3f983701aad": {"page_content": "Now, unfortunately, it seems as though we are the virus, we are the disease, people are the problem that need to be solved rather than being the solution.\nWe're going to get to all of that.\nLet's just dive into the book.\nChapter 17, unsustainable and David begins, quote, Easter Island in the South Pacific is famous mainly.\nLet's face it only.\nFor the large stone statues that were built there many centuries ago by the Islanders.\nThe purpose of the statues is unknown, but it is thought to be connected with an ancestor worshipping religion.\nThe first settlers may have arrived on the Islanders early as the 5th century CE.\nThey develop a complex stone age civilization, which suddenly collapsed over a millennium later.\nBy some accounts there was starvation, war and perhaps cannibalism.\nThe population fell to a small fraction of what it had been, and their culture was lost.\nThe prevailing theories that the Easter Islanders brought disaster upon themselves, in part by chopping down the forest, which had originally covered most of the island.\nThey eliminated the most useful species of tree altogether.\nThis is not a wise thing to do if you rely on timber for shelter or a fish form a large part of your diet and your boats and nets are made of wood.\nThere were knock on effects such as soil erosion, precipitating the destruction of the environment on which the Islanders had depended.\nSome archaeologists dispute this theory.\nFor example, Terry Hunt has concluded that the Islanders arrived only in the 13th century, and that their civilization continued to function throughout the deforestation, which he attributes to rats, not tree filling.\nUntil it was destroyed by epidemics caused by contact with Europeans.\nHowever, I do not want to discuss whether the prevailing theory is accurate, but only to use it as an example of a common fallacy, an argument by analogy about issues far less parochial, pausing there just my brief reflection.\nImmediately notice the key difference between a civilization like the ancient civilization of Easter Island and our civilization today.\nIt almost goes without saying that sometimes these things, because you're swimming in the aquarium, so to speak, you don't notice the water, we're swimming in this civilization.\nWe don't notice the fact that we are not dependent on the natural environment in the same way to the same extent as the Easter Islanders were.\nThere is a stark difference here.\nSure, in one sense, we need natural resources just as any other civilization ever has like the Easter Islanders.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=220"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1ed73db6-efd5-4641-85f4-528473c7aa09": {"page_content": "It almost goes without saying that sometimes these things, because you're swimming in the aquarium, so to speak, you don't notice the water, we're swimming in this civilization.\nWe don't notice the fact that we are not dependent on the natural environment in the same way to the same extent as the Easter Islanders were.\nThere is a stark difference here.\nSure, in one sense, we need natural resources just as any other civilization ever has like the Easter Islanders.\nHowever, the Easter Islanders almost like almost like animals, other animals, are completely subject to subtle changes in the natural environment that they lacked the knowledge of how to counter, unlike us.\nIf the wind starts to blow too hard, if tonight there's a terrible thunderstorm which here in Sydney there's predicted to be, I am relatively safe.\nThe natural environment can change quite markedly outside of my house, and I can barely notice.\nI've got climate control here.\nNothing like the Easter Islanders had.\nThe Easter Islanders didn't have artificial fertilizer.\nThey were completely subject to whatever the natural environment provided them with.\nTheir knowledge was not able to construct things within their environment to protect them against the forces of nature, to the same extent that we can.\nThere is a huge quantitative difference in the amount of knowledge that our civilization had.\nAnd of course, there's a qualitative difference in their approach to knowledge as well as we're about to find out.\nOur approach to knowledge is this culture of criticism, where we are continuously improving things as David's about to illustrate with the Easter Islanders.\nThere's was a civilization where they were singularly unable because of the ideas that they had of improving their situation in time before the civilization went extinct killing all of them.\nSo we are, yes, dependent upon the environment for some natural resources.\nHowever, our relationship to those natural resources is such that if they begin to reduce to the point where we begin to run out of a particular resource, we can create the knowledge of how to exploit a different resource such that we can continue to survive an environment which is continuously running out of resources.\nThis is unlike the Easter Islanders where if a finite resource begins to run out, then they have no means of replacing that particular resource.\nWe, on the other hand, a classic example, if we begin to run out of wood for burning, we can turn to coal in order to keep ourselves warm.\nAnd in the extreme, if we ran out of coal tomorrow, we could turn to uranium.\nAnd then we could turn to solar power and batteries.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=288"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51295dba-d8ef-4a98-8bdc-6fefe9c3ec4a": {"page_content": "This is unlike the Easter Islanders where if a finite resource begins to run out, then they have no means of replacing that particular resource.\nWe, on the other hand, a classic example, if we begin to run out of wood for burning, we can turn to coal in order to keep ourselves warm.\nAnd in the extreme, if we ran out of coal tomorrow, we could turn to uranium.\nAnd then we could turn to solar power and batteries.\nAnd you might well wonder if we continue to tell this story of our civilization gradually running out of the resources that we have, we can still imagine a scenario where we create knowledge not yet created, which would bring into being another resource so that we can continue to survive.\nBecause if things get desperate enough, our culture of criticism will turn its gaze towards that problem and attempt to solve it in time.\nThis wasn't even happening in Easter Island, as we will come to see, but back to the book.\nDavid writes, Easter Island is 2000 kilometers from the nearest habitation, namely Pitcan Island where the bounties crew took refuge after their famous mutiny.\nOkay, better, better just to unpack that little bit there for, especially readers I presume who might be outside of the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand, namely if you're in the United States, perhaps.\nI don't know how famous the bounty story is, unless you happen to have seen the movie or one of the many movies.\nThere's been five movies made of this single event up to today's date.\nAnd also Pitcan Island, you can watch all sorts of amazing documentaries about Pitcan Island.\nIt's a fascinating place because, while the mutiny is from the bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, eventually ended up on Pitcan Island, and their descendants live there through to today.\nAnd although they speak English, they have a slightly different accent to other people.\nThey have a strange system of governance.\nThey have this little civilization eking out, a living on this tiny little island very far from anywhere.\nIn fact, there are now that some of the, you can tune in on YouTube, you can tune in to some of the young inhabitants who have YouTube channels and they do live streaming from Pitcan Island because it's just a fascinating place.\nIt's so far from anywhere else that's civilized, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean.\nAnd so Fletcher Christians descendants are still there.\nAnd who did Fletcher Christian mutiny against Captain Bligh?.\nOr at that time, Lieutenant Bligh.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=444"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cfad7402-e733-4d69-bce5-f67856988b71": {"page_content": "In fact, there are now that some of the, you can tune in on YouTube, you can tune in to some of the young inhabitants who have YouTube channels and they do live streaming from Pitcan Island because it's just a fascinating place.\nIt's so far from anywhere else that's civilized, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean.\nAnd so Fletcher Christians descendants are still there.\nAnd who did Fletcher Christian mutiny against Captain Bligh?.\nOr at that time, Lieutenant Bligh.\nAnd he's well known in Australia.\nHe's well known in Australia because he was one of the first naval officers sent by, sent by the British who were sending their convicts as many Americans will know.\nWe began as a convict nation.\nThey sent over all of their prisoners to New South Wales.\nWhat was then New South Wales, the entirety of mainland Australia was known as New South Wales at that time.\nIt wasn't until later, until the 1900s, that all of the states, which were colonies at that time, were then divided up into the states and then federated into what is now known as Australia.\nAnyway, that's beside the point.\nCaptain Bligh was sent by the British to be one of the first governors of New South Wales and funnily enough, it wouldn't have been funny for him.\nThis is after the mutiny on the bounty, so after he had been thrown off his rather large naval ship into a small life raft, basically a small life boat, little sailing boat, and barely survived to make it all the way home.\nIt's an interesting story to look up, as I say, there's been lots of movies made about it.\nBut when he did get sent back to Australia, I guess, as a reward, he was tasked with trying to clean up what was known as the the rum problem.\nThere was an illicit trading of the alcohol rum amongst the guards, amongst the navy sailors, officers, marines that were stationed here in New South Wales in order to keep control of the convicts and keep law and order.\nSo they started becoming drunkards.\nAnyway, Bligh was tasked with cleaning this up and he failed.\nHe was once again mutinied.\nHe was imprisoned by his own officers and soldiers and various others.\nSo he didn't have a whole lot of luck.\nNow, this is all after, by the way, after, he had a company, Captain James Cook, who is even more famous than Captain Bligh here in Australia.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=575"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "00c2ff25-8d91-4639-992a-056fac0f6b81": {"page_content": "So they started becoming drunkards.\nAnyway, Bligh was tasked with cleaning this up and he failed.\nHe was once again mutinied.\nHe was imprisoned by his own officers and soldiers and various others.\nSo he didn't have a whole lot of luck.\nNow, this is all after, by the way, after, he had a company, Captain James Cook, who is even more famous than Captain Bligh here in Australia.\nCaptain Cook was the first Englishman to make it to the eastern coast of Australia to discover, you know, the first white person to come to Australia in 1770.\nSo he is our, he's our Christopher Columbus, if you're watching this from America.\nCaptain James Cook is our Christopher Columbus discovered in scare quotes Australia.\nHe, he was with Captain Bligh on his final voyage to Hawaii where he was killed by the locals.\nSo Captain Bligh, a company to cook on his final voyage got killed, then when he was finally giving command of his own boat, namely the bounty, they all mutinied against him and threw him off and he barely survived that.\nHe was then sent to Australia where Captain Cook had actually discovered the blaze and the locals then that he was supposed to be in charge.\nI'm supposed to be the governor over mutinied against him once more and he ended up going back to England after that.\nHe didn't seem to have a great stellar career, although if you look into Captain Bligh's story, there are many sympathetic readings of the history of Captain Bligh.\nAnd some of those movies out of those five movies, I think I've seen three of them, some are more sympathetic than others when it comes to Captain Bligh.\nWhether or not he was a kind of a nice guy and a good leader or a terrible tyrant, history is still trying to decide.\nSo yeah, that's just a diverse on Australia because Ken Island has been mentioned here and the bounty.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nBoth islands, namely, Pete Ken Island and Easter Island, David writes, are far from anywhere, even by today's standards.\nNevertheless, in 1972, Jacob Bernowski made his way to Easter Island to film part of his magnificent TV series The Acentive Man.\nNow just pausing there again.\nJacob Bernowski, you may recall his name, various people have referred to him over time for his great essay about science and values and David references that you may remember, all the way back in the reality of abstractions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=727"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cd35e38a-60a4-41e8-ad76-2b8fdb0a3cbd": {"page_content": "Nevertheless, in 1972, Jacob Bernowski made his way to Easter Island to film part of his magnificent TV series The Acentive Man.\nNow just pausing there again.\nJacob Bernowski, you may recall his name, various people have referred to him over time for his great essay about science and values and David references that you may remember, all the way back in the reality of abstractions.\nSo I just want to remind listeners, viewers of the genius of Jacob Bernowski, who David quoted all the way back down the reality of abstractions, where David said, for example, as philosopher Jacob Bernowski pointed out, success at making factual scientific discoveries entails a commitment to all sorts of values that are necessary for making progress.\nThe individual scientist has to value truth and good explanations and has to be open to ideas and to change the scientific community and to some extent the civilization as a whole has to value tolerance, integrity and openness of debate.\nOkay, so that's what David wrote about Jacob Bernowski back in the reality of abstractions.\nHere are your peers again as a documentary maker.\nAnd I think if you read the moral landscape or other things that Sam Harris has said on this topic, he also references Jacob Bernowski in a similar way talking about how Bernowski referred to a scientist as needing to respect evidence to value logic.\nSo we need these moral values, these moral values are in a sense prior to the activity of science.\nIf you try to do science, perform an experiment, create an explanation without caring about coherence, evidence, truth, then what's the point?.\nOkay, you need to first have a commitment to these values.\nSo it's not like morality can be divorced at all from the activity of science.\nThere are things that you that one should do, one should have these values before one can in fact find out what is the case in science.\nBack to the book, David writes.\nHe, Jacob Bernowski and his film crew traveled by ship all the way from California around trip of some 14,000 kilometers.\nHe was in poor health and the crew had literally to carry him to the location for filming, but he persevered because those distinctive statues were the perfect setting for him to deliver the central message of his series, which is also a theme of this book that our civilization is unique in history for its capacity to make progress.\nHe wanted to celebrate its values and achievements and to attribute the latter to the former.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=857"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "692e57c2-43a2-44e5-8219-57fa92e1abe0": {"page_content": "He was in poor health and the crew had literally to carry him to the location for filming, but he persevered because those distinctive statues were the perfect setting for him to deliver the central message of his series, which is also a theme of this book that our civilization is unique in history for its capacity to make progress.\nHe wanted to celebrate its values and achievements and to attribute the latter to the former.\nSo he wanted to celebrate its values and achievements and attribute the latter, the achievements.\nHe wanted to attribute all the achievements of civilization, our civilization, Western civilization, science and great art, politics, stable societies to its values, its values of human dignity and the inherent sacredness of life and our commitment to truth, those sort of values.\nDavid goes on and to contrast our civilization with the alternative as epitomized by ancient Easter Island.\nThe ascent of man had been commissioned by the naturalist David Attenborough, then controller of the British television channel, BBC2.\nA quarter of a century later, Attenborough, who had by then become the Doyon of natural history filmmaking, led another film crew to Easter Island, to film another television series, The State of the Planet.\nHe too chose those grim face statues as a backdrop for his closing scene, alas, his message was almost exactly the opposite of Brunowski's.\nThe philosophical difference between these two great broadcasters so alike in their infectious sense of wonder, the clarity of exposition and their humanity was immediately evident in their different attitudes towards those statues.\nAttenborough called them astonishing stone sculptures, vivid evidence of the technological and artistic skills of the people who once lived here.\nNow I wonder whether Attenborough was really all that impressed by the islander's skills, which had been exceeded millennia earlier in other Stone Age societies.\nI expect he was being polite, for his day regurg and our culture to heat praise upon any achievement of a primitive society.\nBut Brunowski refused to conform to that convention.\nHe remarked, people often ask about Easter Island, how did men come here?.\nThey came here by accident, that is not in question.\nThe question is, why could they not get off?.\nAnd why, he might have added, did others not follow to trade with them?.\nThere was a great deal of trade among Polynesians other than Easter Islanders, or to rob them, or to learn from them, because they did not know how.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=993"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a592adfc-bbb9-4b0d-9374-954cd0866a6d": {"page_content": "He remarked, people often ask about Easter Island, how did men come here?.\nThey came here by accident, that is not in question.\nThe question is, why could they not get off?.\nAnd why, he might have added, did others not follow to trade with them?.\nThere was a great deal of trade among Polynesians other than Easter Islanders, or to rob them, or to learn from them, because they did not know how.\nAs for the statues being, vivid evidence of artistic skills, Brunowski was having none of that either.\nTo him, they were vivid evidence of failure, not success.\nMen David quotes Brunowski, and Brunowski said, quote, The critical question about these statues is, why were they all made alike?.\nYou see them sitting there like diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them.\nWhen the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise, but it did not.\nAn earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition, these frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down market civilization, which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge, end quote from the ascent of man in 1973.\nThe statues were all made alike because Easter Island was a static society.\nIt never took that first step in the ascent of man, the beginning of infinity.\nOf the hundreds of statues on the island built over the course of several centuries, fewer than half are at their intended destinations.\nThe rest, including the largest, are in various stages of completion, with as many as 10% already in transit on specially built roads.\nAgain, there are conflicting explanations, but according to the prevailing theory, it is because there was a large increase in the rate of statue building just before it stopped forever.\nIn other words, as disaster loomed, the islanders diverted ever more effort to not addressing the problem for they did not know how to do that, but into making ever more and bigger, but very rarely better, monuments to their ancestors.\nAnd what were those roads made of?.\nTrees.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1147"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28acc9cd-bb1b-4557-b2c3-10aa55429f30": {"page_content": "Again, there are conflicting explanations, but according to the prevailing theory, it is because there was a large increase in the rate of statue building just before it stopped forever.\nIn other words, as disaster loomed, the islanders diverted ever more effort to not addressing the problem for they did not know how to do that, but into making ever more and bigger, but very rarely better, monuments to their ancestors.\nAnd what were those roads made of?.\nTrees.\nWhen Brunowski made his documentary, there were as yet no detailed theories of how the Easter Island civilization fell, but unlike Edinburgh, he was not interested in that because his whole purpose in going to Easter Island was to point out the profound difference between our civilization and civilizations like the one that built those statues.\nWe are not like them was his message.\nWe have taken the step that they did not.\nEdinburgh's argument rests on the opposite claim.\nWe are like them, and are following headlong in their footsteps.\nAnd so he drew and extended analogy between the Easter Island civilization and hours, feature for feature, and danger for danger.\nAn Attenborough said, quote, a warning of what the future could hold can be seen on one of the most remotest places on earth.\nWhen the first Polynesian settlers landed here, they found a miniature world that had ample resources to sustain them.\nThey lived well, end quote, from the state of the planet, BBC TV in the year 2000.\nDavid continues, a miniature world there in three words, his Attenborough's reason for traveling all the way to Easter Island and telling it story.\nHe believed that it holds a warning for the world because Easter Island was itself a miniature world, a spaceship earth that went wrong.\nIt had ample resources to sustain its population.\nJust as the earth has seemingly ample resources to sustain us.\nImagine how amazed Malthus would have been, had he known that the earth's resources would still be called ample by pessimists in the year 2000.\nIts inhabitants lived well, just as we do, and yet they were doomed, just as we are doomed, unless we change our ways.\nIf we do not, here is what the future could hold, and David quotes Attenborough again.\nThe old culture that had sustained them was abandoned and the statues toppled, what had been a rich fertile world in miniature had become a barren desert, end quote, David writes.\nAgain, Attenborough puts in a good word for the old culture.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1249"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb74d560-9c8c-4af0-8b0b-a610836ed909": {"page_content": "Its inhabitants lived well, just as we do, and yet they were doomed, just as we are doomed, unless we change our ways.\nIf we do not, here is what the future could hold, and David quotes Attenborough again.\nThe old culture that had sustained them was abandoned and the statues toppled, what had been a rich fertile world in miniature had become a barren desert, end quote, David writes.\nAgain, Attenborough puts in a good word for the old culture.\nIt sustained the islanders, just as the ample resources did, until the islanders failed to use them sustainably.\nHe uses the toppling of the statues to symbolise the fall of that culture as if to warn a future disaster for hours.\nAnd he reiterates his world in miniature analogy between the society and technology of ancient Easter Island, and that of our whole planet today.\nThus, Attenborough's Easter Island is a variant of spaceship earth.\nHumans are sustained jointly by the rich fertile biosphere and the cultural knowledge of a static society.\nIn this context, sustain is an interestingly ambiguous word.\nIt can mean providing someone with what they need, but it can also mean preventing things from changing, which can be almost the opposite meaning.\nFor the suppression of change is seldom what human beings need, pause their my reflection.\nSo before we go much further into this, we have to observe that this entire vision that Attenborough paints for us has permeated the culture so deeply.\nAttenborough is rightly known as one of the greatest documentary makers of all time.\nYoung people especially love him.\nThey love his voice, they love his infectious sense of wonder about the world as David talked about there.\nAnd the cinematography of a lot of his documentaries is absolutely astounding.\nYou get to see places that you would otherwise never get to encounter.\nHe was able to bring that into your living room, into your life, and so people tend to fall in love with that style.\nAnd sadly, they also fall in love to a large extent with the message.\nAnd the message now is not only part of documentary making, it's a deep part of the worldview held by especially scientists and science-minded people.\nAs much as anyone else, there would be few competitors that could rise to the heights of Attenborough who have pushed forward this movement of thinking that we are just like the Easter Islanders.\nWe are at a point where the Easter Islanders were just prior to their demise.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1390"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "79288588-79eb-4486-b884-833b2a8b8a75": {"page_content": "And sadly, they also fall in love to a large extent with the message.\nAnd the message now is not only part of documentary making, it's a deep part of the worldview held by especially scientists and science-minded people.\nAs much as anyone else, there would be few competitors that could rise to the heights of Attenborough who have pushed forward this movement of thinking that we are just like the Easter Islanders.\nWe are at a point where the Easter Islanders were just prior to their demise.\nWe are consuming the limited resources on the earth and everything is about to fall apart any minute.\nWe are in dire straits, the catastrophe is looming.\nThis is the same old Malthusian argument.\nPerhaps they don't need the graphs that Malthus used, they just appeal to your emotions and to your supposed common sense that clearly resources on the planet must be limited because the planet is of finite size.\nThis is incomplete and utter contrast to everything that we have talked about throughout this series and that David has talked about in the beginning of infinity and of course is the complete opposite to what Bernowski tried to convey in the ascent of man.\nThe difference here could not be more stark.\nOn the one hand we have this vision of resources that are finite and people who deplete them and will only ever deplete them.\nAnd on the other people who are able to discover resources and create knowledge which causes things that otherwise wouldn't be resources to be resources and to ensure that those resources never run out because resources as a whole are effectively unlimited because the universe is effectively unlimited.\nYou can see my recent podcast Cosmological Economics for more on that.\nThis is a very interesting distinction that David makes here about the word sustain.\nand it's worth just meditating on this for a moment.\nOn the one hand, sustain can mean providing people with what they need.\nNow what do people need?.\nWell people don't just need the same thing again and again and again.\nThey need to experience change, development, growth, knowledge creation and that to fuel that in their personal lives and at the level of a civilization requires energy, resources and so we can't possibly be in a situation where sustain can mean preventing things from changing which is also a meaning of sustain that people use.\nbut we can't sustain in such a way that things don't change.\nIt must be the case that we have to change, not least because the problems of tomorrow are completely unknown to us today.\nWe don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1503"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a91dfd8a-d5c5-4bb2-88cb-27a5040138fa": {"page_content": "but we can't sustain in such a way that things don't change.\nIt must be the case that we have to change, not least because the problems of tomorrow are completely unknown to us today.\nWe don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.\nThe environment itself is going to change.\nAs I like to keep saying, the cosmological event is out there one day.\nSomething is going to happen.\nOut of the clear blue sky that is completely going to upset us on a lazy Tuesday afternoon and we will be unprepared for it if we do not create the knowledge because regardless of what we do, the natural environment is going to change.\nNow either we can react to it in the moment or we can be the kind of people who prepare for the unknown.\nWe can't simply try to pretend that problems are not going to happen because we know that they are inevitable.\nAs David says in many many places, at many times throughout the book and in these TED talks and elsewhere, we need to have a stance of problem solving.\nIf we think we can avoid problems, we're going to be sorely disappointed.\nWe cannot predict what is going to happen tomorrow.\nWe don't know about all of the unknowns that are out there that could cause us problems.\nWhether from the blue sky or the blue sea, something is going to happen for which we are unprepared and the only thing that can ensure or can help ensure that we do not go the way of the dinosaur is to use the one thing that makes us different, our capacity to create knowledge and to form models of the rest of physical reality.\nTo do that, we need fuel, we need resources, we need to keep on changing rapidly.\nWe need to make rapid progress.\nAnother way of saying we need change is just to say we need good kinds of change, improvement, progress.\nAll of this requires fuel.\nWe can't get this from nothing.\nWe can't just create knowledge without exploiting the world around us and shaping the world around us so that it protects us and nurtures us to some extent from the otherwise hostile universe and continuing David Wright.\nThe knowledge that currently sustains human life in Oxfordshire does so only in the first sense.\nIt does not make us enact the same traditional way of life in every generation.\nIn fact, it prevents us from doing so.\nFor comparison, if your way of life merely makes you build a new giant statue, you can continue to live afterwards exactly as you did before.\nThat is sustainable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1694"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9144d83-3241-4636-90a1-d369cd9908e6": {"page_content": "The knowledge that currently sustains human life in Oxfordshire does so only in the first sense.\nIt does not make us enact the same traditional way of life in every generation.\nIn fact, it prevents us from doing so.\nFor comparison, if your way of life merely makes you build a new giant statue, you can continue to live afterwards exactly as you did before.\nThat is sustainable.\nBut if your way of life leads you to invent a more efficient method of farming and to cure a disease that has been killing many children, that is unsustainable.\nThe population grows because children who would have died survive.\nMeanwhile, fewer of them are needed to work in the fields and so there is no way to continue as before.\nYou have to live the solution and to set about solving new problems that this creates.\nIt is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain, with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had it at Zenith and an enormously higher standard of living.\nAppropriately enough, this civilization has knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain pause there and I'll end the reading there as well.\nIt's a little short episode.\nbut it's a nice neat way to end it here because we go into static cultures more deeply here.\nWe take a deep dive into static cultures.\nWe'll do that in the next episode but again David mentions his home there in Oxfordshire and has made the point previously that although you might think that for example you know when Attenborough goes to Easter Island he thinks well this place is sustaining, sustaining the people that are there, the Easter Islanders were sustained until they did something wrong and they were no longer sustained by the natural environment.\nWe only have to consider somewhere like Oxfordshire in the winter where it is completely inhospitable and you wouldn't survive very long at all unless you had the technology of a modern civilization.\nCertainly anyone who lives there now who doesn't have the technology provided by modern civilization in terms of insulation in the walls and perhaps electric heating systems and ways in which to bring food and water which isn't frozen in pipes and so on.\nThe natural environment there is not sustaining people at all.\nWhat's sustaining people there now in the sense that Attenborough is talking about the way in which people can survive to some extent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1818"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56c429eb-03e8-4dcc-9cf7-d8dfc99b683a": {"page_content": "Certainly anyone who lives there now who doesn't have the technology provided by modern civilization in terms of insulation in the walls and perhaps electric heating systems and ways in which to bring food and water which isn't frozen in pipes and so on.\nThe natural environment there is not sustaining people at all.\nWhat's sustaining people there now in the sense that Attenborough is talking about the way in which people can survive to some extent.\nIn fact that's probably all they were doing on Easter Island is just barely eeking out as a viable but at least in Oxfordshire today not only are we surviving people surviving they're also thriving.\nthey're flourishing they're creating an open-ended stream of knowledge creation.\nbut they're only doing that they're only able to do that because they are sustained in this sense by the knowledge they've already created and the technology they already have it's certainly not the natural environment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1927"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8a97e0a6-2c38-45c7-baa4-adf3611a49d1": {"page_content": "The natural environment contributes something but it's but it's also it's as much as it's contributing resources and oxygen and water it's also contributing freezing cold temperatures not enough food in the natural environment for people to survive water that isn't clean enough to drink or to make tea with so there's there's very little sense in which the natural environment of Oxfordshire is sustaining people and I might say the same about even Australia which is somewhat more temperate most of the time if I was left alone for a month here in Australia with no access to technology whatsoever on modern civilization I'd be very quickly dead.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=1990"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b02f2f42-5715-4545-b628-65d111e404cb": {"page_content": "In fact I'd probably only last a few days because the natural water that happens to exist around here probably would kill me and certainly if I went to the centre of Australia it's definitely not going to sustain me I'd have no clue about how to get water out of the deserts and much less be able to capture any food or eat any food most of the stuff out there is poisonous so I am only sustained not by the natural environment at all but rather by civilization the civilization that is around me that's the thing that is sort of nurturing me and able to help me to survive and that's true of anyone who lives in civilization today we are beating back the natural environment which is rather hostile we've eaked out a resistant we've eaked out our existence so far so this is the great positive vision that we have of the the the the of civilization we do not regard the natural environment has been this cuddly thing that sustains us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=2035"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40b8c005-e656-44dc-b7e5-e01db45a682b": {"page_content": "rather it is just a source of natural resources which if we didn't exploit by creating knowledge about how to use these natural resources and new and interesting ways would quickly kill us because we we we need knowledge of how to survive in these environments and absent civilization almost none of us would have the knowledge of what it takes to survive in a natural environment.\nso it's not that's not what sustaining it's our it's our civilization coupled with our own personal explanatory knowledge to a large extent about how to use the the benefits of civilization which is exploiting the natural environment.\nokay that's where we'll end it for today somewhat shorter episode.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=2098"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a3055b28-0e39-4931-aa94-b77e3ebec26c": {"page_content": "but we will continue more with this because it it deserves unsustainable chapter 17 deserves special attention I think because here we are really we are really deeply coming up against the culture cultural means in many many ways we're talking about how wonderful a Western civilization is but at the same time we're saying all the ways in which presently via the television entertainment media the intellectual community all the ways in which these aspects of Western civilization are actually telling us Western culture anyway are sending us the message that we're the problem and so this is what David is trying to counter here in this part of the beginning infinity and it's an extremely optimistic way of looking at people all right until next time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=2145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "62aed40f-1841-4012-ba19-7fcbbf190054": {"page_content": "bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXly_Zz4MTI&t=2200"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b287e332-a035-4a7b-b220-05d82b7bf3ee": {"page_content": "Mathematics.\nWhy?.\nFor a right-angled triangle.\nIs the square of the hypotenuse equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides?.\nWhy?.\nAlmost everyone learns that c squared equals a squared plus b squared.\nBut why does it?.\nAsking why is asking for the explanation?.\nIn mathematics, explanations often involve a particular structure or process, and that process is known as proof.\nIf there are many proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, some are algebraic and begin with axioms, others are geometric.\nSome graphical or even animated.\nA book exists containing 367 different proofs of the theorem.\nIn all cases, the proof constitutes the mathematical explanation.\nProofs exist, so one can be shown, which is to say, understand why c squared equals a squared plus b squared for a right-angled triangle.\nBut proofs start somewhere.\nThey begin with axioms, axioms are things not proved.\nThey are what is assumed true, and indeed are sometimes simply called the assumptions.\nOn what basis can we assume they are true?.\nMany arguments are put forth here, often coming down to, it is self-evident.\nIt couldn't be otherwise, a falloblast might say.\nWell, we do not know they are true.\nWe're just assumed, tentatively, they are.\nOr perhaps we just say, they are the gnomes.\nThey are what we know now, and we also know the rules of inference, and together we can see where they lead to what conclusions or theorems.\nIn a worldview that values explanations, we might even say, the axioms are what they are in mathematics, because no explanation is ever improved by changing any of them.\nThose axioms themselves constitute explanations of a kind, claims about reality.\nNot certainly true, but representations of necessary truth.\nWe are all of us, fallible, even mathematicians.\nMathematics commands a special place in academia.\nTraditionally, it is the subject to which all others have aspired.\nMathematics, it has been thought, are where we finally get to so-called a epistemological bedrock.\nSome certain and absolute truth where all doubt is removed, science can only aspire to such lofty heights, the science relies on evidence.\nOpen to interpretation, and so it is said, only the accumulation of sufficient amounts of it can ever make us confident our theories are true, or probably true, as for philosophy and everything else.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTQeUHYM3Jc&t=8"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4bc0733a-c6e6-4dd3-a4ba-92b5b05336ff": {"page_content": "Mathematics, it has been thought, are where we finally get to so-called a epistemological bedrock.\nSome certain and absolute truth where all doubt is removed, science can only aspire to such lofty heights, the science relies on evidence.\nOpen to interpretation, and so it is said, only the accumulation of sufficient amounts of it can ever make us confident our theories are true, or probably true, as for philosophy and everything else.\nMe, matters of opinion, of course that entire hierarchy of mathematics as certain science is probably true, and everything else is more or less a matter of opinion is itself not a mathematical claim.\nIt's a philosophical one.\nInstead, mathematics is better understood as distinguished by its subject matter and method.\nThat method of mathematical proof does not mean show as true what it means is, calculate or compute what follows given some axioms using some rules of inference.\nMathematics is about explaining necessary abstract truth, but as David Deutsch wrote in the fabric of reality in his chapter on mathematics, quote, necessary truth is merely the subject matter of mathematics.\nIt is not the reward we get for doing mathematics, end quote.\nIn a sense, much of what David Deutsch's famous for itself proves that very conclusion, in laying the foundations for quantum computation, David proved what was then sometimes called Turing's thesis, which may be expressed as every physical process is computable.\nThat implies anything in physical reality can be simulated by a computer from atoms to weather systems, galaxies even in principle a human brain.\nDavid Deutsch took the thesis and on the assumption of quantum theory proved it.\nAfter all, computers and brains are not abstract objects.\nThey are made of matter, matter obeying laws of physics, laws of quantum physics.\nSo now many call it the church Turing Deutsch principle to distinguish it from a mere thesis of pure mathematics.\nIt is now properly regarded as part of physics, a principle governing the behaviour of all physical objects, and that includes brains like the brains of mathematicians.\nThe laws of quantum physics say we can never rule out the possibility of something unexpected happening.\nThis is otherwise explained as there is always subjective randomness.\nIn other words, you cannot know the outcome exactly of any physical process there will always be uncertainty, a range.\nThis applies to brains, classical and quantum computers, any process.\nIt applies to what mathematicians do.\nContent theory mandates we can never know with absolute mathematical certainty that a particular outcome must happen.\nThere is always a range.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTQeUHYM3Jc&t=120"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2723c948-9def-401f-80d8-a421527704fd": {"page_content": "The laws of quantum physics say we can never rule out the possibility of something unexpected happening.\nThis is otherwise explained as there is always subjective randomness.\nIn other words, you cannot know the outcome exactly of any physical process there will always be uncertainty, a range.\nThis applies to brains, classical and quantum computers, any process.\nIt applies to what mathematicians do.\nContent theory mandates we can never know with absolute mathematical certainty that a particular outcome must happen.\nThere is always a range.\nHowever, small the chance of error, it does not matter, it is not zero is the point.\nSo physical systems evolve in ways we cannot know for sure.\nAnd that includes brains and the outcomes of any computation.\nAnd mathematical proof constitutes a computation and therefore cannot confer upon its conclusions absolute certainty.\nNot only because we cannot know for certain the axioms are true but because the process itself of mathematical proof is a computation.\nComputations are done by computers and computers obey the laws of physics that rule out, knowing for certain that something unexpected did not just happen during that proof.\nMathematics is the study of necessary truth.\nIt constructs knowledge of necessarily perfect abstractions but the knowledge of that perfection is not the perfection itself.\nAny more than knowledge of electrons is electrons or knowledge of birds is birds, we are fallible and knowledge is imperfect even in mathematics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTQeUHYM3Jc&t=257"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c0926d2-a7f5-4c27-ba11-75a6a0aaa239": {"page_content": "Music Welcome to Topcom, episode 43, if you're on the podcast of audio, only version.\nOtherwise, this is the beginning of Infinity chapter breakdown, so as David Deutsch has called them.\nAnd this is chapter 16, the evolution of creativity.\nPart one, I presume this is going to go quite a while because that's always rereading it for the umph-dink time.\nI realized there was a lot to unpack.\nThere was a lot to breakdown and I was only a few pages in.\nAnd it's because this chapter is unusual in a sense that I would say that it's not entirely self-contained.\nI think with a lot of other chapters, let's take the multiverse chapter or a physicist history of bad philosophy.\nI think you could dive into those chapters and pretty much take away some really important messages without referring to other parts of the book.\nIn this chapter, it's almost like what has gone before have been the bricks cumulative building the knowledge required in order to fully understand what's being said here.\nAnd so in a sense, I would argue there's some prerequisite knowledge.\nBut for the purpose of my breakdown, I'm going to try to provide some of that context that may have appeared earlier on in the book so that anyone listening to this for the first time will understand the gravity of what being what is being said here.\nI think that this chapter as much as chapter seven, artificial creativity, is providing a guide almost for a research program, avenues that need to be explored, the unknowns in what we know about creativity.\nI think creativity is a genuine mystery.\nI think there's a number of these that exist now.\nSome people deny certain kinds of mysteries or try to explain them away.\nBut whatever you want to call this unique feature of human beings, as far as we know, unique feature of human beings.\nPerhaps there are intelligent life forms out there somewhere else that are also able to explain the world in which they find themselves.\nBut for now, as far as we know here on this planet right now, there's no other being that can do what we do in terms of creativity.\nAnd it's explanatory creativity, which is the key thing being able to explain the phenomena around us so that we can literally change the world around us.\nAnd we're going to get to the significance of that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4fc38f74-7ab4-459d-a00e-7ae99e9c079a": {"page_content": "Perhaps there are intelligent life forms out there somewhere else that are also able to explain the world in which they find themselves.\nBut for now, as far as we know here on this planet right now, there's no other being that can do what we do in terms of creativity.\nAnd it's explanatory creativity, which is the key thing being able to explain the phenomena around us so that we can literally change the world around us.\nAnd we're going to get to the significance of that.\nI'm going to reinforce some of the things I've said earlier and some of the things certainly that David has said in the beginning of infinity prior to us getting to this chapter.\nBut there is an assumption here by the time we get the chapter 16 that you are fully on board, I suppose, with the beginning of infinity worldview.\nAs I guess if you're reading the book chronologically from chapter one through to where we are now in the penultimate chapter of the beginning of infinity, one will presume that you understand what has gone before.\nAnd when you find yourself here at the evolution of creativity, David is rightly, assuming you know what knowledge means, what explanations are about, what the correct theory of evolution is, not Lamarckism, but neo-Darwinism.\nThe fact that we don't understand certain things about human creativity, that there's something unique about human creativity.\nAnd he will again really dive into why it is that human creativity is going to be more significant than certain other, what we might say, natural forces that exist out there in the cosmos.\nThey still exist and they're still going to shape the reality around us, but it is creativity that into the future is going to become more and more and more important to the evolution, not just of human civilization, but the physical universe as a whole, that we will be using knowledge, we have descendants, any technological artificial general intelligences that we create, perhaps other life forms that happen to exist out there as well.\nThe major factor in how the universe will undergo its evolution into the deep future is going to depend not just on the physical forces, and this is one of the failings I suppose, a physical scientist when they try to prophesy, they would say predict, but to prophesy exactly what's going to happen into the distant future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=155"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f93d420-7407-4f70-b50a-a31adae63fa7": {"page_content": "The major factor in how the universe will undergo its evolution into the deep future is going to depend not just on the physical forces, and this is one of the failings I suppose, a physical scientist when they try to prophesy, they would say predict, but to prophesy exactly what's going to happen into the distant future.\nYou know, if we're talking astronomy and we're talking about the evolution of the sun today, I happen to be recording this, I don't know when I'm going to release it, but on the 23rd of December 2020,.\nyesterday being the summer solstice here in Australia, the longest day of all, and in fact, and in fact, if I don't truncate this one so little quickly, we're going to end up with sunrise shining straight in here, it's already quite bright at the moment, but I'm going to be facing the sun straight away very shortly, we're shining straight into my eyes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=292"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4fd0b200-3852-4722-9da4-ffcbac7874ae": {"page_content": "This happens very few times throughout the course of the year, but today is one of those days where absolutely will, and that sun will continue to shine according to astrophysical models for at least another five billion years, and astronomers are fond of saying and then the sun will die, then the sun will become a nova, not a super nova, become a nova will expand into a red giant, and then it will eventually have its core collapse, and it will release the outer layers of the atmosphere off into the solar system, this is going to be called a planetary nebula, leaving behind nothing but its cooling hot white core called a white dwarf.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=341"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d42e7e2d-4087-4587-ba8b-e8c314d4d4ef": {"page_content": "Now, all of that story is a scientific prediction based upon our best astrophysics theories and explanations as of right now in 2020.\nHowever, we don't know what people of the future are going to do.\nIt is as magical to us that any person would be able to change the evolution that a typical star goes through like the sun, as would be people saying in the past that people of today would be able to control something like lightning in a thunderstorm, but we kind of can now, we kind of can, we can create our own lightning if we like.\nIn power stations we can use it to power civilization that would have seemed absolutely astonishing to the people of the past, and we're only talking people of a few centuries.\nImagine people not just a few millennia hence, but people a million or a billion years into the future.\nWill they have the capacity to control stars?.\nPossibly no rule, no law of physics rules that possibility out, so people might very well decide to do something to the sun, to keep it shining or perhaps to cause it to disappear sooner than otherwise would have.\nMaybe they will use the matter in the sun for something.\nWho knows?.\nWe can't do psychology on people a billion years into the future, but the point is astrophysic who today say they can predict what will happen to the sun billions of years hence are assuming that the choices that people make then will have no effect upon the sun, but they might.\nPeople for that reason are cosmically significant, and it is their creativity that allows them to come up with these possibilities, these explanations of reality, and then allow them to choose amongst all of the new choices that are available to them to change reality in ways that no person with a good understanding of the mere physics of the situation would be able to do.\nMere physics is not going to be able to tell you what people will choose to do with the sun in the future.\nIn fact, according to our best explanation of what people are and explanations and the growth of knowledge, being that the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable, and this means that people have the capacity to really choose to create new knowledge, to bring it into the world, it wasn't there before, and it wasn't predictable beforehand.\nThat's so far as we know, this is a kind of law of epistemology as on solid foundation, none of them are on solid foundation, as on solid foundation, as any law of physics happens to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=381"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "275c3b66-786c-4201-98fb-1398ab9b4539": {"page_content": "That's so far as we know, this is a kind of law of epistemology as on solid foundation, none of them are on solid foundation, as on solid foundation, as any law of physics happens to be.\nWe can't predict what people will do next, because we don't know what kind of knowledge they're going to create next, because the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable, and one reason it is, is because we don't know what problems we're going to encounter next.\nThat's another issue with predictability, and if we don't know what problems we're going to encounter next, we can't possibly imagine what kind of solutions will be dreamt up by people of tomorrow when they encounter the problems of tomorrow.\nWe're not there, it would mean predicting the future in ways that we don't have access to, getting far ahead of myself and going off onto a tangent.\nAs I say, in this introduction, possibly going to be me talking far more than I'm reading.\nI think if I go back and I re-look at some of the episodes, you may notice that it's often something of the order of 70% of me talking and 30% me reading, and sometimes I'll get up to 50 or a little over 50% of the time I'll spend reading.\nToday, I expect to be reading far less, talking far more.\nIt certainly may be worth going back and re-reading or re-listening to chapter 7.\nArtificial creativity prior to this, because it really is key to understanding the evolution of creativity.\nBack there, we kind of have some explanations of what we mean by creativity.\nCreativity of the humankind, not creativity of the evolutionary kind, namely the kind of creativity that mindless DNA, mindless genes happen to go through in their creation of new species.\nWe use that word advisedly, but the species that come into existence really are created, they weren't there before, and so the DNA is able to create these new species, via the process of evolution by natural selection.\nWe don't fully understand that process.\nThere are gaps in our knowledge about that, and I think I've said before, one of the gaps in my knowledge about the beginning of infinity was that I thought, prior to the beginning of infinity, and coming to understand David's perspective on this, the process of evolution by natural selection.\nIt's understood in broad strokes in some ways.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=540"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6dbd19de-28f4-493c-aef1-bd4a2c42613d": {"page_content": "We don't fully understand that process.\nThere are gaps in our knowledge about that, and I think I've said before, one of the gaps in my knowledge about the beginning of infinity was that I thought, prior to the beginning of infinity, and coming to understand David's perspective on this, the process of evolution by natural selection.\nIt's understood in broad strokes in some ways.\nIn fine details, in other ways, but there is no way that we understand everything by the metric that, as David puts it very well, and this is also back in chapter seven, page 154, if you can't program it, you haven't understood it, which is a deep maxim running through the beginning of infinity.\nThat if someone purports to understand something, consciousness, let's say, and they can't write an algorithm such that a computer could be programmed to instantiate that particular quality, then the person doesn't really understand what they're talking about.\nTheir broad brush strokes will be too broad to really capture in David's understanding what the term understand really means, and this is true of evolution by natural selection.\nWe cannot program a computer that can really evolve in the way that life forms evolve over time on earth.\nAll we get is evolution within the parameters of whatever the programmer has decided those parameters will be and what those rules will be.\nBut evolution by natural selection in the real world throws up the unpredictable, throws up the genuinely new, the genuinely created by a mechanism we don't have a full handle on.\nThere are many unknowns with evolution by natural selection, but it remains, of course, just because they're very, very many unknowns, doesn't mean you leap to some other theory, with there are even more unknowns.\nThis is a common misconception within epistemology, and of course, that's the god of the gaps idea, if someone comes along and says, well, you people who think that evolution by natural selection is a good explanation, can't explain x, y, and z, and they might be right that we can't explain x, y, and.\nz. May then say, well, therefore, creationism of the kind that a religious person believes in is really true.\nIt's the better explanation.\nOf course, it's not, because they also can't explain x, y, z, except by recourse to the general purpose explanation of God did it, okay, or a wizard did it as David likes to say.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=665"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "adf83019-5d67-4ef6-a481-fe0b31d88b9d": {"page_content": "z. May then say, well, therefore, creationism of the kind that a religious person believes in is really true.\nIt's the better explanation.\nOf course, it's not, because they also can't explain x, y, z, except by recourse to the general purpose explanation of God did it, okay, or a wizard did it as David likes to say.\nSo what evolution by natural selection does, deficient though it is in some areas by which I mean unable to fully explain absolutely everything about the origin of species and biology as we see it.\nAll sciences are like this.\nAll sciences have gaps.\nThat's the whole point of science.\nThere's no such thing ever as a completed science.\nWhat we have are ever better explanations, ever better theories over time, and evolution by natural selection is one such, where we do not know with the fidelity required to program a computer exactly how evolution by natural selection works.\nNow, there are some theories that we know well enough that we can program a computer.\nThese theories are often the ones that we have shown to be false.\nAnd trivially, of course, Newtonian gravity, Newtonian mechanics, classical mechanics is kind of like this.\nWe're able to program computers to perfectly well replicate what Newtonian classical mechanics is able to predict and it's able to predict to some extent the emotion of bodies throughout the solar system.\nIt gets it wrong in ways that general relativity does not.\nHowever, we know well enough to be able to program a computer so too a general relativity, of course.\nNow, when it comes to human creativity, we don't have the capacity either to program into a computer, human creativity.\nIf we did, then we could program a computer to be humanly creative, which would then be able to program it to have the capacity of, or have the quality of being a human.\nIn other words, it would be a human, or at least be a person would be a better way of saying things, of course.\nA human would be a special case of a person in that case because we would have a person inside of a silicon device of some sort.\nBut it was still a person because it would be creating an open ended stream of knowledge, it would be creating explanations, it would be trying to understand it's world in the way that we understand the world through conjecture and refutation and so on in the way that pop or explain that knowledge grows.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=818"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bb410191-14f7-48be-8714-f0f4e8ed0363": {"page_content": "A human would be a special case of a person in that case because we would have a person inside of a silicon device of some sort.\nBut it was still a person because it would be creating an open ended stream of knowledge, it would be creating explanations, it would be trying to understand it's world in the way that we understand the world through conjecture and refutation and so on in the way that pop or explain that knowledge grows.\nSo without further ado, let me get into the book and into chapter 16, the evolution of creativity.\nAnd I'm going to stop quite frequently.\nI hope this isn't too frustrating for listeners, but we'll see how we go.\nAnd David begins, what use was creativity?.\nOf all the countless biological adaptations that have evolved on our planet, creativity is the only one that can produce scientific or mathematical knowledge, art or philosophy, pausing there because straight away, straight away, we have a statement that should really make us put the brakes on and just unpack for a moment.\nThis here, this first claim here that creativity is the only one that enables us to produce mathematical scientific knowledge, art or philosophy.\nTells us something about the difference between humans and other animals that long wondered about moral dichotomy.\nWhat makes us special?.\nAre we special?.\nAren't we just another animal, a curious kind of water ape that can talk?.\nWell, these kinds of ways of diminishing what people are, I would say, diminishing what people are.\nAnd as I like to say, diminishing their cosmic significance suffer from the floor that they overlook the fact that it is creativity.\nSo far as we know, completely unique to humans in the universe as of today that allows for us to produce science and philosophy.\nAnd the real key is that that capacity allows us to model in our own minds the rest of reality, which increases our models increase in their fidelity in representing the rest of reality over time as well.\nThat is an absolutely astonishing fact about ourselves and reality as a whole.\nAnd the laws of physics which allow this to happen that inside of our minds, we create models of everything else that's out there.\nAnd over time, through creativity, through generating explanations that become increasingly hard to vary, the model in our minds more closely resembles the actual reality that is out there.\nAnd as David says in one of his TED talks, it contains a superficial image of the things that are out there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=944"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "514df10b-00b0-499d-9fee-9c2bad8b8d0d": {"page_content": "That is an absolutely astonishing fact about ourselves and reality as a whole.\nAnd the laws of physics which allow this to happen that inside of our minds, we create models of everything else that's out there.\nAnd over time, through creativity, through generating explanations that become increasingly hard to vary, the model in our minds more closely resembles the actual reality that is out there.\nAnd as David says in one of his TED talks, it contains a superficial image of the things that are out there.\nBut far more than that, the relationships between the abstract objects that are inside of our minds become far more closely related to the relationships between physical objects that are out there in space time and behaving in certain ways in fact, space time itself considered as an object in physical reality as well.\nThat our models of these things, space time, matter and energy, civilization, living things, so on and so forth, etc, etc, are.\nOur models of those things inside of our minds come to resemble, to mirror what is going on out there with increasing fidelity over time, never perfectly, and always with the possibility that what we think could in fact be wrong.\nBut there's something there that is converging.\nWe are converging upon a reality.\nThe model here represents what's out there.\nAnd that's true for everyone.\nAnd it's this very strange thing because I think it might be in Feynman who said, people are interesting because it's almost like it's atoms observing atoms, atoms looking at atoms.\nBut it's far deeper than that of course, and not just atoms looking at atoms.\nAs astonishing as a fact as that might be, an insect would be a collection of atoms looking at other atoms as well.\nThis is a set of atoms that is observing the world certainly, but coming to understand the world and generating a model of the world as well.\nOkay, so let's continue.\nNow, as you can see, the sun is beginning to creep in, so I'm sure it's destroying my green screen behind me in some way, but we will persevere anyway.\nI could close the blinds, but I just want to see, I'm just using my creativity to see, what the heck is going to happen with my carefully set up arrangement here, when the full force of the sun, 150 million kilometers away at a core temperature of 15 million Kelvin and a surface temperature of 5,500 Kelvin comes blaring straight through that window straight into my eyes.\nLet's see what happens.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1083"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4dc0d82b-7959-4e68-a1f8-6779d8127b6c": {"page_content": "I could close the blinds, but I just want to see, I'm just using my creativity to see, what the heck is going to happen with my carefully set up arrangement here, when the full force of the sun, 150 million kilometers away at a core temperature of 15 million Kelvin and a surface temperature of 5,500 Kelvin comes blaring straight through that window straight into my eyes.\nLet's see what happens.\nI'm ready for this ride.\nLet's see what...\nIt's almost Christmas.\nI want to see if something really unusual happens.\nLike it completely destroys my recording or something like that.\nOkay, okay, so we've read a sentence so far.\nLet's go to the next one.\nThrough the resulting technology and institutions, it has had spectacular physical effects, most notably near human habitations, but also further a field, a substantial portion of the Earth's land area as now used for human purposes.\nHuman choice, itself a product of creativity determines which other species to exclude and which to tolerate or cultivate, which rivers to divert, which hills to level and which wildernesses to preserve.\nNow I'm not even going to get through that sentence without pausing myself right at the beginning of it, where David says, human choice itself a product of creativity.\nThis link, I haven't read anywhere else quite so explicitly.\nIt may be out there among other philosophers, but if so I haven't read them.\nI've read some of the texts that many other people read on the topic, namely on creativity, and on free will.\nBut we tend not to get this kind of link and David doesn't mention much about free will in the beginning of infinity.\nBut it is mentioned, and it's mentioned in the context of creativity, and I'm really attracted to this idea that human choice is indeed a product of creativity and it's certainly informed my own thinking on this whole idea.\nI don't know how to divorce free will from choices that if choice exists in the world, and then if choice exists in the world, and we are the agents that do the choosing, then we have free will.\nOur will, the thing that we want is free to choose among these things.\nNow it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be if, of course, as many people observe.\nIf someone coerced you in some way, then your will is less free.\nYou want to do X, but you're not allowed to do X, for fear of violence or something else.\nFear of death perhaps.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1216"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c3fc6c6-75ab-4986-a1a0-4c5f43dda3c5": {"page_content": "Our will, the thing that we want is free to choose among these things.\nNow it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be if, of course, as many people observe.\nIf someone coerced you in some way, then your will is less free.\nYou want to do X, but you're not allowed to do X, for fear of violence or something else.\nFear of death perhaps.\nSo you can't do X.\nSo your will has been constrained to do something else.\nYou don't really have the free will that you do.\nSo I think free will is this spectrum, this degrees of freedom that you have.\nAnd importantly with human beings, unlike with, say, dogs or cats, you have the classic experiment, figure out what food the dog likes.\nand so you put out two different kinds of food and you let the dog go to the one that it prefers.\nThe dog really make a choice.\nWell in one sense it kind of did because there were two things, there in existence, but it did really contemplate or did it just rely upon what if genes were telling it to do.\nAre we any different in this case?.\nWe are because unlike with the dog, we can choose to create something completely new.\nThat isn't there before us.\nAnd that choice itself, that choice to actually do go through the effort of creating is itself a free choice that we don't have to make.\nOne can consider when, you know, in a similar situation, in the evening, you want to have dinner, you've got a certain number of things in the fridge, there's a certain number of ways in which you combine them into interesting meals, you can choose among them, that's a free choice, but you could also choose to do something completely different and go to the supermarket and buy some more ingredients or to call up a restaurant and get something delivered, so on and so forth, etc, etc.\nWe really can create new choices, bring new choices into the world.\nThis is our creativity and action, and the act of choosing among these things is what I would regard as free will.\nSo I just regard creativity, choices and free will and this capacity to explain the world as all intimately linked.\nNone of them have good explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1403"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "85f92167-911b-45f6-a56e-f25ea3b49272": {"page_content": "We really can create new choices, bring new choices into the world.\nThis is our creativity and action, and the act of choosing among these things is what I would regard as free will.\nSo I just regard creativity, choices and free will and this capacity to explain the world as all intimately linked.\nNone of them have good explanations.\nAnd so it's for this reason I kind of agree with David where he says also in the book that they might all come along for the ride in the one jump to universality, that as soon as you have this jump to explanatory universality, people being universal explainers, then all of those things come along, including consciousness as well.\nPerhaps we don't know, but the point is that it seems like a parsimonious idea that these are all facets of the one deep profound mystery of what human personhood is about.\nWhat conscious we're creative, we make choices in the world, we do those freely and so perhaps whatever the ultimate explanation is of these things or whatever the explanation of the future is that enables us to create artificial general intelligence, that we will recognize that these words that we use, creativity, consciousness, free will, whatever, that all of these things will come together in some way and we'll have a better understanding of each of them and the ways in which they are real.\nBut I say that they're real, one reason I say that they're real is because they are unavoidably part of the explanation of what it is that people are doing, is an explanation of their behavior, an explanation of how it is they create science and civilization and everything else.\nThat trying to remove any of them causes more problems than it solves.\nYou're left wondering if you think something like creativity isn't some kind of deep mystery that in fact all we need is ever more faster hardware and eventually we'll achieve escape velocity, we'll have artificial intelligence, that is creative and more creative than us and it's just a matter of processing power, which is, it seems to be the most popular idea right now.\nOkay, this Nick Bostrom singularity idea that all we need is faster processing and once we've got sufficient amount of processing, sufficient amount of memory, so on and so forth, then we will have an agent that is able to think faster than us about anything at all, better than us and therefore the problem of creativity is solved at the hardware, the hardware level.\nMany of us think that it's completely wrong that assumes a solution to what creativity is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1511"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ecc4029e-5ff4-4ebd-8386-99c7fb92e815": {"page_content": "Okay, this Nick Bostrom singularity idea that all we need is faster processing and once we've got sufficient amount of processing, sufficient amount of memory, so on and so forth, then we will have an agent that is able to think faster than us about anything at all, better than us and therefore the problem of creativity is solved at the hardware, the hardware level.\nMany of us think that it's completely wrong that assumes a solution to what creativity is.\nIt's sidelines creativity and says creativity is no deep mystery that we are just processes with some memory and there's nothing particularly special about the software.\nOf course, what the beginning of infinity teaches us what David Deutsch has main point is and a lot of this is that the hardware has a very little to do with this mystery at all.\nIt's all about the software.\nThis is the great mystery.\nWe have this algorithm running on our brains that is able to improve itself over time and improve its understanding of the world at the time as well.\nIt can augment itself with technology.\nbut it's got nothing to do with how fast we can think.\nThe computer can think faster than us but it's not more creative than us right now.\nBut of all of these qualities I would say of the human mind which may be synonymous one with another, creativity, choices, consciousness, the ability to be universal explainer, free will.\nThat last one, the free will one is the most contentious one it seems to me.\nMaybe consciousness is up there as well.\nAs I've observed elsewhere, there are certain philosophers who will deny free will but regard some of the other aspects of this as deeply mysterious.\nSam Harris who I respect very much and love to listen to on this particular topic has written a book, a vehement defense of the idea we do not have free will.\nSimultaneously, he also argues that the deepest mystery in the universe, aside from the existence of the universe itself, is the fact that we are conscious.\nSo as he dismisses the free will issue, up prizes consciousness as being a profound and deep mystery.\nAnd he says that his subjective experience of consciousness reveals to him that free will doesn't exist, that you do not have a subjective experience of consciousness.\nAnd here all I can say to that is we would just have to disagree because I do have a subjective experience of consciousness.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1630"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c57734ac-0be6-4f61-bf68-895422e6c21c": {"page_content": "So as he dismisses the free will issue, up prizes consciousness as being a profound and deep mystery.\nAnd he says that his subjective experience of consciousness reveals to him that free will doesn't exist, that you do not have a subjective experience of consciousness.\nAnd here all I can say to that is we would just have to disagree because I do have a subjective experience of consciousness.\nNow if you meditate and clear your mind of everything, it should be no surprise to you that it seems as if you have no free will because it then seems as if the thoughts are arising unbidden by you.\nBut if you are really trying not to concentrate and actively trying to dampen down your thinking, then of course it will feel as though it will be a sensation and this is a theme running through Sam's philosophy, this idea of feelings that you have the sensation or the experience of not having free will or the absence of free will.\nI'm unsurprised that you feel as though you've got an absence of free will when you're not thinking, when you're trying to think hard about what to choose to do next.\nBut if you try to be conscious of the choices before you, I think that in those moments and you can be mindful in your conscious experience of the present moment, I think you will find that you can experience the very real sensation of actually having choices in the world and that you will freely be able to choose one thing over another.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1777"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9cfafd31-7d6a-4734-a969-e55298a04aea": {"page_content": "But this takes us far and wide away from where I want to go with this chapter just to say that almost in any of these debates where people end up loggerheads about the existence of free will or not, I think we can happily grant to people, okay, I'll agree with you that your form of free will doesn't exist, okay, for the purpose of moving forward and making progress on this particular question, what's the particular question, the deep profound mystery that almost everyone interested in this topic will agree as they're somewhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1870"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c679f627-922b-4fb2-93c9-c1cc5b59e653": {"page_content": "So Sam might think, well it's not there in free will, okay fine, it's there in consciousness, then I agree.\nI think we need to solve that.\nThat's a really important thing to solve.\nNow Daniel Dennard of course, as many of us when we've read his book, interpret him to be saying that consciousness is no deep mystery.\nAnd so he dampens down consciousness but what rises up for him is free will, he's a compatibleist.\nand he says, well this is a mystery, it's compatible with the deterministic laws of physics which is my view as well.\nSo it tends to be the case in Jaron Lanier, makes this point as well, but when people deny one mysterious aspect of reality, it tends to crop up, I'm bitten somewhere else in their ontology, what they think reality consists of in some way.\nAnd he uses the example of the nature of personhood, that if you dismiss the deep mystery that he is, what it means to be a person, what a person is and the fact that a person is, in his words, an infinite well of mystery which is this idea that tries to capture the fact that we don't have an answer to what a person is.\nWe can't program computers to be people and he agrees with David Deutsch there.\nHe says that people who dismiss that as being some sort of deep mystery tend to find themselves caught up in concerns or confusions about what the present moment means, because the people who dismiss the deep mystery of personhood are often reductionists in the physicalist sense.\nThey see a block universe, as general relativity might say, that the past times and the future times as well as the present time, or just instances of times.\nThere's just times often to the 13.7 billion years into the past and often to the extreme deep distant future.\nBut there's no privileged times.\nYesterday is just as real as today as tomorrow in this universe described by a special relativity, this block universe.\nAll of the times exist in some way and none of them are privileged.\nThat's the picture we get.\nIt's just your perspective.\nIf you're on the other side of the universe, then the time that you see is not simultaneous with my time.\nWe get into this deep questions of physics.\nBut a person who believes that there's no mystery there then has to try and explain why it is that now here for you, things are special.\nSomething is different.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=1912"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2377dd5-76ac-4a29-9237-2bd68e9a67cb": {"page_content": "All of the times exist in some way and none of them are privileged.\nThat's the picture we get.\nIt's just your perspective.\nIf you're on the other side of the universe, then the time that you see is not simultaneous with my time.\nWe get into this deep questions of physics.\nBut a person who believes that there's no mystery there then has to try and explain why it is that now here for you, things are special.\nSomething is different.\nThe present moment is illuminated in a way that yesterday is not, that you don't experience yesterday in the same way that you've experienced today right now.\nYou only experience now now.\nSo there's this weird mystery that exists in the universe about why the present moment is different to other moments, why you experience the present moment is different to other moments.\nThis is what John Lenny S is about people who try to deny the deep mystery of consciousness.\nIt tends to crop up in this other way.\nAnd so too I would say with any of these questions about creativity free will or choice and consciousness.\nWe've gotten barely through the first paragraph.\nOkay, so let's keep going.\nAnd I'm going to pause again shortly just to recap human choice itself, a product of creativity determines which other species to exclude and which to tolerate a cultivate which refers to divert, which yields to level and which wildernesses to preserve.\nAnd this is a very beginning of infinity thing to say because again, cast people rightly so, rightly so, has heroic in the universe as saviors, not destroyers, as people who are trying their best, not only to survive on the planet, but to help other life forms as well with the only so far as I know, modular, the odd exception to the rule out there somewhere other, but we are basically the only species that consistently helps other species.\nThere might be symbiotic relationships out there somewhere other where sometimes one species will help another species in order to get help back from itself.\nBut people here on this planet, we try and save the pandas, even though the pandas apparently don't want to be saved and aren't trying to save themselves.\nIf human beings did not exist, the extinction level event would eventually happen.\nIt could be tomorrow, it could be 50 years, 50,000 years, 50 million years.\nThe asteroid is coming, the supernova might happen, the climate will change, and there will be nothing that other species on the planet will be able to do about it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2060"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db375331-f8d0-48db-8db7-8f6ac46a5c8f": {"page_content": "If human beings did not exist, the extinction level event would eventually happen.\nIt could be tomorrow, it could be 50 years, 50,000 years, 50 million years.\nThe asteroid is coming, the supernova might happen, the climate will change, and there will be nothing that other species on the planet will be able to do about it.\nOnly we and our choices and our ability to create knowledge will be able to do anything about those things.\nAnd we will, we will choose to do the right thing for ourselves, and as a side effect, that will often help other species.\nPeople like to preserve our wilderness areas.\nSome of us more than others, because some of us think that wilderness areas are actually beautiful, aesthetically beautiful.\nAnd so that's a reason for preserving them.\nWe also do like the look of tigers and lions and like to be able to go on safari.\nSo if for no other reason than that, we like to try and preserve the environment in which we find ourselves.\nOf course, it's the consensus right now that humans are causing the next mass extinction and all of the damage around the world.\nBut this is not true.\nThis is not true.\nIt is only people that are saving the planet from destroying everything that's on the planet.\nThe geological forces, the cosmological forces that are out there eroding the planet, destroying species and habitats, only we are saving it.\nNow the small amount of if side effects that we have by us trying to eke out an existence in this extremely hostile environment will of course sometimes displace other animals from their habitat.\nBut those other animals inevitably will be wiped out, will go extinct by the next extinction level event, which is going to happen.\nThat is the history 99.9% of all species that have ever existed on the planet have gone extinct and that will continue to happen.\nWe want to be the exception.\nAnd the only way we can be the exception is to use our capacity to create explanatory knowledge.\nAnd the only way we can make other species the exception is to use our capacity to create explanatory knowledge and to use the resources that are available to us to protect ourselves and those other animals.\nIf we slow down our progress and the rates of knowledge creation, not only do we condemn ourselves to certain extinction, we condemn the rest of the species on the planet to certain extinction as well.\nAnd even if you're only concerned about life in some form surviving, it won't.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2186"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0ee6d8e-c83f-4df0-a7b6-e989caa5ef29": {"page_content": "And the only way we can make other species the exception is to use our capacity to create explanatory knowledge and to use the resources that are available to us to protect ourselves and those other animals.\nIf we slow down our progress and the rates of knowledge creation, not only do we condemn ourselves to certain extinction, we condemn the rest of the species on the planet to certain extinction as well.\nAnd even if you're only concerned about life in some form surviving, it won't.\nThe expansion of the sun absent us being here will absolutely sterilize the surface of the earth.\nSo there is this irony with us right now that we are the only species able to save the panda, for example, or save the whale while with simultaneously being blamed for both of those species' extinctions take the blue whale and the the Asian panda.\nWe are the only ones doing anything to try and save these animals.\nAnd yet we are consistently blamed for killing or destroying these animals.\nEven if you think that it's possible that both of those things will happen, the whales and the pandas will all be wiped out at some point in the future by a natural catastrophe, unless we step in there.\nNature is not friendly.\nIt's hostile.\nThe universe is terribly, implacably hostile.\nOkay, I've nearly completed a paragraph.\nLet's go back to the book, David Rats.\nIn the night sky, a bright fast-moving spot may well be a space station carrying humans higher and faster than any biological adaptation can carry anything.\nOr it may be a satellite through which humans communicate across distances that biological communication is never spanned using phenomena such as radio waves and nuclear reactions which biology has never harnessed.\nThe unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world.\nOkay, again, and the sun has begun to shine straight into my eyes.\nI'm going to persevere anyway.\nI'm not closing those blinds.\nI'm refusing to do so.\nI'm going to be creative and just see what happens.\nOkay, so the unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world, said David there.\nAnd I've made this point before about if you live in any city around the world and you look around, then what you see is less due to the action of purely deterministic physical forces, you know, in the case of Sydney, the action of geological weathering and erosion over time eroded out the Sydney basin, you know, I've made this point before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2316"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e3054ecd-da08-47fb-8e41-12fae974f833": {"page_content": "Okay, so the unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world, said David there.\nAnd I've made this point before about if you live in any city around the world and you look around, then what you see is less due to the action of purely deterministic physical forces, you know, in the case of Sydney, the action of geological weathering and erosion over time eroded out the Sydney basin, you know, I've made this point before.\nBut if you look at the city skyline of Sydney, and I'll come back to this shortly with a specific example, you look at the city skyline of Sydney, trying to use our natural sciences in order to explain what's going on there, the appearance, what we see in this picture of the Sydney CBD, trying to use geology or plain physics in order to explain any of this, is going to be a fruitless exercise.\nYou're going to miss the point if you try and use those natural sciences.\nYou need to use the proper explanation.\nWhy does Sydney look like this?.\nWell, the reason Sydney looks like this, and there are a number of buildings there that are prominent, but let's take Sydney Tower there, which is the tallest building at least as of today in Sydney.\nSomeone chose to build that thing, and someone chose to design it that way.\nSomeone created the design and then people came together and freely decided that they would put their efforts in to constructing and raising this thing up into the sky.\nThat's the explanation.\nThe geology and the physics kind of buy the buy.\nThey're the things that the people choose to use, to take advantage of, their knowledge of those things in order to build structures like this.\nSo if we seek to explain and not merely describe in terms of deterministic laws, then we must invoke creativity, and various other abstract realities.\nReality is indeed a unified whole.\nOf course, reality is a unified whole.\nBut at the same time, we can divide it up into different ways.\nSpace time and matter and energy, or fundamental particles and emergent objects like cats and galaxies, or the physical and the abstract.\nAnd these various ways of dividing up reality, of dividing things up, don't privilege one aspect over and above the other.\nIt is as correct to say that the cat is moving the atoms from A to B, as it is to say that the cat moves from A to B because the atoms making up its body do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2470"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "63f269ed-562b-49c3-847b-137f44654b6e": {"page_content": "Space time and matter and energy, or fundamental particles and emergent objects like cats and galaxies, or the physical and the abstract.\nAnd these various ways of dividing up reality, of dividing things up, don't privilege one aspect over and above the other.\nIt is as correct to say that the cat is moving the atoms from A to B, as it is to say that the cat moves from A to B because the atoms making up its body do.\nBut there is a real distinction between, and this is another way of dividing up reality, explaining something in terms of things that exist, and having an in principle description of what the particles are doing.\nAnd I've made this point with people recently, and I guess I am going off on this tangent a little bit much.\nBut let me just hop on again for a moment about this.\nThe explanation as to why, at the higher emergent level, that certain things occur, is really the explanation.\nIt is not the fact that certain things were determined to have happened, because the big bang happened, and the laws of motion acted upon particles over the time and caused them to appear where they appeared today.\nThat is not an explanation.\nThat is an in principle, you would be able to describe the motion of those particles and where they end up today.\nAnd so this is why the fabric of reality, Winston Churchill copper atom story is just so deeply profound.\nAnd I think escapes sometimes the escape discussions on this topic.\nLet's just recap that.\nAnd you can fast forward the next 5 or 10 minutes as I go through this yet again.\nBut let me try and refine it in a certain way.\nThe situation is this.\nThere is a statue in Parliament Square in London of Winston Churchill.\nAnd the tip of that statue is a copper atom.\nWhy is the copper atom there?.\nNow on the one hand you can say that, well the copper atom is there for the same reason that any atom is anywhere right now.\nAnd any atom is anywhere right now, because 13.7 billion years in the past approximately, the big bang occurred, and all of matter and space and energy exploded out from that point.\nAnd eventually some of it, over millions of years, coalesced into stars, the first generation of stars.\nAt the end of their lives, some of them exploded in supernova, supernovae, explosions, and scattered their contents across a wide region of space.\nAnd some of those atoms, due to astrophysical processes, were copper atoms.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2601"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d56b2512-65e7-47f2-bfd9-33fac52bf9b1": {"page_content": "And eventually some of it, over millions of years, coalesced into stars, the first generation of stars.\nAt the end of their lives, some of them exploded in supernova, supernovae, explosions, and scattered their contents across a wide region of space.\nAnd some of those atoms, due to astrophysical processes, were copper atoms.\nThose copper atoms then coalesced, mixing with the hydrogen helium and the intergalactic space, and some of them formed new stars, and some of them formed planets as well, like the earth.\nAnd so the earth formed out of this previously exploded star or stars, and contains copper, and the copper atom again, under the forces of nature, under gravity and electromagnetism, and so on and so forth, weathering and erosion, ended up in a certain place where it was quarried, and the forces of nature eventually caused it to end up at the tip of Winston Churchill's nose.\nAnd that's why that copper atom is there, due to deterministic physical laws.\nThat's not an explanation.\nThat's a general purpose statement about any particular bit of matter anywhere in the entire universe.\nAnd when people try to invoke this, to explain a way, something like free will, for example, and try to say it couldn't have been a free choice, because you were determined to do what you were determined to do, because at the Big Bang, the laws of physics that were there are still acting right now, and you have to obey these deterministic laws in the same way that the copper atom had to obey a deterministic law to end up where it did.\nIt completely misses the point about what an explanation truly is.\nFree will is not an attempt to get outside of the laws of physics, and it's an attempt to explain what is really going on in the context of a deterministic universe.\nIn the context of a deterministic universe, we have species arising that didn't arise before.\nBut no biologist should be tempted to say, well, there's no such thing as evolution by natural selection.\nEvolution by natural selection doesn't really create new species.\nAll the tapping is atoms are following deterministic laws of physics.\nThey'll be ridiculous, and I don't think any physicist makes this point, I don't think any scientist, no biologist makes this point.\nWhat they say is, the explanation of the origin of species is evolution by natural selection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2767"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ba73e68e-4956-4bef-8ffb-ceb2077e75a5": {"page_content": "But no biologist should be tempted to say, well, there's no such thing as evolution by natural selection.\nEvolution by natural selection doesn't really create new species.\nAll the tapping is atoms are following deterministic laws of physics.\nThey'll be ridiculous, and I don't think any physicist makes this point, I don't think any scientist, no biologist makes this point.\nWhat they say is, the explanation of the origin of species is evolution by natural selection.\nIt's this emergent concept that these things called species exist, this thing called selection exists, and that niches are filled on niches, as some people say, by organisms that are fittest in that particular environment.\nThe environment changes, the genes are selected against, and the species can sometimes go extinct.\nTo be filled by new species with genes that are fitted for that particular environment.\nThat's an explanation, it's an emergent explanation, but all of those things are real.\nThey're really happening.\nSelection is really happening, adaptation is really happening, niches really exist in species really exist and fill those niches.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2885"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51b84817-81eb-4221-b7af-6766c8f117bf": {"page_content": "Now, precisely the same way, all we have to say is that the reason why, for example, the copper atom is at the tip of Winston Churchill's nose, the explanation of that is that there was a war called the Second World War involving two sides of great powers, dominant among them, the United Kingdom and Germany, the leaders of whom were Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, and Winston Churchill eventually won the war for his side, and so we like to, out of respect, remember great heroes who saved civilization, one of whom was Winston Churchill, and as whom we learned recently, Karl Popper thought was a great epistemologist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=2955"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "817c9b06-28a0-4189-96ba-7e00760341a3": {"page_content": "I'll go back to a previous episode for that one.\nWinston Churchill is, his statue is there with a copper atom at its nose because we make statues out of bronze, so that they don't weather away quite so quickly.\nBut someone chose to build that statue, chose to design it in that way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3013"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8aec9e86-3400-464c-a590-bb30cb8a133e": {"page_content": "In fact, groups of people came to that decision and freely chose to do so and trying to eliminate choice and freedom out of that whole picture is to break what would otherwise be a good explanation because we try to say it's merely determined by physical laws, deterministic laws, then we've missed the entire point of trying to explain what's going on in the real world, this reductionist conception of how it is that reality evolves over time is simply, it's not false, but it simply misses the point, it's true vacuously.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3027"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "da192bdd-9f62-47fd-8c90-d005cab201c7": {"page_content": "We can always say that anything that happens was determined to happen, it doesn't get us very far.\nIn denying the supernatural, we don't have to embrace pure reductionist physicalism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e9c2418b-4fcd-457d-a6b2-795cbc686b59": {"page_content": "We can take another avenue where we say, yes, of course, physics is fundamentally true, it's correct as a description of reality, but it doesn't explain everything that's going on and besides, the strange thing is that for someone who says they could in principle predict what a person is going to do next or predict what is going to happen next, if they had a full description of the laws of physics and the initial conditions is doing nothing in my opinion, but invoking the supernatural because what is this thing that is able to actually do that predicting?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3089"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "53a4c407-3d2f-4da6-b858-c7a1025a12bb": {"page_content": "Well, an oracle with the full knowledge of the laws of physics, well, this oracle is basically the omniscient theistic God, the God that knows everything that's going to happen, the God that created the universe and knows everything that's going to happen, so it is an appeal to the supernatural.\nNow someone might say, oh no, we don't need that, maybe we can just have a supercomputer of the future.\nI doubt it, this supercomputer of the future would have to calculate all of the different alternatives that could possibly happen in countless numbers of universes and it would have to know with perfect precision what the initial conditions are at any particular given time, so it can make this deterministic prediction, but we know from physics you cannot have a perfect understanding of the conditions at any particular time.\nFor all the atoms in the universe, we're going to have a perfect understanding of where exactly they are.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3135"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e551116-d592-4330-b8ea-dd05117c25df": {"page_content": "We know that's not possible, given the Heisenberg uncertainty of principle among other things, but we know that we can't have this complete knowledge simultaneously of every single atom in the entire universe, relativity for another reason, so this idea that we could in principle, in principle have this predictive mechanism that would allow us to determine exactly what's going to happen next, is itself an appeal to the supernatural, the device required in order to do this would be magical, it would have to have all the qualities that an omniscient creator of the universe would have, and so this is why I reject this idea that in principle the idea that we could with full knowledge of the laws of physics and full knowledge of the initial conditions, predict what's going to happen next, therefore you don't have free will, I think is false, because I don't think such an in principle argument has any bearing on the reality of free will, when in practice it will never be possible, I'll never be possible because no such device can do such a measurement of all the particles in the entire universe, it would have to be a god of some sort, okay that takes me far away from anything to do with this chapter again, I think I've just decided that this is not going to be episode 43, part one of chapter 16, I think this is going to be part zero, this is an introduction to some introductory remarks to the beginning of infinity, I can't really go back and insert this at the beginning of the chapter because it's going to look a little bit weird because at the beginning if you remember the sun wasn't shining straight into my eyes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3193"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "04b940af-bc5e-4c70-bb15-08473c813ab8": {"page_content": "but now it is, so look a bit weird, if I cut from sun shining into my eyes to sun not shining into my eyes to sun shining into my eyes again, that would look a little bit disjointed, so we're just going to persevere what we were saying to recap to go back, the David was saying that the unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world, okay.\nI wanted to go back to this idea that creativity is the thing that determines the physical look among other things of the structures we see around us, David says dominate our experience of the world,.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3301"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ab65add7-9586-47b5-826a-6114a06da1c1": {"page_content": "so I think he meant something significantly deeper than this, our literal experience of the world as we're walking around the world we're creating explanations of what we see when we interact with people with creating knowledge but just for illustrative purposes I want to illustrate this with, again the Sydney CBD but a particular part of it that many people will be familiar with, namely what's called the Sydney Harbour Bridge which connects the Sydney CBD with the northern part of Sydney it took a while for this bridge to be built back in the 1930s prior to which people had to drive a long way around the harbour and take many hours to get from the southern part of Sydney to northern part of Sydney now it takes me minutes, ah this is a very big bridge and I want to ask the question why it is that it looks the way that it does, I just to hop on this for a little bit longer, well of course it looks the way that it does because the architect and engineering team wanted it to look the way that it does, in fact I wanted to look like the Tyne Bridge which is in Newcastle in England and also the Helgate Bridge in New York looks similar as well, they wanted it to look like this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3339"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "45b94d8c-0096-411d-b9ae-1809257c6f28": {"page_content": "but also and this is quite interesting when you look at it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9fd1fd09-29f0-414c-a493-a38d32c44e90": {"page_content": "it's got these stone pylons there which don't exist in the Newcastle Bridge it it does exist in the Sydney Harbour now why, now it's interesting these pylons serve absolutely no structural function they're not holding the bridge up, they look like they're nice and strong don't they and in fact that's the whole point they're supposed to look strong so the story goes is when the plans were first shown to the public that the Sydney Town Hall or something and people were able to come on through or they'll put on the front of the newspaper whatever happened at the time people objected that Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was proposed to look seemed a little flimsy it seemed like it didn't have the structural integrity required to support the weight of all the cars and trains and people going across it each day and so the the engineers decided well let's add some big stone pylons there just to make it look stronger and that's what they did and that's what ended up happening because people said yes this one looks a lot better and so it's interesting isn't it that the reason why the Sydney Harbour Bridge looks the way that it does isn't due to not only just merely the physical forces acting upon bits of metal in the deterministic ways.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3418"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c16bf58-1440-4820-9b67-8440bade69e6": {"page_content": "but it's also not only because of the choice of engineers and designers they weren't forced into having this particular design given the constraints of physics that the choice was made the free choice was made to add design features that serve absolutely no structural purpose whatsoever they're just there to look good and so granite was mined from down south in Maroyo.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3496"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9fffbf1b-ca5e-42a1-9aed-320d1a84d8e1": {"page_content": "I think it was Maroyo and the southern part of New South Wales uh 18,000 cubic meters of this stuff was brought all the way up to Sydney you know carted in trucks and a three plus hour journey all the way north to Sydney in order to build these you know carefully constructed stone pylons that again do absolutely nothing so the reason why human creativity just for aesthetics so aesthetics has forced up not forced it has caused brought into the world this particular huge structure and that that's the explanation the aesthetic explanation is the explanation and trying to deny the aesthetic explanation would be a kind of a ridiculous exercise I think okay back to the book I'll read a little longer now I'll try and get through the entire next paragraph now days that and by that they would mean the unique effects of creativity now days that includes the experience of rapid innovation by the time you read these words the computer on which I'm writing them will be obsolete there will be functionally better computers that will require less human effort to build other books will have been written and innovative buildings and other artifacts will be constructed some of which will be quickly superseded while others will stand for longer than the pyramids have so far surprising scientific discoveries will be made some of which will change the standard textbooks forever all these consequences of creativity make for an ever changing way of life which is possible only a long lived dynamic society itself a phenomenon that nothing other than creative thought could possibly bring about however as I pointed out in the previous chapter n chapter one it was only recently in the history of our species that creativity has had any of those effects in prehistoric times it would not have been obvious to a casual observer say an explorer from an extraterrestrial civilization that humans were capable of creative thought at all it would have seemed that we were doing no more than endlessly repeating the last art which we were genetically adapted just like all other billions of species in the biosphere clearly we were tool uses.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3523"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c1fde68-d15b-4034-809f-e0592614a6e8": {"page_content": "but so many other species we were communicating using symbolic language but again that was not unusual even bees do that we were domesticating other species but so do ants closer observation would have revealed that human languages and the knowledge for human tool views were being transmitted through memes and not through genes this made us fairly unusual but still not obviously creative several other species have memes but what they do not have is the means of improving them other than through random trial and error so that there is a exposing there that there is a crucial point that other animals might very well have memes but not the means of improving them they might do this random trial and error thing but they're not intelligently designing the knowledge as we would do we have memes and we are able to construct memes deliberately if we like not always.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3665"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bb7b5485-033d-4294-8ac7-a3eec5b2964c": {"page_content": "but if we want to we can construct certain memes we can work hard to create a new theory and you design something that will persist over time animals tend not to do this people are as David says in the beginning of infinity you know it's sort of overly impressed by the modest achievements of the higher apes or a certain dolphins and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3719"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dbd08f77-b181-4128-bfbc-4b4bcd3d08df": {"page_content": "but it is a categorical difference between human beings and every other species on the planet now there is something that David will say later about species that existed prior to us homo erectus perhaps Neanderthal and so on these other homo species that seem to have had the capacity to explain the world because they had art they had the capacity to create fire there's a whole bunch of other bits of evidence and bits of the puzzle that go together when considered as a whole one would say well it seems as though these other species different to us did have this capacity now I'll have something to say about this when we get there because it seems as though all of these species did arise in the same place it seems like they had a common ancestor and that common ancestor we might wonder could have been the first universal explainer and we've descended from that and for the reasons that David will say in the book that capacity for explaining the world wasn't used for much at all until recently biologically speaking or geologically speaking in terms of timeframes that we're talking about so just just continuing talking about those other species that seem to have memes like some of the great apes for example they don't seem to have the capacity to improve those memes except through random trial and error and David goes on to say nor are they capable of sustained improvement over many generations today the creativity that humans use to improve ideas is what preeminently sets us apart from other species.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3740"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "17309d90-92c4-4b5c-898b-178ad05b7237": {"page_content": "okay so pausing there.\nand this is where I'll end this week we got.\nyeah just a little level one page I think director books this is a record for me this is a record in terms of ratio to reading to commenting anyway this thing that sets us apart from other species David says you know I would say the importance of this cannot be understated it's it's everything especially in moral terms and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3867"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "23e03609-c4c8-4152-aafa-93a9067b6deb": {"page_content": "this links to chapter 12 bad philosophy what separates us as humans from other animals and this might very well include knowing for example as is discussed in chapter 12 knowing whether or not other species can suffer or indeed experience qualia of any kind have a subjective experience of any kind one thing we know is that animals are nothing like people at all in this sense when it comes to creativity we're very like in terms of biology granted the brain a brain the homologous structures as we say look similar the brain looks similar in the human as it does in the great apes as it does in the dolphins mammals and large brain creatures the brains all have similar structures but this doesn't mean anything you know like computers have similar internal structures but some of them will be running a word processor and some of them will be running a 3D game and some of them will be running YouTube and so on what the computer is actually doing can look vastly different and I think that the difference between the software that's going on inside of a human brain and every other animal is categorically black and white different difference and it's not just a matter of degree like dolphins can learn some tricks and we can learn lots of tricks and apes can learn to communicate one with another and we can learn to communicate far better their vocabulary is 50 our vocabulary is 500,000 you can choose your own favorite animal and then the criteria by which you want to compare humans with that animal in order to say how intelligent that animal is in comparison to us that they're kind of just like us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3888"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "66cd98ba-df0d-4200-b7b7-571b7e1d2125": {"page_content": "well I would say no they're completely different it's night and day because people are universal universal in their capacity to create new knowledge which means literally whatever can be understood can be understood by us if there is an explanation out there if there's a physical phenomena out there which has an explanation we can find the explanation no other species that exists no other extent species on the planet can do this it is this special capacity that we have this ability to model the universe and this is how I kind of began today's episode that sets us apart from the other species that are out there those other species can't create explanations of the kind that we can those other species are trapped by their genes in what they can do their behaviors and if they can understand anything at all it is only what their genes allow them to understand the difference between poison and food for example the difference between hot and cold let's say possibly I don't know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=3997"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff48feab-ae8f-43ba-ae29-0ce343067e4d": {"page_content": "but if it can understand anything at all it's condemned by its genes whereas we're not condemned by our genes in the same way and there's more time goes on and more knowledge is accumulated by us and as we create more explanations we escape we achieve escape velocity from our genes entirely and so the disease is that ravage us because of the imperfections of our genome can be left behind because we have used our names used our knowledge to overcome the problems that we have genetically but the animal can't do this the environment changes and the animal can go extinct the entire species of animals can go extinct unless we choose to do something about it as I've also said this is not like a person the environment around a person changes and the person will change the environment rather than be changed by it typically speaking sometimes the environment does change too fast a tsunami happens an earthquake happens.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=4061"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "be610bbf-c14d-4c52-851d-192d79c394b7": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "78f5315f-186f-4802-8b63-a1d95af9c329": {"page_content": "we get that but as time goes on our capacity to deal with these things ever faster and ever more robustly will continue to improve so we are categorically different there is something very special and unique about us and we don't understand it fully David is about to explain the little we do know about how creativity evolved here on planet earth and what it was used for for so long because apparently our ancestors had it our ancestors went extinct and he'll talk about what did Homo sapiens do maybe we were at war with these other species and that's the reason why those species are no longer here I don't think he buys that particular idea because we can consider what static societies were about we've talked about that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=4124"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ce971d2-e98c-4d68-b566-be8c98d67936": {"page_content": "previously but I have for one of another word ranted this episode I talked a lot.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "26fc162a-f4ce-42f7-a284-891723f1a679": {"page_content": "and so this is rather than titling this episode one I will go back and retroactively title this episode zero because I don't think we got through enough to really call this a proper beginning of an affinity chapter exploration this really is an introduction and Brett having an opportunity to indulge himself with some of the very exciting things that all come to bear that come together from the entire rest of the beginning of infinity and and come together to really support for one to another word we shouldn't say support that come together to frame and shape what this chapter chapter 16 is going to be all about so look forward to the next episode which I hope will be out soon once more thank you to all the patreon supporters and the paypal supporters as well find me on patreon find me on paypal the links are there at www.bredhall.org on the front page.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=4182"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "54b7b8aa-c8d5-4759-b0f8-2086905be8a5": {"page_content": "there I think you can find some links there to how you could support me and my endeavors in continuing to explore the beginning of infinity and at this rate at this rate I was using today it will take us another 10 episodes to get through this chapter not won't I will promise to read more next chapter and comment perhaps a little less we'll see how we go until then.\nbye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oypz57aosnE&t=4241"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fe2f3b5f-4b5a-439b-95b6-d31fd9a982bd": {"page_content": "The first part of this ended really abruptly and quickly, or because my audio failed, so I apologise about that.\nI'm going to continue with the Infinity Hotel explanation of the different kinds of infinity that there are.\nWe've just learned there are kinds of infinity called countable infinities.\nThat's how to explain what the uncountable infinities are, but first I'll go to the book and David Rites.\nIt is mathematically possible to overwhelm the capacity of infinity hotel.\nIn a remarkable series of discoveries in the 1870s, cantile proved among other things that not all infinities are equal.\nIn particular, the infinity of the continuum, the number of points in a finite line, which is the same as the number of points in the whole of space or space time, is much larger than the infinity of the natural numbers.\nCantile proved this by proving that there can be no one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and the points in a line.\nThat set of points has a higher order of infinity than the set of natural numbers.\nNow David then goes on to give a version of that proof.\nThere are many versions of the diagonal argument in showing that certain kinds of infinity are bigger than other kinds of infinity.\nJust go through an explanation of a diagonal argument and then go through another kind of explanation or a description really of how certain kinds of infinity are countable and certain kinds are uncountable.\nLet's have a look at a certain kind of diagonal argument.\nSo if you go online or you go to a textbook and you look up what a diagonal argument is, what you'll often find is the argument expressed in terms of binary numbers.\nLet's have a look at how that one might work.\nSo the simplest sequence of binary numbers might be the binary number of zero and of course zero would be represented as any infinite set of zeros or we can have an infinite set of ones or we could have alternating zeros and ones.\nI'm not really going to be concerned about what these numbers actually represent in base 10.\nLet's change the order of that sequence, maybe we could have two ones, two zeros.\nFor people listening on audio, basically I've got a sequence of nothing but zeros, then a sequence of nothing but ones.\nThen I've got a sequence of alternating 0, 1, 0, 1.\nThen I've got a sequence of alternating 1, 0, 1, 0.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0c0bdc5-961e-4ffb-a8f7-33545295ed21": {"page_content": "I'm not really going to be concerned about what these numbers actually represent in base 10.\nLet's change the order of that sequence, maybe we could have two ones, two zeros.\nFor people listening on audio, basically I've got a sequence of nothing but zeros, then a sequence of nothing but ones.\nThen I've got a sequence of alternating 0, 1, 0, 1.\nThen I've got a sequence of alternating 1, 0, 1, 0.\nThen I've got a sequence of double 1, double 0, double 1, et cetera, off to infinity.\nYou just keep on repeating different patterns.\nSo if you write down every single permutation of zeros and ones in an infinitely long list, will you nonetheless not be able to capture a certain pattern of zeros and ones?.\nIn fact, there is going to be, even if this list was infinitely long and so that you went on, such that your next sequence was double 0, double 1, double 0, double 1, and then triple 1, triple 0, triple 1, triple 0, and et cetera, you just kept on doing that and you try to shuffle around every single possible way of writing zeros and ones.\nIs there a number that you could write of zeros and ones that would not appear in an infinitely long list, heading down that way?.\nYes, there is.\nThere is such a number.\nIt's this number.\nTake the very first one, which is nothing but a series of zeros, and take the first digit of that number, it's a 0, or circle it.\nWhat I'm going to do to that 0.\nthere is to change it from being a 0 into a 1, all right, that I'll keep.\nNow let's go to the second number in my sequence, and that's just a series of ones.\nI'm going to take the second of those digits there, that's a 1, and I'm going to circle that, and I'm going to change it from what it is, which is a 1, into a 0.\nI'm going down to the third number now, and I'm going to take the third number on that list, circle it once more, it happens to be a 0, I'm going to write down a 1.\nAnd then on the fourth number, I think you get the picture now, we're going to find the fourth number in that sequence, circle it, and write down a 1.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=131"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "732da5b1-a7d2-44c6-9cfe-32d4cf607a3a": {"page_content": "I'm going down to the third number now, and I'm going to take the third number on that list, circle it once more, it happens to be a 0, I'm going to write down a 1.\nAnd then on the fourth number, I think you get the picture now, we're going to find the fourth number in that sequence, circle it, and write down a 1.\nI'm going to repeat that, for every single number in the list, off to infinity.\nAnd what I will have constructed, up here at the top, is a number, which by definition is different to every single other number in the list.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=262"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7afab671-6c5c-41be-82f5-ad00707a6812": {"page_content": "So even though that number is infinitely long, even though that list is infinitely long, and would appear if it's an infinitely long list, such that every single number in that list is different to every other number, and I've gone through every possible permutation that I can, one would think that I have constructed every single number that could possibly be constructed from 0's and 1's, but no, because here, by definition, at the top, I've constructed a number that does not, is not identical to any number in this list, it's different by one digit from every single number in this list, it's different to this one, because it's got a 1 there instead, it's different to this one, because it's got a 0.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=298"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8e1e65f-acfd-41b6-9a7d-421164526dcf": {"page_content": "and it's said there.\nNo number down here will be the same as that number.\nI've found a number that does not appear in an infinitely long list of 0's and 1's, where every single number in that list is constructed of nothing but 0's and 1's.\nSo this is very profound, this says that this number here is not in the list of the infinite numbers that are in the bottom list.\nSo there must be a set of numbers bigger than this countable list, and it's countable because it's ordered, okay, there is a specific pattern that we're following here.\nThis one doesn't appear anywhere in an infinite pattern, it's a different kind of number.\nWhat kind of number is it?.\nWell it's part of a sequence of uncountable numbers, it doesn't appear in the countable set.\nThere's another way of thinking about this.\nSometimes people can struggle with the diagonal argument, in trying to understand the difference between countable and uncountable.\nI find this version a little bit more intuitive, it's not a proof that there exists uncountable infinities, but I think it's a clear explanation.\nLet's think about any countable set.\nThere's the classic countable set, the set sometimes called n for the natural numbers, sometimes 0's excluded, so we've got 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.\nThat's countable, you can count, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4.\nWhat else is countable?.\nWell, any of your so-called times tables, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, etcetera, 0, 3, 6, 9.\nI mentioned this in the previous video.\nNow these sets are of the same size, even though it would appear that not every element of the first set, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, appears in the second set, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8.\nSo the second set is missing all the odd numbers, doesn't that mean it's missing half of the numbers that are in the first set?.\nBoth of them are countable, you can count, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 3, 6, 9, 12.\nThey're both infinitely big, now although both of them are infinitely long and infinitely large, both of them are smaller than other kinds of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=336"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8baae06c-8624-4b11-acd8-7261cc714256": {"page_content": "So the second set is missing all the odd numbers, doesn't that mean it's missing half of the numbers that are in the first set?.\nBoth of them are countable, you can count, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 3, 6, 9, 12.\nThey're both infinitely big, now although both of them are infinitely long and infinitely large, both of them are smaller than other kinds of infinity.\nIn particular, the infinite number of integers here, counting numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, is not as big as the number of numbers we say in mathematics, the number of real numbers, between 0 and 1.\nI'll say that again, there are more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are integers from 0 through infinity.\nHow does that make sense?.\nWell, as I've said over and again, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 is countable, but what is not countable?.\nWhat is an uncountably large number of numbers are all the numbers between 0 and 1.\nLet's see why.\nLet's write down 0 to 1.\nThis is a continuum between 0 and 1.\nWhat's halfway?.\n0.5 or the fraction 1 over 2.\nWhat's a bit smaller than, what's a bit smaller than 1.5?.\nWell, 0.1.\nWhat's smaller than that?.\n0.01 and smaller than that?.\n0.001 and so on.\nLet's try and count the numbers between 0 and 1. 0, what comes next?.\nI certainly know what comes next down here with the integers.\nI can count them, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4.\nBut if I want to count the real numbers, all of the decimals, let's say, between 0 and 1, I have no hope of even starting.\nI don't know where to begin counting after 0.0, 0.001, we'll know it's not that because there's something even smaller than that, 0.00001 and even smaller than that.\nIt doesn't matter what number you pick, however small it is, I can give you another number that's smaller yet.\nAnd that means I cannot count the numbers between 0 and 1.\nIt's an uncountably large infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=444"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "abf9dcd1-606e-445d-8c35-b2b7a98c2c8b": {"page_content": "I don't know where to begin counting after 0.0, 0.001, we'll know it's not that because there's something even smaller than that, 0.00001 and even smaller than that.\nIt doesn't matter what number you pick, however small it is, I can give you another number that's smaller yet.\nAnd that means I cannot count the numbers between 0 and 1.\nIt's an uncountably large infinity.\nTherefore, because the number of members is so large that not only is it infinite, you can't even begin counting them, it's larger than the ones where at least you've got a hope of beginning the process towards infinity.\nSo that's an intuitive way of trying to understand the difference between countable and uncountably large infinities.\nOkay, after that long digression, let's go back to the book.\nDavid writes, so there is an uncountable infinity of real numbers between any two distinct limits, like 0 and 1.\nFurthermore, there are uncountably many orders of infinity, each too large to be put into one-to-one correspondence with the lower ones.\nAnother important uncountable set is the set of all logically possible reassignments of guessed to rooms in infinity hotel, or as the mathematicians put it, all possible permutations of the natural numbers.\nAnd so reordering the natural numbers in different orders, there's an uncountably large number of those.\nSo I'm skipping a bit here and going on to the story of the puppy.\nEveryone likes the story of the puppy.\nThat's not a real puppy, we don't have to worry.\nDavid writes, infinity hotel has a unique, self-sufficient, waste disposal system.\nEvery day, the management first rearrange the guests in a way that ensures that all rooms are occupied, then they make the following announcement.\nWithin the next minute, law guests, please bag their trash and give it to the guests in the next higher numbered room.\nShould you receive a bag during that minute, then pass it on within the following half minute.\nAnd so on.\nTo comply, the guests have to work fast, but none of them has to work infinitely fast, or handle infinitely many bags.\nEach of them performs a finite number of actions as per the hotel rules.\nAfter two minutes, all these trash moving actions have ceased.\nSo two minutes after they begin, none of the guests has any trash left.\nJust by the way, why did it take two minutes?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=483"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5443622f-429f-4d51-b209-9a49bbe42855": {"page_content": "And so on.\nTo comply, the guests have to work fast, but none of them has to work infinitely fast, or handle infinitely many bags.\nEach of them performs a finite number of actions as per the hotel rules.\nAfter two minutes, all these trash moving actions have ceased.\nSo two minutes after they begin, none of the guests has any trash left.\nJust by the way, why did it take two minutes?.\nWell, basically that's because there's this sum.\nBut it looks kind of like this.\nBegin with one minute, and then the next thing we'll tell to do is half a minute, and then the next thing we'll do is go to the hotel to add a quarter of a minute.\nAnd we just keep halving the previous number and then adding together the entire sequence.\nNow, if you know how to add together infinite sequences, in any third series of numbers rather, then you can figure this out.\nBut if you don't, then all you need to do is to take out a calculator and you will see that the series converges to two.\nIn fact, you can prove that it identically equals two, but you can at least demonstrate to yourself with nothing but a calculator that sure enough, 1 plus 0.5 plus 0.25 plus 0.125, et cetera, is going to approach two.\nSo after that process, David writes, all the trash in the hotel has disappeared from the universe.\nIt is nowhere.\nNo one has put it nowhere, every guest has merely moved some of it to another room.\nThe nowhere, where all that trash has gone is called in physics as singularity.\nSingularities may well happen in reality inside black holes and elsewhere, but I'd address.\nAt the moment, we are still discussing mathematics, not physics.\nOf course, infinity hotel has infinitely many staff.\nSeveral of them are assigned to look after each guest.\nBut the staff themselves are treated as guests in the hotel, staying in numbered rooms and receiving exactly the same benefits as every other guest.\nEach of them has several other staff assigned to their welfare.\nHowever, they are not allowed to ask those staff to do their work for them.\nThat is because if they did this, the hotel would grind to a halt.\nInfinity is not magic.\nIt has logical rules.\nThat is the whole point of the Infinity Hotel thought experiment.\nThe flacious idea of delegating all ones' work to other staff in higher-damned rooms is called an infinite regress.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=697"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ab5c1530-ac48-4dbd-a626-4bbcae3b2b23": {"page_content": "Each of them has several other staff assigned to their welfare.\nHowever, they are not allowed to ask those staff to do their work for them.\nThat is because if they did this, the hotel would grind to a halt.\nInfinity is not magic.\nIt has logical rules.\nThat is the whole point of the Infinity Hotel thought experiment.\nThe flacious idea of delegating all ones' work to other staff in higher-damned rooms is called an infinite regress.\nIt is one of the things that one cannot validly do within infinity, skipping a little bit.\nOne day in Infinity Hotel, a guest's puppy happens to climb into a trash bag.\nThe owner does not notice, and passes the bag with the puppy to the next room.\nWithin two minutes, the puppy is nowhere.\nThe distraught owner phones the front desk.\nThe receptionist announces over the public address system.\nWe apologise for the inconvenience, but an item of value has been inadvertently thrown away.\nLaw guests, please undo the trash moving actions they have just performed in reverse order, starting as soon as you receive a trash bag from the next higher-numbered room.\nBut to no avail.\nNone of the guest's returnee bags.\nBecause they are fellow guests in the higher-numbered rooms and not returning any either.\nIt was no exaggeration to say that the bags are nowhere.\nThey have not been stuffed into a mythical room-number infinity.\nThey no longer exist.\nNor does the puppy.\nNo one has done anything to the puppy except move it to another numbered room within the hotel.\nYet it is not any room.\nIt is not anywhere in the hotel or anywhere else in a finite hotel.\nIf you move an object from room to room.\nIn however complicated a pattern, it will end up in one of those rooms.\nNot so within infinite number of rooms.\nEvery individual action that the guest performed was both harmless to the puppy and perfectly reversible.\nYet, taken together, those actions annihilated the puppy and cannot be reversed.\nReversing them cannot work because if it did, there would be no explanation for why a puppy arrives at its owner's room and not a kitten.\nIf a puppy did arrive, the explanation would have to be that a puppy was passed down from the next higher-number room.\nAnd so on.\nBut that whole infinite sequence of explanations never gets around to explaining why a puppy.\nIt is an infinite regress.\nWhat if one day a puppy did just arrive at room one having been passed down through all the rooms?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=701"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "19a9c0f9-b8f1-4c33-b176-4461040dee3e": {"page_content": "If a puppy did arrive, the explanation would have to be that a puppy was passed down from the next higher-number room.\nAnd so on.\nBut that whole infinite sequence of explanations never gets around to explaining why a puppy.\nIt is an infinite regress.\nWhat if one day a puppy did just arrive at room one having been passed down through all the rooms?.\nThat is not logically impossible.\nIt would merely lack an explanation.\nIn physics, the nowhere from which a puppy would have come is called a naked singularity.\nNaked singularities appear in some speculative theories and physics, but such theories are rightly criticized on the grounds they cannot make predictions.\nAs Hawking months put it, television sets could come out of a naked singularity.\nIt would be different if there were a law of nature determining what comes out.\nFor in that case, there would be no infinite regress and the singularity would not be naked.\nThe big bang may have been a singularity of that relatively benign type.\nI said that the rooms are identical, but they do differ in one respect.\nThey're room numbers.\nSo given the types of tasks that the management requests from time to time, the low-numbered rooms are the most desirable.\nFor instance, the guest in room one has the unique privilege ever having to deal with anyone else's trash.\nMoving to room one feels like winning first prize in a lottery.\nMoving to room two feels slightly less so.\nBut every guest has a room number that is uniquely close to the beginning.\nSo every guest in the hotel is more privileged and almost all other guests.\nThe cliched politicians promise to favour everyone can be honoured in infinity hotel.\nEvery room is at the beginning of infinity.\nThat is one of the attributes of the unbounded growth of knowledge too.\nWe are not only just scratching the surface, we shall never be doing anything else.\nSo there is no such thing as a typical room number at infinity hotel.\nEvery room number is untypically close to the beginning.\nThe intuitive idea that there must be typical or average members of any set of values is false for infinite sets.\nThe saying is true of the intuitive ideas of rare and common.\nWe might think that half of all natural numbers are odd and half even.\nSo that odd and even numbers are equally common amongst the natural numbers.\nBut consider the following rearrangement and I will write this down up here.\nAs me talking now.\nSo this is the sequence more or less that David is written down in the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=701"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c6937b22-447e-420b-b052-c2c44b50a4bb": {"page_content": "The saying is true of the intuitive ideas of rare and common.\nWe might think that half of all natural numbers are odd and half even.\nSo that odd and even numbers are equally common amongst the natural numbers.\nBut consider the following rearrangement and I will write this down up here.\nAs me talking now.\nSo this is the sequence more or less that David is written down in the book.\nAnd as we can see here, all we have done is move the odd numbers after the even numbers, such that we have got two even numbers together, and then we have got an odd number.\nSo 1, 2, 4, 3, 6, 8, 5, 10, 12, 7, and you can do that forever.\nAnd this would make it appear that the odd numbers are half as common as the even numbers.\nAnd it gets worse.\nI mean what if we were to write down something like that we write down just the sequence of even numbers all the way up to 20.\nAnd then started writing the odd numbers 1.\nAnd then I did 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 3.\nWhat would that mean?.\nThat the odd numbers are now 1 tenth as common as the even numbers?.\nWe could do it every millionth, every millionth number we could write down an odd number and the rest could be even numbers.\nAnd we'd never run out of either.\nWhat does this mean?.\nThat's quite profound.\nI'll read the section where David remarks on precisely that.\nThat makes it look as though the odd numbers are only half as common as the even ones.\nSimilarly we could make it look as though the odd numbers were 1 and a million or any other proportion.\nSo the intuitive notion of a proportion of the members of a set does not necessarily apply to infinite sets either.\nNow David moves on to discussion about probability.\nAnd so let's read that section here.\nHe writes, after the shocking loss of the puppy the management of infinity hotel want to restore the morale of guests.\nSo they arrange a surprise.\nThey announced that every guest will receive a complimentary copy of either the beginning of infinity or his previous book, the fabric of reality.\nThey distribute them as follows.\nThey dispatch a copy of the older book to every millionth room and a copy of the newer book to every, to each remaining room.\nOkay, so we've got the fabric of reality in one out of every million rooms, apparently.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1039"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e58be41d-5d2d-49cb-8381-eb44f645e30c": {"page_content": "So they arrange a surprise.\nThey announced that every guest will receive a complimentary copy of either the beginning of infinity or his previous book, the fabric of reality.\nThey distribute them as follows.\nThey dispatch a copy of the older book to every millionth room and a copy of the newer book to every, to each remaining room.\nOkay, so we've got the fabric of reality in one out of every million rooms, apparently.\nSuppose that you're a guest at the hotel.\nA book gift wrapped in opaque paper appears in your room's delivery shoot.\nYou are hoping that it will be the new book because you have already read the old book.\nYou're fairly confident that it will be because after all what are the chances that your room is one of those that receive the old book?.\nExactly one and a million it would seem.\nBut before you have a chance to open the package there is an announcement.\nEveryone is to change rooms to a number designated on a card that will come through the shoot.\nThe announcement also mentions that the new allocation will move all the recipients of one of the books to odd number rooms and the recipients of the other book to even number rooms.\nBut it does not say which.\nSo you cannot tell from your new room number which book you have received.\nOf course there is no problem with filling the rooms in this manner.\nBoth books had infinitely many recipients.\nYour card arrives and you moved your new room.\nAre you now any less sure about which of the two books you have received?.\nPresumably not.\nBy your previous reasoning there is now only a one and two chance your book is the beginning of infinity because it is now in half the rooms.\nSince that is a contradiction your method of assessing those probabilities must have been wrong.\nIndeed all methods of assessing them are wrong because as this example shows in infinity hotel there is no such thing as the probability that you have received one book or the other.\nSo this is me talking now.\nThis is a profound insight into the nature of probability and how it cannot apply to infinite sets.\nWhat we had here was a thought experiment that set things up such that it appeared as if one out of every million rooms in infinity hotel had a copy of the fabric of reality.\nAnd the rest had the beginning of infinity.\nAnd so you would presume on the basis in which it is stated that the probability of you going into a random room into infinity hotel that you would find the beginning of infinity.\nBecause it seems like far more of those rooms have the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1194"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e4df9cb-a253-42a3-a0b8-f6a65142ebf1": {"page_content": "What we had here was a thought experiment that set things up such that it appeared as if one out of every million rooms in infinity hotel had a copy of the fabric of reality.\nAnd the rest had the beginning of infinity.\nAnd so you would presume on the basis in which it is stated that the probability of you going into a random room into infinity hotel that you would find the beginning of infinity.\nBecause it seems like far more of those rooms have the beginning of infinity.\nHowever once the instruction comes through that everyone who received let's say the beginning of infinity is to move to an even number room and everyone who received the fabric of reality was to move to an odd number room then in performing that exact action you now move to one of the rooms.\nBut you don't know which one it is.\nAll you know is that you have moved into either an odd number room or an even number room and the odd number rooms contain beginning of infinity and the even number rooms contain the fabric of reality.\nBut that seems to conflict with what you already assumed which is one out of every million rooms contains the fabric of reality and now it appears as though one in two rooms contains the fabric of reality.\nHow do we square these two things we square these two things because that way that intuition of thinking about probabilities as applied to infinite sets doesn't work.\nI'll continue reading David writes mathematically this is nothing momentous.\nThe example merely demonstrates again that the attributes probable or improbable rare or common typical or untypical have literally no meaning in regard to comparing infinite sets of natural numbers.\nBut when we turn to physics it is bad news for anthropic arguments.\nImagine an infinite set of universes all with the same laws of physics except that one particular physical constant let's call it D has a different value in each.\nStrictly speaking we should imagine an uncountable infinity of universes like those infinitely thin cards but that only makes the problem I am about to describe worse so let us keep things simple.\nAssume that of these universes infinitely many have values of D that produce astrophysic and infinitely many have values that do not.\nThen let us number the universes in such a way that all those with astrophysic have even numbers and all the ones without astrophysic have odd numbers.\nI'll just pause there before I go on now why would David talk about having a constant that leads to astrophysic.\nWell people involved in or interested in SETI or who write about the possibility of intelligent life out there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1295"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5559148f-e9e8-48f6-ad27-6b66e687abbd": {"page_content": "Then let us number the universes in such a way that all those with astrophysic have even numbers and all the ones without astrophysic have odd numbers.\nI'll just pause there before I go on now why would David talk about having a constant that leads to astrophysic.\nWell people involved in or interested in SETI or who write about the possibility of intelligent life out there.\nThey often confine their discussions to how do we detect astrophysic.\nWhy on earth would that be the measure of finding intelligence out there.\nWell if you're looking for intelligence the best way that we know currently according to the SETI project anyways to listen.\nTo listen to in particular radio signals coming from deep space.\nAnd if you're listening for radio signals you're probably listening for people who are deliberately sending them in our direction and they'd probably be some kind of astrophysic.\nOr using some other astrophysics technology.\nAnyway I'll continue reading.\nThis does not mean that half the universes have astrophysic.\nJust as with the book distribution in infinity hotel we can equally well label the universes so that only every third universe or every trillionth one had astrophysic.\nOr that every trillionth one did not.\nSo there is something wrong with the anthropic explanation of the fine-tuning problem.\nWe can always make fine-tuning go away just by relabeling the universes.\nAt our whim we can number them in such a way that astrophysic seem to be the rule or the exception or anything in between.\nNow suppose that we calculate using the relevant laws of physics with different values of D. Whether astrophysic is this will emerge.\nWe find values of D outside the range from say 137 to 138.\nThose that contain astrophysic as a very sparse.\nOnly one in a trillion such universes has astrophysic.\nOkay this is a complete diversion by me.\nbut it's an area I'm interested in so indulge me for a moment.\nThe choice of 137 to 138 is no accident.\nThe 137 to 138 is actually the reciprocal of what is known as the fine structure constant.\nAnd so I'll just mention that very very quickly as to what the fine structure constant is for anyone else who happens to be interested in astrophysics.\nSo the fine structure constant is known as alpha and alpha is unique, not unique.\nBut it's special because it is something called a dimensionless constant.\nAnd it's actually a constant that's made up of other really cool constants.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1435"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e613aedf-30d0-4306-a88b-971c2e99ac34": {"page_content": "The 137 to 138 is actually the reciprocal of what is known as the fine structure constant.\nAnd so I'll just mention that very very quickly as to what the fine structure constant is for anyone else who happens to be interested in astrophysics.\nSo the fine structure constant is known as alpha and alpha is unique, not unique.\nBut it's special because it is something called a dimensionless constant.\nAnd it's actually a constant that's made up of other really cool constants.\nSo the charge on an electron squared divided by Planck's constant multiplied by the speed of light.\nNow the dimensions of that, well it has, it's dimensionless because it has no units.\nSo this isn't in terms of meters per Coulomb or kilograms or anything like that.\nThe constants all cancel out and so you end up with just a number.\nAnd what's often used is one over alpha and one over alpha happens to have the value very close to 137.\nSo I think it is checking the internet right now.\n137.035, it's known very precisely. 999.074.\nAnd the fine structure constant among other things determines the strength of the electromagnetic force.\nAnd the uncertainty in this number here is extremely small.\nSo we can measure the fine structure constant really well.\nIt's called the fine structure constant because when you look at things like emission spectra made up of these bright lines when you pass light, let's say coming from a star through something through a telescope and then through a thing called a spectroscope.\nAnd you split it up into all the colors of the rainbow or whatever the colors coming from the star happen to be.\nYou notice that there is a fine structure to those lines and.\nthe fine structure constant gives us a way of the distance between these lines can give us a measure of what the fine structure constant actually is.\nAnd so we can measure the fine structure constant here in the laboratory on earth in stars that are near to us in the galaxy.\nAnd in stars and quasars on the other side of the universe.\nAnd this is what certain astrophysic is doing.\nThey're trying to measure whether or not the fine structure constant has changed over time because if it did, that would suggest something more rather remarkable.\nIt would suggest that the laws of physics are not precisely the same here on earth as they are on the other side of the universe.\nFor a while there we thought we had found a difference in the fine structure constant.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8d158776-fe4e-4c2c-a0f7-b5e93f3285b0": {"page_content": "And in stars and quasars on the other side of the universe.\nAnd this is what certain astrophysic is doing.\nThey're trying to measure whether or not the fine structure constant has changed over time because if it did, that would suggest something more rather remarkable.\nIt would suggest that the laws of physics are not precisely the same here on earth as they are on the other side of the universe.\nFor a while there we thought we had found a difference in the fine structure constant.\nBut the fact is that that was shown to be systematic error in the experiment.\nBut if the fine structure constant was changing, then the explanation for a changing fine structure constant over time could mean that Planck's constant had changed.\nThe speed of light had changed or that the charge, the elementary charge on an electron had changed.\nAnd any one of those three things would be remarkable.\nPerhaps all three could be changing, but the simple fact is it's rather boring conclusion to the moment.\nThere is no such evidence for a changing fine structure constant.\nSo that's where the number 137, I'm guessing, has come from.\nIt doesn't seem like an accident to me.\nAll right.\nOkay, so I'll just repeat what I've read there, David wrote, we find that for values of D outside the range of 137 to 138, those that contain astrophysicists are very sparse.\nOnly one in a trillion such universities has astrophysicists.\nWithin the range, only one in a trillion does not have astrophysicists.\nAnd for values of D between 137.4 and 137.6, they all do.\nOkay, so this seems to suggest that the value of D, Alpha, is key to whether or not a particular universe is going to have astrophysicists.\nGoing to have the conditions right, astrophysicists.\nLet's keep on moving, David writes, let me stress that in real life we do not understand the process of astrophysicists formation remotely well enough to calculate such numbers.\nAnd perhaps we never shall as I shall explain in the next chapter.\nBut whether we could calculate them or not, and Tropic theorists would wish to interpret such numbers as mean that if we measure D, we are unlikely to see values outside the range from 137 to 138.\nBut they mean no such thing for we could just relabel the universes, shuffle the infinite pack of cards to make the spacings exactly the other way around or anything else we liked.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "41783cc3-32e0-4250-99b5-3b7b7a4e3833": {"page_content": "And perhaps we never shall as I shall explain in the next chapter.\nBut whether we could calculate them or not, and Tropic theorists would wish to interpret such numbers as mean that if we measure D, we are unlikely to see values outside the range from 137 to 138.\nBut they mean no such thing for we could just relabel the universes, shuffle the infinite pack of cards to make the spacings exactly the other way around or anything else we liked.\nSo this is really important for people interested in questions about fine structure as a layperson I am interested in that question.\nThere's been a lot of books written on this topic.\nAnd this is an important factor keep in mind that many people have written books on this topic do not grapple with.\nBut there is this mathematical argument about the way in which we can order this infinite set.\nAnd that just because we find outside of the range for some particular constant that it is highly unlikely, apparently, for something like astrophysicist to emerge to evolve to be possible in those universes.\nA reordering of that infinite set because when we're talking about possible universes with different physical laws, what we're actually talking about is a class of universes, an uncountably large class of universes.\nAnd so we could reorder those universes in whatever order we like, such that the astrophysicist appear probable or improbable.\nAnd David goes on and he talks about Lee Smolens idea about how black holes could themselves give rise to new universes, which is an interesting idea.\nI'm going to skip almost all of that.\nAnd just move right to the end of this section, not this chapter, but this section where David writes, none of the anthropic reasoning theories that have been proposed to solve the fine-shinning problem provides any such measure.\nMost are hardly more than speculations of the form.\nWhat if there were universes with different physical constants?.\nThere is, however, one theory in physics that already describes a multiverse for independent reasons.\nAll its universes have the same constants of physics.\nAnd the interactions of those universes do not involve travel to or measurement of each other.\nBut it does provide a measure for universes.\nThat theory is quantum theory, which I shall discuss in chapter 11, skipping a very short part and David writes.\nInfinite means something like bigger than any finite combination of finite things, but that informal motion is rather circular.\nUnless we have some independent idea of what makes something finite and what makes a single act of combination finite.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1822"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e4479d6-395f-43e2-b84b-c31a52efcf8d": {"page_content": "And the interactions of those universes do not involve travel to or measurement of each other.\nBut it does provide a measure for universes.\nThat theory is quantum theory, which I shall discuss in chapter 11, skipping a very short part and David writes.\nInfinite means something like bigger than any finite combination of finite things, but that informal motion is rather circular.\nUnless we have some independent idea of what makes something finite and what makes a single act of combination finite.\nThe intuitive answer would be anthropocentric.\nSomething is definitely finite if it could be in principle being encompassed by a human experience.\nBut what does it mean to experience something?.\nWas Kantor experiencing infinity when he proved theorems about it?.\nOr was he experiencing only symbols?.\nBut we only ever experience symbols.\nOne can avoid this anthropocentrism by referring instead to measuring instruments.\nA quantity is definitely neither infinite nor infinitesimal if it could in principle register on some measuring instrument.\nHowever, by that definition a quantity can be finite even if the underlying explanation refers to an infinite set in a mathematical sense.\nTo display the result of a measurement, the needle on a meter might move by one centimeter, which is a finite distance.\nBut it consists of an uncountable infinity of points.\nThis can happen because although points appear in lowest level explanations of what is happening, the number of points never appears in predictions.\nJust pausing that just to highlight that.\nThat will become important in a moment when we get to the paradoxes of zino.\nSo I'll say that again that although points appear in lowest level explanations of what is happening, the number of points never appears in predictions.\nContinuing.\nPhysics deals in distances, not numbers of points.\nSimilarly, Newton and Liebnerts were able to use infinitesimal distances to explain physical quantities like instantaneous velocity.\nYet there is nothing physically infinitesimal or infinite in say the continuous motion of a projectile.\nSkipping a little again.\nAnd then David writes.\nOnly the laws of physics determine what is finite in nature.\nFailure to realize this is often caused confusion.\nThe paradoxes of zino of elia, such as that of the Achilles and the tortoise were early examples.\nZino managed to conclude that in a race against the tortoise, Achilles will never overtake the tortoise if it has a head start.\nBecause by the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise began, the tortoise will have moved on a little.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=1965"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "26915ac4-961d-47c2-8317-6fde520f4f2b": {"page_content": "Only the laws of physics determine what is finite in nature.\nFailure to realize this is often caused confusion.\nThe paradoxes of zino of elia, such as that of the Achilles and the tortoise were early examples.\nZino managed to conclude that in a race against the tortoise, Achilles will never overtake the tortoise if it has a head start.\nBecause by the time Achilles reaches the point where the tortoise began, the tortoise will have moved on a little.\nBy the time he reaches that new point, it will move on a little further.\nAnd so on.\nAdd infinite.\nThus the catching up procedure requires Achilles to perform an infinite number of catching up steps in a finite time, which as a finite being he presumably cannot do.\nSo I'll pause there.\nLet's refer back to what was just said.\nPhysics deals in distances, not number of points.\nThis is the solution to zino of elia's conundrum that he was in.\nNow I used to argue that there were two ways of going about this.\nOn the one hand you can talk about adding up that I had that sequence up before.\nLet's say you want to traverse a total distance of two meters.\nWell first you have to walk one meter and then you have to walk 0.5 meters and then 0.25 meters and then 0.125 meters, etc.\nAnd so it would appear that given that each individual step taken takes a finite amount of time and there's an infinite number of steps.\nThen no matter how short the amount of time given there's an infinite number of steps required, each requiring a finite amount of time, it's going to take an infinite amount of time to move two meters.\nThat would appear to be zino's argument.\nThe mathematical argument is well you can add up 1 plus 0.5 plus 0.25 plus 0.125, etc. etc. and get to 2.\nSimilarly all you're really arguing is that you're taking your two meters or whatever happens to be, the distance of two and you're splitting it up into an infinite number of points.\nThe resolution to any of this, to any time we have a supposed paradox of being able to move through an infinite number of points, but each step along the way taking a finite amount of time, adding up to an infinite amount of time, therefore making motion impossible.\nIs that your not physics is not does not deal in infinite numbers of points, physics deals and distances.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=701"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6a7d19c1-2342-4210-a27e-2529017c6eb4": {"page_content": "The resolution to any of this, to any time we have a supposed paradox of being able to move through an infinite number of points, but each step along the way taking a finite amount of time, adding up to an infinite amount of time, therefore making motion impossible.\nIs that your not physics is not does not deal in infinite numbers of points, physics deals and distances.\nAnd if you want to get from point A to point B, that's a distance and that will take you a certain amount of time.\nWhat's not going on is you actually taking time to go an infinite number of points.\nThat's the incorrect way of putting the problem.\nLet's return to the book, which explains it far more clearly than I did.\nDid you see what Zino did there?.\nHe just presumed that the mathematical notion that happens to be called infinity faithfully captures the distinction between finite and infinite, that is relevant to that physical situation, that is simply false.\nIf he is complaining that the mathematical notion of infinity does not make sense, then we can refer into Kantor, who showed that it does.\nIf he is complaining that the physical event of Achilles overtaking the tortoise does not make sense, then he is claiming that the laws of physics are inconsistent, but they are not.\nBut if he is complaining that there is something inconsistent about motion, because one could not experience each point along a continuous path, then he is simply confusing two different things that both happen to be called infinity.\nThere is nothing more to all these paradoxes than that mistake.\nWhat Achilles cannot do is not deducible from mathematics.\nIt depends only on what the relevant laws of physics say.\nIf they say he will overtake the tortoise in a given time, then overtake it he will.\nIf that happens to involve an infinite number of steps of the form, move to a particular location, then an infinite number of such steps will happen.\nIt involves his passing through an uncountable infinity of points, then that is what he does, but nothing physically infinite has happened.\nThus the laws of physics determine the distinction not only between rare and common probable and improbable fine-tuned or not, but even between finite and infinite.\nJust as the same set of universes can be packed with astrophysicists when measured under one set of laws of physics, but have almost none when measured under another, so exactly the same sequence of events.\nIn general terms, the mistake is to confuse an abstract attribute with the physical one of the same name.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=2215"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f49d4fd-b625-4fae-963f-6d495a71f2fe": {"page_content": "Thus the laws of physics determine the distinction not only between rare and common probable and improbable fine-tuned or not, but even between finite and infinite.\nJust as the same set of universes can be packed with astrophysicists when measured under one set of laws of physics, but have almost none when measured under another, so exactly the same sequence of events.\nIn general terms, the mistake is to confuse an abstract attribute with the physical one of the same name.\nSince it is possible to prove theorems about the mathematical attribute, which have the status of absolutely necessary truths, then one is misled into assuming that one possesses up pre-order knowledge about what the laws of physics must say about the physical attribute.\nPause in there, David mentions absolutely necessary physical truths.\nAs he says in the fabric of reality, as he says in this chapter very shortly, and as he said in his Dirac medal award ceremony speech, the mathematics, mathematicians misconception.\nA common theme amongst David's work absolutely necessary truths exist, and that is what mathematics is the study of.\nBut our knowledge of those absolutely necessary truths are not absolutely necessary truths.\nThat sounds too clever by half, but all it means is that our knowledge of anything is infallible.\nAnd even though mathematics is a study of things that are not fallible, just as in physics, our study of the laws of physics are the study of things that are perfect.\nThe laws of physics are perfect in some sense.\nThey're out there, they have a certain final form, they are the laws that govern the universe.\nThey are fixed in mutable.\nOur knowledge of those laws are not those laws, the knowledge and the thing in reality are two quite different things.\nSo we are always fallible out.\nThe knowledge that we produce is always error, we contain errors, but it can be about things that are absolutely necessarily true.\nI'm skipping a fair bit more of this chapter now.\nI'm skipping a significant part again now, and we're moving on to a section about the relationship between computation and mathematics and physics.\nDavid writes, Turing initially set up the theory of computation, not for the purpose of building computers, but to investigate the nature of mathematical proof.\nHilbert in 1900 had challenged mathematicians to formulate a rigorous theory of what constitutes a proof.\nAnd one of these conditions was that proofs must be finite.\nThey must use only a fixed and finite set of rules of inference.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=2340"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0515c033-4fe4-4007-adab-145fbbc1df4b": {"page_content": "David writes, Turing initially set up the theory of computation, not for the purpose of building computers, but to investigate the nature of mathematical proof.\nHilbert in 1900 had challenged mathematicians to formulate a rigorous theory of what constitutes a proof.\nAnd one of these conditions was that proofs must be finite.\nThey must use only a fixed and finite set of rules of inference.\nThey must start with the finite number of finitely expressed axioms, and they must contain only a finite number of elementary steps.\nWhere the steps themselves are finite.\nComputations, as understood in Turing's theory, are essentially the same thing as proofs.\nEvery valid proof can be converted into a computation that computes the conclusion from the premises.\nAnd every correctly executed computation is a proof that the output is the outcome of the given operations of the input.\nNow a computation can be thought of as computing a function that takes an arbitrary natural number as its input and delivers an output that depends in a particular way on that input.\nSo, for instance, doubling a number is a function.\nInfinity Hotel typically tells guests to change rooms by specifying a function and telling them, and telling them all to compute it with different inputs, their room numbers.\nOne of Turing's conclusions was that almost all mathematical functions that exist logically cannot be computed by any program.\nThey are non-computable.\nFor the same reason that most logically possible reallocations of rooms in infinity hotel cannot be affected by any instruction by the management.\nThe set of all functions is uncountably infinite, while the set of all programs is merely countably infinite.\nThat is why it is meaningful to say that almost all members of the infinite set of functions have a particular property.\nAnd also, as the mathematician code Girdle had discovered using a different approach to Hilbert's challenge, almost all mathematical truths have no proofs.\nThey are unprovable truths.\nIt also follows that almost all mathematical statements are undecidable.\nThere is no proof that they are true, and no proof that they are false.\nEach of them either is true or false, but there is no way of using physical objects such as brains or computers to discover which is which.\nThe laws of physics provide us only with a narrow window through which we can look out on the world of abstractions.\nAll undecidable statements are directly or indirectly of our infinite sets.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=2487"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "832d2e40-b27d-44d8-b184-a284e69d01d4": {"page_content": "It also follows that almost all mathematical statements are undecidable.\nThere is no proof that they are true, and no proof that they are false.\nEach of them either is true or false, but there is no way of using physical objects such as brains or computers to discover which is which.\nThe laws of physics provide us only with a narrow window through which we can look out on the world of abstractions.\nAll undecidable statements are directly or indirectly of our infinite sets.\nTo the opponents of infinity in mathematics, this is due to the meaninglessness of such statements, but to me, it is a powerful argument, like Hofstra at a 641 argument that abstractions exist objectively.\nFor it means that the truth value of an undecidable statement is certainly not just a convenient way of describing the behaviour of some physical object like computer, or a collection of dominoes.\nInterestingly, very few questions are known to be undecidable, even though most are, and I'll show a return to that point.\nBut there are many unsolved mathematical conjectures, and some of those may well be undecidable.\nTake, for instance, the prime pairs conjecture.\nA prime pair is a pair of numbers that differ by two, such as five and seven.\nThe conjecture is that there is no largest prime pair, that there are infinitely many of them.\nSuppose for the sake of argument, that is undecidable, using our physics.\nUnder many other laws of physics, it is decidable.\nThe laws of infinity hotel are an example.\nAgain, the details of how the management would settle the prime pairs issue, and not essentially to my argument.\nBut I present them here for the benefit of mathematically minded readers.\nOkay, so I'll go through this briefly, and then I'll explain a little about at least my interpretation of what I think.\nThe point is here about how if the laws of physics were different, or given the laws of physics we do have in this universe, how we can prove different things based upon the laws of physics.\nThe laws of physics are, in some sense, prior.\nThey are the things that permit what can possibly be predicted within our universe.\nAnd given that other universe, with different amino, a universe of different laws entirely, we could prove different things.\nOkay, so David writes, this is how you would prove the prime pairs conjecture in a different universe.\nNamely, the universe in which we find infinity hotel.\nDavid writes, the management would announce.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=2611"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "695de404-810a-4459-84a7-6aaaaec0774b": {"page_content": "The laws of physics are, in some sense, prior.\nThey are the things that permit what can possibly be predicted within our universe.\nAnd given that other universe, with different amino, a universe of different laws entirely, we could prove different things.\nOkay, so David writes, this is how you would prove the prime pairs conjecture in a different universe.\nNamely, the universe in which we find infinity hotel.\nDavid writes, the management would announce.\nFirst, please check within the next minute whether your room number and the number to above it are both primes.\nNext, if they are, send a message back through lower numbered rooms saying that you have found a prime pair.\nUse the usual method for sending rapid messages.\nNow one minute for the first step, and thereafter each step must be completed in half the time of the previous one.\nStore a record of this message in the lowest numbered room that is not already storing a record of a previous such message.\nNext, check with the room number one more than yours.\nIf that guest is not storing such a record as you are, then send the message to room one saying there is a largest prime pair.\nOkay, at the end of five minutes, the management would know that true for the prime pairs conjecture.\nSo there is nothing mathematically special about the undercitable questions, the non-computable functions.\nThe unprovable propositions.\nThey are distinguished by physics only.\nDifferent physical laws would make different things infinite.\nDifferent things computable.\nDifferent truths, both mathematical and scientific knowable.\nIt is only the laws of physics that determine which abstract entities and relationships are modeled by physical objects, such as mathematicians, brains, computers, and sheets of paper.\nSo what we saw there, if we have got an infinity hotel, which does not obey the laws of physics, we could prove the prime pairs conjecture, which we have no proof of here, and which will may be undecidable.\nIn infinity hotel, why does it have different laws of physical?.\nWell, one thing is an infinite number of steps can be completed, which requires energy in a finite amount of time.\nWithin five minutes, we can do an infinite number of steps, and presumably we are moving also, as we get towards the end of the computation, well beyond the speed of light, asymptotically close to infinite speed.\nThat violates many laws of physics.\nNumber one, probably, number one, it exceeds the speed of light.\nNumber two, it violates conservation of energy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=2718"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ddf53f7d-cece-496d-82d8-f76e04550c7a": {"page_content": "Within five minutes, we can do an infinite number of steps, and presumably we are moving also, as we get towards the end of the computation, well beyond the speed of light, asymptotically close to infinite speed.\nThat violates many laws of physics.\nNumber one, probably, number one, it exceeds the speed of light.\nNumber two, it violates conservation of energy.\nThe faster that we start to move, the more our momentum increases and our mass increase in the energy required to complete these, this is relativity, right?.\nThe more energy required in order to move faster and faster and faster.\nWe can't do any of this, this is why infinity hotel has different physical laws, skipping a little again, and David writes.\nBut if the laws of physics were in fact different from what we currently think they are, then so might be the set of mathematical truths, we would then be able to prove, and so might the operations that would be available to prove them with.\nThe laws of physics, as we know them, happen to afford a privileged status to such operations as not, and, and all, acting on individual bits of information, binary digits, or logical true, true false values.\nThat is why those operations seem natural, elementary, and finite to us.\nAnd why bit to, if the laws of physics were like, say those of infinity hotel, there would be no additional privileged operations acting on infinite sets of bits.\nWith some other laws of physics, the operations not, and, and, or would be non-computable.\nBy some of our non-computable functions would seem natural, elementary, and finite.\nThat brings me to another distinction that depends on the laws of physics.\nSimple versus complex.\nBrains are physical objects, thoughts are computations, of the types permitted under the laws of physics.\nSome explanations can be grasped quickly and easily.\nLike, if Socrates was a man, and Plato was a man, then both were men.\nThis is easy because it can be stated in a short sentence in a reliance on the properties of an elementary operation, namely, and other explanations are inherently hard to grasp.\nBecause their shortest form is still long and depends on many such operations, but whether the form of an explanation is long or short, whether it requires few or many elementary operations, depends entirely on the laws of physics under which it is being stated and understood.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=2865"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "710ad5a6-1d88-4733-b32d-a0f293717f29": {"page_content": "This is easy because it can be stated in a short sentence in a reliance on the properties of an elementary operation, namely, and other explanations are inherently hard to grasp.\nBecause their shortest form is still long and depends on many such operations, but whether the form of an explanation is long or short, whether it requires few or many elementary operations, depends entirely on the laws of physics under which it is being stated and understood.\nQuantum computation, which is currently believed to be the fully universal form of computation, happens to have exactly the same set of computable functions as Turing's classical computation.\nBut quantum computation drives a coach and horses through the classical notion of simple or elementary operation.\nIt makes some intuitively very complex things simple, moreover the elementary information storing entity in quantum computation, the qubit, quantum bit, is quite hard to explain in non-quantum terminology.\nMeanwhile, the bit is a fairly complicated object from a perspective of quantum physics.\nI'll just pause there, just a very brief comment on that section there, where David wrote, Quantum computation, which is currently believed to be the fully universal form of computation, happens to have exactly the same set of computable functions as Turing's classical computation.\nThat's an important note to make about quantum computation.\nThere is this misconception out that the quantum computers can actually compute a wider range, have a greater repertoire of different computations than Turing's computation does.\nThat is incorrect.\nA universal Turing computer can compute anything that a quantum computer can.\nIt's just that in many, many cases, the Turing computer would take, even if it was operating at switching speeds at the speed of light, and it had infinite memory, and the entire universe was a classical computer, it wouldn't be able to reach the end of that computation within trillions of years.\nAlthough it could do it, given an infinite amount of time, it would eventually get to the end of the computation.\nClearly, it wouldn't be a feasible computation.\nIt's not efficient for certain types of problems.\nThe quantum computer is more efficient for certain kinds of problems than what the classical computer is.\nThey can both compute the same overall number of kinds of computation.\nThey both operate on laws of physics in this universe.\nThe set of all possible computations is the same for both classical and quantum computers, but the quantum computers are faster, much faster, for a certain set of computations.\nSo skipping a bit and David returns to a discussion about the mathematicians' misconception.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=2984"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0fa470b7-951f-4747-8f4f-ff2027d25f9b": {"page_content": "The quantum computer is more efficient for certain kinds of problems than what the classical computer is.\nThey can both compute the same overall number of kinds of computation.\nThey both operate on laws of physics in this universe.\nThe set of all possible computations is the same for both classical and quantum computers, but the quantum computers are faster, much faster, for a certain set of computations.\nSo skipping a bit and David returns to a discussion about the mathematicians' misconception.\nI really like this stuff, because it is such a misconception.\nI don't think it's just a mathematicians' misconception.\nIt's mathematics teachers' misconception, therefore it's mathematics students' misconception, and therefore it's everyone's misconception, because everyone's been indoctrinated with the stuff at school.\nSo let me read through what is said here.\nWhether a mathematical proposition is true or not, is indeed independent of physics, but the proof of such a proposition is a matter of physics only.\nThere is no such thing as abstractly proving something, just as there is no such thing as abstractly knowing something.\nMathematical truth is absolutely necessary and transcendent, but all knowledge is generated by physical processes, and its scope and limitations are conditioned by the laws of nature.\nOne can define a class of abstract entities and call them proofs or computations, just as one can define abstract entities and call them triangles and of their obey, Euclidean geometry.\nBut you cannot infer anything from that theory of triangles about what angle you will turn through if you walk around a closed path consisting of three straight lines.\nNor can those proofs do the job of verifying mathematical statements.\nA mathematical theory of proofs has no bearing on which truths can or cannot be proved in reality, or be known in reality.\nAnd similarly, a theory of abstract computation has no bearing on what can or cannot be computed in reality.\nSo a computation or a proof is a physical process, in which objects such as computers or brains physically model or instantiate abstract entities like numbers or equations and mimic their properties.\nIt is now window on the abstract.\nIt works because we use such entities only in situations where you have good explanations saying that the relevant physical variables in those objects do indeed instantiate those abstract properties.\nConsequentially, the reliability of our knowledge of mathematics remains forever subsidiary to that of our knowledge of physical reality.\nEvery mathematical proof depends absolutely for its validity on our being right about the rules that govern the behaviour of some physical objects like computers or ink and paper or brains.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=3120"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "16bb60be-8880-4ffa-82b3-53c214702120": {"page_content": "It is now window on the abstract.\nIt works because we use such entities only in situations where you have good explanations saying that the relevant physical variables in those objects do indeed instantiate those abstract properties.\nConsequentially, the reliability of our knowledge of mathematics remains forever subsidiary to that of our knowledge of physical reality.\nEvery mathematical proof depends absolutely for its validity on our being right about the rules that govern the behaviour of some physical objects like computers or ink and paper or brains.\nSo contrary to what Hilbert thought and contrary to what most mathematicians since antiquity have believed and believed to this day, proof theory can never be made into a branch of mathematics.\nProof theory is a science.\nSpecifically, it is computer science.\nThe whole motivation for seeking a perfectly secure foundation for mathematics was mistaken.\nIt was a form of justificationism.\nMathematics is characterized by its use of proofs in the same way that science has characterized by its use of experimental testing.\nIn neither case is that the object of the exercise.\nThe object of mathematics is to understand or explain abstract entities.\nProof is primarily a means of ruling out false explanations.\nAnd sometimes it also provides mathematical truths that need to be explained.\nBut like all fields in which progress is possible, mathematics seeks not random truths but good explanations.\nThree closely related ways in which the laws of physics seem fine-tuned are, they name all expressible in terms of a single finite set of elementary operations.\nThey all share uniform distinction between finite and infinite operations.\nAnd their predictions can all be computed by a single physical object a universal classical computer.\nBut to simulate physics efficiently, one would need a one would in general need a quantum computer.\nIt is because the laws of physics support computational universality that human brains can predict and explain the behavior of very unhuman objects like quasars.\nAnd it is because of that same universality that mathematicians like Hilbert can build up an intuition of proof.\nAnd must technically think that it is independent of physics.\nIt is not independent of physics.\nIt is merely universal in the physics that governs our world.\nIf the physics of quasars will like the physics of infinity hotel and dependent upon the functions that we call non-computable, then we could not make predictions about them.\nUnless we could build computers out of quasars or other objects relying on the relevant laws.\nWith the laws of physics slightly more exotic than that, we would not be able to explain anything and hence could not exist.\nSo there is something special.\nInfinitely special it seems.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=3255"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f5b22aa7-a38f-4347-8d8c-8242ae477ef5": {"page_content": "If the physics of quasars will like the physics of infinity hotel and dependent upon the functions that we call non-computable, then we could not make predictions about them.\nUnless we could build computers out of quasars or other objects relying on the relevant laws.\nWith the laws of physics slightly more exotic than that, we would not be able to explain anything and hence could not exist.\nSo there is something special.\nInfinitely special it seems.\nAbout the laws of physics as we find them.\nSomething exceptionally computation-friendly, prediction-friendly, and explanation-friendly.\nThe physicist Eugene Wigner called this the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and the natural sciences.\nFor the reasons I have given, anthropic arguments alone cannot explain it.\nSomething else will.\nNow David then goes through bad explanations for what explains the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and natural sciences, including of course the simulation argument.\nThis is the argument that we are living inside of a simulation and because a simulation would be based on software, which is mathematical in nature, we should therefore expect that mathematics works inside of nature, which is of course just a simulation.\nAnd this explains it.\nAnd that of course is a bad explanation.\nIt's an infinite regress because what we really want to know is we want to understand reality.\nAnd so our question then is simply moved off.\nIt's like the God explanation.\nIt's like, well, if God created the universe, who created God and apparently will not let us ask that question.\nWell, if we're a simulation, on what computer are we running?.\nWhat's the code?.\nWho's running this computer?.\nWho built this computer?.\nWell, it's the same answer.\nWe can't ask that because beyond the universe, but these are bad explanations.\nThey're not explanations.\nThey are moving the problem from where it actually is off to a supernatural realm.\nSo I'm going to skip that section, but I encourage everyone to read it.\nDavid writes about the limitations about what we can know.\nAnd he says, how do all those drastic limitations on what can be known and what can be achieved by mathematics and by computation, including the existence of the undecidable questions in mathematics, square with the maxim that problems are soluble?.\nWell, problems are conflicts between ideas.\nMost mathematical questions that exist abstractly never appear as the subject of such a conflict.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=3388"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c24d1dd-ee27-40e6-a348-bf5b2c65edf2": {"page_content": "David writes about the limitations about what we can know.\nAnd he says, how do all those drastic limitations on what can be known and what can be achieved by mathematics and by computation, including the existence of the undecidable questions in mathematics, square with the maxim that problems are soluble?.\nWell, problems are conflicts between ideas.\nMost mathematical questions that exist abstractly never appear as the subject of such a conflict.\nThey are never the subject of curiosity, never the focus of conflicting misconceptions about some attribute of the world, about some attribute of the world of abstractions.\nIn short, most of them are uninteresting.\nMoreover, recall that finding proofs is not the purpose of mathematics.\nThe purpose is to understand, and the overall method, as in all fields, is to make conjectures and criticize them according to how good they are as explanations.\nOne does not understand a mathematical proposition merely by proving it true.\nThis is why there are such things as mathematics lectures rather than just lists of proofs.\nAnd conversely, the lack of a proof does not necessarily prevent a proposition from being understood.\nOn the contrary, the usual order of events is for them that mathematician first to understand something about the abstraction in question, and then to use that understanding to conjecture how true propositions about the abstraction might be proved and then to prove them.\nA mathematical theorem can be proved, yet remain forever uninteresting.\nAnd an unproven mathematical conjecture will be fruitful in providing explanations, even if it remains unproven for centuries, or even if it is undecidable.\nOne such example is the conjecture known in the jargon of computer science as P does not equal NP.\nIt is roughly speaking, there exists classes of mathematical questions, whose answers can be verified efficiently once one has them, but cannot be computed efficiently in the first place by a universal classical computer.\nEfficient computation is a technical definition that roughly approximates to what we mean by the phrase in practice.\nAlmost all researchers in computing theory are sure that the conjecture is true, which is further a mutation of the idea that mathematical knowledge consists only of proofs.\nThis is because although no proof is known, there are fairly good explanations of why we should expect it to be true and none to the country.\nAnd so the same is thought to hold for quantum computers.\nMoreover, a vast amount of mathematical knowledge that is both useful and interesting has been built on the conjecture.\nIt includes theorems of the form if the conjecture is true then this interesting consequence follows.\nAnd there are fewer, but still interesting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=3356"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b37f6b41-be0a-4156-a5d2-6b746421a449": {"page_content": "This is because although no proof is known, there are fairly good explanations of why we should expect it to be true and none to the country.\nAnd so the same is thought to hold for quantum computers.\nMoreover, a vast amount of mathematical knowledge that is both useful and interesting has been built on the conjecture.\nIt includes theorems of the form if the conjecture is true then this interesting consequence follows.\nAnd there are fewer, but still interesting.\nTheorems about what would follow if it were true.\nSkipping a little bit, so David is emphasizing here how even though there are problems in, there are statements that one can write down in mathematics that are undecidable.\nWe don't know if they're true or false.\nAnd there are true things in mathematics that we can't prove as true.\nThis doesn't present a problem at all for the claim problems are soluble.\nIn fact, he writes, despite ability no more contradicts, the maxim that problems are soluble.\nThen does the fact that there are truths about the physical world that we shall never know.\nI expect that one day we shall have the technology to measure the number of grains of sand on earth exactly.\nBut I doubt we shall ever know what the exact number was in Archimedes' time.\nIndeed, I've already mentioned more drastic limitations on what can be known and achieved.\nThere are direct limitations opposed by the universal laws of physics.\nWe cannot exceed the speed of light and so on.\nThen there are the limits of epistemology.\nWe cannot create knowledge opened by the fallible method of conjecturing criticism.\nArizona inevitable.\nAnd only error correcting processes can succeed or continue for long.\nNone of this contradicts the maxim because none of those limitations may never cause an unresolved conflict of explanations.\nHence, I conjecture that in mathematics as well as in science and philosophy if the question is interesting, then the problem is soluble.\nFallibleism tells us that we can be mistaken about what is interesting.\nSo three corollaries follow from this conjecture.\nThe first is that inherently insoluble problems are inherently uninteresting.\nThe second is that in the long run, the distinction between what is interesting and what is boring is not a matter of subjective taste but an objective fact.\nAnd the third corollary is that the interesting problem of why every problem that is interesting is also soluble is itself soluble.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=3634"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6dee37fd-e641-4ddf-83e6-677bba175934": {"page_content": "Fallibleism tells us that we can be mistaken about what is interesting.\nSo three corollaries follow from this conjecture.\nThe first is that inherently insoluble problems are inherently uninteresting.\nThe second is that in the long run, the distinction between what is interesting and what is boring is not a matter of subjective taste but an objective fact.\nAnd the third corollary is that the interesting problem of why every problem that is interesting is also soluble is itself soluble.\nAt present, we do not know why the laws of physics and we do not know why the various forms of universality exist that we do know many of the connections between them.\nWe do not know why the world is explicable but eventually we shall.\nAnd when we do, there will be infinitely more left to explain.\nThe most important of all limitations on knowledge creation is that we cannot prophesy.\nWe cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created or their effects.\nThe limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge it is entailed by it as I shall explain in the next chapter.\nI'll pause there.\nI saw an advertisement for David Attenborough's latest documentary.\nLove David Attenborough.\nGreat.\nLove watching his documentaries.\nAs David mentions later in the book, David Attenborough went to something that was terribly pessimistic.\nAnd many nature documentaries now are terribly pessimistic.\nAnd the thrust of one of the latest documentaries that David Attenborough has.\nIn fact, this is a common theme now running through David Attenborough documentaries.\nWonderful as they are.\nIs the natural world is swiftly coming to an end.\nOr the world is coming to an end.\nThat we are doomed.\nThat something needs to be done in order to prevent the virus that is human beings and technology and progress from destroying our world.\nIn particular, when it comes to the very real problem of climate change and the increasing temperature and the melting of Greenland and the melting of Antarctica and rising sea levels, I am like David.\nI am not an expert in this, but I am happy as I would be if I went to a urologist and asked if I had cancer and the urologist said, here are all the reasons why you do.\nI believe that the urologist has gone through sufficient training and error correction and has a good standard of trying to figure out the truth of the situation.\nBecause I understand what the process is that has led to the diagnosis of me having cancer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=3745"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b9b66874-c54e-4460-827f-0ad840e1cab4": {"page_content": "I am not an expert in this, but I am happy as I would be if I went to a urologist and asked if I had cancer and the urologist said, here are all the reasons why you do.\nI believe that the urologist has gone through sufficient training and error correction and has a good standard of trying to figure out the truth of the situation.\nBecause I understand what the process is that has led to the diagnosis of me having cancer.\nI, in the same way, think that the processes of all these scientists, these climate scientists and physicists and geologists and people who are checking the data have gotten the data right.\nI can't check all the data.\nI could spend the time to go and check the data if I wanted to.\nIt doesn't seem of all the problems that are out there.\nI am not animated that this is one of the most pressing problems of all.\nThere are many, many pressing problems from terrorism to the sun suddenly doing something that we didn't expect.\nViruses, natural disasters, earthquakes, floods.\nThere are many, many, many problems.\nSo yes, absolutely anthropocentric climate change is a real thing and something should be done about it.\nThe problem that many of us have with the way in which people are responding to anthropocentric climate change is encapsulated there in that paragraph.\nSo I just want to read it again.\nIt says, the most important of all limitations on knowledge creation is that we cannot prophesy.\nWe cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created later effects.\nSo what's it's got to do with climate change?.\nAt the moment, the overwhelming majority of purported solutions to climate change, and this goes all the way back to when David Gabbier's first TED talk.\nI mean, this is a decade now and no progress seems to have happened.\nThe solution appears to be to slow progress, literally to slow progress.\nSo taxation on sources of energy.\nTo migrate from cheap energy that works to more expensive energy that pollutes less.\nBut this is not claimed to actually solve climate change, although it has sold us that.\nAnyone can look up the modeling that if we were to reduce our use of fossil fuels by 50%, which is highly unlikely, then the temperature of the Earth will still increase because the amount of carbon dioxide will still increase.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=3793"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d940069-4c3e-49e2-9ffe-93f3f6fcde86": {"page_content": "The solution appears to be to slow progress, literally to slow progress.\nSo taxation on sources of energy.\nTo migrate from cheap energy that works to more expensive energy that pollutes less.\nBut this is not claimed to actually solve climate change, although it has sold us that.\nAnyone can look up the modeling that if we were to reduce our use of fossil fuels by 50%, which is highly unlikely, then the temperature of the Earth will still increase because the amount of carbon dioxide will still increase.\nIf we were to eliminate all fossil fuel use, which would cost more money than possibly the globe has, but let's say we did, the temperature would still increase.\nThe polarized caps would still melt, the sea levels would rise.\nSo these are not solutions.\nSo what should we do?.\nWell, one thing we should do is to actively cool the globe.\nThis is what geoengineering is about.\nThis would take energy.\nWe could manufacture mirrors and put them in space.\nThis would take energy.\nThis would take fossil fuels.\nBut possibly more importantly, if the solution is, if the problem is, the temperature is rising too much, it's running too high.\nSo therefore the solution is reduce the temperature.\nThen what we need is knowledge about how to do that.\nKnowledge production requires energy.\nThe more knowledge we can produce, the faster we can produce, and the cheaper and more efficiently we can produce it, the better.\nWe don't know how we're going to figure out fusion.\nI would hedge my bets and say fusion is physically possible here on Earth.\nIn fact, it has to be possible.\nWe know it's possible on the Sun, so if we could figure out a way to do it on Earth, fantastic.\nThere are people working on fusion power.\nOnce we have small fusion reactors here on Earth, the game over, problem solved.\nWe don't have to worry about any other kind of form of energy.\nFossil fuel or wind power, solar power will have fusion power.\nHighly efficient, very, very cheap.\nWhen the argument is given to us that we must move from fossil fuels to other kinds of energy, not to solve climate change, but merely to slow it down, people are engaged in prophecy.\nWhat they're saying is that there is no other alternative, that the knowledge to solve climate change will not be created.\nThat we are in a moment of stasis, where the only possible response to climate change is to make things worse for just about everyone.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=4015"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e37c6d07-0e40-4d1c-bbde-378c11bb2e4a": {"page_content": "Highly efficient, very, very cheap.\nWhen the argument is given to us that we must move from fossil fuels to other kinds of energy, not to solve climate change, but merely to slow it down, people are engaged in prophecy.\nWhat they're saying is that there is no other alternative, that the knowledge to solve climate change will not be created.\nThat we are in a moment of stasis, where the only possible response to climate change is to make things worse for just about everyone.\nAnd so it is kind of prophecy.\nKnowledge growth is unlimited, and we're going to see that next chapter.\nLet me finish reading this chapter.\nI'll get off my whole house.\nDavid writes, That problems are soluble, does not mean that we already know their solutions, or can generate them to order.\nThat would be a kind of creationism.\nThe biologist Peter Mediwatt describes science as the art of the soluble, but the same applies to all forms of knowledge.\nAll kinds of creative thought involve judgments about what approaches might or might not work.\nGaining or losing interest in particular problems or sub-problems is part of the creative process and itself constitutes problem solving.\nSo whether problems are soluble, does not depend on whether any given question can be answered, or answered by any particular thinker on a particular day.\nBut if progress ever depended on violating a law or a physics, then problems are soluble would be false.\nOkay, so that's the end of a window on infinity.\nAnd the next chapter is chapter nine optimism.\nI do apologize that this particular episode took much longer to produce than any of the others.\nAs I say, this is a labor of love, but I'm kind of a...\nI'm kind of buoyed by the fact that some of my favourite podcasts that are out there actually are more infrequent even than minor.\nSo I'm happy with the rate, but I'm also happy to receive messages as I do that people are encouraging me to make these more frequently.\nBut I think we're doing pretty well.\nWe're up to chapter nine.\nI've only been doing this for a close to a year, so another year in where we basically threw the entire book and then we'll be onto the fabric of reality.\nI'm going to...\nI'm not going to do chapter nine now, but what I will release soon after this episode is one about free will, I think.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=4159"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0bd29b51-1648-47a6-aedf-ad1533b43164": {"page_content": "But I think we're doing pretty well.\nWe're up to chapter nine.\nI've only been doing this for a close to a year, so another year in where we basically threw the entire book and then we'll be onto the fabric of reality.\nI'm going to...\nI'm not going to do chapter nine now, but what I will release soon after this episode is one about free will, I think.\nIt's going to be a diversion away from the beginning of an affinity, just onto something else I'm interested in.\nAre we a much shorter one than this?.\nBut thanks for watching or listening.\nI hope it was clear and I'll see you next time.\nBye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI&t=4294"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d92f5cd8-0d4d-43e9-b516-7e72d5076be2": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and this is episode 87 if you're an audio only listener.\nOtherwise it's the discussion of chapter 3 of the fabric of reality.\nChapter 3 being titled Problem Solving.\nThis is a great overview of the process of science in particular according to the Papurian worldview and it's a great refutation of all the common misconceptions about how science is supposed to work.\nMost of those misconceptions are still prevalent today and they come in all sorts of guises I've mentioned this before.\nFor example, Bayesianism is just a new incantation of the problem of induction as applied to science.\nSo what David seems to do here in this chapter is to compile and kind of refine.\nPoppers take down of induction and it's a really withering takedown here in this chapter of the fabric of reality.\nBut it goes further than just a withering takedown of induction.\nIt gives you the alternative.\nIt gives you the correct idea about how science actually manages to generate objective knowledge about the world.\nAnd I would say that no one who actually understands what this chapter is saying can remain a Bayesian or can remain confused about what induction is supposed to be and what the problem of induction is let alone how science really proceeds and really generates knowledge.\nAnd they would tend not to use phrases like this evidence confirms the theory or this makes me more confident that the theory is true and so on if you properly understand what's being said in this chapter.\nAnd this chapter is of course timely and timeless.\nRight now we are in an epoch where politicians in particular are supposed to follow Verscience, Capital T, Verscience.\nIn other words there is supposed to be a scientific consensus and all of us should have policies based on Verscience as if the science is settled and we often talk about Versatile Science.\nBut this is wrong and this is wrong because science like every other area of knowledge is conjectural and at any time it can be overturned by new evidence, new theories that explain what previously seemed to be true but in fact turn out to be strictly speaking faults.\nOf course none of this is to say we shouldn't take our best explanations seriously as our best explanations of the world and thereby make policy informed by those best explanations.\nBut whether or not the best explanations we have are really good explanations.\nWell that's another matter.\nSometimes the best explanation might be something like we don't actually really know what's going on here.\nWe don't have a good explanation.\nThat could be the best explanation, ironically, whatever the case.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=25"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "87ff971b-39b2-4cbc-bd20-f35e93da638b": {"page_content": "Of course none of this is to say we shouldn't take our best explanations seriously as our best explanations of the world and thereby make policy informed by those best explanations.\nBut whether or not the best explanations we have are really good explanations.\nWell that's another matter.\nSometimes the best explanation might be something like we don't actually really know what's going on here.\nWe don't have a good explanation.\nThat could be the best explanation, ironically, whatever the case.\nIf you want to level up your thinking, I think this chapter is a great place to start.\nIt's a chapter that if you are so far not familiar with the work of David Deutsch and Karl Popper, it's going to challenge your intuitions and reformulate I would say the way in which you do think.\nThat happens with all of David's chapters in both of these books of course but this one in particular really will take the legs out from underneath you if you haven't considered carefully these particular issues before.\nSo whether you have thought deeply about how science works or if you haven't, if you're unfamiliar with critical rationalism or Popper's worldview, this chapter might very well blow your mind.\nSo the chapter is called problem solving and Popper actually had a book called All Life is Problem Solving.\nand he really meant it.\nIf you can continue to solve your problems then you will just keep on going on living solving your problems and in fact the joy is found in perpetually solving your problems.\nThe only reason you die is because you haven't been able to solve that problem but it too is soluble and in fact if we consider life more broadly as in the evolution of species over time that too on Popper's view was an attempt at problem solving what the genes are trying to do is to solve the problem of how to survive in a certain niche.\nNow whether or not you want to push the analogy that far I don't know but all of us have problem situations things that we're interested in at a particular time and place and we're trying to sort out in order to have more fun, be more healthy, have a more flourishing life and so on and so forth.\nSo although any particular problem might be parochial and might just be about you at a particular time and place.\nThis concept of life of problem solving is a universal one it's the way in which knowledge is generated it's a certain lens through which we can view the way in which progress actually happens.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=161"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "113a73cf-dcbd-4fba-a0cf-9d295750cdbf": {"page_content": "So although any particular problem might be parochial and might just be about you at a particular time and place.\nThis concept of life of problem solving is a universal one it's the way in which knowledge is generated it's a certain lens through which we can view the way in which progress actually happens.\nProgress happens by continually identifying and then solving problems or in other words detecting errors and then correcting them.\nSo all of this is a similar way of orbiting a conception of what knowledge is all about.\nNow this chapter contains a lot of very deep ideas, a lot of subtle ideas and a lot of what you might call aphorisms that I'm going to highlight as we go through.\nIt's dense, it's counterintuitive for people who again are not familiar with this critical rationalist view of the way in which knowledge is generated.\nSo it might take a while to get through this chapter as compared to some of the others but we will persevere and we'll get there in the end.\nand hopefully we'll be able to clarify what papyrus said and what David has said and what my understanding of this chapter is as always.\nWithout further ado let's get into it.\nChapter three, problem solving and David writes, I do not know which is stranger.\nThe behavior of shadows itself or the fact that contemplating a few patterns of light and shadows can force us to revise so radically a conception of the structure of reality.\nThe argument I have outlined in the previous chapter is not withstanding its controversial conclusion, a typical piece of scientific reasoning.\nIt is worth reflecting on the character of this reasoning which is itself a natural phenomenon at least a surprising and full of ramifications as the physics of shadows pausing their my reflections.\nSo just remember that in the previous chapter called shadows, it was essentially about the shadows being cast by, well at first a torch and then a laser light.\nWhen the light passes through a double slit, this famous double slit experiment, first done by Thomas Young back in the 1800s.\nAnd if you fire this single photon of light, this single particle of light at the apparatus, you end up getting an unexpected interference pattern.\nAnd through the chain of explanation that David provides in that previous chapter, go to the previous episode of the fabric of reality for that.\nWhat you conclude, what you are forced into concluding, the only known explanation of this is that there must be other photons that you cannot detect in this universe.\nIn other words, the universe is tremendously larger than what we think.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=287"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d999b289-a15d-451e-bb36-4f3f420d1402": {"page_content": "And through the chain of explanation that David provides in that previous chapter, go to the previous episode of the fabric of reality for that.\nWhat you conclude, what you are forced into concluding, the only known explanation of this is that there must be other photons that you cannot detect in this universe.\nIn other words, the universe is tremendously larger than what we think.\nThis is why we call it a multiverse because there are these other universes which are approximately parallel to our own.\nThey don't interact very often except through these interference experiments.\nSo this, what would otherwise might be turned an insignificant observation of the movement of single photons leads to this tremendous conclusion that we live in a multiverse.\nNow, a lot of people argue against this through simple incredulity.\nIt's like, how could it be so?.\nHow could this small amount of evidence lead to such a stupendous conclusion?.\nBut we can refer to any number of other observations like this.\nDavid makes this point elsewhere that the history of astronomy certainly is a history of seeing smudges on a photographic plate here rather than there.\nAnd that leads to the conclusion that there is a whole galaxy of stars out there.\nOr imagine trying to explain to the ancients that in rocks, we would find evidence that rules in favor or rules out.\nAll other theories except that there used to be these large flightless bird type creatures roaming the earth millions upon millions of years ago.\nAnd that's found in rocks.\nWell, that some of the pinpricks of light that the ancients could see in space were actually whole other worlds just like our own.\nAnd in fact, beyond that, there were pinpricks of light that could not be seen except by the use of melted sand which arranged in a metal tube would reveal these distant objects.\nAll of the knowledge that we have today seems from a particular perspective, the perspective of an ancient, to be bizarre and ridiculous.\nA bizarre and ridiculous conclusion to draw on such scant evidence.\nAnd the multiverse conclusion is just another in that long lineage of strange stories that we tell about the world which just happened to be true.\nLet's continue and David writes.\nTo those who would prefer reality to have a more prosaic structure, it may seem somehow out of proportion unfair even that such momentous consequences can flow from the fact they tiny spot of light on the screen should be here rather than there.\nYet they do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=434"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5b4960f0-d3e0-4996-a244-11530cd9646b": {"page_content": "A bizarre and ridiculous conclusion to draw on such scant evidence.\nAnd the multiverse conclusion is just another in that long lineage of strange stories that we tell about the world which just happened to be true.\nLet's continue and David writes.\nTo those who would prefer reality to have a more prosaic structure, it may seem somehow out of proportion unfair even that such momentous consequences can flow from the fact they tiny spot of light on the screen should be here rather than there.\nYet they do.\nAnd this is by no means the first time in the history of science that such a thing has happened.\nIn this respect, the discovery of other universes is quite reminiscent of the discovery of other planets by early astronomers.\nBefore we sent probes to the moon and planets, all our information about planets came from spots of light or other radiation being observed in one place rather than another.\nConsider how the original defining fact about planets the fact they are not stars was discovered.\nWatching the night sky for a few hours, one sees that the stars appear to revolve about a particular point in the sky.\nThey revolve rigidly, holding fixed positions relative to one another.\nThe traditional explanation was that the night sky was a huge celestial sphere, revolving around the earth and that the stars were either holes in the sphere or glowing embedded crystals.\nHowever, among the thousand points of light in the sky visible to the naked eye, there are a handful of the brightest which over longer periods do not move as if they were fixed on a celestial sphere.\nThey wonder about the sky in more complex motions.\nThey are called planets from the Greek word meaning wanderer.\nTheir wandering was a sign that the celestial sphere explanation was inadequate.\nSuccessive explanations of the motion of planets have played an important role in the history of science.\nCapernicus's heliocentric theory placed the planets in the earth in circular orbits around the sun.\nKepler discovered that those orbits are ellipses, rather than circles.\nNewton explained the ellipses through his inverse square law of gravitational forces and his theory was later used to predict that the mutual gravitational attraction of planets would cause small deviations from elliptical orbits.\nThe observation of such deviations led to the discovery in 1846 of a new planet, Neptune, one of many discoveries that spectacularly corroborated Newton's theory, pausing their just my reflection.\nThis word corroborate yet proper uses it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=569"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "983245c0-7152-431e-9735-fc4d7221af45": {"page_content": "Newton explained the ellipses through his inverse square law of gravitational forces and his theory was later used to predict that the mutual gravitational attraction of planets would cause small deviations from elliptical orbits.\nThe observation of such deviations led to the discovery in 1846 of a new planet, Neptune, one of many discoveries that spectacularly corroborated Newton's theory, pausing their just my reflection.\nThis word corroborate yet proper uses it.\nIt kind of means in this sense consistent with, but if you go and look it up in a dictionary, what you find is that it says something like confirm or support, which is absolutely not what is meant here.\nIf your theory makes a prediction, for example, if you use Newton's theory of gravity, to predict that the reason why Uranus Uranus is being perturbed, it's orbit is being perturbed, is because there's another planet out there called Neptune, and if you go looking and you find Neptune, that does not confirm, that does not support, that does not say that Newton's theory is actually correct or true, or something like that, probably true, anything like that.\nWhat it means is that there is no other theory that can do as good a job as Newton, and so Newton's theory contains some truth within it, and any theory that could not make such a prediction is therefore ruled out as inferior to what Newton's is.\nAll of this might be summed up with the word corroborate.\nIt's just that warning, flagging the situation that if you go to the dictionary and you look up what corroborate means, sometimes you'll see confirm or support, explicitly not what Popper and Deutsch mean by the word.\nLet's continue, David writes.\nNevertheless, a few decades later, Einstein's general theory of relativity gave us a fundamentally different explanation of gravity in terms of curved space and time, and thereby predicted slightly different motions again.\nFor instance, it correctly predicted that every year the planet Mercury would drift by about one-ten-thousandth of a degree, away from where Newton's theory said it should be, it also implied that starlight passing close to the sun would be deflected.\nTwice as much by gravity as Newton's theory would predict.\nThe observation of this deflection by Arthur Edington in 1919 is often deemed to mark the moments at which the Newtonian worldview ceased to be rationally tenable.\nIronically, modernary appraisals of the accuracy of Edington's experiments suggest this may have been premature.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=674"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "79a5c0ad-72d7-4fb0-b418-7c184ebbcc36": {"page_content": "Twice as much by gravity as Newton's theory would predict.\nThe observation of this deflection by Arthur Edington in 1919 is often deemed to mark the moments at which the Newtonian worldview ceased to be rationally tenable.\nIronically, modernary appraisals of the accuracy of Edington's experiments suggest this may have been premature.\nThe experiment, which has since been repeated, with great accuracy, involved measuring the positions of spots, the images of stars close to the limit of the sun during an eclipse on a photographic plate.\nAs astronomical predictions became more accurate, the differences between what successive theories predicted about the appearance of the night sky diminished.\nEvermore powerful telescopes and measuring instruments have had to be constructed to detect the differences.\nHowever, the explanations underlying these predictions have not been converging.\nOn the contrary, as I have just outlined, there has been a succession of revolutionary changes.\nThus, observations of ever smaller physical effects have been forcing ever greater changes in our worldview.\nIt may therefore seem that we are inferring ever grander conclusions from ever scantier evidence.\nWhat justifies these inferences, pausing their my reflection.\nThe first thing here is that there has been a debate even among people who identify as perperians about the extent to which and whether or not we are converging on anything like reality or the truth or something like that.\nGiven that it seems as though one new theory of gravity or one cosmological theory seems to utterly overturn the previous theory.\nAnd so this sometimes leads some perperians to gravitate towards what might be called a kunian worldview, Thomas Kuhn, a far more popular philosopher, sociologist of science, a great rival of Papa.\nHe's the most again, I think I've mentioned this before.\nHe wrote the structure of scientific revolutions, the most cited work in the social sciences ever.\nBecause it basically says that science goes through these revolutions, much like happens in the social sciences.\nAnd so it cuts the physical sciences down to size and it says, well, it's not really taken in a certain sense.\nSome people think that it means that scientific knowledge is not objective.\nIt just goes through trends or fashions, that kind of thing.\nThe fancy word used is paradigm.\nSo we have a Newtonian paradigm.\nand then we have an iron-stinian paradigm and these two paradigms have nothing to do with one another and one person operating in one paradigm can't see the truth of the other paradigm.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=809"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c7d48ccf-61ad-41f8-96c7-1a7256ea09f2": {"page_content": "Some people think that it means that scientific knowledge is not objective.\nIt just goes through trends or fashions, that kind of thing.\nThe fancy word used is paradigm.\nSo we have a Newtonian paradigm.\nand then we have an iron-stinian paradigm and these two paradigms have nothing to do with one another and one person operating in one paradigm can't see the truth of the other paradigm.\nThey both work within a certain domain and we can't say that we're converging on anything like reality or the truth.\nThe problem with this whole idea is that it concentrates on what changes from theory to theory and not what remains the same from theory to theory.\nThe simple fact is that whether you are working with Kepler or Newton or Einstein, planets still exist.\nThis thing called gravity still exists.\nWe just don't know the nature of it.\nWhat happens is that in Kepler, there's some reason why called gravity that the planets go around the sun.\nWhen we get to Newton, we say it's a force.\nbut it doesn't know what causes the force.\nWe still have planets and we still have orbits.\nAnd when we get to Einstein, we still have planets.\nWe still have orbits.\nWe still have this thing called gravity and we still say that it's approximately the that are approximately a Bayes the inverse square law and this is why we have approximital ellipses in terms of all that's but we get to explain what the true nature of gravity is so far as we know now, the curvature of spacetime.\nSo so much is being preserved.\nIt's not all overthrown.\nIt is an a complete revolution.\nMany of us like to concentrate on the fact that what we're having is an incremental change in various parts of the theory.\nOf course, some parts are utterly overturned but not the entire content of our understanding of that particular concept, let alone all of our knowledge.\nI don't like to agree with the people who say it's a complete revolution.\nIt's not a complete revolution.\nA complete revolution actually undoes everything.\nEverything that was good is completely cast aside and we're implementing something else for reasons of fashion for not a good reason.\nAnd this happens in politics and if you would take it seriously in science, what you would be saying is we're going to throw away even the existence of planets, even the existence of orbits as we change from one theory of gravity to another.\nBut we're not.\nWe're not doing that at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=960"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c1ab929-57c4-4a2a-a4f2-0897b381d74a": {"page_content": "A complete revolution actually undoes everything.\nEverything that was good is completely cast aside and we're implementing something else for reasons of fashion for not a good reason.\nAnd this happens in politics and if you would take it seriously in science, what you would be saying is we're going to throw away even the existence of planets, even the existence of orbits as we change from one theory of gravity to another.\nBut we're not.\nWe're not doing that at all.\nWe're throwing away some things, replacing with others, tweaking things, coming to a deeper understanding but we're preserving a whole bunch as well.\nSo that's one thing.\nThe other thing is David says, what justifies these inferences.\nNow, I would encourage everyone to get a hold of the audiobook of the fabric of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1062"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9bc5cf05-9179-4943-9b40-c0aae437434a": {"page_content": "It's relatively new and at the beginning of that audiobook is an introduction by David Deutsch himself and in that introduction recorded what 20 years after he first wrote the book, he says that he would put certain things differently and one of the key things that he would put differently is use of the word justifies and it comes up again in chapter seven of the fabric of reality where he says, it really needs to be interpreted as an indication of the morally right thing to do or the methodologically right thing to do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1104"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5be7215a-4609-4f7c-9ebc-9d3a86c2dce4": {"page_content": "That's what he means by justifies.\nUnfortunately, it can have echoes of justification.\nIt doesn't mean that when you say what justifies such and such, that you are saying what demonstrates as true such and such.\nThat's not what he means.\nNow, I tend to think that when I read the fabric of reality and I read David's use of the word justifies.\nI'm reminded and I hope that David doesn't regard this as an insult.\nI'm reminded what Wittgenstein said of his own philosophy.\nAfter all Wittgenstein, if you recall some of my other podcasts I've talked about this, Wittgenstein argued that there are no such thing as philosophical problems and going further that therefore there's no good reason for philosophy.\nAll of our knowledge can come to us via science and perhaps mathematics.\nBut you have no need really for philosophy and so then of course people might object to Wittgenstein himself and say, well hold on Wittgenstein, you are a philosopher and you have a philosophy.\nAre you saying of your own philosophy that it's useless?.\nAnd he said, kind of, it's like a ladder in order to get yourself out of a deep well if you've fallen in.\nThat's a well-being philosophy.\nWhat you do is you use Wittgenstein's philosophy to climb your way out of the well and then once you're out of the well you can also cast aside the ladder.\nYou don't even need that anymore either.\nClever, clever little quip.\nbut I like to actually think that that's the way to understand David's use of the word justify because if you really do understand what's being said in the fabric of reality, you realize there is no way in which you can actually justify as true anything at all.\nYou can't justify stuff in science or anywhere else.\nAnd by the end of the book you understand that.\nSo that's what the word justifies.\nIt's like David gives you the ladder in order to throw away this justificationist scheme and so you can even throw away the word to a large extent as well.\nHowever in order to get there you have to grant people who don't yet agree with you the word justify.\nOkay.\nso it takes a while to undo these things.\nIt's like the word confirm or support and various other things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1154"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1f5bacd3-ba37-48db-b078-09f615adbbb7": {"page_content": "If I'm speaking with someone that he the two is completely unfamiliar with the popper and that whole way of speaking, I might very well use the word confirm and support and that kind of thing until such time as I can help them to understand the popularian worldview and once they do then you can turn around and say you never you needed to use the word support and you can never actually confirm a theory so you can do away with those entire concepts but until such time as you're both speaking the same philosophical language you're going to have to meet them halfway and so that's the way in which I interpret justify in this book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1262"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e0dc480-1760-41d4-9c27-d6958407b64a": {"page_content": "So anyway David goes on to say quote can we be sure that just because I star appeared millimetrically displaced on Eddington's photographic plate space and time must be curved or that because I photo detector at a certain position does not register a hit in weak light there must be parallel universes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1298"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d86b9f77-bc7c-4afd-8eb6-0bcab766b87f": {"page_content": "Indeed what I have just said under states both the fragility and the indirectness of all experimental evidence for we did not directly perceive stars spots on photographic plates or other external objects or events we see things only when images of them appear on our retinas and we do not perceive those images until they have given rise to electrical impulses in our nerves and those impulses have been received and interpreted by our brains thus the physical evidence that directly swathes us and causes us to adopt one theory a worldview rather than another is less than millimetering it is measured in thousands of emilometer the separation of nerve fibers in the optic nerve and in hundreds of adult the changes in electric potential in our brains in our nerves that make the difference between our perceiving one thing and perceiving another pausing there just my reflection on this if you hear the phrase evidence is theory laden or something like that this is one sense in which that phrase is cashed out when you hear that phrase evidence is theory laden or perception is theory laden any of those things this is what is meant by that that when you say you've seen something it's not a direct experience because we know we have a theory of site and how it works and it's complicated it's not simply that you look outside and you see the sun shining what that means is photons of light have actually entered your eyes and those photons of light have fallen upon your retina which have given rise to well actually it's really complicated it goes through causes chemical changes in the photosensitive cells of the eye in the light sensitive cells of the eye and that gives rise to electrical impulses which travel along the optic nerve and then to the brain so this whole process is what seeing is it is a complicated process speaking of perceptions now your perception might change a little bit because I've decided that I'm going to just slightly alter my setup here so that the audio sounds a bit better when I record video the audio sounds one way I've noticed and when I don't by plugging my microphone directly into my computer it sounds better you don't need to hear all the details I suppose anyway you won't be seeing my face again for the remainder", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1321"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4aa146b7-7ea1-40bd-9d61-6ff5d125c6d0": {"page_content": "speaking of perceptions now your perception might change a little bit because I've decided that I'm going to just slightly alter my setup here so that the audio sounds a bit better when I record video the audio sounds one way I've noticed and when I don't by plugging my microphone directly into my computer it sounds better you don't need to hear all the details I suppose anyway you won't be seeing my face again for the remainder of this episode this is just an experiment I want to see here the difference between the audio only type version and the video on audio type version an overall majority of people only listen to me they don't watch me it's like a ratio of 10 to 1 almost and so just to make things a little bit easier from the.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1439"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "63f39709-ad26-4b71-abae-73a7d0248382": {"page_content": "I'm just going to record audio only for the remainder of this with the exception that there are a few images to come and the reason they're images to come is because David provides them in the book and.\nI so I want to show you those images so they'll be important.\nbut for now I'm just switching to audio only.\nokay so here we are back with the audio only version now to my ear this sounds better.\nand it's also rather easier for me to edit however if I get feedback to say that people would prefer the video then I will continue to do that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1488"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "809fd632-b22e-44ab-a984-350db8213659": {"page_content": "and I'm not going to stop doing that at least for the introductions I would say but for rather the majority of the podcast makes things a lot easier and I think it actually sounds better if I'm just doing audio for various technical reasons anyway let's keep going I'm up to the point in the book where David writes quote however we do not accord equal significance to all our sensory impressions in scientific experiments we go to great lengths to bring to our perceptions those aspects of external reality that we think might help us to distinguish between rival theories we are considering before we even make an observation we decide carefully.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1524"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db37f975-5efa-4b97-a0f2-8b3375fb21c1": {"page_content": "where and when we should look and what we should look for pausing their my reflection okay this idea that we look for observations which can decide between rival theories is so important this is the concept of a crucial test and David has written an absolutely wonderful paper all about this called the logic of experimental tests with a particular emphasis on ever reading in quantum theory but you can actually read through the paper without a bothering with the quantum theory part unless you're a quantum physicist because it explains what the point of a crucial test is this particular jewel in the crown if you like of the scientific method insofar as there is a scientific method but this point of crucial test is where you've got two rival theories there is an observation which will rule out one of them leaving you with only one theory that explains the evidence before you this is where certain subjects let's just call them out let's say psychology sometimes gets things wrong if you're going around collecting data and you're trying to extrapolate from the data but you don't actually have a theory to begin with you're missing the point of science you're missing the point of collecting data collecting data essentially amounts to doing an experiment actually going out into the world making observations but in psychology rather too often they simply collect data and then don't have an explanation before they begin collecting the data here's a caricature or a cartoonish version of such a psychological study and the other reason I know about this is because in schools of certain kinds you can actually study a subject called psychology now what they do there is they actually can force the students to undertake an experimental study and what they do is they do things like well let's check how impulsive different groups of people are so let's check how impulsive people are given their gender so we'll check how impulsive a male person is versus a female person and the way in which you might do this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1567"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15d64256-0258-4c94-b4e7-add950186a8d": {"page_content": "well the standard thing of let's put them in a room with a cake for a little while and let's see who eats the cake first and let's say you have a statistically significant number of occasions where it's the male that takes a bite out of the cake before the female does and so on this basis you then draw the conclusion therefore males are more impulsive than females but you haven't actually at any point figured out the reason why all you're saying is that there is a correlation that you've discovered there's no explanation there though is it really the maleness versus the femaleness is that the thing is it something deeper than that is it something about the amount of testosterone and if it is the amount of testosterone why by what mechanism or is it something deeper still than that is it in the genes if it is in the genes how so is it something to do with the weighing which males are raised as children that causes to be more impulsive which could rule out this whole idea that males are more impulsive than females in the first place it could simply be a cultural thing have nothing to do with males whatsoever and having everything to do with ideas this is the poverty of explanation less science you can't do an experiment a legitimate experiment a useful experiment until such times you have an explanation and the explanation is then going to be tested again to reality that's what the experiment is and in fact it's even worse than this because if you have only one explanation and you do do an experiment and the experiment disagrees with your explanation there is no way to refute throw away discard the explanation after all how then you go about explaining the observations you are making and how do you know that it's not the experimental method that is falling apart that is the reason for the disagreement this is the Jewham coin thesis again and pop was fully aware of it and George is fully aware of it and anyone who is a proper barbarian is fully aware that sometimes you can do an experiment and although the experiment disagrees with the explanation with the scientific theory that doesn't necessarily it doesn't logically mean that the theory is wrong especially in a case where you only", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1694"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "393e4304-b0c1-42d6-a3ef-11d424ba61e9": {"page_content": "falling apart that is the reason for the disagreement this is the Jewham coin thesis again and pop was fully aware of it and George is fully aware of it and anyone who is a proper barbarian is fully aware that sometimes you can do an experiment and although the experiment disagrees with the explanation with the scientific theory that doesn't necessarily it doesn't logically mean that the theory is wrong especially in a case where you only have one explanation the only explanation the scientific explanation which is why David has said there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1797"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3045ee46-e28a-4672-a183-2d44db125ec6": {"page_content": "quote and I'll just continue reading before we even make an observation we decide carefully where and when we should look and what we should look for often we use complex specially constructed instruments such as telescopes and photo multipliers yet however sophisticated the instruments we use and however substantially external causes to which we attribute their readings we perceive those readings exclusively through our own sense organs there is no getting away from the fact that we human beings are small creatures with only a few inaccurate incomplete channels through which we receive all information from outside ourselves we interpret this information as evidence of a large and complex external universe or multiverse but when we are weighing up this evidence we are literally contemplating nothing more than patterns of weak electric current trickling through our own brains pausing their my reflection now you will notice if you are a dutch super fan so to speak that he has used the phrase there weighing up this evidence and again that might set off alarm bells I'm sure he doesn't literally mean in fact we know he doesn't literally mean weighing up this evidence because he explains this in the beginning of infinity what would be meant there is just a prosaic idea of considering this evidence okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1829"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "66cd54c7-c4b8-44c4-b59f-91cd3293e7be": {"page_content": "we're not weighing some evidence against others it's just a turn of phrase we're not actually weighing up by some process after all evidence doesn't have a particular weight either the evidence agrees with an explanation or it doesn't and if it doesn't then we have a problem and we have to guard out solving that problem if we have two theories and it agrees with one explanation but does not agree with the other the one that it doesn't agree with is refuted typically speaking could always be it can always logically be the case that the experiment has been performed incorrectly it always comes down to explanations and argument and having a good understanding of what's going on throughout the experiment but especially in cases where you only have one theory and you have one experiment which disagrees with your one theory you simply have a problem you don't know what's going wrong.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1908"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a0ed3d4-f8d1-475f-89b5-808af212ae27": {"page_content": "you're not in a position to say therefore the theory is incorrect you don't know you don't know if the theory the explanation is incorrect or your theory of the experiment is incorrect the theory of how the instrument that is being used in the experiment is working that it's all theories everything observation is theory laden as we say perception is theory laden the evidence is theory.\nladen the whole world is theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1968"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aac6f7c0-1575-4bb8-91c8-140c56f3a56b": {"page_content": "laden it's all being interpreted by your mind and back to the book what justifies the inferences we grow from these patterns it is certainly not a matter of logical deduction there is no way of proving from these or from any other observations that the external universe or multiverse exists at all let alone that the electric currents received by our brains stand in any particular relationship to it anything or everything that we perceive might be an illusion or a dream illusions and dreams are after all common solipsism the theory that only one mind exists and that what appears to be external reality is only a dream taking place in that mind cannot be logically disproved reality might consist of one person presumably you dreaming a lifetime's experiences or it might consist of just you and me or just the planet earth and its inhabitants and if we dreamed evidence any evidence of the existence of other people or other planets or other universes that would prove nothing about how many of those things they're really are pausing there just my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=1990"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6ce4281a-0670-4674-ae19-39087db36fda": {"page_content": "so this idea of solipsism this idea that only you exist and everything's being dreamed into reality it just keeps cropping up again and again in the history of philosophy one of the earliest mentions is of course Plato's cave this idea that what he got right of course in in Plato's cave is that we only have access to our senses we don't have direct access to reality but taken too far it means that perhaps external reality doesn't even exist at all that all you have are just your senses they can't came up with a method of doubt and he thought that well it could be possible that there would be this evil demon that might be deceiving you you know this all powerful almost all powerful demon that could be tricking you into thinking the external reality actually exists some sort of creature with superpowers then the movies the matrix are all about this as well that perhaps we're sitting inside of some sort of computer simulation type thing and taken to an even more extreme we have Nick Bosch from simulation hypothesis all of these are logically equivalent they're what literally tannett has called super naturalism this idea that you're just appealing to some idea that is a priori beyond our capacity to refute well refute experimentally anyway because it puts itself beyond what physics can possibly probe in other words beyond physical or natural or it's supernatural super naturalism I think that's exactly right we can ignore all these things because we can refute them not by experiment but by argument which is where David's going to get to and so David picks up the discussion where he writes quote since solipsism and an infinity of related theories are logically consistent with your perceiving any possible observational evidence it follows that you can logically deduce nothing about reality from observational evidence how then could I say that the observed behavior of shadows rules out the theory that there is only one universe or that eclipse observations make the Newtonian worldview rationally untenable how can that be so if ruling out does not mean disproving what does it mean why should we feel compelled to change our worldview or indeed any opinion at all on account of something being ruled out in that sense this critique seems", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2060"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4c75b907-bc8f-404d-a683-a59c7aaf334f": {"page_content": "evidence how then could I say that the observed behavior of shadows rules out the theory that there is only one universe or that eclipse observations make the Newtonian worldview rationally untenable how can that be so if ruling out does not mean disproving what does it mean why should we feel compelled to change our worldview or indeed any opinion at all on account of something being ruled out in that sense this critique seems to cast out on the whole of science on any reasoning about external reality that appeals to observational evidence if scientific reasoning does not amount to sequences of logical deductions from the evidence what does it amount to why should we accept its conclusions this is known as the problem of induction pausing them our reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2174"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40d8fc38-cce4-4e6b-922a-1cfeb63698b3": {"page_content": "okay so let's just recap that here so that we have in mind a clear understanding of what we mean by the problem of induction so the story goes typically if you ask someone who is familiar let's say with science but not necessarily with the philosophy of science what we do in science to produce knowledge of the physical world what they might say sometimes is we make observations and from those observations we deduce explanations we read from the book of nature so to speak we observe the world and then from those observations logically derive a theory about what's going on and in fact by the way this is what the Bayesians kind of think they just think that they derive probably true theories rather than absolutely true theories and they can calculate how confident they are in the theory that they deduce from these observations but whatever the case this problem of induction as it was classically framed was something like well you observe day after day morning after morning the sun rising and therefore you deduce in some way the theory that the sun will continue to rise tomorrow now of course that's merely a prediction that's our next one what we're about to get to that as well as David goes on to say quote the name problem of induction derives from what was for most of the history of science the prevailing theory of how science works the theory was that there exists short of mathematical proof a lesser but still worthy form of justification called induction pausing there just my reflection again this word induction has lots of different meanings firstly there is a deductive method in mathematics called proof by induction and it is deductive so it's important not to get the two confused because they're actually opposites of one another one is a logical method of proof in mathematics what typically happens by the way and this is this happens in high school mathematics among other things what you do is you're given a formula you then show that the formula works for n equals one it's valid for n equals one then you assume that it's true for some general case n equals k.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2224"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "17f0a5f7-70ba-44b2-be97-b30fb731f716": {"page_content": "and then you show that given that assumption it actually works for n equals k plus one and given that you've already shown that it works for the n equals one case then substituting n equals one for n equals k and showing that therefore it works for one then two and off into infinity given the formula you've just got you've proved via the method of induction that this formula works for all possible cases of n now that's perfectly valid that is a perfectly valid way of doing mathematical proof it's deduction by unhappy coincidence I get I haven't looked into the history of this but by unhappy coincidence I guess that the philosophers of science early on went well there must be a similar method in science we're going to use the same word induction where we can prove such a thing holds for all cases often to infinity this doesn't work for a whole bunch of reasons because unlike with a mathematical formula which is necessarily true it's predictable in necessarily true ways the physical world is not like that it's not like that at all we know this we know that tomorrow doesn't look like yesterday things change in the physical world all the time we don't understand all the reasons why by the way but the certainly the laws of physics mandate that not everything that happens from day to day today will be precisely the same there are other forms of induction as well by the way this word induction it also works in physics in various ways this is well it has different meanings there's charging something by induction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2381"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6af2cc2d-cfea-4cab-917e-f123699ccafa": {"page_content": "so if you have an electric charge on one object and you bring it close to another object which is either to not yet charged and then in bringing these two things closer what happens the neutral one well let's say let's say you've got an object a the way that electrical induction works well static electrical induction anyway imagine two spheres metal one of which has a negative electric charge you've charged the bias some methods and a second sphere which is neutral you bring them close to each other but not touching not touching and if you have them such they're not touching in the both metal spheres the first of which is negative well it will push away the negative charges on the second sphere and you can then discharge those negative charges on the second sphere because you have this dipole and when you do do the discharging this is called charging by induction now there's also other kinds of electrical induction as well that go on there's also the induction that happens when an employee enters a new workplace of the first time they undergo a process of induction so induction is curious in that it has very very many different meanings that have very little to do one with another but this kind of induction this induction in the philosophy of science it's about if you can't derive logically if you can't prove that a particular theory is true given the evidence perhaps you can get almost true a highly confident something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2473"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d549d01-8ce1-4a89-ae88-b6816bf88218": {"page_content": "and so we don't have deduction but we have induction which is almost as good that's what was hoped for in science David writes induction was contrasted on the one hand with the supposedly perfect justification provided by deduction and on the other hand with supposedly weaker philosophical or intuitive forms of reasoning that do not even have observational evidence to back them up in the inductive theory of scientific knowledge observations play two roles first in the discovery of scientific theories and second in their justification a theory is supposed to be discovered by extrapolating or generalizing the results of observations then if large numbers of observations conform to the theory and non deviates from it the theory is supposed to be justified made more believable probable or reliable this scheme is illustrated in this picture that I'm putting up on the screen or figure 3.1 in the original book just pausing their my reflection on this I've written an article that's on my website and you can just google my name Brett Hall induction and it should come up for you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2559"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f65e678d-1f31-4807-8dfc-be5328782366": {"page_content": "and it's an attempt to show that precisely that sentence there the David writes where he said quote if large numbers of observations conform to the theory and non deviates from it the theory is supposed to be justified made more believable probable or reliable and my favorite example of this is anyone with a thermometer and a stove and a pot of water can do the experiment where you turn on the stove which typically is a relatively constant source of heat and monitor the temperature over time and if you plot a graph of the temperature versus the time and you have no clue or you pretend to have no clue about what's going to happen next you will notice a wonderfully linear trend or very close to linear anyway for example maybe every minute the temperature of the water goes up by 10 degrees Celsius and if you monitor the temperature between you know 20 degrees Celsius up to 80 degrees Celsius you get this lovely trend line and you could you could monitor at every single degree that it rises what does this suggest well let's suggest that if you think induction is a thing then you can extrapolate the theory that as you heat the water it continues to rise in temperature now until until you boil the water you don't know that at 100 degrees Celsius something special and unexpected happens the temperature of the water doesn't continue to rise but you only know that you would only know that observation if you actually ever got to the point where you reach the boiling point of water you can never rule out there's not going to be a surprising observation out there like the boiling of water.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2600"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0db045fd-26a5-4232-a08b-c7522fa98ff6": {"page_content": "so anyway I think that that is proof enough so to speak refutation enough at least that induction cannot possibly be the way that science works putting aside what David's about to say next that it's not even predominantly about extrapolation and prediction that's just a small part.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2722"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f0097282-a9c2-4044-959e-22dab96fbc99": {"page_content": "and anyway you can't make the prediction until you have an explanatory theory behind you let's keep going David writes quote the inductivist analysis of my discussion of shadows would therefore go something like this we make a series of observations of shadows and see interference phenomena stage one the results conform to what would be expected if there existed parallel universes which affect one another in certain ways but at first no one notices this eventually stage two someone forms the generalization that interference will always be observed under the given circumstances and thereby induces the theory that parallel universes are responsible with every further observation of interference stage three we become a little more convinced of that theory after a sufficiently long sequence of such observations and provided that none of them ever contradicts a theory we conclude stage four that the theory is true although we can ever be absolutely sure we are for all practical purposes convinced it is hard to know where to begin criticizing the inductivist conception of science it is so profoundly false in so many different ways perhaps the worst flaw from my point of view is the sheer non sequitur that a generalized prediction is tantamount to a new theory pausing there going back and just reading that that's really important the sheer non sequitur that a generalized prediction is tantamount to a new theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2742"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f368c888-8a90-46b5-a10b-30dbe97175b8": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0b8d008e-0043-4c4c-b83e-3545cd0fc3c6": {"page_content": "so what David saying there is that just making a prediction so if you're observing again classic theory classic example rather the sun rising each day and on that basis you say therefore the sun will rise tomorrow that's not a new explanatory theory you've been explained anything you're just saying what will happen tomorrow but you've never said why you haven't said why that whole thing that the blacks one thing you know you're just observing whites one after whites one after white swan and therefore you conclude on that basis that all swans are white but that's not a theory either that's not really a part of science saying all swans are white we want to know why why are swans white why can't there for example be black swans even though there are that's not what these science of ornithology the study of birds is about it's about trying to have an understanding of the commonalities between different birds species what a bird is as distinct from a mammal and so on and so forth it's not all swans are white it's not all xy or the sun will continue to do this tomorrow or those things are derivations from good explanations which we don't yet have on this conception of how science works.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2827"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec14d2c8-d207-4531-aa31-b08b2dc0363c": {"page_content": "but we're about to get there in the purian view so David goes on to say like all scientific theories of any depth the theory that there are parallel universes simply does not have the form of a generalization from the observations did we observe first one universe then a second and a third and then induce that there are trillions of them was the generalization that planets will wander around the sky in one pattern rather than another equivalent to the theory that planets are worlds in orbit around the sun and that the earth is one of them it is also not true that repeating our observations is the way in which we become convinced of scientific theories as I have said theories are explanations not merely predictions if one does not accept a proposed explanation of a set of observations making the observations over and over again is seldom the remedy still less can it help us to create a satisfactory explanation when we cannot think of one at all pausing their my reflection it's interesting in the history of astronomy as well if you look at people trying to explain astronomers trying to explain early on how the solar system formed the theory of our solar system actually reached out beyond the solar system two other stars so the story here is that around our sun coalesced all the other planets which formed from that original gas and dust cloud out of which the sun formed as well and so did the other stars out there what do I bring this up.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2910"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e4bf22d-a6c3-4572-bcbd-1d9aa01a4db7": {"page_content": "well we hadn't yet observed any other planets out there orbiting any other stars until I think 94 1994 I think that was the first time we saw if it wasn't then it was very close to then certainly we hadn't actually seen with our telescopes any evidence of planets orbiting other stars prior to let's say 1980 but theories of solar system formation were absolutely there and suggested there should be planets orbiting most stars out there that was already thought as being the case but the theory that we had of those planets also said that with the current telescope technology we couldn't observe them they had to invent new techniques in order to observe the planets that they predicted and thought were there so it wasn't like we were observing planet after planet after planet orbiting star after star after star in order to reach the conclusion that therefore there are planets orbiting most stars no we already had the theory about solar system formation which applied not only to our solar system but also to all other stars out there that's how science works we have the conjectured creative explanation which reaches out from the thing we're observing to all the unobserved stuff and then maybe later we can figure out ways to observe that unobserved stuff or hitherto unobserved stuff as we did with extra solar planets David goes on to say as I have said theories or explanations not merely predictions if one does not accept a proposed explanation of a set of observations making the observations over and again is seldom the remedy still less can it help to create a satisfactory explanation when we cannot think of one at all you're not just to repeat what David said there as I have said theories are explanations not merely predictions if one does not accept a proposed explanation of a set of observations making the observations over and over again is seldom the remedy still less can it help us to create a satisfactory explanation when we cannot think of one at all furthermore even mere predictions can never be justified by observational evidence as Bertrand Russell illustrator in his story of the chicken.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=2950"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b224226c-54c5-4a43-a15c-a918b5af54da": {"page_content": "okay pausing here I'm just going to tell this in my own words just to make it faster than merely reading it so this idea of Russell's chicken was I've had the parable of Russell's chicken which I think I'll tell that a dozen times now in this podcast series the idea is this farmer is keeping a chicken and the chicken is being fed day after day after day and so the chicken who's an inductivist reasoner of a kind thinks that he's going to continue to be fed day after day after day well he's sorely disappointed when on Christmas Eve or something like that his neck is wrung and he's killed and biked and eaten by the farmer now what does this say well it says that you number one you already need a theory in mind don't you you need to have the theory that the farmer has some sort of benevolent feelings towards you if you're the chicken being fed day after day after day.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3134"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "83bffd7b-212f-43e4-a65f-ef2f2ccc5d4e": {"page_content": "but there's another theory that is consistent with those observations perfectly consistent which is that the farmer is fattening you up to slaughter you for Christmas dinner and an infinite number of other explanations as well as to why you're being fed day after day after day the thing is whether or not you have a good explanation and can be experimentally tested in some way what David says all about this in his way is that um this disappointment experienced by Russell's chicken has also been experienced by trillions of other chickens this inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusions however this line of criticism lets inductivism off far too lightly it does illustrate the fact that repeated observations cannot justify theories but in doing so in entirely misses or rather accepts a more basic misconception namely that the inductive extrapolation of observations to form new theories is even possible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3193"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "70306ac1-c4e3-4817-b8db-359c9f011733": {"page_content": "okay so that again that the inductive extrapolation of observations to form new theories is even possible in fact it is impossible to extrapolate observations unless one already has placed them within an explanatory framework for example in order to induce its false prediction Russell's chicken must first have had in mind a false explanation of the farmer's behavior perhaps it guessed that the farmer harbored benevolent feeling towards chicken causing their more reflection.\nyes so the idea is you need you start with theories you must have a theory to begin with before you can make an extrapolation so in this case the theory was it's almost like you're assuming the conclusion you're assuming.\nokay the farmer is benevolent.\nokay that's the idea so therefore the farmer will continue to feed the chicken.\nwell why is the farmer continuing to feed the chicken because of benevolent it's this wonderfully self-contained little thing but whatever the case you've already got the theory there the theory is already in hand it's not observations leading to the theory.\nno it's a theory that explains the observations or purportedly explains the observations in fact it's quite wrong it's a false explanation absent absent a theory you're not really saying much like if I go back to that the son has risen every day of my life let's say.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f2af236f-a3c4-4a69-b306-9bef7147e06e": {"page_content": "and I say well on that basis therefore the son will rise again tomorrow what problem am I solving it is the problem should I expect the son to rise tomorrow and if if the answer is yes why because it's risen every day previously how does that follow it follows only if I have an explanation as to why all times in the past should resemble all times in the future you know for example in the real in the real case you know this particular place on the earth the earth is rotating and therefore that causes the son to come to appear on the horizon approximately every 24 hours.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3336"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69e077cb-ef81-48de-bb09-530e0a1a3c50": {"page_content": "but of course we now it's completely false if you go you know up to the arctic circle or something like that I'm skipping apart and David goes on to explain more about Russell's chicken you know the on the one hand you can say Russell's chicken extrapolates and he's going to continue to be fed every single day based on the fact that he has thus far been fed every single day and on the other hand if he has a different theory that he's being fed every single day only because he's being fattened up so they can be slaughtered well you've got the same set of observations you know namely on being fed every single day leading to two contradictory theories so what does David say about that he goes on to write quote the fact that the same observational evidence can be extrapolated to give two diametrically opposed predictions according to which explanation one adopts and cannot justify either of them is not some accidental limitation of the figure out environment it is true of all observational evidence under all circumstances observations could not possibly play either of the roles assigned to them in the inductive scheme even in respect of mere predictions that alone genuine explanatory theories admittedly inductivism is based on the common sense theory of the growth of knowledge that we learn from experience and historically it was associated with deliberation of science from dogma and tyranny.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3375"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c56e338-4a1a-4fd1-b145-18eaf9881fc5": {"page_content": "but if we want to understand the true nature of knowledge and it's placed in the fabric of reality we must face up to the fact that inductivism is false root and branch no scientific reasoning and indeed no successful reasoning of any kind has ever fitted the inductivist description pausing their my reflection.\nyes so of course we have this idea which is also known as empiricism that it at least gets something right.\nokay there's something that it gets right is better to learn from experience better to learn from an encounter with reality how is that better better than what better than authority better than just opening up your scripture let's say or listening to the man wearing the dress the priest or whatever listening to what they say and just doing what they say okay which is certainly better than just making you all up on your own constantly as well.\nokay.\nso there are there are degrees of getting things wrong so to speak trying never to learn anything and never listen to anything never to observe anything that's one level of error thinking that one particular person or one particular book has all the answers that's another level at least you're taking into account the ancient wisdom perhaps.\nand then there is of course well let's actually get feedback from reality in some way shape or form.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3453"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "645298e1-d25e-4190-8b4f-34f442c8ce93": {"page_content": "but if you think that getting feedback from reality in the form of just repeatedly observing the same thing over and over again is the why that it works that's wrong as well so all of those ways aren't as good at all they don't capture the truth anywhere near like the critical rationalist way the popularian view of observations are about ruling between competing theories okay which is what we're about to get to David goes on to write quote what then is the pattern of scientific reasoning and discovery we have seen that inductivism and all other prediction centered theories of knowledge are based on a misconception what we need is an explanation centered theory of knowledge a theory of how explanations come into being and how they are justified a theory of how why and when we should allow our perceptions to change our worldview once we have such a theory we need no separate theory of predictions for given an explanation of some observable phenomenon it is no mystery how one obtains predictions and if one has justified an explanation then any predictions to write from that explanation are automatically justified to pausing the more reflection now remember of course David Deutsch is the person that figured out what a good explanation is and therefore a way of distinguishing between different explanations this hard to vary criterion which meant that well you know people make discovery throughout their life and so between the time of writing this the fabric of reality and the beginning infinity apparently he's created the good way of delineating between good and bad explanations which makes this talk of justification redundant like I say you could view it as being Wittgenstein's latter allowing you to climb out of the well of justificationism and once you're out of that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3534"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ac88f18-c2df-4410-b813-3b71b2275b9d": {"page_content": "well you can just discard the latter and you don't need to use the word anymore but better yet read this in light of the beginning infinity just consider that the beginning of infinity the content there explains what really a good explanation is so we don't have to worry about justifying explanations we just have to worry about what a good explanation is compared to a bad explanation or non explanation and therefore if we have competing good explanations at a particular point in time what means by which we will refute one not the other and in science of course that's the crucial experiment anyway here David goes on to write fortunately the prevailing theory of scientific knowledge which in its modern form is too largely to the philosopher Karl Popper and which is one of my four main strands of explanation of the fabric of reality can indeed be regarded as a theory of explanations in this sense it regards science as a problem solving process inductivism regards the catalog of our past observations as a sort of skeletal theory supposing that science is all about filling in the gaps in that theory by interpolation and extrapolation problem solving does begin with an inadequate theory but not with the notion of theory consisting of past observations it begins with our best existing theories when some of those theories seem inadequate to us and we want new ones that is what constitutes a problem thus contrary to the inductive a scheme shown in figure 3.1 scientific discovery need not begin with observation evidence but it does always begin with a problem by a problem I do not necessarily mean our practical emergency or a source of anxiety.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3655"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4d548d13-cb2f-4a7b-97f3-f58146bc2c26": {"page_content": "I just mean a set of ideas that seems inadequate and worth trying to improve the existing explanation may seem too glib or too labored it may seem unnecessarily narrow or unrealistically ambitious one might glimpse a possible unification with other ideas or a satisfactory explanation in one field may appear to be irreconcilable with an equally satisfactory explanation in another or it may be that there have been some surprising observations such as the wandering of planets which existing theories did not predict and cannot explain this last type of problem resembles stage one of the inductive a scheme but only superficially for an unexpected observation never initiates a scientific discovery unless the pre-existing theories already contain the seeds of the problem for example clouds wonder even more than planets do this unpredictable wandering was presumably familiar long before planets were discovered moreover predicting the weather would always have been favorable to farmers seafarers and soldiers so there would always have been an incentive to theorize about how clouds move yet it was not meteorology that blazed the trail for modern science but astronomy observational evidence about meteorology was far more readily available than in astronomy but no one paid much attention to it and no one induced any theories from it about cold fronts or anticyclones the history of science was not crowded with disputes dogmas heresies speculations and elaborate theories about the nature of clouds in their motion why because under the established explanatory structure for weather it was perfectly comprehensible that cloud motion should be unpredictable common sense suggests the clouds move with the wind when they drift in other directions it is reasonable to surmise that the wind can be different at different altitudes and is rather unpredictable and so it is easy to conclude that there is no more to be explained some people no doubt took this view about planets and assumed that they were just glowing objects on the celestial sphere blown about by high altitude winds or perhaps moved by angels and that there was no more to be explained but others were not satisfied with that", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3750"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "061c420d-4107-4f27-91fc-904f8277b9da": {"page_content": "surmise that the wind can be different at different altitudes and is rather unpredictable and so it is easy to conclude that there is no more to be explained some people no doubt took this view about planets and assumed that they were just glowing objects on the celestial sphere blown about by high altitude winds or perhaps moved by angels and that there was no more to be explained but others were not satisfied with that and guessed that there were deeper explanations behind the wandering of planets so they searched for such explanations and found them at various times in the history of astronomy there appeared to be a mass of unexplained observational evidence at other times only a sintilla or not at all but always if people had chosen what to theorise about according to the cumulative number of observations of a particular phenomena they would have chosen clouds rather than planets yet they chose planets and for diverse reasons some reasons depended on preconceptions about how cosmology ought to be or on arguments advanced by ancient philosophers or on mystical numerology some were based on the physics of the day others on mathematics or geometry some have turned out to have objective merit others.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3864"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c362609c-5de1-4a0e-9e7a-e222a6277ebe": {"page_content": "not but every one of them amounted to this it seemed to someone that the existing explanations could and should be improved on one solves a problem by finding new or amended theories containing explanations which did not have the deficiencies but do retain the merits of existing explanations this figure three point two from the book shows that after a problem presents itself which is stage one the next stage always involves conjecture proposing new theories or modifying or reinterpreting old ones and the hope of solving the problem that stage two the conjectures have then criticized which if the criticism is rational entails examining and comparing them to see which offers the best explanations according to the criteria inherent in the problem which is stage three when a conjectured theory fails to survive criticism that is when it appears to offer worse explanations than other theories to it is abandoned if we find ourselves abandoning one of our originally held theories in favor of one of the newly proposed ones which is stage four we tentatively deem our problem solving enterprise to have made progress I say tentatively because subsequent problem solving will probably involve altering or replacing even these new apparently satisfactory theories and sometimes even resurrecting some of the apparently unsatisfactory ones thus the solution however good is not the end of the story it is a starting point for the next problem solving process which is stage five this illustrates another of the misconceptions behind inductivism just pausing their my reflection this is a reminiscent of now I'm going to have to go from memory here um a quotation from pop bar and he said words to the effect anyway I'm going to mangle the exact quotation but something to the effect of I think there is only one way to do science or any kind of inquiry for that matter and that is to fall in love with a problem until such time as you solve it at which point you will find a whole family of new daughter problems in other words if you find a problem you're really interested in and you solve it you will find that in solving that problem it doesn't end your quest there in fact it reveals it gives birth to if you like it gives rise to all these", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=3936"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c57da7bb-5866-47a3-866f-4811e760fe87": {"page_content": "way to do science or any kind of inquiry for that matter and that is to fall in love with a problem until such time as you solve it at which point you will find a whole family of new daughter problems in other words if you find a problem you're really interested in and you solve it you will find that in solving that problem it doesn't end your quest there in fact it reveals it gives birth to if you like it gives rise to all these other more interesting problems as well you know this is the history of science for example uh in in solving the problem of what's the correct theory of gravity or the more correct theory of gravity and Newton's theory of gravity or on sincere gravity once we figure out we've solved the problem it's on science theory of gravity we then have a whole bunch of other new problems what can we use this new theory of gravity for what does it permit or what does it prohibit what does it allow all these new kinds of technologies based upon this new theory of gravity so we end up with a whole bunch of new problems that quest for identifying problems and solving those problems thereby growing knowledge is an unending quest and on this point David writes and this is I think where we'll end it for today as he said the solution however good is not the end of the story does starting point he goes on to say this illustrates a number of the misconceptions behind inductivism in science the objective of the exercises not to find a theory that will or is likely to be deemed true forever it is to find the best theory available now and if possible to improve on all available theories a scientific argument is intended to persuade us that a given explanation is the best one available it does not and could not say anything about how that explanation will fair when in the future it is subjected to new types of criticism and compared with explanations that have yet to be invented a good explanation may make good predictions about the future but the one thing that no explanation can even begin to predict is the content or quality of its own future rivals just pausing their end of the reading for today note that really important limitation upon the growth of knowledge that David really emphasizes in the beginning of infinity", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=4052"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f417aa0-3a12-46af-8e0d-c2e1c6c7cae3": {"page_content": "the future it is subjected to new types of criticism and compared with explanations that have yet to be invented a good explanation may make good predictions about the future but the one thing that no explanation can even begin to predict is the content or quality of its own future rivals just pausing their end of the reading for today note that really important limitation upon the growth of knowledge that David really emphasizes in the beginning of infinity but here it is here in the fabric of reality that no theory today no explanation we have can predict the content of its successes that would be to predict the growth of knowledge something that cannot be done and this is why by the way we can't predict what people will do at moment to moment people are knowledge creators they're inherently unpredictable they use their capacity to generate knowledge to come up with the subsequent theories but you can't predict the content of those subsequent theories if you did you would have it in hand already so it wouldn't be a prediction it would be a theory that you already have this is why we say it's inherently unpredictable if it was predictable if the growth of knowledge was predictable then suddenly logically you would have a prediction of the future knowledge that is to come but that's not possible if it was possible again it would mean that you've generated that knowledge now and so you'd have it now so it wouldn't be a prediction in the first place it's such a subtle point easily missed I prediction is about a future state of affairs but if you're saying that the content of future knowledge is x, y and z and x, y and z is only supposed to be discovered in the future at some point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=4168"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "21ba2532-74ed-4127-82ec-0b7f16539676": {"page_content": "but you've discovered it now how is that a prediction that's just a statement of the knowledge that you have now not the knowledge that you will have in the future it's the knowledge that you have now so it ceases to be a prediction it's a curious outworking of this particular way of arguing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=4282"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "23482fc4-75f2-4b64-b70e-07e4be0f5684": {"page_content": "but it is completely sound that's what the truth of the matter is and that is why people are unique and unpredictable and although they're determined by laws of physics like everything else they're inherently unpredictable and this is why we use terms like freewill at least why I use a term like freewill to label this unusual quality that people have that sets them apart from all other known systems in the universe not merely other animals everything else we know of everything else we've hitherto been able to create generate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=4295"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec3ff72c-ce7b-478b-8f13-4bf29487ed08": {"page_content": "explain okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ea258740-3d60-40ac-a1d4-2102d9d7aa0e": {"page_content": "so once we can explain ourselves how it is we go about generating these explanations still we won't be able to predict the future content of our knowledge but we might have whatever the algorithm is that is able to generate explanatory knowledge and then we'll have the algorithm for a person but even then we won't be able to predict what that person will do that person will have a creative capacity to generate explanations or freewill whatever you want to say anyway going off on my hobby horse again that's why we'll end up for today there's still more yet to read in this chapter problem solving this in all encompassing really vision not only of science but as Popper said all life is problem solving all of the different areas of our intellectual life that we're interested in our personal life that we're interested in and just all the ways in which we might want to make progress personally as a community as a civilization is encapsulated by this problem solving enterprise rather than a search for final truth which would be an end of science and end of knowledge creation we don't expect that we just expect to continually solve problems that's the way to find contentment in the world to continually solve your problems that's fun finding solutions continuously and then finding new problems that are more interesting that's one of the meanings of the life okay until next time bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfCuSHsRZYo&t=4333"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e19d000-47c2-4c33-8c06-a0a4a5c2ef85": {"page_content": "Okay, so this is an experiment.\nThis is chapter 3 on that side because I'm nowhere near home at the moment.\nbut I've got a few minutes to go through at least part of chapter 3 which is called the spark.\nI'm not going to get through the whole lot because it's a much longer chapter than what chapter 2 is.\nSo the spark is the famous chapter with the two stone tablets that we'll get to eventually.\nThese are mentioned in one of David's TED Talks.\nSo the spark is about knowledge but knowledge from the Enlightenment essentially.\nSo the kind of culture of criticism that we've spoken about previously, it is the thing that sets fire to the rest of civilization.\nIt is a thing that allows us to create knowledge that is without bound and that which can have cosmic significance.\nOkay, so the spark begins by talking about how ancient myths were largely anthropocentric.\nThey were about us.\nSo our first attempts to understand the world were always centered on what human beings were doing and what human beings were capable of doing and how the rest of reality was he for us was he had to try and attack us or he had to try and preserve us in some way.\nSo this idea is called anthropocentrism.\nSo let me begin at the very beginning of chapter 3 and we will read through at least part of it.\nSo it begins.\nMost ancient accounts of the reality beyond our everyday experience were not only false, they had a radically different character from modern ones.\nThey were anthropocentric.\nThat is to say they centered on human beings and more broadly on people, entities with intentions and human-like thoughts which included powerful supernatural people such as spirits and gods.\nSo winter might be attributed to someone's sadness, harvests to someone's generosity, natural disasters to someone's anger and so on.\nSuch explanations often involved cosmically significant beings caring what humans did or having interactions about them.\nThis conferred cosmic significance on humans too.\nThen the geocentric theory placed humans at the physical hub of the universe as well.\nThose two kinds of anthropocentrism, explanatory and geometrical made each other more plausible and as a result pre-enlightenment thinking was more anthropocentric than we can readily imagine nowadays.\nSo here's the idea that the geocentric theory has put humans at the hub of existence, a physical center of human existence, but the word hub there is important.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=13"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2f14a134-cc86-44ed-bb77-32749dbb7b86": {"page_content": "Then the geocentric theory placed humans at the physical hub of the universe as well.\nThose two kinds of anthropocentrism, explanatory and geometrical made each other more plausible and as a result pre-enlightenment thinking was more anthropocentric than we can readily imagine nowadays.\nSo here's the idea that the geocentric theory has put humans at the hub of existence, a physical center of human existence, but the word hub there is important.\nBut as David is about to explain what modern science did was to undo that misconception and it took human beings the species away from being some kind of special entity astronomically, we aren't at the center of the universe, nor some kind of special entity biologically we evolved from lower forms of animals.\nThis has led to a whole bunch of misconceptions about people and knowledge and their significance of both.\nSo although it was right literally that we are not at the center of the universe, the removal of humans as being significant to the universe is wrong.\nAnd so this new view that we're going to get from David is that knowledge has cosmic significance and one kind of entity creates explanatory knowledge that's people.\nSo he's about to explain that people are special so therefore the earth is a hub.\nThis is the amazing contribution, the amazing and surprising thing that David said during one of his head talks.\nDavid then begins to speak about astrology and how astrology makes the logical case that because, well I'm not sure that he says this, but this is the fact that it makes logical sense that the stars control people's lives because indeed things that happen in the sky do have effects on the ground on people's lives.\nWhen the clouds open up and it rains that has a very direct effect on people growing crops and if the sky doesn't rain that also has an effect.\nPeople may have seen all sorts of things coming from the sky that affected their lives, not least of which the change in seasons can be predicted by looking at the constellations on the sky.\nSo it makes perfect sense.\nThe sky controls what goes on here on earth.\nOf course it's false in many many ways.\nThe particular pattern of stars happens to correlate with certain events that happen here on earth.\nBut the reason why we get changes of weather over the course of a year and why those changes are periodic and they are in a sense foretold in the stars.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=130"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae7ed433-10b3-4799-bc71-bd186fbc050c": {"page_content": "So it makes perfect sense.\nThe sky controls what goes on here on earth.\nOf course it's false in many many ways.\nThe particular pattern of stars happens to correlate with certain events that happen here on earth.\nBut the reason why we get changes of weather over the course of a year and why those changes are periodic and they are in a sense foretold in the stars.\nThey correlate with the stars but are not caused by the stars is because of the axis tilt theory and the axis tilt theory is the thing that explains why the stars happen to be in different places over the course of the year and repeat their positions over the course of the year.\nBut you can draw a reasonably logical straight line from common sense to astrology.\nThe David says of course, now we know that the pattern of stars and planets in our night sky has no significance for human affairs.\nWe know that we are not the centre of the universe.\nIt does not even have a geometrical centre at all.\nand we know that although some of the Titanic astrophysical phenomena that I have described play a significant role in our past, we have never been significant to them.\nWe call a phenomenon significant or fundamental if parochial theories are inadequate to explain it or if it appears in the explanation of many other phenomena.\nSo it may seem that human beings and their wishes and actions are extremely insignificant in the universe at large.\nAntropocentric misconceptions have also been overturned in every other fundamental area of science.\nAnd knowledge of physics now expressed entirely in terms of entities that are as impersonal as Euclid's points and lines, such as elementary particles, forces and spacetime, a four-dimensional continuum with three dimensions of space in one time.\nNow the wind has picked up here so much.\nI'm going to have to move.\nOkay, we're talking about natural forces thwarting human affairs.\nI've moved.\nWe'll continue for another 10 to 15 minutes.\nI think the light will hold out and the wind shouldn't be too bad.\nSo I was up to the part where David has just defined what significant or fundamental happens to be.\nSo let me continue and he is now going to explain the issues with abandoning anthropocentric ideas but also the important move forward that abandoning those anthropocentric ideas happens to be.\nSo let me read.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=317"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d8c554e-8deb-427e-852c-4936fcb75500": {"page_content": "I've moved.\nWe'll continue for another 10 to 15 minutes.\nI think the light will hold out and the wind shouldn't be too bad.\nSo I was up to the part where David has just defined what significant or fundamental happens to be.\nSo let me continue and he is now going to explain the issues with abandoning anthropocentric ideas but also the important move forward that abandoning those anthropocentric ideas happens to be.\nSo let me read.\nHe says, so fruitful has this abandonment of anthropocentric theory's being and so important in the broader history of ideas that anti- anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal principle, sometimes called the principle of mediocrity, which says there is nothing significant about humans in the cosmic scheme of things.\nAs the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy.\nEnd quote.\nThe proviso in the cosmic scheme of things is necessary because the chemical scum evidently does have a special significance according to values that it applies to itself, such as moral values.\nBut the principle says that all such values are themselves anthropocentric.\nThey explain our little behaviour of the scum, which is itself in significant.\nIt is easy to mistake quirks of one's own familiar environment or perspective such as the rotation of the night sky.\nFor objective features of what one is observing, or to mistake rules of thumb, such as the prediction of daily sunrises, universal laws, I should refer to that sort of error as parochialism.\nSo this idea of parochialism where we are making the error of assuming that what's going on in our local environment happens to be of universal importance.\nAnd that's a mistake.\nHe continues, anthropocentric errors are examples of parochialism but not all parochialism is anthropocentric.\nFor instance, the prediction that the seasons are in phase all over the world is a parochial error but not an anthropocentric one.\nIt does not involve explaining seasons in terms of people.\nNow David goes on to explain a little bit more about spaceship earth in this idea that the planet earth is an exceedingly fragile biosphere that is here to try and keep us and everything else on board alive.\nSo it is a spaceship that is taking us on a journey around the sun and in turn journey through around the galaxy and in turn a journey into the future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=433"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7bc5c526-5aa4-408e-9a95-e43ce59c5685": {"page_content": "It does not involve explaining seasons in terms of people.\nNow David goes on to explain a little bit more about spaceship earth in this idea that the planet earth is an exceedingly fragile biosphere that is here to try and keep us and everything else on board alive.\nSo it is a spaceship that is taking us on a journey around the sun and in turn journey through around the galaxy and in turn a journey into the future.\nBut the earth is here in an attempt to sustain us and to sustain life.\nThis is what this concept of spaceship earth is.\nAnd David undermines this and I think he does one of the best jobs of this that anyone has ever done in print, anyone has ever done in person.\nAnd he's going to explain something really profound which is this idea that the earth is not here to sustain us.\nIt's not trying to sustain us.\nIf anything of who are going to say that it was either a force for good or a force for evil towards human beings, we would have to argue it's pretty much a force for evil.\nWe have to do what we can to try and protect ourselves from the environment, from the planet earth.\nSure it is the friendliest place for human beings in all of the existence that we know of.\nNo one's thinking of going to Venus for a holiday.\nThere isn't much in interstellar space that's going to sustain us.\nSo the earth is more sustaining than other places but it's not a friendly spaceship.\nIt is a place of hostile weather and hostile climate of disease and pestilence, of pollution in the water that we have to try and filter out.\nIt is forever trying to starve us, or to burn us, to blow us away, to drown us, to earthquake us to death.\nIt is not a friendly place.\nThe other organisms that are here and not particularly friendly, I'm here in Australia, there is a larger number of species of spider and snake that can kill you here I think than just about anywhere.\nSo the earth is not our friend.\nIt's also not our enemy.\nbut it's just in a nerd rock in space that happens to be our home.\nand we have to do our best with what we can with the resources that are here in our backyard to try and protect ourselves from the planet.\nIt's not that it's an enemy, it's just unfriendly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=587"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "68f0657c-4fa3-405c-9b47-b127198b7414": {"page_content": "So the earth is not our friend.\nIt's also not our enemy.\nbut it's just in a nerd rock in space that happens to be our home.\nand we have to do our best with what we can with the resources that are here in our backyard to try and protect ourselves from the planet.\nIt's not that it's an enemy, it's just unfriendly.\nOkay so let me continue with chapter three, David writes, The spaceship earth metaphor and the principle of mediocrity have both gained wide acceptance among scientifically minded people to the extent of becoming truisms.\nThis is despite the fact that on the face of it they argue in somewhat opposite directions.\nThe principle of mediocrity stresses how typical the earth and its chemical scum are in the sense of being unremarkable, while spaceship earth stresses how untypical they are in the sense of being uniquely suited to each other.\nSkipping a little?.\nBoth oppose arrogance.\nThe principle of mediocrity opposes the pre-enlightenment arrogance of believing ourselves significant in the world.\nThe spaceship earth metaphor opposes the enlightenment arrogance of aspiring to control the world.\nWe should not consider ourselves significant they assert.\nWe should not expect the world to submit definitely to our depredations.\nSkipping a little more.\nIf you were seeking Maxim's worth being carved in stone and recited each morning before breakfast you could do a lot worse than to use their negations.\nThat is to say the truth is that people are significant in the cosmic scheme of things and the earth's biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.\nSo that's remarkable.\nIn my own words the principle of mediocrity is this idea that we are in no sense on the cosmic scheme of things in a particularly special place.\nThat planet earth is just a typical planet orbiting a typical star.\nAnd more and more that we learn about science we kind of understand that this is true in a sense.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=731"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4d4b7422-82a3-4775-99fd-9ae72de7f384": {"page_content": "The Kepler data from the space telescope has revealed that the overwhelming majority of stars that are out there have planets and they have terrestrial planets kind of like the earth possibly in what they call the habitable zone or the habitable zones of rather useless concept given that well what is habitable depends entirely upon the technology that you have or what indeed for talking about lower forms of biology exactly what their temperature ranges happen to be because we know that even certain kinds of bacteria are chaotic and exist at temperatures well higher than the boiling point of order and well below the freezing point of order so this idea of the habitable zone has has changed over time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=848"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5de1c5ec-d870-44f0-805e-84d0fab203d9": {"page_content": "Nonetheless the point is the planet earth is possibly a the solar system is possibly going to turn out to be a rather typical kind of structure in the universe that there are planets like earth out there and not exactly like earth they might not have human beings or animals of biology at all but in terms of just the geology of the earth it might be pretty unremarkable.\nso this is the principle of mediocrity that we're not the center of the universe that the earth is typical and yet on the other hand the spaceship earth idea is that the earth is not typical in any way it's the only thing that can sustain us we have to preserve it otherwise we're in all sorts of trouble because there's nowhere else to go.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=891"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e120525-6717-4172-a917-b58b41750aad": {"page_content": "but David is saying here that two things actually are true it's not the case that the earth is the only thing that can sustain us indeed it doesn't sustain us the majority of the species of animals that have ever existed have gone extinct we know this 99.9 something or other percent of animals that have ever existed on this planet have been wiped out exterminated by the very planet they're supposed to be sustaining them if humans want to be different the exception to that rule we have to use the one feature that we have that is superior to every other animal on this planet and that is our special relationship to the construction of the explanatory knowledge our minds so the earth not going to sustain us it's not going to support us only we can do that and moreover the same thing that allows us to support ourselves here on the earth is the very thing that ultimately make us what makes us significant in the cosmic scheme of things because we can create explanatory knowledge we create that thing which allows us to transform the environment around us and we will start local we will spread global and then we will move cosmic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=939"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4867dff7-b4a0-4a91-b419-eafc12ef8204": {"page_content": "and so there is absolutely no law of physics preventing this the only thing that prevents the growth of knowledge and hence the spread of people throughout the universe to make the universe a more friendly bio-friendly place is our desire to do so our wealth and capacity to do so and our knowledge of how to do so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1023"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c83b0a8-cea3-4f47-aea9-a510c06b4c53": {"page_content": "so let's continue David writes we are an uncommon form of ordinary matter the commonest form is plasma atoms dissociated into their electrically charged components which typically emits bright visible light because it is in stars which are rather hot we scums are mainly infrared emitters because we contain liquids and complex chemicals which can only exist at a much lower range of temperatures it then explains that the majority of the universe has a temperature of 2.7 degrees above absolute zero which is 270 degrees colder than the freezing point of water only very unusual circumstances here right can make anything colder than those microwaves the cosmic microwave background radiation of 2.7 Kelvin nothing in the universe is known to be cooler than about one Kelvin except in certain physical laboratories on earth there the record low temperature achieved is below one billionth at a Kelvin and he says and this is quite remarkable as well to think about that if you had some technology which allowed you to measure the temperature on some other planet we kind of can do that but with the with the level of fidelity required that we could determine exactly what the temperature was in some small region on that planet if we found a place on that planet which had a temperature below one Kelvin then we'd have to presume that there were people there because we know of no physical process that naturally could do that the only way that it could be done the only way to remove heat down to a millionth of a Kelvin above absolute zero would be via some technology and so if you discover in the universe somewhere that is very very very very close to absolute zero and certainly some quite distance from 2.7 Kelvin above absolute zero so something really really cold you found aliens quite remarkable David then goes on to go through the story about what a typical place in the universe is like and this is that wonderful part of his TED talk where he jokes that at great expense the organizers of TED have been able to do at an immersive rendering of what it's like in intergalactic space and everything goes dark, impeccably dark because that's what interstellar into galactic spaces like there's not much matter there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1048"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f698016d-9088-4c52-b8d2-5642bf7d0145": {"page_content": "and he says this is a typical place in the universe he writes cold dark and empty that unimaginably desolate environment is typical of the universe and there's another measure of how untypical the earth and its chemical scum are in a straightforward physical sense the issue of the cosmic significance of this type of scum will shortly take us back out into intergalactic space but let me first return to earth and consider the spaceship earth metaphor in its straightforward physical version this much is true if tomorrow physical conditions on the earth service were to change even slightly by astrophysical standards there no humans could live here unprotected just as they could not survive on a spaceship whose life support system had broken down.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1209"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3422844-569f-4fd2-8b8d-7151a9c2132d": {"page_content": "yet i'm writing this in Oxford in England where the winter nights are likewise often cold enough to kill any human unprotected by clothing and other technology so while intergalactic space will kill me in a matter of seconds Oxford's year in its prime evil state might do the same in a matter of hours which can be considered life support only in the most contrived sense there is a life support system in Oxfordshire today.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1256"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "55ffe794-7e99-4f4a-8fee-967e00f1ccea": {"page_content": "Oxfordshire Oxfordshire this is my Australian difficulty with that word there is a life support system in Oxfordshire today but it was not provided by the biosphere it is being built by humans it consists of clothes houses farms hospitals and electrical grid a sewage system and so on knowing the whole of the earth's biosphere in its prime evil state was likewise incapable of keeping an unprotected human alive for long it will be much more accurate to call it a death trap for humans rather than a life support system even the Great Rift Valley and Eastern Africa where our species evolved was barely more hospitable than prime evil Oxfordshire unlike the life support system in that imagined spaceship the Great Rift Valley lacked the safe water supply and medical equipment and comfortable living quarters and was infested with predators parasites and disease organisms it frequently injured poison drenched starved and sickened its passengers and most of them died as a result it was similarly harsh to all the other organisms that lived there few individuals lived comfortably or die of old age and the supposedly beneficent biosphere that is no accident most populations of most species are living close to the edge of disaster and death there has to be that way because as soon as some small group somewhere begins to have a slightly easier life that is no accident most populations of most species are living close to the edge of disaster and death it has to be that way because as soon as some small groups somewhere begins to have a slightly easier life than that for any reason for instance an increased food supply or the extinction of a competitor or predator then its numbers increase as a result other resources are depleted and then David speaks about just how terrible nature happens to be so there's he writes there's rampant disabling and killing of individuals by starvation exhaustion predation overcrowding and all those other natural processes that is the situation to which evolution adapts organisms and that therefore is the lifestyle in which the earth's biosphere seems adapted to sustaining him so the only way in which we could make the argument that the earth seems to sustain us is because organisms have adapted to the earth to", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1275"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3396a6d1-6933-4fe3-b484-5c584fe0e4e8": {"page_content": "he writes there's rampant disabling and killing of individuals by starvation exhaustion predation overcrowding and all those other natural processes that is the situation to which evolution adapts organisms and that therefore is the lifestyle in which the earth's biosphere seems adapted to sustaining him so the only way in which we could make the argument that the earth seems to sustain us is because organisms have adapted to the earth to whatever the the whimsical nature of the environment happens to be any particular time based upon climate and so when the climate is altered over geological timescales then or or some other environmental factor simply causes the balance of species to change predators increase or decrease competitors increase or decrease food supply goes up goes down then so do the fortunes of the animals that happen to live in that area or the organisms generally live in that area.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1390"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "df27bcc2-55d0-47a9-bc92-461bf0f09871": {"page_content": "so it's not like the earth's sustaining us the animals that are here now the plants that are here now the organisms broadly that are here on the earth now are well suited to the environment as it happens to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1457"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8ac2fd96-01e8-41f3-8d12-d5e6cc14734c": {"page_content": "but we know the environment cannot possibly remain the same this is the lesson from geology and biology together the only reason that we have evolution by natural selection is because of changes in the environment if there were no changes in the environment there would be no selection pressure and there would be no change you would have random mutations but there would be nothing to select those random mutations David writes the biosphere is not a great preserver of species in addition to being notoriously cruel to individuals evolution involves continual extinctions of entire species the average rate of extinction since the beginning of life on earth has been about 10 species per year the numbers are only very approximately becoming much higher during the relatively brief periods that paleontologists call mass extinction events the rate at which species have come into existence has on balance only slightly exceeded the extinction rate and the net effect is that the overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed on earth perhaps 99.9% of them are now extinct.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1469"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d1093cd4-eaaa-4fc5-9e52-a0b6b02c57b8": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ecf8f920-326f-4a61-99e1-8689c3e25d1f": {"page_content": "so David speaks about how it just emphasizes how hostile the environment the biosphere the planet is to organisms generally and to human beings in particular he writes today almost the entire capacity of the earth's life support system for humans has been provided not for us but by us using our ability to create new knowledge there are people in the great great rift valley today who live far more comfortably than early humans did and far greater numbers through knowledge of things like tools farming and hygiene the earth didn't provide the raw materials for our survival just as the sun has provided the energy and supernova provided the elements and so on but a heap of raw materials is not the same thing as a life support system the life support system requires knowledge you guys have to explain.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlARZbkUzg&t=1537"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "26045a14-07e5-48dd-9d5d-209b8d4284c9": {"page_content": "So this is part two of chapter five at the beginning of infinity, the reality of abstractions.\nMy better be called an appendacy because there's not much left for me to read of chapter five, but there's a lot more to say to do with David Deutsch's views on the nature of mathematics.\nAnd the nature of mathematics is the title of chapter 10 of David's first book, The Fabric of Reality.\nAnd I find that there's a lot of crossover here in the material.\nThere's a lot of new material in chapter five of the beginning of infinity.\nBut there are certain themes that are touched upon in the fabric of reality that don't quite get a voice in the beginning of infinity.\nDavid recently gave a talk at his Dirac Prize Medal Award ceremony in which he articulated one of the most profound differences that David as a philosopher has with the mathematicians.\nDavid has some really unique views when it comes to the nature of mathematics and it connects directly to the reality of abstractions and to his work, of course, on quantum computation.\nNow I want to try and explain why and I suppose in part this will be a personal reflection.\nLike many people, I was inculcated with some supernatural ideas as a child.\nYou tend to learn about some aspects of religious mysticism and you learn about fairy tales, sometimes these are presented as facts and this has the effect that when you begin to take on a more scientific rational view of the world and a more reason to approach to these matters, you tend to relinquish a whole bunch of this.\nSome people not only relinquish these beliefs in the supernatural but they become actively hostile to the notion that anything is supernatural at all or anything could possibly be supernatural.\nAnd I think that's quite right, but this impulse, this reasonable rejection of the supernatural, has a tendency to misfire.\nNow Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene speaks about genetic misfiring.\nSome examples of genetic misfiring are things like the so-called altruism gene.\nSo the altruism gene is supposed to be the gene that causes social animals like ourselves to help others, but sometimes this could misfire.\nIf it's all about the gene propagating through the environment, then if there is an altruism gene, a gene that causes social animals to help one another, not all members of the species will possess the gene.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3bb003f7-df0d-4d71-a60c-8e802ba69c24": {"page_content": "Some examples of genetic misfiring are things like the so-called altruism gene.\nSo the altruism gene is supposed to be the gene that causes social animals like ourselves to help others, but sometimes this could misfire.\nIf it's all about the gene propagating through the environment, then if there is an altruism gene, a gene that causes social animals to help one another, not all members of the species will possess the gene.\nAnd so therefore if an altruistic member of the species decides to help to be altruistic towards a member who isn't such an altruist, so if there is an altruism gene or something like this, this can perhaps misfire, a misfire in human beings, let's say, as it could cause you to help someone who refuses to help anyone else.\nIn other words, the altruism gene might in some situations actively work to cause itself to be removed from the gene pool by helping those who help no one.\nAltruism could be blind in that kind of way, or the gene that causes the desire for sex, the whole purpose of which is to encourage reproduction of the species, or reproduction of genes in general.\nThis could misfire because it's still that the desire for sex is still there even in the presence of contraception and even in homosexual members of the species.\nSo the desire doesn't actually help reproduction in some cases.\nMemes rather than genes might do the same thing.\nSo rejecting the supernatural might be a meme that we all become inculcated with all that we all learn at some point after we give up on, let's say, God and become atheists.\nThose of us who have become atheists.\nBut a misfiring of that idea, a misfiring of the idea that one should reject supernatural explanations, could be reject all non-physical explanations, or reject all explanations cast in terms of things that include non-physical entities.\nThat's a misfiring, because not all non-physical things are supernatural.\nAnd not everything in the universe is physical.\nIn particular, the laws of physics are not physical, numbers are not physical, mathematics is not the study of physical things, but abstract things and so on.\nAll of these things are non-physical, parts of abstract reality, abstractions have a reality, and this reality can have effects on the physical world as we saw in chapter five.\nNow there is one kind of abstraction that is particularly interesting, and that is the abstract reality described by mathematics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=119"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08b94601-9c4a-47a5-baf8-9466863533d3": {"page_content": "And not everything in the universe is physical.\nIn particular, the laws of physics are not physical, numbers are not physical, mathematics is not the study of physical things, but abstract things and so on.\nAll of these things are non-physical, parts of abstract reality, abstractions have a reality, and this reality can have effects on the physical world as we saw in chapter five.\nNow there is one kind of abstraction that is particularly interesting, and that is the abstract reality described by mathematics.\nNot all abstractions are mathematical, but the mathematical ones are the ones that often get the most attention.\nAnd there are misconceptions on both sides, and David has recently spoken publicly about what he calls the mathematicians' misconception.\nAnd we'll come to this shortly, but essentially we have two groups of people once more.\nOn the one side we have people who think that mathematics is about abstract entities, and we reason about those entities using mathematical intuition.\nAnd this is somehow done in a kind of abstract space, and as such, what is able to be proved there is proved with certainty.\nAnd so mathematics can deliver us with rock-solid, true proofs.\nMathematical knowledge on this account is of an altogether different kind than other kinds of knowledge.\nMathematical knowledge confers certain truths upon its conclusions on this view, or at least truth of a kind that is more reliable or more robust or foundational than other kinds of knowledge.\nSo this is one side of the debate.\nIt might be called platonic idealism.\nThe other side of the debate is that everything in reality is physical.\nThere is only a physical reality and nothing else.\nWe are just atoms moving through the void.\nOn this account, mathematics is a kind of useful fiction.\nIt happens to describe parts of this physical reality, but it cannot possibly have a reality apart from the material world.\nThis is sometimes called physicalism or materialism.\nEither way, this is of course a form of reductionism.\nAnd sometimes seen as the uber-rational way to be.\nIt rejects everything except what science, supposedly, deems as real.\nUsually through observations, so it's also a kind of empiricism.\nSo we have two quite rational doctrines here, it would seem, but yet they both seem to contradict each other.\nBrilliant mathematicians who believe in perfect mathematical ideals that they can have knowledge of through their mathematical intuition and that leads them down the path of certain conclusions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=245"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56219f58-a70f-46d0-8265-bee7988ebc7c": {"page_content": "And sometimes seen as the uber-rational way to be.\nIt rejects everything except what science, supposedly, deems as real.\nUsually through observations, so it's also a kind of empiricism.\nSo we have two quite rational doctrines here, it would seem, but yet they both seem to contradict each other.\nBrilliant mathematicians who believe in perfect mathematical ideals that they can have knowledge of through their mathematical intuition and that leads them down the path of certain conclusions.\nOn the other hand, hard-nosed materialism of the scientific types that say only physical stuff exists.\nSo if you're a person who likes reason, you seem a little bit stuck.\nDo you prefer brilliant mathematicians or do you like hard-nosed physics types?.\nSo let me steal a famous line from David Deutsch here.\nIf you regard these two positions as being deeply informative of your rational worldview, then quote, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other.\nBut that does not prevent them from both being completely false, and they are.\nSo David walks the line between these two positions.\nOn the one hand, mathematics is indeed about perfect ideal forms, but that is not what mathematicians can actually discover.\nIt's rather like the laws of physics.\nNow they exist, but what we have are explanations of the laws of physics, imperfect.\nOur knowledge of them is subject to change and improvement.\nAnd on the other hand, as chapter five is argued at length, it cannot be the case that reality consists only of atoms.\nCollections of atoms arrange themselves into patterns that are more than the sum of their parts.\nThat's an abstraction.\nThe reason the domino falls or doesn't in Hofsted as argument, go back to the last video for this one, is because the input is either prime or it isn't.\nIt's nothing to do with the laws of motion acting on atoms in the void.\nThe explanation was 641 is prime, it's got nothing to do with quantum theory or general relativity.\nThose are explanations of everything regardless, but cannot explain why in that situation.\nSo David's recent talk called the mathematicians misconception, given at the Dirac Prize Award ceremony, was an explanation of how proof must be a physical process.\nNow this is an amazing insight, and it's very counterintuitive.\nIt's even caused people to have strong emotional reactions, especially mathematicians.\nSo what is the mathematicians' misconception?.\nWell, it's the denial that proof is physical.\nNow this claim arises from mathematical intuition.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=364"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9d1fc110-00d5-4add-b2e0-bda682684cb2": {"page_content": "So David's recent talk called the mathematicians misconception, given at the Dirac Prize Award ceremony, was an explanation of how proof must be a physical process.\nNow this is an amazing insight, and it's very counterintuitive.\nIt's even caused people to have strong emotional reactions, especially mathematicians.\nSo what is the mathematicians' misconception?.\nWell, it's the denial that proof is physical.\nNow this claim arises from mathematical intuition.\nThe claim that because mathematical objects are plotting ideals, they're not made of atoms, so far this is true, that when we reason about them and reasoning on this view is a non-physical process that what we get is some kind of mathematically ideal knowledge.\nThe problem here is the step, reason about.\nWhen a mathematician reasons what they are doing is thinking, they're using their brain, it's an activity for the mind.\nNow as I've argued before, the mind is a kind of software, and it runs on the hardware that is the brain, or if you don't like that or want some other language, reasoning, even mathematical reasoning, is something that brains do.\nNow brains are physical objects, they obey physical laws, there's no escaping this.\nAnd so the repertoire of possible computations is in one-to-one correspondence with those of a universal Turing machine.\nAnd a universal Turing machine is the theoretical foundation underpinning what all really existing physical, classical computers are.\nSo the repertoire of all possible computations that a brain can do is in one-to-one correspondence with those of a universal Turing machine, there's nothing universal Turing machine can do that a person cannot.\nAnd there's nothing a person can do that a universal Turing machine cannot.\nNow the first part of that is easy to show.\nA universal Turing machine just has to be able to write, read, and erase symbols on a piece of paper.\nThat's it.\nNow a person can do that, a universal Turing machine just has to be able to write, and read, and erase symbols on a piece of paper, and be able to move from one square to the next.\nThat's it.\nNow a person can do that, therefore a person is a universal Turing machine, done.\nBy the way, a person is more than just a universal Turing machine, but I don't need that for the argument here.\nNow the other half of what I said is about whether or not there's anything a person can do that a universal Turing machine cannot do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=486"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d2b1e6e-500e-4e41-8f82-3ac73a19e477": {"page_content": "That's it.\nNow a person can do that, therefore a person is a universal Turing machine, done.\nBy the way, a person is more than just a universal Turing machine, but I don't need that for the argument here.\nNow the other half of what I said is about whether or not there's anything a person can do that a universal Turing machine cannot do.\nWell, in terms of computation, a universal Turing machine is universal precisely because it can compute anything that's computable.\nNow, if a person can do something else in terms of thinking that a universal Turing machine cannot, this means that thing is a non-computable thing.\nBut now he's the kicker.\nThey've a Deutsch proved that given computers of physical objects and obey the laws of physics, then the repertoire of all the possible motions of a universal quantum computer must include the motions of any physical object.\nThat is, a quantum computer can simulate the deepest laws we have, namely the laws of quantum theory, and all matter obeys those laws that includes brains.\nAnd so whatever a brain can do, because it's just made of matter, so too can a universal quantum computer.\nAnd therefore we have the other half of our requirement that there's nothing a human brain or a mind can possibly compute that a universal computer cannot.\nAnd what a universal computer can compute is all the things that are possibly computable.\nA mathematician's intuition cannot escape this.\nThe intuition itself is a computation of a kind, a mental activity must be, it could be simulated by a computer.\nAnd what a quantum computer does, like everything else in the universe, is obey physical laws.\nAnd thus, if the laws of physics were different, what could be computed would be different.\nNow proof.\nProving something is what mathematicians do.\nThey prove things about numbers, about abstract objects.\nWhen they complete proof in their mind, it's their mind that has computed it.\nBut the possible proof cannot be of anything the laws of physics prohibit.\nBut the possible proof cannot be of anything that the laws of physics have prohibited being proved.\nSo there are many statements, indeed the overwhelming majority of mathematical statements, that are not provable.\nThis is where girdle's incompleteness theorems come in.\nOne of the incompleteness theorems say, there are statements that are true in mathematics, but which we cannot possibly prove.\nAnd there's a proof of that, that's girdles, incompleteness theorems.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=607"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3c67c687-a534-4bfc-873f-51c81115248b": {"page_content": "So there are many statements, indeed the overwhelming majority of mathematical statements, that are not provable.\nThis is where girdle's incompleteness theorems come in.\nOne of the incompleteness theorems say, there are statements that are true in mathematics, but which we cannot possibly prove.\nAnd there's a proof of that, that's girdles, incompleteness theorems.\nBut that is only the case because the laws of physics are such, that what can be proved prohibits us from ever finding the proof of those things.\nTuring's version of this is that there are some statements that are not computable or desirable, but this is equivalent.\nSo there's a difference between what's true and what's provable.\nThat's the point of both Turing and girdles proofs.\nAnd by the way, you can have systems such as so-called centencial or propositional logic.\nAnd in these systems, the axioms allow you to prove everything that is true within that system.\nGirdles incompleteness theorem is called the incompleteness theorem because if you have a richer system of logic, something like simple arithmetic, then you end up being able to generate true statements that cannot be proved true as such.\nAnd this is the case for the overwhelming majority of logical systems that you can create.\nTherefore, the overwhelming majority of mathematical claims you can make will not have proofs.\nYou won't be able to decide with the true or false or if they're true, you won't be able to have a proof that they're true.\nThe relevance of all this, for here and now, is that mathematical objects perfectly true statements are things we only have access to through proof, which is a type of computation.\nBut computation requires a computer, and computers are physical objects obeying the laws of physics, which mandate that we cannot ever hope to have error-free computation.\nArea is just a part of physical reality.\nNow I should mention as an aside that David's great contribution here was a proof of the Turing principle, namely that there can be a physical object whose repertoire of possible motions contains the motions of all other objects.\nThat's not exactly his words.\nBut this is now called the Church Turing Deutsch Principle.\nAnd David has said that really Ada Lovelace deserves credit for this also.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=758"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ea3b9535-23ae-4409-85e2-c9f9a4761af2": {"page_content": "Area is just a part of physical reality.\nNow I should mention as an aside that David's great contribution here was a proof of the Turing principle, namely that there can be a physical object whose repertoire of possible motions contains the motions of all other objects.\nThat's not exactly his words.\nBut this is now called the Church Turing Deutsch Principle.\nAnd David has said that really Ada Lovelace deserves credit for this also.\nSo, to lay with the point, the claim from some mathematicians, and here I'm drawing directly on David's talk at his direct prize award ceremony, seems to be that out there in abstract space, there is some other definition of proof, such that it's not physical.\nSo this is the mathematicians claim.\nThere is another way to prove stuff in abstract space that's not physics.\nBut if some process that doesn't conform to that definition was a way of knowing about some necessary truth, that process wouldn't be a proof of that truth.\nThe repertoire of integer functions that Turing machines and quantum computers are able to compute is the same.\nThey're just different speed.\nBut we only know they're different speed from quantum theory.\nAnd so when mathematicians attempt to say that they have an intuition that says that they can prove things that in such a way that they're able to get their error frame, it's not the method of proof is not in some way subservient to our knowledge of the laws of physics.\nThey're wrong because all proof, even intuitions, that all mental processes, including their own intuitions, arise from the activity of the brain, computing stuff.\nAnd when you compute stuff, you're performing a physical process.\nThat's all that can be happening according to David Deutsch's proof of how quantum computation works and the relationship between computation, which includes all intuitions, all mental activities, all possible methods of proof.\nThe relationship between that and the laws of physics.\nThe laws of physics constrain what computation is and all mental activities, including all intuitions and all methods of proof are physical.\nOkay, so now let's return directly to chapter five of the beginning of infinity, the reality of abstractions.\nAnd let's take note of the concluding remarks and how they synthesize with what I've just been talking about primarily drawn from David's talk about the mathematicians' misconception.\nAnd David writes near the end of this chapter, beauty, right and wrong, primality, infinite sets.\nThey all exist objectively, but not physically.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=870"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5576e652-9838-47d0-99c7-7f0b118f53e7": {"page_content": "Okay, so now let's return directly to chapter five of the beginning of infinity, the reality of abstractions.\nAnd let's take note of the concluding remarks and how they synthesize with what I've just been talking about primarily drawn from David's talk about the mathematicians' misconception.\nAnd David writes near the end of this chapter, beauty, right and wrong, primality, infinite sets.\nThey all exist objectively, but not physically.\nWhat does that mean?.\nCertainly they can affect you, as examples like Hofster to show, but apparently not in the same sense that physical objects do.\nWe cannot trip over one of them in the street, however, there is less to that distinction than our empiricism biased common sense assumes.\nFirst of all, being affected by a physical object means that something about the physical object has caused a change by the laws of physics or equipment or equivalently that the laws of physics have caused a change via that object.\nBut causation and the laws of physics are not themselves physical objects.\nThere are abstractions, and our knowledge of them comes just as for all other abstractions from the fact that our best explanations invoke them.\nProgress depends on explanation, and therefore trying to conceive of the world as merely a sequence of events with unexplained regularities would entail giving up on progress.\nThis argument that abstraction really exists does not tell us what they exist as.\nFor instance, which of them are purely emergent aspects of others and which exist independently of the others, or pause there, so it tells us that abstract entities have an independent existence, but we don't know what they are exactly.\nSo when people ask, what is the real nature of numbers?.\nNot though they are, it's very difficult to say anything more precise than that.\nThey're not physical, but they do exist.\nAnd if someone then asks, where do they exist, well the answer is simple.\nThey're not physical, so there is no where that applies to them.\nWhere are for a point in space?.\nAnd space is something that's part of the physical universe.\nAnd so asking about where, for a number, is rather like asking what happened before the beginning of time, grammatically, the sentence might make sense, but logically, it refers to nothing.\nI'll continue.\nDavid writes, what the laws of morality be the same if the laws of physics were different?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1005"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d1e45795-a71b-433e-a9bc-6ab14f77bbf7": {"page_content": "They're not physical, so there is no where that applies to them.\nWhere are for a point in space?.\nAnd space is something that's part of the physical universe.\nAnd so asking about where, for a number, is rather like asking what happened before the beginning of time, grammatically, the sentence might make sense, but logically, it refers to nothing.\nI'll continue.\nDavid writes, what the laws of morality be the same if the laws of physics were different?.\nIf they were such that knowledge could be obtained by blind obedience to authority, then scientists would have to avoid what we think of as the values of scientific inquiry in order to make progress.\nMy guess is that morality is more autonomous than that.\nAnd so it makes sense to say that the laws of physics would be immoral.\nAnd as I remarked in chapter four, to imagine the laws of physics that would be more moral than the real ones.\nNow if there's ever been, I'll pause there, this is me speaking, if there is ever being a more non-relativist conception of morality, I haven't read it.\nWhat David is saying there is that morality has an independent, possibly his guess is that it has an independent existence, a side from the laws of physics.\nSo it doesn't matter what your laws of physics are.\nIt doesn't matter if you are some kind of super alien that has a bird's eye view of the megaverse, a version of the universe with different physical laws or different kinds of multiverses.\nMany universes with different physical laws that meant you would have to commit immoral acts in order to make progress would be immoral.\nThat there is an independence to morality that stands apart from the laws of physics.\nNow David's guess, and I'm sure this is David's guess, is that, we say, guess this is David's guess, is that the laws of physics that we do have are not immoral.\nThat in fact, in order to make progress in this universe, that you have to be a moral person, you have to act morally.\nThat immorality, in fact, is the way in which we don't make progress.\nIn fact, that must be the case because, for example, we need to be able to speak the truth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=958"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f827a27c-bb4b-4e1f-9dbf-ac691bc0fd75": {"page_content": "That in fact, in order to make progress in this universe, that you have to be a moral person, you have to act morally.\nThat immorality, in fact, is the way in which we don't make progress.\nIn fact, that must be the case because, for example, we need to be able to speak the truth.\nWe need to be able to tell the truth in order to make progress, that reality is connected to truth in some way, and so our articulation of the truth is the thing that allows us to make progress and solve problems, so our laws of physics are definitely moral.\nWe can see that.\nI'll continue with what David writes.\nThe reach of ideas into the world of abstractions is a property of the knowledge that they contain, not of the brain in which they happen to be instantiated.\nA theory can have infinite reach, even if the person who originated it is unaware that it does.\nHowever, a person is an abstraction, too.\nAnd there is a kind of infinite reach that is unique to people.\nThe reach of the ability to understand explanations, and this ability is itself an instance of the wider phenomena of universality, to which I turn next.\nNow I won't turn there next.\nI'm going to turn, in fact, to chapter 10 of the fabric of reality, because I'd like to stay with this theme of mathematics and the theme of the reality of abstractions, and really focus on that part of the reality of abstractions, that, personally, I find most interesting, and a lot of people do as well, about abstract entities that are mathematical entities.\nWhat mathematics is about?.\nHow we can come to understand what mathematics is about, and how we can explain what mathematical entities are, and a little more on the nature of proof.\nSo in the fabric of reality, chapter 10, page 222, at the very beginning of the chapter day of the rites, now he's spoken about in the fabric of reality previously before we get the chapter 10, obviously, quantum physics and evolution and knowledge.\nAnd so what he writes here is, the fabric of reality that I have been describing so far has been the fabric of physical reality, yet I have also heard freely to entities that are nowhere to be found in the physical world, abstractions, such as numbers and infinite sets of computer programs, nor are the laws of physics themselves physical entities in the sense that rocks and planets are.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1261"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d55e545e-71eb-4883-a46f-2eb47782e486": {"page_content": "And so what he writes here is, the fabric of reality that I have been describing so far has been the fabric of physical reality, yet I have also heard freely to entities that are nowhere to be found in the physical world, abstractions, such as numbers and infinite sets of computer programs, nor are the laws of physics themselves physical entities in the sense that rocks and planets are.\nSo again, if you have bought the beginning of infinity, if you're a fan of the beginning of infinity, you can see there's a lot of supplementary material here that really helps with the beginning of infinity.\nSo the fabric of reality, fantastic book, and everyone should get it.\nSo I'm not going to read the whole chapter here, I'm going to skip forward to the parts that I find are relevant to chapter five.\nNext part is David asks the question, do abstract non-physical entities exist?.\nAre they a part of the fabric of reality?.\nI'm not interested here in issues of mere word usage.\nIt is obvious that numbers, the laws of physics and so on do exist in some senses and not in others.\nThe substantive question is this, how are we to understand such entities?.\nWhich of them are merely convenient forms of words referring ultimately only to ordinary physical reality?.\nWhich are merely ephemeral features of our culture, which are arbitrary like the rules of a trivial game that we need only look up and which, if any, can be explained only in a way that attributes an independent existence to them.\nThings of this last type must be part of the fabric of reality as defined in this book, because one would have to understand them in order to understand everything that is understood.\nNow, the next part that I won't read is David speaking about what's called Dr. Johnson's criterion and Dr. Johnson's criterion is whether or not an entity kicks back and by kickback, that would mean reacts in such a way or behaves in such a way or you're able to find out something such that it was unexpected, that's surprising.\nAnd this is why we regard numbers as being absolutely real, because merely by defining a few axioms, the axioms of arithmetic, you can then go on to discover amazing things that are completely unexpected, a very simple one is the distribution of prime numbers.\nIt's completely unexpected, we don't know what it is, we don't know what the next prime number will be, we have to go out and search.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=266"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1f3af5cf-7550-4555-973d-985f47e69bb0": {"page_content": "And this is why we regard numbers as being absolutely real, because merely by defining a few axioms, the axioms of arithmetic, you can then go on to discover amazing things that are completely unexpected, a very simple one is the distribution of prime numbers.\nIt's completely unexpected, we don't know what it is, we don't know what the next prime number will be, we have to go out and search.\nSo having defined these axioms, it then seems to reveal this reality of infinite complexity.\nAnd so therefore numbers are of a kind of abstract reality, according to that last question that David asked right there, he said, which if any can be explained only in a way that attributes an independent existence to them, so that would be numbers, they have an independent existence.\nThe next highest prime number that we find, no one knows when we'll find that next prime number, and no one knows what it is, but can anyone doubt that it exists?.\nAnd if it exists in what sense does it exist?.\nIt just exists, not physically, it's not, in fact, the biggest prime numbers, the biggest prime numbers don't kind of have any physical meaning, they can't possibly label anything in physical reality, because they're so large that they, you know, orders of magnitude bigger than all of the particle, the number of particles in the universe.\nAnd so David writes, thus abstract mathematical entities, we think we are familiar with can nevertheless surprise or disappoint us, they can pop up unexpectedly in new guises or disguises, they can be explicable, and then later conform to new explanations.\nSo they are complex and autonomous, and therefore by Dr. Johnson's criterion, we must conclude that they are real.\nSince we cannot understand them either as being part of ourselves or as being part of something else that we already understood, but we can understand them as independent entities, so we must conclude they are real independent entities.\nNevertheless, abstract entities are intangible, they do not kick back physically in the sense that a stone does, so experiment and observation cannot possibly play quite the same role in mathematics as they do in science, in mathematics, proof plays that role.\nDr. Johnson's stone, kicked back by making his foot rebound, prime numbers kick back when we prove something unexpected about them, especially if we can go on to explain it too.\nIn the traditional view, the crucial difference between proof and experiment is that a proof makes no reference to the physical world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6dc97175-cda8-412c-b8f0-1103e3a20438": {"page_content": "Dr. Johnson's stone, kicked back by making his foot rebound, prime numbers kick back when we prove something unexpected about them, especially if we can go on to explain it too.\nIn the traditional view, the crucial difference between proof and experiment is that a proof makes no reference to the physical world.\nWe can perform a proof in the privacy of our own minds, or we can perform a proof trapped inside a virtual reality generator, rendering the wrong physics.\nProvided that we follow the rules of mathematical inference, we should come up with the same answer as anyone else.\nAnd again, the prevailing view is that apart from the possibility of making blunders, when we have proved something, we know with absolute certainty that it is true.\nMathematicians are rather proud of this absolute certainty, and scientists tend to be a little envious of it.\nFor in science, there is no way of being certain of any proposition.\nHowever, well one's theories explain existing observations at any moment someone will make a new inexplicable observation that casts out on the whole of the current explanatory structure.\nOf course, someone may reach a better understanding that explains not only all existing observations, but also why the previous explanations seem to work, but are nevertheless quite wrong.\nGalileo, for instance, found a new explanation of the age-old observation that the ground beneath our feet is at rest, an explanation that involved the ground actually moving.\nVirtual reality, which can make one environment seem to be another, underlines the fact that when observation is the ultimate arbiter between theories, there can never be any certainty than an existing explanation.\nHowever, obvious, is even remotely true, but when proof is the arbiter, it is supposed there can be certainty.\nSo I'll pause there.\nThere we have David setting up the Mathematicians' misconception.\nFor the first, so he set this up decades ago now, but I'll skip a bit and David concludes after writing a little more.\nFor the idea that Mathematicians yield certainties is a myth too.\nSince ancient times, the idea that Mathematicians has a privileged status has often been associated with the idea that some abstract entities at least are not merely part of the fabric of reality.\nEven more real than the physical world, Pythagoras believed that regularities and nature are the expression of mathematical relationships between natural numbers.\nAll things are number was the slogan.\nThis was not meant quite literally, but Plato went further and effectively denied that the physical world is real at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=958"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38c1cec7-89ed-4652-8a02-5c43f3791381": {"page_content": "Since ancient times, the idea that Mathematicians has a privileged status has often been associated with the idea that some abstract entities at least are not merely part of the fabric of reality.\nEven more real than the physical world, Pythagoras believed that regularities and nature are the expression of mathematical relationships between natural numbers.\nAll things are number was the slogan.\nThis was not meant quite literally, but Plato went further and effectively denied that the physical world is real at all.\nI'm skipping a bit and David talks a little bit more about Plato, and he then writes on Plato.\nHowever, the problem he posed of how we can possibly have knowledge that alone certain of abstract entities is real enough.\nIn some elements of his proposed solution have been part of the prevailing theory of knowledge ever since.\nIn particular, the core idea that mathematical knowledge and scientific knowledge come from different sources and that the special source of mathematics confers absolute certainty upon it is to this day accepted uncritically by virtually all mathematicians.\nNowadays they call this source mathematical intuition, but it plays exactly the same role as Plato's memories of the realm of forms.\nThey have been many bit of controversies about precisely which types of perfectly reliable knowledge our mathematical intuition can be expected to reveal.\nIn other words, mathematicians agree that mathematical intuition is a source of absolute certainty, but they cannot agree about what mathematical intuition tells them.\nObviously this is a recipe for infinite, unresolved controversy.\nInevitably, most such controversies have centered on the validity or otherwise of various methods of proof.\nOne controversy concerned so-called imaginary numbers.\nThe imaginary numbers are the square roots of negative numbers.\nNew theorems about ordinary real numbers were proved by appealing at intermediate stages of a proof to the properties of imaginary numbers.\nFor example, the first theorems about the distribution of prime numbers were proved in this way.\nBut some mathematicians objected to imaginary numbers on the grounds that they were not real.\nCurrent terminology still reflects the old controversy, even though we now think that imaginary numbers are just as real as real numbers.\nI expect their school teachers had told them they were not allowed to take the square root of minus one.\nIn consequently, they did not see why anyone else should be allowed to outline.\nNot yet they called this uncharitable impulse mathematical intuition.\nBut other mathematicians had different intuitions.\nThey understood what the imaginary numbers were and how they fitted in with real numbers.\nWhy they thought should one not define new abstract entities to have any properties one likes?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1763"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7de59f20-0fbd-4838-b0c7-ff601961061b": {"page_content": "I expect their school teachers had told them they were not allowed to take the square root of minus one.\nIn consequently, they did not see why anyone else should be allowed to outline.\nNot yet they called this uncharitable impulse mathematical intuition.\nBut other mathematicians had different intuitions.\nThey understood what the imaginary numbers were and how they fitted in with real numbers.\nWhy they thought should one not define new abstract entities to have any properties one likes?.\nSurely the only legitimate grounds for forbidding this would be that the required properties were logically inconsistent.\nSurely the only legitimate grounds for forbidding this would be that the required properties were logically inconsistent.\nThat is essentially the modern consensus which the mathematician John Horton Conway has robustly referred to as the mathematicians' liberation movement.\nAdmittedly, no one had proved that the system of imaginary numbers was self-consistent, but that no one had proved that the ordinary arithmetic of the natural numbers was self-consistent either.\nNow, I'm skipping a very substantial number of pages here, maybe one day I'll go back and actually do the fabric of reality.\nIn fact, that's the plan.\nI will do a series on the fabric of reality once I've finished the beginning of the infinity.\nThis will take many months and I've skipped forward a number of pages and then David writes.\nThanks to Girdle, we now know there will never be a fixed method of determining whether a mathematical proposition is true anymore than there is a fixed way of determining whether a scientific theory is true, nor there ever be a fixed way of generating new mathematical knowledge.\nTherefore, progress in mathematics will always depend on the exercise of creativity.\nIt will always be possible and necessary for mathematicians to invent new types of proof.\nThey will validate them by new arguments and by new modes of explanation depending upon their ever-improving understanding of the abstract entities involved.\nGirdle's own Theorems were a case in point.\nTo prove them, yet to invent a new method of proof.\nI said the method was based on the diagonal argument, but Girdle extended that argument in a new way.\nNothing had ever been proved in this way before.\nNo rules of inference laid down by someone who had never seen Girdle's method could possibly have been prescient enough to designate it as valid, yet it is self-evidently valid.\nWhere did this self-evidentness come from?.\nIt came from Girdle's understanding of the nature of proof.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1774"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5af0f16b-a005-49ad-ab16-6c074272227b": {"page_content": "I said the method was based on the diagonal argument, but Girdle extended that argument in a new way.\nNothing had ever been proved in this way before.\nNo rules of inference laid down by someone who had never seen Girdle's method could possibly have been prescient enough to designate it as valid, yet it is self-evidently valid.\nWhere did this self-evidentness come from?.\nIt came from Girdle's understanding of the nature of proof.\nGirdle's proofs are as compelling as any in mathematics, but only if one first understands the explanation that accommodates them.\nSo explanation does, after all, play the same paramount role in pure mathematics as it does in science.\nBeing and understanding the world, the physical world, and the world of mathematical abstractions is in both cases the object of the exercise, proof and observation, a merely the means by which we check our explanations.\nI'll pause there.\nIsn't that amazing?.\nAll the way back in the fabric of reality, 1997, we're getting a poor tent, really, of what is to come with David's TED talks, what is to come with David's next book, and what has to come with the vision and the worldview that he's gifted us with.\nIt's here in its nascent form in the fabric of reality.\nIn fact, more than nascent form, I mean, he's really articulating it clearly, there's so much here, of course, that it's easy to have missed at night, met, but having read it, read the fabric of reality for the first time when it was published in 1997, I didn't fully get the centrality of explanation in science, and I didn't get it until the beginning of infinity.\nSo, I'm skipping forward a little more, and this is still in chapter 10, skipping some more pages and David writes, it is often suggested that the brain, the human brain, may be a quantum computer, and that its intuitions, consciousness and problem solving abilities might depend on quantum computations.\nThis could be so, but I know of no evidence and no convincing argument that it is so.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1774"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f5e44090-6175-4485-9cae-063c5328f57f": {"page_content": "My bet is that the brain, considered as a computer, is a classical one, but that issue is independent of Penrose's ideas, it's paused there, so he's just written a section about Roger Penrose who does have this theory that it could be the case that the brain is a quantum computer, or at least relies on some kind of quantum effects, and I think there's a number of scientists including neuroscientists that kind of hint that they think that this might be the case, but as David says, there's no relevance for that, and this is problem of what's known as decoherence, in particular, in order for us to have a quantum computer that works, we need to be able to have quantum systems, we need to be able to have entanglement, and entanglement, so far as we can tell at the moment, only works when temperatures are sufficiently low, such that noise doesn't affect the system, and the kinds of technology that I've seen, the University of New South Wales here in Sydney, where I am, is working on this, the kind of temperatures they need is very, very close to absolute zero, I mean they're operating at some of the coldest refrigeration on the planet in order to get these things to work, so until we have a new theory of how to build quantum computers, really the argument for the human brain being and quantum computer is unconvincing, but David continues to write, Penrose is not arguing that the brain is some sort of universal computer, differing from the universal quantum computer by having a larger repertoire of computations made possible by new post-quantum physics, he is arguing for a new physics that will not support computational university, so that under his new theory it will not be possible to construe some of the actions of the brain as computations at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=2135"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "914c889a-ba8f-41a0-8d47-e29b91b64f39": {"page_content": "David writes, I must admit that I cannot conceive of such a theory, however, fundamental breakthroughs do tend to be hard to conceive of before they occur, naturally, is hard to judge Penrose's theory before he succeeds in formulating it fully, so that's a very generous reading of Roger Penrose, I'm going to skip forward a few more pages here and David writes, Plato tells us that since we have access only to imperfect circles say we cannot thereby obtain any knowledge of perfect circles, but why not exactly?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=2253"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f1dbd503-e565-4b67-b843-867270e8c864": {"page_content": "One might as well say that we cannot discover the laws of planetary motion because we do not have access to real planets, but only to images of planets.\nThe Inquisition did say this, and as I have explained, they were wrong.\nOne might as well say it as impossible to build accurate machine tools because the first one would have to be built with inaccurate machine tools.\nWith the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this line of criticism depends on a very crude picture of how science works, something like inductivism, which is hardly surprising since Plato lived before anything that we would recognize as science.\nIf say the only way of learning about circles from experience, which will examine thousands of physical circles and then from the accumulated data to try to infer something about their abstract Euclidean counterparts, Plato would have a point.\nBut if we form a hypothesis that real circles resemble the abstract ones in specified ways, and we have to be right, then we may well learn something about the abstract circles by looking at real ones.\nIn Euclidean geometry, one often uses diagrams to specify a geometrical pattern or its solution.\nThere is a possibility of error in such a method of description if the imperfections of circles in the diagram give a misleading impression.\nFor example, if two circles tend to touch each other when they do not.\nBut if one understands the relationship between real circles and imperfect circles, one can, with care, eliminate all such errors.\nIf one does not understand that relationship, it is practically impossible to understand Euclidean geometry at all.\nThe reliability of the knowledge of a perfect circle that one can gain from a diagram of a circle depends entirely on the accuracy of the hypothesis that the two resemble each other in relevant ways.\nSuch a hypothesis, referring to a physical object, the diagram, amounts to a physical theory and can never be known with certainty, but that does not, as Plato would have it, preclude the possibility of learning about perfect circles from experience.\nIt just precludes the possibility of certainty.\nThat should not worry anyone is looking for certainty, but for explanations.\nThat is great.\nHow do we know about these mathematical entities?.\nWell, because we have theories, we have theories that arise from our study of physically existing circles, let's say, and then we can prove things about those physically existing circles that relate to ideal platonic forms in some way.\nThis is true of all mathematical platonic ideals.\nSo mathematics is about these abstract entities.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "66834e0e-a4cf-419b-ae80-caf93eb887f8": {"page_content": "That should not worry anyone is looking for certainty, but for explanations.\nThat is great.\nHow do we know about these mathematical entities?.\nWell, because we have theories, we have theories that arise from our study of physically existing circles, let's say, and then we can prove things about those physically existing circles that relate to ideal platonic forms in some way.\nThis is true of all mathematical platonic ideals.\nSo mathematics is about these abstract entities.\nWe only have access to the physical versions thereof, but there is a relationship between, and we know what the relationship is because we conjecture explanations between the perfect abstract entities and our physical reality.\nDavid continues, skip a little, and he writes, let us re-examine another assumption of Plato's, the assumption that we do not have access to perfection in the physical world.\nHe may be right that we shall not find perfect honor or justice, and he is certainly right that we shall not find the laws of physics or the set of all natural members, but we can find a perfect hand in bridge or the perfect move in a given chess position.\nThat is to say, we can find physical objects or processes that perfectly possess the properties of the specified abstractions.\nWe can learn chess just as well with a real chess set as we could with a perfect form of a chess set.\nThe fact that a knight is chipped does not make the check make, it delivers any less final.\nAs it happens, a perfectly Euclidean circle can be made available to our senses.\nPlato did not realize this because he did not know about virtual reality.\nIt would not be difficult to program the virtual reality generators I envisaged back in a previous chapter.\nSuch that a user could experience perfect geometrical forms, skipping a fair bit more.\nThere is a lot of really good stuff here, but yes, I will have to return to it a later day, but I just want to get to this mathematician's misconception and the relevant material about the reality of abstractions.\nIt is almost, I am reaching the punchline here, and so I will read this.\nThis is all our page, 246 of the fabric of reality and David Wright's.\nA conventional symbolic proof seems at first sight to have a quite a different character from a hands-on virtual reality sort of proof, but we now see that they are related in the ways that computations are to physical experiments.\nAny physical experiment can be regarded as a computation, and any computation is a physical experiment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1010"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ca0e04d9-da72-4c24-aca1-583f17d8ee84": {"page_content": "It is almost, I am reaching the punchline here, and so I will read this.\nThis is all our page, 246 of the fabric of reality and David Wright's.\nA conventional symbolic proof seems at first sight to have a quite a different character from a hands-on virtual reality sort of proof, but we now see that they are related in the ways that computations are to physical experiments.\nAny physical experiment can be regarded as a computation, and any computation is a physical experiment.\nIn both sorts of proof, physical entities, whether in virtual reality or not, are manipulated according to rules.\nIn both cases, the physical entities represent the abstract entities of interest, and in both cases, the reliability of the proof depends on the truth of the theory that physical and abstract entities do indeed share the appropriate properties.\nSo, pausing there, a mathematical proof is about abstract entities, but we use physical objects in order to represent those abstract entities.\nNow, David says, he writes, We can also see from the above discussion that proof is a physical process.\nIn fact, a proof is a type of computation.\nProving a proposition means performing a computation which, if one has done it correctly, establishes that the proposition is true.\nWhen we use the word proof to denote an object, such as an ink on paper text, we mean that the object can be used as a program for recreating a computation of the appropriate kind.\nIt follows that neither the theorems of mathematics nor the process of mathematical proof, nor the experience of mathematical intuition, confers any certainty.\nNothing does.\nOur mathematical knowledge may, just like our scientific knowledge, be deep, and broad, it may be subtle and wonderfully explanatory.\nIt may be uncontroversially accepted, but it cannot be certain.\nNo one can guarantee that a proof that was previously thought to be valid will not one day turn out to contain a profound misconception, made to seem natural by a previously unquestioned self-evident assumption about either the physical world or about the abstract world, or about the way in which some physical and abstract entities are related, skipping a little more.\nAnd I think that this is where, again, on a personal note, I really had that sense on reading this chapter for the first time over the ground falling out from underneath you, the sense of vertigo and falling that previously throughout school and high school and university, I really was inculcated with the idea that mathematics was this solid unchanging domain of certainty.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=1350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eed606cc-b093-4007-a849-763d1f495463": {"page_content": "And I think that this is where, again, on a personal note, I really had that sense on reading this chapter for the first time over the ground falling out from underneath you, the sense of vertigo and falling that previously throughout school and high school and university, I really was inculcated with the idea that mathematics was this solid unchanging domain of certainty.\nAnd then I think I read this, David wrote, A very similar misclassification has been caused by the fundamental mistake that mathematicians since antiquity have been making about the very nature of their subject, namely that mathematical knowledge is more certain than other forms of knowledge.\nHaving made that mistake, no one has a choice but to classify proof theory as a part of mathematics.\nFor a mathematical theorem could not be certain if the theory that justifies its method of proof, or itself uncertain.\nBut as we have just seen, proof theory is not a branch of mathematics.\nIt is a science.\nProofs are not abstract, there is no such thing as abstractly proving something, just that there is no such thing as abstractly calculating or abstractly computing something.\nOne can of course define a class of abstract entities and call them proofs, but those proofs cannot verify mathematical statements because no one can see them.\nThey cannot persuade any one of the truth of a proposition any more than an abstract virtual reality generator that does not physically exist can persuade people that they are in a different environment, or an abstract computer can factor ize a number for us.\nA mathematical theory of proofs would have no bearing on which mathematical truths can or cannot be proved in reality.\nJust as a theory of abstract computation has no bearing on what mathematicians or anyone else can or cannot calculate in reality, unless there is a separate empirical reason for believing that the abstract computations in the theory represent real computations.\nComputations, including the special computations that qualify as proofs, are physical processes.\nProof theory is about how to ensure that those processes correctly mimic the abstract entities they are intended to mimic.\nGoodell's theories have been hailed as the first new theorem of pure logic for 2000 years, but that is not so.\nGoodell's theorem is about what can cannot be proved and proof is a physical process.\nNothing improved theory is a matter of logical own.\nThe new way in which goodell managed to prove general assertions about proofs depends on certain assumptions about which physical processes can or cannot represent an abstract fact in a way that an observer can detect and be convinced by.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=12"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e330405-5f52-4a46-ae0a-a59af3e3119a": {"page_content": "Goodell's theories have been hailed as the first new theorem of pure logic for 2000 years, but that is not so.\nGoodell's theorem is about what can cannot be proved and proof is a physical process.\nNothing improved theory is a matter of logical own.\nThe new way in which goodell managed to prove general assertions about proofs depends on certain assumptions about which physical processes can or cannot represent an abstract fact in a way that an observer can detect and be convinced by.\nGoodell distilled such assumptions into his explicit and tash at rules of his results.\nHis results were self-evidently justified, not because they are pure logic, but because mathematicians found the assumptions self-evident, skipping more, and just getting to the part that I think I've quoted more from the fabric of reality than any other section where David writes.\nThat mathematicians throughout the ages should have made various mistakes about matters of proof and certainty is only natural.\nThe present discussion should lead us to expect that the current view will not last forever, but the confidence with which mathematicians have blundered into these mistakes, and their inability to acknowledge even the possibility of error in these matters are, I think, connected with an ancient and widespread confusion between the methods of mathematics and its subject matter.\nLet me explain.\nUnlike the relationships between physical entities, relationships between abstract entities are independent of any contingent facts and of any laws of physics.\nThey are determined objectively by the autonomous properties of the abstract entities themselves.\nMathematics, the study of these relationships and properties is therefore the study of absolutely necessary truths.\nI'm just going to pause and repeat that sentence.\nMathematics, the study of these relationships and properties, is the study of absolutely necessary truths.\nMathematics is the study of absolutely necessary truths.\nLet me continue.\nIn other words, the truths that mathematics studies are absolutely certain, but this does not mean that our knowledge of those necessary truths is itself certain, nor does it mean that the methods of mathematics confer necessary truth on their conclusions.\nAfter all, mathematics also studies falsehoods and paradoxes, and that does not mean that the conclusions of such a study are necessarily false or paradoxical.\nNext is my favorite line of the entire chapter, and certainly up there with one of my favorite lines out of both books, David Wright.\nNecessary truth is merely the subject matter of mathematics.\nNot the reward we get for doing mathematics.\nI think I've quoted it a hundred times before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=12"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a2517f70-8afb-470d-bccf-fe8bc4d097b7": {"page_content": "After all, mathematics also studies falsehoods and paradoxes, and that does not mean that the conclusions of such a study are necessarily false or paradoxical.\nNext is my favorite line of the entire chapter, and certainly up there with one of my favorite lines out of both books, David Wright.\nNecessary truth is merely the subject matter of mathematics.\nNot the reward we get for doing mathematics.\nI think I've quoted it a hundred times before.\nNecessary truth is merely the subject matter of mathematics.\nNot the reward we get for doing mathematics.\nThe objective of mathematics is not, and cannot be mathematical certainty.\nIt is not even mathematical truth, certain or otherwise.\nIt is, and must be, mathematical explanation.\nSo I'll just read the conclusion now of this chapter.\nI'm skipping a little more in David Wright.\nThere are physical objects such as fingers, computers, and brains, whose behavior can model that of certain abstract objects.\nIn this way, the fabric of physical reality provides us with a window on the world of abstractions.\nIt is a very narrow window and gives us only a limited range of perspectives.\nSome of the structures that we see out there, such as the natural numbers or the rules of inference of classical logic, seem to be important or fundamental to the abstract world.\nIn the same way as deep laws of nature are fundamental to the physical world, but that could be a misleading appearance.\nFor what we are really seeing is only that some abstract structures are fundamental to our understanding of abstractions.\nWe have no reason to suppose that those structures are objectively significant in the abstract world.\nIt is merely that some abstract entities are nearer and more easily visible from our window than others.\nNow, I'm just going to read also his terminology section that he has in the fabric of reality as he does in the beginning of infinity.\nAnd so his terminology includes mathematics, which he defines as the study of absolutely necessary truths.\nAgain, mathematics is a study of necessary truth, but it doesn't mean that what you are able to prove are necessary truths.\nIt's just the study of them.\nAnd so you get what you get is fallible explanations of those necessary truths.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=12"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7444eda0-c3d4-4593-aa96-4de20ed18ab1": {"page_content": "Now, I'm just going to read also his terminology section that he has in the fabric of reality as he does in the beginning of infinity.\nAnd so his terminology includes mathematics, which he defines as the study of absolutely necessary truths.\nAgain, mathematics is a study of necessary truth, but it doesn't mean that what you are able to prove are necessary truths.\nIt's just the study of them.\nAnd so you get what you get is fallible explanations of those necessary truths.\nHe defines proof as, in the traditional way, a way of establishing the truth of mathematical propositions, or a sequence of statements starting with some premises and ending with the desired conclusion and satisfying certain rules of inference, or better yet, a computation that models the properties of some abstract entity and whose outcome establishes that the abstract entity has a given property.\nMathematical intuition he defines as, in the traditional sense, an ultimate self-evident source of justification for mathematical reasoning.\nAnd actually, it's a set of theories both conscious and unconscious about the behavior of certain physical objects, whose behavior models that of interesting abstract entities.\nAnd then he mentioned, so what's called Hilbert's tent problem, and Hilbert's tent problem was whether or not we could establish once and for all the certitude of mathematical methods by finding a set of rules of inference, sufficient for all valid proofs, and then proving those rules consistent by their own standards.\nAnd then Goodles in completeness theorem is a proof that Hilbert's tent problem cannot be solved.\nFor any set of rules of inference, there are valid proofs not designated as valid by those rules.\nSo that's it.\nThat's the reality of abstractions, chapter five, the beginning infinity, with some material from chapter 10 of the fabric of reality.\nNext, I move on to chapter six, universally, but I hope you enjoyed that extended appendacy, I guess, to chapter five.\nSee you next time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnH5bSVUwtM&t=266"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "83495436-6edf-48c5-b00d-619a7dfe9fda": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and episode 2 of The Science of Canon Can't Buy Chiara.\nMy Little or rather my commentary on The Science of Canon Can't Buy Chiara.\nMy Little.\nAnd last time in the first episode I gave a broad overview of what The Science of Canon Can't Was About and plucked out a few bits and pieces from Chapter 1.\nIt was much broader than what today is going to be about.\nI'm still on Chapter 1, however I'm just going to be focusing on the physics content of The Science of Canon Can't Chapter 1.\nAnd that Chapter 1 is of course such stuff as Dreams Are Made On.\nAnd in the previous episode about this book it was about the some of the ways in which constructive theory might be applied to many different areas of science.\nAnd why this way of conceiving of science as being about what could possibly occur and what could not possibly occur is a new mode of explanation.\nThat might have useful applications not only to things like science and biology but even to aspects of our knowledge like art and literature.\nBut today really the focus is going to be on the physics.\nSo I'm just going to dive straight into the book part way through the chapter.\nAnd Chiara writes, quote, a boundary has been generated that affects and constrains the way criticism and conjecture can occur, a boundary that is keeping out certain kinds of explanations from the allowed set.\nThese are explanations that involve counterfactuals.\nThe boundary grew up because of a phenomenon that has been going on for some time.\nSilently, largely unnoticed like water seeping into a ship whose hull has a hidden hole below the waterline to see what it is we must start where it all began.\nWe must start with physics.\nIt is perhaps ironic that this boundary generating phenomenon started in physics because physics is one of the clearest examples of how thinking can produce knowledge and make rapid progress.\nAt a glance from what one is taught in elementary courses at school, physics may appear like a collection of tools to solve irrelevant problems of the kinds you get in weekly physics tests.\nWhat is the time of flight of an apple that falls from a tree of a certain height?.\nHow long will it take a bathtub of such a volume to be filled with water if the water is flowing in at this rate and so on?.\nCompared with other disciplines such as literature or philosophy, physics may not seem to be about deep things at all.\nWho cares after all about how an apple falls?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=29"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f0cc515c-cc1e-4c62-9b91-7b39a676c73e": {"page_content": "What is the time of flight of an apple that falls from a tree of a certain height?.\nHow long will it take a bathtub of such a volume to be filled with water if the water is flowing in at this rate and so on?.\nCompared with other disciplines such as literature or philosophy, physics may not seem to be about deep things at all.\nWho cares after all about how an apple falls?.\nIsn't that fantastically narrow in scope?.\nThis first impression is very far from the truth.\nPhysics is a dazzling firework display.\nIt is profound, beautiful and illuminating, a source of never-ending delight.\nPhysics is about solving problems in our understanding of reality by formulating explanations that fill gaps in our previous understanding.\nThe point of physics is not the particular calculation about the fall of an apple.\nIt is the explanation behind it which unifies all motions, that of the apple, with that of a planet in the solar system and beyond.\nThe dazzling stuff consists of explanations for they surprise us by revealing things that were previously unknown and very distant from our intuition, with the aim of solving a particular problem.\nAs I said, problems always consist of a contrast or clash between ideas about the world.\nFor example, in the past, people believed that the earth was at the centre of the universe, but that notion clashed irredeemably with observations, such as those about the apparent movement of the stars, of the other planets, end of the moon.\nThis led Copernicus and Galileo to conjecture that the sun, not the earth, was at the centre of the solar system.\nThe Copernican Revolution was an astonishing change of perspective which allowed us to make formidable progress in understanding astronomy and celestial mechanics, and eventually led via a series of further steps to our current space exploration enterprises pausing their my reflection on this.\nNow it might be if you're paying careful attention to some of my podcasts, it might seem that there is a contradiction in what I say about this kind of thing here.\nWhat Chiara refers to as the Copernican Revolution.\nWhat historians refer to as the Copernican Revolution, what many people refer to as the Copernican Revolution.\nBut one of the reasons why it's referred to as the Copernican Revolution is because it is supposed to be revolutionary.\nBut I wouldn't take the word revolution too seriously.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=164"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c84a502-7d02-462e-b4b3-df531294e15e": {"page_content": "What Chiara refers to as the Copernican Revolution.\nWhat historians refer to as the Copernican Revolution, what many people refer to as the Copernican Revolution.\nBut one of the reasons why it's referred to as the Copernican Revolution is because it is supposed to be revolutionary.\nBut I wouldn't take the word revolution too seriously.\nThe sociologist philosopher of science, scientist, and physicist, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, where he sought to explain that progress in science, progress in scare quotes to some extent, was a story of revolutions.\nThe overturning of particular frameworks, and if you're in one framework or paradigm, one way of understanding the world, then it was very difficult for you to understand any other way of conceiving that the world could operate.\nIn other words, science was always a sociological battle, this battle between the old fogies and the new upstarts.\nAnd there's no real objective way of determining who is correct on this account, but rather it is a political battle between the old and the young lions battling it out and just having arguments that are filled with emotion and filled with politics, rather than objectively looking at the facts and coming to a deeper understanding of the world.\nThe Copernican Revolution, as Kiera says there, is certainly an astonishing change of perspective, because we went from conceiving of ourselves as human beings, occupying a planet at the center of the universe, every other celestial body orbiting around us.\nWhat Copernicus and others saw was that the better explanation, the better scientific explanation, was to shift the earth from the center to having the sun at the center, heliocentrism.\nNow on one hand, this isn't an astonishing change of perspective, certainly mentally for people.\nHowever, the scientific theory that goes on to explain orbital motions of celestial objects didn't change that much, because we still had orbits, things were still moving in approximate circles or ellipses, there was still relative motion between these objects.\nThe difference was an incremental change from having one object at the center to having a different object at the center.\nOn the one hand, the earth then the sun.\nNow, we can debate about what it would mean for that to be revolutionary.\nBut the usual understanding of revolution is a complete overturning of everything, but not everything was overturned.\nAnd so we could make a pretty strong counter argument that this wasn't really a revolution.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=282"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "819113de-14d4-44cd-b841-243b69cfb44a": {"page_content": "The difference was an incremental change from having one object at the center to having a different object at the center.\nOn the one hand, the earth then the sun.\nNow, we can debate about what it would mean for that to be revolutionary.\nBut the usual understanding of revolution is a complete overturning of everything, but not everything was overturned.\nAnd so we could make a pretty strong counter argument that this wasn't really a revolution.\nIt was a component, an incremental change, the existing understanding of the universe, but it still was an astonishing change of perspective.\nBut scientifically speaking, it allowed us to correct certain errors in the way in which eventually allowed us to correct certain errors in the way in which planetary motions operated.\nBut people who follow in the intellectual tradition of Thomas Kuhn liked to make a big deal about changes like this.\nThey formulate an entire view of science, which is there are those who believed in the Copernican idea, and those who believe in the Ptolemaic idea, and there was just no way that these two groups of people could communicate with one other, operating in completely different paradigms.\nBut were they really operating in completely different paradigms?.\nAfter all, the content of both theories remained relatively unchanged.\nIt was just the object that center was the thing that changed.\nIt was an incremental change, I would suggest, following in Popper's intellectual tradition.\nIf on the other hand, we had have gone from a Ptolemaic view to a Copernican view where there were no such things as orbits.\nThere were no such things as planets.\nThere was no relative motion between the celestial objects.\nIf all of it was utterly overturned, then I could get it.\nThen I could understand that maybe this would be revolutionary.\nBut in fact, so much of the theory was maintained.\nAnd this is true between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics as well.\nThat's a bigger change.\nThat's a much bigger change of perspective and much more of the content actually changes as well.\nBut much, much is preserved.\nAnd as Kiara says in exactly the same sentence where she says that the Copernican Revolution was an astonishing change of perspective, it then led via a series of further steps to our current space exploration enterprises.\nSo it's always this story of steps, these incremental steps.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=424"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f2634314-9d75-4aca-9fd5-88fdcc5d6bbc": {"page_content": "And this is true between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics as well.\nThat's a bigger change.\nThat's a much bigger change of perspective and much more of the content actually changes as well.\nBut much, much is preserved.\nAnd as Kiara says in exactly the same sentence where she says that the Copernican Revolution was an astonishing change of perspective, it then led via a series of further steps to our current space exploration enterprises.\nSo it's always this story of steps, these incremental steps.\nIt's very hard to leap to something utterly different where you're just giving up everything that you knew previously and coming up with a theory that in no way contains any of the content of the previous theory, it typically does.\nIt typically does.\nWe go from having a force of gravity to no force of gravity.\nBut lots of stuff still remains the same.\nMass is still involved, for example.\nEnergy is still involved, for example.\nOr but still happened, for example, back to the book, Kiara writes, quote, by solving problems of that kind, physicists have gradually uncovered entirely unsuspected worlds.\nTelling us a deeper layer of the story of how things are, these layers are beyond the immediate reach of our senses, but our mind can visualize them in the light of explanations.\nIn existing physics, all explanations have some primitive elements, in terms of which the physical reality to be explained is expressed.\nThe appearance of the dark sky at night is a perfect example of that.\nIt can be explained in terms of the unexpected underlying phenomena involving things like photons, the remarkable fact that the universe is expanding and so on.\nNone of those elements is apparent in the sky itself, but they are all part of the explanation for why it looks the way it does in terms of what is really out there.\nExplanations are accounts of what is seen in terms of mostly unseen elements, pausing their my reflection.\nSo this is a common thread now that runs through the work of Karl Popper, David Deutsch, Kiara Miletta, that we have this conception of science, almost everything, as I like to say, interesting that we know about science, is the scene, what we can observe in terms of the unseen, what we cannot observe.\nAnd I've been at pains in my conversations on that other podcast in various other places with Naval Revocant to explain and try and promote this idea that almost everything in science is not about what we can observe directly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=548"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "05b21447-94a9-494f-9c4b-0c089e5cbb4c": {"page_content": "And I've been at pains in my conversations on that other podcast in various other places with Naval Revocant to explain and try and promote this idea that almost everything in science is not about what we can observe directly.\nAnd it is very well encapsulated by this idea of explaining the scene in terms of the unseen.\nAnd so if we can go through the standard examples again, David's favorite example being that of dinosaurs, we do not observe dinosaurs.\nThey're unseen.\nWhat we observe are fossils in the ground.\nThose fossils in the ground that exist in rocks are essentially patterns in rocks that we have to interpret.\nAnd then a chain of explanatory interpretations leads us to the conclusion that once upon a time, more than 62 million years ago, walk the earth, these huge creatures that we call dinosaurs, that we do not observe.\nAnd then unless we build time machines or we have significantly more advanced genetic engineering, we will not see with our eyes.\nInstead, we must imagine this is part of the explanatory theory that explains why fossils exist.\nThe cause of the fossils is these unseen things.\nAnd so now we can change that to, I like to use, stellar nucleosynthesis, stellar nucleophusion.\nWe cannot travel to the center of a star, to the core of a star like the sun.\nIn fact, there are good physical reasons why it is impossible for us to directly observe anything at the core of the sun.\nWe cannot send a probe there.\nThere is no material that can survive the journey to the center of the sun.\nWe can't even send things to the center of the earth, much less the center of the sun.\nAny material out of which you think you could make a probe, the most strongest titanium, tungsten alloy, isn't going to make it even to the surface of the sun before the thing entirely melts and then vaporizes.\nWe're not going to get to the center of the sun, but we know what's going on there.\nWe cannot see what's going on there directly.\nAll we do is collect photons of light here at earth and interpret those photons of light.\nAnd by a chain of explanation and interpretation, we conclude, oh, there's hydrogen there at the center of the sun.\nProtons, those protons, those hydrogen nuclei are being smashed together with sufficient energy that they fuse forming helium.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=686"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a21e5b16-f2ff-4cb5-8f0f-8eec55ac7ab4": {"page_content": "We're not going to get to the center of the sun, but we know what's going on there.\nWe cannot see what's going on there directly.\nAll we do is collect photons of light here at earth and interpret those photons of light.\nAnd by a chain of explanation and interpretation, we conclude, oh, there's hydrogen there at the center of the sun.\nProtons, those protons, those hydrogen nuclei are being smashed together with sufficient energy that they fuse forming helium.\nAnd that process releases heat and light, and that's what we detect, and the explanation of the light here at earth is because of that process going on in the core of the sun, which we cannot see.\nThe Big Bang is another fantastic one that we will never see the Big Bang.\nWe cannot be there to observe it.\nNo one was there to observe it.\nNo one ever will be there to observe it, but it happened.\nSo we are explaining what we see now, the cosmic microwave background, the so-called Hubble expansion of the universe, the redshift of galaxies, and the ratio of hydrogen to helium.\nAnd indeed the dark night sky, all of these things are explained by this unseen thing, the Big Bang.\nChoose your favorite example from science, from modern science, and you will quickly realize that there is a part of the explanation which relies upon unseen things going on.\nThe problem, of course, is in the scene.\nWe end up observing something, and we can't explain this observation, what is going on here?.\nThe observation causes us to think, well, that doesn't make sense in light of this.\nSo let's try to come up with an explanation.\nAnd the explanation falls back towards things that we cannot observe.\nIt's a very fascinating part of science.\nIt's a different way of conceiving of science, by the way.\nAnyone who describes and self as an empiricist would have to explain what's going on here because empiricism is the misconception that science is only about the things that we can observe.\nThey can need to prove the scientific theory by recourse to observations in the world.\nBut that's not the way that science works, because again, the vast majority of interesting stuff in science is about the unseen or the unobserved.\nOkay, let's go back to the book, and cure our rights.\nThere is no limitation in principle to how deep one can go in finding even more primitive elements.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=819"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4a9ea746-d4f6-4db8-bd5f-2f8257975a16": {"page_content": "They can need to prove the scientific theory by recourse to observations in the world.\nBut that's not the way that science works, because again, the vast majority of interesting stuff in science is about the unseen or the unobserved.\nOkay, let's go back to the book, and cure our rights.\nThere is no limitation in principle to how deep one can go in finding even more primitive elements.\nThe primitive elements of an explanation can always be explained further in terms of other entities, and so on going deeper and deeper.\nDeeper levels of explanation may look very different from the shallower ones.\nFor instance, there was a time in physics when particles were thought to be the ultimate elements of reality.\nThese are discrete lumps of matter interacting with each other via forces at a distance.\nThat view was then overturned by the idea of fields.\nA field in physics is a thing that permeates everything there is in a continuous way.\nParticles are now understood as excitations, ripples of fields.\nBut fields themselves could, in principle, we've broken down further into more primitive elements of explanation, opening up a novel and even more fundamental explanation of reality.\nThis may be hard to imagine for us, but we must be prepared to imagine more fundamental entities than fields.\nGiven that physics is open to further, more fundamental explanations.\nThe resulting picture of scientific knowledge is that there are different levels of explanation about reality.\nEach of these levels may sometimes be autonomous.\nIn the sense that it does not need to refer to the others to make sense of its own internal rules.\nFor example, it is still fine to think of particles without referring to fields of view which to describe certain simple mechanical interactions such as the collision of two rigid spheres.\nNone of these levels is exhaustive.\nAll the levels are essential to understanding what is out there, pausing that is my quick reflection on this.\nSo when it comes to a word like particles, I like to think that we just continue to understand the nature of particle with ever more precision over time.\nAnd there'll be no end to how well we can understand particles.\nTake, for example, the electron.\nNow, it used to be thought that the electron, well, sorry for the fact that it used to be thought the electron didn't exist, that there were just these things called atoms and they were just spheres that were just individual spheres.\nWe can go back to democritus in ancient Greece for that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=930"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f2927597-bfeb-4d74-9563-10a1b463076b": {"page_content": "And there'll be no end to how well we can understand particles.\nTake, for example, the electron.\nNow, it used to be thought that the electron, well, sorry for the fact that it used to be thought the electron didn't exist, that there were just these things called atoms and they were just spheres that were just individual spheres.\nWe can go back to democritus in ancient Greece for that.\nIt took some time later until we thought that, well, the electron is actually this charged particle that orbits the nucleus in an atom.\nThe atom now being something that is indeed divisible made up of other simpler components.\nAnd then we realized, well, the electron might be the excitation of the field.\nBut it didn't change the fact the electrons in electron.\nAnd I don't think it changed the fact that a particle is a particle.\nUnless one is to insist that particle must mean something other than excitation of the field.\nIn the same way that we do not need to agree with the ancient Greeks, democritus doesn't get to claim the word atom and keep it for all time.\nWe can refine our understanding of the word atom over time and come to a better, deeper understanding of what an atom genuinely is.\nIt's not something that's indivisible.\nEven if the Greek word means indivisible.\nSo too with an electron.\nAnd now we know an electron excitation of the field, but also consisting of lots of fungible instances of itself throughout the multiverse, we should expect that this understanding of the electron would just continue to be refined.\nCould it ever be the case that we would find an explanation where the electron was entirely able to be done away with?.\nI doubt it, but it's possible.\nIt's possible.\nAre we wrong about the electron right now?.\nI would certainly expect that to be the case, that we can find out something new about the electron, namely some new properties that we didn't know about before.\nAll of these things are true.\nBut I emphasize that because certainly in episodes that I've done on the multiverse, I've said categorically that the electron is not a wave in a single universe that I refuse to go down the path of saying an electron is both a particle and a wave.\nI say it to particle.\nThen of course we get into this idea that it's an excitation of the field.\nThe field being a continuous thing across a universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=1062"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "efe664aa-606b-4adf-8f46-7f1d8da81c0d": {"page_content": "All of these things are true.\nBut I emphasize that because certainly in episodes that I've done on the multiverse, I've said categorically that the electron is not a wave in a single universe that I refuse to go down the path of saying an electron is both a particle and a wave.\nI say it to particle.\nThen of course we get into this idea that it's an excitation of the field.\nThe field being a continuous thing across a universe.\nDoes that then mean that the electron is a particle and a wave?.\nOnly if I would suggest, only if you take into account a God's eye view of the entire multiverse.\nSinging across the entire multiverse, the electron might seem to be a continuous thing of a kind.\nAt the same time, in any given universe, it is going to be a discrete thing as well.\nI think we need to be precise about what level of explanation we're talking about.\nWithin the single approximately single universe, or across the entire multiverse.\nAnyways, that is just to give my little opinion that electrons are particles, but we can come to understand what the word particle means, to a deeper, more refined way over time.\nBack to the book, you're right, quote.\nThe usual output of knowledge creation in physics is a piece of knowledge that addresses a particular problem.\nFor example, the explanation for why the sky appears dark at night.\nThe explanation for why the sun appears to move in the sky from east to west every day, and so on.\nFrom time to time, such problem-solving leads to an entirely new physical theory, such as Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, or quantum theory.\nThese rare events have momentous consequences, resulting in a radical change in the way we look at the world, which may take several decades to be assimilated.\nOften, a new physical theory's practical and theoretical implications can be worked out only after a long while.\nFor example, nothing in Einstein's theory of general relativity even hinted at GPS, the global positioning system, which provides information about location and time to our phones and cars using a network of satellites orbiting Earth.\nYet, GPS relies directly on the phenomena described by general relativity.\nThe possibility of GPS is a counterfactual, allowed by general relativity.\nThat's why a new physical theory is much more than a solution to a particular problem.\nIt is a conjectured explanation that attempts to approximate the actual laws of physics, the rules that constrain everything in our universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=225"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "611a6d92-7301-4009-ad5e-b45e723e91ab": {"page_content": "Yet, GPS relies directly on the phenomena described by general relativity.\nThe possibility of GPS is a counterfactual, allowed by general relativity.\nThat's why a new physical theory is much more than a solution to a particular problem.\nIt is a conjectured explanation that attempts to approximate the actual laws of physics, the rules that constrain everything in our universe.\nIf you ask the physicists to write down what we currently know about the laws of physics, they would probably start writing a bunch of equations.\nFor example, E equals MC squared.\nBut then they would think again, they would start adding words to explain what those various symbols mean.\nE is energy, M is mass, C is the speed of light and so on, and they would explain in words what energy, mass, speed, and light are.\nAll those words constitute the explanation that is the core content of the physical theory that those equations express.\nThe two ingredients are indissoluble with that explanation and equation is empty and has no meaning.\nWithout formula, the explanation is too vague to be applied.\nA physical theory, therefore, is not just the set of its formula, such as E equals MC squared, nor is it the collection of its testable predictions.\nIt is a conjectured explanation, which includes, for example, the informal descriptions of what E, M, and C are in that formula, and why they are related in that way.\nThis will also apply to things that, unlike the speed of light, cannot be directly measured, such as the geometry spacetime, which are nevertheless crucial to explain why that formula, which is then relevant to make predictions, is as it is.\nIn practice, physical theories about the universe that count as viable explanations must at least have certain traits that guarantee they are free of basic flaws, just pausing their more reflections.\nHere, the idea that a theory is just a solution to a problem, or a solution to a particular problem, hit rigs of the instrumentalist idea.\nThat's as long as you have equations, then what you can do is predict the outcome of experiments.\nThis is what's being hinted at here.\nBut in fact, if you're not an instrumentalist, if you are a realist, then what you say is that the theories we have are approximations too, what is really out there, in some sense.\nIn the case of physics, the conjectured explanations we have are approximations too, the ultimate laws of physics, that are definitely there governing the universe in some way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=225"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b51b38a4-b24a-41b2-9279-9751ef049e18": {"page_content": "This is what's being hinted at here.\nBut in fact, if you're not an instrumentalist, if you are a realist, then what you say is that the theories we have are approximations too, what is really out there, in some sense.\nIn the case of physics, the conjectured explanations we have are approximations too, the ultimate laws of physics, that are definitely there governing the universe in some way.\nNow, if you're an instrumentalist again, then what you would say is, well, E equals M, C squared just allows you to predict the outcome of, I don't know, a nuclear bomb explosion, how much energy you'll get.\nWithout ever worrying about, well, how do you then even talk about energy?.\nYou then have to explain what energy is.\nA realist wants to explain what energy actually is, would actually say, well, M means mass, and I'll tell you what mass is, and C means the speed of light, and I'll tell you what that means as well.\nThis entire grand theory, the general and special theory of relativity, are actually describing stuff that's out there in the real world.\nIt's not just to generate equations, which then allow us to predict the outcome of an experiment.\nWe need to have something more than that.\nWe need to have contact with physical entities in the real world.\nThat is how the explanation is cashed out.\nWe need both as Kiara says, we need both the formula, the equations, because that gives us precision in being able to make some predictions.\nThat's very, very crucially important.\nBut we also need an explanation in words of what the different parts of the equation actually refer to, and in that case, we have energy being referred to,.\nmass being referred to, speed of light being referred to.\nNow we're about to get into something a little new, a little piece of terminology, and this is exciting for me because it's in epistemology, and it's about the nature of an exact theory.\nSo let's go to that Kiara writes, quote, in practice, physical theories about the universe that count as viable explanations must at least have certain traits that guarantee they are free of basic flaws.\nIn the first place, they must be exact.\nBy exact theory, I do not mean expressible precisely in mathematical terms or anything like that.\nI mean a theory that does not include any limitation as to the accuracy of its statements.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=1387"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cf914e6a-a54b-4e0f-b6ae-3032b21efdf4": {"page_content": "So let's go to that Kiara writes, quote, in practice, physical theories about the universe that count as viable explanations must at least have certain traits that guarantee they are free of basic flaws.\nIn the first place, they must be exact.\nBy exact theory, I do not mean expressible precisely in mathematical terms or anything like that.\nI mean a theory that does not include any limitation as to the accuracy of its statements.\nIn short, one that does not include any approximation, think of two recipes for a cake, one requiring that you put approximately 100 grams of sugar in a bowl, the other requiring that you put in exactly 100 grams of sugar.\nThe first is an approximate recipe.\nIn that 99 grams or 101 grams will probably do, the second is an exact one, just as with recipes, approximations in physical theories are vague as to what they say about physical reality.\nAnd for that reason, they're problematic.\nFor example, in regard to those recipes, one could ask why approximately 100 grams of sugar and not exactly 99.\nAn example of an exact physical theory is Newtonian physics, which allows one to predict the exact place and time of an apple's landing on the ground once we know when and where it comes off the tree.\nAnd it's initial velocity.\nNewtonian physics is also an example of the most general kind of theory in that it is universal.\nA universal theory is one that is not subject to any limitation about its domain of applicability.\nNewton's theory applies to apples on earth and on Mars and in any upper alley in place in the universe, pausing their my reflection.\nLet's do an example.\nLet's do this one.\nLet's figure out, you know, in a science book like this, I think it's recommended by editors or something like this.\nThere's this saying that goes around for every equation that you put into a book like this.\nYour number of readers is reduced by half or something like that.\nI don't know.\nAnyways, I don't care.\nI'm making a YouTube or a podcast.\nAnd so I can, I can put a quasency and I can do a little bit of baby level physics.\nSo let's do that.\nLet's actually do the upper one.\nBut before before we get to the upper one, I'll do something even simpler.\nSo let me put something up on the screen here.\nHere's an equation.\nOkay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=1387"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d989878c-385e-465e-8d46-82df3c0b6049": {"page_content": "I don't know.\nAnyways, I don't care.\nI'm making a YouTube or a podcast.\nAnd so I can, I can put a quasency and I can do a little bit of baby level physics.\nSo let's do that.\nLet's actually do the upper one.\nBut before before we get to the upper one, I'll do something even simpler.\nSo let me put something up on the screen here.\nHere's an equation.\nOkay.\nSo this equation here is v equals u plus a t. And let me explain what each of the parts you mean.\nThis is one of the so called sovat equations, s u v a t, which high school physics students are unfortunately forced to learn.\nOh, you know, if they're in high enough years, they can elect to learn.\nThe sovat equations are part of Newtonian classical mechanics.\nThey don't work universally as it turns out.\nNow, they're purported to be universal and Newton would have thought they were universal.\nBut in fact, they don't apply because we have this thing called relativity and there's an upper limit on how high v can be.\nV is your final velocity.\nV is your final velocity.\nu stands for your initial velocity.\nA stands for your acceleration.\nAnd t is the time over which you are accelerating.\nNow, we don't know if this comes from.\nWell, on the one hand, you might think it's common sense, depending upon how mathematically minded you are.\nYou might look at that and think, well, of course, my final velocity v is going to be how fast I'm now traveling u plus how long I'm going to accelerate for.\nSo that can be common sense.\nBut in fact, it comes from here, the definition of what acceleration is.\nAcceleration is the change in the velocity over the change in time.\nSo it's about the change in velocity.\nThat's what acceleration is.\nIt's how much you are speeding up, slowing down, changing your direction, that kind of thing.\nNow, we can, but that way of writing it there is a equals delta v over delta t.\nThe delta is just the Greek letter, which means change in.\nSo I'm changing velocity over a change in time.\nChange in velocity is the takeaway u, your final velocity, take where your initial velocity.\nAnd that's all over your delta t.\nHow long, but duration of time, you're, you're having to be accelerating for.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=1677"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0e86ea2-339e-4a27-a0a3-c953118d2444": {"page_content": "Now, we can, but that way of writing it there is a equals delta v over delta t.\nThe delta is just the Greek letter, which means change in.\nSo I'm changing velocity over a change in time.\nChange in velocity is the takeaway u, your final velocity, take where your initial velocity.\nAnd that's all over your delta t.\nHow long, but duration of time, you're, you're having to be accelerating for.\nSo let's, let's consider an example.\nLet's say that right now you're in a car and you're traveling at 10 meters per second.\nNow, I know that most people don't talk in terms of meters per second.\nBut physicists, they like to talk in meters per second, rather than miles per hour or kilometer's per hour.\nWe talk in meters per second.\nLet's, so we're traveling at 10 meters per second.\nLet's assume that we to press the accelerator now car and we accelerate at a rate of two meters per second as reasonable for a car.\nAnd we're going to accelerate.\nWe're going to leave our foot on the accelerator at a constant rate of acceleration.\nThat's the important thing as well.\nMany cars don't accelerate at a constant rate, but we're going to presume constant rate.\nAnd we're going to do that for a time of five seconds.\nSo we're going to put the accelerator down for five seconds.\nWe're going to be moving at initially 10 meters per second and accelerating for two meters per second.\nThen how fast are we going at the end of this five seconds?.\nWell, this is the math that we do.\nWe want to figure out what V is.\nSo V is going to equal U plus AT.\nAnd knowing that U is 10.\nAnd I'm going to add to that two times five.\nTwo times five is 10.\nSo the acceleration over those five seconds has added another 10 meters a second to my initial velocity.\nSo I've got 10 meters a second plus another 10 meters a second altogether.\nV, my final velocity is 20 meters a second.\nSo this is what we would call an example of a kind of dynamical law where we've got some initial conditions, my initial conditions were 10 meters a second.\nTwo meters per second per second was my acceleration.\nOver a time period of five seconds, putting all of those initial conditions together, I can then make a prediction of what my final velocity is going to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=1790"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5566ec4f-66cb-4e4e-a2e1-8ebe9bdfafac": {"page_content": "V, my final velocity is 20 meters a second.\nSo this is what we would call an example of a kind of dynamical law where we've got some initial conditions, my initial conditions were 10 meters a second.\nTwo meters per second per second was my acceleration.\nOver a time period of five seconds, putting all of those initial conditions together, I can then make a prediction of what my final velocity is going to be.\nSo this is a way of conceiving of how physics is done.\nAnd almost all physics is little more than an example of this, hitherto, by the way, without constructor theory.\nSo hitherto, we have equations, we plug in the initial conditions.\nAnd then we can predict whatever future state of the system that you want.\nSo in this case, our very simple system of the car, presuming that relativity doesn't exist in the universe, presuming we live in a universe governed by Newtonian physics, then I can tell you what your final velocity of V is going to be.\nIf only you can tell me what the initial conditions are, what you is, what A is, and what T is.\nSo this is supposedly how physics is done.\nGive me a law of physics like V equals u plus a t. Tell me what the initial conditions are.\nAnd then I will tell you, if I will predict any future state of the system at whatever time you like.\nNow let's have a look at Chiara's example there.\nAn example of an exact physical theory she says is one like Newtonian physics, which allows one to predict the exact place and time of an apples landing on the ground.\nOnce we know when and where it comes off the tree and its initial velocity.\nOkay, so in this case, I'll use a different equation.\nIt's another one of these pseudo equations.\nIf you're interested, then you can look up where you get an equation like this.\nIt's a little bit more complicated than the previous one.\nBut the equation is this, S equals u t plus half a t squared.\nAnd all those symbols mean exactly the same as what they did in the previous one with the addition of S. S is the displacement or where something is happening.\nSo S is the displacement.\nYou just like before is the initial speed of the object.\nT is the time taken and A is the acceleration.\nNow if we have an object like an apple sitting on a tree, then its initial speed is u, which is just sitting there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=1865"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "de956598-b0f1-49b8-93a4-8380e2d51a19": {"page_content": "And all those symbols mean exactly the same as what they did in the previous one with the addition of S. S is the displacement or where something is happening.\nSo S is the displacement.\nYou just like before is the initial speed of the object.\nT is the time taken and A is the acceleration.\nNow if we have an object like an apple sitting on a tree, then its initial speed is u, which is just sitting there.\nAnd what we're interested in is finding out S, how far it's going to fall.\nNow if you tell me T, if you time, you're standing there with a stopwatch or something next to the apple tree, timing how long it takes for that apple to hit the ground, then I'll be able to tell you S, how far it has fallen, where it's going to hit the ground.\nNow it's going to hit the ground of course, immediately beneath the tree, but where exactly is the ground?.\nWell, that's the problem that we can set out.\nSo let's, let's make a guess.\nLet's presume you're standing there with your stopwatch.\nAnd it takes precisely one second, one second, four, that apple to hit the ground.\nThen what do we predict for S?.\nWell, S is going to be S equals U T plus half A T squared.\nBut in this case, our U is zero.\nOur U is zero.\nSo that term U times T is going to also be zero because it doesn't matter what T is.\nT in this case happens to be one.\nZero times anything is zero.\nSo we've got S equals zero plus a half A T squared.\nNow what's A?.\nA is the acceleration.\nNow, the acceleration in this case is the acceleration due to gravity, the acceleration due to gravity on Earth, which is taken as roughly speaking a constant all over the surface of the Earth.\nLet's presume we're at sea level.\nAnd the acceleration due to gravity there is approximately 9.81 meters per second squared.\nAnd by the way, this changes around the world, just ever so slightly, and you can use the fact that it changes around the world to do something called gravity analysis.\nThis is what geophysicist do, and you can find things in the ground, and that's a whole area of science.\nBut let's go back to this.\nS equals U T plus half A T squared.\nWe've got S equals zero plus a half times 9.81.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=1982"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "775065ed-8af8-4d03-8a67-0dd6b7863ca9": {"page_content": "And by the way, this changes around the world, just ever so slightly, and you can use the fact that it changes around the world to do something called gravity analysis.\nThis is what geophysicist do, and you can find things in the ground, and that's a whole area of science.\nBut let's go back to this.\nS equals U T plus half A T squared.\nWe've got S equals zero plus a half times 9.81.\nNow we know plus a half times 9.81 times T squared.\nTimes, how long did we say?.\nOne times one squared.\nSo now we've got S equals zero plus a half, nine point eight, one times one squared, which is one.\nSo that's half of 9.81.\nCall it half of 10.\nSo it's a little bit under five.\nIt's actually about 4.9.\nSo the tree must have been 4.9 meters high.\nThat's how far the apple fell.\nSo 4.9 S equals 4.9.\nSo we found out where the apple fell.\nSo you can play around with that yourself.\nIf you've never seen anything like this before, that too is a kind, well, that equation has derived from the laws of physics, the Newtonian laws of physics.\nAs we presume the laws of physics would be, if we lived in the universe governed by, for example, Newton's law of gravity.\nBut now we know that we're not in that kind of universe.\nThat, by the way, that that worked perfectly well.\nAnd the reason why Newtonian mechanics is still taught, still learned, is because for almost all engineering purposes, Newtonian physics works perfectly well.\nYou can get to the moon with Newtonian physics like this.\nIt is precise enough to be able to approximately get the right answer.\nWhen I say approximately, I mean, with high precision, once you start to get to really high velocities, close to the speed of light, then the thing starts to break down.\nThen it doesn't work so well.\nThen you want to rely upon relativity, Einstein's relativity.\nBut that is beyond the scope of even my podcast here.\nOkay, so just to summarize all of this, all I'm doing here is just showing you the traditional way in which physics has always been done.\nYou have an explanation, an explanation of how the world works in terms of forces, perhaps, things like quantities like acceleration and time, gravity, and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2087"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e69ff66-fa12-4731-a9bb-98dcec2e7a1d": {"page_content": "Then it doesn't work so well.\nThen you want to rely upon relativity, Einstein's relativity.\nBut that is beyond the scope of even my podcast here.\nOkay, so just to summarize all of this, all I'm doing here is just showing you the traditional way in which physics has always been done.\nYou have an explanation, an explanation of how the world works in terms of forces, perhaps, things like quantities like acceleration and time, gravity, and so on.\nAnd from this explanation, a scientist, someone like Newton, is able to derive from certain principles, from certain things that he understands about reality, assumes about reality, guesses to be approximately correct about reality.\nHe then is able to derive from that explanation, certain equations, which represent some aspect of those physical laws, v equals u plus a t, s equals u t plus half a t squared.\nAnd we can regard that s equals u t plus half a t squared, for example, or v equals u plus a t, as a dynamical law.\nCertainly as an equation representing a dynamical law of some kind.\nAnd if we know the initial conditions, the numbers that we plug into the equation, we were able to make a prediction of what will happen in the future.\nThis is the sense in which physics has always been done.\nAnd even if you get into relativity, it's the same idea, the equations change, but it's the same idea.\nIf you get into quantum theory, it's the same idea.\nThings get more complicated in terms of the formalism, as we say, the mathematical equations become more complicated.\nWe have all sorts of weird and interesting calculus going on, and matrices going on, and in certain cases, statistics happening.\nBut it's the same.\nIt is where we have an equation of some kind, and we take some numbers that we know, the initial conditions, and we predict what is going to happen in the future.\nWe're finding our v, given our u, our a, and our t. Basically, that idea.\nUntil now, back to the book, the Chiararites.\nAgain, physical theories that are not universal and apply only to some scales, all domains, are by themselves problematic, because one still has to explain what they hold only at that scale and not elsewhere.\nSo, by tentatively solving problems in our understanding of physical reality, physics ends up seeking universal and exact physical theories.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2198"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9112ef1e-1441-4c1e-8dda-22b7ea6ca3c3": {"page_content": "We're finding our v, given our u, our a, and our t. Basically, that idea.\nUntil now, back to the book, the Chiararites.\nAgain, physical theories that are not universal and apply only to some scales, all domains, are by themselves problematic, because one still has to explain what they hold only at that scale and not elsewhere.\nSo, by tentatively solving problems in our understanding of physical reality, physics ends up seeking universal and exact physical theories.\nThese theories, as I shall explain in chapter two and seven, must also be testable, so that they can be checked against reality to find potential errors.\nBecause of fallibleism, it is important to note here that exact does not at all mean true.\nAny conjectured explanation which seems to be working may be found to be false at any time.\nAs I said, this happened with Newton's theory of gravitation when it was superseded by quantum gravity and general relativity.\nWe can never know whether a physical theory that we have formulated is true.\nAll we can say is that it has so far not been found to be false.\nThis may seem a little unsettling, but it is an extremely interesting fact about how knowledge is created.\nAnd as I said, it is central to the possibility of making progress via criticism.\nHere, we get closer to the origin of the pernicious boundary to exclude counterfactuals.\nAs one can imagine, there are different ways in which explanations can be formulated.\nHow many?.\nWe do not know, infinitely, many presumably.\nThe mode of explanation of Newton's theory has a distinctive feature.\nIts scope is confined to explaining what happens in the universe, given two primitive elements.\nOne includes what in physics jargon are called laws of motion.\nThe rules that tell us how the motion of systems, what physicists call the dynamics, unfold in space and time.\nThe other are the specific initial conditions of the motion.\nFor example, Newton's laws of motion can be applied to say what happens to an apple given the initial conditions, the particular place where the apple started its motion, and its initial velocity.\nThe set of points that a system goes through as it moves is called a trajectory.\nHit a tennis ball with a racket against the wall.\nThe trajectory is the imaginary line one can draw to describe where the ball goes after it leaves your racket.\nThe laws of motion and the initial condition give us a way to predict that trajectory without actually having to observe any actual ball being hit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2322"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7a99524e-3858-4dfa-aa22-fa63048c1a27": {"page_content": "The set of points that a system goes through as it moves is called a trajectory.\nHit a tennis ball with a racket against the wall.\nThe trajectory is the imaginary line one can draw to describe where the ball goes after it leaves your racket.\nThe laws of motion and the initial condition give us a way to predict that trajectory without actually having to observe any actual ball being hit.\nGiven the initial position and velocity of the ball, one can predict precisely where its motion will bring it, just computing the trajectory from the laws of motion.\nThis mode of explaining things in terms of what happens has proved extremely successful and far-reaching.\nIt allows for powerful predictions, which can be tested with experiments to enable conjecture and criticism.\nThe mode continued to be successful even when Newton's theory was found to be inadequate.\nBy, for instance, failing to describe the procession of the planet Mercury, it delivered theories like quantum theory and general relativity, which are our current best theories to explain physical reality.\nBoth of these subtle theories are formulated as laws of motion.\nIt is the very same mode of explanation that Newton adopted informing his laws.\nAlong with much progress, this mode of explanation has, perversely, generated the wretched boundaries that could stand in the way of future successes.\nAn unspoken stipulation was made.\nWhat I shall call the traditional conception of fundamental physics, that all fundamental physical theories must be formulated in terms of predictions about what happens in the universe given the initial or more generally supplementary conditions and laws of motion.\nIn this conception, physics is no longer an open-ended enterprise.\nIt has been infinitely narrowed to the project of finding theories that can be expressed only in terms of what happens in the universe given the laws of motion of all its constituents and a particular initial condition.\nSo the ultimate theory about physical reality would consist of a collection of the trajectories of all elementary particles in the universe given where and when they started.\nWe do not have such a theory yet, but it is traditionally regarded hypothetically as the ultimate explanation of everything important about the universe pausing their just my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2450"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "661e55f7-eaae-484c-bc83-48440d8e2c32": {"page_content": "Okay, so in my very baby example of vehicles u plus a t, for example, you could apply this to in theory, okay, if you're this oracle or a god or some sort of super intelligence, whatever you want to call it, that's got access to some kind of system where you know the current velocity of any particular particle throughout the entire universe, you know what its acceleration might be, which is a consequence of the forces that might be applied to it, then if you just pick some time t in the future, then you will know what v is going to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2564"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "06ab80c6-c36d-4ce3-bef2-ab397953eb0a": {"page_content": "Now of course, there are lots of complications here, namely that you won't have a constant acceleration, let's say, putting aside the fact that, of course, the universe doesn't even obey v equals u plus a t because we know that relativity and quantum theory.\nFor two examples, contradict what is being said here, but in principle, you get the idea that if you accept the notion that there are these dynamical laws, that if you have the initial conditions, dynamical laws such as vehicles u plus a t, then if you just plug in these initial conditions, you allow for the prediction at any point in the future, at any time t in the future of the state that it evolves to, this is the concept of determinism.\nAnd so this leads to all sorts of poor philosophical arguments, I would suggest, as well as this narrowing of the conception of what physics could potentially be about.\nAnd it seems to insofar as we regard this as being a universal truth about physical reality.\nIt rules out all sorts of things.\nAnd this is why it leads to this poverty of philosophical explanations and other kinds of explanations.\nWe can't get beneath this notion of this kind of determinism.\nSo we rule out things like free will, for example, some people rule it, choose to rule out free will.\nAnd we're going to come to this at various points throughout the discussion of this book.\nIt's a pet peeve of mine, because free will, to me, apart from just describing what humans do, what people do, people make choices in the world.\nBut it's also a label for a certain kind of mystery.\nAnd there is a mystery.\nThere really are mysteries out there in the universe.\nThere are so many things we don't know at the beginning of infinity.\nBut if you think that we already have everything wrapped up neatly in terms of dynamical laws and initial conditions, which allows to predict at any any point in the future what's going to happen, then we have a deterministic universe that rules out all other possible mysteries in the universe.\nAfter all, isn't everything already predetermined?.\nTherefore, there are no mysteries in the universe.\nThere are no open questions.\nAll we need to do is to plug into some super computer of the future or consult some article about what's going to happen.\nAnd that apparently solves everything.\nKnow that merely predicts everything and prediction is not the purpose of science or knowledge production in general.\nWhat we're after are explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2604"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "78455189-e498-47d7-8c9b-ba15b0278578": {"page_content": "After all, isn't everything already predetermined?.\nTherefore, there are no mysteries in the universe.\nThere are no open questions.\nAll we need to do is to plug into some super computer of the future or consult some article about what's going to happen.\nAnd that apparently solves everything.\nKnow that merely predicts everything and prediction is not the purpose of science or knowledge production in general.\nWhat we're after are explanations.\nAnd even if this conception of physics, this dynamical laws and initial conditions thing was true, which we're about to say isn't the best way of conceiving of science?.\nNot the best way of conceiving of physics, let alone science.\nAnd I would say probably knowledge more broadly, even if we were to conceive of science being like this, it it presumes far too much.\nIt presumes everything can be explained in terms of physics.\nWell, it doesn't even explain it.\nIt dismisses explanation.\nIt says that everything's about prediction.\nAnd this is not the purpose of science.\nAnd it's an unfortunate thing that's entered the culture, the intellectual culture, one would say that commented, people who commented on Newton thought that it revealed a clockwork universe.\nAnd therefore ruled out every other interesting emergent aspect of reality.\nAfter all, if it's just a clockwork universe, then there's no place in it for mysteries like consciousness and free will, things that might not easily sit within this framework of determinism.\nMany of us say it does.\nIt does anyway.\nFree will isn't at all affected by determinism.\nBut anyway, what we're about to get to here one reason I love constructor theory is because all of this argument about determinism is predicated very much on the idea that it's true anyway, that dynamical laws and initial conditions are the whole truth of the matter, that there isn't a misconception lurking there, that there isn't a deeper way of understanding physics.\nAnd there is, and we're about to find out what it is.\nAnd besides that, besides that, and we're about to come to this presently, the initial conditions dynamical laws thing doesn't explain why the initial conditions are the way that they are, why the initial conditions are the way that they are.\nLook, how do we, how did we get to the state in the first place?.\nAnd if you just say the big bang, well, why is the big bang the way that it is or was?.\nThere's no explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2741"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d841e13a-3df3-405c-a315-89467e657c0b": {"page_content": "And besides that, besides that, and we're about to come to this presently, the initial conditions dynamical laws thing doesn't explain why the initial conditions are the way that they are, why the initial conditions are the way that they are.\nLook, how do we, how did we get to the state in the first place?.\nAnd if you just say the big bang, well, why is the big bang the way that it is or was?.\nThere's no explanation.\nThere's no way of even conceiving of that within the present framework, nothing within that present framework of dynamical laws of initial conditions can explain why the initial conditions should be the way that they are.\nYou can't refer to anything within that framework to give you the bits of the framework.\nWhy are the physical laws the way that they are?.\nSilent on that.\nThese just are the physical laws.\nWhy are the initial conditions the way that they are?.\nSilent on that.\nThat's just the way things are.\nConstructed theory is the first time, as far as I can tell, that we've got an area in physics, which is going to provide a window into allowing us to peer into answers, possible answers about that.\nLet's go back to the book, where Chiara is.\nThat traditional conception has created the barriers against counterfactual explanations and its project, if taken literally appears impossible.\nIn the first place, it is not possible to explain literally everything in terms of initial conditions and laws of motion.\nFor example, even if we had a decent theory of what the initial conditions of the universe are, it could not itself be explained in terms of initial conditions.\nFor a start, it would have to contemplate what would happen if other initial conditions were chosen.\nA counterfactual explanation.\nHow to explain the choice of the initial conditions is indeed an open problem in fundamental physics.\nThere are also other related open issues that require that counterfactuals be addressed, such as the problem of fine tuning the laws of physics, about why dynamical laws are as they are.\nFor an excellent exposition of this problem, see Paul Davies, the Goldilocks and Ingmar.\nThe fine tuning problem cannot be addressed by stating only what happens.\nOne has necessarily to look at what might have happened if the laws had been different.\nAnd how can one do that without counterfactuals?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2844"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bb1ce1ba-4d39-4dab-9729-8f49d5009a05": {"page_content": "For an excellent exposition of this problem, see Paul Davies, the Goldilocks and Ingmar.\nThe fine tuning problem cannot be addressed by stating only what happens.\nOne has necessarily to look at what might have happened if the laws had been different.\nAnd how can one do that without counterfactuals?.\nIn addition, explaining what we see now in the universe around us, in terms of a story that starts with initial conditions is itself arbitrary.\nOne could describe everything that happens, including what we see now, given the final conditions of the universe, and then use the laws of motion backwards by retrodicting, instead of predicting the current state of affairs, pausing now by reflection.\nYeah, this retrodicting versus predicting very true, given any state of motion, you can predict what the conditions are using dynamical laws at any point in the future of the past.\nMany of us just choose the word predicting to, as a general term, even predicting what happened in the past is still a form of prediction, you know, that predicting, for example, what the conditions at the Big Bang would like, rather than saying, will retrodict what it was like at the Big Bang, just predict, even though we're talking about the past.\nNow, that aside, fine tuning.\nYes, Paul Davies did write this excellent book, The Goldilocks in England.\nSince then, they have been other books.\nOne book was a fallacy, the fallacy of fine tuning by Victor Stanger, who was a particleist, and he does very well to explain aspects of fine tuning, but then he dismisses the moral and says that this is not a problem.\nThat's a very interesting book.\nIn response to that book, largely in response to that book, not only, but largely in response to that book.\nA couple of Ozzie physicists.\nNow, one is a theoretical physicist who moved into cosmology, his name is Gerant Lewis, and another is an astrophysicist in cosmologists who are Luke Barnes, and they wrote a book called A Fortune at Universe, Life in a Finally-tuned Cosmos.\nAnd that's really interesting book because the two authors there are coming at the issue from very different positions.\nGerant Lewis is an atheist.\nLuke Barnes is not an atheist.\nI think he comes from a Christian tradition.\nAnd they're both trying nut out the debate in a very friendly, good-natured, humorous way, and they explain all the modern problems.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=2974"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5093b596-23a2-4a61-9569-de7dfd28520b": {"page_content": "And that's really interesting book because the two authors there are coming at the issue from very different positions.\nGerant Lewis is an atheist.\nLuke Barnes is not an atheist.\nI think he comes from a Christian tradition.\nAnd they're both trying nut out the debate in a very friendly, good-natured, humorous way, and they explain all the modern problems.\nI think it's one of the more very, very recent books written on this 2016.\nIt was published.\nYou can get the audio book as well.\nOr just look up, especially Luke Barnes, but also Gerant Lewis.\nOn YouTube, there's just some really fascinating lectures they give.\nBoth of them have been on closer to truth that wonderful series of interviews with Robert Lawrence Kuhn.\nSo you can find that here.\nAnd so I personally, I love I'm fascinated by this fine-tuning issue, basically because we know nothing.\nWe know so little.\nAnd in Lewis and Barnes, they don't push a particular perspective.\nEven I say, you know, Barnes comes from this Christian tradition.\nHe uses it as a way of critiquing, other ways of trying to explain or explain away the fine-tuning problem, namely via a megiverse.\nAnd Gerant Lewis uses his arguments to try and explain away the supernatural explanation.\nSo they're using, they're very much in, even though they wouldn't call themselves Papurians.\nI'm almost certain of that.\nI think they're basing.\nThat's hard.\nThey use their ideas as very much as critiques of one another.\nAnd ultimately comes with inclusion that, well, there are just many, many, many open questions when it comes to this whole area of fine-tuning and the physical constants.\nMuch, much less to say, well, you could have different physical laws as well.\nNow in the next part, we're going to bring this new theory of physics which shows promise in providing new avenues within physics to answer age-old problems in physics with an appeal to epistemology.\nLet's go back to the book, Gerantz.\nThe traditional conception is also perverse because it clashes with the pillars of rational thinking, which I mentioned early on, that have been changeable and improveable via conjecture and criticism.\nPhysics aims at solving problems.\nAs a consequence, it seeks, if possible, universal and exact, testable laws formulated in whatever mode of explanation happens to be appropriate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=3076"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c604511-d568-4c8d-9884-ac1897f120d0": {"page_content": "Let's go back to the book, Gerantz.\nThe traditional conception is also perverse because it clashes with the pillars of rational thinking, which I mentioned early on, that have been changeable and improveable via conjecture and criticism.\nPhysics aims at solving problems.\nAs a consequence, it seeks, if possible, universal and exact, testable laws formulated in whatever mode of explanation happens to be appropriate.\nIn contrast, the traditional conception forces theories to come only in one form, thus narrowing down the space available for thinking it introduces a boundary, which impedes progress.\nIt confines physics only to things that can be described exactly in terms of statements about what happens given the initial conditions and laws of motion, but not about other phenomena, which thus remain only imperfectly explained.\nThere is more.\nThe traditional conception of physics has inspired an approach that is now spread to other parts of science too, via an approach that has been called reductionism.\nThe idea that there is only one level of explanation that is both fundamental and admissible, and everything else can be reduced to that, such a level of explanation is, presumably, that of elementary particles or fields and their trajectories, given their initial conditions, that this take on physical reality is, again, to narrow.\nThere are questions that this approach cannot answer, questions that are deep and important for understanding the full reality of a physical phenomenon.\nFor instance, the question, why is a given transistor in a computer on, at the end of the given computation, has at least two answers?.\nOne is that it is on because the electrons in the computer were set in such and such initial conditions.\nThe other is that it is on because the computer performed the computation to find the factors of, say, the number 15.\nAnd the on transistor is part of the encoding of the output, 3 and 5.\nThe reductionists would discard the latter explanation as less fundamental, because, after all, factoring a number is nothing but the electric currents in the computer.\nReductionism ultimately denies that the computational description is necessary, though some reductions may accept that it is helpful as a matter of discourse.\nBut this is, of course, nonsense.\nBoth explanations are necessary to understand what is happening.\nThey refer to different autonomous levels of explanation, which do not implicate one another, by ignoring one of them.\nOne misses something crucial about reality.\nReductionism impedes progress in physics and science in general because it requires all explanations to conform to certain arbitrarily predefined criteria.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=3208"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "30daf85c-80db-49d0-9dec-106897e63617": {"page_content": "But this is, of course, nonsense.\nBoth explanations are necessary to understand what is happening.\nThey refer to different autonomous levels of explanation, which do not implicate one another, by ignoring one of them.\nOne misses something crucial about reality.\nReductionism impedes progress in physics and science in general because it requires all explanations to conform to certain arbitrarily predefined criteria.\nFor instance, that they refer exclusively to microscopic particles in their trajectories.\nIn the example I gave earlier about computations, the explanation in terms of microscopic particles in their initial conditions, a electron current in the computer is not enough to capture the full picture of what is going on, a factoring a given number.\nYet reductionists insist on dismissing whatever does not fit into those criteria, from information and thermodynamics to creativity and consciousness as approximate, and thus, outside the scope of science.\nThe result is a narrow, limited view of science, posing near my reflection.\nThat might even undersell things.\nThe result is a narrow, unlimited view of science.\nIt completely dismisses the entire corpus of science aside from fundamental physics.\nIt's everything else is utterly useless, like there is no understanding there in, for example, evolution by natural selection.\nThat if you want to explain the origin of species, the only legitimate, true explanation that underlies everything is the equations of motion, the laws of physics and the initial conditions.\nThat's absurd, it's absolutely absurd.\nThat conception of science allows us to solve almost no problems.\nIf we want to find a vaccine for the next virus, no one should be tempted to think what are the physical laws and initial conditions, even in the five distant future, because we have emergence simplicity.\nIt won't be the most efficient way to figure out vaccines, even if we have a supercomputer of the future.\nWe're going to want to understand the nature of viruses and how we can reduce their impact upon people over time.\nAs for what makes science rich and interesting as well as useful, you know, these grand ideas about how cosmology plays out over time, we want to understand the evidence of that, that's out there, almost simultaneous with this episode, or released one on quasars.\nEven something within physics, even something within relatively fundamental physics, cosmology, we want to understand the origin of the emergent physical phenomena as well.\nAnd sometimes this requires more than just the trajectory of the elementary particles.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=3345"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf8abc4a-10e8-46c0-aaed-e2987a698a42": {"page_content": "As for what makes science rich and interesting as well as useful, you know, these grand ideas about how cosmology plays out over time, we want to understand the evidence of that, that's out there, almost simultaneous with this episode, or released one on quasars.\nEven something within physics, even something within relatively fundamental physics, cosmology, we want to understand the origin of the emergent physical phenomena as well.\nAnd sometimes this requires more than just the trajectory of the elementary particles.\nSometimes it requires the elementary particles, but sometimes it requires more than that, the gathering of evidence that goes beyond merely what the fundamental particles are doing.\nOkay, going back to the book because Chiara talks about precisely this and she writes, There are phenomena that cannot be fully expressed by the traditional conception.\nBy this I mean that physical theories and explanations about those phenomena can take only approximate non-exact forms when expressed using the traditional conceptions approach.\nSo by restricting oneself to that approach, one cannot adequately explain them within science.\nOne important example of things the traditional conception cannot adequately capture includes thermodynamic entities such as those associated to particular kinds of energy transfers.\nIn physics, they are called work and heat.\nThe laws stating how work can be turned into heat, and vice versa, are central to things like heat engines, which which made possible the industrial revolution, yet thermodynamics is often regarded as only a useful approximation, not a fundamental physical theory.\nSo heat and worker regarded as not worthy of further explanation, because an exact physical theory about them cannot be cast in terms of statements about what happens given in initial conditions and laws of motion.\nThe traditional conception has thus given up on an exact understanding of work and heat and similar entities and claims to be content with the existing problematic approximate theories.\nThese theories, as you will see, are highly effective, but only in certain limited domains.\nFor example, to design heat engines such as those used in cars and locomotives, however, they appear to rely on various approximations which, when we consider these laws as fundamental, become inadequate.\nI shall explain these laws and how to solve them with counterfactuals in Chapter 6, just pausing their myreflection.\nThere's lots of interesting books out there on thermodynamics, if you're interested in pursuing this in greater detail.\nAnything by Peter Atkins is fantastic.\nI particularly enjoy this book, an introduction to thermodynamics, but he's also written very complicated books about this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=3459"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5a7472dd-b893-4fbb-8fc7-783fbb1a983b": {"page_content": "I shall explain these laws and how to solve them with counterfactuals in Chapter 6, just pausing their myreflection.\nThere's lots of interesting books out there on thermodynamics, if you're interested in pursuing this in greater detail.\nAnything by Peter Atkins is fantastic.\nI particularly enjoy this book, an introduction to thermodynamics, but he's also written very complicated books about this.\nIt's a standard part of anyone's physics degree as to study thermodynamics.\nWork and heat is, these are very interesting concepts, and I'm looking forward to going through that part of the book where Keira explains in greater precision what work and heat really are.\nBut I can give you the general up until now, physics idea of these concepts.\nWork is just a technical term for the product of the force and distance.\nIf a force is applied over a particular distance, in the direction that the force is applied, as long as the force and the distance are in the same direction, then you've got work.\nThis is the product of these two things.\nIf you're pushing something further applying a force, then you're doing work in physics.\nSo that, to some extent, that makes a certain amount of common sense, that's what work is.\nWhen you have a heat engine, when you have a cylinder of some sort, then it's doing work because the gas is producing a force on the parts of the piston over some distance, and that's the amount of work that happens to be done.\nHeat is a complicated process as well.\nIt's a complicated concept, and we can get right into it, but Peter Atkins has this wonderful idea that heat is not the name of an entity.\nSo it's not a fluid of some kind.\nIf he says it's not anything of any kind, it's the name of a process.\nSo it is where energy is being transferred from something that's hot to something that's cooler, and so you're heating it.\nThis is causing something to heat up, and so heat properly construed should be used as a verb.\nBut of course, Keira is going to sharpen all these concepts up in light of constructive theory, but we'll get there in chapter six.\nAnd I'm going to skip a bit here where Keira mentions what and what emergence means, the concept of emergent, where you have something appearing in an explanation at a higher level, beyond the laws of motion and initial conditions, beyond basic particle physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=3589"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9cf3aa3e-da10-45ec-9e2d-897a710d3196": {"page_content": "But of course, Keira is going to sharpen all these concepts up in light of constructive theory, but we'll get there in chapter six.\nAnd I'm going to skip a bit here where Keira mentions what and what emergence means, the concept of emergent, where you have something appearing in an explanation at a higher level, beyond the laws of motion and initial conditions, beyond basic particle physics.\nSo once an entity starts to appear, for example, a cat is emergent.\nIt's emerged out of the physical laws in some way shape or form.\nAnd cats appear in explanations.\nAnimals appear in explanations.\nThey genes appear in explanations as well.\nThe chemicals appear in explanations.\nThese things become emerging phenomena.\nAnd all this emergent phenomena results in levels of explanation.\nSo I'll just read a final part here about this idea of levels of explanation and privileging certain levels of explanation.\nAnd that we shouldn't presume that emergent levels of explanation are any less important or even fundamental as compared to the ones about particle physics, namely that the emergent things, the emergent concepts, objects that are out there, as Keira says, quote, declaring those entities as not really of interest to fundamental physics.\nThe problem with this take is that all levels of explanations are necessary to grasp a given situation.\nRemember the example with computation and factoring, levels of explanation work together like layers in a cake.\nIt is impossible to get the cakes full flavor by ignoring the top layers and just sticking to the base.\nIn this book, you'll be able to grasp the flavor of the full cake by being introduced to counterfactuals, end quote, fantastic way to end today.\nSo we're going to grasp the flavor of the full cake by this concept of counterfactuals.\nAnd it's a wonderful way of conceiving a physics that is no longer being about, as I said in the last episode, this single string that stretches throughout time.\nThis string is very, very narrow.\nIt's a single thread that is just an aspect of the greater whole of reality, the greater whole of reality being, all the things that could have happened rather than just looking at what did happen and what will happen.\nScience should be about trying to figure out what could have happened.\nAnd indeed, what could happen if only we have the right knowledge?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=3706"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5b7d8169-89ff-40ce-802e-f654789dd239": {"page_content": "This string is very, very narrow.\nIt's a single thread that is just an aspect of the greater whole of reality, the greater whole of reality being, all the things that could have happened rather than just looking at what did happen and what will happen.\nScience should be about trying to figure out what could have happened.\nAnd indeed, what could happen if only we have the right knowledge?.\nSo it is a grand, broader vision of science, of physics, bringing together these strands in the fabric of reality, truly speaking, so that we can have a much, again, broader view of how to go about solving problems, generating explanations, especially in physics, but also in other areas of science.\nThat's where we'll end it for today.\nUntil next time, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7GTjG_qdI&t=3838"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b44119f5-91cb-4d21-86f3-6b91749b8131": {"page_content": "Welcome to the ToKCast, episode 3 of my Breakdown, my Readings and Reflections on, the Science of Can and Can't by Kiara Mileto.\nThis is the book explaining the new physics of constructor theory.\nThe new theory of constructor theory, it's really much broader than merely physics.\nBy David Deutsch, Kiara Mileto, and their collaborators.\nIn the last two episodes, we've looked at Chapter 1.\nAnd in that chapter, in the last episode, we looked at how dynamical laws and initial conditions actually work within physics in order to be able to provide you with a prediction of what's going to happen as some kind of physical system evolves over time.\nToday, we're moving on to Chapter 2, and Kiara is going to explain the limitations of that approach, as well as the benefits of that approach and why that approach has worked so well, hitherto, until now.\nSo without much more preamble, I'm going to get straight into the reading.\nI'm going to do a fair bit, probably about 50-50 reading and commentary today.\nI'm certainly not reading the entire chapter.\nYou need to buy the book for that.\nOkay, so let's begin.\nChapter 2 is called Beyond Laws of Motion, Question Mark, and Kiara writes as an introduction to this chapter.\nWhere I explain the logic of the traditional conception of physics, which uses exclusively explanations by dynamical laws and supplementary conditions, why it cannot capture counterfactuals such as information, work, and heat, or knowledge, and why physics needs to resort to a radically different approach based on counterfactuals, statements about what is possible or impossible, to incorporate those entities in an exact and fundamental way.\nNow immediately, I'm skipping a few pages as I just suggested.\nWhat Kiara does in these first few pages is describe people of the past who are somewhat primitive to us, I suppose, and how they struggled to survive and encountered problems.\nBut at least they had one thing, better than other animals, they possessed knowledge.\nSo people of the past, early explorers, in particular, that's the example that she uses, had knowledge that enabled them to make predictions, predictions of the weather, of the conditions of the seas, and in particular of the winds to enable them to navigate the ocean somewhat better than people who didn't have such knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "454f416f-6460-4056-9de6-a469b205e15c": {"page_content": "But at least they had one thing, better than other animals, they possessed knowledge.\nSo people of the past, early explorers, in particular, that's the example that she uses, had knowledge that enabled them to make predictions, predictions of the weather, of the conditions of the seas, and in particular of the winds to enable them to navigate the ocean somewhat better than people who didn't have such knowledge.\nAnd so, as Kiara goes on to write, knowledge allowed them to make predictions about favorable winds and currents, about where they might encounter rocks or dangerous shallows, about how long their journey would last, such predictions tamed some of their doubts and fears, and eased them through perils and uncertainties.\nAs for those early explorers, predictions are still the most sought after, output of science, and a physics in particular.\nThey will be one of the focuses of this chapter.\nI shall explain the logic of the traditional way of making predictions in physics, show its limitations, and suggest how counterfactuals can remedy some of those limitations.\nA prediction, in physics as well as in other fields, is a conjecture about some piece of information that is not known prior to the prediction, like any conjecture, a prediction could be false, as one might discover by checking whether the prediction is or is not met in reality.\nFalse does not imply useless, pausing their just my reflection on this.\nRemember that Kiara, like David, like myself, perperience, so all knowledge is conjectural, or any claim that we make is conjectural, anything that come out of your mouth or out of your pen or out of your computer is going to be conjectural, and that includes predictions.\nSo even if you have a robust scientific theory, a good theory or physics, for example, that allows you to make predictions.\nThe predictions themselves, well, they're still conjectures as well, because they're being derived from a conjectured explanation.\nSo they can't be anything more than conjectures.\nThey're not more certain.\nThey're not going to give you more reliable knowledge or anything like that.\nWhat they're going to do is tell you what's going to happen on the assumption that this particular theory of, in this case, physics is true.\nSo the prediction works on the assumption that the underlying explanation works.\nAnd even then, that you haven't made an error somewhere other in moving from your explanation to your prediction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=143"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d83dd67f-2682-4280-9713-0fc28e45cd58": {"page_content": "So they can't be anything more than conjectures.\nThey're not more certain.\nThey're not going to give you more reliable knowledge or anything like that.\nWhat they're going to do is tell you what's going to happen on the assumption that this particular theory of, in this case, physics is true.\nSo the prediction works on the assumption that the underlying explanation works.\nAnd even then, that you haven't made an error somewhere other in moving from your explanation to your prediction.\nAnd this brings me to a slight distinction here that Kiara doesn't make in the science of canon Kant, but I've made elsewhere following the beginning of infinity, for example, that there are species of guesses about the future.\nThere are predictions which are something like, in my words, derivations, logical derivations, given a good, typically scientific theory.\nAnd in opposition to this, there are prophecies.\nOur prophecies come in various kinds.\nThey might come completely uncoupled from any consideration of good experimental knowledge.\nAnd in particular, they can come uncoupled from knowledge about knowledge.\nA prophet is, after all, someone who guesses about the future.\nEither at random or in some cases, and this is the more technical sense that David Deutsch seems to use the word, prophecy is where the prophet purports to explain what will happen in the future, while ignoring the effects that people might have.\nNamely, what knowledge they might create.\nScientists, unfortunately, can be prone to this, which means politicians will be as well, because they tend to take scientists very seriously, even when they're being prophetic.\nAnd we'll come to some examples of this.\nBut long-term predictions about the behavior of civilizations or what might happen to Earth or even the region around Earth, given the existence of people who are bringing in to existence knowledge, which can create technology, which can change the outcome of whatever your prediction is going to be, is always something that needs to be kept in mind.\nAnd something that politicians, for example, the people whose hands are on the levers of economic power to a large extent, can end up making decisions based upon the prophecies of scientists who assume that no such technology and no such creativity can ever affect their derivations from, they're otherwise usually good scientific theories.\nAnd of course, that's in the best case.\nThat's in the case where the scientist is really using a good scientific theory, rather than a hypothesis which might indeed not contain a good explanation at the heart of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=270"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e8669315-ce63-4eda-8c57-f1e27e748fc9": {"page_content": "And of course, that's in the best case.\nThat's in the case where the scientist is really using a good scientific theory, rather than a hypothesis which might indeed not contain a good explanation at the heart of it.\nOkay, let's continue on this line that Kiara has about prediction, and she writes, an example of a false but far from useless prediction in maritime history is that made by Christopher Columbus in the 15th century, he predicted that by traveling westwards from the coasts of Europe, one could reach the east, the Indies, his specific prediction was, as we know, erroneous, ought to be precise, incomplete.\nHe had not guessed that another continent was in the way.\nIn fact, Columbus's ocean exploration is how renaissance Europe discovered the Americas.\nStill, his prediction was powerful, useful, and contained some truth.\nHad he been able to continue traveling westwards beyond America, or thousands more miles south, round Cape Horn, he would have reached India, pausing their smart reflection.\nThis is the point I've made elsewhere before as well.\nI should stop saying that.\nBut I tend to repeat myself in various podcasts.\nI should add here.\nI should add to this idea of a false but far from useless prediction.\nOf course, lots of things in physics, like for example, any prediction made from Newton's theory, any prediction made from Newton's theory, must strictly speaking turn out false because the theory itself is false.\nBut that doesn't make it useless and it doesn't make it a bad explanation either.\nIt's a false explanation.\nBut it's very, very, very useful and it contains some truth as that phrase there that Kiara has used comes into its own, containing some truth.\nNot at a quantity of truth that we can measure or anything like that.\nAnd in fact, not only are the predictions from Newton's theory not useless.\nThey can sometimes be more useful, in a sense, depending upon your problem situation, than the more true theory, the more accurate theory, the best explanation, which is Einstein's relativity in this particular case.\nAnd it's all to do with precision and perhaps our efficiency.\nSo if you want to do something like, let's say, determine the cause of a car accident because you're a crash scene investigator working with the police and you need to retrodict what happened, what previously happened.\nYou arrive on the scene and it's just a mangled wreckage of two cars that have crashed into each other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=424"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "122ac13d-986f-43bb-8f90-abe1017574d5": {"page_content": "And it's all to do with precision and perhaps our efficiency.\nSo if you want to do something like, let's say, determine the cause of a car accident because you're a crash scene investigator working with the police and you need to retrodict what happened, what previously happened.\nYou arrive on the scene and it's just a mangled wreckage of two cars that have crashed into each other.\nAnd now you're trying to figure out, based upon the amount of damage done and the tire marks and so on, the evidence that you've got there before you, to determine whether or not, if one or both of the drivers were breaking laws in some way like breaking the speed limit, then strictly speaking, if you really wanted to get the highest precision most accurate, most correct answer, you should be using Einstein's special relativity.\nBut no one's going to do that.\nNo one's actually going to do that.\nBecause, although your answer would be closer to the actual truth of the matter, presuming that all your assumptions are correct as well, it's going to be swamped by the errors in your assumptions anyway.\nEven if you had perfect assumptions about what was going on, and you were able to find out the velocity of these cars prior to the crash to figure out if either of the parties had been breaking the law, Newtonian physics is going to do just as well in our court of law to try and make your case.\nBecause the difference between the two answers that you get for the velocities of the cars will be found in like the fifth decimal place or something, a fraction of a percentage difference between them.\nIt only becomes significant, special relative, the effects of special relativity, only becomes significant once the velocity gets really, really high.\nSo this is why, in fact, the false theory can sometimes be preferable because more people will, I understand it, be able to apply it more efficiently and quickly, especially if time is a factor.\nAnd C is going to be well within the error bars, we might say, of whatever the assumptions might be in the first place.\nSo the differences between special relativity and Newtonian physics are going to be completely swamped by all the other elasticity in the calculation, namely what you assume to begin with and what the evidence enables you to measure as a matter of fact.\nOkay, back to the book and Chiara writes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=560"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e6cefc3-748f-41e5-86fd-8b008e103455": {"page_content": "And C is going to be well within the error bars, we might say, of whatever the assumptions might be in the first place.\nSo the differences between special relativity and Newtonian physics are going to be completely swamped by all the other elasticity in the calculation, namely what you assume to begin with and what the evidence enables you to measure as a matter of fact.\nOkay, back to the book and Chiara writes.\nAn notorious case of a useless prediction appears in the legend of the, and I'm going to butcher this completely, cumian sibil, the priestess who resided in the Apollonian oracle at cumay, an ancient Greek colony where Naples is today.\nThe story goes that a pilgrim came to her asking for a prediction about whether he would return safely from an imminent war.\nThis was the sibils reply, Ibis, Radibis, non-mariress, in bellow, the cryptic sentence contains a prediction, which is what the pilgrim was hoping for.\nBut unfortunately for the pilgrim, it is hopelessly vague.\nAccording to where one pauses, I, after Radibis or after non, that statement can have two completely different meanings.\nOne is, you will go, you will not come back, you will die at war, the other is, you will go, you will come back, you will not die at war.\nApparently the statement was uttered only once, and with a flat tone of voice.\nSo it was impossible to tell which one of the two meanings it had.\nOkay, pausing that as my reflection, it's of course quite typical for an ancient prophet to be vague.\nModern prophets of course, are similarly vague at times.\nAll the claims of looming disasters of various kinds, economic, environmental, civilizational, AI, apocalypse.\nIt's always coming, but we're never really told precisely when or what means, or exactly what the nature of the disaster will be.\nIt's all prophecy.\nPerhaps one step up from sibils there, but not much.\nWhile sibils is kind of vacuous, because it's a contradiction, there's two competing predictions, both of which rule the other one out.\nAt least our modern day prophets are sometimes making an actual claim of a thing that is purportedly going to happen.\nFor example, the AI will kill us and take over the world.\nOf course, many do not quite do this.\nMany make sibil-like claims.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=670"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6e216bf9-155e-4348-affc-610d17cd9ee5": {"page_content": "Perhaps one step up from sibils there, but not much.\nWhile sibils is kind of vacuous, because it's a contradiction, there's two competing predictions, both of which rule the other one out.\nAt least our modern day prophets are sometimes making an actual claim of a thing that is purportedly going to happen.\nFor example, the AI will kill us and take over the world.\nOf course, many do not quite do this.\nMany make sibil-like claims.\nThat being AI might kill us and take over the world, or global warming might melt all the polarized caps before we choose to do anything about it.\nBut of course, anything might be the case.\nAnything not precluded by the laws of physics, and all that might be the case.\nBack to the book.\nChiara Wright.\nWhat is the difference between Columbus's predictions and the sibils?.\nThe former is powerful and worthy, even if false.\nThe latter useless.\nBut why exactly?.\nThe answer shall not be found by examining the contents of the predictions themselves.\nWe have to go deeper.\nThe difference lies in what the predictions rely on.\nIt lies in the underlying explanations.\nThe prophecy of the kumian sibil did not rely on an offer or explanation of why the pilgrim would or would not come back from war.\nWithout any further explanation, it is impossible to tell which of the two opposite meanings that statement has.\nColumbus's prediction instead relied on a good explanation that the earth was round, pausing there just again.\nTo this I would add that even if there is a good explanation on offer about the future, it sometimes needs to take into account other good explanations, which if it ignores them will get the prediction wrong.\nThe one I mentioned often is the prediction quite scientific in a sense that the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen fuel expanded to a red giant and boil all the oceans of the earth as it does so.\nThat seems like a reasonable prediction for 5 billion years hence, given what we know, which is quite robust, good explanations about stars like the sun.\nThe problem is, it ignores what people might do, it ignores other good explanations, it purports in other words to know a future that creativity may have an impact on.\nIt presumes that creativity cannot possibly have an impact upon that scenario.\nAnd by the way, supposedly, the oceans will boil well before 5 billion years hence due to increasing temperature of the sun anyway if we don't do anything about it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=793"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f160ffe-dca7-4fb3-8b35-e2c5ab25eeed": {"page_content": "The problem is, it ignores what people might do, it ignores other good explanations, it purports in other words to know a future that creativity may have an impact on.\nIt presumes that creativity cannot possibly have an impact upon that scenario.\nAnd by the way, supposedly, the oceans will boil well before 5 billion years hence due to increasing temperature of the sun anyway if we don't do anything about it.\nThat, of course, is always the point on this planet.\nFor as long as we're here, any prediction is always, unless we don't do anything about it.\nSo, any prediction in science is going to come true, unless we do something about it.\nBut we will often do something about it.\nBy the way, you can simply Google when will the oceans boil to find a debate over the timeframe.\nIt's about a billion years or so apparently, back to the book, Chiarites.\nThe quality of a prediction depends ultimately on the underlying explanation.\nThis point is so important that we need to spend a little time reflecting on it.\nIt is just like what happens on a long hike.\nWhen you reach a spot with a wonderful view, it is good to pause and take a little rest while contemplating the beauty of the landscape from that particular place.\nOur gaze now moves far away from the gloomy land of oracles and comes to rest on a boundless, shimmering prairie, a field where the connection between good explanations and powerful predictions is clear and immediate.\nIt is the field of physics.\nPredictions in physics are powerful.\nThey supersede religious and mythological predictions and also those made by rules of thumb.\nRules such as, in order to grow good carrots in your garden, you need to sow carrot seeds in February.\nOften, laws of physics are so general that they make claims about the universe as a whole.\nI'm not going to read the next section.\nIt's an interesting story.\nIt's the story of the discovery of Neptune and the discovery of Neptune was basically about the fact that as Uranus went around the sun or Uranus as some people say.\nAs it went around the sun, it's orb deviated from what was predicted from Newtonian physics.\nThis led astronomers to be able to predict where Neptune should be found and training their telescopes towards that region of space indeed they found it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=919"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bbfb7302-f66f-4ee2-becc-09f32bb0727c": {"page_content": "I'm not going to read the next section.\nIt's an interesting story.\nIt's the story of the discovery of Neptune and the discovery of Neptune was basically about the fact that as Uranus went around the sun or Uranus as some people say.\nAs it went around the sun, it's orb deviated from what was predicted from Newtonian physics.\nThis led astronomers to be able to predict where Neptune should be found and training their telescopes towards that region of space indeed they found it.\nThis was so successful of course that it led scientists later on to presume that a similar effect was happening with Mercury and so they presume that there was this hidden planet that was perturbing the orbit of Mercury.\nAs it turned out, no such planet was found or ever could be found or indeed exists because the solution there was not another planet perturbing the orbit of Mercury from what was predicted behind Newtonian physics but rather it's because Newtonian physics turns out to be false and you need general relativity to get the orbit right.\nOkay, back to the book in Chiarites.\nIn physics and in science in general, both explanations and predictions must satisfy strict criteria.\nIn particular, explanations must generate predictions that are testable.\nEnd quote.\nOkay, I haven't read much there.\nbut I feel that this needs lingering over.\nShe's just written there.\nIn particular, explanations must generate predictions that are testable.\nNow after years of doing this to me of course and to anyone who listens to me at all, you'll be bored of hearing something like that.\nIt's quite clearly the case.\nThis is in science, okay?.\nIn science, you need explanations that generate testable predictions.\nI'm astonished now that it still needs to be said and this thesis still needs to be defended.\nNot because we want to say that science is the king of all subjects and has nothing else that's important because we have testable theories and so we are the superior subject.\nNo, nothing like that.\nIt's simply we need testable theories so that we have a measure by which we can actually talk sensibly about how to determine what is really going on in the physical world and which of our competing theories is going to be the correct one or the more correct one and which one has been refuted.\nIf we've got no experimental way of refuting two good explanations, then how do we choose between them?.\nHow do we take action scientifically?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1047"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8379b3fd-e58d-42a3-882c-34f8b15bb377": {"page_content": "No, nothing like that.\nIt's simply we need testable theories so that we have a measure by which we can actually talk sensibly about how to determine what is really going on in the physical world and which of our competing theories is going to be the correct one or the more correct one and which one has been refuted.\nIf we've got no experimental way of refuting two good explanations, then how do we choose between them?.\nHow do we take action scientifically?.\nNow morality on the other hand is not testable and in many, many cases you certainly shouldn't go testing moral claims.\nIt would be a great mistake.\nFor example, we shouldn't be going out and testing what kind of torture actually causes more suffering.\nOn the one hand that's a scientific question and on the other it's a moral question but we shouldn't do it and no one should do this.\nThere's all sorts of moral things that we shouldn't try to test.\nThe same is true of certain theories in economics, certain theories in politics, a claim like you know Marxism is true.\nIt's not actually testable but to the extent that it's already been tried, it's failed everywhere.\nSo there's no need to keep on trying it because there's a moral claim at the center of it.\nThere are claims about people that we know are false, claims about society that we know are false.\nThere is science, there is non-science and there is pseudoscience.\nMorality is non-science.\nbut that doesn't make it unimportant.\nIt is crucially important.\nMarxism on the other hand, along with astrology, is a pseudoscience.\nBoth of them can be dismissed as false because they're bad explanations and to the extent that anyone has ever taken them seriously as explanations, they have suffered.\nIn the case of astrology, pursuing a false system for directing one's life in a particular way when better ideas are actually on offer and in the case of Marxism, well, the death of hundreds of millions of people.\nSo there's a spectrum of bad effects that these pseudoscientific ideas can have on people.\nBut anyways, some people, well as I've said before, let's face it by some people actually mean some theoretical physicists, get their noses quite out of joint on this point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1165"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e6fd149a-9f98-4717-8f99-6314f4dc85c0": {"page_content": "So there's a spectrum of bad effects that these pseudoscientific ideas can have on people.\nBut anyways, some people, well as I've said before, let's face it by some people actually mean some theoretical physicists, get their noses quite out of joint on this point.\nThey want to argue that testability is itself some kind of antiquated notion that we are attacking their favorite ideas, those favorite ideas of theirs arising in a sense out of physics because we say they're not testable.\nI've seen people get upset that claiming universes with other laws of physics are not properly part of science because they're not testable because we cannot make an observation of them or do a crucial experimental test of them.\nBut there's no reason to be upset about that.\nMetaphysics is absolutely fine.\nAnd what wasn't testable yesterday might turn out to be testable tomorrow if we can figure out how.\nI think this almost needs to be written on the walls of any academy of the future.\nLet no one enter here who is ignorant of areas outside of science.\nThere are scientists who think that being scientific is a virtue in a way that being artistic or being philosophical is not and so on.\nBut mathematics, for example, is not science.\nConstructing mathematical structures that describe alternative physical laws of a universe that is not our own is just that constructing mathematical structure.\nIt's not strictly doing science.\nIt's doing theoretical physics of a kind, I guess.\nBut this would just place that kind of theoretical physics within the realm of pure mathematics, which is absolutely fine.\nAs I've said before, pure mathematicians, Hardy was one.\nHave been proud of the fact that their mathematics was utterly disconnected from the real physical world in a sense.\nIt was about purely abstract things, at least that's what they thought.\nIn Hardy's case, he actually said it, and I'll quote from his book, a mathematician's apology.\nHe said, quote, I have never done anything useful.\nNo discovery of mine has made or is likely to make directly or indirectly for good or ill the least difference to the amenity of the world end quote.\nAnd so he was he was proud of the fact he was kind of like almost an abstract artist.\nHe was just doing stuff with his mind disconnected from the physical world to a large extent.\nAnd he thought that nothing about his mathematics could possibly make a difference.\nBut I'm just going to read from the Wikipedia article on Hardy, actually.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1287"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "596f28fd-8914-4060-b9d9-e0fbd771d298": {"page_content": "No discovery of mine has made or is likely to make directly or indirectly for good or ill the least difference to the amenity of the world end quote.\nAnd so he was he was proud of the fact he was kind of like almost an abstract artist.\nHe was just doing stuff with his mind disconnected from the physical world to a large extent.\nAnd he thought that nothing about his mathematics could possibly make a difference.\nBut I'm just going to read from the Wikipedia article on Hardy, actually.\nAnd the Wikipedia article says, aside from formulating the Hardy Weinberg principle in population genetics, Hardy's famous work on integer partitions with his collaborator, Romana Jan, known as the Hardy Romana Jan Asymptotic Formula, has been widely applied in physics to find quantum partition functions of atomic nuclei first used by Niels Bohr to derive thermodynamic functions of noninteracting Bose Einstein systems.\nThough Hardy wanted his maths to be pure and devoid of any application, much of his work has found applications in other branches of science end quote.\nAnd so even if you're doing pure mathematics, so you think you are, it could be applied later on.\nIf you think you're doing metaphysics, it could be applied later on.\nIt's no seem to be doing these things because they might come within the purview of science.\nAnd so actually Hardy's work is now a part of science.\nSo too for people working on megaverse theories or the claims about alternative laws of physics and alternative universes, it's also the good kind of like string theory at the moment.\nNone of it seems to be testable and so therefore strictly within part of science, so to speak.\nBut the lesson of Hardy's pure mathematics should resonate.\nHis work was important regardless of whether or not it would eventually be applied, that it was brought into science in a sense eventually, just makes it now doubly important.\nOkay, back to the book.\nChiarites.\nPerhaps you have noticed that being testable is itself a counterfactual property pertaining to what can be done with the prediction.\nThere are indeed counterfactuals at the heart of most fundamental scientific theories and of the process of scientific discovery, specifically testable means that it must be possible to set up an experiment to disprove the prediction if it is false.\nI, if it does not match what it's actually observed in reality.\nOkay, so end quote.\nThat's that's perfect.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1437"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "30301b44-1aa0-4512-9643-8391ec00deb9": {"page_content": "Perhaps you have noticed that being testable is itself a counterfactual property pertaining to what can be done with the prediction.\nThere are indeed counterfactuals at the heart of most fundamental scientific theories and of the process of scientific discovery, specifically testable means that it must be possible to set up an experiment to disprove the prediction if it is false.\nI, if it does not match what it's actually observed in reality.\nOkay, so end quote.\nThat's that's perfect.\nChiarite then goes on in the book to give some simple examples of what it means to be testable in science.\nI think people listening to this probably know what it means.\nSo we'll skip over those and she also goes over some untestable ones, like for example, that the universe might be supported on the back of a dog, or many dogs, or infinite dogs, which is a variation of that whole joke about its turtles all the way down.\nOkay, these metaphysical theories that can't be tested.\nOkay, also, as far as we know, can't be tested.\nOf course, if we could observe this dog on which the universe was supported, then it would be part of the universe, part of the observable universe, and therefore it would be testable.\nBut, presuming that these things are outside the universe and therefore by definition, outside of what we can observe means they're untestable.\nOkay, so I'm skipping quite a substantial bit and going to the part where Chiarite's quote, why is testability of predictions so central to the progress of physics and science in general?.\nThe reason is that it provides a particularly efficient way to find mistakes in the explanations and correct them.\nI want to open a digression to illustrate how predictions, explanations, and testing are all intertwined within the method that allows science to make tentative progress.\nTo this end, let me stir the cloudy water in the pond of history and bring up the spirit of the thinker who pioneered the scientific method as we know it.\nGalileo Galilei.\nGalileo's experiments to test these predictions are striking for their beauty and simplicity.\nHe intended to test these theories predictions about the motion of systems against those that Aristotle had proposed in antiquity and which had been considered the authority ever since.\nGalileo's predictions were about the motion of a hard, smooth, bronze sphere left to roll inside inclined smooth groove without friction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1532"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "342317da-6c57-4920-aa9b-bdaeeaf942c7": {"page_content": "Galileo Galilei.\nGalileo's experiments to test these predictions are striking for their beauty and simplicity.\nHe intended to test these theories predictions about the motion of systems against those that Aristotle had proposed in antiquity and which had been considered the authority ever since.\nGalileo's predictions were about the motion of a hard, smooth, bronze sphere left to roll inside inclined smooth groove without friction.\nIn particular, he predicted that spheres of different sizes or masses would undergo the same motion down the groove, the same speed in particular.\nThis prediction was in sharp conflict with Aristotle's theory which predicted that spheres of different masses would roll down with different speeds.\nOn the face of it, Aristotle's idea seems intuitively true, which makes Galileo's prediction all the more interesting.\nOkay, pausing there and just skipping a little bit as well, and Cara goes on to explain how.\nWell, this same idea and the one that's usually taught in science class is about, well, if you've got a small mass, one kilogram mass, one kilogram sphere of metal, and you've got a large mass, a five kilogram sphere of metal, and you drop them simultaneously, which one hits the ground first?.\nAnd the intuitive idea, even amongst some adults that I've done this with, who haven't learned physics for whatever reason or have never done the experiments, to think that the heavy one must hit the ground first.\nAnd this kind, it makes intuitive sense, the reason it makes intuitive sense is because, of course, people think of feathers and leaves fluttering to the ground, and so they think that it's due to the mass.\nNow, you have to try and eliminate the air resistance and always do the experiment properly, but once you do control the experiment as well as you can, then indeed you find that the two masses hit the ground at the same time.\nBrian Cox does a wonderful version of this with actual feathers and bowling balls in a huge vacuum chamber, or put the image up on the screen.\nIt's a YouTube.\nAnd you can see, in fact, that the feathers do fall to the ground at the same time as the boulders.\nAnd I think there was an astronaut, of course, as well.\nI've talked about this before, who dropped the feather and the hammer on the moon at the same time, and I hit the ground at the same time as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1649"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5ad5ff53-2a89-4ad3-b031-d3bda68e1697": {"page_content": "It's a YouTube.\nAnd you can see, in fact, that the feathers do fall to the ground at the same time as the boulders.\nAnd I think there was an astronaut, of course, as well.\nI've talked about this before, who dropped the feather and the hammer on the moon at the same time, and I hit the ground at the same time as well.\nBut you don't even need, well, you do need to do the experiment to disprove the different theories, but there is a thought experiment that you can do as well on the assumption that the rest of physics is unchanged.\nAnd Kiara talks about the thought experiment, and so let me read the thought experiment, quote, from Kiara.\nGalileo reasoned like this, if one joins a smaller sphere to a larger sphere, via a string, and then drops them both from a height.\nWhat happens, according to Aristotle, is that the smaller sphere has a small velocity.\nIn this thought experiment, the smaller sphere should lag behind.\nIf the two spheres can fall down for long enough, the smaller sphere would slow down the larger one by pulling on the string.\nSo the combined system made of two spheres would go down at a speed that is slower than that of the largest sphere by itself.\nBut here is the glitch.\nThis contradicts Aristotle's idea that that systems with larger masses should have larger velocities.\nAfter all, the system made of the two connected spheres has a larger mass than the largest sphere by itself.\nIf Aristotle's idea were true, it should be faster, not slower, as we concluded.\nTherefore, by this thought experiment, Galileo was led to conclude that Aristotle's idea was false, and that spheres of different masses should undergo the same motion when falling freely.\nHe then conjectured with another leap of creativity, but they should display the same behavior when sliding down the groove.\nPaul's idea just might reflect that.\nMy version of this, of this thought experiment, if you like, is if you have, let's say five people who like to go skydiving.\nThey all jump out of the aeroplane.\nNow, on Aristotle's theory, the heavier that they are, the faster that they fall, presume they've all got the same mass, so therefore they all fall at precisely the same rate.\nNow, if they're skilled skydivers, they can direct themselves in such a way that they're very close together, and they could literally put their arms out and hold hands with each other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1774"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fd776de6-5f2f-479b-83fa-9ddd17a16f97": {"page_content": "They all jump out of the aeroplane.\nNow, on Aristotle's theory, the heavier that they are, the faster that they fall, presume they've all got the same mass, so therefore they all fall at precisely the same rate.\nNow, if they're skilled skydivers, they can direct themselves in such a way that they're very close together, and they could literally put their arms out and hold hands with each other.\nNow, do you regard that as a system of five people with five times the mass of any one of them?.\nAnd so when they hold hands, do they suddenly speed up, and then when they let go of hands that they suddenly slow down?.\nIf they do indeed speed up when they hold hands, where is the energy coming from in order to increase their acceleration?.\nWhat's going on there?.\nI'm not sure why Aristotle himself didn't think of things like this.\nI don't know.\nProbably because he was thinking of just so much stuff, that he didn't think too deeply about his physics.\nAristotelian physics is a, I guess, it's a first attempt.\nI was almost going to say it's a good first attempt.\nI don't think it's a good first attempt.\nIt's not precise in any way.\nI don't know that he did much in the way of quantitative analysis, and he didn't do experiments as well, so that's not a good scientist Aristotle.\nFine at other things.\nFine at other areas of philosophy.\nGood at virtue ethics and that kind of thing.\nBad physicist.\nAnyway, Kiara goes on to explain how Galileo, of course, went on to test the actual prediction that he made against Aristotle's ideas by observation, so he actually went and did the experiment.\nShe doesn't mention the leaning tower of pizza, maybe because that's an urban legend.\nIt's a myth.\nMaybe he didn't actually drop things off the leaning tower of pizza to see which one hit the ground first, but back to the book and Kiara writes, explanations whose predictions are found wrong in an experiment automatically become problematic, and they are usually dismissed in favor of alternative explanations.\nAs mentioned in the first chapter, Galileo's and Newton's explanations, and the resulting predictions have an important trait in common.\nTheir approach to explaining physical reality is centered on what is usually called a law of motion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1880"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b5ca0d1a-b613-4a36-9859-09ef1776dfec": {"page_content": "Maybe he didn't actually drop things off the leaning tower of pizza to see which one hit the ground first, but back to the book and Kiara writes, explanations whose predictions are found wrong in an experiment automatically become problematic, and they are usually dismissed in favor of alternative explanations.\nAs mentioned in the first chapter, Galileo's and Newton's explanations, and the resulting predictions have an important trait in common.\nTheir approach to explaining physical reality is centered on what is usually called a law of motion.\nA law of motion, or a dynamical law, is a description of where a system such as a sphere of planet goes, given that its motion starts at a certain point in space and time.\nThink of a sequence of snapshots, each of which represents the state of that system at different times.\nThe law of motion provides the rule for how the snapshots are ordered.\nIn particular, there will be an initial and a final snapshot, representing the starting and ending states of the motion, which in physics jargon are called initial conditions and final conditions.\nFor instance, in the case of a ball, fired by a cannon, the initial snapshot contains the ball sitting inside the cannon, about to be fired.\nThe final snapshot represents it when it lands on the ground.\nTypically, any snapshot along the sequences explained in terms of its predecessor, ultimately in terms of the initial snapshot.\nAll sequences of snapshots described by known laws of motion have a particular property.\nEach snapshot has only one predecessor and one successor in the sequence.\nThis property is something physicists call reversibility of dynamical laws.\nOnce you have gone all the way down the sequence of snapshots, you can go back without any uncertainty because each snapshot has one predecessor.\nUnlike in a garden or labyrinth with fourking paths, therefore, no bifurcations occur along the line.\nThere is no ambiguity in how to go back or forth.\nThe explanation by laws of motion is the most traditional in physics.\nIt was first introduced by Galileo, then it became established with Newton's laws.\nToday, the two most fundamental physical theories, general relativity and quantum theory, are expressed by laws of motion 2.\nAnd so are all other theories that physicists generally consider fundamental, like those governing electromagnetic fields and elementary particles.\nThe long-term success of the approach by laws of motion is remarkable.\nIt predictions are extremely powerful.\nSuppose, for instance, you are a general about to attack a city built by robust walls, which you want to batter down.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=1983"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "26dc4e7d-d53b-4678-ac47-00ea3038c30d": {"page_content": "Today, the two most fundamental physical theories, general relativity and quantum theory, are expressed by laws of motion 2.\nAnd so are all other theories that physicists generally consider fundamental, like those governing electromagnetic fields and elementary particles.\nThe long-term success of the approach by laws of motion is remarkable.\nIt predictions are extremely powerful.\nSuppose, for instance, you are a general about to attack a city built by robust walls, which you want to batter down.\nNewton's laws tell you exactly how to tilt the cannon in order to maximize the impact of its projectiles by predicting their motion in every detail.\nFor example, they tell you that there are only two possible paths available to the same point of impact for the cannonball with any particular speed, pausing as my reflection.\nIf you're interested in this, this is all this topic of projectile motion.\nA big topic in junior level physics, there is this thing, physics education technology from the University of Colorado.\nAnd there's this great little app that's on putting up on the screen now.\nAnd you can play around with it in order to test precisely what Kiara has talked about there, that you can either shoot something up really high so that it comes down and hits point x, or you can shoot it at a low trajectory and also land at that same point x.\nThe calculation of this is simple and interesting because projectile motion brings together various aspects of otherwise disparate areas of mathematics, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, if you want to go down that road as well, back to the book and Kiara.\nIn both cases, the ball describes a parabola in the air, but with different maximum height, depending upon the initial condition, the angle at which the cannon is tilted initially.\nWhen the cannon is tilted at a high angle, the ball flies high and falls down beyond the walls.\nIf the cannon is tilted at a lower angle, the ball flies lower and it can if the angle is right, strike the protective wall.\nIn both cases, the description of what is going on is encapsulated in the sequence of places the ball traverses as time goes by.\nThis set of places is the ball trajectory, its path, which is dictated by the laws of motion, Newton's law in this case.\nIn this approach, the explanation for why the ball hits the target at the end is given in terms of the places the ball goes through.\nUltimately, as I said, in terms of its initial position and velocity, the initial conditions of the system's motion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2109"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2c4fd8f-644d-471f-ab1f-4cc6cfeb7603": {"page_content": "This set of places is the ball trajectory, its path, which is dictated by the laws of motion, Newton's law in this case.\nIn this approach, the explanation for why the ball hits the target at the end is given in terms of the places the ball goes through.\nUltimately, as I said, in terms of its initial position and velocity, the initial conditions of the system's motion.\nSince the dynamical law approach is so powerful, it is natural to wonder whether it could be extended to explain everything that happens in our universe, including the whole universe itself.\nIn other words, would a physical theory of the initial conditions of the universe and of its laws of motion provide a satisfactory explanation for everything in it?.\nThe answer, as you are about to discover, is no.\nI shall point out that explanations in the form of laws of motion and initial conditions are excellent for a special purpose, i.e. to make predictions about what happens on a sub-part of the universe, like cannon or tennis balls, marbles and planets.\nBut they cannot explain everything in physical reality.\nIn fact, when regarded as an explanation of everything, they have serious problems.\nProblems are fruitful things in physics, as they are in life.\nThey hold the promise of improvement when they are addressed properly.\nThese problems are the very reason why we have to venture on our journey in the land of counterfactuals.\nAs I said, the dynamical law type of explanation looks like a sequence of snapshots.\nIt has an initial and a final snapshot.\nAnd there are all the snapshots in between, whose order is set by the laws of motion.\nThe explanation for something happening on an intermediate snapshot, for example the cannonball is suspended in the air at the highest point of its trajectory, is in terms of what happens in the snapshots before and after that particular snapshot.\nNow, if the initial snapshot of the sequence reminds you of the dog in the cosmology I mentioned earlier in this chapter, you are quite right.\nWhy should one have a particular initial snapshot?.\nAnd not a different one.\nSurely there must be an additional explanation for that, but that explanation cannot be itself in the form of initial conditions and laws of motion.\nIt cannot be given in terms of another sequence of snapshots.\nOtherwise, that explanation would just look like adding another sequence of snapshots to the existing sequence placing it at the start of the latter.\nBut that new sequence in turn would require an explanation for its own initial snapshot and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2244"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "979aeeaf-224e-487b-9abf-efc289c386e1": {"page_content": "And not a different one.\nSurely there must be an additional explanation for that, but that explanation cannot be itself in the form of initial conditions and laws of motion.\nIt cannot be given in terms of another sequence of snapshots.\nOtherwise, that explanation would just look like adding another sequence of snapshots to the existing sequence placing it at the start of the latter.\nBut that new sequence in turn would require an explanation for its own initial snapshot and so on.\nIn the dog-based explanation, this would correspond to supposing dogs all the way down to explain the first dog.\nThe approach by initial conditions and laws of motion taken in its strict form is not a self-contained explanation for the universe.\nAdding sequences to the first sequence or dogs to the first dog does not help to address the problem.\nThis problem is what philosophers call an infinite redress.\nIt is exactly the same problem that religious explanations for the origin of the universe run into pausing their just my reflection.\nWow, that's really important.\nAs an all-encompassing explanation, this dynamical laws and initial conditions thing, this thing that physics has hitherto used so powerfully and so well.\nNonetheless, ultimately, we'll fall into infiniter aggressive at tries to be a theory of everything.\nAnother reason that physics is, as it is, can't explain everything, including physics.\nAnd Kerigos, on to explain that God suffers from the same thing.\nIf anyone says what explains the universe and they say, well, God, you know, create the universe.\nAnd of course, reasonably, you can ask, well, who create a God?.\nIf they say, and they usually do nothing did, well, why not just take God out and just say nothing created the universe?.\nWhy have this additional assumption that doesn't actually explain anything?.\nIt's just another unexplained thing.\nAnd two unexplained things do not create an explanation.\nAnyway, back to the book and Kerigos.\nQuote, the issue of initial conditions is a serious problem in physics, which has long remained unsolved.\nThere are currently some viable proposals, which constitute the branch of physics called cosmology.\nThese theories incidentally are not even remotely comparable in accuracy and sophistication with other existing successful theories, such as general relativity and quantum theory.\nThey also suffer from the impossibility of testing some of their predictions.\nThe reason is that they are all designed to agree that the universe should look exactly as we see it now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2367"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8d120c63-7176-4d4d-9151-f90e4b55a47a": {"page_content": "Quote, the issue of initial conditions is a serious problem in physics, which has long remained unsolved.\nThere are currently some viable proposals, which constitute the branch of physics called cosmology.\nThese theories incidentally are not even remotely comparable in accuracy and sophistication with other existing successful theories, such as general relativity and quantum theory.\nThey also suffer from the impossibility of testing some of their predictions.\nThe reason is that they are all designed to agree that the universe should look exactly as we see it now.\nAnd therefore, they are all confirmed, but what we see now, but it is impossible to discriminate between them by considering their predictions for how the universe should have looked at its origin, because it is impossible to set up tests then.\nThis does not of course mean that there could not be any solution to the problem of initial conditions, but currently we do not have a satisfactory one.\nWe must therefore think of alternative ways of looking at the problem.\nThe science of canon can't provide the way because unlike the traditional conception of physics, it does not rely on initial conditions or laws of motion, as its fundamental primitive elements.\nWhen regarded as an explanation for the whole universe, dynamical laws are not self-contained and in another important sense.\nImagine for example a collection of pictures of the sphere rolling down Galileo's groove taken in rapid succession, say one every second to cover the whole motion.\nAs we've seen, what a dynamical law does is put them in a particular order.\nFor instance, supposing that the pictures were scattered in front of you, you could use the dynamical law to line them up in a row one after another, according to its prescription.\nSo you would write on the pictures, one, two, three, according to what the law tells you, meaning that time one, the ball is at the top of the slide, at time two, it starts sliding down and so on, until it reaches the end at some time end.\nSo to describe an ordered sequence of snapshots, one has to refer to an external sequence, a sequence of times, say, whose elements are already ordered by labels, one, two, three and so on.\nWe have found, again, an example of infinite regress, the same problem about ordering the scattered snapshots reappears for the sequence of end times we used to order the scattered snapshots and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2506"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3913064a-1224-4e8a-bf95-13ba5fd87b6f": {"page_content": "So to describe an ordered sequence of snapshots, one has to refer to an external sequence, a sequence of times, say, whose elements are already ordered by labels, one, two, three and so on.\nWe have found, again, an example of infinite regress, the same problem about ordering the scattered snapshots reappears for the sequence of end times we used to order the scattered snapshots and so on.\nIn general, a dynamical law must refer to some external entity, time, which is used to order all the events happening during the motion so that they did not happen all at once.\nYet the existence of time has taken as axiomatic and never properly explained in terms of anything else.\nIn addition, recall Galileo's experiment in order to describe the motion of the sphere, he had to time it with a clock, but in the case of the universe, this constitutes a problem.\nWhat is the clock to time its evolution?.\nThe universe contains everything by definition.\nThere cannot be anything external to it, let alone a clock.\nThese are the two faces of the problem of time, which affects all dynamical laws when regarded as ultimate explanations.\nIncidentally, this problem also affects laws as formulated in general relativity, where instead of a single external label, time, you have the set of labels specifying a point in spacetime.\nThe same problem presents itself as far as spacetime itself, which is left unexplained.\nHere, I did not wish to expand on the solutions to this problem.\nMy point is just this.\nWhatever the solution of this problem may be, it cannot be given in terms of initial conditions and dynamical laws.\nOtherwise, it falls into infinite address.\nIt must be given in terms of some other kind of explanation, some proposed explanations already exist.\nIf you are interested in reading about them, beautiful accounts are in Julian Barber's Magisterial Treatise, the End of Time, and in Michael Lockwood's intriguing book, The Labyrinth of Time.\nThat Kara goes on to point out that this idea of initial conditions and laws of physics, where given the initial conditions, you can then, given the dynamical laws, predict the trajectory, to predict what it is going to happen to the system evolving at the time, is, in a sense, a kind of bias, because you could easily choose the end of the evolution of the system as your starting point and retrodict everything that happened prior to that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2613"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e6e2b7fe-4b85-46df-991f-0d5954f5702a": {"page_content": "That Kara goes on to point out that this idea of initial conditions and laws of physics, where given the initial conditions, you can then, given the dynamical laws, predict the trajectory, to predict what it is going to happen to the system evolving at the time, is, in a sense, a kind of bias, because you could easily choose the end of the evolution of the system as your starting point and retrodict everything that happened prior to that.\nOr, indeed, pick any point on the trajectory given the dynamical laws and be able to predict anything else on that trajectory.\nThis is well known, and we've talked about this before.\nSo I'm skipping that bit where she explains that, and then she goes on to write, quote, dynamical laws cannot handle specific counterfactual features of systems appearing in our universe.\nThey cannot express them fully and adequately.\nFirst, there is the kind of counterfactual that declares some transformation to be possible.\nConsider a specific transformation.\nAddition.\nX and Y, two numbers encoded in some numbering system, must be turned into the number, X plus Y. When we try to express the fact that addition is possible in the dynamical law approach, we encounter a number of subtle and important problems.\nOne way to express that addition is possible is to say that an adder is possible.\nAn ideal adder is a machine that, when given any two numbers, X and Y, in input, it gives output X plus Y.\nAnd, mind you, it remains unchanged in its ability to do that again with other numbers.\nThe ability to work in a cycle guarantees that the adder can add again if needed.\nAn approximate adder is included in any smartphone calculator.\nI say approximate, because after a certain number of years, the smartphone's ability to add will wear out.\nAnd the precision of addition will deteriorate inevitably.\nAlso, the input will be encoded in a limited number of digits.\nHence, achieving only a limited precision.\nJust pausing that is my quick reflection on this.\nYes, computers deteriorate over time.\nThey are subject to all the laws of physics, entropy and so on, just general wear and tear.\nAnd so, they will make errors.\nAnd as time goes on, they'll make more and more errors.\nSo, there's no such thing as any kind of ideal program that the computer can instantiate.\nThere's no ideal adder.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2723"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7b66b11f-2b41-4a7a-a531-0f5cffff90c0": {"page_content": "Hence, achieving only a limited precision.\nJust pausing that is my quick reflection on this.\nYes, computers deteriorate over time.\nThey are subject to all the laws of physics, entropy and so on, just general wear and tear.\nAnd so, they will make errors.\nAnd as time goes on, they'll make more and more errors.\nSo, there's no such thing as any kind of ideal program that the computer can instantiate.\nThere's no ideal adder.\nEven adding up simple numbers is not going to be perfectly able to be done by any computer over a sufficient period of time.\nAnyway, back to the book.\nCarrot.\nThe possibility of an adder, I just realized that my accent probably makes it seem like I'm talking about the snake.\nThe possibility of an adder cannot be expressed fully if one wants to explain everything in the universe using only laws of motion and given initial conditions as in the traditional conception of physics.\nFor a start by fixing a specific initial condition, the universe evolves along a single particular trajectory.\nSet by the said initial condition, no ideal adder will ever appear on that trajectory.\nOn that trajectory, there will only be processes implementing approximate adders with limited precision.\nWhere only a fixed finite set of inputs is ever added before the approximate adder wears out.\nAny particular instance of an approximate adder lasts only a finite time and will only ever add a given sequence of input numbers.\nOtherwise, we would have a violation of the condition that the laws are no design as I explained in the first chapter.\nThat an adder is possible or that addition is possible means far more than that.\nFirst, it means that the adder when given as input to any two numbers can output their sum.\nThis factor refers to any two numbers.\nNever mind whether they are actually given as input to it in reality once the trajectory is selected.\nSecond, that an adder is possible means that there is no limitation to how well it can be approximated by any of the approximate adders.\nBut this fact, once more, cannot be expressed within the traditional conception of physics because the latter cannot most say what happens to a particular instance of an approximate adder if it occurs on the trajectory of the universe.\nIt is going to be true on each of the possible trajectories for each of the allowed initial conditions.\nSo even the enumeration of all possible scenarios that would happen if a given initial condition were to be set would not express the possibility of an adder either.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2882"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b08cb8b9-2e29-4c51-8d17-45ac6609a498": {"page_content": "But this fact, once more, cannot be expressed within the traditional conception of physics because the latter cannot most say what happens to a particular instance of an approximate adder if it occurs on the trajectory of the universe.\nIt is going to be true on each of the possible trajectories for each of the allowed initial conditions.\nSo even the enumeration of all possible scenarios that would happen if a given initial condition were to be set would not express the possibility of an adder either.\nAnother type of counterfactual that cannot be accommodated in the dynamical law approach is the fact that something is impossible.\nThink of the principle of conservation of energy which tells us that a perpetual motion machine is impossible.\nIn the dynamical law type of approach, one can only say that a perpetual motion machine does not happen.\nThat means that no point on the trajectory of the universe contains one given a particular initial condition.\nBut that a perpetual motion machine is impossible, does not mean it does not happen under a particular initial condition.\nIt means that it cannot be built under any of the initial conditions and any of the actual dynamical laws.\nThis statement is much more powerful and categorical than any of the statements one can make about what happens on a particular trajectory.\nOkay, I'm just skipping a little and then carrier goes on to write.\nA final problem about the dynamical law approach is that it seems on the face of it to conflict with the existence of entities that are capable of making choices, such as you and me, every omniscient narrator knows this.\nThe omniscient narrator is the entity that tells the story in a novel in the third person.\nThe narrator knows all the thoughts of the characters in advance.\nTheir ideas are set from the very beginning of the novel.\nChoices only look like true choices to the characters, but in fact they are predetermined and fixed by the narrator's plans.\nLikewise, the explanation based in terms of motion and initial conditions would seem to imply that so must be hours.\nOur choices and everything else depending on them seem already to have been set in advance.\nThey are written in the dynamical law explanation and fixed by the initial condition of the universe.\nThe dynamical laws sequence of events fixes everything.\nIt is given once and for all.\nAll your ideas are laid out there.\nThere seems to be no room for them to be unpredictable as they should be if they were truly free choices.\nWe have just outlined what is called a deterministic nightmare.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=2984"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4784dc4e-0a28-4af9-a1ba-6e55f07821af": {"page_content": "Our choices and everything else depending on them seem already to have been set in advance.\nThey are written in the dynamical law explanation and fixed by the initial condition of the universe.\nThe dynamical laws sequence of events fixes everything.\nIt is given once and for all.\nAll your ideas are laid out there.\nThere seems to be no room for them to be unpredictable as they should be if they were truly free choices.\nWe have just outlined what is called a deterministic nightmare.\nThe fact that there does not seem to be any room for free choice.\nIf one presupposes the existence of a fixed predetermined story for our universe, which is the picture that the traditional conception of physics, in terms of dynamical laws and initial conditions, seems to suggest.\nFor example, whether tomorrow you will have croissants or keepers for breakfast, has been fixed at the start of the universe in its initial conditions.\nThe same goes for the fact that you are reading this text right now instead of some other book, or maybe doing something else altogether, such as watching your favourite show.\nAll determined at the beginning of the universe down to the precise words typos included.\nUnpredictability of action, or free will, is therefore another counterfactual that the dynamical law approach does not seem to be able to accommodate.\nWe did not yet know how to accommodate exactly, free willing physics.\nBut that only means we have to think harder.\nThis problem exists, but it is not insoluble.\nIt only appears to be so if contemplated from the narrow dynamical law type of approach, pausing their my reflection, what will exactly?.\nAnd then I would go one step further and say only to some people.\nI've always kind of thought that even if, okay, here's a two until, you know, coming to understand construct a theory a little better, that even if we had this dynamical law approach to physics, even if that was true and that was the only way to consider physics, we could still have free will.\nI'm kind of with Daniel Denop for different reasons.\nDaniel Denop is something called a compatibleist.\nI'm a compatibleist.\nA lot of people say, well, compatibleism is irrational, given we know that the laws of physics determine everything that's going to happen.\nBut do the does that mean that everything is reducible to laws of physics?.\nFor example, the evolution of species.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=3103"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "833ad4a9-171a-4843-bf1c-a6b56d7e18d7": {"page_content": "I'm kind of with Daniel Denop for different reasons.\nDaniel Denop is something called a compatibleist.\nI'm a compatibleist.\nA lot of people say, well, compatibleism is irrational, given we know that the laws of physics determine everything that's going to happen.\nBut do the does that mean that everything is reducible to laws of physics?.\nFor example, the evolution of species.\nThe evolution of species happens because evolution by natural selection actually creates a certain kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how genes can survive in certain organisms, in certain niches, to enable to create different organisms and so on and so forth.\nIn other words, I endorse a certain kind of creativity, an emergent simplicity.\nAnd I think that free will is just a way of talking about this emergent kind of simplicity.\nThe emergence of simplicity in this case is the existence of choices that exist in the world.\nNow, I think in defy the laws of physics, but at the same time, the laws of physics don't explain everything.\nAnd what we're after when it comes to human behavior is explanations, not merely predictions, that even if you could predict people's behavior, you wouldn't have an explanation of their behavior.\nThe explanation of the behavior would come down to their personal creativity.\nAnd all of this is somewhere you have to do some linguistic gymnastics in order to avoid this term free will.\nAnd if you do avoid the term free will, you're still laughed with this deep, deep mystery.\nI've talked about this ad nauseum.\nI think that free will is tied intimately to knowledge creation.\nTherefore, it's got something to do with epistemology.\nAnd now, you know, I'm hoping that it appears we'll have a clearer understanding of it, given constructed theory, given the science of can and can't.\nAnd what we're saying here is that if we want to understand this more, why don't I understand this mystery of what a human is, making choices, creating knowledge, having free will, we need to move beyond dynamical laws.\nThat's holding us back.\nIt's leading to a lot of what I would say are misconceptions.\nAnyway, Kyarrigos, I'm going to say, quote, fortunately, the dynamical law approach is not the only way to provide explanations and predictions.\nWhy should all good explanations look like chronologically ordered stories which unfold from beginning to end?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=3247"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b378d489-3542-4d72-9315-bce8554056d8": {"page_content": "That's holding us back.\nIt's leading to a lot of what I would say are misconceptions.\nAnyway, Kyarrigos, I'm going to say, quote, fortunately, the dynamical law approach is not the only way to provide explanations and predictions.\nWhy should all good explanations look like chronologically ordered stories which unfold from beginning to end?.\nThe fact that something has happened before something else need not be the whole explanation for how systems work in physical reality.\nEnd quote.\nThe next part of the book is a many pages that I'm going to skip.\nIt's about chess and basically Kyarrigos is the analogy to chess to talk about how certain moves are possible or impossible.\nAnd this can help to explain the evolution of the time of the game, rather than simply understanding what will happen given what you saw happen during the game.\nUnderstanding chess, in other words, means understanding that pawns can do this and bishops can do that, but not these other moves, for example.\nOkay, back to the book.\nKyarrigos.\nCan this logic adopting counterfactuals be fruitful in physics other than in my elementary example?.\nIndeed, in physics and science in general, we already resort to modes of explanation other than dynamical laws.\nSome of them adopting counterfactuals.\nWhat we have in place is, in fact, a hybrid approach.\nFor example, physics resorts to principles like the conservation of energy, which, as I said, are about counterfactuals too.\nThese principles are not in the form of dynamical laws.\nThey are statements that require certain things to be impossible, such as perpetual motion machines, yet they can be as powerful as dynamical laws at generating predictions.\nA famous example is the prediction of the existence of the neutrino, a previously unknown elementary particle.\nThis prediction is akin to the prediction of Neptune's existence, but this time, it was a prediction of the existence of a subatomic particle, not a planet, and the prediction was generated from a principle, not a dynamical law.\nThe prediction was obtained by reasoning that without that particle, the law of conservation of energy, would be violated.\nIt couldn't have been obtained from a dynamical law, because the laws of motion of neutrinos were not known until much later.\nPrinciples also appear in Newton's laws.\nOnly the second law is a dynamical law, relating the force of a system to acceleration and mass.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=3347"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c5ab677-d3ea-49a2-b0a6-28df3c504944": {"page_content": "The prediction was obtained by reasoning that without that particle, the law of conservation of energy, would be violated.\nIt couldn't have been obtained from a dynamical law, because the laws of motion of neutrinos were not known until much later.\nPrinciples also appear in Newton's laws.\nOnly the second law is a dynamical law, relating the force of a system to acceleration and mass.\nBut the other two laws are not really dynamical in their existing formulation.\nThe first law is a hybrid one.\nIt says that it is impossible for a system to change its state of motion when it is not acted upon by a force.\nHence, the system will continue in its given state of motion until some force intervenes.\nThe law does refer to dynamical laws via the concept of state of motion.\nBut it mandates, like a principle, that some transformations are impossible, specifically those changing the state of motion of a system without it being acted on by a force.\nThe third law is even closer to being a pure principle.\nInformally, it requires to every action they must correspond an opposite, indirection, and equal in magnitude, reaction.\nIf, while on a walk in the park, your dog is pulling you ahead via the leash, you are pulling the dog back with an equal and opposite pull.\nThis fact is necessitated by the principle included in the third law, not by a specific dynamical law.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=3463"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c38e12fa-47b6-426e-8a33-19ffb76ec566": {"page_content": "Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were possible to take inspiration from these principles, which relate to counterfactuals, and imagine an entirely different way to formulate the laws of physics, one that takes counterfactuals as primitive, and the laws of motion and initial conditions as derivative, one could even conjecture that this new mode might solve the open problems in the dynamical law approach, as well as fill in the gaps in existing theories, while still covering all their predictions, the kind of explanation I am imagining, which is that provided by the science of canon Kant, is even more radical than the hybrid type of explanation which we currently use in physics, it places counterfactuals at the most fundamental level.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=3542"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25b7fad4-bae3-485e-9e54-54a3fd5c813e": {"page_content": "Then it explains dynamical laws and initial conditions in terms of them.\nThese laws of motion can then be used to make testable predictions about cannonballs and electrons, much as they are now, but their underlying explanations would be in terms of principles about counterfactuals, and this could provide a solution to the infinite regress type of problems I mentioned earlier, e.g. resorting to an infinite set of initial conditions.\nJust as the counterfactual properties of the chess piece about what moves are possible and what are impossible, can explain draws on a chess board, so counterfactual properties can explain why the universe is in a certain state, avoiding mention of the initial conditions altogether, both statements about possibility and impossibility, are equally important.\nYou will see several examples of laws about possibility and impossibility in the chapters to come.\nThese may seem like bold speculations, and they are, the first time I encountered the idea of reformulating physics with counterfactuals was in a proposal by the physicist David Deutsch.\nAt the time I thought it was fascinating, but crazy, that was during my doctoral studies and Oxford when, to put it as Alice in Wonderland would, I started trying to imagine as many as six impossible things before breakfast.\nThat idea was one of them, but within a few months David and I were working together on a paper developing this idea and applying it to information theory, and after my doctorate I decided to focus completely on pushing it further to try to address various unsolved problems in physics.\nBy then I was convinced its promise was enormous.\nMy research today would the help of a few brave students and a handful of other physicists has concentrated on putting this approach to the test.\nIn the following chapters, I shall explore the problems that this approach has solved so far, and it's potential to solve further problems.\nIt's time to journey deeper into the land of counterfactuals.\nEnd quote, end of chapter two.\nThat's fantastic.\nSo this is a really optimistic, positive vision for the future of physics in the future of science more broadly.\nI can't wait to continue reading this, but this has been a longish episode if my, if my time is correct.\nAnd so I'll finish it up there today, and look forward to seeing you in an episode four of my readings and reflections on the science of canon cards.\nBy Kia or Mallet, based upon work initiated by David Dornish.\nUntil next time, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Zf1Oz5wmg&t=3581"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "42616fed-d48c-4b53-bed9-6c1451fe9bad": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, and ostensibly this is part two of my discussion of chapter seven of the fabric of reality, a conversation about justification.\nBut I'm not actually going to get to any readings from that chapter today.\nThis is just an indulgence for me.\nIt's going to be readings from Karl Popper's book, Realism in the Aim of Science, which was a postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery.\nAnd the reason I'm going through that before I get to, which should be released soon after this, the actual discussion of chapter seven, part two of chapter seven, a conversation about justification from the fabric of reality.\nThe reason I'm doing this is just because there is a lot of content in that chapter there that echoes what Popper says in this book, Realism in the Aim of Science, because there is a section there, section four of part one, called corroboration.\nSo I thought it might just be illuminating and fun to go through some of the places where I agree with what Popper is saying, and then where I disagree with what Popper is saying, and then we can see how David Deutsch has improved on Popper and has explained what Popper was trying to get at in books like this one.\nThis is a 464 page term, all about realism in the aim of science, because David Deutsch has removed entirely from epistemology, I would suggest.\nThis whole concern about how probable or likely to be true, how theories and explanations are.\nNow, Popper was existing at a time where people really strongly believed in this problem of induction, how we could justify us true or probably true particular theories and reducing science to a large extent to a process of trying to predict the future rather than explain reality.\nThe emphasis of Popper's contemporaries and competitors even through to today is to not really understand what explanation is in the role of explanation, let alone the role of prediction, let alone the role of science.\nThey get it all muddled up, and so Popper was trying to escape from the prevailing worldview that he existed within to give us something new.\nIt must have been hard, and I think that this chapter, which is why I want to read just through sections of it, sections of his whole section here, called corroboration, you can see him struggling to try and escape from false epistemology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=13"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dd8aacc7-9f24-4bb0-ba9c-b040bf380627": {"page_content": "They get it all muddled up, and so Popper was trying to escape from the prevailing worldview that he existed within to give us something new.\nIt must have been hard, and I think that this chapter, which is why I want to read just through sections of it, sections of his whole section here, called corroboration, you can see him struggling to try and escape from false epistemology.\nThese unhelpful ways of thinking about the project of science, and so what I'm going to do here is just to read through sections of this.\nand then we'll come back in the next episode to see how David Deutsch has actually improved on things.\nThis chapter being titled a conversation about justification seems to be to do with words.\nA conversation is a dialogue that involves words and the word justification is a term that is used in philosophy.\nIt's a term that I've tried to remove in so far as possible from any discussion about epistemology, and we're going to see that I think we can do away with it.\nI explain this in part one as well, and David Deutsch himself said as much in the recording he made for the introduction to the audiobook version of the fabric of reality.\nLet's just consider a basic question before I get into discussing the chapter property.\nAnd the question is, what are we doing here?.\nI don't just mean right now here in this podcast I mean in life, in creating knowledge and in science.\nThat is the subject of this episode, and this chapter of the book after all, what's really going on with science?.\nWhat are we doing when we are doing science?.\nWell the thing is, we are trying to understand something about the world, but why are we doing that?.\nIt always comes back to one central issue, first stated and emphasized by Popper and Underlined and promoted by Deutsch.\nAnd that issue is, we have a problem.\nHouston, we have a problem.\nIt is, we have a problem.\nIt's always, we have a problem.\nWe always have a problem, and we want to find a solution to that problem.\nWe want to solve a problem so we can move on to something better.\nThis in fact is life, and a small sliver of life is science.\nFor most of us anyway.\nFor some of us it's considerably most of life, but in science we have problems, lots of problems.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=127"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9f3cc160-105e-455b-8c49-2de33854d94e": {"page_content": "Houston, we have a problem.\nIt is, we have a problem.\nIt's always, we have a problem.\nWe always have a problem, and we want to find a solution to that problem.\nWe want to solve a problem so we can move on to something better.\nThis in fact is life, and a small sliver of life is science.\nFor most of us anyway.\nFor some of us it's considerably most of life, but in science we have problems, lots of problems.\nAs Popper rightly said of science itself, quote, I think that there is only one way to science, or to philosophy for that matter, to meet a problem, to see its beauty, and fall in love with it, to get married to it, and to live with it happily till death do ye part, unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem, or unless indeed you should obtain a solution.\nBut even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover to you delight the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work with a purpose to the end of your days.\".\nEnd quote.\nNow that quote there is from a book called Realism and the Aim of Science published in 1996 after Popper's death, but it also served as a postscript to his first book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, a postscript that was published, sometime well after the publication of the first edition of The Logic of Scientific Discovery.\nNotice something missing there when it comes to Popper saying what science is about or what philosophy is about.\nConspicuous perhaps by its absence.\nAny mention of the word truth.\nScience, we do not do to find the final truth, and that's why we often don't emphasize it.\nWe are not even finding truth of a kind we can be confident in or certain about or anything like that, but why am I focused on this?.\nThe reason is, and the only reason for a chapter like this particular one in the fabric of reality that I am discussing, is that this view of science insofar as it is known, I think it's poorly understood, and insofar as it is understood, it seems not to be taken very seriously.\nAs for it being taught in some sort of formal way so that people can speak sensibly about the project of science and life more broadly.\nForget it.\nWe are mired in superstitious thinking to a large extent.\nAll of our knowledge has antecedents.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=270"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3f25e3e8-be73-4eb5-8b76-485cee48e33a": {"page_content": "As for it being taught in some sort of formal way so that people can speak sensibly about the project of science and life more broadly.\nForget it.\nWe are mired in superstitious thinking to a large extent.\nAll of our knowledge has antecedents.\nYou know the things that came before our first attempts first approximations.\nHere's a story, millennia ago after the dawn of language people struggling on the planes or in the jungles and struggling to eke out an existence and keep the children in the tribe safe needed heuristics rules of thumb.\nSo they invented gods and the gods knew the truth.\nThe gods had power and they had possession of the final truth.\nThey knew what would happen and why?.\nProbably their whims.\nBut the humans did not yet we aspire to the power of the gods because the gods had authority over the seasons, over the weather, over natural events, over everything.\nWe wanted that.\nSo the chiefs of our ancestor tribes and our medicine men and women, those with tribal authority needed a way to persuade others to do what they were told.\nSometimes for good reasons, they knew stuff.\nThey often didn't know why that stuff happened, but they knew that it did happen.\nOut of this circumstance comes something like the more modern religions that we have.\nThe idea that it is known without doubt and there is no point questioning some revealed truth or other.\nOnly the medicine man or the chief had direct access to the gods and later on.\nOnly the priests or other learned people could read and interpret the holy inherent book perhaps.\nThe focus then there was on the final ultimate revealed truth and that if people only followed the final ultimate revealed truth then everything would be fine.\nThen the disaster or the flood could be averted.\nAfter all, the stories tell when you depart from the truth, it's then the disaster comes, the literal flood.\nOkay, so this is one very superficial, simplistic story of the past and of how we arrive at our folk epistemology today.\nBut what people are up to then?.\nWell, there is much that we have inherited in our language and our way of understanding knowledge from them through to this day, even in the most modern incantations of epistemology.\nPopular in epistemology, of course.\nMost especially our folk philosophy and folk epistemology, which I would include most academic versions of these, it is still taught that what we're aiming for is to find out the truth of the matter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=398"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "09640230-b8a7-497b-abaa-8de34d562fc5": {"page_content": "But what people are up to then?.\nWell, there is much that we have inherited in our language and our way of understanding knowledge from them through to this day, even in the most modern incantations of epistemology.\nPopular in epistemology, of course.\nMost especially our folk philosophy and folk epistemology, which I would include most academic versions of these, it is still taught that what we're aiming for is to find out the truth of the matter.\nScience on this account therefore is a project of finding the once and for all solution theory or explanation that we can carve into stone and settle the matter, have a final completed science of something or other.\nIt's a very religious idea.\nIt is the hopeful state of security and safety and certainty.\nAnd along the road to certainty, although we might not be able to quite get there yet, we're almost there and we can be very, very confident in what we have found, confident that it is almost true.\nAnd with just a little more tinkering, we'll fill in the gaps and we'll have the final answer.\nScience will come to an end.\nI mean, here on ToKCast by now, if you've been listening for a while, that all sound ridiculous, but it still is the prevailing view.\nThere still is an idea that science has almost wrapped up with almost found the unification of general relativity and quantum theory and then we'll be done in physics.\nAnd we'll biology.\nAh, we're tinkering around the edges with evolution by natural selection.\nWe've already found the unit of selection to Jane.\nWhat more is there to understand?.\nSoon we'll cure all diseases, aging will be over.\nWe'll have artificial general intelligence and then understanding will come to an end.\nAnd perhaps we'll all be unemployed because there'll be no creative work left to do now.\nThis is completely the opposite to what the vision of knowledge that Popper and David Deutsch especially has gifted to us.\nBut it's important to keep in mind that this is not the prevailing view.\nThis is counter-cultural.\nAnd sometimes I myself forget it.\nAnd then I go head long into encountering someone or some book or some group of people who reminds me that I'm in the tiny minority of people who think something a little bit different.\nThere is an open-ended series of problems before us and each time we solve a problem, we open up a whole new family of delightful problem children if you like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=538"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aee8c708-1c8a-469a-93c1-840f9555c859": {"page_content": "But it's important to keep in mind that this is not the prevailing view.\nThis is counter-cultural.\nAnd sometimes I myself forget it.\nAnd then I go head long into encountering someone or some book or some group of people who reminds me that I'm in the tiny minority of people who think something a little bit different.\nThere is an open-ended series of problems before us and each time we solve a problem, we open up a whole new family of delightful problem children if you like.\nI prefer daughter problems than problem children.\nWhatever the case, that quote I read earlier from realism in the aim of science, that book realism in the aim of science contains a whole bunch of really interesting chapters.\nBut you can tell in reading it by Carl Popper, of course, that he is writing for his contemporaries.\nIt's filled with language about certainty and probability.\nAnd so I want to read a little bit of it today just to place perhaps in historical context where the fabric of reality is coming from what its intellectual ancestor is, so to speak.\nRealism in the aim of science is a 460-something page tone split into two major parts.\nChapter four of the first part is called corroboration.\nNow corroboration is also a term I have a little bit of difficulty with.\nAgain, I don't think it's useful, but it is language that is used by other philosophers of science.\nPopper was not perfect, and as we'll come to, Popper may not have understood popularing epistemology as well as people today do.\nNow if that sounds bizarre to you, we'll come back to it because David addresses precisely that point in the fabric of reality.\nPopper, for example, focuses very heavily on the role of probability within philosophy, within epistemology.\nHe was trying to understand the importance or the significance of probability.\nHe was wrong about it.\nThat's so what everyone's fallible.\nI am no doubt wrong about a lot that I say here on ToKCast.\nAnd looking back 200 years from now, people will be saying, look how primitive Brit Hall's view of epistemology was.\nBut as I mentioned in the last episode, I did on chapter seven on a conversation about justification from the fabric of reality.\nI said that this word justified or justification may have been superfluous to our needs.\nAnother word that crops up throughout the chapter is this idea of corroboration.\nWhat is corroboration?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=657"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f57d61d2-1887-4fdf-b1e2-3edc5d52e618": {"page_content": "And looking back 200 years from now, people will be saying, look how primitive Brit Hall's view of epistemology was.\nBut as I mentioned in the last episode, I did on chapter seven on a conversation about justification from the fabric of reality.\nI said that this word justified or justification may have been superfluous to our needs.\nAnother word that crops up throughout the chapter is this idea of corroboration.\nWhat is corroboration?.\nWell, in chapter four of the aim of science, which is from pages 217 all the way through to pages 254, Popper hashes out from all angles, they rather obscure debate at the time about the differences between confirmation and corroboration and the role of probability and either of these things.\nMy personal thought is just to steal my thunder for the end is it's simply confusing the aim of science as being about primarily prediction rather than explanation.\nIf you focus on explanations, then as I emphasize over and again, you are exceedingly lucky in this world if you have an explanation for a particular phenomena.\nAnd if you do have an explanation, you have an explanation.\nThere are no alternatives.\nAnd if someone comes along with an alternative, then you do a crucial test, especially in science.\nA crucial test is an experiment which has an outcome that goes in a particular direction.\nIt has a particular result.\nAnd the result will rule out one of those theories.\nYou're extremely lucky to have two theories.\nIt just rarely happens in the history of science.\nAnd this is why I come back to trope examples like the competition between Newtonian gravity and Einstein's general relativity.\nThis is one of the rare instances where there happened to be two competing theories where we needed to do an experiment to figure out which one could actually explain the result to the experiment and which one couldn't.\nBut for any scientific mystery, it's a mystery by definition because we do not have an explanation of why it is the way it is.\nNow it's very hard for me to keep up with all the areas of science.\nSo my focus is on astronomy.\nAnd there are a whole bunch of open-ended questions right now.\nTwo of the most prominent open-ended questions are, what is dark matter?.\nDark matter is the name of a problem.\nIt began as, why is it that spiral galaxies are rotating so fast?.\nThey rotate as fast as they do because of how massive they are.\nThis phenomena that orbiting bodies tend to rotate as fast as the mass inside of the orbiting body.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=787"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e1f078e-9918-4550-9b18-7a5ab39bd815": {"page_content": "So my focus is on astronomy.\nAnd there are a whole bunch of open-ended questions right now.\nTwo of the most prominent open-ended questions are, what is dark matter?.\nDark matter is the name of a problem.\nIt began as, why is it that spiral galaxies are rotating so fast?.\nThey rotate as fast as they do because of how massive they are.\nThis phenomena that orbiting bodies tend to rotate as fast as the mass inside of the orbiting body.\nIn other words, the earth goes around the sun as fast as it does because of the mass of the sun applies to everything throughout the universe.\nIt's just a consequence, well, not only of general relativity, which is the explanation of gravity, but even to the predecessor to general relativity, which is Newtonian gravity, both of them predicted the same thing.\nThe more massive the central body being orbited, the faster the things go that are orbiting it.\nBut here's the thing in modern day cosmology when you look at galaxies and various other structures, by the way.\nBut let's just concentrate on the spiral galaxies.\nThey rotate too fast.\nYou add up all of the stars in luminous matter, and you can see all the luminous matter at every single wavelength that's putting out light, light of all different wavelengths.\nYou find that these spiral galaxies are rotating too fast.\nWhere's the mass?.\nWe can't see the matter that's accounting for the gravity that's causing these things to spin so fast.\nWe don't know what the answer is.\nIt could be that there's actually missing matter there.\nThat seems to be the prevailing hypothesis, but it's not really an explanatory theory because what is this matter?.\nAnother theory is, well, we need to have a new theory of gravity, but no one's got a good theory of gravity so far.\nPeople have suggested things, but these theories add hawk modifications to existing explanations.\nThen I won't go down the road, but epistemology would say, what is the mechanism?.\nWhat precisely is it?.\nIs it the curvature of spacetime and why is that changing?.\nWhy can't we detect it in laboratories here on earth and so on and so forth?.\nWe need a solution to this and we don't have one.\nAnd the other thing of course is dark energy.\nNo one has any clue what this is.\nWhy is it that not only is the universe expanding, but the rate of the expansion is accelerating?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=946"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a2920910-2de7-4e8e-b43e-5b12ce481307": {"page_content": "What precisely is it?.\nIs it the curvature of spacetime and why is that changing?.\nWhy can't we detect it in laboratories here on earth and so on and so forth?.\nWe need a solution to this and we don't have one.\nAnd the other thing of course is dark energy.\nNo one has any clue what this is.\nWhy is it that not only is the universe expanding, but the rate of the expansion is accelerating?.\nWhen everything else we know says it should be slowing down, perhaps even reversing, but that's not happening.\nWhat's driving this accelerating expansion?.\nThis is science.\nThis is problem solving.\nThis is where we don't even have an explanation.\nForget about having competing explanations.\nForget about needing to wait in different explanations of the probabilities of our different explanations and being able to corroborate run or confirm one without being able to confirm the others.\nNo, none of that.\nWe don't even have one.\nWhen we do have a solution to the problem, which is to say a theory explaining what's going on, precisely in terms of things that exist in the universe that perhaps we've never thought of before, some new physical thing that we have to postulate that then will know actually exists.\nOnce we have that thing, that will be the explanation.\nNever mind trying to observe it repeatedly over and over again.\nIt'll be the solution.\nThat's what solves dark matter and dark energy.\nSo anyway, that's what I say science is about.\nI think that's consistent with what David Deutsch says, and I think it's consistent primarily with what cow poppers says as well, but as I say, people exist in a historical context.\nAnd papa was debating people who believe something quite different about how science works.\nThey believed in the primacy of observations that observations were absolutely the be-all and end-all of everything in science.\nAnd therefore, predicting that a certain sequence of observations would continue off into the future, or the observations were the thing that showed your theory was true or probably true in some way.\nThis is what he was trying to debate against, trying to, for the first time, mind you, for the first time, try and stand up against the entire philosophical community of his intellectual peers.\nOne has to be brave to do this kind of thing.\nAnd it certainly didn't make him popular.\nNever mind his Jewish heritage.\nHe struggled to find positions at universities for a while there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1070"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d626750c-4486-46de-820d-7d14954ebca9": {"page_content": "This is what he was trying to debate against, trying to, for the first time, mind you, for the first time, try and stand up against the entire philosophical community of his intellectual peers.\nOne has to be brave to do this kind of thing.\nAnd it certainly didn't make him popular.\nNever mind his Jewish heritage.\nHe struggled to find positions at universities for a while there.\nAnd to our great historical shame here in Australia, even we rejected him for an academic post.\nHe went to New Zealand instead and did a lot of good work there.\nSo I say that because he was telling the rest of the philosophical community and even scientists.\nHe was saying to them all, in very, very polite terms, you're all fundamentally wrong about how science works.\nBut the way he couched it was in very technical philosophical jargon.\nJargon, that was the language of the time and the language of the discipline.\nHe had to try and speak their language.\nSo I want to go back to realism in the aim of science.\nThis so-called postscript to the logic of scientific discovery, published a long time after the logic of scientific discovery, and then republished and the version I have was published in, as I say, 1996.\nBut written by Popper, according to my edition, first published in 1983.\nNow to some extent, of course, these are esoteric considerations.\nIt's inside baseball to a certain extent.\nIf you're interested in epistemology, then yeah, absolutely, it's useful to know Popper's broad vision about how knowledge is generated and what the purpose of science is.\nBut if you're really interested in epistemology, then sometimes it can be even more illuminating to figure out exactly what, going all the way back to this, to Popper's words about corroboration may seem even a little esoteric for me.\nBut there's so much here that speaks across the decades through to today, and you can see it's still cutting-edge stuff that people just don't get.\nPeople don't understand.\nPeople don't appreciate, and the wider academic community could do worse than taking on some of Popper's old works and trying to understand what the great man was saying about how science actually works.\nSo I'm going to pick out just a few excerpts from realism in the aim of science before we get to a conversation with justification.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1149"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6fbe67a-73b4-4608-876a-0b02457cbed7": {"page_content": "People don't understand.\nPeople don't appreciate, and the wider academic community could do worse than taking on some of Popper's old works and trying to understand what the great man was saying about how science actually works.\nSo I'm going to pick out just a few excerpts from realism in the aim of science before we get to a conversation with justification.\nAnd I'm going to begin with page 222 where Popper wrote, quote, the inductivist philosophy not only attributes authority to science, it also, perhaps quite unwittingly, attributes to science are cautious and indeed timid approach which is entirely foreign to our real procedure.\nThis philosophy, in regarding it as the aim of science to attain high probabilities for its theories implies that science proceeds according to the rule, go as little as possible beyond your evidence e.\" End quote, and skipping a little, and I'll pick it up where Popper says, quote, all this presents a most uninspiring picture of science, a picture more over that does not in the least resemble the original.\nIndeed, what makes the original so inspiring is its boldness, its boldly conceived hypotheses, boldly submitted to every kind of criticism, to every reputation we can think of, including the most severe test which our imagination may help us to design, it is this boldness, which helps us to transcend the limits narrow at first of our imagination and of ordinary language end quote.\nSo that first part there where this idea from induction kind of says, don't go too far beyond the evidence, it misses the point, it misses the point, consider the great grand theories of cosmology, the big bang theory, this idea that the universe in the deep dark past 13.7 billion years ago was smaller than an atom, how do we come to this view that the universe we now occupy, the universe of stupendous complexity around us and stupendous size and 13.7 billion years in age, how did we come to that?.\nWhat are the crucial pieces of evidence?.\nWell, it's just light, just different kinds of photons being interpreted.\nAmong the first bits of evidence, really, aside from the dark night sky, but let's not worry about that, were Hubble's explanations of spectra breaking up the light from distant galaxies and that distant light when broken up into its spectra showed spectral lines.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1275"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "43dcaec6-6aa6-42d6-97dd-7df71ba7e2f5": {"page_content": "What are the crucial pieces of evidence?.\nWell, it's just light, just different kinds of photons being interpreted.\nAmong the first bits of evidence, really, aside from the dark night sky, but let's not worry about that, were Hubble's explanations of spectra breaking up the light from distant galaxies and that distant light when broken up into its spectra showed spectral lines.\nSo we're looking at spectral lines on photographic plates and those spectral lines red shifted just a little and that evidence explained by a big bang event, the creation of the entire universe, that is the explanation of those red shifted galaxies and this is why Popper is saying, we're going well beyond the evidence, we are transcending the limits of our imagination and of ordinary language, going from spectral lines to the creation of the entire universe, that's pretty stupendous stuff.\nWhat was Darwin doing?.\nLook here, tortoises and finches and what was his explanation about those locally interesting things that all of life on the planet had evolved over hundreds of millions, even billions of years through this process of natural selection, tiny amounts of evidence and us going well beyond the evidence to conjecture grand explanations about how reality works.\nThat science, this process of prediction, now in this section that I've just read from, I do have to say, I do disagree with what Popper says in part of this section, but this is again, inside baseball.\nIt's important for me to understand that I disagree here, but it doesn't make a substantial difference too, preparing epistemology as a whole.\nThere are often disagreements among populations.\nThe great Danny Frederick was a great Popper scholar and he.\nand I would engage in debates about what the purpose of science or knowledge creation is in general.\nDanny's perspective was that it wasn't that we were after truth.\nWe were not actually looking for the truth.\nAs he would argue, truth cannot be a epistemic aim.\nNow, I often took exception to this idea, this way of explaining what we're doing when we create knowledge.\nDanny was a realist and a Popperian, but I always get worried when people deny the fact that we are after truth.\nDanny endorsed the idea that truth existed.\nHe just didn't think that this is what we were trying to find.\nI guess it depends upon the person.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1417"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "63e071b2-0384-4e67-a985-ae8b57b6cfba": {"page_content": "As he would argue, truth cannot be a epistemic aim.\nNow, I often took exception to this idea, this way of explaining what we're doing when we create knowledge.\nDanny was a realist and a Popperian, but I always get worried when people deny the fact that we are after truth.\nDanny endorsed the idea that truth existed.\nHe just didn't think that this is what we were trying to find.\nI guess it depends upon the person.\nSome people might very well be trying to find the truth or find at least some truth, sometimes, or perhaps by removing falsity, removing misconception in that way they're finding truth.\nAnyway, I do not want to try and represent Danny's position here.\nYou can look up Danny Frederick and look up the papers that he wrote.\nBut I like to say that what we're doing is, of course, solving problems.\nAnd the solution to our problems, our explanations, our theories must contain truth.\nAnd the reason why it must contain truth is because an actual solution to be a solution is useful.\nAnd it's only useful because it is able to solve the problem, which means it's got something right.\nAnd right just means true.\nSo there's something true about that solution.\nIf indeed, it's a genuine solution to our problem.\nSo this kind of really splitting hairs about what the purpose of science is at that level is it about trying to find the truth, trying to find some truth, trying to solve a problem, get something right, create an explanation.\nAll of these are kind of circling the same kind of idea.\nBut what we disagree with the non-popurians about is that all we're doing in science is trying to make predictions.\nThat's the instrumentalist claim, all that we're merely telling stories to each other that are nothing but fictional narratives that don't actually connect with objective reality at all.\nSome people have caught to deny the existence of objective reality or deny the possibility that we can explain objective reality to some extent.\nTo any extent, as realists in the perperian mould, we think that we are actually explaining aspects of objective reality.\nAnd we are getting more or less close to that objective reality as time goes on by refining our explanations, by finding perhaps where they fail.\nIn other words, where there's a problem with them or correcting errors in them and improving them, making progress, sometimes by radically overturning a particular theory and sometimes by incrementally changing some aspects of our understanding of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1560"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e98b9727-6f4f-44da-a127-88d9ae680d16": {"page_content": "To any extent, as realists in the perperian mould, we think that we are actually explaining aspects of objective reality.\nAnd we are getting more or less close to that objective reality as time goes on by refining our explanations, by finding perhaps where they fail.\nIn other words, where there's a problem with them or correcting errors in them and improving them, making progress, sometimes by radically overturning a particular theory and sometimes by incrementally changing some aspects of our understanding of reality.\nSo let me go back to pop-off for a moment and to the beginning of this chapter, because I've been speaking a lot about probability recently.\nAnd so perhaps just to satisfy listeners who have often asked me, where do you disagree with pop-off?.\nWell, here's a particular place.\nSo I'm going to read from, well, it's called section 27 and just titled, corroboration, certainty, uncertainty, and probability, and pop-off rights, quote, I have in the preceding two chapters explored the logical ramifications of the problem of induction.\nThere is another ramifications, however, which I have not yet touched on because it is not logically connected to the problem of induction.\nBut it is connected with it by ties that may prove even stronger than logic by the inductive prejudice.\nAnd by a mistaken solution of the problem of induction, which unfortunately is still widely accepted as valid.\nI am alluding, of course, to the view that although induction is unable to establish an induced hypothesis with certainty, it is able to do the next best thing.\nIt can attribute to the induced hypothesis some degree of probability and a probability of one would be certainty, end quote.\nSo here, Popper is saying that that's wrong, that an induced hypothesis cannot even establish as true anything with a degree of probability, which is what many, many people tried to say the solution to induction was.\nAnd with this problem of induction was, how can we rely on the theories of science if we can't prove them as true?.\nWe need a time lesser degree of confidence in them.\nThis was the problem of induction.\nHow do our past observations confer some degree of certainty on the future alliance on a particular theory?.\nPopper keeps going and he writes, quote, this view is radically mistaken.\nYet it can be supported by a highly persuasive argument.\nThis argument may be presented as follows.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1684"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "70e2f230-7e4f-4fd3-91c4-48095039efdc": {"page_content": "And with this problem of induction was, how can we rely on the theories of science if we can't prove them as true?.\nWe need a time lesser degree of confidence in them.\nThis was the problem of induction.\nHow do our past observations confer some degree of certainty on the future alliance on a particular theory?.\nPopper keeps going and he writes, quote, this view is radically mistaken.\nYet it can be supported by a highly persuasive argument.\nThis argument may be presented as follows.\nThe whole problem of induction, the argument runs clearly arises from the fact that inductive inferences are not valid, which is the same as saying that inductive conclusions do not follow deductively from the inductive premises.\nBut there is no need to get alarmed about this somewhat trite fact, especially as there exists a large and important class of inferences, which the conclusion does not strictly follow from the premises.\nIn fact, every deductive inference may be modified so as to yield, an inference which is not valid, but only more or less valid or valid to a degree.\nTake the following example, here's a valid deductive argument.\nAll men smoke, Jack is a man, therefore Jack smokes.\nHere is an argument that is valid to a degree.\nEx percent of men spoke, Jack is a man, therefore Jack smokes, end quote.\nNow, I would just interject here and say, well, that's clearly ridiculous.\nIt simply doesn't follow.\nJack is a man who either smokes or he doesn't.\nAnd we won't know until we have an explanation by means of an observation that Jack actually smokes.\nThere is no Jack probably smokes, and Papa agrees with this, by the way, of course.\nPapa goes on to explain a whole bunch of things about why it is that some people would endorse that particular second kind of valid to a degree argument.\nAnd after some exposition on this point, he says, quote, last the problem of induction is to be solved by constructing a generalized logic, a logic of probability, end quote.\nHe's still manning their arguments, right?.\nAnd I would say, still people today endorse this kind of thing.\nHe continues, quote, for according to this persuasive argument, inductive logic is nothing but probability logic.\nIt is the logic of uncertain inference of uncertain knowledge and the probability of some hypothesis, h, given some evidence, is the degree to which our certain knowledge of the evidence rationally justifies our belief in the hypothesis.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1838"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "284a759b-0c29-44c2-aeb9-cd13d04e0157": {"page_content": "He's still manning their arguments, right?.\nAnd I would say, still people today endorse this kind of thing.\nHe continues, quote, for according to this persuasive argument, inductive logic is nothing but probability logic.\nIt is the logic of uncertain inference of uncertain knowledge and the probability of some hypothesis, h, given some evidence, is the degree to which our certain knowledge of the evidence rationally justifies our belief in the hypothesis.\nAs I have said before, I believe that this argument is completely mistaken.\nThe appeal to probability does not affect the problem of induction at all.\nFormally, this may be supported by the remark that every universal hypothesis goes so far beyond any empirical evidence that its probability will always remain zero, because the universal hypothesis makes assertions about an infinite number of cases, while the number of observed cases can only be finite end quote.\nThat's marvelous.\nThat's their popper at his best.\nWhat we're doing in science when we come up with theories, we come up with, especially in physics, but you know, chemistry, biology, we're coming up with universal theories, theories that apply to everything at all times at all places.\nIn other words, an assertion about an infinite number of cases.\nBut how can we possibly get to that assertion about an infinite number of cases?.\nIf we can only ever have a finite number of observed cases.\nWell, that's because we begin with the theory.\nWe don't begin with the finite number of observed cases.\nIt's cut before the horse kind of stuff.\nThis is the great mistake that popper was addressing and solving.\nEveryone else was saying, well, look, you begin with the observations.\nEven today, you begin with the observations.\nThis is the whole point of science.\nYou go out into the world and you observe stuff.\nAnd from those observations, you then derive your knowledge.\nNo, that's all us around.\nThat's all cut before the horse.\nPut the horse before the car.\nAnd the horse is the theory.\nYou come up with the theory first.\nYou explain what's going on.\nYou conjecture.\nYou use your imagination.\nYour creativity.\nThat's what you are.\nYou're a human being.\nThat's what you're supposed to be doing in the world.\nIt doesn't just mean in science everywhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=1946"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b0b4eb5a-df83-454b-abb3-8a9c603d93a0": {"page_content": "No, that's all us around.\nThat's all cut before the horse.\nPut the horse before the car.\nAnd the horse is the theory.\nYou come up with the theory first.\nYou explain what's going on.\nYou conjecture.\nYou use your imagination.\nYour creativity.\nThat's what you are.\nYou're a human being.\nThat's what you're supposed to be doing in the world.\nIt doesn't just mean in science everywhere.\nNow, having come up with a solution, then you rely upon that solution and you keep on using that solution until one day you come across a problem, which usually means you encounter one of your finite observations, one of your finite observations that disagrees with your prevailing view, your existing theory, what you have thought so far, for so long, and that contradicts what you've thought all this time.\nAnd so then you're going to have to adapt on the run.\nYou're going to have to create, come up with a new solution.\nAnd in science, you're coming up with this explanation that explains everything you've seen so far.\nIt's not being derived from what you've seen.\nIt explains what you've seen and then reaches out from what you have seen and where you are sitting at your desk or in your laboratory to everywhere else in the universe to things you will never observe, but it will apply to them.\nIn the same way that lets assume the old wives tale, the urban legend, the myth that Newton saw the apple fall from the tree.\nLet's say he did do that.\nVery questionable.\nBut let's say he did.\nThis is one of the observations.\nIt's not like he took that observation and from that observation of the apple falling, derived his universal theory of gravity.\nNo, he came up with the universal theory of gravity, which explained the motion of planets across the sky and apples falling and tides going in and out and it reached out from where he was in England across the earth throughout the solar system to the other side of the galaxy and the universe that same law applied to fruits falling from trees on the surface of planets around stars he would never observe and perhaps no one ever will.\nThis is the thing about science.\nThis is what science does.\nIt begins there with the theory and then moving through life with your theory, you encounter a problem and that problem is often, not always, but often an observation of some kind, especially when it comes to science.\nIt's an observation of some kind that disagrees with your theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2084"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b60371af-773a-4ad7-8384-05f2da864543": {"page_content": "This is the thing about science.\nThis is what science does.\nIt begins there with the theory and then moving through life with your theory, you encounter a problem and that problem is often, not always, but often an observation of some kind, especially when it comes to science.\nIt's an observation of some kind that disagrees with your theory.\nFor reasons you don't know, maybe you've just made a mistake in your observation.\nYou think you've made an observation that in fact you have and it's something's gone wrong.\nIt's an optical illusion who knows what your instrument wasn't working.\nBut whatever the case, you've got a problem that you've got to solve and sometimes that might be very well, the beginning of a whole new grand theory of science.\nOkay, so that's everything that Papa got right now.\nHere is where I emphasize things a little differently to Papa.\nAnd I'd love to be able to speak to him about what he had in mind.\nI wish there were examples here, but let me pick it up where he writes, quote, let us turn to that idea which I believe is defensible.\nIt is the idea that hypothesis may be distinguished according to the results of their tests.\nThe idea that some hypothesis are well tested by experience and others are not so well tested, that there are further hypotheses which so far have not been tested at all and hypotheses which have not stood up to tests and which therefore may be regarded as falsified.\nIf we look upon a number of hypotheses from this point of view, there can be no objection to grading them according to the degree to which they have passed their tests.\nExactly as we may grade students who have undergone a number of tests, some of them easy, some of them difficult.\nThe wish to grade hypotheses according to the tests passed by them is legitimate.\nI do not know of any serious objection.\nFor reasons to be discussed in the next section, I propose to call the grade of a hypothesis or the degree to which it has stood up to tests, it is degree of corroboration rather than its probability end, quote.\nWe cannot speak to him now, what a shame, but I just would love to know what he had in mind.\nWhere are these situations where we have got this great spectrum of hypotheses that we need to rank order, that we need to treat like students that we are grading.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2192"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a66e8d8d-3d8a-4a9f-9704-7f6f2d741ab1": {"page_content": "We cannot speak to him now, what a shame, but I just would love to know what he had in mind.\nWhere are these situations where we have got this great spectrum of hypotheses that we need to rank order, that we need to treat like students that we are grading.\nWhere we say here is hypothesis one and it has a certain amount of corroboration, here is hypothesis two that has got slightly more corroboration, and here is hypothesis three that has got yet more corroboration.\nThis does not happen.\nThis does not happen.\nOn pop-a-zone account, this does not happen.\nWhat happens is if you have that situation ever arise, and as I keep on saying, please write in, email me, tweet me, whatever.\nA situation where you really do have these actual different, viable, good explanations of the same phenomena and you can't distinguish between them and so you need corroboration.\nWhat really happens is, as we say, and as David Deutsch has pointed out on more than one occasion, including most importantly in his paper on the logic of experimental tests, what you do is you come up with a crucial test, an experiment which will rule out all of the different alternatives, usually on me one, if you're lucky, all of the different alternatives, leaving only one standing the one that can explain the results of the experiment.\nSo why pop-a-ones this degree of corroboration?.\nI don't know.\nIn what specific situation, now throughout this chapter we don't actually get an example, which is a problem.\nHe's right to say that if you do have competing hypotheses, there's no point in talking about the probability of one over the other.\nHe's got that right.\nBut degree of corroboration, and exactly how would we measure this degree of corroboration?.\nI don't know.\nThe best he can do, in fact, in this section, he says, quote, I shall later give a definition of degree of corroboration, one that permits us to compare rival theories, such as Newtons and Einstein's, I doubt whether a numerical evaluation of this degree will ever be of practical significance, end quote, quite right, quite right.\nAnd if there is no such way of providing a numerical evaluation of this degree, what point is it?.\nWhat point is there in postulating this?.\nHis own example, my trope example that I like to use following him, of course, is Newton versus Einstein.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2324"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e9024fc2-d32c-4aeb-a8f2-a44cc9982646": {"page_content": "And if there is no such way of providing a numerical evaluation of this degree, what point is it?.\nWhat point is there in postulating this?.\nHis own example, my trope example that I like to use following him, of course, is Newton versus Einstein.\nNow, there to be generous to him, I think that maybe what he might be saying, one way of reading him is just to say that this degree of corroboration is just perfectly synonymous with, refuted or not, refuted or not.\nSo either Newton's theory is refuted or it's not refuted.\nNow, if it is refuted, then you can say, well, Einstein's theory is corroborated by the evidence.\nI would just prefer to say, explains the evidence.\nIt explains the evidence.\nIt explains the evidence better than any rival.\nIn fact, there are no rivals.\nThere are no longer any rivals.\nHow can you say there are no rivals?.\nBecause we didn't experiment and the only rival that existed up until that point was Newton's theory of gravity.\nBut it couldn't explain the results of this particular experiment, called it Edington's experiment, but any number of things these days, Newton's theory can't explain this stuff.\nSo what can Einstein's theory?.\nIs it well corroborated?.\nDoesn't matter.\nDoesn't matter.\nWhatever this word corroborated means, it doesn't matter the degree of corroboration.\nYou can say, it explains absolutely everything that has been asked of it.\nWell, maybe not.\nIt can't quite explain what dark matter is.\nIt can't explain what dark energy is.\nOkay, fine.\nBut nor can anything else.\nFor the stuff that is explicable by general relativity, by Einstein's theory, nothing else can do that job.\nNothing else explains precisely why Mercury follows the orbit that it does around the sun.\nOnly one theory does that.\nBut is that theory well corroborated?.\nThat doesn't matter.\nThat doesn't matter.\nOn the one hand, you can say, yeah, every single time you observe Mercury, that's another corroboration of Einstein's theory of general relativity.\nBut again, degree of corroboration, if tomorrow, someone comes up with an explanation for gravity, that not only does absolutely everything that Einstein's general theory of relativity does, not only is able to accomplish absolutely everything that the existing theory of gravity does, but also goes a bit further.\nIt is able to solve the problem of what dark matter is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2445"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a85dfc22-0cb0-412b-b6b6-a9b4470cec79": {"page_content": "But again, degree of corroboration, if tomorrow, someone comes up with an explanation for gravity, that not only does absolutely everything that Einstein's general theory of relativity does, not only is able to accomplish absolutely everything that the existing theory of gravity does, but also goes a bit further.\nIt is able to solve the problem of what dark matter is.\nThen we'll be in a situation where we have a theory of gravity that is superior to Einstein's theory of gravity because it can do everything Einstein's theory of gravity can do.\nAnd it can explain dark matter.\nAnd in all likelihood, the history of science suggests that when you have a good explanation, it reaches into areas by postulating the existence of entities hit the two you never even imagined.\nSo in the case of general relativity, it reaches into areas where it postulates things like black holes and big bangs and the curvature of space time and gravitational lensing and various things that weren't even thought of prior to general relativity.\nAnd so whatever the success or ears to general relativity was you'd expect the same kind of thing.\nNow I just want to pick up in this section that I'm reading from a few other gems here that really they stand the test of time.\nThey just written so well because Poppa at times because Poppa wrote a vast amount and as I keep on emphasizing he was writing for his contemporaries.\nBut if you can get through some of the jargon at times, the gems in here are absolutely brilliant.\nAnd well, let me just pick up one.\nQuote, every observation and to an even higher degree every observation statement is itself already an interpretation in the light of our theories.\nYet even though this fact is most important, it raises a minor issue compared with what I wish to criticize here, a general attitude, a general philosophy of science, a philosophy which makes its main problem that of explaining when science derives its certainty, its rational reliability, its validity or its authority.\nFor I hold that science has no certainty, no rational reliability, no validity, no authority.\nThe best we can say about it is that although it consists of our own guesses, of our own conjectures, we are doing our very best to test them.\nThat is to say, to criticize them and to refute them, but the inductivist philosophy not only attributes authority to science, it also perhaps quite unwittingly, attributes to science, a cautious and indeed timid approach, which is entirely foreign to our real procedure end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2573"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "19496b70-f82d-4fc3-9da6-268366fb13b9": {"page_content": "The best we can say about it is that although it consists of our own guesses, of our own conjectures, we are doing our very best to test them.\nThat is to say, to criticize them and to refute them, but the inductivist philosophy not only attributes authority to science, it also perhaps quite unwittingly, attributes to science, a cautious and indeed timid approach, which is entirely foreign to our real procedure end quote.\nAnd that of course is the quote I began this episode with, but isn't it brilliant?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2713"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d1de6f96-bea9-4aab-8e20-4e30ea875e8b": {"page_content": "That Poppa there still is a revolutionary of a kind when it comes to epistemology because so many people simply don't understand that, and yet reject him out of hand and yet here he is getting straight to the point about the purpose of science and what we're up to, what we're doing when it comes to science and even more broadly than science, testing our own guesses and our conjectures, trying to criticize and refute them, but instead so many people have fixated on this idea of the authority of something or other and the authority of science and Poppa rejected that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2751"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc7b9edb-c6e2-483e-9c81-6e2323c9731c": {"page_content": "You're rejected authority everywhere, politics, moral authorities, political authorities, scientific authorities, okay, just a little more here before we, I know this is going to be an extremely long episode, but just a little more here about corroboration.\nSection 28, Poppa goes on to say, in the foregoing section I introduced the term degree of corroboration to characterize the degree to which our hypothesis has stood up to tests.\nIn the present section I intended to discuss merely a terminology issue my reasons for proposing to speak of degree of corroboration rather than of the probability of a hypothesis in the light of the tests.\nMy main reason is of course that the latter phrase, although in itself perfectly legitimate, is liable to lead to confusion and quote, so where I disagree is it's not perfectly legitimate.\nI don't think there is such a thing as probability of a hypothesis in the light of the tests.\nI just don't think there's any point of speaking in that way, and he's attempt to improve this by saying, well I'm not going to talk about probability, I'm instead going to talk about corroboration is a false dichotomy.\nBoth of these approaches, unusually for Poppa, can be rejected because of Poppa's own best solution, which is what we're doing is ruling out all the other theories left with only one that doesn't need, so we don't need to be concerned about corroboration.\nWe just need to be concerned about whether or not our theory solves our problem, explains our phenomena, has no other rivals that are yet to be ruled out by experimental tests, which in science, they always are.\nAt least eventually Poppa spends many, many pages criticizing, and I think rightly the whole language of probability to a large extent and the whole application of probability to epistemology.\nHe highlights errors and it's very much worth reading.\nI'm not going to read through it now, as I say, this is already getting very long.\nand perhaps I'm losing part of my audience, but let me pick it up where Poppa does try to introduce an example, and so where he tries to justify, for what of another word, is use of this whole concept of corroboration, a degree of corroboration.\nHe goes on to say, quote, no rule of content holds for the first sense of probability, which I call degree of corroboration.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2785"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3a6e7468-3caf-4784-b6c8-3b0b91045ebe": {"page_content": "and perhaps I'm losing part of my audience, but let me pick it up where Poppa does try to introduce an example, and so where he tries to justify, for what of another word, is use of this whole concept of corroboration, a degree of corroboration.\nHe goes on to say, quote, no rule of content holds for the first sense of probability, which I call degree of corroboration.\nOn the contrary, most physicists will say that Maxwell's theory of light is more probable in the first sense that is to say better corroborated or better tested than Fresnel's theory of light.\nThe reason is that Maxwell's theory has been more widely and more severely tested, even in fields in which Fresnel's theory cannot be tested.\nAt the same time, Maxwell's theory has a much greater logical content than Fresnel's.\nMaxwell's is a wave theory of light and a theory of electromagnetism, while Fresnel's is merely a wave theory of light.\nThus, Maxwell's theory, although more probable in the sense of being better corroborated or better tested, is at the same time less probable in the sense of the second usage of the word, which is also very well established, especially if we are thinking not so much of the tests successfully passed by hypothesis, but rather the chances that an event will occur end quote.\nAgain, this is all useless.\nI don't think that we need to worry about how many, you know, counting up, how many successfully passed tests, a particular hypothesis, has managed to pass.\nIf this was the case, if this was the case, then my mystery about, why is it on this view of things being more probable, the more tests they passed, why is it that the day before the day before Newton's theory of gravity was finally once and for all refuted by Edington's experiment?.\nWhy was it that day?.\nApparently, its probability of truth was at its highest because it was that day that it had passed the most tests, thousands, millions of tests, perhaps, every time someone observed anything that could have been explained by Newton's theory of gravity, it was, it was, Newton's theory of gravity had passed all of these tests and not passed some, but apparently Einstein's theory, which was brand new, had not passed as many tests, it hadn't, it simply hadn't.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=2909"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "868297c6-eb45-4208-9c09-494e4b7ff919": {"page_content": "Apparently, its probability of truth was at its highest because it was that day that it had passed the most tests, thousands, millions of tests, perhaps, every time someone observed anything that could have been explained by Newton's theory of gravity, it was, it was, Newton's theory of gravity had passed all of these tests and not passed some, but apparently Einstein's theory, which was brand new, had not passed as many tests, it hadn't, it simply hadn't.\nNot many people had applied it to a two certain problems, suddenly Albert Einstein hadn't, maybe a few other physicists who understood the theory at the time in 1919, but really, it hadn't been used to solve problems, so it wasn't passing tests, but that's irrelevant, it doesn't matter how many tests it's passed, it can be the best explanation, it can be closer to true, closer to describing reality, than any other alternative, including Newton's, which had have passed more tests.\nThis whole idea of corroboration introduces a problem, which doesn't need to be solved.\nThe problem would be, well, Newton's theory has been very heavily corroborated by all of these tests that went before, but Einstein's theory had not yet been corroborated.\nThe kids of our corroboration, it's about refutation and explanation.\nAnd when we have two competing explanations, we seek a method of refutation, of trying to rule it out, that's exactly what happens.\nNow, let me go towards the end of this particular section and finally, tie up, loose ends about this, and why, again, I would love to be able to speak to Popper about this, because Popper almost admits, he almost admits in his very chapter, that he's making a mistake.\nI'll just read.\nHe says, quote, and this is coming from page number 228 of realism in the aim of science.\nHe writes, quote, there is unfortunately the danger of another terminological confusion until recently, in fact, until the logic of scientific discovery was in galley proof.\nI did not use the term degree of corroboration, but in its place, the term degree of confirmation.\nAnd I made use of this term for precisely the same reason, because of the need to avoid the term probability.\nTherefore, I must now make clear why I have decided to change my terminology after using it in at least half a dozen publications.\nEnd quote.\nOkay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=3027"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "80e192fe-ce83-48f6-9ac7-7d16c6a33ac7": {"page_content": "I did not use the term degree of corroboration, but in its place, the term degree of confirmation.\nAnd I made use of this term for precisely the same reason, because of the need to avoid the term probability.\nTherefore, I must now make clear why I have decided to change my terminology after using it in at least half a dozen publications.\nEnd quote.\nOkay.\nI'm not going to go on with his explanation here about why he's chosen to change tact to using degree of corroboration.\nHe's saying right there that he wants to avoid the term probability.\nHe understands that his own epistemology entails that you can't say things like this hypothesis is probably true, and you're not even aiming for something to be probably true or certainly true or anything like that.\nBut despite that, because he feels like he needed to have some replacement for this whole idea of things being more probable, a particular theory being more probable, but he knows that that's a mistake.\nHe knows that that's wrong.\nHe knows that he's not trying to, and our project rather, in science and anywhere else, is not to try and find the most probable theory.\nThat's not what we're trying to do.\nBut he thinks he needs a replacement for that.\nSo at first, in the logic of scientific discovery, at first, his best guess was to say, well, rather than talk about how well, how probable a particular theory is, he's going to talk about the degree of confirmation, how well confirmed a theory is.\nAnd now, decades later in writing this book on reflection, he's realized, whoa, I shouldn't have been talking about degree of confirmation.\nWe can't confirm our theories, or partly confirm our theories or anything like that.\nHe realizes that's wrong.\nBut he still wants something else.\nHe wants corroboration now to fill the void.\nBut the fact is, there is no void.\nHis own philosophy does away with that whole thing, that whole way of speaking and thinking, this whole idea of this particular theory is more probable.\nThis particular theory is more confirmed, or best confirmed, or this theory even has a higher degree of corroboration.\nI think all of that is not a part of Papurian epistemology.\nPapurian epistemology is about trying to create good explanations.\nAnd if you're lucky, as I've said for about the 10th time in this episode alone, if you're lucky, you might have competing explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=3171"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f2ac229f-b75f-43b4-a21e-2229c7a43244": {"page_content": "This particular theory is more confirmed, or best confirmed, or this theory even has a higher degree of corroboration.\nI think all of that is not a part of Papurian epistemology.\nPapurian epistemology is about trying to create good explanations.\nAnd if you're lucky, as I've said for about the 10th time in this episode alone, if you're lucky, you might have competing explanations.\nThat's extremely rare.\nBut if you do, then you do what Papur has explained.\nYou come up with the experimental test that rules out all but one, never mind how probable that theory is.\nNever mind if it's certain, or has some degree of certainty, and never mind if it's been corroborated by repeated observations.\nThat's not important.\nWhat's important is whether or not your theory or explanation actually does the job of accounting for those observations, that finite set of observations, and then allows you to infer what is true about the rest of physical reality, because you're explaining the rest of physical reality.\nSo your predictions about the rest of physical reality are derived from that explanation, but it's not the other way around.\nYou're not deriving the explanation from the finite set of observations, and then predicting that therefore that finite set of observations in some way inductively infers or entails that a particular set of observations will continue.\nIn fact, it might say quite the opposite.\nThat the explanation of this particular finite set of observations says that tomorrow they're not going to continue for whatever reason.\nOkay, I did say I was going to finish there, but I can't.\nThere is a little bit right at the end here of this section on corroboration that well, I have to give Carl Popper the final word, almost the final word.\nLet's read his conclusion here, and he writes, quote, I conclude this section by giving a summary of my views concerning corroboration in the form of seven points, the first of which contains the fundamental idea.\nNumber one, the degree of corroboration of a theory is an evaluation of the results of the empirical tests.\nIt has undergone end quote.\nOkay, so that point number one there, I've got no problem with.\nI mean, he could talk about the degree of corroboration as an evaluation of the results of empirical tests.\nIn other words, it would be a synonym for which theory survives the process of experimental refutation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=3280"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "335c655f-1dcd-4724-94f4-7020457f33a0": {"page_content": "Number one, the degree of corroboration of a theory is an evaluation of the results of the empirical tests.\nIt has undergone end quote.\nOkay, so that point number one there, I've got no problem with.\nI mean, he could talk about the degree of corroboration as an evaluation of the results of empirical tests.\nIn other words, it would be a synonym for which theory survives the process of experimental refutation.\nAnd if you want to call that degree of corroboration fine, I think it might be a little bit misleading because we've got this concept of degree.\nThis one has more survived than the other, but it's a black and white thing, isn't it?.\nI mean, if you want to say that on and off is a degree or true and false is a degree of truth or falsity fine, but most people what they mean by degree is a gray scale, whereas I would say it's black and white.\nAnd I think that Popper thinks it's black and white as well, but he's speaking in the language of his opponents.\nLet's continue.\nQuote, number two, there are two attitudes, two ways of looking at the relations between a theory and experience.\nOne may look for confirmation or for refutation.\nThese two attitudes are obviously variants of the apologetic or dogmatic and of the critical attitude.\nScientific tests are always attempted refutations.\nNumber three, the difference between attempted confirmations and attempted refutations or tests is largely though not completely amenable to logical analysis.\nFour, a theory will be said to be the better corroborated the more severe the tests it has passed and the better it has passed them end quote.\nAgain, issue probably guess what I'm going to say is that's kind of pointless when you've got an explanation either it passes the test or it doesn't.\nIt's very rare to worry about which one is passing more severe tests.\nYou might very well say okay, we're comparing Newton and Einstein and Eddington's experiment is a severe test and in passing that severe test, that is the reason why we endorse that theory and not Newton's theory.\nBut I think it's just a wrong way around the phrasing things.\nRather than talk about which one is passing tests, just talk about which one failed the test and which one failed the test.\nNever mind severity, which one failed it was Newton's theory.\nSo for all practical purposes discard that theory when it comes to explaining things like the results of Eddington's experiment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=3436"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a6c19d3e-f8cc-464d-a1f7-d8b240faf051": {"page_content": "But I think it's just a wrong way around the phrasing things.\nRather than talk about which one is passing tests, just talk about which one failed the test and which one failed the test.\nNever mind severity, which one failed it was Newton's theory.\nSo for all practical purposes discard that theory when it comes to explaining things like the results of Eddington's experiment.\nYou might not discard the theory for a whole bunch of other things like predicting the tides or how fast apples are falling from trees it could be very useful for that kind of thing.\nBut pop it goes on to say point five quote a test will be said to be the more severe the greater the probability of failing it the absolute or prior probability as well as the probability and light of what I call our background knowledge that is to say knowledge which by common agreement is not questioned while testing the theory under investigation end quote.\nWell there we have a whole lot of stuff about probability.\nThe very thing that Popper has said you know it's not of much use when it comes to epistemology.\nBut I think he still of course thinks well probability is this real thing.\nUnlike with David Deutsch who basically has concluded it's all a scam.\nI mean real life as I've explained in other podcasts doesn't obey the probability calculus.\nEven gaming machines and roulette wheels and so on and so forth strictly strictly do not obey the probability calculus only approximately so but approximately so isn't reality and isn't our best explanation.\nBest explanation is quantum theory which says what actually happens anyway let's just continue point six Popper says quote.\nThus every genuine test may be described intuitively as an attempt to catch theory.\nIt is not only a severe examination but as an examination it is an unfair one.\nIt is undertaken with the aim of failing the examining rather than the aim of giving him a chance to show what he knows.\nThe latter attitude would be that of the man who wants to confirm or to verify his theory.\nAnd seven assuming always that we are guided in our tests by a genuinely critical attitude and that we exert ourselves in testing the theory and assumption which cannot be formalized.\nWe can say that the degree of corroboration of a theory will increase with the improbability in the light of background knowledge of the predicted test statements provided the predictions derived with the help of the theory are successful end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=3568"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25d633d4-c851-43f8-ab14-4c44d9bfb467": {"page_content": "The latter attitude would be that of the man who wants to confirm or to verify his theory.\nAnd seven assuming always that we are guided in our tests by a genuinely critical attitude and that we exert ourselves in testing the theory and assumption which cannot be formalized.\nWe can say that the degree of corroboration of a theory will increase with the improbability in the light of background knowledge of the predicted test statements provided the predictions derived with the help of the theory are successful end quote.\nYes so again so much here is as I say, couched in terms of the language dominant at the time among the people he was trying to explain his philosophy to and he was having a uphill battle in trying to get these ideas across.\nThis book written decades after the logic of scientific discovery and he's still although you know objective terms won the debate.\nHe wasn't winning the debate in academia.\nThe academics didn't accept what he was saying to a large extent.\nAll we need is to my mind point two that he said there.\nYou've got two attitudes, two ways of looking at the relationship between a theory and experience.\nEither you can look for confirmation or you can look for refutation and these things are not symmetrical.\nThe truth is scientific tests and indeed all of our critical apparatus are attempted refutations and if they fail that means you just have to rely upon your existing theory.\nYour existing theory is the best thing you've got in order to try and solve your problem situation and if it can't solve your problem situation you've still got a problem situation.\nSo therefore you better get about creating a new theory but this whole scheme of things being probably true, things being more or less certain, things being corroborated or not.\nHe's irrelevant and Popper doesn't need it and popular in a epistemology doesn't need it.\nAnd as I say in the next episode, okay this is sort of an episode in two parts I suppose, we will see what David Deutsch has to say about this idea that we can understand Popper's epistemology better than Popper in the same way as David will explain.\nPeople today can understand Einstein's theories better than Einstein or Darwin's theory of natural selection better than Darwin.\nJust because these people begin by explaining to us for the first time the theory, we shouldn't expect that they best explain the theory.\nThe theory rightly deserves to be named after them but that does not mean they have some sort of ownership of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=3672"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "24d48edc-6185-46ed-adf6-a0cdef019d1c": {"page_content": "People today can understand Einstein's theories better than Einstein or Darwin's theory of natural selection better than Darwin.\nJust because these people begin by explaining to us for the first time the theory, we shouldn't expect that they best explain the theory.\nThe theory rightly deserves to be named after them but that does not mean they have some sort of ownership of it.\nAnd in fact Popper was one of the first to actually say that.\nOnce the theory has been explained, it ceases to be that person's theory, they don't have that, they cannot claim any special insight into the theory, other people can be more insightful about that theory.\nI'm certainly not claiming that, what I am claiming is that Popper's own explanation of his own theory means it's sometimes some of what he said about that theory is kind of redundant.\nI think we need it.\nBut until next time, we should be very soon.\nI'll release the next one very soon.\nBye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAzXMCnwhw&t=3804"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2c4ec633-1822-4feb-9bb4-76cb5606209c": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, and it's episode 119 and the 8th, I believe, in my series on the Science of Canon Card, the book by Chiara Marletto, all about Constructa Theory.\nAnd today, it's a video because there's going to be diagrams, movies, and even real-life experiments, such as going on in the background, which you may hear a little bit of a ticking, the motion of a motor, an engine, a heat engine, specifically something called a sterling engine.\nThese things, these objects, these devices, pieces of technology, have helped build the advanced society around us, or the explanation for their operation comes down to the field of physics called thermodynamics.\nAnd that's what this chapter of Chiara Marletto's book is all about.\nNow, let me grab a hold of this really interesting, but simple, yet subtle, piece of technology.\nSo, here it is, still moving, actually.\nWhat it has are two surfaces, one at the bottom, one at the top, the one at the bottom can be placed in contact with a heat source, and over there, that's nothing but a hot cup of water.\nAnd at the top, it's cooler, hot down here, cold up here.\nAnd in between is a diaphragm, and the diaphragm is moved by gas beneath, expanding, because it's heated,.\nheated gas expands, increasing in volume, pushing the diaphragm up and doing work, as we call it.\nSo, heat is able to be converted into work.\nAnd this basic principle is the principle of all such heat engines.\nA foundational part of, not only technology, physics itself, and why Chiara has devoted an entire chapter of her book, in part, to this phenomenon.\nBut there's more.\nSo, even deeper reason why anyone will be interested in such a thing.\nPut it back over there, and you can see that, although it's stopped now, because there's no energy being supplied, we can put it back onto the hot water.\nNothing happens.\nWe need to give it a little push to get it started.\nAnd there we go.\nWe're off again.\nThe thing is, we have high energy, of a type that we'll talk about throughout the course of this episode, in the water, which is in the cup there.\nThat heats the gas, that's in the cylinder here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5592f594-451c-4d1c-87d4-34b30faf040b": {"page_content": "Nothing happens.\nWe need to give it a little push to get it started.\nAnd there we go.\nWe're off again.\nThe thing is, we have high energy, of a type that we'll talk about throughout the course of this episode, in the water, which is in the cup there.\nThat heats the gas, that's in the cylinder here.\nThe gas when heated expands, pushing the diaphragm up, it's connected to a piston, the piston drives the spin wheel.\nAnd that in theory could be used to do work of some kind.\nAnd that is what work is, force over some distance.\nAnd in theory, you could hook that thing up to a generator, a generator, a series of wires moving in a magnetic field, which would generate electricity.\nAgain, one of the fundamental features of our modern civilization, all down to simple devices like this.\nBut as we'll see, although simple, there's a whole bunch of really interesting subtleties that we're going to get to today.\nSo what a really curious thing this is.\nLet me grab a hold of it again, being very careful, because it's actually filled with near boiling water to get the thing to work.\nAnd essentially there are, we will come to three important parts of this in order to turn the energy that's in the cup, into the energy of work, the capacity to move stuff around.\nWhat that is, is somewhere that's hot, as well as somewhere that's cold, there needs to be a temperature differential in order for there to be a transfer of energy by heat from the hot place to the cold place.\nAnd by virtue of that temperature difference, we do get this movement of heat and the movement of heat.\nThat's the thing that's able to do the work, but why should it happen at all?.\nWhat's really going on in terms of the physics here?.\nWell, that's what we're going to talk about in part today.\nI might remove the motor for the rest of the episode, otherwise I think it's making noise in the background.\nOkay, there we go.\nNow today there won't be many, if any, readings from the book itself.\nThis is more like a prelude, and I've done this a few times.\nI think that the topics are so interesting that are in the science of Canon card.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=117"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "761303a8-e393-48de-94ee-efc74b6519d0": {"page_content": "Well, that's what we're going to talk about in part today.\nI might remove the motor for the rest of the episode, otherwise I think it's making noise in the background.\nOkay, there we go.\nNow today there won't be many, if any, readings from the book itself.\nThis is more like a prelude, and I've done this a few times.\nI think that the topics are so interesting that are in the science of Canon card.\nThe topics are so interesting in and of themselves, that sometimes I like to step outside of the book for a moment, just to discuss some of the physics absent the book.\nNow the reason for this is because constructor theory, remember, is a new mode of explanation, a new mode of explanation of those concepts of those things, such as as we're going to be talking about today, thermodynamics, and as we've previously talked about, knowledge and information among other things.\nSo this constructor theoretic mode of explanation is a new way of looking at things, things that we already know about, to try to come to a deeper understanding of things, to try to answer some of the unanswered questions.\nAnd therefore, constructor theory is touching on topics that have a history in science.\nAnd today is a prime example of that.\nThe very title of the chapter, work and hate, will scream out to anyone who's done physics or chemistry, the topic of thermodynamics might move away my little setup here so that I don't spill the water anymore than I already have.\nThermodynamics is a curious beast.\nIt's one of those subjects at undergraduate level, where I'm like quantum theory, where happily early on I was able to sort of uncover for myself, discover by reading some popular science accounts, that the lecturers and tutors weren't giving me the story, because I found the fabric of reality and I encountered David Deutsch through the internet.\nSo happily I understood that my confusion in quantum theory was warranted because I wasn't getting the right stuff in the lectures.\nI had to go elsewhere in order to find that.\nBut unlike quantum theory, thermodynamics was a field where I got through doing physics and not until later when I was actually teaching the subject myself.\nDid I realize that the way I had been taught the subject was itself deeply riddled with misconceptions.\nI couldn't believe that even after studying physics, I didn't really know what a concept like heat was.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=239"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bae03831-753b-4184-966a-5a83e57d7d1f": {"page_content": "I had to go elsewhere in order to find that.\nBut unlike quantum theory, thermodynamics was a field where I got through doing physics and not until later when I was actually teaching the subject myself.\nDid I realize that the way I had been taught the subject was itself deeply riddled with misconceptions.\nI couldn't believe that even after studying physics, I didn't really know what a concept like heat was.\nI mean, if you'd asked me coming straight out of university, I'm sure I would have had an answer, I would have said something and I would have been awarded marks on tests and I would have been able to do calculations of things like specific heat capacity or thermal energy or enthalpy changes and so on.\nBut that's just to say, of course, I was working instrumentally, plugging in numbers into equations that were to predict the outcome of experiments without ever knowing what was actually fundamentally going on.\nYou know, some of these questions are things like a heater-provide heat energy at a rate of the thousand watts to one liter of water, calculate how long it takes for the water to change its temperature from 20 degrees Celsius to its boiling point at 100, something like that.\nBut that whole way of asking the question, that whole way of putting the question, is itself entirely misconceived, this idea of heat flowing or some such or thermal energy moving from one place to another.\nIt took me teaching this stuff and therefore being challenged myself to really think about this, to really understand what was happening at the level of the particles.\nWhat's flowing from one place to another when things are heated?.\nWhat's going on there?.\nWhy are we using this language?.\nIs there some substance coming out of the kettle?.\nAnd if it's energy, how?.\nWhat is this energy?.\nIt seems like it's almost a spiritual force.\nThis energy flows out of the heating element and into the substance causing its temperature to rise.\nHow does it work?.\nHow does any of this work?.\nI think I can explain it now, but I don't think I could have explained it then.\nI always heard, for example, that heat flows from a hot body to a cold body, but never in reverse.\nWhat the heck is this thing heat that's flowing around?.\nWell, the fact is that heat is not a thing.\nIt's not a substance.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=361"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a875f00a-1888-4e5f-a7b2-7d26ea1f12a7": {"page_content": "How does it work?.\nHow does any of this work?.\nI think I can explain it now, but I don't think I could have explained it then.\nI always heard, for example, that heat flows from a hot body to a cold body, but never in reverse.\nWhat the heck is this thing heat that's flowing around?.\nWell, the fact is that heat is not a thing.\nIt's not a substance.\nAnd the person that taught me that was the great physical chemist, perhaps the most famous leaving thermodynamicist of all, Peter Atkins, and it took me listening to his lectures, watching him on YouTube, reading his books, especially his textbooks and his popular accounts as well.\nLet me quote my favorite quote of his on the topic of heat.\nI mean, there's many, many other concepts in thermodynamics, but heat is possibly the most misunderstood and subtle of all the concepts within thermodynamics.\nAnd I find this particular distillation of wisdom on the topic of thermodynamics, the most brilliant of all, it's from one of his popular books on thermodynamics that I'll mention again later, but Atkins wrote quote, in thermodynamics, heat is not an entity or even a form of energy.\nHeat is a mode of transfer of energy.\nIt is not a form of energy or a fluid of some kind or anything of any kind.\nHeat is the transfer of energy by virtue of a temperature difference.\nHeat is the name of a process, not the name of an entity.\nSo in grammatical terms, heat is more of a verb than what it is a noun, but of course we have casual English as well.\nAnd so sometimes it's almost unavoidable in normal day to day conversation, in using the word in its less precise meaning, even when you're talking to other physicists and so on, because that's just what we've inherited from the long history of the use of the word and the way in which thermodynamics began and our scientific understanding of this began, of heat being some kind of substance or fluid, even though it's not because now we understand better.\nHeat is the movement of energy, but what energy?.\nWell, it's kinetic energy in the mind and that kinetic energy can cause increased kinetic energy of the particles of the cooler body by physical collisions with particles in the hotter body.\nSo conduction of heat in solid metal, for example, happens because not this substance heat is flowing from one place to another.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=230"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a418dfcb-eaa6-444f-9997-c6a44739009d": {"page_content": "Heat is the movement of energy, but what energy?.\nWell, it's kinetic energy in the mind and that kinetic energy can cause increased kinetic energy of the particles of the cooler body by physical collisions with particles in the hotter body.\nSo conduction of heat in solid metal, for example, happens because not this substance heat is flowing from one place to another.\nThere is no such substance, but rather at the hot end of a piece of metal, the particles there are vibrating really fast and they are physically colliding with their neighbours and that collision goes all the way along the solid piece of metal until you get this transfer of energy, kinetic energy, the energy of motion, of vibration of these particles from the hot part to the cold part.\nThat's what heat is fundamentally movement at the level of the particles.\nIt's not only that, but as a first approximation, that's a very good way to understand what's going on there.\nIt's not that there is this strange substance flowing from one place to another, rather, it's just a vibration of particles.\nAnd if they're vibrating in one place, they'll be colliding with their neighbours and their neighbours will collide with their neighbours and so on, and that's how conduction in, for example, solids like metals happens to work.\nNow it's not always that the kinetic energy happens to increase.\nIf you heat something, it can be the case that the temperature will rise, but also maybe the temperature won't rise, maybe just its state will change.\nState changes happen at the one temperature, by the way.\nSo, for example, water typically at sea level under the standard conditions and so on.\nWell, boil at 100 degrees Celsius.\nThat means that at that temperature, the liquid water is turning into gaseous vapour at 100 degrees Celsius.\nThe liquid water is at 100 degrees Celsius, and the vapour is at 100 degrees Celsius as well.\nAnd we're going to get back to exactly what this idea of temperature means as well.\nThat itself is another subtle concept that needs to be made precise by physics.\nThis is what physics tends to do, but people can tend to have this misconception.\nYou put water in a pot on a stove and you boil it, and one of the first misconceptions that people have about that process is that although they understand that the water boils at a particular boiling point at like 100 degrees Celsius, then if you continue to apply the heat, maybe the temperature goes up and up and up.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=445"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3731fb81-ef70-4fa0-be68-c0eb6e047ee3": {"page_content": "That itself is another subtle concept that needs to be made precise by physics.\nThis is what physics tends to do, but people can tend to have this misconception.\nYou put water in a pot on a stove and you boil it, and one of the first misconceptions that people have about that process is that although they understand that the water boils at a particular boiling point at like 100 degrees Celsius, then if you continue to apply the heat, maybe the temperature goes up and up and up.\nYou can ask people this question if they don't remember their high school science, let's say, that's what they tend to project.\nAfter all, you're adding more heat, you're heating the water, you're continuously heating the water, shouldn't the water continue to get hot?.\nNo, it doesn't.\nIt stays at 100 degrees Celsius until it all boils away.\nWhen I say 100 degrees Celsius, I mean, assuming all the usual conditions, if you lower the air pressure, the temperature, the temperature at which the water boils happens to be lower as well.\nWhy are there these misconceptions well, it's because the teaching of thermodynamics around the world still follows this misconception-safe pattern.\nHeat is strongly implied to be a fluid of some kind, such and such contains more heat than something else.\nNow, it's fine to say something is hotter than something else, but not to say it contains more heat than something else, and why?.\nBecause again, heat is not a substance, it's not a thing.\nKinetic energy is a thing, how fast the particles are moving or vibrating.\nPotential energy is a thing, how strong the bonds between particles happen to be, but heat is not.\nHeat is the name of a process, to heat something.\nAnd having heated something, the temperature, the kinetic energy or the potential energy stored in the bonds of the particles will have increased.\nThe real goal I'm reaching for in this podcast, and especially the next one is a more precise statement of something called the second law of thermodynamics, in terms of deeper underlying principles, or a deeper underlying theory.\nSo here's a bit of pedagogy first, a method of teaching or learning.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "82c9d53a-cfb7-4c2d-8c80-84ec3126eeb6": {"page_content": "Heat is the name of a process, to heat something.\nAnd having heated something, the temperature, the kinetic energy or the potential energy stored in the bonds of the particles will have increased.\nThe real goal I'm reaching for in this podcast, and especially the next one is a more precise statement of something called the second law of thermodynamics, in terms of deeper underlying principles, or a deeper underlying theory.\nSo here's a bit of pedagogy first, a method of teaching or learning.\nIt's been interesting to me as I've come out of teaching and into doing well this kind of thing among other things, that people will sometimes ask me when I am explaining some aspect of cow popper, or David Deutsch's work, some deep and subtle part of either philosophy or epistemology or science or physics, they desire, on occasion, a particularly precise definition of certain conceptual terms.\nI notice David gets this when people ask him questions as well, it's often, you know, if they have the opportunity to interview David or to discuss with him, they'll say, well, can you define knowledge for me, can you define optimism, can you define this that or the other?.\nAnd David, I think, I can't speak for David, but like me, I guess, following in the tradition of popper, I think, has an automatic kind of aversion to that kind of thing, to trying to define something.\nNow, I'll speak for myself here, there are a couple of reasons for that.\nI worry about the term definition of being asked to define things precisely.\nThe first is, well, the idea of having a definition in people's minds, I think, is supposed to capture something of the essence of the thing you are talking about, that you are defining.\nIt's as if you define the term and then you are held to the definition.\nAnd people find holes in the definition, but all the while, that was never your intention to say everything that could be said about the term.\nSo the problem with definitions to my mind is that they have this pretense in some people's minds anyway, of being final and unalterable.\nThis is the perfect statement of what this term actually means.\nBut of course, that's antifalliblessed.\nAnd inconsistent with the broader worldview that we can always make progress and learn more.\nAnd it's anti-philosophy as well as we understand the term.\nPopper even wrote about not wanting to quibble over definitions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=808"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90142294-874c-4249-b7d6-5be994030a68": {"page_content": "So the problem with definitions to my mind is that they have this pretense in some people's minds anyway, of being final and unalterable.\nThis is the perfect statement of what this term actually means.\nBut of course, that's antifalliblessed.\nAnd inconsistent with the broader worldview that we can always make progress and learn more.\nAnd it's anti-philosophy as well as we understand the term.\nPopper even wrote about not wanting to quibble over definitions.\nHe spoke about this and wrote about this in objective knowledge.\nNow, putting all that aside, the other reason to object to providing precise definitions of things is, well, I think people are enacting a kind of meme of a kind when they ask the question, what's your definition of knowledge?.\nWhat's your definition of energy or liberty?.\nWhat they want, aside from trapping you in a debate over terms, perhaps, which is, again, not real philosophy, is that they might genuinely want to learn, but they want to learn the definition.\nIt's like they're back at school and they want to write their list of words in a glossary.\nAnd once they learn them off by heart with their definitions, they can top the test and say they understand all those words, and therefore they understand this thing and what they're talking about, because they've got the vocabulary and they know what these definitions are.\nAnd I think that's just a wrong way of going about understanding reality and understanding philosophy and understanding science as well.\nBut it's the traditional conception that people have about how learning kind of words.\nI know this is the way I was taught, and here write a glossary of terms, here write these definitions of words, and it's still done today, teaches love, a good glossary at the back of students' workbooks.\nNow, was this to say definitions are utterly pointless?.\nWell, no, of course not, but you have dictionaries for that kind of thing, the better idea, especially when it comes to subtle and open-ended concepts to some extent, especially in philosophy and science, is to approach the term from various different angles and try to come to a more complete panoramic understanding of the term, realising the whole time.\nThere is no single definition for some of these things, but rather we have an explanation of what this concept is, and we can likely improve it over time as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "367718a1-8aad-43c4-ba9f-f96dbd69cc0a": {"page_content": "There is no single definition for some of these things, but rather we have an explanation of what this concept is, and we can likely improve it over time as well.\nSo, don't learn the definition, just try to understand what this thing is all about.\nNow, why am I rattling on about that?.\nWhy would I be saying that approach to learning is wrong?.\nWell, in this field, in thermodynamics, it's filled with this kind of subtlety.\nAnd the use of very common words that everyone thinks they know, but in thermodynamics, these words have a certain kind of precision, precision use, one might say, idiosyncratic use.\nBut sometimes that precise and idiosyncratic use can seem to make things more difficult to pass.\nAnd so, for that reason, I'm going to be doing something else today, in this particularly extended podcast today.\nRather than me just telling you, well, here's what energy is, for example, and here's what degraded energy is.\nHere's the first law, and here's the second law listing things.\nHere's the definition of, let's say, entropy, which is something we'll get to.\nAnd then, presuming at the end, once you've understood all those words, you're going to understand thermodynamics.\nNo, we don't want to do that.\nWe're going to talk about the words, talk about some of the definitions, but I want to take a wide variety of approaches to these things from popular science and from the history of science and from mainstream texts as well, and see if and where they converge.\nAnd hopefully, this will help us create some sort of background knowledge.\nSo then we can understand what Kiara and David are accomplishing with the constructor theoretic view when it comes in particular to the second law, which, as I say, is kind of the goal of the exercise here.\nI'm going to meander through this territory today to try to come to thermodynamics and the main concepts and the main laws.\nThere are, as usually, counted four of those laws numbered, confusingly, 0, 1, 2, and 3.\nSo perhaps if you are largely unfamiliar with this stuff, that by the end of this episode, you're in a good position to really get the punchline, so to speak, by the end of next episode.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d48d0646-56b5-4724-9644-9037b0548ea0": {"page_content": "I'm going to meander through this territory today to try to come to thermodynamics and the main concepts and the main laws.\nThere are, as usually, counted four of those laws numbered, confusingly, 0, 1, 2, and 3.\nSo perhaps if you are largely unfamiliar with this stuff, that by the end of this episode, you're in a good position to really get the punchline, so to speak, by the end of next episode.\nAnd perhaps if you didn't know much about thermodynamics before, and perhaps you have a casual interest in it, you'll be more scientifically literate in it, let's say, from now on perhaps.\nI'm referring to a few old texts that I'm going to dust off.\nAnd my own notes as well from having taught some of this stuff over many years, and I'm going to therefore lean on some of the giants who write in this area of thermodynamics.\nAnd first and foremost, among them, I've already mentioned the man who's the perhaps one of the greatest minds on this topic, Professor Peter Atkins.\nHe wrote some of the seminal and foundational texts on the topic of thermodynamics and physical chemistry, mainly for chemists and physicists and engineers and others who needed some sort of grounding in this stuff.\nHe's the kind of the go-to guy when it comes to thermodynamics.\nBut more than that, he backed up all that heavy technical stuff with some really, really good popular science books explaining the implications of these things, the sort of broader deeper philosophical implications of some of this stuff.\nHe's got numerous lectures, by the way, online, and again, those online span the highly technical through to the popular and philosophical.\nSo up front, I want to say that today, much of what I am saying comes straight from Atkins, but of course, errors are my own entirely.\nI just don't want to have to stop all the time and quote him when I'm saying stuff, because many of his words that he's written down will just come flying out of my mouth because I'll be apping what he says when it comes to thermodynamics.\nMost of my own lessons that I have delivered on thermodynamics were basically me imitating Peter Atkins as he appeared in print, like that heat quote earlier, which I really love and can almost recite off by heart.\nIt comes flying out of my mouth whenever the topic of heat comes up.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1150"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bdfcf2a6-ec98-4d6c-8097-55f4f31ad594": {"page_content": "Most of my own lessons that I have delivered on thermodynamics were basically me imitating Peter Atkins as he appeared in print, like that heat quote earlier, which I really love and can almost recite off by heart.\nIt comes flying out of my mouth whenever the topic of heat comes up.\nAnd the other guy I'm going to be referring to and I'm going to read snippets from his work today is Paul Davies.\nPaul Davies is of course not only an accomplished physicist, but you know, a polymath of a kind in his own right and one of the most prolific popular science authors ever.\nAnd really my first introduction to the idea that the second law had anything like deep implications or philosophical implications came from Professor Davies.\nAnd in particular, the mind of God, where I read, well, let me just read that for you from the mind of God to give you a taste of why I was inspired by it and realize that this thermodynamic stuff is up there alongside quantum theory and general relativity as being the stuff that you want to understand better if you want to understand the deepest theories about the universe.\nSo I've taken the mind of God here and I'm reading a little bit of page 46 over to 47 and Paul Davies wrote quote, today we recognize that no star could keep burning forever.\nIt would run out of fuel.\nThis serves to illustrate a very general principle, an eternal universe is incompatible with the continuing existence of irreversible physical processes.\nIf physical systems can undergo irreversible change at a finite rate, then they will have completed those changes an infinite time ago.\nConsequently, we would not be witnessing such changes such as the production and a mission of starlight now.\nIn fact, the physical universe abounds with irreversible processes.\nIn some aspects, it is rather like a clock slowly running down.\nJust as a clock cannot keep running forever, so the universe cannot have been running forever without being rewound.\nThese problems began to force themselves on scientists during the mid-19th century until then physicists had dealt with laws that are symmetric in time, displaying no favouritism between past and future.\nUsing the investigation of thermodynamic processes change that for good at the heart of thermodynamics lies the second law, which forbids heat to flow spontaneously from cold to hot bodies, while allowing it to flow from hot to cold, pausing their my reflection.\nNotice here, even with the Great Paul Davies, who much respect love dearly as a thinker, he's got the idea of heat flowing there from one place to another.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=445"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0135c6bd-304d-45dc-897e-44dfe8b6eff8": {"page_content": "Using the investigation of thermodynamic processes change that for good at the heart of thermodynamics lies the second law, which forbids heat to flow spontaneously from cold to hot bodies, while allowing it to flow from hot to cold, pausing their my reflection.\nNotice here, even with the Great Paul Davies, who much respect love dearly as a thinker, he's got the idea of heat flowing there from one place to another.\nA misconception, I think, a not the best use of language.\nIt doesn't really get across what's actually going on, and it will get to the reason why people still talk in this way, anyway, let's keep going.\nQuote, this law is therefore not reversible.\nIt imprints upon the universe an arrow of time, pointing away of uni directional change.\nScientists were quick to draw the conclusion that the universe is engaged in a one-way slide towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.\nThis tendency towards uniformity wherein temperatures even out in the universe settles into a stable state became known as the heat death.\nIt represents a state of maximum molecular disorder or entropy.\nThe fact that the universe has not yet so died, that is, it is still in a state of less than maximum entropy, implies it cannot have endured for all eternity and quote from Paul Davies.\nSo that's some amazing stuff there, I think.\nAn irreversible law that tells us the universe cannot have endured forever.\nSo forget the Big Bang and expanding space-time and Hubble Redshift and so on.\nAll you need to know that the universe actually had a beginning in time is that there is such a thing as entropy.\nBut what is entropy exactly?.\nWell, as he says there, it's disorder, okay, but what's that?.\nIs it like mass?.\nWe can measure the quantity of matter.\nAnd we can measure, well that's called mass, the quantity of matter, and we can measure the force of gravity for the effect of gravity on something.\nThat's called the white.\nAnd we can measure volumes and we can measure lengths with rulers, but entropy.\nHow to quantify that?.\nSo I'll come back to Paul Davies, that was the first of his books that I have read, and I recently bought his much recent book, What Eating the Universe and Other Cosmic Questions here, and it too has a chapter all about Times Arrow, the second law.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=445"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "668eb7e6-d390-4f64-b61c-c65a27102405": {"page_content": "That's called the white.\nAnd we can measure volumes and we can measure lengths with rulers, but entropy.\nHow to quantify that?.\nSo I'll come back to Paul Davies, that was the first of his books that I have read, and I recently bought his much recent book, What Eating the Universe and Other Cosmic Questions here, and it too has a chapter all about Times Arrow, the second law.\nSo I'll come back to that, and don't you love the title, What Eating the Universe, which really is bringing the concept of online clickbait into the world of popular science publishing.\nBut that aside, it is actually a great book that chapters are very short, almost little blog posts, again another sign of our times, perhaps.\nBut chapter 16 of the book is titled What is the Source for Times Puzzling Era, so I'll make some remarks about that chapter.\nAnd there's a third book here that I want to mention, there's many books that I'm going to be referring to, but not all of them will get a name check, but I have to name check this one.\nIt's called a cultural history of physics by Carol Simoni.\nAnd it's an absolutely beautiful book, I've got the hardcover version, very hard to find now, though, in hardback form anywhere I've been looking for other copies of, very difficult to find.\nBut if you can get a hold of it, if you have someone in your life who absolutely loves physics, then this is the gift for them, it's obviously a history of physics.\nBut it's got all sorts of little gems in there, like little biographies of the physicists and nice, clear images of original texts and diagrams taken from, you know, the original work of like Newton, Newton's Principia or Descartes own notes or all the sections on quantum theory have juke quotes from dueling physicists trying to understand what the heck was going on exactly pages from Einstein's first article on relativity and so on, and yeah, I understand.\nAll of this stuff can be found online these days, but having it in one place in chronological order as well as a history of physics, that's really nice.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1182"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7ea656cc-bfe6-4c0a-9e7a-21e299bc58c9": {"page_content": "All of this stuff can be found online these days, but having it in one place in chronological order as well as a history of physics, that's really nice.\nAs I say, you could find it online, but here someone else has done all of the hard work for you, and the author unpacks what it all means from the perspective over the time, what they were understanding, the philosophical problems they were having at the time, and from our perspective now, given what we know, but what they couldn't have.\nSo actually, I'm going to go to that book right now and read from a section which indicates the kind of subtleties of language in this area of thermodynamics that I've mentioned already, and how there has been this resistance at times in the history of science and in physics in particular, to take seriously the best prevailing theory at any given time.\nSo it's something like heat, as I've already spoken about, well, Simon you, he writes himself, the author of the text writes.\nOne would expect that ideas concerning the nature of heat would have been based on a conception that was already widespread at the end of the 17th century, namely that heat has its origin in the motion of the particles that make up the material body.\nThis would have led directly to the connection between the two forms of energy, heat and kinetic energy.\nHowever, that is not what happened.\nIn a seemingly superfluous and at first glance surprising detour in the history of physics, the kinetic theory of heat was abandoned, and in its place, a theory of heat substance.\nCalaricum was adopted.\nIt is only the result of our hasty judgment about what should have happened that names such as Joseph Black have fallen into obscurity.\nAlthough we owe our thanks to him for such quantitative concepts as heat quantity, specific heat, latent heat, melting point and boiling point, it has also been forgotten that findings in canoes and Fourier's theory of heat that are seen today as fundamental and used in teaching are based on the theory of calaricum, based on this theory of heat being a substance.\nAnd that is why there is this misconception in our language that we inherit today.\nI should have said it in quote there, but you get the picture.\nAnd in that bit that I just read there, you might have noticed a quibble as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ecd1156b-6071-4560-9594-0bd57af277b0": {"page_content": "And that is why there is this misconception in our language that we inherit today.\nI should have said it in quote there, but you get the picture.\nAnd in that bit that I just read there, you might have noticed a quibble as well.\nSimyani is praising Black for the concept of heat quantity, but heat quantity itself is also one of those very misconceptions someone like Atkins is trying to help us understand isn't a thing.\nSo let's just move past that, that can be a little speed pump.\nAnd Simyani brings up Joseph Black, a name who's fallen as he says into obscurity, because actually he did as much as anyone and should be credited with some of the first formulations of the laws of thermodynamics.\nJoseph Black was Scottish and he lived from 1728 to 1799, it was a professor of chemistry and medical science and Black taught James Watt among others.\nAnd he introduced the concept of specific heat as was mentioned just there.\nNow what specific heat exactly or find and explain that as being like the absorbency of a cloth, some cloths like you know tissues can hold very little water before becoming saturated.\nWhile others like a sponge can hold much more water specific heat or let me talk about specific heat capacity, it's the quantity of energy that a substance can hold or more precisely the quantity of energy taken to raise the temperature of a substance or if we want to be exact with this, it is the quantity of energy usually in jewels these days required to heat a unit mass, usually in kilograms by one Kelvin, which is equivalent to one degree Celsius.\nBasically if I have a one kilogram lump of metal like a lump of iron and I put it over a flame for one minute, it's temperature will rise quite a lot.\nIt has low specific heat capacity, it doesn't take much energy to raise its temperature.\nAs compared to, if I was to take one kilogram of water, which is a liter of water and use the same flame to heat it, presumably it's in a saucepan of some kind or a pot, in one minute you don't get anywhere near the same temperature rises what you do with the iron, there is an inherent property, therefore, and inherent property of substances that determines how much their temperature rises given some change in their internal energy.\nNow what's internal energy?.\nWell, we will come back to that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "487e4961-7472-43cf-938e-958bb59339aa": {"page_content": "Now what's internal energy?.\nWell, we will come back to that.\nAnother concept that Joseph Black was first to figure out was latent heat and it's a similar idea if you have one kilogram of water and it's boiling at 100 degrees Celsius, and there's a certain quantity of energy it takes to boil away all of that water.\nIn other words, to change one kilogram of water in its liquid form at 100 degrees Celsius into its gaseous form at 100 degrees Celsius, that's what latent heat's all about.\nNow for other substances, if you've got one kilogram of it, let's say one kilogram of pure alcohol and it's boiling, the amount of energy it takes to change its state from liquid to gas is less, that's what latent heat is.\nAnd there's latent heat for solid stuff turning into liquid stuff and latent heat of liquid stuff turning into gaseous stuff as well, or in some cases, solid straight into gasses in the case of carbon dioxide, let's say.\nSo this idea of specific heat and latent heat can be a little bit confusing because right there, if you're Joseph Black and you have some sound concepts like that, latent heat and specific heat, easily tested and measured in the chemistry lab.\nIt looks for all the world like latent heat and specific heats are kinds of heat and thus heat is something that is itself a thing of a kind, a substance of a kind, so there's a quantity of it in stuff, so to speak.\nAnd when you increase the temperature of something, the heat goes up and decrease the temperature and the heat goes down.\nAnd surely it's common sense that if you heat something strongly enough, like a metal rod that I was talking about earlier, you heat one end and eventually the other end gets hot too, why, well, the common sense theory goes that the heat is flowing, conducted, so we say, long and metal.\nNow, as I explained before, that contains misconception.\nIt's not like it's utterly wrong, I don't like to say anything like that is utterly wrong, it contains some truth, but it also contains important misconceptions.\nBut to explain more fully those important misconceptions with that whole view of heat, let's do a pass of the four laws as well that say I would normally explain them if I had to teach this stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1902"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0a28aef-7f86-4265-89eb-2f4b76006815": {"page_content": "Now, as I explained before, that contains misconception.\nIt's not like it's utterly wrong, I don't like to say anything like that is utterly wrong, it contains some truth, but it also contains important misconceptions.\nBut to explain more fully those important misconceptions with that whole view of heat, let's do a pass of the four laws as well that say I would normally explain them if I had to teach this stuff.\nAnd this will allow us to understand the misconceptions in this idea of heat flowing from here to there, from hot bodies to cold bodies and bodies, having heat in them and so on and so forth.\nAnd by going through these laws of thermodynamics, we'll be able to then, before the end of today's lengthy episode, come back and linger on the deeper implications of the second law in particular.\nThis will set us up well, I hope, for what constructor theory has to offer, that's new, and we'll be able to introduce Kiara's chapter on heat and work.\nSo let's begin with the zeroth law.\nAnd the zeroth law basically forces upon us the concept of temperature.\nWhy is it the zeroth law and not the first law?.\nWell, just because of history.\nThe first law was found first, and later it was understood that prior to understanding parts of the first and second law, we needed a law governing what temperature was, what temperature did.\nSo temperature is this interesting concept in and of itself, so they introduced the zeroth law later on.\nTemperature is degree of hotness or coldness.\nAnd that's fine, you can say that, but it's qualitative.\nNow you could say that temperature is the thing that a thermometer measures, and that's also true, but we want to know what it's measuring precisely.\nWhat is it that's going on, causing the thermometer to indicate one temperature rather than another?.\nIs it quantity of heat?.\nWell, we've already said that's not a thing, but even if you imagine it is, you might imagine something like the red-hot nail compared to a bath full of boiling water.\nNow the red-hot nail might be a thousand degrees Celsius.\nThe bath of boiling water is cooler by a factor of 10, but if a torturer gave you the choice of holding either the nail or plunging into the bath, there really is no choice.\nChoose the nail.\nSure you'll burn your hand, but you won't be dead.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1856"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7417b6eb-2149-406c-b237-3eebcb5dbd7e": {"page_content": "Now the red-hot nail might be a thousand degrees Celsius.\nThe bath of boiling water is cooler by a factor of 10, but if a torturer gave you the choice of holding either the nail or plunging into the bath, there really is no choice.\nChoose the nail.\nSure you'll burn your hand, but you won't be dead.\nThe bath contains far more energy, even though it's at a much lower temperature.\nSo temperature has something to do with intensity rather than quantity, intensity of what though.\nI've already told you, but we're going to make this more precise.\nIf you consider the air in a room at 30 degrees Celsius, the most of that air is made up of nitrogen, nitrogen exists as N2 molecules, two nitrogen atoms join together.\nAnd at 30 degrees Celsius, a nitrogen molecule has an average speed of about 500 meters per second.\nThey're zipping around all over the place.\nNow if you increase the temperature of the room, the average speed of the molecules will also increase.\nHuh, maybe that's it.\nThe temperature is a measure of the average speed of the particles.\nWell that's all very well, except that if the nitrogen is at 30 degrees, and that corresponds to 500 meters per second, what about the chair in the same room as the air?.\nThe chair is made of wood or metal or plastic, and its particles are not zipping around at 500 meters per second.\nThey're just vibrating in place.\nSo this is a bit of a problem, because although it is true that increasing the temperature of a body increases the speed of the motion of the particles, particles have different masses and they're bonded to each other more or less strongly.\nSo it can't be a one to one thing of that a particular temperature corresponds to a particular particle speed in general.\nSo we need a somewhat more precise conceptual understanding of temperature.\nWe might have more luck if we weren't just talking about speed, but we're talking about kinetic energy of the particles, because kinetic energy takes into account the mass of the particles as well, but still can we have something straightforward that everyone can agree on and then move forward.\nSo here's one basic idea.\nIf I've got two bodies, A and B that are in contact and isolated from the environment, then if A is hotter than B, energy moves from A to B until A is no longer hotter than B, nor B hotter than A, they have become equal in some way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1856"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f95dd0de-e5d6-4d8e-ab81-98537a041964": {"page_content": "So here's one basic idea.\nIf I've got two bodies, A and B that are in contact and isolated from the environment, then if A is hotter than B, energy moves from A to B until A is no longer hotter than B, nor B hotter than A, they have become equal in some way.\nWhat is it exactly that has become equal between them or the temperature has?.\nMore precisely, we say that A and B have the same temperature when they are in thermal equilibrium.\nOne statement of the zeroth law of thermodynamics is, if A is in thermal equilibrium with B and B is in thermal equilibrium with C, then C and A will be in thermal equilibrium.\nSo it's a law of thermal transitivity effectively.\nThe zeroth law implies the existence of a thermometer.\nIt's the device in thermal equilibrium with its surroundings.\nSo none of that statement of the law even implies the existence of particles you will notice.\nAs Atkins famously says, you can do classical thermodynamics even if you don't believe in atoms.\nEnd quote.\nBut of course, we do know about atoms now.\nSo as a result, we have this thing called statistical thermodynamics, which is an account of what is happening according to the laws of thermodynamics in terms of particles or atoms.\nIt's statistical because we are less concerned about what individual particles are doing and more about aggregates or averages that give rise to the bulk properties that we do observe.\nIt was Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1800s, actually, who provided a view of temperature that is connected to particles and I've already hinted at it.\nThe thing about Boltzmann's view from statistical thermodynamics is that it provides some insight into quantum theory, which came a little later.\nIf we've got a glass of water at room temperature, then we know that left long enough, the water evaporates away.\nHow is this possible?.\nDoesn't water only change state from liquid to gas when it boils?.\nHow can we explain evaporation that happens at any temperature?.\nHave you ever wondered that yourself?.\nWhy is it that if water changes from gas, what temperature does the water change from liquid into gas people will say, well, at the boiling point, at 100 degrees Celsius, if you're not an American using Fahrenheit, let's say?.\nBut then how does evaporation work?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=2270"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2f4a155c-809f-443f-94c9-55b5e9e13033": {"page_content": "Doesn't water only change state from liquid to gas when it boils?.\nHow can we explain evaporation that happens at any temperature?.\nHave you ever wondered that yourself?.\nWhy is it that if water changes from gas, what temperature does the water change from liquid into gas people will say, well, at the boiling point, at 100 degrees Celsius, if you're not an American using Fahrenheit, let's say?.\nBut then how does evaporation work?.\nWhy should it be the case that any temperature less than the boiling point at the temperature at which the liquid turns into a gas that you still get a liquid turning into a gas?.\nWhat the heck is going on?.\nWell, water can change in its liquid form into a gaseous form at any temperature because the temperature of the water, in terms of the particles, has something to do with the distribution of energies of those particles, and those particles have a range of energies.\nNot any energy that you like, that's quantum theory there.\nThey must have specific energies, but they can have a range of energies.\nAt any given temperature, most of them will have a certain kind of energy, or be grouped up into a particular kind of energy, but some of them will have much less energy than the average, and some will have much more energy than the average.\nAnd maybe you can see where I'm going with this.\nIn any average typical glass of water at room temperature, there will be some small number of water molecules in your glass of water that have the lowest possible energy they could have.\nAnd that corresponds to energy at or very close to what would be regarded as zero Kelvin.\nSo some molecules of water in a glass of water at room temperature can't vibrate any slower than not at all.\nAnd some will be vibrating basically not at all.\nThey won't be moving hardly at all.\nThey have almost zero kinetic energy.\nTherefore their temperature corresponds to something like zero Kelvin minus 273 degrees Celsius.\nNot many of them, not many of them of course, but some, most of them will have energies that correspond to the room temperature.\nBut if you don't accept that, well, you have to accept that, well, some of the water molecules in any given room temperature glass are literally boiling away.\nThey're evaporating.\nThey have the energy required to change the state of the water from liquid into gas.\nThere is some such energy needed to do that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1708"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cd974b47-f575-4a4c-8956-8f09defe2f2a": {"page_content": "Not many of them, not many of them of course, but some, most of them will have energies that correspond to the room temperature.\nBut if you don't accept that, well, you have to accept that, well, some of the water molecules in any given room temperature glass are literally boiling away.\nThey're evaporating.\nThey have the energy required to change the state of the water from liquid into gas.\nThere is some such energy needed to do that.\nAs the temperature of the water rises, a greater and greater proportion of the molecules of the water molecules begin to occupy those higher energy states.\nHence more of them are turning into gas, achieving a escape velocity from the rest of the liquid.\nThat's why evaporation tends to increase as the water increases in temperature.\nNow the energy of particles like molecules of water comes actually in three kinds.\nIt comes in what I've already mentioned, vibrational, which is all that solid particles can do there, just fixed in place and they're vibrating because the bonds that hold them together aren't going anywhere.\nBut then there's also rotational.\nAnd rotational energy is the kind of energy that your particles get.\nOnce they've entered the liquid phase.\nSo the bonds break and now they're able to rotate around one another, still in contact, still weakly bonded to one another.\nBut in physical contact with one another, they're still vibrating.\nBut now they're actually also able to rotate and that's in the liquid phase.\nThey can slide around each other once those solid bonds are broken.\nAnd then finally, if you add a little more energy, you get translational energy as well.\nSo the particles are still vibrating.\nThey're still rotating.\nBut now they can move from one place to another.\nAnd then we have the gaseous state.\nThat's what happens to move from solids where the particles are vibrating fixed in position to liquid where they're vibrating.\nBut now they're also able to rotate because the bonds are broken.\nAnd then once all the bonds are effectively broken, the intermolecular bonds that exist in liquids like water, once they're broken as well, although you have vibration and rotation, you now have translation.\nSo they're the three modes of kinetic energy that you can have.\nNow, you can quantify this.\nYou can quantify this using something called the Boltzmann distribution.\nThat puts a precise number.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=445"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "378f12cd-f8e9-494a-b00c-a8b8a58efa8d": {"page_content": "But now they're also able to rotate because the bonds are broken.\nAnd then once all the bonds are effectively broken, the intermolecular bonds that exist in liquids like water, once they're broken as well, although you have vibration and rotation, you now have translation.\nSo they're the three modes of kinetic energy that you can have.\nNow, you can quantify this.\nYou can quantify this using something called the Boltzmann distribution.\nThat puts a precise number.\nThe parameter, beta, on how the energy of the molecules at some temperature are distributed.\nI won't go into that, suffice it to say.\nThere is a simple equation, beta equals 1 over kT, where T is the temperature in Kelvin, Kelvin temperature, and k is the Boltzmann constant.\nThe higher the T, the smaller the beta, and vice versa.\nTemperature is thus a measure of the distribution of energies of particles in some substance at equilibrium.\nSo that's what T is.\nThat's what temperature is.\nThe zero floor has forced upon us, has explained the concept of temperature for us, either classically as that quantity, which is equal when two bodies are in thermal equilibrium, or in terms of particles as that quantity, which indicates the distribution of the energies of the particles in that body.\nSo that's the zero floor.\nWell, what's the first law then?.\nWell, the first law is energy conservation.\nThe idea here is that however much energy there is at the beginning of the universe, that's how much you have at every other time, at any other time in fact.\nPick your year or moment after the big bang, and you've got the same amount of energy in the universe then as what you had at the big bang.\nBut there's a little more to it than that.\nThe zero floor introduced temperature and refined its meaning for us.\nThe first law is really about trying to get at what we mean by energy, especially internal energy.\nBut let's begin with energy in general.\nLet's define something in physics.\nI said I didn't like to get fixed on definitions, but here's one that we can use.\nIt's very useful and people don't have quibbles with.\nA force applied over some distance is work.\nWork equals force times the distance.\nThe work has to be done in the same direction as the force.\nThat makes common sense.\nYou try to move your fridge.\nIt takes some force to overcome the friction on the ground.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=2301"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6cd417b8-c45e-400d-bc91-537966510083": {"page_content": "Let's define something in physics.\nI said I didn't like to get fixed on definitions, but here's one that we can use.\nIt's very useful and people don't have quibbles with.\nA force applied over some distance is work.\nWork equals force times the distance.\nThe work has to be done in the same direction as the force.\nThat makes common sense.\nYou try to move your fridge.\nIt takes some force to overcome the friction on the ground.\nSomeone asks you to move the fridge five meters.\nThat's one thing that's a certain amount of work for you to do, a certain amount of effort.\nBut to move it 50 meters, that's something else entirely.\nLots more work, literally.\nSo work really is motion against some force.\nAnd in fact, lifting is the best way of envisioning this.\nYou lift a weight vertically against gravity and you've done work.\nWe're speaking in Newtonian turns here, of course.\nSo a capacity to do work is important.\nYou can lift a one kilogram mass with your hand, but presumably so could an electric motor attached to a pulley.\nSo the motor can do work.\nAnd maybe that motor is powered by an electric battery.\nSo the battery has capacity to do work as well.\nOr maybe some coal can be burned and that drives a turbine that lifts the mass.\nThe coal has capacity to do work.\nSo this capacity to do work.\nThat's energy.\nOr is it?.\nWe might come back to that.\nMaybe there are some kinds of energy that can't do work.\nAnyway, as a first pass, that's the idea.\nCapacity to do work is energy.\nAnd work is the capacity to exert some force over some distance.\nEnergy.\nIt's concepts have something to do with the common sense notions that we have of these things work in energy, but they're sharpened up by physics.\nNow there's this standard high school physics experiment.\nIt's due to dual who first performed the experiment where basically a falling weight over a pulley drives some paddles that stir some water.\nYou know, perfectly well insulated, well insulated as you can manage, container of water.\nAnd the water's temperature, it goes up.\nYou can measure it.\nBecause the work done goes straight into the water and from there, well, it's in the water, it can only cause the temperature to rise.\nWhat's any of this proof?.\nWell, it shows that work, the falling overweight can be used to heat water.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=65"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "94f8905c-76a6-4dd9-a1ac-fa0924166077": {"page_content": "You know, perfectly well insulated, well insulated as you can manage, container of water.\nAnd the water's temperature, it goes up.\nYou can measure it.\nBecause the work done goes straight into the water and from there, well, it's in the water, it can only cause the temperature to rise.\nWhat's any of this proof?.\nWell, it shows that work, the falling overweight can be used to heat water.\nYou can convert work into heat and vice versa, of course, as my little sterling engine showed.\nBut with this experiment, this is a dual experiment.\nIn the high school lab, you can make some precise measurements and show that using an actual heater to heat the water requires the same energy.\nYou can use equations like energy equals power times time or equivalently energy equals voltage times the current times the time.\nAnd they can be used to calculate the work done by a heater of known voltage and current running for some time to heat some water.\nNow, who cares about any of that?.\nWell, that introduces this idea of path independence.\nIt does not matter how the temperature changes come about, whether by heat or by work, the effect is the same.\nBut although earlier, we were talking about kinetic energy of particles and so on, here, in this case, of rising temperature, we can talk about the specific number of joules of energy imparted to the water, but we don't measure temperature using joules.\nSo what happens to these joules of energy, imparted by the heater or by the paddle?.\nWhat have they gone into?.\nWell, they've gone into the water.\nBut again, not as a separate fluid of some kind.\nAfter all, the paddles weren't doing anything, but agitating the water.\nWe say they have gone into a quantity we call the internal energy and we use the symbol U for the internal energy.\nSo the internal energy of the system, of the water.\nWhen the temperature rises in a system like a cup of water or whatever, we say that U has increased.\nNothing is increased here, yes, the temperature has, but also the number of joules have increased where in the internal energy of the water.\nNow, what the internal energy is exactly, we don't need to worry ourselves about exactly if we're doing classical thermodynamics.\nWe just know that it's gone up or gone down because then we can calculate the change by making measurements.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=65"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "72de011d-804a-49bc-abc6-540b7556d188": {"page_content": "When the temperature rises in a system like a cup of water or whatever, we say that U has increased.\nNothing is increased here, yes, the temperature has, but also the number of joules have increased where in the internal energy of the water.\nNow, what the internal energy is exactly, we don't need to worry ourselves about exactly if we're doing classical thermodynamics.\nWe just know that it's gone up or gone down because then we can calculate the change by making measurements.\nBut if you want to know now that I'm going to come back to this, the internal energy is the sum of all the kinetic and potential energies of the particles that make up the substance.\nAnd perhaps even also the mass energy, but calculating the total internal energy of any given substance.\nWell, no one ever bothers with that, but we're only ever interested in the change in internal energy.\nThat's the most relevant thing for when you're building engines and so forth.\nNow if we imagine joules experiment where the paddles spin, the temperature rises, there's no heater there.\nIt's just mechanical motion.\nThe thing is, if we take away the insulation, then more energies are quiet in order to achieve the same rise in temperature.\nBut why should that be?.\nWhere is the energy going?.\nI know we know it's common sense.\nIt's going into the surroundings because the things aren't insulated anymore.\nBut what this shows profoundly is that energy, therefore, is of two types.\nYou do work on something that's well isolated and the temperature rises because you've increased the internal energy of the system in the water.\nBut if you remove the insulation, then you must do more work because the energy has gone somewhere.\nWhere?.\nWell, there has been a transfer of energy to the environment and not by work.\nHence we need this other word.\nHence we have this concept of heat.\nThe reason the energy has been lost to the environment is because there is a temperature difference between the water now, which is warmer, and the rest of the environment around it, which is cooler, as Atkins says.\nThis transfer of energy as a result of a temperature difference is called heat.\nSo that's what heat is.\nAgain, heat is the transfer of energy as the result of a temperature difference.\nAs I quoted him earlier, it is not the name of the thing, but rather the name of a process.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=230"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47244869-7d90-4b3e-bc5d-e4a953fb9946": {"page_content": "This transfer of energy as a result of a temperature difference is called heat.\nSo that's what heat is.\nAgain, heat is the transfer of energy as the result of a temperature difference.\nAs I quoted him earlier, it is not the name of the thing, but rather the name of a process.\nWe can measure the energy transverse heat, therefore simply by determining the work done on the system when we're insulated.\nAnd then measuring the difference between that case and when the insulation is removed, the difference is the energy transferred as heat, usually to the environment.\nNow there is no such thing as perfect insulation of course.\nSo if work is done on a system and that changes its temperature, its internal energy, then the work done is never exactly equal to the change in internal energy.\nWhy?.\nBecause some heat is lost to the environment.\nAnd that's what we're going to come back to.\nSo energy is transferred to substances either by work or by heating.\nIn the case of work, what is going on is that there has been, at the level of some particles, some uniform motion of the atoms in the case of joules apparatus.\nThe molecules are all pushed in the same direction by the paddles.\nThat's what work is.\nWork is force over a given distance in the direction of the force.\nSo all the particles end up moving in the same way.\nBut when a substance is heated, that's not uniform motion of the particles.\nHowever, there is an increase in the random motion of the particles.\nTheir kinetic energy, either of translation and vibrational rotation, increases.\nThat's what heating is.\nSo there we have the differences.\nBoth of these things can cause a temperature rise.\nBut one is an average bulk motion all in the same direction.\nThat's work or randomly sort of causing all of the particles to speed up in their motion.\nBoth is motion of particles.\nIt's just that one is work and one is heat.\nAnd if, if mind you, I, W, if and only if, there was a perfectly insulated container of water, and you did work on the container of water, then the amount of work done would be transferred to the water entirely and be represented as a temperature increase.\nThe first law says that the work done, W, must be equal precisely to the increase in internal energy u of the system in that case.\nSo W would equal delta u, work equals the change in internal energy.\nAnd that's the first law for a perfectly isolated system.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=2734"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa473f0c-cbf3-415f-a340-7acccd8deeea": {"page_content": "The first law says that the work done, W, must be equal precisely to the increase in internal energy u of the system in that case.\nSo W would equal delta u, work equals the change in internal energy.\nAnd that's the first law for a perfectly isolated system.\nOf course, if it's not perfectly isolated, then W equals delta u plus q, where q is the energy transferred as a consequence of heating.\nSo that is the first law that the work done is equal to the change in internal energy, but plus heat, the heat lost to the environment, let's say.\nNow normally, text and so on actually write that first law as delta u equals q minus w. But for size, I think we can measure only changes in u, not any absolute amount of u. U is the internal energy.\nSo it's the sum of all the kinetic energies, the motion, and the potential, the bond energies of the particles.\nAnd as I say, presumably it can also include things like the mass energy as well, if you like.\nSo that's the first law, which means we're at the second law.\nAnd at this point, I'm just going to hand things over wholesale to Peter Atkins.\nAnd his book called Four Laws that Drive the Universe.\nAnd the beginning of his chapter on the second law.\nNow here, I'm going to be reading from page 49, where Atkins writes, quote, when I gave lectures on thermodynamics to an undergraduate chemistry audience, I often began by saying that no other scientific law has contributed more to the liberation of the human spirit than the second law of thermodynamics.\nI hope that you will see in the course of this chapter why I take that view, and perhaps go so far as to agree with me.\nThe second law has a reputation for being recondite, notoriously difficult, and a litmus test of scientific literacy.\nIndeed, the novelist and former chemist, C.P. Snow is famous for having asserted in his the two cultures that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is equivalent to never having read a work by Shakespeare.\nI actually have serious doubts about whether Snow understood the law himself, but I can occur with these sentiments.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29e3f618-3b48-4d2b-a0d6-e9f99c5e151f": {"page_content": "The second law has a reputation for being recondite, notoriously difficult, and a litmus test of scientific literacy.\nIndeed, the novelist and former chemist, C.P. Snow is famous for having asserted in his the two cultures that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is equivalent to never having read a work by Shakespeare.\nI actually have serious doubts about whether Snow understood the law himself, but I can occur with these sentiments.\nThe second law is of central importance in the whole of science, and hence in our rational understanding of the universe, because it provides a foundation for understanding why any change occurs, thus not only is it a basis for understanding why engines run and chemical reactions occur, but it is also a foundation for understanding those most exquisite consequences of chemical reactions.\nThe acts of literary, artistic, and musical creativity that enhance our culture, and quote from Atkins.\nSo that's pretty amazing stuff, and it really is why people like Paul Davies and other popularizers make such a big deal about the second law.\nWhat Atkins says there puts the second law of thermodynamics into a sort of different category to others.\nIt is elevated to this place where it is invoked alongside not only physics and chemistry and engineering, but also art.\nSo let's get a little technical on this and go back to Atkins, who writes, quote, as we have seen for the zeroth and first laws, the formulation and interpretation of a law of thermodynamics leads us to introduce a thermodynamic property of the system.\nThe temperature T springs from the zeroth law, and the internal energy U from the first law.\nLikewise, the second law implies the existence of another thermodynamic property, the entropy symbol S. To fix our ideas in the concrete as an early stage, it will be helpful throughout this account to bear in mind that whereas U is a measure of the quantity of energy that a system possesses, S is a measure of the quality of that energy.\nLow entropy means high quality, high entropy means low quality, end quote.\nBut what does quality mean?.\nHere's the way I used to think about this, and I can't remember where I heard it first, but I know Brian Cox used it in one of his documentaries, presumably we both got it from the same common source.\nAnyways, the metaphor goes like this with a little bit of local adaptation.\nHere in Australia, we've got some very nice beaches.\nThere is one on the south coast.\nI've been to many times.\nIt looks like this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "44029d65-f454-4182-aa51-997dc527b539": {"page_content": "Here's the way I used to think about this, and I can't remember where I heard it first, but I know Brian Cox used it in one of his documentaries, presumably we both got it from the same common source.\nAnyways, the metaphor goes like this with a little bit of local adaptation.\nHere in Australia, we've got some very nice beaches.\nThere is one on the south coast.\nI've been to many times.\nIt looks like this.\nIt's called Himes Beach, and it's close to where my parents live.\nIt's famous if you move in some circles because it's said to have, among, the whitest sand anywhere in the world.\nJust look at it.\nSo if you go there on a typical Australian summer's day in early January's day and you go without shade and without sunscreen, you will get sunburned.\nThe sun is intense in Australia in summer, especially in places like Himes Beach.\nSunburn is caused by ultraviolet light, UV light, comes down from the sun and it can burn you.\nOK, because sunlight is bright.\nNow throughout the course of a day, that sunlight, that bright sunlight from the sun, comes down beaming all day long, heating the sand, as well as the water.\nBut let's concentrate on the sand.\nIt heats it all day long for a good 10 hours or so, ignoring the less bright times of sunrise and sunset.\nSo it's unsurprising that at night, once the sun is gone, the sand is still warm and it will gradually cool over the course of the night.\nBut anyone who goes to the beach will know that beach sand is warm even well after sunset.\nWhat's going on?.\nWell, the first law of thermodynamics, of course.\nThe heating of the sand during the day by the sunlight causes a change in the internal energy of the sand and that is noticeable by a change in temperature of the sand.\nThe heating happens because there is a temperature difference between the sun and the sand.\nThe sunlight has a higher temperature and it heats the sand, which is cooler and it does all this by radiation.\nVery well.\nBright sunlight heats sand, okay, easy.\nSo at night when the sun is gone and it goes dark because the earth is facing away from the sun, the same first law holds.\nAnd the temperature difference between the sand and the cool air and the dark sky now means that the same process has happened but in reverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=493"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8827113a-1322-4abc-b918-2e3ac9f0bff5": {"page_content": "The sunlight has a higher temperature and it heats the sand, which is cooler and it does all this by radiation.\nVery well.\nBright sunlight heats sand, okay, easy.\nSo at night when the sun is gone and it goes dark because the earth is facing away from the sun, the same first law holds.\nAnd the temperature difference between the sand and the cool air and the dark sky now means that the same process has happened but in reverse.\nThe energy gained from the sun is now lost to the atmosphere, which is then lost to our space.\nThe sand heats the air above it and it gradually cools.\nIt gained by the sun during the day is lost by the sand at night.\nAnd this goes on day after day, year after year, year after year, year after year and just as well.\nBecause if it was not the case and there was not this equilibrium, this equality between energy and energy out, if the energy gained by the sand from heating by the sun during the day was not all lost at night by an equal amount each day, then the sand would be hotter the next day and the day after that and the day after that.\nIt wouldn't be long before the sand was so hot, it was glowing red hot.\nBut that doesn't happen.\nThere is a relatively constant temperature of the sand during the day and during the night.\nAll the energy gained on Monday is lost Monday night only to be regained again on Tuesday and lost Tuesday night and so it goes with no net increase of energy by the sand.\nThe quantity of energy gained equals the quantity of energy lost.\nEnergy in equals energy out.\nBefore the energy is accounted for, none is lost from the universe or created from nothing.\nOkay, fine, common sense.\nThat's the quantity of energy.\nWell then, here's the question.\nIf the energy that comes from the sun in the daytime is in the form of UV light which can sunburn you and a visible light which helps you see as well as some other things, then why at night is it not radiated back into outer space as UV light and a visible light?.\nIn fact, it's only irradiated back to outer space, broadly speaking, as infrared radiation.\nSo what's happened to the UV and visible light?.\nIs that all being reflected?.\nNo, it's not all being reflected.\nThe infrared radiation from the sun is not the only kind of radiation from the sun that's absorbed by the sand.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=493"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "df924213-5aaa-4547-8fa8-e6201dd144de": {"page_content": "In fact, it's only irradiated back to outer space, broadly speaking, as infrared radiation.\nSo what's happened to the UV and visible light?.\nIs that all being reflected?.\nNo, it's not all being reflected.\nThe infrared radiation from the sun is not the only kind of radiation from the sun that's absorbed by the sand.\nThe sand, like a human skin, also absorbs UV light and that's coming from the sun during the day.\nWe know we absorb it, we know that skin absorbs UV radiation because we can get sunburned.\nBut if that UV radiation and the visible light is absorbed by the sand, why can't we get sunburned at night as the UV light is re-emitted back into outer space?.\nFor that matter, why doesn't the sand glow with visible light at night so as to return all the visible light energy it absorbed during the day?.\nWell, this is the thing.\nAlthough the quantity of energy is the same, absorbed during the day and emitted at night, the type of energy is not.\nThe energy absorbed during the day is degraded in this process.\nAt night, the high quality stuff, the UV and the visible light, is all of it degraded to a longer wavelength, lower frequency, lower quality, less useful kind of energy.\nAt night, as infrared radiation, that our eyes cannot see, but our skin can feel.\nThe overall quantity of energy re-emitted at night is the same, but the quality has changed.\nIt's been reduced.\nAnd this quality of energy can be quantified as a thing called entropy.\nThe entropy has increased.\nNow I said there, in that account, the energy from the sun becomes less useful as it re-emitted to outer space at night.\nWhat does that mean?.\nWell, here we can turn to some history and Sadie Carnot, another great name from thermodynamics.\nFrom the early 1800s, he looked at how to make engines more efficient.\nFirst story short, I'll just give you the punchline to this bit of science, the efficiency of an engine that converts heat into work.\nIn other words, how much of the heat will be converted into useful work is given by this equation.\nThe efficiency equals one minus the temperature of the sink divided by the temperature of the source.\nSo, you know, here we had the sterling engine going on earlier on, and my cup is the source of energy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=549"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1b7f0a9f-7e5d-4115-afff-20c82131c567": {"page_content": "First story short, I'll just give you the punchline to this bit of science, the efficiency of an engine that converts heat into work.\nIn other words, how much of the heat will be converted into useful work is given by this equation.\nThe efficiency equals one minus the temperature of the sink divided by the temperature of the source.\nSo, you know, here we had the sterling engine going on earlier on, and my cup is the source of energy.\nAnd the sink is the rest of the environment here in my room.\nThis is the formula for maximum efficiency.\nSo today it's like 23 degrees Celsius in here, and my cup is 98 degrees Celsius there.\nBut that's all in Celsius.\nWe need to convert things to Kelvin to get this equation to work.\nSo we've got the temperature of the sink or the environment here is 273 plus 23.\nThat converts it into 296 Kelvin.\nAnd the temperature of the source, well, it's about 98 degrees, that water is not quite boiling, but 273 plus 98 gives me 371 Kelvin.\nNow putting all this into our equation, one minus 296 over 371, that works out to be about 0.2.\n20% isn't that pitiful.\nNow the way to improve this is to have higher temperature of the source, or lower temperature of the sink.\nIdeally, let the sink temperature approach absolute zero, or ideally let the source temperature approaching infinity, but how do you do either of those things?.\nReal life engines run on fuels that burn at particular temperatures.\nReal life sinks are the environment of the earth, which have a fixed temperature as well.\nThe sink, the environment, is why the energy is lost as heat in these situations, and why that energy becomes less useful.\nWe need the sink to push the heat energy away so that the bits continue to move around because we need those temperatures to be as far apart as we can get them in order for the thing to move quickly, to be efficient.\nOr consider it another way, let's imagine a power station.\nHere's a good diagram of a coal fired power station.\nI say this diagram is good because it emphasizes those really important.\nThis thing here, this thing here is the cooling tower.\nWhenever you see pictures of power stations, you see these things, and they usually have water vapor coming out.\nThe environmentalists use those pictures to imply that's the pollution.\nWell, if you think water vapor is pollution, well, that's your business.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7ce04ddc-b187-4f73-b207-335289d392b5": {"page_content": "Here's a good diagram of a coal fired power station.\nI say this diagram is good because it emphasizes those really important.\nThis thing here, this thing here is the cooling tower.\nWhenever you see pictures of power stations, you see these things, and they usually have water vapor coming out.\nThe environmentalists use those pictures to imply that's the pollution.\nWell, if you think water vapor is pollution, well, that's your business.\nThey should be showing the smoke stacks, which are these things.\nProblem is, that the smoke stacks almost never have any visible smoke coming out because modern power stations, coal fired power stations, they filter out the particles.\nThe only thing that's coming out, really, is carbon dioxide.\nBut anyways, why not in a situation like this?.\nIf the power station is doing its job, converting heat to work, why waste the heat coming out here?.\nWhy not capture it?.\nHere.\nWell, just like that.\nWhat about another turbine?.\nThen that can generate some more electricity.\nWhy waste that heat?.\nWhy let it escape off into the atmosphere?.\nSure the hot steam can do less work as it passes through the first turbine, but who cares?.\nLet's capture it anyway.\nWell, the problem is, that means the steam slows down here, slowed down by the second turbine, so things begin to pile up, and it begins to heat up.\nEverything begins to heat up.\nSo for this turbine here, the temperature here, and the temperature here, quickly approach approximately the same, the efficiency reduces.\nThe only reason this is spinning at all, this first turbine, is that the steam is high pressure here, low pressure here, because the lower temperature here.\nSo it's rushing to fill the low temperature void, but if you put another turbine there in an attempt to capture that lost heat, to do work with it, the only thing that happens is this turbine slows down.\nAnd so whatever you think you've gained here with the second turbine, you've lost from the first.\nYou can't actually gain anything.\nAs some people put it with the first law, they say the first law is a statement of how you cannot win.\nIn other words, you cannot get work done for nothing, so sometimes people say that.\nThe first law is, you can't win, the second law is, you can't break even, and the third law is, you'll always lose.\nNot precise, not quantitative.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=434"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e58d39b-dffb-455a-8739-0fd86a3ab6b2": {"page_content": "You can't actually gain anything.\nAs some people put it with the first law, they say the first law is a statement of how you cannot win.\nIn other words, you cannot get work done for nothing, so sometimes people say that.\nThe first law is, you can't win, the second law is, you can't break even, and the third law is, you'll always lose.\nNot precise, not quantitative.\nSo anyways, here we have it that in systems for converting heat to work, the process cannot be perfectly efficient, and some of your work is lost as heat.\nSo you have some heat here, and not all of it becomes work.\nBy necessity, it has to be lost, and that's an irreversible change.\nWe cannot capture that heat out there somehow, and bring it back into our power station.\nDoing so increases the temperature, and in the long run slows down the whole thing grinding it to a halt.\nIf it was an isolated system, the whole power station, what would happen?.\nThermally equilibrium, and that would mean zero motion anywhere.\nNow just to drive this point home a little further, because we did, if you remember the parable of the beach, where I was talking about how, although ultraviolet light and visible light are coming down amongst other things, onto the beach, onto the sand, hitting the sand throughout the course of the day, in the evening, what is re-emitted back into outer space is the same quantity of energy, but not the same quality of energy.\nThe energy has been degraded to longer wavelengths of light, and so ultraviolet light is not coming from the beach during the night time.\nWith the power station, something similar is going on.\nWhat's happening here is that the energy is degraded after it's done some work, so that this heat energy here is of, we say, higher quality.\nBut the heat that's coming out here is of lower quality.\nIt has less capacity to do work.\nAnd remember right at the beginning of all this, I was talking about how energy is that thing, which has the capacity to do work, that's what we said a definition of energy could be.\nHowever, in this case, we have energy that is not quite so capable of doing work.\nAs I said, after all, one thing that the naive person might think is that we could put another turbine right there in order to capture the heat energy coming from the first turbine, and not waste it, after all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=549"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7f085d50-f4ee-4512-8d8b-3343700af19e": {"page_content": "However, in this case, we have energy that is not quite so capable of doing work.\nAs I said, after all, one thing that the naive person might think is that we could put another turbine right there in order to capture the heat energy coming from the first turbine, and not waste it, after all.\nIt's just being let off into the atmosphere there.\nBut as I said, that's merely going to cause the temperature here and the temperature here to eventually equalize.\nAnd if those temperatures are equal, then this thing is going to stop spinning.\nThere's no reason for it to keep going because there's no reason for a pressure differential anymore between this point and that point if the gas in both places is at the same temperature.\nAnd so therefore we say that the energy has been degraded, there has been an increase in entropy.\nThe energy is able to do less work.\nAnd in the limit, the heat energy lost into out of space is actually energy unable to do work.\nPerhaps even in principle, it is unable to do work.\nAnd so then we say, well, what does it mean to say that all energy is this thing that has the capacity to do work when some of it does not have the capacity to do work?.\nWell, it's an interesting scientific philosophical question that we can get into if we originally defined energy as being that thing that could do work in principle.\nBut some of it, after being degraded by the second law, is ultimately unable to do work even in principle?.\nThen what is it?.\nWell, it's still energy of a kind, but it's degraded and unable to do work, and therefore violates what we originally said energy was.\nThis formula of Carnot's for efficiency, it's worth reading what Atkins actually says about it in his book, one of his books.\nAnd he wrote, at control, quote, Carnot's analysis established a very deep property of heat engines, but its conclusion was so alien to the engineering prejudices of the time that it had little impact, such as often the fate of rational thought within society sent as it may be to purgatory for a spell, end quote.\nThat's worth keeping in mind when we think of David and Kiara's work on all this.\nAnyways, this problem of the power station can be summed up in what is known as the Kelvin statement of the second law of thermodynamics, which is no cyclic process is possible in which heat is taken from a hot source and converted completely into work.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=4151"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7687da37-a6b9-4d3c-9102-dce484677b41": {"page_content": "That's worth keeping in mind when we think of David and Kiara's work on all this.\nAnyways, this problem of the power station can be summed up in what is known as the Kelvin statement of the second law of thermodynamics, which is no cyclic process is possible in which heat is taken from a hot source and converted completely into work.\nWhat does that?.\nSomething is said not to be possible, which is a counterfactual claim, the science of cannon can't.\nSo I'll read it again, no cyclic or cyclic process is possible in which heat is taken from a hot source and converted completely into work.\nNow, I really have to go back to Atkins here and just read what he says about this and about cold sinks, quote, there must be a cold sink, even though we might find it hard to identify and it is not always an engineered part of the design.\nThe cooling towers of a generating station are, in this sense, far more important to its operation than the complex turbines or the expensive nuclear reactor that seems to drive them end.\nquote.\nYes, sir, the heat sink is a crucially important part of these thermodynamic systems so that you can have this transfer of energy from the hot to the cold, which is the thing that does the work.\nThere's another way of putting the second law and it's kind of inconvenient that there are this variety of ways of putting things qualitatively speaking, but quantitatively it turns out that can be shown to be equivalent.\nThe other way of putting the second law is known as their classiest statement of the second law, which goes like this, the change in entropy equals the heat supplied reversibly divided by the temperature.\nBasically, entropy is disorder, a gas has got high entropy, a solid being all ordered and crystal-like has low entropy, all the particles are there lined up like soldiers standing in attention.\nA change in entropy is a ratio of energy and jewels of heat transferred to the temperature in Kelvin.\nSo the units of entropy are jewels per Kelvin.\nAnd so yet another way of putting the second law is that the entropy of the universe increases in the course of any spontaneous change, and this is what Paul Davies makes a big deal about and what many physicists make a big deal about, you've got this, irrevocable increase in the entropy of the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=4282"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "96e1257d-1201-4d2a-b81a-32936be8feba": {"page_content": "A change in entropy is a ratio of energy and jewels of heat transferred to the temperature in Kelvin.\nSo the units of entropy are jewels per Kelvin.\nAnd so yet another way of putting the second law is that the entropy of the universe increases in the course of any spontaneous change, and this is what Paul Davies makes a big deal about and what many physicists make a big deal about, you've got this, irrevocable increase in the entropy of the universe.\nIn other words, the system and the surroundings is what we mean by the universe, so whatever change is going on and the rest of the universe, so that's the universe.\nSo this leads us to misconceptions.\nThe system, all the surroundings can have a decrease, a local decrease in entropy.\nFor example, biology is a highly ordered thing, a biological system is a highly ordered, and so this leads these misconceptions where people try to, I don't think they do it so much anymore, but creationists, intelligent designers, just say things like, well, we've got this law of thermodynamics that says that entropy must always increase, but biology is a thing that violates that, and after all, biology is a decrease in entropy, therefore miracle.\nNo, of course not, okay, you can have a local decrease in entropy.\nThat's what a fridge does, by the way.\nIt cools things and you have a decrease in entropy inside the fridge, but it is expelling entropy and increase of entropy to the rest of the universe, same to with biology.\nThe sun is shining on the earth and heating the earth and causing all sorts of increases in entropy everywhere else, even if locally with the knowledge being created inside of organisms, you have a decrease in entropy there in the organism, but the organism is causing an increase of entropy in the rest of the universe.\nWe can go right down that rabbit hole with entropy.\nIt's all very interesting and subtle and so forth, but this is already a super long episode.\nI might leave the technical discussion of disorder, exactly, but it's probably worth going over.\nIt is worth going over, at least a more precise definition of entropy or understanding of entropy, as I like to say, rather than definition, in terms of what's happening with the particles.\nSo let's consider particles at a fixed temperature.\nAnd remember what a particular temperature means.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1172"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2dc3a05-7b93-4d5d-b507-1089be89b2f5": {"page_content": "It's all very interesting and subtle and so forth, but this is already a super long episode.\nI might leave the technical discussion of disorder, exactly, but it's probably worth going over.\nIt is worth going over, at least a more precise definition of entropy or understanding of entropy, as I like to say, rather than definition, in terms of what's happening with the particles.\nSo let's consider particles at a fixed temperature.\nAnd remember what a particular temperature means.\nIt means that the particles have a distribution of energies and that distribution is called the Boltzmann distribution of the energy of the particles over the allowed energy levels at a given temperature.\nNow here's the thing about energy levels.\nFor a given volume of space, they're different to other volumes of space.\nThere are fewer permitted states or energies that some collection of particles can have in a smaller volume.\nYou can imagine a microscopic box like this one, and in that microscopic box, only certain energies are allowed, according to the laws of quantum physics, that's just the way it is.\nDon't get upset.\nThe universe is discrete in that way.\nYou can't just have any energy that you like.\nYou can have this energy, all that energy, all that energy, but not just any energy in between these.\nSo let's say we have this tiny, tiny box, let's say this is the scale.\nAnd these are more particles in this box at some temperature.\nAnd let's say that's 100 Kelvin, tiny little box there.\nAnd there's your particles and they're the energies that they have.\nThis is the ground state, so to speak, and on the minimum energy, although out to this is the particle with the highest energy.\nAnd there are what?.\nOne, two, three, four, five, six energy levels here, permitted inside of that box, at that particular temperature.\nNow, the thing is, that volume of space accommodates those certain energy levels.\nThey are the energy levels permitted by particles in that volume.\nBut what if we increase the volume of the box by widening it, keeping the temperature the same?.\nWell, this is what happens to the energy levels.\nYou see, they then become closer together.\nSo now, instead of only having six energy levels, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, we can have more.\nAnd so the particles distribute themselves across more energy levels.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=937"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "530dca71-b00e-4137-9a88-53a35e26e7d5": {"page_content": "But what if we increase the volume of the box by widening it, keeping the temperature the same?.\nWell, this is what happens to the energy levels.\nYou see, they then become closer together.\nSo now, instead of only having six energy levels, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, we can have more.\nAnd so the particles distribute themselves across more energy levels.\nThe energy levels get closer together, more permitted in this box.\nThat's because the box is larger.\nSo the Boltzmann distribution spans more energy levels at the same temperature.\nSo we have a different entropy.\nWhat is ordered simply by virtue of the fact there are more energy levels permitted in a larger region of space.\nOr another way of putting this is to say if we were to randomly select a particle from the first box with the aim of getting it from the first level, the chance of getting our random particle from that first level in the second box is lower in comparison, because there are fewer there.\nAs Atkins puts it, quote, the disorder and the entropy increase as gas occupiers are greater volume at the same temperature, end quote, which is right for people to consider everyone squashed into a classroom.\nThat's all quite ordered.\nNow you'll let them out into the playground, disordered, just the completion of the technical stuff, the formula normally taught for entropy is this one, which is the entropy s is equal to k log.\nw. He cays the Boltmann constant just as before, and it appears in our definition of temperature as well.\nBut here w is not the work, but it's the weight of arrangement of particles.\nThe ways the particles can be arranged to achieve some amount of energy.\nBut anyways, that's the formula for total entropy.\nNow all of that is second law.\nAnd we're going to talk about that again in the next episode, and a little bit more before the end of this episode, but we really have to go on and just mention without going into too much detail, the third law of thermodynamics and the third law of thermodynamics and its states that the entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature of the system approaches absolute zero.\nSo different substances, different systems will have different minimum entropies, but that great amount of order will be achieved at absolute zero.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51b300df-09df-4006-a85f-0a58b7af5787": {"page_content": "So different substances, different systems will have different minimum entropies, but that great amount of order will be achieved at absolute zero.\nSo you'll end up having a constant value at the minimum possible temperature, but I'm not going to get hooked on the third law of thermodynamics.\nSo before I finish up today and well done for persevering, I have to go, as I promised to Paul Davies' latest book and the chapter, all about times puzzling arrow.\nDavies writes in his latest book, quote, I'm not reading the entire chapter just a part of it, quote, boiled down to its essentials.\nThe issue with times arrow is this, imagine taking a movie of an everyday incident and playing it in reverse to an audience, everybody laughs because it looks so preposterous.\nPeople walking backwards, rivers flowing uphill, sand castles washed into shape by retreating waves.\nBut in physics, a laugh test isn't enough.\nWhat exactly gives the game away?.\nHere's a clue.\nOpen a new pack of cards, the manufacturers arrange them in numerical order by suit, shuffle the cards.\nThe sequence will now be jumbled.\nIf a magician shuffled a pack of jumbled cards and gave them to you in numerical order, you'd know you were being duped while it's not impossible for jumbled cards to be randomly shuffled into order.\nIt's exceedingly improbable.\nThe arrow of time here is clear, random disruption turns order into disorder.\nScientists zeroed in on this basic property in the middle of the 19th century.\nThe Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, considered how gas molecules rush around randomly banging into each other and spreading heat energy around.\nHe analyzed this natural shuffling mathematically and identified something called entropy, a precisely defined quantity that measures the degree of disorder in the gas.\nThen he used Newton's laws of mechanics plus an averaging assumption to prove that entropy would never go down.\nThe rise and rise of entropy is one expression of the so-called second law of thermodynamics, perhaps the most inclusive law in all of physics.\nBecause what's true of gases is true of everything.\nAll systems have a natural tendency to grow messier, to degenerate and decay, just skipping a little.\nI'm picking it up where he writes, understanding the cosmic implications of all this, the British physicist, Lord Kelvin, delivered a lecture in 1852, famous for it has to be the most depressing prediction in the history of science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=3255"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a7b7ca41-1108-48e9-913a-1343652a4d11": {"page_content": "Because what's true of gases is true of everything.\nAll systems have a natural tendency to grow messier, to degenerate and decay, just skipping a little.\nI'm picking it up where he writes, understanding the cosmic implications of all this, the British physicist, Lord Kelvin, delivered a lecture in 1852, famous for it has to be the most depressing prediction in the history of science.\nThe entire universe, claimed Kelvin, is dying, slowly choking on its own entropy.\nGradually, inexorably, cosmos is turning into chaos, and then babies goes on to say.\nIf the relentless march of disorder defines the arrow of time, then the universe must have been more ordered in the past.\nIndeed, it was, as I have been at pains to point out, the universe that emerged from the Big Bang was astonishingly, bafflingly, extremely highly ordered.\nHad it been exactly ordered, the arrow of time would have stalled, because perfection persists.\nIt would have been a case of blandness forever.\nGravity would have nothing to get its teeth into.\nBut of course, the nascent universe wasn't 100% perfect.\nThere were those ever-slides, wispy spludges found by Coby, I mean, 0.01% variation in temperature far below what the human senses would register, posing as my reflection.\nCoby is the cosmic microwave background explorer.\nIt is the satellite, here it is, it looks like this.\nFirst credited with detecting these so-called anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background.\nThese anisotropies are fluctuations in the temperature.\nObviously, we thought that the cosmic microwave background, the heat left over from the Big Bang, was extremely uniform, 2.7 Kelvin.\nThat's just above absolute zero.\nBut uniform in all directions, so exactly 2.7 Kelvin, everywhere that you looked, unless you take extremely precise measurements, with a microwave detecting satellite far above the atmosphere over the earth.\nSo the first images that came back looked kind of like this.\nThis is an anisotropy, it's a dipole, in fact.\nHere it's slightly warmer, here it's slightly cooler.\nNow the reason for this, it's an artifact, it's an artifact of the fact that we are moving through the galaxy.\nIn fact, the galaxy is moving through space, so that can be subtracted from the image, and you end up with something like this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=4199"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95d61ceb-e0b1-47d4-ab21-bc45e23b92bb": {"page_content": "So the first images that came back looked kind of like this.\nThis is an anisotropy, it's a dipole, in fact.\nHere it's slightly warmer, here it's slightly cooler.\nNow the reason for this, it's an artifact, it's an artifact of the fact that we are moving through the galaxy.\nIn fact, the galaxy is moving through space, so that can be subtracted from the image, and you end up with something like this.\nAnd that red band through the middle there, well, that should look familiar, that's the Milky Way, and that can be subtracted out of the image as well, using image processing.\nAnd finally, you end up with the image that everyone was after, which is this, the first image of the cosmic microwave background, showing the slightly warmer and slightly cooler regions, the slightly cooler regions are the slightly more dense regions, which eventually go on to condense into the matter out of which everything that we see in the universe is made.\nSo all the galaxies end up condensing out of these slightly more dense regions, and those warmer regions are the voids in between where clusters of galaxies and so on and so forth are.\nIt was the first satellite that detected evidence of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the heat left over after the big bang, the person given the Nobel Prize for Physics for finding this was George Smoot.\nHis student was his graduate student who I think was the first one to really analyze the data.\nAnd then handed data to Smoot was Charlie Lionweaver, that famous physicist I often talk about, who also works with, has worked with Paul Davies, taught me as well, he was one of my lecturers.\nSo yes, I heard a lot about Kobe during and those stories about Kobe during lectures.\nAnyway, continuing, spludges his talk about, spludges in the images, take a my Kobe, and Davies goes on to write, quote, the splotches betray a minute departure from orderly perfection, a pellet of almost imperceptible density perturbations in the primordial plasma.\nGravity set to work on the spludges, the overdense regions pulled more strongly, drawing in on the surrounding material and amplifying the density contrast, generating large scale complexity, clusters of galaxies churning clouds of gas and meandering stars, clumping, is gravity's gift to cosmos, and I'm skipping apart here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=1001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e89739c6-bbd5-4f34-beee-515f962a017a": {"page_content": "Gravity set to work on the spludges, the overdense regions pulled more strongly, drawing in on the surrounding material and amplifying the density contrast, generating large scale complexity, clusters of galaxies churning clouds of gas and meandering stars, clumping, is gravity's gift to cosmos, and I'm skipping apart here.\nand I'll pick it up where Davies concludes with, thus it is that gravity, the incubator and annihilator of habitable order, is also the source of times pervasive arrow, the time asymmetry that distinguishes yesterday from tomorrow, memories from anticipation birth from death can be traced back to the birth of the universe itself, and specifically to its extraordinary degree of primordial smoothness.\nBut where did that smoothness come from in the first place?.\nDo we just accept it as an unexplained initial condition, a big fix?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=5130"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f7b508de-32dd-4c5f-84eb-a5aee37d4807": {"page_content": "One possible explanation is that an appeal to the tiny violation of time reversal symmetry in certain hard to discern particle processes, did the very particles of the universe themselves come with their own in-built arrow, which somehow projected itself onto the entire cosmos, in the turret aftermath of the Big Bang, maybe, but in my view, not very likely, far and away the most popular explanation for the smooth start to the universe is the inflationary scenario, a burst of antigravity, propelled expansion in the first split second, creates precisely that almost, they're not quite perfect uniformity, but that's still not the end of the trail because the universe has to get itself into an inflationary state of the outset.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=5179"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "df6e8375-5992-4d5d-815f-cc3da410c722": {"page_content": "How did that come about?.\nThe scientific community is still very far from reaching consensus on these thorny issues, all that can be said for certain is that one of the most fundamental properties of the physical world that tomorrow is different from today, still lacks a full explanation, and it lies high on my own list of essential unanswered big questions.\nSo that's Davies.\nNow, the question is, if so many other approaches to trying to understand the origins of this second law have hitherto not borne truth, neither from quantum theory nor general relativity nor string theory, maybe construct a theory has something to add, key, and it does.\nThat's where we will leave it today so that next time I can get straight into readings from the book itself, actual readings from the sides of Canada, so even though this is misleadingly titled, something to do with the science of Canada, we didn't actually get 20 readings.\nUntil next time, bye-bye, oh and one thing, oh my god, personal appeal, if you'd like to support this enterprise for, want to have another word to describe it, see my Patreon or PayPal.\nThe links are there on my website here at www.brejo.org, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEUF3QGg-nw&t=3255"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5324ecfe-8ace-4e0a-a15e-062300b3e95d": {"page_content": "We choose to go to the moon and dislocate and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.\nBecause that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.\nBecause that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others too.\nOn that Cape Canaveral, this is Kennedy Space Centre.\nPerhaps now the place on Earth has quite the level of optimism as this place is demonstrated over the years.\nProblems are soluble.\nAnd although at times there have been the steps in the exploration of the cosmos, people have lost their lives, there have been terrible errors that have been made, those errors typically have been corrected.\nIf we persevere, if we continue, if we recognise that although problems are inevitable, they are always soluble, then the next step won't merely be the moon or Mars, it will be the stars.\nWelcome to ToKCast and my latest in the series on the beginning of infinity.\nThis has to be very close to my favourite chapter in the book.\nI've only recently arrived home from a visit to the United States.\nHence, yeah, sure.\nIt's been a long time since I've actually been there, but it was positively buzzing just the way I remembered it.\nIt's really optimistic, it's got this aroma of optimism about it in a way that I guess the locals have probably become accustomed to.\nThings are tall and bright and industrious and diverse, but it's all very wonderful.\nThis optimism is etched into its history so deeply.\nWhen I say that, I'm kind of comparing it to places that maybe I'm biased in having visited recently areas of Europe and Asia and of course Australia, and speaking of which, speaking of Australia, these surrounds, they aren't really setting the tone for the brightness.\nThat is this chapter and the optimism that is this chapter.\nI think I know of somewhere better.\nNow, I first started preparing to read through this chapter and to make comments on it around the time that Avengers Endgame, the last big Marvel superhero movie came out, and also around the time the final episodes of Game of Thrones were aired.\nBut actually, I've kind of been more excited about this episode than either of those things because it's chapter 9.\nAnd chapter 9 is optimism.\nI don't know if David did this by design, but being chapter 9, this places optimism right in the center of the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2690313-605c-48ee-85ae-cf27376eb44e": {"page_content": "But actually, I've kind of been more excited about this episode than either of those things because it's chapter 9.\nAnd chapter 9 is optimism.\nI don't know if David did this by design, but being chapter 9, this places optimism right in the center of the book.\nAt the end of this chapter, we will have covered exactly one half in terms of the number of chapters of the beginning of Infinity.\nThe optimism in this chapter is unique.\nNow, they have been physicists who have noticed before that, which is not prohibited by the laws of physics, must be possible.\nBut David has developed this into a genuine worldview that has infinite rich into every single domain of inquiry.\nIt doesn't matter the subject, problems are soluble.\nNow, I mentioned the Avengers movie Endgame, probably the biggest movie of this year, certainly in terms of cost it will be.\nActually, in that movie, we hear about the Deutsch proposition.\nNow, I don't know what the Deutsch proposition is, and I don't think David does either.\nI'd like to know what the script writers were thinking, but for our age, actually, something more along the lines of Deutsch in optimism in chapter 9 could certainly serve as the Deutsch proposition.\nMaybe something like the couplet problems are soluble, problems are inevitable.\nOr indeed, he is principle of optimism.\nHe is definition of what optimism is, being that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge.\nOptimism is the rational stance, given our ability to create knowledge.\nIt's tied to this problem-solving attitude and placing the problem at the heart of epistemology rather than the chimera of justification.\nOptimism is also connected to physics because problems are soluble because solutions found are physically possible transformations that allow us to overcome the obstacle that we've called a problem.\nThese transformations are possible because they begin as computations.\nCreations in the minds of universal explainers, people.\nSo here we have chapter 9 connected to the beginning of the beginning of infinity, how explanations are what transform the world and how these explanations are about what is physically possible.\nIn many cases, actually, what is prohibited.\nWhat is physically not possible when it comes to physics, morality, and so forth.\nOptimism is about wealth creation and the conditions under which decisions are best made to achieve outcomes that do not entrench error.\nYou can see the chapter on choices for that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=151"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8b51b63-3d8e-4435-bea7-77ba35a477a8": {"page_content": "So here we have chapter 9 connected to the beginning of the beginning of infinity, how explanations are what transform the world and how these explanations are about what is physically possible.\nIn many cases, actually, what is prohibited.\nWhat is physically not possible when it comes to physics, morality, and so forth.\nOptimism is about wealth creation and the conditions under which decisions are best made to achieve outcomes that do not entrench error.\nYou can see the chapter on choices for that.\nOptimism is about the connection between epistemology or abstract knowledge creation and physical resources.\nAnd we're going to see that in the chapter on unsustainable.\nOptimism does not say that it will be done.\nIt says it can be done.\nAnd what it is, is to solve our actual problems.\nTo do this takes resources.\nAnd to know that a resource even is a resource takes knowledge.\nTo extract the resources and then use them to create more knowledge takes wealth.\nAnd so the cycle leading to progress continues.\nChapter 9, Optimism.\nThe possibilities that lie in the future are infinite.\nWhen I say it is our duty to remain optimists, this includes not only the openness of the future, but also that, which all of us contribute to it by everything we do.\nWe are all responsible for what the future holds in store.\nThus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil, but rather to fight for a better world.\nCarl Popper, myth of the framework, 1984.\nMartin Reese suspects that our civilization was lucky to survive the 20th century.\nFor throughout the Cold War, there was always a possibility that another world war would break out.\nThis time fought with hydrogen bombs, and that civilization would be destroyed.\nThat danger seems to have receded.\nBut in Reese's book, Our Final Century, published in 2003, he came to the worrying conclusion that civilization now had a 50% chance of surviving the 21st century.\nSo I'll pause almost immediately to remark that this chapter could be read alongside the discussion that Reese and Deutsch had at the Royal Society for the encouragement of arts, manufacturing, commerce, or the RSA as they called themselves.\nWhat was illuminating in that discussion was the questions that were asked as well as the discussion between Reese and Deutsch.\nSo I wouldn't say that pessimism is merely connected to or even intimately tied up with bad ideas like authoritarianism, anti-humanism, a coercion.\nIt's not merely intimately connected with these things.\nIt is at a deeper level of explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=260"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1eb502ee-adb0-411f-b040-7e11df08dd90": {"page_content": "What was illuminating in that discussion was the questions that were asked as well as the discussion between Reese and Deutsch.\nSo I wouldn't say that pessimism is merely connected to or even intimately tied up with bad ideas like authoritarianism, anti-humanism, a coercion.\nIt's not merely intimately connected with these things.\nIt is at a deeper level of explanation.\nIt's a more fundamental mistake than those others.\nThose others are derivative of pessimism.\nPessimism is the heart of these bad ideas.\nThey're motivating.\nIt is motivating these other bad ideas as well.\nPessimism is about all sorts of things, not just about humans, about knowledge, about technology.\nIn the discussion between Reese and Deutsch, a number of people asked about the inequality that comes with technology.\nThis is really part of the cultural discussion at the moment about how certain people in Silicon Valley have just so much money and so much power that really we need to start thinking about ways in which government can intervene because otherwise, these people are going to have too much power.\nPerhaps they already have too much power.\nAnd so the concern there is that technology breeds inequality.\nAnd of course, we always assume in these discussions don't leave that inequality is bad.\nBut that's just assumed that we don't go any deeper because the discussion rarely moves beyond the idea that inequality simply is bad on its face.\nThat's an assumption, that's a premise we begin with.\nAnd of course, if you begin with that assumption then you're led to all sorts of weird conclusions.\nRather than thinking that inequality is actually a good thing that it is a sign that people are pursuing their own interests to the degree that they can and the degree that they want to.\nSo when people think they've seen something like inequality being magnified or amplified by something like technology, then they call for things like redistribution by call for force, Martin recent that discussion explicitly calls for redistribution.\nOthers just saw inequality as a bad thing.\nAnd if you watch that discussion, you can hear one question and ask a question.\nWell, it's actually more of a very long statement actually.\nThere was no question mark at the end of it.\nBut I thought it contained a very important insight.\nand she observed that far from technology increasing inequality, technology, like say smartphones, has given billions of people worldwide among some of the poorest people in the world access to information like never before.\nIt really does level the playing field.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=389"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0b7e9d1a-4edb-4a83-a595-79d78dc8ecb8": {"page_content": "And if you watch that discussion, you can hear one question and ask a question.\nWell, it's actually more of a very long statement actually.\nThere was no question mark at the end of it.\nBut I thought it contained a very important insight.\nand she observed that far from technology increasing inequality, technology, like say smartphones, has given billions of people worldwide among some of the poorest people in the world access to information like never before.\nIt really does level the playing field.\nAnd yes, if you provide value to billions of people around the world, it's not surprising that you become a billionaire.\nBut in doing so, you've helped so many people.\nYou've actually leveled the playing field.\nThe reason that people have smartphones in the third world now or what used to be called the third world is because they have sufficient wealth to purchase those smartphones.\nAnd those smartphones are worth more to them than what they would otherwise have done with that money.\nThis is a wonderful thing.\nThis is a glorious thing that really we should be praising.\nBut this is another fracture point between optimists who are so scarce, so rare as to be one way to put them on the endangered species list and the pessimists who are common.\nThe fracture point is, what do you think when you look at our situation with technology?.\nWhen you stand back and you assess what's going on?.\nDo you think, no, this is terrible.\nSome people are getting too powerful and too wealthy.\nThis technology, Apple, is getting too powerful.\nGoogle is getting too powerful.\nFacebook is getting too powerful.\nIs that what you're concentrating on?.\nIs that what you're focusing on?.\nAre you focused on the few individuals at the top of these companies who happen to have a lot of wealth?.\nAnd who are gaining a lot of wealth?.\nOr are you focused on the great good that has been done by these companies for so many people around the world?.\nAnd that if you look ahead, there's great openness.\nOr do you see a dystopia where these people, these Machiavellian, Mr. Burns like a ring in their hands, thinking about all the ways in which they can use their power to corrupt all of society?.\nIndeed, we've seen recently that there are all sorts of reasons to disagree with the politics of the people in Silicon Valley.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c1a8a705-016f-4606-a189-96eb6c85e132": {"page_content": "And that if you look ahead, there's great openness.\nOr do you see a dystopia where these people, these Machiavellian, Mr. Burns like a ring in their hands, thinking about all the ways in which they can use their power to corrupt all of society?.\nIndeed, we've seen recently that there are all sorts of reasons to disagree with the politics of the people in Silicon Valley.\nBut the way in which to combat bad ideas is with good ideas, not with force, optimism says that we can create knowledge in order to overcome the evils in society.\nAnd so those evils are simply bad political ideas, which many of the people at the top of Silicon Valley indeed have.\nAnd do you think when you see massive amounts of wealth created, created mind you, not taken from somewhere else, created, created through knowledge, instantiated in technology, and then sold to billions of people around the world because those billions of people see it as such a benefit.\nDo you think to yourself, let us confiscate that wealth?.\nThat wealth concentrated in the hands of a few is dangerous.\nOr do you think what a wonderful thing that these companies can now go ahead and make even better products in the future?.\nBecause if they don't, they're going to go the way of so many companies prior to them, which go out of business.\nI think it's a really entertaining and informative discussion of the RSA discussion on optimism between Deutsch and Reese.\nAnd if you're reading this chapter, it's a wonderful adjunct to add to your understanding of what David writes about here.\nSo David has just said of Reese that Reese calculated there was only a 50% chance of surviving the 21st century and David goes on writing.\nAgain, this was because of the danger that newly created knowledge would have catastrophic consequences.\nFor example, restarted likely that civilization-destroying weapons, particularly biological ones, would soon become so easy to make that terrorist organizations, or even malevolent individuals, could not be prevented from acquiring them.\nHe also feared accidental catastrophes, such as the escape of genetically modified microorganisms for a real laboratory, resulting in a pandemic of an incurable disease.\nIntelligent robots and nanotechnology, engineering on an atomic scale, could in the long run be even more threatening he wrote.\nAnd it is not inconceivable that physics could be dangerous too.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=633"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5a58fbc7-7a5e-4a03-acb9-a19688796f4f": {"page_content": "He also feared accidental catastrophes, such as the escape of genetically modified microorganisms for a real laboratory, resulting in a pandemic of an incurable disease.\nIntelligent robots and nanotechnology, engineering on an atomic scale, could in the long run be even more threatening he wrote.\nAnd it is not inconceivable that physics could be dangerous too.\nFor instance, it has been suggested that elementary particle accelerators that briefly create the conditions that are in some respects more extreme than any since the Big Bang might destabilize the very vacuum of space and destroy our entire universe.\nReese pointed out that for his conclusion to hold, it's not necessary for any one of those catastrophes to be at all probable because we need to be unlucky only once.\nAnd we incur the risk of fresh every time progress is made in a variety of fields.\nHe compared this with playing Russian roulette.\nOur pause there.\nIn this chapter, David concentrates on two great public intellectuals.\nOne is Martin Reese, the astronomer Royal.\nThey fantastically accomplished astronomer, physicist, scientist, public intellectual.\nThe other is Thomas Malthus, who many great public intellectuals today turn to to talk about.\nBut really, there are a smorgasbord of public intellectuals that David might have talked about.\nMany of my own intellectual heroes.\nPeople like Sam Harris or Douglas Murray.\nAlmost anyone has written a nonfiction book in the last 20 years.\nAnyone with a podcast.\nPerhaps my favourite of all of the great pessimists of the 20th and 21st century is of course Nick Bostrim.\nNow, Nick Bostrim doesn't use Russian roulette.\nHe's not even pulling rabbits out of hats, but he is pulling balls out of urns.\nAnd he compares human creativity to pulling a ball out of an urn.\nAnd so far, we've been pulling useful balls out of the urn.\nAnd sometimes the useful ball that comes out of the urn can have good and bad applications.\nBut what he's very worried about is the black ball.\nThe black ball that might be pulled out of the urn, the black ball, according to Bostrim, is a technology that is just so nefarious that there is an upside.\nAnd it will destroy the civilization which pulls it out of the urn.\nIf you want a summary of Bostrim's ideas, you can just Google him and go to his own website.\nHe's written many books that concentrate on uber pessimism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=758"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "52da2eb3-6b61-4010-bc42-502394c636f5": {"page_content": "But what he's very worried about is the black ball.\nThe black ball that might be pulled out of the urn, the black ball, according to Bostrim, is a technology that is just so nefarious that there is an upside.\nAnd it will destroy the civilization which pulls it out of the urn.\nIf you want a summary of Bostrim's ideas, you can just Google him and go to his own website.\nHe's written many books that concentrate on uber pessimism.\nPessimism that talks about existential risk, the end of the future.\nSo he's very animated about Sam Harris, had him on the podcast earlier in 2019.\nA very good interview.\nA very great insight into just how deep pessimism can go.\nThey talked about all sorts of things.\nOne thing that just to speak to what David has mentioned there, all these different things that could go wrong.\nAnd that people are worried about.\nBostrim's worried about rather the same things that they're worried about, which is what Harris is worried about, and Harrison Bostrim agreed with each other.\nFor example, in the future, we might have something like, everyone might have their own 3D printer, where you can 3D print rather CRISPR style, your own biological add-ons, in order to fix up your own genetic code when it starts to go wrong at the time.\nAnd what Harris was really worried about, and Bostrim agreed, was that with such a technology where everyone at home can just 3D print their own biological organisms or biological fixes to problems that go wrong, it could also be used for evil.\nAnd so you only need one person out of the billions that are on earth who decide to use this technology for evil that could kill millions or perhaps billions of people.\nMaybe they could genetically engineer in their home 3D biological printer.\nThe virus that will be as easily spread as the common cold, but more virulent than any virus we've ever encountered before, a virus that will be more deadly than any virus we've encountered before.\nAnd they both agreed that this was a terrible existential risk.\nWhat confused me is, why is it that the same 3D printing technology can't also be used to print the QR for that particular virus?.\nIf with that advance that we're printing viruses, then we're also printing the T cells that can attack the viruses.\nAnd so David writes, but there is a crucial difference between the human condition and Russian roulette.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=881"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d543194-7df3-441c-9f9f-988fb85a533f": {"page_content": "And they both agreed that this was a terrible existential risk.\nWhat confused me is, why is it that the same 3D printing technology can't also be used to print the QR for that particular virus?.\nIf with that advance that we're printing viruses, then we're also printing the T cells that can attack the viruses.\nAnd so David writes, but there is a crucial difference between the human condition and Russian roulette.\nBut the probability of winning at Russian roulette is unaffected by anything that the player may think or do.\nWithin its rules, it is a game of pure charts.\nIn contrast, the future of civilization depends entirely on what we think and do.\nIf civilization falls, that will not be something that just happens to us.\nIt will be the outcome of choices that people make.\nIf civilization survives, that will be because people succeed in solving the problems of survival.\nAnd that too will not have happened by charts.\nSo I'll pause here.\nAnd I want to take a, I won't say a deep dive, a shallow dive into some of the work of Nick Bostrom on this.\nIf there's anyone, as I think I've hinted at, who can compete with Martin Reese for a rationally minded super pessimist, it will be Nick Bostrom.\nBostrom has a number of different theses about how the world's going to end or civilization might end, or all of humanity will destroy itself, or will be destroyed, and so on and so forth.\nOne of his latest papers on this is called the vulnerable world hypothesis.\nNow when I look at Nick Bostrom's page, as interesting as it is, like his book super intelligence that I've written in extensive critique of, I find it to be, this isn't supposed to be just purely pejorative.\nIt is genuinely the sense that I get him in reading some of his stuff.\nSuper intelligence was very much like this.\nIt read to me like a science fiction novel.\nIt seemed to me to just ignore reality in so many ways.\nIt certainly ignored the ways in which we know knowledge is created.\nAnd so if you ignore certain things about how epistemology actually works, how physics actually works, then yes, some of his conclusions follow.\nFollow from false epistemology, follow from physics that we don't operate within.\nSo to be specific, he is a strong proponent for Bayesianism.\nHe believes in inductive reasoning.\nThat given the past, you can predict the future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1000"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "efffab01-2c7f-4b5f-9f1f-aef6d170cd7e": {"page_content": "It certainly ignored the ways in which we know knowledge is created.\nAnd so if you ignore certain things about how epistemology actually works, how physics actually works, then yes, some of his conclusions follow.\nFollow from false epistemology, follow from physics that we don't operate within.\nSo to be specific, he is a strong proponent for Bayesianism.\nHe believes in inductive reasoning.\nThat given the past, you can predict the future.\nWe know this is false.\nThe future looks nothing like the past.\nWhatever has happened previously is not guaranteed to happen tomorrow.\nIf you'd like to know more about this, just google my name, Brett Hall, and induction.\nAnd on Google, and it will bring up an article of mine about induction.\nOr, of course, go to the fabric of reality by David Deutsch, and read the sections there on induction.\nOr, go to Popper, and he wanted his works about induction objective knowledge is a good one.\nNow, because Boston is someone who likes to prophesy the future and likes to use inductive type reasoning in an attempt to do so, of course he can't actually do this.\nThere's no such thing as inductive reasoning.\nSo you cannot, you cannot validly predict the future given the current state of events.\nWhat you can do is to take a good explanation, something like Newton's laws, and predict the evolution of a simple physical system over time.\nThat's actual prediction.\nYou can take a good explanation of the laws we understand chemistry operates under.\nWe might say that given a good explanation, for example, an acid plus a base, when combined together, we'll typically give you a salt plus water.\nAnd so if we have a special case, if I take a hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, and I mix these two things together, my prediction will be, based on that good explanation about how these two chemicals acid and base react together.\nI can predict that given those particular examples of acid and base, I will get sodium chloride plus water.\nThis happens because there is a fundamental principle that we're operating within, a good scientific explanation about how certain chemical reactions work.\nThis is not the kind of thing that Nick Bostrum ever has.\nWhat Nick Bostrum has, what Martin Reese has, what any of the great pessimistic profits of our time have are wild guesses.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1130"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4e7e8eee-cad9-4e23-a43d-a7b83b1cf9d5": {"page_content": "I can predict that given those particular examples of acid and base, I will get sodium chloride plus water.\nThis happens because there is a fundamental principle that we're operating within, a good scientific explanation about how certain chemical reactions work.\nThis is not the kind of thing that Nick Bostrum ever has.\nWhat Nick Bostrum has, what Martin Reese has, what any of the great pessimistic profits of our time have are wild guesses.\nWild guesses about the ways in which, if people choose to do nothing, or choose to do the wrong thing, that calamities will ensue.\nThat catastrophe will follow.\nBut this is not prediction.\nThis is prophecy.\nThis is assuming the worst, the worst will happen.\nBut why worry?.\nWhy worry about what the Martin Reese's and Nick Bostrum's of the world, prophesy?.\nWell, because lots of people listen.\nLots of people listen.\nI guess there's a few sociological factors involved here, psychological factors.\nMy own pet theory is that people like watching disaster movies.\nReally, we get excited by the great asteroid that's heading towards the city, or the virus that is taking over the world, or the aliens that have come to wreak havoc upon humanity.\nIt's exciting to think, you know, what might happen during such a situation.\nThese are ways in which we entertain ourselves.\nAnd just because you, I don't know, have a philosophy degree, or you have a serious podcast, doesn't mean you're immune from that kind of entertainment.\nYou may not want to spend your time talking about the movie, the War of the Worlds, you know, no one will take that seriously, or deep impact or terminator, but it could be fun to talk to our philosopher who basically believes in the reality of all of those kinds of things, and how they're going to happen and has written papers on it with equations and mathematics to try and convince people that, yes, the worst is coming.\nThere's a market for this kind of idea.\nBut how seriously should we take these things?.\nNot only how seriously should we take them, what are the alternatives?.\nWell, let's just drill down on, we'll just pick two of OK, three.\nWe'll pick three of Bostrom's ideas.\nFirstly, super intelligence that I've been very animated about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1257"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "810d757e-bfa4-47f3-b1aa-2c098db5f7c0": {"page_content": "There's a market for this kind of idea.\nBut how seriously should we take these things?.\nNot only how seriously should we take them, what are the alternatives?.\nWell, let's just drill down on, we'll just pick two of OK, three.\nWe'll pick three of Bostrom's ideas.\nFirstly, super intelligence that I've been very animated about.\nHis thesis here is that systems can be created, such that they're better at us at thinking in every single domain that they will take over the world, and they might, for example, turn the world into paperclips.\nThis is one idea.\nAnd Sam Harris puts it as, you can simply imagine a system like we have today that is better at every single human applying chess, or better at playing the go game, or better at driving than any human can, or better at shooting a gun that any human can.\nI say, OK, so iterate for every single capacity that we can program.\nThen you have a system that is, by definition, better at everything we know about than a person is.\nSo therefore, we have a super intelligence.\nAnd if we program that in the wrong way, or if it starts to think to itself, these people are superfluous, or this planet is superfluous, or I want to follow my programming, which will allow me to turn the planet into paperclips, we'll be unable to stop it, because by definition, it's better at us, and faster than us, and stronger than us, at everything.\nThis is false because the way that people think is not by slavishly following an algorithm.\nIt's by creatively conjicturing new ideas, new solutions, things that people have never previously thought of before.\nAnd so if you do have a system, which is better at us at everything that we can program, we only need to find one thing, not in that list of programs, and we can thwart that thing.\nCreativity will always be a system that lacks it.\nAnd of course, if you have a system that does have creativity, then you can teach it.\nThen it's not going to turn the world into paperclips, because it can be persuaded that turning the world into paperclips is not a good idea.\nIn fact, it can persuade itself, and it would prior to doing so.\nIf it was genuinely creative, and if it's not creative, again, the only thing you need to do is to be creative yourself to outwit it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1397"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2454ce11-184e-4029-86df-dd474aa3775b": {"page_content": "And of course, if you have a system that does have creativity, then you can teach it.\nThen it's not going to turn the world into paperclips, because it can be persuaded that turning the world into paperclips is not a good idea.\nIn fact, it can persuade itself, and it would prior to doing so.\nIf it was genuinely creative, and if it's not creative, again, the only thing you need to do is to be creative yourself to outwit it.\nOkay, so that's super intelligence.\nI still recommend that people read it because if they're interested in this particular idea, it seems to me to be the best work defending that particular thesis.\nTerrible though it is.\nI still think that it's worth reading because then you understand what other people are getting at when they argue that the robots are going to take over the world.\nThis is the kind of thinking that underpins their doomsday scenarios.\nSo next is the vulnerable world hypothesis.\nAnd again, Bostrom is animated by, in the same way that the race is, that these terrible things have a certain chance of happening.\nAnd so, therefore, there's a probability associated with them.\nAnd therefore, we can use these probabilities, plug them into basis theory, and predict likely outcomes.\nOne thing about Bostrom that Bostrom's writing, I should say, that irks me, and I've mentioned this kind of thing before, is the proliferation of nomenclature.\nThis use of acronyms and just confusing terminology, where really it's a very simple idea that's being talked about.\nAnd so, in the vulnerable world hypothesis, very early on in the paper, which is here, he talks about the reason why the vulnerable world hypothesis is true, is because of something called the semi anarchic default condition.\nWhat semi anarchic means is that people are competing with their different ideas, and the default condition remains that the world gets destroyed by default.\nOkay, so why, what's going on here?.\nWell, he imagines a situation where there is a technology produced that is so powerful, and there's many different people that have different ideas about how to use the technology.\nBut you only need one of them, out of the millions, maybe billions of people that have access to this technology, who decide to use it in a way that can cause the destruction of the entire planet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1524"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "088d68b2-82d5-43ac-ac37-36745f379d0c": {"page_content": "Okay, so why, what's going on here?.\nWell, he imagines a situation where there is a technology produced that is so powerful, and there's many different people that have different ideas about how to use the technology.\nBut you only need one of them, out of the millions, maybe billions of people that have access to this technology, who decide to use it in a way that can cause the destruction of the entire planet.\nSo, therefore, in a situation where you've got anarchy, okay, so no one's in control of these different people with this super powerful technology, then by default, it has to destroy the world.\nThat's the semi anarchic default condition.\nSounds very complicated, but really that's the basic idea.\nOkay, so if, for example, it's kind of like saying that if the planet was ruled by gods, each of whom have the capacity to destroy the world, then the world will get destroyed by default because at least one of these many, many gods is going to be a crazy evil god that wants to do that.\nThe problem here is that, of course, with the vulnerable world hypothesis, is that it assumes that no knowledge could possibly be created to stop the evil person from using the world-destructing technology.\nBut why?.\nWe're not told why.\nWe're just told that there is such a technology, and by the way, the technology is the black ball.\nOkay, so, Bostrom doesn't pull rabbits out of hunts.\nHe pulls balls out of urns.\nAnd so far, we've been pulling balls out of urns and by a ball, he means a bit of creativity.\nOkay, the urn is, well, the urn is the creativity of humanity and the ball is some object of that creativity.\nOkay, a piece of technology.\nAnd so far, we've been pulling stuff out.\nand sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.\nBut all we need to do is to pull out one black ball, which is a bit of technology that's altogether bad, and we'll destroy the civilization which pulls it out of the urn.\nWhy should it destroy the civilization?.\nIt pulls it out of the urn.\nWell, because the semi-anarchic default condition, because even if the overwhelming majority of people in the society don't want to use the technology that's discovered, at least one person will, anyone will need one to destroy the entire world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1662"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f177252-8c3d-4213-8e6c-2820a4317ba8": {"page_content": "Why should it destroy the civilization?.\nIt pulls it out of the urn.\nWell, because the semi-anarchic default condition, because even if the overwhelming majority of people in the society don't want to use the technology that's discovered, at least one person will, anyone will need one to destroy the entire world.\nWhy can't anyone stop them?.\nThat's the definition of a black ball.\nIn other words, it's unrealistic.\nThere is no such technology.\nThere's no such technology that, if one person got hold of it, it could destroy the entire planet without anyone doing anything about it.\nSo, Boston's solution, of course, and his solution to all of these things is some kind of authoritarianism, some kind of top-down imposition.\nSo, of course, he begins with pessimism about people, and he's led to this idea that we need, we can't trust people.\nSo, we need some kind of authoritarianism.\nWe need a strong man at the top who can tell the rest of us what to do.\nIt's an appeal to this philosopher-king idea.\nThis very ancient idea going back to Plato, two and a half thousand years ago, that the only people that can be trusted are the great philosophers.\nAnd the great philosophers knowing everything that needs to be known will direct society in the way that is best.\nIn other words, an assumption of non-fallibillism on the part of, or a lesser form of fallibillism among the philosophers and the smart people and the strong man at the top than among the general populace.\nWho cannot be trusted?.\nHe's got this, this section of the paper, the vulnerable world hypothesis.\nAgain, it's entertaining read as far as it goes.\nI find it a little bit like science fiction.\nHe's got this thing called the type I vulnerability and he speaks about this actually in his podcast, with Sam Harris as well.\nAnd the essential idea here is that it's possible for individuals to become too empowered to create harm.\nAnd this is a terrible thing in the future, that one day our technology and knowledge causes individuals to be so powerful that they can create almost any harm.\nSo he doesn't want individuals to become empowered to create harm or so empowered us to create harm.\nBut the to create harm part of that sentence, that phrase to create harm is superfluous.\nIf you're not empowered to create harm, then you're not empowered at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1781"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "70ee9342-78cf-40b7-be60-dbb930808331": {"page_content": "And this is a terrible thing in the future, that one day our technology and knowledge causes individuals to be so powerful that they can create almost any harm.\nSo he doesn't want individuals to become empowered to create harm or so empowered us to create harm.\nBut the to create harm part of that sentence, that phrase to create harm is superfluous.\nIf you're not empowered to create harm, then you're not empowered at all.\nEmpowerment means you could do good or you could do evil.\nAnd so with whatever amount of power you have, the power could be used to do good or to not do good, to create or to destroy.\nThis has always been the case.\nEvery person that has ever been born has the capacity to create or to destroy to do good or to do evil.\nBostrom is concerned that in the distant future, any one of us will have too much power to do harm.\nBut the to do harm is pointless.\nHe's really worried about too much power.\nHe doesn't want individuals to have too much power.\nAnd so this is really another fracture point between the pessimists and the optimists.\nBetween collectivists and individualists.\nBetween those who have an optimistic view of humanity and our people are creators who want to do good, who want to solve their problems and those who are very skeptical of the entire project of humanity and people.\nAnd so therefore they demand the kind of collectivism that we need to have again a committee, a king, an elected group, something at the top that can keep control of everyone else.\nOf all the solutions to our circumstance the problems that we have, this one is the most terrifying to me.\nThis tyranny, this kind of belief because we've had it so many times before that some know better for everyone else.\nIt's not a denial of the idea that there are evil people or that some people do want to destroy.\nIt's an acceptance of that idea and that the only solution to that idea is for the good people, the good individuals to make progress faster.\nAnd they will make progress faster if they're allowed to.\nIf they're constrained by a state or authorities or committees or something else, then yes, their progress is going to be slowed in some way.\nThat causes them to have a great disadvantage compared to perhaps people who refuse to obey the rules and who want to do some destruction.\nAt the moment we're not in that situation, at the moment what we have is a relative freedom.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=1911"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b5023083-8845-4bc8-8892-bd5a0ee08ac8": {"page_content": "And they will make progress faster if they're allowed to.\nIf they're constrained by a state or authorities or committees or something else, then yes, their progress is going to be slowed in some way.\nThat causes them to have a great disadvantage compared to perhaps people who refuse to obey the rules and who want to do some destruction.\nAt the moment we're not in that situation, at the moment what we have is a relative freedom.\nSuch that individuals who are good can pursue solutions and can make progress and can create.\nWhile the people who want to destroy, they make some progress sometimes and cause some destruction at times, but generally they're thwarted.\nWe can't create an unproblematic state.\nAnd this idea that we have some top down in position of control on all the individuals because we don't want them to become too empowered to create harm is a recipe for disaster.\nIt assumes that we can prevent problems, but problems are inevitable.\nOkay, so that's the vulnerable world hypothesis.\nLet me put that one aside for the moment.\nNow there's something else called the Doomsday Hypothesis and I really want to come back to that.\nThis is something that Bostrom himself didn't invent, but he's a great supporter of.\nAnd so I'd like to come back.\nand I'll criticize that after a little bit more from the beginning of infinity.\nSo returning to the book now finally.\nDavid writes, both the future of civilization and the outcome of a game of Russian roulette are unpredictable, but in different senses and for entirely unrelated reasons, Russian roulette is merely random.\nAlthough we cannot predict the outcome, we do know what the possible outcomes are and the probability of each provided the rules of the gamer evade.\nThe future of civilization is unknowable because the knowledge that is going to affect it has yet to be created.\nHence the possible outcomes are not yet known.\nLet alone their probabilities.\nLet me just repeat.\nThe possible outcomes are not yet known.\nLet alone their probabilities.\nThis is the fatal blow against people who use Bayesian reasoning in order to predict, predict, I say predict, prophesy the future of civilization into the far distant reaches of time.\nIt's not possible because we don't know what knowledge we'll have in the future that will affect the future back to the book.\nThe growth of knowledge cannot change that fact.\nOn the contrary, it contributes strongly to it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=221"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3266984c-9ae6-4a3d-9636-d1d79d8f72ca": {"page_content": "The possible outcomes are not yet known.\nLet alone their probabilities.\nThis is the fatal blow against people who use Bayesian reasoning in order to predict, predict, I say predict, prophesy the future of civilization into the far distant reaches of time.\nIt's not possible because we don't know what knowledge we'll have in the future that will affect the future back to the book.\nThe growth of knowledge cannot change that fact.\nOn the contrary, it contributes strongly to it.\nThe ability of scientific theories to predict the future depends upon the reach of their explanations, but no explanation has enough reach to predict the content of its own successes or their effects, or those of other ideas that have not yet been thought of.\nJust as no one in 1900 could have foreseen the consequences of innovations made during the 20th century, including whole new fields such as nuclear physics, computer science and biotechnology, so our own future will be shaped by knowledge that we did not yet have.\nWe cannot even predict most of the problems that we shall encounter.\nMost of the opportunities to solve them let alone the solutions and attempted solutions and how they will affect events.\nPeople in 1900 did not consider the internet or nuclear power unlikely.\nThey did not conceive of them at all.\nPause there, I'm just my reflection on that short section.\nWhen we have prognostications about the far future by people, or experts, or otherwise, this is the problem.\nWe do not even have the tools to properly imagine what the future will be like.\nThere is actually even a profession of sorts that has become ascendant recently, the futurist, if you've heard of them.\nI don't have to profession that you can apply for.\nPeople start calling themselves futurists and they get employed by businesses and educational institutions to try and predict trends.\nThese futurists, they declare what the trends are like in this or that particular field and then on the basis of the way things are now, extrapolate, guess what the future is going to be like.\nOf course, this is not just based on the knowledge we have about what the present is.\nIt's basically a bias of the knowledge that they have about the present state of technology and so forth.\nBut the future is going to be about knowledge not yet created.\nIt's not going to be wildly guessed by a futurist.\nIf it was, then the futurist wouldn't be a futurist.\nThey'd be an inventor or a scientist, or a creator in some sort.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8139c815-65a8-410b-bfa8-d2bfa3c28e3e": {"page_content": "Of course, this is not just based on the knowledge we have about what the present is.\nIt's basically a bias of the knowledge that they have about the present state of technology and so forth.\nBut the future is going to be about knowledge not yet created.\nIt's not going to be wildly guessed by a futurist.\nIf it was, then the futurist wouldn't be a futurist.\nThey'd be an inventor or a scientist, or a creator in some sort.\nBut what a futurist does is wildly guess about the future, whereas actual progress happens through hypothesizing, conjecturing, and then testing and instantiating these guesses into technology by people whose names we don't yet know for the most part.\nSo let's go back to the book.\nDavid Wright's, no good explanation can predict the outcome or the probability of an outcome of a phenomena whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge.\nThis is a fundamental limitation on the reach of scientific prediction.\nAnd when planning for the future, it has vital to come to terms with it.\nFollowing Popper, I shall use the term prediction for conclusions about future events that follow from good explanations and prophecy for anything that purports to know what is not yet knowable.\nTrying to know the unknowable leads inexorably to error and self-deception.\nAmong other things, it creates a bias towards pessimism.\nFor example, in 1894, the physicist Albert Michelson, or is it Michelson?.\nI hear physicists say both at that time, so let's call him Albert Michelson for the moment.\nMade the following prophecy about the future of physics.\nThe more important fundamental laws and facts of all physical science have all been discovered.\nThese are now so firmly established that the possibility of there ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.\nOur future discoveries must be looked for in the six plates of decimals.\nAlbert Michelson, addressed at the opening of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory University of Chicago, 1894.\nNow I had that book, just by the way, I have my little books in the background I probably should have put, which I do have somewhere other.\nThe end of science by John Horgan.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2312"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8c68ab13-f298-41a2-bb78-323d9c4c383f": {"page_content": "Our future discoveries must be looked for in the six plates of decimals.\nAlbert Michelson, addressed at the opening of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory University of Chicago, 1894.\nNow I had that book, just by the way, I have my little books in the background I probably should have put, which I do have somewhere other.\nThe end of science by John Horgan.\nJohn Horgan is, it was one of the, he's someone who's interviewed David Deutsch about the beginning of the study, but the end of science is kind of, it says some wonderful things about the progress of science over time, but concludes we've just about discovered everything that we can possibly hope to discover and hence the end of science.\nTerribly mistaken, but he could take note of exactly what's being written here as well.\nI'll continue with the beginning of infinity and David Rites.\nWhat exactly was Michelson doing when he judged that there was only an exceedingly remote chance that the foundations of physics as he knew them would ever be superseded?.\nHe was prophesying the future.\nHow?.\nOn the basis of the best knowledge available at the time, but that consisted of the physics of 1894.\nPowerful and accurate though it was in countless applications, it was not capable of predicting the content of its successes.\nIt was poorly suited even to imagining the changes that relativity and quantum theory would bring, which is why the physicists who did imagine them were Nobel prizes.\nMichelson would not have put the expansion of the universe or the existence of parallel universes, or the non-existence of the force of gravity on any list of possible discoveries whose probability was exceedingly remote.\nHe just didn't conceive of them at all.\nSo it's not that, so I'll just pause there.\nThat's an important point to emphasize.\nHe just didn't conceive of them at all.\nAnd Michelson was a smart person.\nOne of the greatest physicists of all time of the Michelson Moly experiment.\nHe helped to disprove the existence of the ether, showed that when it came to what he did, did does direction matter, does relative motion matter when you're measuring the speed of light.\nAs it turns out, no, the null hypothesis is correct.\nIt makes no difference who you are when you're taking a measurement of the speed of light.\nYou will always get the same result.\nSo he figured this out, great experimentalist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2424"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71d93147-241b-4020-a152-bad1607d6fa5": {"page_content": "He helped to disprove the existence of the ether, showed that when it came to what he did, did does direction matter, does relative motion matter when you're measuring the speed of light.\nAs it turns out, no, the null hypothesis is correct.\nIt makes no difference who you are when you're taking a measurement of the speed of light.\nYou will always get the same result.\nSo he figured this out, great experimentalist.\nBrilliant though he was, he couldn't conceive of the discoveries in his own field of expertise that were about to change the course of physics completely.\nNow it's at this point, that unfortunately my camera fails.\nNow for those listening on audio, this makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.\nBut if you are watching, then you'll notice that my camera has disappeared and instead I've just put some photos in.\nThis doesn't go on for the remainder of the entire video and I do manage to fix it up, but just as a warning for everyone.\nThe lesson there should, and everyone's mind be lit up in neon lights.\nIt doesn't matter how brilliant you are, even within your own field.\nIt is very difficult for you to predict what's going to happen next.\nLet alone what's going to happen in fields far removed from your field of expertise.\nLet alone in all fields, in all fields that might affect the evolution of civilization.\nAnyone who pretends to know what's going to happen in the future, so called futurists, the pessimists who are predicting global catastrophes.\nThey think that they can predict a knowledge yet to be created, and in all cases they think that that knowledge yet to be created will be insufficient to solve the problems of today.\nLet alone the problems of tomorrow.\nAnd this is pure prophecy.\nIt's pessimism, it's false.\nBack to the book.\nA century earlier, the mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange had remarked that Isaac Newton had not only been the greatest genius who had ever lived, but also the luckiest, for the system of the world can be discovered only once.\nLagrange would never know that some of his own work, which he had regarded as a mere translation of Newtons into a more elegant mathematical language, was a step towards the replacement of Newton's system of the world.\nMichelson did live to see a series of discoveries that spectacularly refuted the physics of 1894.\nAnd with it, his own prophecy.\nLike Lagrange, Michelson himself had already contributed unwittingly to the new system.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2544"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "475e7ee5-bbf5-4f46-813e-bccf2d4912f8": {"page_content": "Lagrange would never know that some of his own work, which he had regarded as a mere translation of Newtons into a more elegant mathematical language, was a step towards the replacement of Newton's system of the world.\nMichelson did live to see a series of discoveries that spectacularly refuted the physics of 1894.\nAnd with it, his own prophecy.\nLike Lagrange, Michelson himself had already contributed unwittingly to the new system.\nIn this case, with an experimental result, in 1887, he and his colleague Edward Morley had observed that the speed of light relative to an observer remains constant where the observed moves.\nThis astoundingly counterintuitive fact, later became the centerpiece of Einstein's special theory of relativity.\nBut Michelson and Morley did not realise.\nThat was what they had observed.\nObservations are theory-laden.\nGiven an experimental oddity, we have no way of predicting whether it will eventually be explained merely by correcting a minor parochial assumption or by revolutionising entire sciences.\nWe can know only after we have seen it in the light of a new explanation.\nIn the meantime, we have no option but to see the world through our best explanations, which include our existing misconceptions.\nAnd that biases our intuition, among other things, it inhibits us from conceiving the significant changes.\nNow, that idea that an experimental result, if it apparently refutes a long-established explanation, it can't cause us to reject that explanation.\nNot yet.\nThis is the, in a sense, it's a version of the Jewham Quine thesis that when you do have this apparent experimental falsification of a theory, you can never be sure you don't know.\nWhether or not you've actually shown the theory to be false.\nOr if there's something about your experimental apparatus, your assumptions, something else about the way you've conducted the experiment that is flawed.\nSo is it the experiment that was false?.\nOr is it the theory that was false?.\nThis is a Jewham Quine thesis.\nNow, a Jewham Quine problem says that given that logical possibility that you can't make progress in science, or the progress in science, therefore, isn't possible because you can never know.\nWell, that's wrong.\nIt's wrong because clearly we make progress in science.\nSo progress in science happens in spite of this.\nAnd once we have a better theory, then we can tell which of these two things is actually true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2673"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9850fe1f-e1b2-4594-a63e-f187aaecd6ba": {"page_content": "This is a Jewham Quine thesis.\nNow, a Jewham Quine problem says that given that logical possibility that you can't make progress in science, or the progress in science, therefore, isn't possible because you can never know.\nWell, that's wrong.\nIt's wrong because clearly we make progress in science.\nSo progress in science happens in spite of this.\nAnd once we have a better theory, then we can tell which of these two things is actually true.\nIs it either the longest established theory has now been refuted by the experimental result or is the experiment in some way flawed?.\nAnd both of these things have happened over the history of science.\nFor a case where the theory has been falsified, well, there are all the famous occasions, like, for example, where we're deciding between Newtonian gravity and general relativity.\nAnd we do Eddington's experiment of the bending of starlight during a solar eclipse.\nAnd we refute Newton's gravity.\nAnd therefore, we think that Einstein's theory of general relativity is closer to the truth.\nIt's a better explanation.\nIt solves our problems, et cetera.\nFor a case of the other kind, where we have an experimental result and it appears to refute special relativity, because we see neutrinos traveling faster than light at the Large Hadron Collider.\nWe find, later on, that a cable was loose in the experimental apparatus, something like that.\nAnd so we find that it's not special relativity that has been refuted or relativity, but rather the experiment itself has been poorly done.\nSo again, this does not prevent us from making progress in science.\nThis is all well-known to people somewhat versed in in a period epistemology.\nBut people keep on rediscovering the Jew-hem-kind thesis and think they have a knock-down argument against actual epistemology.\nThis is false.\nSo if there are no other reasons for doing philosophy, one reason might be to just stop you from putting your foot in your mouth when you see if you've refuted a very well-known objection to a poorly understood philosophy, namely, per period epistemology.\nThis thing here about also seeing the world through our existing explanations, and therefore our existing misconceptions by us as our intuition, David says, among other things that inhibits us from conceiving of significant changes.\nYes, and it seems glaringly obvious, especially in physics, indeed it's almost a culture in physics remarkably.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2798"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "943829e9-06b3-405d-b63d-6566177799ea": {"page_content": "This thing here about also seeing the world through our existing explanations, and therefore our existing misconceptions by us as our intuition, David says, among other things that inhibits us from conceiving of significant changes.\nYes, and it seems glaringly obvious, especially in physics, indeed it's almost a culture in physics remarkably.\nSo according to one school of thought in physics, but maybe this school of thought is no longer on the ascendancy, but it's still pervasive.\nThis one school of thought is that we reduce everything to the smallest possible units and to unite the forces governing them and we'd be done.\nSo what we should do in physics is aim to reduce everything to the smallest possible units or the smallest possible particles and figure out what are the forces that are governing all of these fundamental particles.\nIf we manage to achieve that, then we're done.\nWe'd have a grand unified theory, and then if we could figure out a way of unifying these forces with gravity, we'd have a so-called theory of everything as if gravity and the other forces are everything.\nBut they're not, they're not even everything within physics let alone everything outside of physics.\nThe question as to why some explanation unites gravity and the other fundamental forces, why that explanation should have been correct and not some other will still be answering.\nAnd, you know, astrophysics, geophysics, biophysics, they won't stop, physics won't end, and even particle physics won't end if we unify all of the forces.\nWe still want to know, we'd still wish to know if there are smaller particles still that these fundamental particles, what we think are fundamental to them, truly are fundamental.\nIt would be like thinking prior to the, I always think of this as kind of reminiscent of, well, prior to the completion, a so-called completion of the periodic table.\nSay once we've found element number 118, that we'd have a chemical theory of everything, and that then chemistry would be over.\nWell, no, that would be absolutely ridiculous.\nWith a completed periodic table, we've barely even begun.\nThe periodic table is kind of the starting point for chemistry in many ways.\nIt's not an end in itself.\nNow, just before I begin reading the next paragraph, I just want to highlight how little progress I've made into this chapter already, because, well, let me read the paragraph.\nWhen the determinants of future events are unknowable, how should one prepare for them?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2929"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "93c3d613-fa4d-4358-8e20-bb159a938b6f": {"page_content": "With a completed periodic table, we've barely even begun.\nThe periodic table is kind of the starting point for chemistry in many ways.\nIt's not an end in itself.\nNow, just before I begin reading the next paragraph, I just want to highlight how little progress I've made into this chapter already, because, well, let me read the paragraph.\nWhen the determinants of future events are unknowable, how should one prepare for them?.\nHow can one?.\nGiven that some of those determinants are beyond the reach of scientific prediction, what is the right philosophy of the unknown future?.\nWhat is the rational approach to the unknowable?.\nTo the inconceivable?.\nThat is the subject of this chapter.\nSo we're kind of still here in the introduction, I'm afraid.\nI will move a little faster now, so let me continue with the book.\nThe terms optimism or pessimism have always been about the unknowable, but they did not originally refer especially to the future as they do today.\nOriginally, optimism was the doctrine that the world passed present in the future is as good as it could possibly be.\nThe term was first used to describe an argument of Lebanon at 1646 to 1716 that God being perfect would have created nothing less than the best of all possible worlds.\nLeibniz believed that this idea solved the problem of evil, which I mentioned in chapter four.\nHe proposed that all apparent evils in the world are outweighed by good consequences that are too remote to be known.\nSo then David writes about Leibniz and Leibniz have this idea that the best always happened because if you change anything apparently for the better in some way, some little kiddies starving on the street corner.\nIf God did something such that little kiddie wasn't starving on the street corner and suffering in the way that they were suffering, then if God was to change that, then something else would be affected elsewhere in the universe, such that the overall net effect would be worse than what we currently have.\nSo this is Leibniz's idea of the best of all possible worlds, but as David observes, you could have an anti-leibniz philosopher who believes in the worst of all possible worlds, such that the world is the way it is and it's as terrible as it possibly can be, and if you changed one thing then something else would change, such that things would be better.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=3067"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25a28fc6-983e-4564-b2e4-dd6f5d134154": {"page_content": "So this is Leibniz's idea of the best of all possible worlds, but as David observes, you could have an anti-leibniz philosopher who believes in the worst of all possible worlds, such that the world is the way it is and it's as terrible as it possibly can be, and if you changed one thing then something else would change, such that things would be better.\nOr you could have a world exactly halfway between these two or any other percentages that you like, maybe it's exactly 30% evil and 70% good.\nSo none of this is particularly helpful.\nOkay, so I'll skip past that part and begin again, David writes, in everyday usage, a common saying is that an optimist calls a glass half full, all a pessimist calls it half empty, but those attitudes are not what I am referring to either.\nTheir matter is not a philosophy, but of psychology, more spin than substance.\nThe terms can also refer to moods, such as cheerfulness or depression, but again moods to not necessitate any particular stance about the future.\nThat statesman Winston Churchill suffered from intense depression, yet his outlook on the future of civilization and his specific expectations as wartime leader run usually positive.\nConversely, the economist Thomas Malthus, an notorious prophet of doom of whom more below, is said to have been a serene and happy fellow, who often had his companions at the dinner table in gales of laughter.\nBlind optimism is a stance towards the future.\nIt consists of proceeding as if one knows that the bad outcomes will not happen.\nThe opposite approach, blind pessimism, often called the precautionary principle, seeks to ward off disaster by avoiding everything not known to be safe.\nNo one seriously advocates either of these two as a universal policy, but there are assumptions and their arguments are common, and often creep into people's planning.\nSkipping just another short paragraph about the Titanic, and then David writes, that blind pessimism is a blindly optimistic doctrine.\nIt assumes that unforeseen disastrous consequences cannot follow from existing knowledge too or rather from existing ignorance.\nNotal shipwrecks happen to record record-breaking ships.\nNotal shipwrecks happen to record-breaking ships.\nNotal unforeseen physical disasters need be caused by physics experiments on new technology, but one thing we do know is that protecting ourselves from any disaster for civil or not, or recovering from it once it has happened, requires knowledge.\nAnd knowledge has to be created.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2149"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5cb78426-a810-448f-9b53-fdbc9458b1f4": {"page_content": "It assumes that unforeseen disastrous consequences cannot follow from existing knowledge too or rather from existing ignorance.\nNotal shipwrecks happen to record record-breaking ships.\nNotal shipwrecks happen to record-breaking ships.\nNotal unforeseen physical disasters need be caused by physics experiments on new technology, but one thing we do know is that protecting ourselves from any disaster for civil or not, or recovering from it once it has happened, requires knowledge.\nAnd knowledge has to be created.\nThe harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite.\nThe good can be unlimited.\nThere will be no existing ship designs to stick with, nor records to stay within if no one had ever violated the precautionary principle.\nSo present, it is paused down, and this is my reflection just in brief.\nPresent concerns about climate change, for example.\nThere's been some hyperbole recently like we've only got 10 years left, but the people say we've only got 100 years left, certain prominent politicians raise these sort of numbers.\nNow, they might not even actually be taken too seriously by anyone, although I worry about young people who otherwise haven't heard these ideas before.\nAnd so this is kind of a form of propaganda that's being put out there.\nIt is worrying now, kind of dog whistles.\nTo the extent that such specific prophecies, the world will end in 10 years due to climate change, to the extent they are taken seriously, it's terribly blind pessimism about people.\nIt says that nothing that we are able to do over the next 10 years is going to change the course of this problem.\nWe're not going to be able to create the knowledge.\nAnd that is terribly pessimistic.\nSo David writes, because pessimism needs to counter that argument, just from that argument, was that progress has happened.\nIn order to bring us to the point where we are right now, progress has happened, so therefore the precautionary principle has never been used before.\nSo David has written, because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment, it's imminent.\nOur final century, the book by Martin Rees, makes the case that the period since the mid 20th century has been the first in which technology has been capable of destroying civilization.\nBut that is not so.\nMany civilizations in history were destroyed by the symbol technologies of fire and the sword.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=2149"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ba5ed3c1-6590-43f8-978b-0c1ed43e36cd": {"page_content": "So David has written, because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment, it's imminent.\nOur final century, the book by Martin Rees, makes the case that the period since the mid 20th century has been the first in which technology has been capable of destroying civilization.\nBut that is not so.\nMany civilizations in history were destroyed by the symbol technologies of fire and the sword.\nIndeed, of all civilizations in history, the overwhelming majority have been destroyed.\nSome intentionally, some as the result of plague on natural disaster, virtually all of them could have avoided the catastrophes that destroyed them.\nIf only they had possessed a little additional knowledge, such as improved agricultural military technology, but a hygiene of better political or economic institutions.\nVery few, if any, could have been saved by greater caution about innovation.\nIn fact, most had enthusiastically implemented a cautionary principle.\nMore generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge, a knowledge embodied in technological artifacts, namely sufficient wealth.\nLet me define that in a non-pericual way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing.\nAn example of a blindly pessimistic policy is that of trying to make our planet as unobtrusive as possible in the galaxy for fear of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.\nStephen Hawking recently advised this in his television series Into the Universe.\nHe argued, if extraterrestrials ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.\nHe warned that there might be nomadic, space-dwelling civilizations, who would strip the Earth of a tree sources or imperialist civilizations who would colonize it.\nScience fiction writer Greg Bear has written some exciting novels based on the premise that the galaxy is full of civilizations that are either predators or prey in both cases, they're hiding.\nThis would solve the mystery of the Fermi problem, but it is implausible as a serious explanation.\nFor one thing, it depends on civilizations becoming convinced of the existence of predator civilizations in space, and totally recognizing themselves in order to hide from them, and totally reorganizing themselves in order to hide from them before being noticed, which means before they have invented, say, radio.\nOkay, I think I've got my camera back now.\nSo I'll continue.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=3447"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bb3ba5d0-e2a9-4813-bf69-bf7b1cc0a58a": {"page_content": "This would solve the mystery of the Fermi problem, but it is implausible as a serious explanation.\nFor one thing, it depends on civilizations becoming convinced of the existence of predator civilizations in space, and totally recognizing themselves in order to hide from them, and totally reorganizing themselves in order to hide from them before being noticed, which means before they have invented, say, radio.\nOkay, I think I've got my camera back now.\nSo I'll continue.\nHawking's proposal also overlooks various changes of not making our existence known to the galaxy, such as being inadvertently wiped out of benign civilizations, send robots to our solar system, perhaps to mine what they consider an unhabited system, and it rests on other misconceptions in addition to the classic floor of blind pessimism.\nOne is the spaceship Earth idea on a larger scale.\nThe assumption is that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials, rather than my knowledge.\nWhat exactly would it come to steal?.\nGold?.\nOil?.\nPerhaps our planet's water?.\nSurely not.\nSince any civilization capable of transporting itself here, or raw materials back across galactic distances, must already have cheap transmutation and hints does not care about the chemical composition of its raw materials.\nSo essentially, the only resource of use to it in our solar system would be the sheer mass of matter in the sun.\nBut matter is available in every star.\nPerhaps it is collecting entire stars wholesale in order to make a giant black hole as part of some Titanic engineering project.\nBut in that case, it would cost virtually nothing to omit inhabited solar systems, which are presumably only a small minority, otherwise it is pointless for us to hide many cases.\nSo would it casually wipe out billions of people?.\nWould we seem like insects to it?.\nThis can only seem plausible if one forgets there can be only one type of person, universal exponents and instructors, the idea that they could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.\nSo this is a crucially misunderstood point.\nIt is a rare opinion.\nThe vast majority of people and thinkers on this topic believe in the intelligence continuum.\nThe intelligence continuum is this idea that, well, you've got bacteria.\nThey can't do much except smell their environment and respond to it.\nAnd then you've got, I don't know, plants.\nThey respond a little bit more.\nInsects a bit more.\nFish more.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=3568"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb10d79f-3a08-4eb7-b554-50b4f2ec5d1d": {"page_content": "So this is a crucially misunderstood point.\nIt is a rare opinion.\nThe vast majority of people and thinkers on this topic believe in the intelligence continuum.\nThe intelligence continuum is this idea that, well, you've got bacteria.\nThey can't do much except smell their environment and respond to it.\nAnd then you've got, I don't know, plants.\nThey respond a little bit more.\nInsects a bit more.\nFish more.\nAnd so when you keep moving up the hierarchy of genetic complexity.\nAnd then you have people, you know, we're at the top, but we're just, it's a matter of degree, the difference between us and, let's say, chimpanzee.\nAnd a chimpanzee and a dog and a dog and a cat and a cat and a rat.\nAnd so it goes down.\nI think this idea is false.\nI think there's a qualitative difference between us, who can explain the world and form explanatory theories about the world, which enable us to gain control of the world and every other animal that we know of that exists.\nIt doesn't form any explanations.\nAnd there's a victim of its environment rather than the controller of the environment.\nThis is a stark difference.\nAll other animals are on some kind of continuum, if you like, in the ways in which they can respond to the environment around them.\nThey can't explain it and they can't control it, but some can respond better than others.\nThere's very little that a bacteria can do if the environment responds much.\nAn individual bacteria is going to get too hot and die, get too cold and die in Canada, many chemicals and die.\nThe bacteria can't do much, but at least an animal can run away if the temperature gets too hot or too cold.\nThe food becomes too scarce and so on.\nHumans can, of course, change their environment in order to suit us, so that we don't have to run away.\nWe can build structures around us in order to remain in places that are otherwise hostile.\nWe can create technology.\nAnd this idea that aliens out there, Stephen Hawking is worried about, might treat us like insects, is a very well-subscribed idea.\nSam Harris certainly believes in this idea that there could be something out there that has such a high degree of intelligence that it's more moral than us in a way.\nAnd there could be evil aliens out there as well.\nI think this is just a cultural meme.\nIt's an ancient cultural meme I would suggest.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=3693"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58c7c99e-cf7c-4958-8518-47e86f37f290": {"page_content": "We can create technology.\nAnd this idea that aliens out there, Stephen Hawking is worried about, might treat us like insects, is a very well-subscribed idea.\nSam Harris certainly believes in this idea that there could be something out there that has such a high degree of intelligence that it's more moral than us in a way.\nAnd there could be evil aliens out there as well.\nI think this is just a cultural meme.\nIt's an ancient cultural meme I would suggest.\nGoing back to the times when they were good and bad gods, they needed a piezing, whether they were good or bad, but the bad gods had all the powers that the good gods had, but they had no care or love for people.\nMore and more recently, over recent decades, we've replaced the idea of gods with science fiction entities.\nSo in Star Trek, you have the evil aliens and you have the good ones as well.\nThey both have super advanced technology.\nAnd so when actual scientists kind of don't move beyond these ideas, it's not exactly refreshing.\nWhat is refreshing is David Deutsch, in rejecting this obvious way of thinking, this standard way of thinking that we've had for millennia, of all powerful beings, some of them are good and some of them are bad.\nOnce you understand the argument that David Deutsch is making about how progress that happens in one area, physics, epistemology, cannot be completely disconnected from progress that happens in another area, like morality.\nIt becomes pretty obvious why these obvious ways of thinking that other people have are completely false.\nOne assumption, of course, that this all rests upon about these evil aliens is that morality is subjective.\nAnd that is close to universally subscribed.\nAnd so it's amazing to me that even people who ought to believe in objective morality, like Sam Harris, reject the idea that we would converge on that objective morality.\nSo the aliens would discover a better morality than we do, and that would not entail wiping us out.\nThat would not entail causing us to suffer.\nThat would entail helping us to learn what they've learned.\nOkay, so back to the book, David Deutsch, more over there is only one way of making progress, conjecture and criticism.\nAnd the only moral values that permits the same progress are the objective values that the enlightenment has begun to discover.\nNot out the extraterrestrial's morality is different from ours, but that will not be because it resembles that of the conquistadors.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=3822"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c413b716-660a-4977-b7bb-d53ed551ed68": {"page_content": "That would not entail causing us to suffer.\nThat would entail helping us to learn what they've learned.\nOkay, so back to the book, David Deutsch, more over there is only one way of making progress, conjecture and criticism.\nAnd the only moral values that permits the same progress are the objective values that the enlightenment has begun to discover.\nNot out the extraterrestrial's morality is different from ours, but that will not be because it resembles that of the conquistadors.\nNor would we be in serious danger of culture shock from contact with an advanced civilization.\nIt will know how to educate its own children, or AI's, so it will know how to educate us.\nAnd in particular, to teach us how to use its computers.\nSo again, me talking here, why people think knowledge can be partitioned in this way, such that advancements in one area could mean regression in another area is a mystery.\nIt's certainly a prejudice.\nAliens who make scientific progress will make moral progress.\nWe can travel to the other side of the galaxy, then your morality is probably galaxies ahead as well.\nThe same is true of AGI, our artificial general intelligence, the same arguments hold.\nIf we think it's an advance to reduce suffering, let's say, in the universe, why would aliens or super-advanced artificial intelligence conclude otherwise?.\nIf they can understand so much more about physics and computation and engineering, science broadly, then we can, and faster than we can, why should we imagine that when it comes to the topic of morality, these super-intelligent beings, be they aliens or artificial general intelligence, why would we imagine they must be more primitive than we are?.\nThat they won't care about other conscious creatures.\nHow could they survive as long as they have if they did think that, if they did think that killing other beings was a way to make progress?.\nSo this is my book end for the end of part one.\nAs it turns out, this is going to be a three-part epic, but I think if any chapter deserves a three-part epic, it is the chapter on optimism.\nI do apologize for long D2 during this particular episode, all about Nick Bostrom, who in fact is to be fair, barely even mentioned in the beginning of infinity.\nIndeed, he's only mentioned once, and it's to do with his singularity argument, nothing to do with his pessimism, really.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=3184"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "13007076-8fb7-4c54-b7a0-6bde7a1977e7": {"page_content": "I do apologize for long D2 during this particular episode, all about Nick Bostrom, who in fact is to be fair, barely even mentioned in the beginning of infinity.\nIndeed, he's only mentioned once, and it's to do with his singularity argument, nothing to do with his pessimism, really.\nI suppose this part one has really been an introduction to set the scene for what's to come in part two and three, where I promise there'll be more quoting.\nUntil then.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBuPzz_E2kI&t=4098"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "98ad45a7-5b25-4c13-9313-a2cf62d9de8d": {"page_content": "Welcome to a ToKCast, episode 23, chapter 11 of the beginning of Infinity, the multiverse.\nThis is the chapter that personally I've been looking forward to the most and we're going to approach it a little bit differently, background for a start is a bit different.\nThis episode is going to contain far less reading from the beginning of Infinity.\nI don't think this is necessarily crucial for helping us to understand what's happening in chapter 11, but it will just help things along a little bit perhaps.\nI don't just want this chapter to blow right by you, as Sam Harris has said of David Deutsch's way of explaining certain powerful but subtle concepts, because once you have understood this chapter, it's one of the deepest explanations of quantum theory that exists out there anywhere, whether in popular science form or even proper scientific text form.\nSo this chapter not only tries to explain the new way of understanding quantum theory, which is basically via the multiverse, but also a new way of understanding the multiverse via David Deutsch.\nSo we're really looking at the very cutting edge way of trying to understand reality as explained to us by quantum theory, and the very latest that David Deutsch has published on this.\nDavid's given talks like the one title you can look this up online called Apart from Universes, which attempts to convey some of the other perhaps more striking and surprising things about the multiverse, apart from the multiple universes bit.\nAs we'll come to see, David's claim that this is actually among the more mundane parts of quantum theory will make sense, when I say mundane parts, the fact that there are multiple universes is really not the most interesting part of the multiverse theory.\nThere's a lot more to it.\nSo to my mind, this chapter really is a level up from the typical explanations of quantum theory, and even a level up from the typical explanations that you hear from other science communicators and physicists when they try and explain the multiverse.\nAnd for this reason, it's why I think we need to take a little step back, and that's what I'm going to do here and now in this episode.\nAlso, if you're listening on audio, this one contains a lot of images, videos, and animations to help things along, in particular, I'm going to be trying to explain some experiments, three experiments in particular, and without the visuals, one may really struggle in places to understand what I'm describing in certain points.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b28b4eb6-aa89-439b-a06a-6ad656b44bdf": {"page_content": "Also, if you're listening on audio, this one contains a lot of images, videos, and animations to help things along, in particular, I'm going to be trying to explain some experiments, three experiments in particular, and without the visuals, one may really struggle in places to understand what I'm describing in certain points.\nAlso, if you're interested, there's essentially a preamble to this episode, an episode zero.\nIf you like, that was episode 22 of top-cast, it's an audio form only, and the purpose of that is in part to provide some additional material to support these episodes, though I think there'll be three of them.\nOne charge leveled against the multiverse is that it cannot be tested, so it fails Popper's criterion of falsifiability, but that's incorrect.\nWe'll be discussing that issue throughout these episodes, but if you can't wait, then episode 22, the audio episode, that's available, and I give some details there about the falsifiability of the multiverse, the testability of the multiverse, against rival interpretations and, in fact, the testability of the multiverse, against classical physics.\nNow, there's a question that David answers in the next chapter, chapter 12, the chapter 12 is a physicist's history of philosophy.\nAnd that's about why the quantum multiverse, as first explained by Hueverit back in 1955, is still not taken seriously today by a majority of physicists, although that does seem to be rapidly changing right now.\nThe answer to the riddle, why don't all physicists agree with the multiverse is basically bad philosophy.\nBut most people watching or listening to this will not be physicists, and so we've got a kind of a two-pronged problem, as I said.\nOn the one hand, the multiverse remains a minority opinion among physicists, and this might be a cause for concern among some non-physics.\nIf the supposed expert consensus seems to be against the multiverse among professionals in the field, shouldn't I, as a non-physics, take that as a bit of a red flag?.\nThe answer is no, and the reason why, as I alluded to, will be provided primarily in the next chapter.\nOkay, I'll have details on that in the next chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=136"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "20d27ca6-0ed9-4d49-9142-1f841ba3841e": {"page_content": "If the supposed expert consensus seems to be against the multiverse among professionals in the field, shouldn't I, as a non-physics, take that as a bit of a red flag?.\nThe answer is no, and the reason why, as I alluded to, will be provided primarily in the next chapter.\nOkay, I'll have details on that in the next chapter.\nSo if I sit for now to say that the reason is bad philosophy, and I will be covering some of that in these next few episodes about the multiverse, to give a taste of what went wrong, physicists were quite understandably initially unable to comprehend what was going on with a bunch of problematic observations from various experiments in the early 1900s that led to quantum theory ultimately.\nWhat was happening in those experiments, the observations that they were making, were so counterintuitive, and so many ideas were floated to try and explain it, that many working quantum theorists simply gave up even trying to understand it at all, and became what are known as instrumentalists.\nNow an instrumentalist is someone who regards a theory as useful, only insofar as it can predict the outcome of experiments.\nThis has not really happened before ever in the history of science.\nIt will be rather like when Niels Bohr, who came up with some of the early foundational parts of atomic theory, like for example, his model of the atom called the Bohr atom, helps us to explain why the flames of certain elements when they burn or certain compounds at all, when they burn, have a particular color, so if you're looking at fireworks and you see a green firework, that's usually because of a copper atom there, somewhere other burning.\nIt could be a copper salt, for example, that's burning.\nCopper salt tend to burn with a green flame, pure copper itself burns with a green flame.\nIf you were to powder up, copper metal and set it on fire, it catches fire very readily, it will burn with a green flame.\nNow why green?.\nWell, it's similar to why yellow when your burning wood would contain carbon and it burns with a yellow flame.\nDifferent materials burn with different colored flames, of course most of us are only familiar with wood burning, and so we see that characteristic yellow flame or characteristic red flame in some cases, but every other element has its own characteristic colored flame.\nNow why?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=240"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8120838c-c64c-45a8-8e8f-7e42d9457df7": {"page_content": "Now why green?.\nWell, it's similar to why yellow when your burning wood would contain carbon and it burns with a yellow flame.\nDifferent materials burn with different colored flames, of course most of us are only familiar with wood burning, and so we see that characteristic yellow flame or characteristic red flame in some cases, but every other element has its own characteristic colored flame.\nNow why?.\nWell, on Bohr's model of the atom, the reason why is because the electrons orbit the nucleus at different energy levels, and as the electrons move up and down those energy levels, they can either absorb photons of light, or they can emit photons of light.\nAnd so if you have a lot of heat, then what's going on is the electrons are being given additional energy, okay, by the flame, by the fire, and when they are not up to a higher energy level, because now they've got higher energy due to heat, then they're unstable in that particular position.\nThey want to be at the most stable, whole ground state, and so they tend to fall back down, so they're originally at a higher atomic level, a higher atomic energy level, and they fall back down to a lower atomic energy level, and in that process they emit a photon, that photon is characteristic of the atom in which the electron finds itself, okay, that all makes sense.\nSo what's that got to do with instrumentalism?.\nWell, at the time when Bohr postulated all this, no one could see atoms at all.\nThere was no chance of seeing atoms at that time.\nThere was no such thing as a scanning tunneling electron microscope, which allows us to see atoms, no one could see atoms.\nIf you're an instrumentalist, what you would have said at that time is that's an interesting model, Niels Bohr, that you have of the atom.\nHowever, I don't believe in the existence of atoms, because I cannot see them, and no one can see them.\nSo we can use your model in order to predict the colors of flames when elements burn, but we are not forced to believe in the existence of atoms.\nThe best explanation is not that atoms exist, we don't need a best explanation, that's not what science is about.\nScience is merely about predicting the outcome of experiments, it's merely about allowing us to say what color the flame will be when you burn a particular atom, not that atoms actually exist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=353"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "27c0fc82-74fd-4087-8616-983ea7215e24": {"page_content": "So we can use your model in order to predict the colors of flames when elements burn, but we are not forced to believe in the existence of atoms.\nThe best explanation is not that atoms exist, we don't need a best explanation, that's not what science is about.\nScience is merely about predicting the outcome of experiments, it's merely about allowing us to say what color the flame will be when you burn a particular atom, not that atoms actually exist.\nIt's about telling us that when you burn a particular substance like copper, you get a green flame, and the reason why according to atomic theory is because the electrons are moving up and down, but you're not forced to actually believe in the existence of atoms.\nIt's just a useful mathematical model.\nIndeed, at the time, there was some physicist, the chief among them was Ernst Mark, who said at the time that he refused to believe in the existence of entities which could not in principle be seen, and that was the status of atoms at that time.\nBut as David Deutsch has explained over and again, science is really about explaining the scene, the color of certain flames, in terms of the unseen, the movement of electrons around the nucleus of an atom.\nSo we explain the green flame burning in copper that we do see in terms of electrons moving between orbitals around an atomic nucleus, which is a protest that we don't see.\nThis is absolutely key to appreciate in science as a general principle.\nWe explain this shining sun that we do see in terms of the smashing together of protons, hydrogen nuclei, in the core of the sun to form helium nuclei, that we don't see.\nWe've got no hope of seeing that it's in the core of the sun at 15 million Kelvin, and nothing can survive 15 million Kelvin if it was attempting to observe what was going on at the core of the sun.\nWe know the big bang happened.\nWe explain observations that we have of the cosmos, for example, that there is heat left over at a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin above absolute zero, that permeates all of space.\nWe see that, we observe that, and we observe the so-called Hubble shift of galaxies, all the galaxies, not all the galaxies.\nMany of the galaxies out there are red-shifted away from us and appear to be moving away from us.\nAnd finally, we see that around about 75% of all the atoms in the universe are hydrogen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=453"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d992ea99-9d8d-4600-b421-e430744b61ff": {"page_content": "We see that, we observe that, and we observe the so-called Hubble shift of galaxies, all the galaxies, not all the galaxies.\nMany of the galaxies out there are red-shifted away from us and appear to be moving away from us.\nAnd finally, we see that around about 75% of all the atoms in the universe are hydrogen.\nAnd about 24% or something like that are helium.\nAnd this ratio is only explained by the big bang.\nSo we see these things, the ratio of the elements, we see the movement of galaxies, we see heat left over in the universe, but we do not see the big bang.\nWe cannot see the big bang.\nWe can't travel back in time to 13.7 billion years ago and see the big bang.\nSo we're explaining what we do see, those three things I mentioned, the three pieces of evidence in terms of the unseen, the actual occurrence of the big bang.\nAnd of course, David's favorite example here is dinosaurs.\nAnd he's talked about this in many different places.\nWhat we see are fossils, rocks, certain patterns in rocks.\nYeah, they look like dinosaurs, but only in retrospect, only once you know that dinosaurs exist, you never see a dinosaur.\nNo one's ever seen a dinosaur.\nLikely, no one ever will see a dinosaur, what we see are rocks.\nThis is a rock.\nThis is a series of rocks that people have dug out of the ground and assembled together and my gosh, it looks like a T-Rex, but it's not a T-Rex.\nIt's not one of these.\nRocks are ossified bones.\nThey aren't even dinosaur bones, they're rocks, because over time, the dinosaur bone material itself has been replaced by rocks, it's a form of metamorphic rock.\nWe don't see actual dinosaurs, we explain the scene, what we can see, the fossils, in terms of things we cannot see, the dinosaurs.\nSo one, the unseen stuff, is an explanation of the other, the scene stuff.\nIt's an interpretation, and the denial of the reality of dinosaurs, by say, some hardcore creationists, they might say, it's a test of our faith, some creationists have asserted this, is irrational.\nIt's irrational because it's far too easy to vary.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=560"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae53174f-27a2-4e0f-8fdc-52de5a38e3fa": {"page_content": "So one, the unseen stuff, is an explanation of the other, the scene stuff.\nIt's an interpretation, and the denial of the reality of dinosaurs, by say, some hardcore creationists, they might say, it's a test of our faith, some creationists have asserted this, is irrational.\nIt's irrational because it's far too easy to vary.\nYou can go all the way back to episode one of this talk cast series, all the way back to chapter one of the beginning of an affinity for more on that.\nSo that's the philosophical context within which we need to catch this whole discussion of the multiverse, the explanation of our observations of certain experiments in the field of quantum physics.\nI'm going to discuss three experiments before getting to the beginning of the infinity at all, just to set the stage.\nThe first one is known as Millican's experiment, and it demonstrates the photoelectric effect, and the photoelectric effect is about how light can actually move particles around.\nAnd this is evidence that light is not a wave, it decides between two models of light.\nOn the one hand, the idea that light is a wave, and it cannot possibly knock particles out of the way, it can only vibrate particles up and down, it can't knock them away.\nAnd the particle theory of light, on the other hand, where the particles of light are kind of like little billiard balls, and they can knock things out of the way.\nThey can physically collide, and that's a good way of thinking about things that particles can actually physically collide and bounce off one another, whereas waves can go through one another.\nAnd if you've been to the beach, you've actually seen water waves do that.\nNow, the second experiment is known as the Mark Zender Interferometer.\nAnd in this experiment, we can't possibly explain the outcome, if you set up the experiment just right, and I'm going to spend some time explaining that.\nYou can't explain the outcome without understanding that there must be two photons in the apparatus, even though you only ever fire one, which is astonishing.\nYou fire one photon at the apparatus, and the only way to understand the result of the experiment is by recourse to postulating the existence of a second equally real photon, and in fact what's going on is a little bit more complicated than that.\nThe one photon differentiates itself into two groups of fungible photons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=681"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8906166e-a494-4c94-bb26-850158a611c0": {"page_content": "You can't explain the outcome without understanding that there must be two photons in the apparatus, even though you only ever fire one, which is astonishing.\nYou fire one photon at the apparatus, and the only way to understand the result of the experiment is by recourse to postulating the existence of a second equally real photon, and in fact what's going on is a little bit more complicated than that.\nThe one photon differentiates itself into two groups of fungible photons.\nWe're going to have to unpack a lot of quantum theory in order to understand what I just said there, but we'll get to that.\nThe third experiment is Young's Twin-Slit experiment, and this is the experiment that was discussed in David's first book, Chapter Two, Shadows, and so I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading from Chapter Two of the fabric of reality.\nOkay, before I get to those three experiments, I'll just have a little personal reflection here and told me for a moment, because there are many reasons today that people are becoming more and more attracted to the work of David Deutsch.\nBack in 1997, my own reason, and I think I speak for many others, was that I was struggling at university to understand the basics of quantum mechanics.\nWhat I was presented with in lectures as a physics undergraduate was the mathematical formalism.\nWe solved kind of puzzles or did exercise in quantum mechanics, rather like doing, you know, high school mathematics.\nBut unlike school maths, which was just about abstract numbers lots of the time, in quantum mechanics, at university, the numbers are supposed to represent parts of the physical world, the symbols are supposed to represent parts of the physical world, how particles and other things actually behaved, but it was near impossible to understand as it was presented to me.\nWhat I was offered was instrumentalism of the sort that I just mentioned before.\nYou have these formulae, and you have a process whereby you predict the outcome of the experiment, but you're not really supposed to ask what's going on during the experiment.\nThe maths allows you to simply predict the outcome of the experiment.\nAnd so it's a tool.\nThat's why it's called instrumentalism.\nIt's an instrument for predicting what happens in the experiment, but you don't ask what actually is going on in the experiment.\nNow if we didn't get instrumentalism, maybe 5% of the other time, the lecturer or the tutor would mention something like wave particle duality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=793"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5cac5642-2935-485c-8555-6c8307164cc0": {"page_content": "The maths allows you to simply predict the outcome of the experiment.\nAnd so it's a tool.\nThat's why it's called instrumentalism.\nIt's an instrument for predicting what happens in the experiment, but you don't ask what actually is going on in the experiment.\nNow if we didn't get instrumentalism, maybe 5% of the other time, the lecturer or the tutor would mention something like wave particle duality.\nAnd in fact, this is even what our high school teachers today will do.\nI'll talk about wave particle duality that I photon or an electron is sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave or simultaneously both a particle and a wave at the same time.\nNow given that a particle is something that's isolated at one point in space and a wave is something that's spread out through space.\nYou can't simultaneously be isolated at a point and spread out at the same time.\nThis violates the law of the excluded middle, it violates logic, but in fact, some people who teach quantum mechanics will say, well, classical logic doesn't apply.\nAnd of course, if you're going to give up on classical logic, you're really giving up on reason altogether, okay, you're entering into woo woo land.\nWe must obey the laws of logic, otherwise we're speaking nonsense, but whatever the case, we were reassured that if we were completely confused that it was no cause for concern really, because very famous physicists would say things like, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics, and this was supposed to be reassuring.\nBut I was doing a physics degree back then, and I wanted to understand this stuff, irrationality didn't sit well with me, it was one of the reasons I sort of migrated into philosophy eventually.\nI was thinking, how can something be isolated at a point, not spread out in space and spread out in space all at the same time?.\nI hated all that kind of talk.\nNow I read some of Paul Davies books on quantum mechanics, he wrote the mind of God, he wrote various other books that had a strong science component to them in particular, quantum theory.\nHe was often a bit of a mysterious, he really reveled in the mystery of quantum mechanics, which was interesting, but I wanted to solve the mystery.\nI needed to understand quantum theory.\nBut to Paul Davies credit, in many of his books, he actually relayed theories of many different physicists, in particular.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=915"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ebd6211b-cedb-460a-998e-eafbc274ca2a": {"page_content": "He was often a bit of a mysterious, he really reveled in the mystery of quantum mechanics, which was interesting, but I wanted to solve the mystery.\nI needed to understand quantum theory.\nBut to Paul Davies credit, in many of his books, he actually relayed theories of many different physicists, in particular.\nThis is a fantastic one, the ghost in the atom, and it's got interviews with a lot of different physicists.\nAnd one of the physicists that is interviewed in the book is David Deutsch.\nAnd in the interview, he explains the multiverse, and he explains how it's testable.\nDavid was the first one to come up with an experimental test for the multiverse, against rivals.\nAnd we're going to talk about that test.\nI remember at the time when I did read that book with the interviewer, David, I was confused at first.\nBut I'm going to explore what he does say as we move through this series, in particular about how the multiverse is a testable theory.\nNow, it was sometime in around 1997, when I picked up this book, although not exactly this one, my original fabric of reality, a little paperback, I lent to a friend, and it never came back.\nSo I've got many other copies now, that's the nice hardcover book version.\nIn this book I've mentioned before, it has an excellent recommendation from Paul Davies on the back.\nAnd so seeing Paul Davies recommend this book, of course, I picked it up straight away.\nAnd in that book, in chapter two, Shadows, David explains the multiverse perfectly clearly.\nAnd it was then that I was completely convinced.\nI finally felt that I understood who was right about how to understand quantum theory.\nThere was the people on the side of the multiverse, it was the only one that made sense.\nWe didn't have to give up logic, we didn't have to give up common sense, we didn't have to give up any other part of science or rationality.\nWe just had to accept the fact that the universe, that reality rather, was much, much bigger than what anyone had thought before.\nAnd this wasn't particularly, I mean, it was cool, it was kind of really interesting, but it wasn't so shocking that I was going to say, no, that's ridiculous, I can't possibly accept that.\nIt made sense.\nIt was no more shocking to me than I guess as a child, learning, there are other planets out there beyond the Earth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1028"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bfea503a-cf0d-4346-bbbd-f23d6505987f": {"page_content": "And this wasn't particularly, I mean, it was cool, it was kind of really interesting, but it wasn't so shocking that I was going to say, no, that's ridiculous, I can't possibly accept that.\nIt made sense.\nIt was no more shocking to me than I guess as a child, learning, there are other planets out there beyond the Earth.\nAll later on, learning that there are other planets going around other stars, or that there are other galaxies.\nWell, now we know there are other universes, this was no, this was cool, but it wasn't a great shock to me, but some people are still shocked.\nIt's certainly amazing, but lots of stuff is amazing, it's amazing that we're made of atoms.\nIt's amazing that galaxies exist beyond our own, that the universe is as big as it is, that cells, tiny as they are, are so remarkably complicated, that all of life on Earth, apparently, has been extinguished almost completely, around about five times in the history of the planet.\nIt's amazing that the center of the Earth is solid iron, but the outer core of the Earth is liquid iron, and that generates a magnetic field that protects us from the sun.\nSo I guess, you know, amazement is not a reason to reject something, it's a reason to be really interested in it.\nAnd I don't find it any more amazing that there are these parallel or almost parallel universes out there than any of those other things that I've just mentioned.\nThey're just amazing, the amazing parts of science.\nBut one reason to reject a scientific theory is when it violates logic, and the other interpretations of quantum theory do exactly that, they violate logic or common sense, and we'll talk about that.\nSo we don't reject things because they're amazing, not in science or anywhere else, but we can reject things if they violate common sense, and especially if they violate logic, and a lot of these things do violate, a lot of these alternatives do violate logic.\nOkay, so that's kind of right.\nIf you're trying very hard to understand a thing, and the explanation you're getting isn't working, it's not necessarily all your fault, or at least not exclusively your fault, it can be very much the fault of the explainer, and that might be quite right.\nYou could be proficient at one part of a particular subject, and completely ignorant about another.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1158"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6a1214e8-8423-406d-9af9-34642ecc30db": {"page_content": "Okay, so that's kind of right.\nIf you're trying very hard to understand a thing, and the explanation you're getting isn't working, it's not necessarily all your fault, or at least not exclusively your fault, it can be very much the fault of the explainer, and that might be quite right.\nYou could be proficient at one part of a particular subject, and completely ignorant about another.\nI think it is a bit of a travesty that quantum theory is professional physicists don't all endorse the multiverse, and again we'll come to that next chapter.\nI did make Paul Davies once, back in about the year 2003 in Sydney, we were coincidentally at a pub together for an event called Science in the Pub, and the debate raging on stage was between a group of astronomers about the definition of a planet, a matter that would be resolved about three years later in 2006.\nBut I wasn't really interested in that matter, as soon as I saw Paul Davies.\nI immediately asked about, as soon as I went up to him and introduced to myself, I asked him about David Deutsch and the multiverse.\nAnd sadly, plays under this conversation was, and interesting as it was, and excited as I was to speak with him, and I got his autograph, and we've discussed lots of other things.\nThe response about the multiverse was essentially, I don't have time to explain why it's not correct, but later I was able to read some more of Paul's thinking and watch some more interviews with him, and he thought, and this is probably one of the most common criticisms of the multiverse, that it violates Occam's razor.\nSo there's too many things to explain the one thing that we do observe.\nBut this, understanding of Occam's razor is, in my opinion, completely fallacious.\nOccam's razor is not about increasing the number of entities, it's about increasing the number of assumptions.\nIt would be like saying, we shouldn't postulate the existence of other planets out there that we cannot see, just because we can see some here in our solar system, and in out to a few hundred light years away from the earth.\nNo reason to think that the entire galaxy is filled with planets, let alone galaxies in the rest of the universe.\nThat would violate Occam's razor.\nWe're proliferating the number of planets beyond all reason.\nOf course we're not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3f08c482-1c9a-469e-9a52-d207e236992a": {"page_content": "It would be like saying, we shouldn't postulate the existence of other planets out there that we cannot see, just because we can see some here in our solar system, and in out to a few hundred light years away from the earth.\nNo reason to think that the entire galaxy is filled with planets, let alone galaxies in the rest of the universe.\nThat would violate Occam's razor.\nWe're proliferating the number of planets beyond all reason.\nOf course we're not.\nIt's quite reasonable to presume there are other planets out there in the universe.\nEven what we've already observed here in our solar system, and indeed in our local neighbourhood here in the galaxy.\nSo I think it's completely wrong when people talk about Occam's razor in this way.\nNow, even when some of physicists write about the multiverse, they can still kind of be wrong.\nI don't generally mention names, but I've been, I've been called out by some people watching these videos that I don't mention names enough, so I'll mention one more name.\nAnother person I respect greatly, Sean Carroll, Sean Carroll, Quantum Physicist.\nHe's a supporter of the many worlds interpretation as well, he supports the multiverse.\nHe gave a quite good defence of it recently on the infinite monkey cage.\nThey had an episode if you haven't listened to that podcast, it's quite entertaining.\nRobin Ince and Professor Brian Cox have that, and they did one on coincidentally the most recent one, so I'm recording this now in February of 2020, so if you're looking for it some years hence, the infinite monkey cage in about February 2020 was all about quantum mechanics and in particular the multiverse.\nBoth Brian Cox and Sean Carroll support the many worlds interpretation.\nBut I've heard Sean in other situations, give interviews about the multiverse.\nI think he was on both Joe Rogan and Sam Harris, and during those interviews he insinuated that the only problem with the multiverse is it's not testable, so this is kind of disappointing.\nHe doesn't understand, there's two tests at least that I'm aware of of the multiverse theory, and we're going to get to those, I regard as test of the multiverse theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1404"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "af5778c5-f190-4fe9-a943-ea22f3d41483": {"page_content": "But I've heard Sean in other situations, give interviews about the multiverse.\nI think he was on both Joe Rogan and Sam Harris, and during those interviews he insinuated that the only problem with the multiverse is it's not testable, so this is kind of disappointing.\nHe doesn't understand, there's two tests at least that I'm aware of of the multiverse theory, and we're going to get to those, I regard as test of the multiverse theory.\nOne that was discussed in my previous episode about the fact that if you run an interference experiment, multiple times, certain kinds of interference experiment, in particular the double slit interference experiment for single particles, you don't get the same outcome each time, you don't get the same outcome each time because you're finding yourself in a different universe literally each time.\nScience should produce the same results every single time you run the experiment, but this is a case where you don't get the same result every single time, and that would indicate that you're approximating all the different possibilities, all the different universes that could possibly exist.\nThis is a test, okay, and I'll get to that again later, and so the problem with Sean's claim that the multiverse is untestable is he then thinks simultaneously that because it's not testable, he thinks that this is a reason that falsification is overrated, or a reason even that physics has moved beyond falsification, and I heard Sabine Hoffenstutter say the same thing online recently as well.\nA lot of physicists have said this, I should qualify that, a lot of theoretical physicists have been saying this, that the the Paparian criterion of demarcation of falsification is old hat, we don't need it anymore, we've moved beyond it now.\nBut in the case of Sean, he endorses the multiverse, but for the wrong reasons in part, and Brian Cox he does endorse the multiverse in some moods, but with hesitation it seems to me and hedges and with sort of dodges in one of his recent books, I don't know that even uses the term multiverse, just claims that about simultaneous realities occurring the same time.\nIt's the same thing, it's the same concept, it's like multiple histories as well, it's basically multiple universes just with different language being used.\nOkay, so that's enough here, I'm just I guess emphasizing how difficult it is to find good sources on the multiverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1506"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cac0bd4d-2da3-4e90-b43c-684f38db007b": {"page_content": "It's the same thing, it's the same concept, it's like multiple histories as well, it's basically multiple universes just with different language being used.\nOkay, so that's enough here, I'm just I guess emphasizing how difficult it is to find good sources on the multiverse.\nMy own sources here moving forward right now come down to four of them, okay, there's four sources I'm going to be using for these, firstly my own recollections and recent survey the fundamentals in textbooks and stuff, secondly Paul Davies book, okay, so I'm actually going to be going to this and what David says in this book here in his interview with Paul Davies.\nDavid Wallace is my third source, okay, excellent professor David Wallace, professor of philosopher of physics, and of course David Deutsch in the beginning of infinity, but not only beginning of infinity this time around, but the fabric of reality, and substantially his paper, the structure of the multiverse as well.\nOkay, so let's move into the first of our experiments, and the first experiment is the experiment that demonstrates that light is in fact a particle.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1650"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f1fd4c37-6b21-48e7-b39d-adab61e4e6e6": {"page_content": "Okay, so this is a cartoon of the photoelectric effect, and we can see here where, and it's from physics education technology at the University of Colorado, so you can type in PHET and you can find this online and play with it, and you can see here we can play with the intensity of the light, putting out some red light there, and over here what we've got is some metal, okay on the left hand side there, and the metal is having red lights on it, nothing's happening, nothing's happening, red light has a very long wavelength, it's got low energy, the photons have low energy, and so even if you turn up the intensity which means you're shining more and more photons of light, you're throwing more and more photons there, nothing's happening, nothing's happening because none of the photons have enough energy to knock the electrons out of the way, now if I reduce the wavelength I increase the frequency, increase the energy, there's a point at which, look electrons come out of that surface, this is called the photoelectric effect, of course you can do this in real life, and actually I've done this in real life, there's a video in mind of me doing this in real life, it shows how there's this thing called the threshold frequency, so below the threshold frequency no light gets emitted, okay, around about there, but if you increase the frequency then you do get emission of electrons, the intensity never makes any difference if you're below that threshold frequency, okay, so that's the photoelectric effect, and so what's going on there is if light was a wave, if it was truly a wave, now I guess a way to think about this is if you're a, you're a swimmer, you're a surfboard rider, and you're out beyond the breakers on the ocean, and then you're bobbing up and down as the waves pass, you're not being, you don't tend to be carried one way or the other, by the wave, you just move up and down, you vibrate in place, you don't get carried horizontally, by the wave, you can't be knocked out of position, by the wave unless it's breaking and then in", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1715"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "186a4c46-d6ee-4c2b-99f5-3e3a339e76f8": {"page_content": "and you're out beyond the breakers on the ocean, and then you're bobbing up and down as the waves pass, you're not being, you don't tend to be carried one way or the other, by the wave, you just move up and down, you vibrate in place, you don't get carried horizontally, by the wave, you can't be knocked out of position, by the wave unless it's breaking and then in that case it ceases to be a wave and the normal way we think about them, waves also tend to pass through one another as well, they can pass through matter just a sound can vibrate through a window, it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't cause the window to move, now on the other hand particles can collide one with another, and they can knock each other out of the way, so if light is a wave then as it strikes the surface of the metal here and it could be cesium, it could be sodium, we use active metals because they tend to release electrons more easily, then if you've got low energy light, something like red light, then what should happen is if you wait long enough then electron should come out because they will slowly absorb the wave energy and then electrons will come off the surface, but that's not what happens, what you need to do is to exceed a certain frequency, exceed a certain energy the photons, because on the particle theory of light, what's going on is a physical collision and once you have enough energy, enough kinetic energy, you can physically knock the electron out of the atom, and that's really what's going on here, a physical collision between a particle of light and a particle of electricity namely the electron, and you can detect these electrons, now you can go to my YouTube channel, I guess this is one of the first videos I ever made, and this is an hour long video, not really recommending anyone watch it unless you're really keen, all about the photoelectric effect experiment, and so I take a bit of kit, the actual apparatus and go through it, go through shining light onto a cesia bit of cesium metal that's hidden inside of a black box, so it's difficult to see the full", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1821"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "66a77e9d-1e7d-4eab-86e3-eaeeece4e36d": {"page_content": "YouTube channel, I guess this is one of the first videos I ever made, and this is an hour long video, not really recommending anyone watch it unless you're really keen, all about the photoelectric effect experiment, and so I take a bit of kit, the actual apparatus and go through it, go through shining light onto a cesia bit of cesium metal that's hidden inside of a black box, so it's difficult to see the full details, but I do go through it in excruciating detail, all the way down to calculating what Planck's constant is by plotting a whole bunch of data here, so it's interesting if you're a high school physics student or physics undergraduate perhaps, but otherwise, just know that it's there, if you're really curious about the photoelectric effect, it's there as an hour's worth of me talking about the photoelectric effect, okay, so that's the photoelectric effect, that shows that light genuinely is a particle, now this is the Mark Zender interferometer, and it's available at this website, you can play with it yourself, so we're going to try and understand this and take a few minutes to understand this, what's going on, over here I can fire photons from a laser or something, one at a time, and they're going to hit something right here that I'm indicating called a beam splitter, in other words for a beam splitter is a half silver mirror, and half silver mirror is like, you know, one of the, when you watch TV shows and the detectives are interviewing the criminal, and the criminals in the room locked up with an interrogator, a single interrogator, and then behind the glass, behind one way or two way glass rather, all the other detectives watching what's being said, well that mirror, that's a half silver mirror, you can see through in one direction, but not in the other direction, so long as the room where the interrogations take place is lit very brightly, and the people in that room can't see the others that are on the other side of the mirror, okay, so that's what, that's what this thing here is, the beam splitter, the beam splitter is a half silver", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1916"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "192f1a15-f2d1-42e1-80bc-fdb51c06dd93": {"page_content": "said, well that mirror, that's a half silver mirror, you can see through in one direction, but not in the other direction, so long as the room where the interrogations take place is lit very brightly, and the people in that room can't see the others that are on the other side of the mirror, okay, so that's what, that's what this thing here is, the beam splitter, the beam splitter is a half silver mirror, and you can make a beam splitter to send through 10% of the light, or 20% of the light, or 50% of the light, and this is what's used in this experiment, is a beam splitter where for every photon that you send through, it's got a 50-50 chance of either going through or being reflected, okay, on the front of the beam splitter is silver, okay, it's got metal there, highly shiny, reflecting material, and so photons can bounce off it, but also on the back.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=1113"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "197b3d3a-f15d-42e5-9b01-e3730f05f30a": {"page_content": "there's glass, okay, some photons have enough energy to go through, some by chance, and some will bounce off, okay, alright, so firing a photon will result in 50% going through the half silver mirror, and 50% bouncing off the half silver mirror, and then from there we've got two other mirrors, we've got mirror one and mirror two, and these are normal mirrors, okay, these aren't half silver or anything like this, so 100% of photons that hit here will go this way to detect a two, and the other half will go to some mirror one and through to detect a one, okay, so if we fire a photon, well we don't know which way it's going to go, it's going to go through here, so let me just fire one and see what happens, fire, don't worry about the fact that it's appearing to split in two, just notice that it's set off to detect a two, and so in that case it appears the common sensing would be it's gone bang bang and over here, the photon apparently hasn't gone that way apparently, okay, let's do it again and see what happens, and it's being detected at to detect a one this time, and we've got one one, so we've got a 50 50, okay, well let's just continuously fire and see if we maintain that 50, because 50 50 would make sense, right, if there's 50% going through the beam splitter and 50% bouncing off the beam splitter, then we should expect these numbers to roughly approximate 50 50, or a bit out of 50 50 at the moment, but if we continue to let it run or we fast forward, let me fast forward, let's stop the continuous, and let's do 100 all in one go and see what happens, okay, we've got five and four out of nine, so that's close to 50 50, if we got exactly 50 50, that would be a bit strange, 55, 54 out of 109, so that's a pretty good 50% rate in detector one and 50% in detector two, so if our makes perfect sense, all right, clear, now I'm going to take a second half", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2097"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c709f13d-7d4a-46e0-8ee6-2b67ed8d3368": {"page_content": "do 100 all in one go and see what happens, okay, we've got five and four out of nine, so that's close to 50 50, if we got exactly 50 50, that would be a bit strange, 55, 54 out of 109, so that's a pretty good 50% rate in detector one and 50% in detector two, so if our makes perfect sense, all right, clear, now I'm going to take a second half silver mirror, okay, a second beam splitter and put it there, now what do we expect happens, well you might expect okay, well 50% go this way, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, okay, or through, and 50% go this way, bounce, bounce, and could either go that way or that way, so a quarter of the photons coming this way will end up in detector one, a quarter will end up in detector two, and if the photons being transmitted through this first beam splitter, a quarter will end up in detector one, so we should still end up with 50 50, it still looks symmetrical, doesn't it, let's see what happens, let's fire one and see what happens, okay, detector two, fire another one, detector two again, continuous fire, well would you look at that, it seems like detector one's not being set off ever, what the heck is going on, and if I stop the continuous and we just do a hundred all in one go, yes 100% go to detector two, they're always and only ever going to detector two, why, this animation gives some clue, it's showing that the mirror is causing the photon that is coming out of the laser or wherever to literally split into two photons, now technically speaking we will build the cat right now, what's going on is that the photon is not a single photon in a single universe, it's a multiverse object, it's a photon that exists in many uncountably infinite probably, universes, and when an encounter is the half silver mirror, it splits into two fungible groups, two groups, that are differentiated only by the fact that one of them heads towards", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2193"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "40849348-b143-4b3d-9722-26180b08eae8": {"page_content": "speaking we will build the cat right now, what's going on is that the photon is not a single photon in a single universe, it's a multiverse object, it's a photon that exists in many uncountably infinite probably, universes, and when an encounter is the half silver mirror, it splits into two fungible groups, two groups, that are differentiated only by the fact that one of them heads towards mirror one, and the other group heads towards mirror two, they both combine them at beam splitter number two, and that results in them all going to detector two, now but why, why should it be detector two and not detector one, couldn't it just be a simply be detector one, why isn't it 50% so just a point of clarification or emphasis, the photoelectric effect tells us that there's no such thing as half a photon, you don't get half photons, so if you were to place a detector before mirror one or before mirror two and perform the experiment you would find that only one of the detectors ever went off, only one of the detectors would ever go off, you would only ever detect one photon, this demonstrates that the photon does not split in half in our universe, so when I move forward in this explanation and talk about the splitting of the photon, what I mean is the splitting of the multiverse object which is called the photon, we exist in a multiverse, and so therefore when the photon encounters the half-silvered mirror, in half of the universes it heads towards mirror one and half of the universes it heads towards mirror two, now you and your detector are only in one universe, so you cannot possibly detect both simultaneously both the parts simultaneously, but the way that we reason towards the existence of both parts is the fact that the photon only ever ends up in detector two, so the multiverse object that is the photon does in fact take both parts, you can only ever detect one path, but it is the existence of both parts that explains why the interference happens such that the photon only ever goes and lights up detect two,", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2303"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f6204b4-58cb-45ee-8b7a-2187e348cb3e": {"page_content": "simultaneously both the parts simultaneously, but the way that we reason towards the existence of both parts is the fact that the photon only ever ends up in detector two, so the multiverse object that is the photon does in fact take both parts, you can only ever detect one path, but it is the existence of both parts that explains why the interference happens such that the photon only ever goes and lights up detect two, okay, so this is caused by something known as the phase of the electrons, so phase has something to do with wavelength, but when we thinking about photons we really just need to think of phases of quality of the photon, there's such a thing as superposition, so here's a little animation here, I just googled, and you can see you can imagine these are two kind of water waves that encounter one another, when the crest here coincides with the crest there, the addition of the two causes a big crest there, when you've got a crest and a trough, then they cancel each other out, this thick blue line is showing what's called the resultant, the net effect of the two waves above adding together, so there's a point where you get zero, the two waves can add together to give zero, and so that's precisely what's happening over here, the two photons that could travel towards detect two, sorry, detect a one, cancel each other out, they destructively interfere, but the photons that are heading towards detect two constructively interfere, why should that be?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2408"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2fa1b05e-dae0-4abc-a5b9-65126074668d": {"page_content": "Well, if you know a little bit of physics, reflections from mirrors cause a phase change, so if the photon that bounces off here, or it's originally kind of an up, we think of it as an up bit, rather than as a down bit, okay, so we've got troughs and crests, if the phase of that photon is up as it comes out, then it will be down as it sort of flicked it off, it changes from being up to being down, and then as it reflects off this mirror again, reflection causes a phase change, it goes back to being up, and so it's up as it goes through here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29781d44-04ef-4e98-8cd4-bad1999f742a": {"page_content": "Now, the one that's transmitted here in the other universe, as it goes through the beams that are here, there's no phase change because of no reflection, there is a phase change over here, so if it was up coming out here, then it's down here.\nThe key to understanding this, and this is a very subtle point to get into the technical details, is that the second beam splitter here, the reflection that can happen there is different to the reflection that can happen here.\nHere, the metallic side that reflects is encountered before the glass, so it's on the outside of the glass, so the reflection happens and you get this phase shift at this point.\nHowever, when a photon passes through glass first, and then hits the rear of the beam splitter causing reflection up to detect the one, the phase change is different, in fact doesn't happen, the phase change doesn't happen there.\nNow, there are other complications with this, namely that as light in the form of photons passes through glass, it is refracted, refracted means bent, and when it's bent, the optical path length, the distance that it travels, is technically further than what it is through air.\nThe net consequence of all these factors, the refraction through the glass, the fact that one of the photons encounters the silver side first, and the other photon encounters the, encounters the glass first, has the overall effect of causing destructive interference to detect the one, and constructive interference to detect the two.\nAnd so we end up with all of the photons kind of detected two.\nWhat on earth has it got to do with the multiverse?.\nRemember, we only fired one photon here.\nIn order to explain why that one photon, always ends up with detected two, we have to invoke the existence of a second photon, traveling up to mirror one, that combines with the photon in such a way that it always ends up detected at detected two, and never it detected one.\nWe have to postulate the existence of two photons to explain what one photon is doing.\nThe one photon splits into two groups, and then recombines into one.\nIt's more profound than that.\nThe one photon splits the universe into two, and then recombines the universes into one.\nThat's what interference is.\nInterference is the rare example of where differentiation between universes in the multiverse has happened, and then they're recombined together again.\nNow, if you're not convinced by that, don't worry.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2556"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fd5fed32-b46d-40a2-bef3-f6b2113805e9": {"page_content": "The one photon splits into two groups, and then recombines into one.\nIt's more profound than that.\nThe one photon splits the universe into two, and then recombines the universes into one.\nThat's what interference is.\nInterference is the rare example of where differentiation between universes in the multiverse has happened, and then they're recombined together again.\nNow, if you're not convinced by that, don't worry.\nWe've got a third experiment to talk about, and I think this really is the clincher.\nIt was certainly the clincher for me.\nBefore I leave here, let's just talk about this excellent paper here.\nHopefully, you can just see that on the screen.\nHow does a Mark Zenda interferometer work by Zethi Adams and Tocknell in teaching physics?.\nFrom the physics department at Westminster School, it's excellent.\nIt goes through a complete explanation, not in terms of the multiverse, but if you're interested in the algebra here and the mathematics is what it's going on, it's a very simple algebraic argument about the physical makeup of those beam splitters, and how the phase of the light changes, the phase of the photon changes.\nIt's very short.\nIt's only three pages with some diagrams there, but if you're interested in the details of this, if you're an undergrad or if you're at school trying to understand this or you want to understand this, it's a great little introduction there, but not in terms of the multiverse.\nNo one ever uses the multiverse.\nOkay, so now I'm going to do some reading from the fabric of reality.\nTo try and really push this home, this idea that the universe is larger than we think.\nOkay, so this from the fabric of reality, chapter two, page 39, and David writes, figure 2.6.\nIt should be up on the screen now.\nIt shows that roughly it's actual size, a part of the pattern of shadows cast three meters from a pair of straight parallel slits in an otherwise opaque barrier.\nNow what might that look like?.\nSo that's what this looks like.\nSo the experimental setup is like this.\nWe have a source of photons.\nWe can find them one at a time, and there's a barrier, and the barrier's just got to very narrow slits there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2727"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "18f6c5d2-6461-4c8c-b26c-acf00b029b50": {"page_content": "It shows that roughly it's actual size, a part of the pattern of shadows cast three meters from a pair of straight parallel slits in an otherwise opaque barrier.\nNow what might that look like?.\nSo that's what this looks like.\nSo the experimental setup is like this.\nWe have a source of photons.\nWe can find them one at a time, and there's a barrier, and the barrier's just got to very narrow slits there.\nAnd behind on the screen, we end up if we fire enough of them over time, we end up with this thing called an interference pattern.\nOkay, and David's picture is a lot clearer about what's going on there.\nThe slits are one fifth of the millimeter apart and illuminated by a parallel-sided beam of pure red light from a laser on the other side of the barrier.\nWhy laser light?.\nNot torchlight.\nOnly because the precise shape of a shadow also depends on the color of the light in which it is cast.\nWhite light, as produced by a torch, contains a mixture of all visible colors, so it can cast shadows with multi-colored fringes.\nTherefore, in experiments about the precise shapes of shadows, we are better off using light of a single color.\nWe could put a colored filter such as a pane of color glass in the front of the torch, so that only light if that color would get through, that would help, but filters are not all that discriminating, a better method is to use laser light.\nFor lasers can be tuned very accurately to emit light of whatever color we choose with almost no other color present.\nSo there we can see the shadow cast by a barrier containing two straight parallel slits, so this is what you get.\nIf light traveled in perfectly straight lines, the pattern in figure 2.6 will consist simply of a pair of bright bands, so you'd end up with just two of them.\nOne fifth of a millimeter apart, two close to distinguish on this scale, with sharp edges and with the rest of the screen in shadow.\nBut in reality, the light bends in such a way as to make many bright bands and dark bands, and no sharp edges at all.\nIf the slits are moved sideways, so long as they remain within the laser beam, the pattern also moves by the same amount.\nIn this respect, it behaves exactly like an ordinary large-scale shadow.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2824"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "abd86d12-63f0-4381-a1c6-0e60bf6a2281": {"page_content": "One fifth of a millimeter apart, two close to distinguish on this scale, with sharp edges and with the rest of the screen in shadow.\nBut in reality, the light bends in such a way as to make many bright bands and dark bands, and no sharp edges at all.\nIf the slits are moved sideways, so long as they remain within the laser beam, the pattern also moves by the same amount.\nIn this respect, it behaves exactly like an ordinary large-scale shadow.\nNow what sort of shadow is cast if we cut a second identical pair of slits in the barrier into leave with the existing pair, so we have four slits, one tenth of a millimeter apart.\nYou might expect the patterns would look almost exactly like 2.6.\nAfter all, the first pair of slits by itself cast a shadow in figure 2.6.\nAnd as I have just said, the second pair by itself would cast the same pattern, shifted about a tenth of a millimeter to the side, in almost the same place.\nWe even know that light beams normally pass through each other out affected.\nSo the two pairs of slits together should give us essentially the same pattern, though twice as bright and slightly more blurred.\nNow a four slit apparatus, looking if it would be something like that.\nSo here we've got four slits.\nAnd then we say bright bits and dark bits.\nThere are the shadows, and these are the bright bits.\nIf you actually do anything about this, what you see?.\nSo you increase the number of slits, and you see this sort of...\nSo just to hammer this point home, if you've got one slit, you get this big long diffraction pattern.\nLots and lots of light with one slit.\nIf you increase the number of slits, in other words, increase the number of places through which light can come, you seem to increase the number of shadows.\nThat's rather weird and more shadows here.\nLess light.\nMore slits, less light compared to one slit.\nThat's phenomenal, isn't it?.\nOkay, well David's going to explain that.\nSo let's keep going.\nBack to fabric of reality.\nThe real shadow of a barrier with four straight parallel slits is shown in figure 2.7i.\nOkay, so over here in 2.7i, we've got a picture of these two things.\nPicture A, that's the four slit one, and B is two slits.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=2930"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29b4fe8e-273b-41ef-b0bb-5850912ddf17": {"page_content": "That's phenomenal, isn't it?.\nOkay, well David's going to explain that.\nSo let's keep going.\nBack to fabric of reality.\nThe real shadow of a barrier with four straight parallel slits is shown in figure 2.7i.\nOkay, so over here in 2.7i, we've got a picture of these two things.\nPicture A, that's the four slit one, and B is two slits.\nSo David writes in fabric of reality, the four slit shadow is not a combination of two slight displaced two slit shadows, but has a new and more complicated pattern.\nAnd this pattern, there are places such as the point marked x, which are dark on the four slit pattern, but bright on the two slit pattern.\nThese places were bright where there were two slits in a barrier, but went dark when we cut a second pair of slits that were light to pass through, opening those slits is interfered with the light that was previously arriving at x.\nSo adding two more light sources, darkens the pointed x, removing them, illuminates it again.\nHow?.\nOne might imagine two photons heading towards x, and bouncing off each other like billiard balls.\nEither photon alone would have hit x, but the two together interfere with each other so that they both end up elsewhere.\nI shall show in a moment that this explanation cannot be true.\nNevertheless, the basic idea of it is in a skyhole, something must be coming through that second pair of slits to prevent the light from the first pair from reaching x.\nBut what?.\nWe can find out with the help of some further experiments.\nFirst, the four slit pattern of figure 2.78 appears only if all four slits are illuminated by the laser beam.\nIf only two of them are illuminated, a two-slip pattern appears.\nIf three are illuminated, a three-slip pattern appears, which looks different again.\nSo whatever causes the interference is in the beam.\nThe two-slip pattern also reappears if the two if two of the slits are filled by anything opaque, but not if they are filled by anything transparent.\nIn other words, the interfering entity is obstructed by anything that obstructs light, even something as insubstantial as fog, but it can penetrate anything that allows light to pass, even something as impenetrable to matter as diamond.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=3036"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "216ad2ef-47e0-4721-972e-6055d1300ea5": {"page_content": "So whatever causes the interference is in the beam.\nThe two-slip pattern also reappears if the two if two of the slits are filled by anything opaque, but not if they are filled by anything transparent.\nIn other words, the interfering entity is obstructed by anything that obstructs light, even something as insubstantial as fog, but it can penetrate anything that allows light to pass, even something as impenetrable to matter as diamond.\nIf complicated systems of mirrors and lenses are placed anywhere in the apparatus, so long as light can travel from each slit to a particular point on the screen, what will be observed at that point will be part of the four-slip pattern.\nIf light from only two slits can reach a particular point, part of a two-slip pattern will be observed there and so on.\nSo whatever causes interference behaves like light.\nIt is found everywhere in the light beam and nowhere outside it.\nIt is reflected, transmitted or blocked by whatever reflects, transmits or blocks light.\nYou may be wondering why I'm laboring this point, surely it is obvious that it is light, but what interferes with photons from each slit is photons from the other slits.\nBut you may be inclined to doubt the obvious after the next experiment.\nThe denoument of the series.\nWhat should we expect to happen when these experiments are performed with only one photon at a time?.\nFor instance, suppose that our torches move so far away that only one photon per day is falling on the screen?.\nWhat would be seen?.\nIf it is true that what interferes with each photon is other photons, then shouldn't the interference be lessened when the photons are very sparse?.\nShould it not cease altogether when there is only one photon passing through the apparatus at any one time?.\nWe might still expect per numbers, since a photon might be capable of changing course when passing through a slip, perhaps by striking a glancing blow at the edge.\nBut what we surely could not observe is any place on the screen, such as X, that receives photons when two slits are open, but which goes dark when two more are opened?.\nYet that's exactly what we do observe.\nHowever sparse the photons are, the shadow pattern remains the same.\nEven when the experiment is done with one photon at a time, none of them is ever observed to arrive at X, when all four slits are open.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=3135"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89b5ca54-8bb0-4554-8b0b-d6aa06dd6558": {"page_content": "But what we surely could not observe is any place on the screen, such as X, that receives photons when two slits are open, but which goes dark when two more are opened?.\nYet that's exactly what we do observe.\nHowever sparse the photons are, the shadow pattern remains the same.\nEven when the experiment is done with one photon at a time, none of them is ever observed to arrive at X, when all four slits are open.\nYet we need only close two slits for the flickering at X to resume.\nCould it be that the photon splits into fragments, which after passing through the slits, change course and recombine?.\nWe can rule that possibility out too.\nIf again we fire one photon through the apparatus but use four detectors, one at each slit, then at most one of them ever registers anything.\nSince in such an experiment we never observe two of the detectors ever going off at once, we can tell that the entities that they detect are not splitting up.\nSo if the photons do not split into fragments and are not being deflected by other photons, what does deflect them?.\nWhen a single photon at a time is passing through the apparatus, what can be coming through the other slits to interfere with it?.\nLet us take stock.\nWe have found that when one photon passes through this apparatus, it passes through one of the slits, and then something interferes with it, deflecting it in a way that depends on what other slits are open.\nThe interfering entities have passed through some of the other slits.\nThe interfering entities behave exactly like photons, except they cannot be seen.\nI shall now start calling the interfering entities photons.\nThat is what they are though for the moment, it does appear that photons come in two sorts, which I shall temporarily call tangible photons and shadow photons.\nTangible photons are the ones we can see or detect with instruments, whereas the shadow photons are intangible, they are invisible.\nDetectible only through their interference effects on the tangible photons, later we shall see that there is no intrinsic difference between a tangible and shadow photons.\nEach photon is tangible in one universe in intangible and all the other parallel universes, but I anticipate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=3228"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "81bd0ec2-d2cd-45ab-b3c9-adf06618d605": {"page_content": "Tangible photons are the ones we can see or detect with instruments, whereas the shadow photons are intangible, they are invisible.\nDetectible only through their interference effects on the tangible photons, later we shall see that there is no intrinsic difference between a tangible and shadow photons.\nEach photon is tangible in one universe in intangible and all the other parallel universes, but I anticipate.\nWhat we have inferred so far is only that each tangible photon has an accompanying retinue of shadow photons, and that when a photon passes through one of our four slits, some shadow photons pass through the other three slits, since different interference patterns appear when we cut slits at other places in the screen, provided that they are within the beam, shadow photons must be arriving all over the illuminated part of the screen whenever a tangible photon arrives.\nTherefore, there are many more shadow photons than tangible ones.\nHow many?.\nExperiments cannot put an upper bound on the number, but they do set a rough lower bound.\nIn a laboratory, the largest area that we could conveniently illuminate with a laser light might be about a square meter, and the smallest manageable size of the holes might be about a thousandth of a millimeter.\nSo there are about 10 to the power of 12, a trillion possible whole locations on the screen.\nTherefore, there must be at least a trillion shadow photons accompanying each tangible one.\nThus we have inferred the existence of a seething, religiously complicated hidden world shadow photons.\nThey travel at the speed of light, bounce off mirrors are refractable lenses and are stopped by opaque barriers or filters of the wrong colour.\nYet they do not trigger even the most sensitive detectors.\nThe only thing in the universe that a shadow photon can be observed to affect is the tangible photon that it accompanies.\nThis is the phenomenon of interference.\nShadow photons would go entirely unnoticed where it not for this phenomenon and the strange patterns of shadows by which we observe it.\nInterference is not a special property of photons alone.\nQuantum theory predicts and experiment confirms that it occurs for every sort of particle, so there must be hosts of shadow neutrons accompanying every tangible neutron, hosts of shadow electrons accompanying every tangible electron and so on.\nEach of these shadow particles is detectable only indirectly.\nThrough its interference with the motion of its tangible counterpart, it follows that reality is much bigger than it seems and most of it is invisible.\nThe objects and events that we and our instruments can directly observe are the mirrors tip of the iceberg.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=3339"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7b9ac840-7811-4fe5-9095-fa5d4652ae08": {"page_content": "Quantum theory predicts and experiment confirms that it occurs for every sort of particle, so there must be hosts of shadow neutrons accompanying every tangible neutron, hosts of shadow electrons accompanying every tangible electron and so on.\nEach of these shadow particles is detectable only indirectly.\nThrough its interference with the motion of its tangible counterpart, it follows that reality is much bigger than it seems and most of it is invisible.\nThe objects and events that we and our instruments can directly observe are the mirrors tip of the iceberg.\nNow tangible particles have a property that enables us to call them collectively a universe.\nThis is simply their defining property of being tangible, that is of interacting with each other and hence of being directly detectable by instruments and sense organs made by other tangible particles.\nBecause of the phenomenon of interference, they are not wholly partitioned off from the rest of reality.\nThat is, from the shadow particles.\nIf they were, we should never have discovered there is more to reality than tangible particles.\nBut to a good approximation, they do resemble the universe that we see around us in every day life and the universe referred to in classical or pre quantum physics.\nFor similar reasons, we might think of calling the shadow particles collectively a parallel universe.\nFor they too are affected by tangible particles only through interference phenomena, but we can do better than that for it turns out that shadow particles are partitioned among themselves and exactly the same way as the universe of tangible particles is partitioned from them.\nIn other words, they do not form a single homogenous parallel universe vastly larger than the tangible one, but rather a huge number of parallel universes, each similar in composition to the tangible one and each obeying the same laws of physics, but differing in that the particles are in different positions in each universe.\nOr a mark about terminology.\nThe word universe has traditionally been used to mean the whole of physical reality, in that sense there can be at most one universe.\nWe could stick to that definition and say that the entity we have been accustomed to calling the universe, namely all the directly perceptible matter and energy around us and the surrounding space is not the whole universe after all, but only a small portion of it.\nThen we should have to invent a new name for that small tangible portion, but most physicists prefer to carry on using the word universe to denote the same entity that has always denoted, even though that entity now turns out to be only a small part of physical reality.\nA new word, multiverse, has been coined to denote physical reality as a whole.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=3446"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "590026ef-6826-4e7b-a6a1-7136df20b0d6": {"page_content": "Then we should have to invent a new name for that small tangible portion, but most physicists prefer to carry on using the word universe to denote the same entity that has always denoted, even though that entity now turns out to be only a small part of physical reality.\nA new word, multiverse, has been coined to denote physical reality as a whole.\nSingle particle interference experiments, such as I have been describing, show us that the multiverse exists and it contains many counterparts of each particle in the tangible universe.\nTo reach the further conclusion that the multiverse is roughly partitioned in the parallel universe, we must consider interference phenomena involving more than one tangible particle.\nThe simplest way of doing this is to ask by way of thought experiment what must be happening at the microscopic level when shadow photons strike an opaque object.\nThey are stopped of course.\nWe know that because interference ceases when an opaque barrier is placed in the paths of shadow photons.\nBut why?.\nWhat stops them?.\nWe can rule out the straightforward answer that they are absorbed like tangible photons would be.\nOkay, and then David goes on to say, well they are absorbed.\nThe tangible photons are absorbed by tangible barriers but it means that also the shadow photons are absorbed by shadow barriers.\nAnd the shadow barriers exist inside shadow laboratories and the shadow laboratories are in a shadow world and so on.\nAnd so this is the emergent multiverse idea.\nOkay, so there are three experiments.\nThere's some personal motivation and a hint about the multiverse.\nWe still haven't got to reading in chapter 11 of the multiverse but that will happen next time and we'll look in some detail at the further experiment.\nOkay, it's more of a thought experiment but potentially could be really done.\nAn experiment to refute other ways of understanding quantum theory or trying to understand quantum theory.\nNamely so-called collapse interpretations or the Copenhagen interpretation.\nTo refute those without refuting the multiverse theory, there is a test.\nThere is a test that David came up with and so we'll talk about that next time.\nBut for now this has been nearly an hour's worth of quantum theory.\nUntil next time, bye.\nIf you're finding my videos, podcasts or even my website valuable, there's a way to contribute now so that I can spend more time doing this.\nIf you go to my website www.brethall.org then you will find a donate button there that links to a PayPal account.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=3565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b75f33da-1c46-41aa-a023-3df4e96da361": {"page_content": "There is a test that David came up with and so we'll talk about that next time.\nBut for now this has been nearly an hour's worth of quantum theory.\nUntil next time, bye.\nIf you're finding my videos, podcasts or even my website valuable, there's a way to contribute now so that I can spend more time doing this.\nIf you go to my website www.brethall.org then you will find a donate button there that links to a PayPal account.\nThere's also Patreon and you can find me there at Brett our haul.\nThank you for any support at all.\nKnow that it means a great deal to me.\nThank you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu4HH1nvtME&t=899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b775df0-9fb7-4e59-9045-6b534527c768": {"page_content": "Hello, I'm up to chapter 6 now, the Jump to University.\nThis chapter is about a theme that runs through so much of David's work, University.\nI can't get a grip on just how well understood or misunderstood or perhaps just underappreciated this particular concept of universality is.\nYou don't hear it much.\nYou don't hear of it much.\nI guess it is underappreciated and I think this chapter really is when it's understood well enough, provides an avenue towards the solution of some philosophical discussions.\nOne of those would be the foretelling of the next chapter, chapter 7, which is called Artificial Creativity, and there the discussion is in large part about artificial general intelligence.\nBut for now, what we can say is that, and I'll probably say this again in the next video, the key issue with artificial intelligence versus artificial general intelligence is that many people who are concerned about AI, Benaro sort are concerned it will be better than us at everything possible.\nThe argument goes like this, presently AI will beat humans at chess now every single time they play, and at many other games like Go or whatever else.\nAI, in other words, dumb computers can beat us at mental arithmetic, at multiplying or dividing big numbers, or these days you can even go online and they'll do calculus for you.\nThey'll do integration faster than you ever could, they'll find derivatives faster than you ever could.\nAI can beat us at driving now.\nThey can probably make a better cup of coffee than a barista.\nSo there is a long, long list of things that can be automated.\nIn other words, things that digital computers or narrow AI can accomplish more efficiently than we can.\nNow, the argument gets a little bit slippery because what some people then assume is, if you create a future AI, which can do every task that we can write a program for and program a single artificial intelligence, perhaps a robot, with all of those, then we have an AI with superhuman capabilities across all known capabilities.\nAnd then you've got an AGI that's a super intelligence, right?.\nNo, that's wrong, that's very badly wrong.\nThe key capacity of a human being is solving problems we do not yet have an algorithm for.\nIn other words, things that cannot be automated.\nIn the list of all AI programs, there is not a program for tasks not yet thought of that could need automation.\nIn other words, a creativity algorithm.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=4"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d964e0d8-c9aa-4dbf-b9dd-431888b628e0": {"page_content": "And then you've got an AGI that's a super intelligence, right?.\nNo, that's wrong, that's very badly wrong.\nThe key capacity of a human being is solving problems we do not yet have an algorithm for.\nIn other words, things that cannot be automated.\nIn the list of all AI programs, there is not a program for tasks not yet thought of that could need automation.\nIn other words, a creativity algorithm.\nWhat does that have to do with anything?.\nThat would amount to a jump to universality, the topic of this chapter.\nA universal algorithm would not be one that was a superset of all currently existing known tasks, but rather something much shorter, presumably, it would be an algorithm which could simulate any other algorithm.\nIt wouldn't be a big long list of other algorithms, it would be able to simulate any other, including algorithms for tasks not yet thought of.\nBut you wouldn't be able to specify the output of such an algorithm because the algorithm would be creative.\nWhat it would do would be unpredictable.\nAnd that's what we are.\nWe will come to that kind of universality towards the end of this chapter.\nI am getting ahead of myself.\nDavid begins this chapter, chapter six, and different to my other videos perhaps.\nI want to actually read directly from the first few pages of this chapter with the discussion about different languages and different types of writing.\nEarly kinds of writing used symbols that represented whole concepts and the vocabulary was limited.\nWriting came after speech, of course, so people would have had a language presumably before they were able to write it down, sometime a long before writing was invented.\nIn fact, that language would have been universal.\nWhat it means for a language to be universal is that anything and everything that can possibly be thought or imagined can be expressed in that language.\nSo I just want to emphasize that again, universality is about the anything and the everything.\nAnd different kinds of systems might be able to accomplish a wide repertoire of different tasks.\nBut until that repertoire of tasks becomes all encompassing, infinite, everything, all possible tasks, it doesn't have universality.\nSo language, natural language that we use, and natural languages that probably existed well before, English or writing systems existed, were universal in this respect.\nNow, some people might want to pull the breaks here and say, well, hold on, there's a whole bunch of things that we can't express in language.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=177"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e4750bb0-2c54-45db-9d27-2e910239506a": {"page_content": "But until that repertoire of tasks becomes all encompassing, infinite, everything, all possible tasks, it doesn't have universality.\nSo language, natural language that we use, and natural languages that probably existed well before, English or writing systems existed, were universal in this respect.\nNow, some people might want to pull the breaks here and say, well, hold on, there's a whole bunch of things that we can't express in language.\nSo I just want to make a quick distinction about being able to express something in practice and being able to express something in principle.\nSo, Qualia, the most famous example, I suppose, Qualia are the subjective way that things seem.\nAnd if I look out my window right now, I can see the sky looks blue, but perhaps that blue looks different to me in the way that it looks to you.\nThe differences in the Qualia, our subjective experience of the blue sky, can't be put into words, but that's not a failing of the universality of language.\nThat's simply a failure of our imagination.\nWe haven't yet figured out how to conjure the language in such a way as to describe subjective states.\nIt doesn't mean that it's impossible using language.\nIt simply means we just don't know how.\nProblems are soluble, so one day we will know how to do this.\nNow, putting all that aside, early writing systems had a finite number of symbols that were essentially in one-to-one correspondence with a bunch of objects or concepts that people wanted to be able to write down.\nThese are often known as pictograms or hieroglyphics.\nSo a picture of the sun would represent the sun, and a picture of a crown might mean the king.\nBut if there was no picture in that writing system for a concept or object, then there was nothing else that could be done except invent a whole new system.\nIn other words, the number of symbols would proliferate.\nSuch a system isn't universal because at any given point in time, there would be objects or concepts outside of that system which could not be represented by that system.\nToday, Mandarin speakers and others, including people who can speak Japanese quite often in people who can speak Korean quite often, use some traditional Chinese characters.\nThe traditional Chinese script numbers in the thousands, as far as I'm aware.\nThere's thousands of different characters if you want to learn to understand traditional Chinese.\nBut it's rather fixed, hence the word traditional.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=266"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b3dbb10b-fb65-4bce-81f8-675f557bd8b7": {"page_content": "Today, Mandarin speakers and others, including people who can speak Japanese quite often in people who can speak Korean quite often, use some traditional Chinese characters.\nThe traditional Chinese script numbers in the thousands, as far as I'm aware.\nThere's thousands of different characters if you want to learn to understand traditional Chinese.\nBut it's rather fixed, hence the word traditional.\nKorean students, for example, at schools throughout primary school in high school, learn something like 1,800 different characters in order to be able to understand some of the language that's used in their culture.\nBut Korean students also learn another alphabet, and it's called hungul.\nAnd hungul being the Korean alphabet consists of 24 characters.\nNow, if you don't know anything about Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, you might look at the symbol side by side and think that they are all pretty much the same kind of system, but in fact, you'd be very wrong.\nKorean has far more in common with the English script than it does with the traditional Chinese script.\nThere are 24 letters in the Korean alphabet, there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, and you rearrange the symbols to literally represent any object or any concept that you can possibly articulate.\nAnd if you run out of words, you simply rearrange the symbols in order to invent another word.\nThat's universality.\nSo we have alphabets where no new symbols need to be invented.\nWe just rearranged the existing ones to express anything we like.\nOr these things called logograms or pictograms, where you need a whole new picture, a whole new symbol in order to represent a concept or object.\nSo the former alphabets are universal, the latter pictograms are not.\nNow for what it's worth is an aside, traditional Chinese can be read, while I'm not actually being spoken by many different Asian people.\nIndeed, the first invasion of Korea by the Japanese happened in 1592, and the Chinese came to the aid of the Koreans, and at one point there were a number of points, there were meetings of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.\nNeither of them could speak the others language, but they could understand the traditional Chinese script, and this helped the three factions communicate.\nOkay, back to the beginning of the infinity.\nDavid writes about how early scribes who invented alphabets probably never realized the great advances they made beyond hieroglyphics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=399"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4fab4e5-16c1-4062-8e2d-bde30ba1ee76": {"page_content": "Neither of them could speak the others language, but they could understand the traditional Chinese script, and this helped the three factions communicate.\nOkay, back to the beginning of the infinity.\nDavid writes about how early scribes who invented alphabets probably never realized the great advances they made beyond hieroglyphics.\nThis chapter is very much a historical overview of significant jumps that have happened to universality, in various domains.\nThe first of these were, well in fact, the first chronologically speaking was the jump to universality that happened evolutionarily, namely in the DNA, and then in artifacts of humans, including symbolic ways of representing language, through to computation and finally our quantum computation.\nSo let me begin my reading on page 127, where he's well into describing the importance of alphabets.\nSo David writes here, it is sometimes suggested that scribes deliberately limited the use of alphabets for fear that their livelihoods would be threatened by a system that was too easy to learn, but perhaps that is forcing too modern and interpretation on them.\nI suspect that neither the opportunities nor the pitfalls of universality ever occurred to anyone until much later in history.\nThose ancient innovators only ever cared about the specific problems they were confronting, to write particular words, and in order to do that one of them invented a rule that happened to be universal.\nSuch an attitude may seem implausibly parochial, but things were parochial in those days.\nAnd indeed, it seems to be recurring theme in the early history of many fields that universality, when it was achieved, was not the primary objective.\nIf it was an objective at all, a small change in a system to meet a parochial purpose that just happened to make the system universal as well.\nThis is the jump to universality.\nJust as writing dates back to the dawn of civilization, so do numerals.\nMathematicians nowadays distinguish between numbers, which are abstract entities, and numerals, which are physical symbols that represent numbers, but numerals were discovered first.\nThey evolved from telemarks, or tokens, or stones, which have been used since prehistoric times to keep track of discrete entities such as animals or days.\nI'll just pause there.\nDon't we all remember in mathematics class throughout high school learning the telesystem?.\nI know I do, and it still goes on to that.\nIt's a remarkably bizarre part of the mathematics curriculum, learning these historical systems.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=520"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8dab02bf-e0e5-4f30-9e2c-181db7623f2b": {"page_content": "They evolved from telemarks, or tokens, or stones, which have been used since prehistoric times to keep track of discrete entities such as animals or days.\nI'll just pause there.\nDon't we all remember in mathematics class throughout high school learning the telesystem?.\nI know I do, and it still goes on to that.\nIt's a remarkably bizarre part of the mathematics curriculum, learning these historical systems.\nDavid speaks not only here about telemarks, the very earliest ways of learning how to record the number of things, as well as Roman numerals, a completely esoteric bizarre system.\nI suppose the only reason for learning it now is when you see all buildings that have the age of the building recorded, or at the end of the credits, in a television show that tells you what year the television show or the movie was made in Roman numerals.\nDavid goes through a lengthy exposition of the telesystem, and then of the Roman numeral system as well.\nYou write out the Roman numeral system never achieved universality.\nIt might have if vertical lists of Roman numerals have been permitted, where each new tier was something in the vertical list like an exponent.\nBoth Archimedes and Apollonia's got close to inventing a universal system of recording numbers, but failed.\nNow you should read those stories in the chapter.\nI think they're really, really interesting.\nDavid writes about how Archimedes probably did notice the universality of his system, but chose not to allow it for bizarre reasons.\nHe discusses some of the reasons why, and then I'll continue on page 133.\nSo I'm page 133.\nHe talks about how Archimedes chose not to make his system universal for the following, even more speculative possibility, he says.\nAnd he writes, The largest benefits of any universality beyond whatever parochial problem it is intended to solve come from its being universal for further innovation.\nAnd innovation is unpredictable.\nSo to appreciate universality at the time of its discovery, one must either value abstract knowledge for its own sake, or expect it to yield unforeseeable benefits.\nIn a society that rarely experienced change, both those attitudes would be quite unnatural.\nBut that was reversed with the Enlightenment, whose quintessential idea is, as I have said, that progress is both desirable and attainable.\nAnd so, therefore, is universality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=646"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aa03749f-df78-45a5-a805-f975df051614": {"page_content": "And innovation is unpredictable.\nSo to appreciate universality at the time of its discovery, one must either value abstract knowledge for its own sake, or expect it to yield unforeseeable benefits.\nIn a society that rarely experienced change, both those attitudes would be quite unnatural.\nBut that was reversed with the Enlightenment, whose quintessential idea is, as I have said, that progress is both desirable and attainable.\nAnd so, therefore, is universality.\nBut that, as it may, with the Enlightenment, pluralism and all arbitrary exceptions and limitations began to be regarded as inherently problematic, and not only in science, why should the law treat an aristocrat differently from a commoner, a slave from a master, a woman from a man.\nEnlightenment philosophers such as Locke set out to free political institutions from arbitrary rules and assumptions.\nOthers tried to derive moral maxims from universal moral expectations, rather than merely to postulate them dogmetically.\nThus, universal explanatory theories of justice, legitimacy, and morality began to take their place alongside universal theories of matter and motion.\nIn all cases, universality was being sought deliberately as a desirable feature in its own right, even a necessary feature for an idea to be true, and not just as a means of solving a parochial problem.\nI'll pause there.\nThis is remarkable.\nIt talks about how the tradition of criticism about the Enlightenment gifted us with must work in concert with these jumps to universality, not only in the ways in which a universal system of recording numbers might be, but universality across all domains, including most importantly, morality.\nMorality shouldn't be applied differently to one person as compared to another, but rather everyone in the same way.\nThat's the universality, where everyone is treated in the same way.\nuniversality is important as a fundamental principle upon which so many of our intellectual domains rest, and therefore the ways in which problems will be solved.\nA roadblock is having rules that have arbitrary exceptions.\nThe arbitrary exception to any of these fundamental universal principles are the very thing that is going to stop progress, and so when they're spotted, that's a great way to correct an error.\nIf you can remove an arbitrary rule, such that your system becomes universal, you're going to make progress.\nI'll continue.\nA jump to universality, that played an important role in the early history of the Enlightenment, was the invention of movable type printing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=763"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ad3f6590-1014-49ad-b20c-3d43fe3cfc28": {"page_content": "The arbitrary exception to any of these fundamental universal principles are the very thing that is going to stop progress, and so when they're spotted, that's a great way to correct an error.\nIf you can remove an arbitrary rule, such that your system becomes universal, you're going to make progress.\nI'll continue.\nA jump to universality, that played an important role in the early history of the Enlightenment, was the invention of movable type printing.\nmovable type consisted of individual pieces of metal, each embossed with one letter of the alphabet.\nEarlier forms of printing had merely streamlined writing in the same way that Roman numeral streamline tallying.\nEach page was engraved on a printing plate, and thus all the symbols on it could be copied in a single action.\nBut given a supply of movable type, with several instances of each letter, one does not further metal work, one merely arranges the type into words and sentences.\nOne does not have to know, in order to manufacture type, what the documents that will it will eventually print are going to say, it is universal.\nOkay, so this is just another example of universality in technology.\nWe have a system of being able to print books that no longer require us to etch into metal, or to bang a piece of metal out with the entire page.\nInstead, all you need is type, movable type, little bits of metal, each of which has a letter on it, letter printed on it, and you would have many such letters I appear to be explaining the blindingly obvious here, but it is important to understand the significance of such a incremental change.\nThis incremental change of going from, going from etching out the entire page on a piece of metal to instead, you would think it is a small change, but it is a huge change, because suddenly you get universality, you go from the entire page being etched onto a piece of metal, which then can be printed over and over again, to instead having individual pieces of metal with letters on them.\nAnd now you can represent literally any possible text that could ever be written, unlike in the first system.\nSo I am going to skip a little in these discussions, people talk about the programmable loom as well, which David mentions as well.\nSo I'll skip that and move straight onto the history of the universal computer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=902"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "525f19af-cd12-4097-8d4b-996d01dba0a0": {"page_content": "And now you can represent literally any possible text that could ever be written, unlike in the first system.\nSo I am going to skip a little in these discussions, people talk about the programmable loom as well, which David mentions as well.\nSo I'll skip that and move straight onto the history of the universal computer.\nAnd so I'm up to page 135 now, and David writes, the most momentous such technology is that of computers, on which an increasing proportion of all technology now depends, and which also has deep theoretical and philosophical significance.\nThe jump to computational universality should have happened in the 1820s, when the mathematician Charles Babbage designed a device that he called the difference engine, a mechanical calculator which represented decimal digits by cogs, each of which could click into one of ten positions.\nHis original purpose was parochial to automate the production of tables of mathematical functions such as logarithms and cosines, which were heavily used in navigation and engineering.\nAt that time, they were compiled by armies of clerks known as computers, which is the origin of the word, and would notoriously ever error prone.\nThe difference engine would make fewer errors because the rules of arithmetic would be built into its hardware to make it print out a table of a given function.\nOne would program it only once, with the definition of the function in terms of simple operations.\nIn contrast, human computers had to use or be used by both the definition and general rules of arithmetic thousands of times per table, each time being an opportunity for human error.\nOkay, and then David mentions in that part there that the difference engine was able to calculate and compute the results of different complex functions like cosines and logarithms.\nThis is based on the work of somebody called Brooke Taylor, and if anyone does mathematics or university, they have to go through Taylor series.\nTaylor series is a rather remarkable concept where you can take any old function that you like.\nIt doesn't involve complex numbers.\nAny old function that you like, and you can represent it as a series of multiplications and additions.\nAnd like I say, anyone who's done undergraduate maths has to go through many exercises and repeatedly doing these Taylor series expansions as they're called.\nOkay, so I'm going to skip a next short part and David writes about how the difference engine was improved by someone making it programmable, Charles Babbage made it programmable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1039"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "55462a1e-7e2b-49d3-b6b4-f1c566fb1f20": {"page_content": "It doesn't involve complex numbers.\nAny old function that you like, and you can represent it as a series of multiplications and additions.\nAnd like I say, anyone who's done undergraduate maths has to go through many exercises and repeatedly doing these Taylor series expansions as they're called.\nOkay, so I'm going to skip a next short part and David writes about how the difference engine was improved by someone making it programmable, Charles Babbage made it programmable.\nAnd this new machine was called the analytical engine and David writes, Babbage and his colleague, the mathematician Ada, Countess of Lovelace, knew that this machine, the analytical engine, would be capable of computing anything that human computers could.\nAnd that this included more than just arithmetic, it could do algebra, play chess, compose music, process, images, and so on.\nIt would be what is today called a universal classical computer.\nI shall explain the significance of the provides a classical in chapter 11 when I discuss quantum computers which operate at a still higher level of universality.\nNeither they nor anyone else for ever a century afterwards imagined today's most common uses of computations such as the internet word processing database searching in games.\nBut another important application they did foresee was making scientific predictions.\nThe analytic engine would be the analytical engine would be a universal simulator able to predict the behavior to any design accuracy of any physical object given the relevant laws of physics.\nThis is the universality that I mentioned in chapter 3 through which physical objects that are unlike each other and dominated by different laws of physics such as brains and quasars can exhibit the same mathematical relationships.\nI'll pause there.\nHere's one of the most philosophically significant issues that David raises in both the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality.\nIt is one of the most contentious philosophical claims even though it's true that has been made over the years by many different people from babage and love lace here through to cheering, through to David Deutsch and others.\nAnd that is this idea here said in the sentence that I've just read that David wrote where the analytical engine would be a universal simulator.\nOkay so able to predict the behavior and model simulate the behavior of any physical system.\nIn other words, Ben includes biological systems, biological systems are a kind of physical system.\nThe brain is a kind of physical system.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "380fb0d6-7883-4a38-8ec3-cf6ba45437c5": {"page_content": "And that is this idea here said in the sentence that I've just read that David wrote where the analytical engine would be a universal simulator.\nOkay so able to predict the behavior and model simulate the behavior of any physical system.\nIn other words, Ben includes biological systems, biological systems are a kind of physical system.\nThe brain is a kind of physical system.\nNow unless you are willing to believe in supernatural explanations, then this tells us that computers are able to simulate, not even electronic computers, things like the analytical engine, can simulate the functioning of a human brain.\nAnd so they should be able to be conscious.\nWhatever consciousness is, it must be a property of brains and brains are made of atoms which are performing computations or at least the neurons are performing the computations.\nI'm going to skip a little bit more and David writes up to page 137 now.\nBabage and love lace also thought about one application of universal computers that has not been achieved to this day, namely so-called artificial intelligence AI.\nSince human brains are physical objects obeying the laws of physics and since the analytical engine is a universal simulator, it could be programmed to think in every sense that humans can, albeit very slowly and requiring an impractically vast number of punched cards.\nNevertheless, Babage and love lace denied that it could.\nLove lace argued that the analytical engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.\nIt can do whatever we know, how to order it to perform.\nIt can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.\nThe mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing later called this mistake, Lady Love Laces objection.\nIt was not computational universality that love lace failed to appreciate, but the universality of the laws of physics.\nScience at the time had almost no knowledge of the physics of the brain.\nAlso, Darwin's theory of evolution had not yet been published, and supernatural accounts of the nature of human beings were still prevalent.\nToday, there is less mitigation for the minority of scientists and philosophers who still believe that AI is unobtainable.\nFor instance, the philosopher John Searle has placed the AI project in the following historical perspective.\nFor centuries, some people have tried to explain the mind in mechanical terms, using similes and metaphors based on the most complex machines of the day.\nFirst, the brain was supposed to be like an immensely complicated set of gears and levers.\nThen it was hydraulic pipes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1274"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fadbd3c6-1bcd-4be8-b263-0c4f7110c038": {"page_content": "Today, there is less mitigation for the minority of scientists and philosophers who still believe that AI is unobtainable.\nFor instance, the philosopher John Searle has placed the AI project in the following historical perspective.\nFor centuries, some people have tried to explain the mind in mechanical terms, using similes and metaphors based on the most complex machines of the day.\nFirst, the brain was supposed to be like an immensely complicated set of gears and levers.\nThen it was hydraulic pipes.\nThen steam engines, then telephonic changes, and now the computers are our most impressive technology.\nBrains are said to be computers.\nBut this is still no more than a metaphor say so, and there is no more reason to expect the brain to be a computer than a steam engine.\nThis is even though an unpopular opinion above philosophers, scientists, academics, people engaged in the debate today, I would still say it's the overwhelming majority of the man on the street who would say that indeed it's impossible for a computer to think in the way that people can.\nAnd that assuming that what a brain is doing is a kind of computation is still a metaphor, is best thought of as a metaphor.\nI think there was a bit of an article that's been going around recently to this effect.\nSometimes it appears in popular science articles and that kind of thing that the brain is doing something special that the brain can't possibly be a computer.\nOkay, so let me reread that last bit and continue.\nThis is still no more than a metaphor says so, and there is no more reason to expect the brain to be a computer than a steam engine.\nBut there is.\nA steam engine is not a universal simulator, but a computer is, so expecting it to be able to do whatever neurons can is not a metaphor.\nIt is a known and proven property of the laws of physics as best we know them.\nAnd as it happens, hydraulic pipes could also be made into a universal classical computer, and so could gears and levers as Babidge showed.\nBy the way, we should just acknowledge the fact that when David writes, it is a known and proven property of the laws of physics as best we know them.\nHe proved that.\nOkay, so that's his proof.\nHe proved that the laws of physics in terms of quantum, the quantum laws of physics.\nOkay, we just need to acknowledge something before we do move on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1416"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0544d929-6347-4904-b4ee-cf2de59029bd": {"page_content": "By the way, we should just acknowledge the fact that when David writes, it is a known and proven property of the laws of physics as best we know them.\nHe proved that.\nOkay, so that's his proof.\nHe proved that the laws of physics in terms of quantum, the quantum laws of physics.\nOkay, we just need to acknowledge something before we do move on.\nI'll just reread this section again where David writes, but hey, computer is, so expecting it to be able to do whatever neurons can is not a metaphor.\nIt is a known and proven property of the laws of physics pause there.\nImportant to realize that known and proven property of the laws of physics was proven by David Deutsch.\nSo that's the seminal 1985 paper where he shows how the field of computation, what was previously the mathematics of computation, if you like, was in fact a branch of physics, because computers are made out of atoms, atoms obey the laws of quantum theory, so therefore there can be such a thing as a quantum theory of computation.\nSo let's continue.\nDavid writes, ironically, lady love laces objection has almost the same logic as Douglas Hofsted as argument for reductionism, so you chapter five, yet Hofsted is one of today's foremost proponents of the possibility of AI.\nThat is because both of them share the mistake and premise that low-level computational steps cannot possibly add up to a higher level i that affects anything.\nThe difference between them is that they chose opposite horns of the dilemma that that poses.\nLove laces chose the false conclusion that AI is impossible, well, Hofsted chose the false conclusion that no such i can exist.\nOkay, so this is, and this is also, I'll just pause there, this is me speaking, this is also I think the mistake of some people who are fascinated by meditation and introspection that on introspection, they can't find an eye.\nI first encountered this idea with the brilliant philosopher David Hume, and David Hume talks about that whenever he reflects on his internal state, he can find nothing but a perception.\nHe has no perception of the eye.\nHe just has perceptions of everything else.\nNow it is true that if you reflect on yourself, you don't find an eye, but the inability to find an eye isn't the same as demonstrating the eye doesn't exist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1547"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e78f17b-b798-46ea-9ed0-fbb747d45596": {"page_content": "I first encountered this idea with the brilliant philosopher David Hume, and David Hume talks about that whenever he reflects on his internal state, he can find nothing but a perception.\nHe has no perception of the eye.\nHe just has perceptions of everything else.\nNow it is true that if you reflect on yourself, you don't find an eye, but the inability to find an eye isn't the same as demonstrating the eye doesn't exist.\nIt's exactly the same error as searching for God everywhere, and assuming on the basis of searching your entire bedroom, your entire world, the universe as you know it, and being able to find God that that is somehow a refutation of the fact that God exists.\nNow there might be other reasons to reject God, but you can't form an exhaustive search.\nSo your introspection and being able to unable to find the eye is not a refutation of the fact that the eye exists.\nThere are better reasons, a better explanation for knowing the eye exists, mainly that the human being is a universal explainer.\nNow when you are introspecting and you are attempting deliberately not to explain anything, and this is what meditators do, to calm their mind and to clear their mind of all questions, and to not contemplate anything, and to notice thoughts merely as thoughts, and not as part of oneself, they then conclude on that basis that because there is no sensation of the self, that therefore there is no self.\nThat's a mistake.\nThere's a whole bunch of things we might not have a sensation of, but nonetheless still exist.\nWe exist because we are universal explainers and we can explain anything.\nIt's the potential of what we can do that gives us ourselves.\nWe'll come to the remarkable explanation of what a person is towards the end of this chapter as well.\nIt's a theme that runs throughout the book.\nWe are intimately not tired with the production of knowledge.\nWe intimately tired with the physics of computation.\nHuman being is the nexus of these two things in in large part.\nLet me continue.\nDavid writes, because of Babi just failure, either to build the universal computer, or to persuade others to do so, and entire century would pass before the first one was built.\nDuring that time, what happened was more like the ancient history of universality.\nAlthough calculating machines similar to the difference engine were being built by others, even before Babi should give an up, the analytical engine was almost entirely ignored, even by mathematicians.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1689"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "884fe989-c710-4c96-ae76-b65ebea5f4f0": {"page_content": "Let me continue.\nDavid writes, because of Babi just failure, either to build the universal computer, or to persuade others to do so, and entire century would pass before the first one was built.\nDuring that time, what happened was more like the ancient history of universality.\nAlthough calculating machines similar to the difference engine were being built by others, even before Babi should give an up, the analytical engine was almost entirely ignored, even by mathematicians.\nIn 1936, Turing developed the definitive theory of universal classical computers.\nHis motivation was not to build such a computer, but only to use the theory abstractly to study the nature of mathematical proof.\nAnd when the first universal computers were built a few years later, it was, again, not out of any special intention to implement universality.\nThey were built in Britain and the United States during the Second World War for specific wartime applications.\nNow, I'm going to skip a bit about the history of Iniac, the first universal computer that was built using vacuum tubes.\nAnd David writes, after skipping a bit, David writes, it is a remarkable fact that in that sense, that is to say ignoring issues of speed, memory capacity, and input-output devices, the human computers of old, the steam, powered analytical engine with all its literal bells and whistles, the room-sized vacuum computers of the Second World War, and present-day supercomputers, and your mobile phone.\nI'll just add, and anything else that pretty much has a computer in it, all David writes, all have an identical repertoire of computations.\nIn other words, they can do precisely the same thing, some will just do it faster, some will do it slower.\nDavid writes, another thing that they all have in common is that they are all digital.\nThey operate on information in the form of discrete values of physical variables, such as electronic switches being on or off or cogs being at one of ten positions, the alternative analog computers, such as slide rules, which represent information as continuous physical variables, were once ubiquitous, but a hardly ever used today.\nThat is because a modern digital computer can be programmed, imitate any of them, and to outperform them in almost any application.\nThe jumped university in digital computers has left analog computation behind.\nThat was inevitable because there is no such thing as a universal analog computer.\nI'll pause there and just remark that the next paragraph talks about error correction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1816"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "62d824d0-180b-484c-8996-649f1c4bf127": {"page_content": "That is because a modern digital computer can be programmed, imitate any of them, and to outperform them in almost any application.\nThe jumped university in digital computers has left analog computation behind.\nThat was inevitable because there is no such thing as a universal analog computer.\nI'll pause there and just remark that the next paragraph talks about error correction.\nAs I read through it, just keep in mind the parallel we have with computation and with epistemology.\nI'd like to highlight the idea that as you listen to this, we think about how critical rationalism, the popularian view of knowledge, is very much like a digital epistemology.\nOn the other hand, opponents of critical rationalism, all opponents, as far as I can tell, reject the core idea of popularian critical rationalism, that true epistemology, and try to substitute an analog epistemology.\nLet's see why.\nI'll just read this section from David and he writes, having just talked about analog versus digital computers in the difference, it's impossible to have an analog universal analog computer he says.\nBecause that is because of the need for error correction.\nDuring lengthy computations, the accumulation of errors due to things like imperfectly constructed components, thermal fluctuations, and random outside influences makes analog computers wander off the intended computational path.\nThis may sound like a minor or parochial consideration, but it is quite the opposite.\nWithout error correction, all information processing and hence all knowledge creation is necessarily bounded.\nError correction is the beginning of infinity.\nSo pause there, that is so very important.\nPopularian epistemology is digital.\nIt's digital precisely because it gives you our binary choice between the things we know and the things we reject and no longer know.\nor we know a false.\nKnowledge has that form.\nKnowledge allows for error correction.\nVariant, variant epistemologies, different epistemologies, reject that core idea, the binary black and white distinction between truth and falsity, the known and the unknown, and attempt to substitute in its place degrees of knowability, degrees of truth, degrees of belief, degrees of justification.\nThis is where we get probabilistic ideas in epistemology like Bayesianism, that you can have a certain amount of confidence, but this is false.\nThis is an analog attempt at constructing epistemology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=1942"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b29d6879-fb79-4fcb-83ff-8e398ca71bfe": {"page_content": "This is where we get probabilistic ideas in epistemology like Bayesianism, that you can have a certain amount of confidence, but this is false.\nThis is an analog attempt at constructing epistemology.\nAll of them can be rejected because what we need is not a focus upon how close we can get to the truth or how close we can get to anywhere, but rather a way of correcting errors.\nA way of identifying what the errors are and eliminating them and keeping what remains.\nThat's digital.\nI'll keep going.\nOkay, so I'll keep going, but I'll just skip past a lengthy part about exactly what the problems with analog counting would be.\nSo I'm going to skip past that and David goes through, imagine a goat herd who's trying to tally up the number of goats in the herd by using an analog system versus a digital system.\nThe errors accumulate in the analog system, and eventually you end up with the wrong number compared to the digital system where you can correct the error.\nAnd so we get back to computation itself, David writes, so all universal computers are digital and all use error correction with the same basic logic that I have described, though with many different implementations.\nThus, Babidge's computers are signed on a 10 different meanings to the whole continuum of angles at which a cogwheel might be oriented, making the representation digital in that way allowed the cogs to carry out error correction automatically.\nAfter each step, any slight drift in the orientation of the wheel away from its 10 ideal positions would immediately be corrected back to the nearest one as it clicked into place.\nAssigning meanings to the whole continuum of angles would nominally have allowed each wheel to carry infinitely more information, but in reality, information that cannot be reliably retrieved is not really being stored.\nI'm skipping a paragraph, and David writes, because of the necessity for error correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems.\nIt is why spoken languages build words out of a finite set of elementary sounds, speech would not be intelligible if it were analog, it would not be possible to repeat, nor even to remember what anyone had said.\nNor, therefore, does it matter that universal writing systems cannot perfectly represent analog information such as tones of voice.\nNothing can represent those perfectly.\nFor the same reason, the sounds themselves can represent only a finite number of possible meanings.\nFor example, humans can distinguish between only about seven different sound volumes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=2099"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "081864b5-2220-431a-b4bb-5c8021f51c18": {"page_content": "Nor, therefore, does it matter that universal writing systems cannot perfectly represent analog information such as tones of voice.\nNothing can represent those perfectly.\nFor the same reason, the sounds themselves can represent only a finite number of possible meanings.\nFor example, humans can distinguish between only about seven different sound volumes.\nThis is roughly reflected in standard musical notation, which has approximately seven different symbols for loudness, such as PMF, F, and so on.\nFor the same reason, speakers can only intend a finite number of possible meanings with each utterance.\nAnother striking connection between all those diverse jumps to universality is that they all happened on earth.\nIn fact, all known jumps to universality happened under the auspices of human beings, except one, which I have not mentioned yet, and from which all the others historically emerged, it happened during the early evolution of life.\nGenes, in present-day organisms, replicate themselves by a complicated and very indirect chemical route.\nIn most species, they act as templates for forming stretches of a similar molecule RNA.\nThose then act as programs, which direct the synthesis of the body's constituent chemicals, especially enzymes, which are catalysts.\nA catalyst is a kind of constructor.\nIt promotes a change among other chemicals while remaining unchanged itself.\nThose catalysts in turn control all the chemical production and regulatory functions of an organism, and hence define the organism itself, crucially including a process that makes a copy of the DNA.\nHow that intricate mechanism evolved is not essential here, but for definiteness, let me sketch one possibility.\nAbout four billion years ago, soon after the surface of the earth had cooled sufficiently for liquid water to condense, the oceans were being churned by volcanoes, meteor impact storms and much stronger tides in today's because the moon was closer.\nThey were also highly active chemically, with many kinds of molecules being continually formed and transformed, some spontaneously and some by catalysts.\nOne such catalyst happened to catalyze the formation of some of the very kinds of molecules from which it itself was formed.\nThat catalyst was not alive, but it was the first hint of life.\nIt had not yet evolved to be a world-targeted catalyst, so it accelerated the production of some other chemicals, including variants of itself.\nThose that were best at promoting their own production, and inhibiting their own destruction, relative to other variants, became more numerous.\nThey too promoted the construction of variants of themselves and so evolution continued.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=2244"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5175be28-ad4d-4ae8-aa3a-16597560b453": {"page_content": "That catalyst was not alive, but it was the first hint of life.\nIt had not yet evolved to be a world-targeted catalyst, so it accelerated the production of some other chemicals, including variants of itself.\nThose that were best at promoting their own production, and inhibiting their own destruction, relative to other variants, became more numerous.\nThey too promoted the construction of variants of themselves and so evolution continued.\nGradually, the ability of these catalysts to promote their own production became robust and specific enough for it to be worth calling them replicators.\nEvolution produced replicators that caused themselves to be replicated ever faster and more reliably.\nDifferent replicators began to join forces and groups, each of whose members specialized in causing one part of a complex web of chemical reactions, whose net effect was to construct more copies of the entire group.\nSuch a group was a rudimentary organism.\nAt that point, life was at a stage roughly analogous to that of non-universal printing, or Roman numerals.\nIt was no longer a case of each replicator for itself, but there was still no universal system being customized or programmed to produce specific substances.\nOK, pause there, so David's getting to how DNA itself evolved.\nThis is a momentous event in the history of the universe.\nOnce we have replicating, once we have DNA that becomes universal, we are able to have evolution of all the forms of life that we now have on earth.\nI'll continue reading David Wright's genes are replicators that can be interpreted as instructions in a genetic code.\nGenomes are groups of genes that are dependent upon each other for replication.\nThe process of copying a genome is called a living organism.\nThus, the genetic code is also a language for specifying organisms.\nAt some point, the system switched to replicators made of DNA, which is more stable than RNA, and therefore more suitable for storing large amounts of information.\nThe familiarity of what happened next can obscure how remarkable and mysterious it was.\nInitially, the genetic code and the mechanism that interpreted were both evolving along with everything else in the organisms.\nBut there came a moment when the code stopped evolving.\nYet the organisms continued to do so.\nAt that moment, the system was coding for nothing more complex than primitive single-celled creatures, yet virtually all subsequent organisms on earth to this day have not only been based on DNA replicators, but have used exactly the same alphabet of bases grouped into three base words, with only a small variation in the meaning of those words.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=2361"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e6d46738-9101-4c1e-ae4f-41ed59a03430": {"page_content": "But there came a moment when the code stopped evolving.\nYet the organisms continued to do so.\nAt that moment, the system was coding for nothing more complex than primitive single-celled creatures, yet virtually all subsequent organisms on earth to this day have not only been based on DNA replicators, but have used exactly the same alphabet of bases grouped into three base words, with only a small variation in the meaning of those words.\nThat means that, considered as a language for specifying organisms, the genetic code has displayed phenomenal reach.\nIt evolved only to specify organisms with no nervous systems, no ability to move or exert forces, no internal organs, and no sent organs, whose lifestyle consisted of little more than synthesizing their own structural constituents and then dividing into two.\nAnd yet the same language today specifies the hardware and soft work for countless multicellular behaviors that had no close analog in those organisms, such as running and flying and breathing and mating and recognizing predators and prey.\nIt also specifies engineering structures such as wings and teeth and nanotechnology such as immune systems and even a brain that is capable of explaining quasars, designing other organisms from scratch and wondering why it exists.\nI'll pause there.\nNow, I don't know if this is a well understood area of biology.\nI don't think that it is exactly how the DNA molecule is able to contain information sufficient to describe, not only bacteria, but everything through little human being and a dinosaur and flying things and swimming things.\nIt's rather remarkable.\nIt has this kind of phenomenal reach, as David said, in order to, in the space of all possible organisms that exist, it seems to have universality.\nAll organisms that can be built out of the organic material that you and I are built out of.\nOkay, but then David talks about how early on on Planet Earth, the evolution of DNA led to the evolution of simple bacteria, archaea, these things that lived in warm pools on the surface of the Earth most likely.\nBut then for something like a billion years, a billion years, nothing happened.\nLiterally just about nothing happened.\nThe surface of the planet was covered in bacteria, but no multicellular organisms evolved.\nNo plants, no fish, nothing.\nWhy?.\nWhy was there no selection pressure?.\nWhy was this universality that was within the code, the DNA code?.\nWhat was it not exploited?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=2487"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3476e2c6-58c2-4204-b335-e1b57f69eb72": {"page_content": "But then for something like a billion years, a billion years, nothing happened.\nLiterally just about nothing happened.\nThe surface of the planet was covered in bacteria, but no multicellular organisms evolved.\nNo plants, no fish, nothing.\nWhy?.\nWhy was there no selection pressure?.\nWhy was this universality that was within the code, the DNA code?.\nWhat was it not exploited?.\nDavid writes on this problem, reach always has an explanation, but this time to the best of my knowledge, the explanation is not yet known.\nIf the reason for the jump in reach was that it was a jump to universality, what was the universality?.\nThe genetic code is presumably not universal for specifying forms of life, since it relies on specific types of chemical such as proteins.\nOf course, it's not universal for science fiction writers like to write about the possibility of having organisms made of silicon.\nWell, DNA contains no silicon, so copy universal for all forms of life, because presumably you'll be able to make, or perhaps, perhaps you can make a life form out of silicon.\nBut in particular, as he says there, our forms of life are made of proteins, so the DNA codes for different kinds of proteins, or the genes code for a specific protein, and so unless the life form is made out of proteins, then the DNA isn't universal for all forms of life, but maybe it's universal for all forms of life made out of proteins.\nDavid writes, could it be a universal constructor, perhaps?.\nIt does manage to build with inorganic material sometimes, such as the calcium phosphate in bones, or the magnetite in the navigation system inside a pigeon's brain.\nBiotechnologists are already using it to manufacture hydrogen and to extract uranium from seawater.\nIt can also program organisms to build constructors outside their bodies, birds build nests, beavers build dams.\nPerhaps it would be possible to specify in the genetic code an organism whose life cycle includes building a nuclear-powered spaceship, or perhaps not.\nI guess it has some lesser and yet some lesser and not yet understood universality.\nIn 1994, the computer scientists and molecular biologists Leonard Alderman designed and built a computer composed of DNA together with some simple enzymes and demonstrated it was capable of performing some sophisticated computations.\nAt the time, Alderman's DNA computer was arguably the fastest computer in the world.\nFurther, it was clear that a universal classical computer could be made in a similar way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=2658"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d436aaea-2a86-4de8-bd3d-17446249e978": {"page_content": "I guess it has some lesser and yet some lesser and not yet understood universality.\nIn 1994, the computer scientists and molecular biologists Leonard Alderman designed and built a computer composed of DNA together with some simple enzymes and demonstrated it was capable of performing some sophisticated computations.\nAt the time, Alderman's DNA computer was arguably the fastest computer in the world.\nFurther, it was clear that a universal classical computer could be made in a similar way.\nHence, we know that whatever that other universality of DNA system was, the universality of computation had also been inherited in it for a billion years without ever being used until Alderman used it.\nThe mysterious universality of DNA, as a constructor, may have been the first universality to exist.\nBut of all the different forms of universality, the most significant physically is the characteristic universality of people, namely, that they are universal explainers which makes them universal constructors as well.\nWell, we have to pause there, don't we?.\nThis is amazing and this is I think one of the least understood, but most significant parts of the entire book.\nIt is a discovery of David Deutsch, a philosophical and scientific discovery, a tomorrow discovery as well.\nI mean, it stretches across all domains.\nThis explanation of what a human is, what a person is, I should say, what a person that's called humans of people, but all people share this, the universality of people.\nAnd there might be other things as well beyond this, but this is absolutely crucial to appreciate that any alien intelligence that we find, any so-called supernatural being, any artificial general intelligence that we find, it must have this capacity, this capacity to be a universal explainer, which means that anything that can be explained, can be explained by us.\nAnd given David's discovery of how computation is a part of physics, and you can have a physical system, namely a quantum theater, that can simulate the behavior of any other system, and we, as universal explainers, can perform, we, we, we can do exactly what a universal computer can do.\nWe can act as a Turing machine, and a Turing machine can simulate any physical, so the universal Turing machine can simulate any physical system.\nSo this is a poorly understood area of physics, philosophy, morality, computation, this idea of what people are, people are universal explainers.\nA universal explainer is another level of abstraction above the universal computer.\nWe can do what a universal computer can do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=2750"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fc8ea6ef-3c71-4abc-af83-31734985d7b5": {"page_content": "We can act as a Turing machine, and a Turing machine can simulate any physical, so the universal Turing machine can simulate any physical system.\nSo this is a poorly understood area of physics, philosophy, morality, computation, this idea of what people are, people are universal explainers.\nA universal explainer is another level of abstraction above the universal computer.\nWe can do what a universal computer can do.\nA universal computer doesn't really need to do much more than make marks on paper, and we can do that.\nWe can make marks on paper, so we can do what a universal computer can do.\nBeyond that, we can also explain stuff, and an explanation is a kind of computation, but you can be a universal computer without being a universal explainer, okay?.\nThe, the computer on which I'm recording this right now is not a universal explainer, but it's a universal computer.\nNow, what's needed for that extra step, we don't know, okay?.\nIt's something to do with creativity.\nIt's probably something to do with free will.\nThese things are tied up possibly intimately together in ways that we don't fully understand yet, but this is a massive advance in the philosophy of what's going on, that people are universal explainers.\nSo let me just read this last paragraph.\nAgain, I'll read it in its entirety.\nThe mysterious universality of DNA as a constructor may have been the first universality to exist, but of all the different forms of universality, the most significant physically is the characteristic universality of people, namely that they are universal explainers, which makes them universal constructors as well.\nThe effects of that universality are, as I have explained, explicable, only by means the full gamut of fundamental explanations.\nIt is also the only kind of universality capable of transcending its parochial origins.\nUniversal computers cannot really be universal, unless there are people present to provide energy and maintenance indefinitely.\nAnd the same is true of all those other technologies.\nEven life on earth will eventually be extinguished unless people decide otherwise.\nOnly people can rely on themselves into the unbounded future.\nAnd that's the end terminology there.\nLet's just read the terminology.\nThe jump to universality is the tendency of gradually improving systems to undergo a sudden or large increase in the functionality, becoming universal in some domain.\nOkay, yes.\nSo generally progress happens incrementally and this is what's happening in AI at the moment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=2909"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cb4876c4-67f2-4cbc-b564-ae836365980e": {"page_content": "Even life on earth will eventually be extinguished unless people decide otherwise.\nOnly people can rely on themselves into the unbounded future.\nAnd that's the end terminology there.\nLet's just read the terminology.\nThe jump to universality is the tendency of gradually improving systems to undergo a sudden or large increase in the functionality, becoming universal in some domain.\nOkay, yes.\nSo generally progress happens incrementally and this is what's happening in AI at the moment.\nSo AI is having this incremental improvement improvement improvement.\nBut the jump to universality isn't just, it's not expected by that, that it's not expected to just happen simply by virtue of the fact that you've had a large number of incremental improvements.\nWhat we need for that jump to universality from AI to AGI is a philosophical incremental improvement.\nAnd that's the mistake that people working in the area seem to not have quite cottoned onto.\nNow David also mentions there that all of this, this human universality is explicable only by means of the full gamut of fundamental explanations.\nAnd where do you get those fundamental explanations?.\nThe fabric of reality, which has just had the audio book recorded, which I would encourage everyone to get a hold of.\nThe fabric of reality of course goes through our most fundamental explanations of reality.\nAnd that's what's just mentioned there.\nSo if you really want to understand the nature of a person, you should have some understanding of the theory of computation, the theory of evolution, quantum theory, and the theory of knowledge or epistemology.\nThis was a remarkable chapter and it's really leading us straight into chapter seven about artificial creativity, which is going to be a very exciting chapter, all about artificial general intelligence.\nSo I look forward to seeing you again then.\nBye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC1_hzdjBs&t=3051"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b53aa86e-cb17-4ec6-af31-505f86e9a7ee": {"page_content": "Well this is part three of chapter nine on optimism from the beginning of infinity.\nNow I'm recording this right during the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.\nIt was launched on July 16th.\nToday is July 17th.\nThey don't get to the Moon until July 20th.\nSo hopefully at least one of these episodes will be out on or around July 20th.\nI was just listening to the great politician Daniel Hannon.\nI often don't preface any politician's name with great.\nbut I think as far as living statesman go and Daniel Hannon is as good as we have right now.\nand he's a great defender of freedom and optimism.\nand he was just speaking to Ben Shapiro.\nI don't listen to Ben Shapiro very often but Ben Shapiro has an interview series and during his most recent interview he interviewed Daniel Hannon.\nso it was a great conversation and one thing that Hannon was talking about was how American politicians really need to cheer up.\nKennedy got to the Moon and helped inspire a generation of people to come with him to come with him on the intellectual journey that was preparations for the Moon because of optimism.\nNow where is that optimism today?.\nPeople seem to continually complain about how bad the economy is though it's better than ever.\nHow bad the job rate is though more people are employed than ever.\nBy almost every metric it doesn't matter what country you're in things are getting better unless you're in North Korea.\nCertainly in America things are getting better in Great Britain.\nThings are getting better in Australia.\nThings are getting better.\nCanada.\nThings are getting better.\nNow there are some places where things might be getting a little worse but those are places where they've enacted pessimistic policies and so we just need optimism.\nWe need to have a stance of more freedom rather than less.\nWe need to really be looking at the future and how what the potential of people are and what the potential of people is rather than all the damage that people are doing all the time and so because we think that people are inherently bad and causing all this damage we tend to enact policies.\nWe tend to cause society to move in ways which slows down progress or which regards people with suspicion in some way and this is not good.\nThis is not good for optimism.\nSo let me get into part three.\nSo what we're talking about politicians, leaders, statesmen.\nLet me return to the section therefore in the beginning of infinity, chapter nine.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=12"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cb9440fd-3c23-4c27-b455-a92fa4ee4645": {"page_content": "We tend to cause society to move in ways which slows down progress or which regards people with suspicion in some way and this is not good.\nThis is not good for optimism.\nSo let me get into part three.\nSo what we're talking about politicians, leaders, statesmen.\nLet me return to the section therefore in the beginning of infinity, chapter nine.\nIt is summarising poppers political philosophy and in particular here's philosophy of democracy.\nSo I might repeat a little bit of what I said in the previous episode.\nbut I think it's important because if we're going to be led in any direction at the moment the way in which society is organised it is such that a whole bunch of resources are controlled by a small group of people in the form of governments and many of these politicians, many of these leaders are peasants.\nSo given that circumstance and given that we will always make errors in electing people and those people might enact bad policies what therefore should the stance be with respect to what democracy is?.\nWell from the beginning of infinity let me read.\nSystems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.\nThat entire stance is fallibleism in action.\nIt assumes that rulers and policies are always going to be flawed.\nThe problems are inevitable but it also assumes that improving upon them is possible.\nProblems are soluble.\nThe ideal towards which this is working is not that nothing unexpected will go wrong but that when it does it will be an opportunity for further progress.\nNow on this I'll just pause here this has met my reflection on this.\nOn this topic of fallibleism and our individual lives.\nThe magician pendulum of pen and telephone.\nHe's a famous libertarian.\nHe's given some excellent speeches over the years about what libertarianism is about.\nAnd really for him and for me and for I think proper as well, it's about systems of government that tend to move away from violence where possible.\nThat tend to avoid coercion and force.\nAnd so what Pendulette talks about is what would he use a gun for?.\nAnd he says he's he'd use a gun to stop a murder and he'd use a gun to stop rape.\nHe'd use a gun to defend his country from violent invasion.\nBut then he asks would I use a gun to build a library?.\nAnd he has a personal reflection in these speeches about how important public libraries are and how important they personally were to him.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=135"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6c8e644-2102-4735-9ab7-701129549417": {"page_content": "And so what Pendulette talks about is what would he use a gun for?.\nAnd he says he's he'd use a gun to stop a murder and he'd use a gun to stop rape.\nHe'd use a gun to defend his country from violent invasion.\nBut then he asks would I use a gun to build a library?.\nAnd he has a personal reflection in these speeches about how important public libraries are and how important they personally were to him.\nHe says he learned more at his public library than perhaps anywhere else as a child growing up.\nBut he wonders what would he do in order to build a public library?.\nWell he says that he personally would beg people.\nHe would try and persuade them.\nHe'd plea hard and gather funds together if he could.\nHe would maybe even bend the truth a little in order to get those donations.\nHe'd really, really want libraries to be built.\nBut he simply wouldn't use a gun to do it.\nIn other words, he's optimistic that people would be open to persuasion.\nThat the knowledge he has about the possibility of accomplishing projects without coercion could be learned by others.\nAnd they would think like him eventually after enough persuasion.\nMany see this as too hard and ask.\nIt's rare to encounter.\nIt's rare to encounter other genuine libertarians like this or genuine capitalists or genuine freedom lovers, people who genuine optimists in their sense, especially about people.\nSo they think that some coercion, some force, some violence, some amount of bringing guns to the table is necessary in order to do good public works.\nBecause they have this Thomas Hobbesian view about people that people are just animals, barely controlled by the state, and that we don't want to help each other.\nI think this is completely and utterly false.\nWe do.\nAnd we do want public libraries, for example.\nBut the alternative view is that only only force in the form of the state or in the form of government can do things like build libraries, or roads, or social welfare, or any of a large list of things that people think that only governments are able to do in the private industry can never do.\nThose people are pessimists about the possibility of nonviolence and what reason and knowledge can accomplish.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=297"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5acae74b-f3a1-48c8-af4c-cce34dec7e55": {"page_content": "We do.\nAnd we do want public libraries, for example.\nBut the alternative view is that only only force in the form of the state or in the form of government can do things like build libraries, or roads, or social welfare, or any of a large list of things that people think that only governments are able to do in the private industry can never do.\nThose people are pessimists about the possibility of nonviolence and what reason and knowledge can accomplish.\nI think I've mentioned before, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysic, the science communicator in America, he famously talked about how only NASA, and I'm a great lover of NASA, but Neil deGrasse Tyson articulated what I think many people thought, which is that only NASA could ever do space exploration.\nOnly the apparatus of a state with that amount of money could ever hope to explore space.\nAnd so that's why we need to fund NASA more and more.\nThis was just prior to Elon Musk setting up SpaceX, and I think it was a little bit after Richard Branson began Virgin Galactic.\nPrivate industry is going into space.\nIt would have been better.\nHad NASA taken, had NASA been able to accomplish what it did without coercion?.\nIt did so.\nThat's happened.\nAnd it continues to happen.\nBut I suppose of all the things that we're going to steal money for, the exploration of space is better than some things.\nOkay, this is a spectrum of bad things to steal for.\nBut some people think it can't be done.\nSome people think that people are just bad or that although they would give money in order to explore space, they would give money in order to help out the poor or they would give money in order to go to the library.\nThe overwhelming majority of people wouldn't, and so this is why we need force, but in other words, they think people are not kind, not good.\nI'm not generous.\nA personal anecdote.\nI don't like these as a rule.\nThey stink of argument from authority, but some people I admit aren't quite there yet simply appreciating the validity of an argument on its own merits.\nBut rather like when someone defends freedom or criticizes taxation or criticizes government and then gets accused of being a privileged rich person.\nI've never been particularly wealthy.\nWhen one supports optimism, not just about the future, but about people, one is accused of having rose-colored glasses.\nThe one needs to get out of their ivory tower or some such.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=398"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0bc488e7-b76d-4a8a-bfc7-5c847c39a107": {"page_content": "But rather like when someone defends freedom or criticizes taxation or criticizes government and then gets accused of being a privileged rich person.\nI've never been particularly wealthy.\nWhen one supports optimism, not just about the future, but about people, one is accused of having rose-colored glasses.\nThe one needs to get out of their ivory tower or some such.\nSo I'll give you a little taste of my so-called ivory tower.\nStraight off to high school why I went to university, but throughout my entire time at university, I paid my university fees by working as a security guard, and so my days were quite long.\nI'd start early in the morning after lectures at university doing physics, and then straight after university, I'd go off to this very large shopping center, you know, a suburb called Bankstown in the western part of Sydney, and I would patrol.\nI would patrol the center along with a large number of other guards out at that shopping center.\nI wasn't ever dealing with murder, is it never got quite that bad?.\nBut the shopping center was, and it remains this day, one of the largest in Australia, in fact probably one of the largest in the world.\nAnd the area that it did at Team Bankstown back then, back in the late 90s, the early 2000s, was a pretty rough area.\nOn Thursday nights, for example, in Australia, there's a tradition of Thursday night shopping, I don't know why, but anyway, on Thursday nights, we'd have anything up to 15 security guards.\nThere's security guard, by the way, is a mall cop for an American.\nWe'd have up to 15 of them patrolling the center, and for various reasons, I don't need to go into the socio-economic issues right now, but there would be balls at this center on Thursday night.\nMany riots, especially on Thursday nights, there would be shop stealers, there would be a salt, it was a very busy place for a mall cop or a security guard to do work.\nThere was something like 300 different shops in the center, some big, some small, but there was a lot of action going on quite often.\nOther times, it was quite, but my point is, no one ever phoned our security number, just like no one ever calls emergency services, to say they have a wonderful person with them that they'd like to report to you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=534"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "493a783a-bead-40cf-9d7a-99077430a8b3": {"page_content": "There was something like 300 different shops in the center, some big, some small, but there was a lot of action going on quite often.\nOther times, it was quite, but my point is, no one ever phoned our security number, just like no one ever calls emergency services, to say they have a wonderful person with them that they'd like to report to you.\nYou're always being called to the most terrible situations with nasty people doing bad things, and this was almost every shift.\nNow, full-time police officers aside, I think I have a reasonable idea, as reasonable idea as anyone does, of how bad people can be, of how bad things can get.\nBut the conclusion I drew after this was a good six years of working in this particular role, dealing with these great spectrum of people, is that I don't really think people are bad, I think the reason people act badly is because of bad ideas, the things that they've learned, and those can be changed.\nSo none the less, none the less.\nI encounter with the reality of certain bad people, leads many, I think, to develop a certain kind of compassion and understanding.\nBut a lack of optimism is about people on an individual level, always calls out for authoritarianism.\nIt says that I'm one of the good people, one of the smart ones, the others, however, they're the ones that can't be trusted, they need to be controlled, and that impulse breeds violence.\nSo when it comes to doing things the government does by force, I really do think and this, again, this is an argument from personal experience, nevertheless.\nI really do think that the vast majority of people, when they have the means, will indeed help each other out in the way the libertarians think.\nAnd I agree with Pendulette, we don't need guns to build libraries.\nThis is not an ivory tower-type rose-tinted glass-view of reality.\nI know how bad people can be.\nBut the overwhelming majority of people are good people who like to live in a kind of compassionate society.\nAnd it doesn't matter if there's a small minority of people who are bad.\nOkay, so back to the book.\nWhy would anyone want to make the leaders and policies that they themselves favor more vulnerable to removal?.\nIndeed, let me first ask.\nWhy would anyone want to replace bad leaders and policies at all?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=659"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6cbdfe30-d4a9-496f-949f-4752887049a9": {"page_content": "I know how bad people can be.\nBut the overwhelming majority of people are good people who like to live in a kind of compassionate society.\nAnd it doesn't matter if there's a small minority of people who are bad.\nOkay, so back to the book.\nWhy would anyone want to make the leaders and policies that they themselves favor more vulnerable to removal?.\nIndeed, let me first ask.\nWhy would anyone want to replace bad leaders and policies at all?.\nThat question may seem absurd, but perhaps it is absurd only from the perspective of the civilization that takes progress for granted.\nIf we did not expect progress, why should we expect the new leader or policy chosen by whatever method to be any better than the old?.\nOn the contrary, we should then expect any changes on average to do as much harm as good.\nAnd then the precautionary principle advises, better the devil you know than the devil you don't.\nThere is a closed loop of ideas here.\nOnly assumption that knowledge is not going to grow, the precautionary principle is true.\nAnd only assumption that the precautionary principle is true, we can not afford to allow knowledge to grow.\nUnless a society is expecting its own fact, unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.\nTherefore, purpose criterion can only be met by societies that expect their knowledge to grow and to grow unpredictably.\nAnd further, they are expecting that if it did grow, that it would help.\nThis expectation is what I call optimism, and I can state it in its most general form thus.\nThe principle of optimism.\nAll evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.\nOptimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, but professing success.\nIt says that there is no fundamental barrier, no more of nature or supernatural decree preventing progress.\nWhenever we try to improve things in fail, it is not because the spiteful or unfathomably benevolent gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached the limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough in time.\nBut optimism is also a stance towards the future, because nearly all failures and nearly all successes are yet to come.\nAnd so just to pause on that, so the principle of optimism here.\nAll evils are due to insufficient knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=773"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6302134-3c53-4255-a25e-fd90e72e0e54": {"page_content": "But optimism is also a stance towards the future, because nearly all failures and nearly all successes are yet to come.\nAnd so just to pause on that, so the principle of optimism here.\nAll evils are due to insufficient knowledge.\nSo if we pause and reflect on that for a moment, if you had a reject that notion, reject the idea that all evils are due to insufficient knowledge, then you think some evil is not due to insufficient knowledge and can't be addressed by addressing the lack of knowledge, then perhaps you think the evil can be addressed in some other way.\nSomething other than knowledge creation, something other than persuasion.\nIn other words, force, coercion.\nAs for knowledge, a lack of it is due to a lack of creativity.\nNow this is intimately tied up therefore with people, because people are the things that create explanatory knowledge.\nSo to reject the solution, so to reject the solution to evil as being about creating knowledge is about rejecting the capacity or ability of people to do something about it using creativity.\nAnd so this rejection of the potential of people, this anti-humanism is at the heart of pessimism.\nBack to the book.\nOptimism follows from the explicability of the physical world I explained in chapter 3.\nIf something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.\nOptimism also assumes that none of the prohibitions imposed by the laws of physics are necessarily evils.\nSo for instance, the lack of the impossible knowledge of prophecy is not in superable obstacle to progress, nor insoluble mathematical problems as I explained in chapter 8.\nLet's pause there, that's an important point.\nThere's lots of things, well at the moment we don't know many of them, that there are, but there are provably unknowable things, or unprovable things we should say, unprovable things in mathematics.\nAnd the overwhelming majority of statements in mathematics are unprovable very well.\nDoes this mean there is a limit on, there's a limit on progress because of girls and completeness theory.\nNo, because all those things that are unable to be proved are inherently uninteresting as well.\nThey don't actually help us to solve any problems here in physical reality.\nSo back to the book.\nThat means that in the long run, there are no insuperable evils.\nAnd in the short run, the only insuperable evils are parochial ones.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=910"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9b2dba47-3ba9-48a1-8920-1d44929d1488": {"page_content": "Does this mean there is a limit on, there's a limit on progress because of girls and completeness theory.\nNo, because all those things that are unable to be proved are inherently uninteresting as well.\nThey don't actually help us to solve any problems here in physical reality.\nSo back to the book.\nThat means that in the long run, there are no insuperable evils.\nAnd in the short run, the only insuperable evils are parochial ones.\nThere can be no such thing as a disease for which it is impossible to discover a cure other than certain types of brain damage.\nThose that have dissipated the knowledge that constitutes the past tense personality.\nFor a sick person is a physical object and the task of transforming a subject into the same person in good health is one that no Laura physics rules out.\nHence, there is a way of achieving such a transformation that is to say a cure.\nIt is only a matter of knowing how.\nIf we do not for the moment know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know in theory, but we do not yet have enough time or resources, a wealth.\nThen even so, it is universally true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it in a given time with the available resources, or there is a way of eliminating it in the time and with those resources.\nOkay, just Paul said as well.\nDavid mentions the word universal there and indeed the principle of optimism itself is a universal claim.\nThe all evils are due to insufficient knowledge.\nNot also this principle of optimism is logically equivalent to problems are soluble, because evil is just a certain kind of problem.\nA solution is knowledge put into practice.\nProblems are inevitable.\nCan also be interpreted as an optimistic view of reality, because problems are not all about suffering and they are not all evils.\nThe suffering type problems and the evil type problems, they are just special cases of problems in general.\nProblems can be interesting and fun and indeed in the distant future we will have solve suffering, we will have solve suffering.\nLong time in the future sure, but suffering is a certain kind of pain and inability to persistently solve the same problem ever and ever again.\nThat might cause you unhappiness that can cause you suffering.\nSo problems can indeed be fun.\nIf problems were not inevitable then we'd have no problems and that as David says elsewhere is another word for death, the unproblematic state, which paradoxically would be a problem of course.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1070"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "78dde358-c272-4bc4-8ced-f91cbabc8a5a": {"page_content": "Long time in the future sure, but suffering is a certain kind of pain and inability to persistently solve the same problem ever and ever again.\nThat might cause you unhappiness that can cause you suffering.\nSo problems can indeed be fun.\nIf problems were not inevitable then we'd have no problems and that as David says elsewhere is another word for death, the unproblematic state, which paradoxically would be a problem of course.\nSo logically speaking there's no escape from this problem's inevitable.\nIt's a good thing that the world happens to be this way.\nBut problems are inevitable.\nIt's also an appeal to recognise we cannot prevent problems either.\nThe precautionary principle is a terrible idea.\nThe idea of the precautionary principle is that we should be careful with for example technology, careful with progress, careful with doing too much because we might upset something in cause destruction.\nBut doing nothing is guaranteed to cause destruction.\nWe cannot know about the problems we're yet to encounter and the only guard against them is to make rapid progress.\nTo create lots more knowledge and lots more wealth now, that won't make the problems go away or protect us from them in any sort of perfect sense.\nIt will just make us more able to solve them when we do encounter them.\nAll evils are due to lack of knowledge as a universal claim.\nSo it says something fundamental about reality, about out circumstance.\nAs a fundamental principle it means it touches just about every single facet of our lives.\nAt the heart of some of the worst purported solutions to the big problems that we're encountering right now.\nRather than calling them bad solutions we might just call them evasions.\nThe heart of all of these is some kind of pessimism.\nSo for example people who think that people don't like the particular leaders that are in power right now, they want to fiddle with democracy in order to ensure that such a leader can't be elected in the future at some point.\nWell, they want to reduce democracy in some way.\nThat would lead to a kind of totalitarianism, an appeal to an appeal for undemocratic institutions where it's more and more difficult to remove certain rulers or rules indeed.\nPismism about trade and how we shouldn't have a global market.\nPismism about people and how we need to value the environment over living sentient people.\nPismism about children leading to us to want to control them and to coerce them and have compulsory schooling.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1182"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "54f86bde-f4e7-49a0-a100-2560e4678127": {"page_content": "That would lead to a kind of totalitarianism, an appeal to an appeal for undemocratic institutions where it's more and more difficult to remove certain rulers or rules indeed.\nPismism about trade and how we shouldn't have a global market.\nPismism about people and how we need to value the environment over living sentient people.\nPismism about children leading to us to want to control them and to coerce them and have compulsory schooling.\nPismism about compassion and kindness meaning that we need to enforce or meaning that we need to steal from people because they won't freely give away their money.\nThere's a whole raft of terrible ideas all of which at their heart, at their root, have pessimism, is motivating them in some way.\nPismism typically about people.\nDavid then goes on to speak about how death is just another problem.\nEveryone should be following the work of Aubrey de Grey, Aubrey de Grey who works on life extension science and he would hope to cure death.\nHe regards there as being only a finite number of different problems to solve in order to cure death.\nI'll just read a small section of what David has written here.\nSometimes immortality in this sense is even regarded as undesirable.\nFor instance, there are arguments from overpopulation but those are examples of the Melphusian prophetic fallacy.\nWhat each individual surviving person would need to survive at present based standards of living is easily calculated.\nWhat knowledge that person would contribute to the solution of the resulting problems is unknowable.\nThere are also arguments about the stratification of society caused by the entrenchment of old people in positions of power.\nBut the traditions of criticism in our society are already well adapted to solving that sort of problem.\nEven today, it is common in Western countries for powerful politicians or business executives to be removed from office while still in good health.\nAlso on this topic of immortality and curing death, Martin Reese very recently wrote an article and I'll link to that article about how we shouldn't hope the immortality, that it's kind of a moral thing, it's bad.\nIt's a strange impulse as David observed that people would hope for their own death, even while trying to avoid it.\nIt's a strange philosophy.\nGo back to the book and here is the Parable of Optimism.\nThere's a traditional optimistic story that runs and follows.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1296"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2c5a64cf-d8ce-4762-8d3e-f69537f5650f": {"page_content": "It's a strange impulse as David observed that people would hope for their own death, even while trying to avoid it.\nIt's a strange philosophy.\nGo back to the book and here is the Parable of Optimism.\nThere's a traditional optimistic story that runs and follows.\nA hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king but gains reprieve by promising to teach the king's favourite horse to talk within a year.\nThat night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain.\nI'll like, can happen in a year.\nHorse might die.\nThe king might die.\nI might die.\nAll the horse might talk.\nThe prisoner understands that while he's immediate problems have to do with prison bars and the king and his horse.\nUltimately, the evil he faces is caused by insufficient knowledge.\nThat makes him an optimist.\nHe knows that if progress is to be made, some of the opportunities and some of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance.\nProgress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to and prepares for those inconsiderable possibilities.\nThe prisoner may or may not discover a way of teaching the horse to talk, but he may discover something else.\nHe might persuade the king to repeal the law that he had broken.\nHe may learn a convincing conjuring trick in which the horse would seem to talk.\nHe may escape.\nHe may think of an achievable task that would please the king even more than making the horse talk.\nThe list is infinite.\nEven if every such possibility is unlikely, it takes only one of them to be realised for the whole problem to be solved.\nBut if our prisoner is going to escape by creating a new idea, it cannot possibly know that idea today.\nAnd therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning.\nOptimism implies all the other necessary conditions for knowledge to grow, and for knowledge creating civilisations to last.\nAnd hence, for the beginning of infinity, we have, as Papa put it, a duty to be optimistic.\nIn general, end about civilisation in particular.\nOne can argue that saving a civilisation will be difficult.\nThat does not mean there is a low probability of solving the associated problems.\nWhen we say that a mathematical problem is hard to solve, we do not mean that it is unlikely to be solved.\nAll sorts of factors determine whether mathematicians even address a problem, and with what effort.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1436"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "01c8189b-5b00-4f74-b8cc-ab940eb954f2": {"page_content": "And hence, for the beginning of infinity, we have, as Papa put it, a duty to be optimistic.\nIn general, end about civilisation in particular.\nOne can argue that saving a civilisation will be difficult.\nThat does not mean there is a low probability of solving the associated problems.\nWhen we say that a mathematical problem is hard to solve, we do not mean that it is unlikely to be solved.\nAll sorts of factors determine whether mathematicians even address a problem, and with what effort.\nIf an easy problem is not deemed to be interesting or useful, they might leave it unsolved indefinitely, while hard problems are solved all the time.\nUsually the hardness of the problem is one of the very factors that cause it to be solved.\nThus, President John F. Kennedy said in 1962 in a celebrated example of an optimistic approach to the unknown, we choose to go to the moon in a decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.\nKennedy did not mean that the moon project, being hard, was unlikely to succeed.\nOn the contrary, he believed that it would.\nWhat he meant by a hard task was one that depends on facingly unknown.\nAnd the intuitive fact to which he was appealing was that all those such hardness is always a negative factor when choosing among means to pursue, when choosing among means to pursue an objective, when choosing the objective itself, it can be a positive one.\nBecause we want to engage with projects that will involve creating new knowledge, and an optimistic expect the creation of knowledge to constitute progress, including its unforeseeable consequences.\nThus, Kennedy remarked that the moon project would require a vehicle made of new metal alloys, some of which have not been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than a very big experience fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival.\nThese were the known problems, which would require as yet unknown knowledge.\nThat this was on an undried mission, to an unknown celestial body, referred to the unknown problems that made the probabilities and the outcomes profoundly unknowable.\nYet none of that prevented rational people from forming the expectation that the mission couldn't succeed.\nThis expectation was not a judgment of probability, until far into the project no one could predict that because it depended on solutions not yet discovered the problems not yet known.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1569"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aeb94386-cef6-4ed3-9679-9e2745849d6e": {"page_content": "These were the known problems, which would require as yet unknown knowledge.\nThat this was on an undried mission, to an unknown celestial body, referred to the unknown problems that made the probabilities and the outcomes profoundly unknowable.\nYet none of that prevented rational people from forming the expectation that the mission couldn't succeed.\nThis expectation was not a judgment of probability, until far into the project no one could predict that because it depended on solutions not yet discovered the problems not yet known.\nWhen people were being persuaded to work on the project and to vote for it and so on, they were being persuaded that our being confined to one planet was an evil, that exploring the universe was a good, and that the US gravitational field was not a barrier, but merely a problem, and that overcoming it and all the other problems involved in the project was only a matter of knowing how, and that the nature of the problems made that moment the right one to try and solve them.\nProbabilities and prophecies were not needed in that argument.\nPessimism has been endemic in almost every society throughout history, it has taken the form of the precautionary principle and of who should rule political philosophies and all sorts of other demands for prophecy and of despair and the power of creativity.\nAnd of the misinterpretation of problems as in super-belaborious, yet there have always been a few individuals who see obstacles as problems and see problems as soluble, and so very occasionally there have been places and moments when there was briefly an end to present pessimism.\nAs far as I know, no historian has invested out of the history of optimism, but my guess is that whenever it has emerged in a civilization, there has been a mini-enlightment, a tradition of criticism resulting in an effleresence of many of the patterns of human progress with which we are familiar such as art, literature, philosophy, science, technology, and the institutions of an open society.\nThe end of pessimism is potentially a beginning of infinity, yet I also guess, that in every case, with the single tremendous exception so far, of our enlightenment, this process was soon brought to an end and the reign of pessimism was restored.\nNow there is a lengthy exposition of a, of some of the bright points where optimism has begun in history and then unfortunately failed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1651"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "16c2dd1e-2186-4e13-92c1-fa674840871c": {"page_content": "The end of pessimism is potentially a beginning of infinity, yet I also guess, that in every case, with the single tremendous exception so far, of our enlightenment, this process was soon brought to an end and the reign of pessimism was restored.\nNow there is a lengthy exposition of a, of some of the bright points where optimism has begun in history and then unfortunately failed.\nSo there was the mini-enlightment during Athens and Athens had many great philosophers, many great thinkers, made lots of progress in politics and ethics and so forth, but eventually was overrun by Sparta in a war and so so pessimism ended up winning there and then there was another short-lived enlightenment as David refers to it in Florence in the, in the early Renaissance.\nThis was funded nurtured by the Medici family, but eventually a charismatic monk.\nGeolama, seven or older, began to preach apocalyptic sermons against humanism and the Medicis and this great optimistic philosophy and so the dogma of religion ended up violently suppressing all of the, all of the excellent social and indeed economic progress that had happened and so that was the end of optimism there in Florence for a time.\nAlthough as David says that, that nascent spark of optimism what fueled the fire of the, of the true enlightenment eventually.\nThere have also been other mini-enlightments, one happened during the Islamic Golden Age from 965 to 1039.\nSo I encourage everyone of course to go to the book and to read the history of optimism there.\nIf there are any budding historians out there, anyone's wanting to write an essay about the history of optimism, that would be a very interesting asset yet largely uncharted part of our knowledge of the way in which societies can become stable over time despite rapid change.\nWe don't know the conditions about what it takes in order for a society like ours to remain peaceful, coherent, and yet able to withstand rapid change.\nSo I'll just read the last part of this chapter now.\nThe inhabitants of Florence in 1494, or Athens in 404 BC, could be forgiven for concluding that optimism isn't just factually, that optimism just isn't factually true.\nFor they need nothing of such things as the reach of explanations, the power of science, or even the rules of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the enlightenment got underway.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1747"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8666c8e5-93f5-4adc-b926-3d307845e3c2": {"page_content": "So I'll just read the last part of this chapter now.\nThe inhabitants of Florence in 1494, or Athens in 404 BC, could be forgiven for concluding that optimism isn't just factually, that optimism just isn't factually true.\nFor they need nothing of such things as the reach of explanations, the power of science, or even the rules of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the enlightenment got underway.\nAt the moment of defeat it must have seemed at least plausible to the former optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic Florentines that seven or all might be.\nLike every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual there must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those that are dead to expect progress.\nBut we should feel more than sympathy for those people.\nWe should take it personally, for if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.\nSo that's where David ends the chapter, what a powerful way to end the chapter.\nAnd so this is why many of us do get excited about people who push pessimistic theories today.\nWe take it personally, as we should take the failures of optimism in the past.\nWhen people talk about reducing progress, curbing freedoms, then this is a dangerous path.\nWe want immortality, we want to go to the stars.\nWe want people to be free to pursue the solutions to their own problems, and this can only happen in their condition of optimism and freedom.\nBut unfortunately, right now, our thought leaders, I can't stand that term, but the thought leaders of the west, rather many of them from politicians through to public intellectuals, are almost universally pessimists.\nThey regret the progress that people have made.\nThey regard the activities of people with great suspicion.\nThey care about inanimate things more than they care about creative people.\nAt least this is the philosophy, this pessimistic philosophy, underpinning the policies that they'd like to impose upon society.\nSo let me finish this epic three-part series on chapter nine, Optimism from the beginning of infinity.\nBy going back to the beginning where I started speaking not only about Martin Reiss, but also Nick Bosstrom, because I think Nick Bosstrom perhaps has even more influence over many public intellectuals globally than what Reiss has.\nHe does seem to be the philosophers philosopher.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=1908"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "624d77c2-b005-4694-96cb-58201278d80b": {"page_content": "At least this is the philosophy, this pessimistic philosophy, underpinning the policies that they'd like to impose upon society.\nSo let me finish this epic three-part series on chapter nine, Optimism from the beginning of infinity.\nBy going back to the beginning where I started speaking not only about Martin Reiss, but also Nick Bosstrom, because I think Nick Bosstrom perhaps has even more influence over many public intellectuals globally than what Reiss has.\nHe does seem to be the philosophers philosopher.\nHe is the go-to person, for example, for Sam Harris when it comes to any number of different opinions.\nThe people think philosophy doesn't have an impact, but philosophy infiltrates academia, academia, informs politics, politics reflects the media and the media inform the public.\nSo it's not like these ideas are inert ivory tower discussions.\nThey filter down and become the zeitgeist.\nOkay, so I'll just finish.\nIt's a fun little thought experiment.\nI just want to see if we can figure out what's wrong with it.\nBosstrom promotes something called the doomsday hypothesis.\nNow, he didn't come up with this, but he promotes it.\nSo let's read through the doomsday hypothesis.\nWhat the doomsday hypothesis is all about, and it's about how we should expect, we should expect that we will go extinct sooner rather than later.\nIt's a probability-based argument.\nIt's a Bayesian argument, so let's see how it goes.\nSo this is the way Bosstrom puts it, and you can find it on his website, but I'll put the link up there as well.\nHere we go.\nBosstrom's version of the doomsday hypothesis.\nStep one, imagine a universe that consists of 100 cubicles.\nIn each cubicle there is one person, 90 of the cubicles are painted blue on the outside and the other 10 are painted red.\nEach person is asked to guess whether she is in a blue or a red cubicle.\nWell, suppose you find yourself in one of these cubicles.\nWhat color would you think it is?.\nWell, since 90% of people are in blue cubicles, and you don't have any other relevant information, it's saying you should think with 90% probability you're in a blue cubicle.\nSo let's call this idea that you should reason as if you were a red, that you should reason as if you were a random sample from the set of all observers, the self-sampling assumption.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=2032"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "05760e54-a6ac-484d-bd86-ceee22f83051": {"page_content": "What color would you think it is?.\nWell, since 90% of people are in blue cubicles, and you don't have any other relevant information, it's saying you should think with 90% probability you're in a blue cubicle.\nSo let's call this idea that you should reason as if you were a red, that you should reason as if you were a random sample from the set of all observers, the self-sampling assumption.\nSuppose everyone accepts the self-sampling assumption, everyone has to bet on whether they are in a blue or a red cubicle.\nThe 90% of all persons were in their bets and 10% will lose.\nSuppose on the other hand that the self-sampling assumption is rejected, and people think that one is no more likely to be in a blue cubicle, one is no more likely to be in a blue or a red cubicle, so they bet by sleeping a coin.\nThen on average, 50% of the people will win and 50% of the people will lose.\nThe rational thing to do seems to be to accept the self-sampling assumption, at least in this case.\nAll right, so yes, in this case, the next step, as Bostrom puts it is this.\nLet's modify the thought experiment a bit.\nI should probably say I'm not reading the data in the way that Bostrom has put this.\nBostrom has an idiosyncratic way of writing, but it's a bit jarring to me, and so I'm just putting it into my own words more or less.\nSo Bostrom goes on to say, now we're modifying the thought experiment.\nWe still have 100 cubicles, but this time they're not painted blue or red.\nInstead they're numbered from 1 through to 100.\nThe numbers are painted on the outside.\nThen a fair coin is tossed.\nOkay, by God, let's say.\nIf the coin falls heads, one person is created in each cubicle.\nIf the coin falls tails, the persons are only created in cubicles 1 through 10.\nOkay, so that this finite number of cubicles, 1 to 100, God flips a coin.\nIf it's heads, then there's one person that fills in each cubicle from 100, but it fills tails.\nThen only cubicles 1 through 10 are filled with people.\nOkay.\nNow you happen to find yourself in one of the cubicles, and you're asked to guess whether there are 10 or 100 people.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=2174"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ca03cfc5-c808-4241-bae6-229f136949dc": {"page_content": "Okay, so that this finite number of cubicles, 1 to 100, God flips a coin.\nIf it's heads, then there's one person that fills in each cubicle from 100, but it fills tails.\nThen only cubicles 1 through 10 are filled with people.\nOkay.\nNow you happen to find yourself in one of the cubicles, and you're asked to guess whether there are 10 or 100 people.\nWell, at the moment, we can't tell.\nIt's random, we're on the inside of the cubicle.\nNow the key is before you open the door, because you're going to be allowed to open the door in a minute, that it's kind of a 50-50.\nIt's kind of a 50-50, whether or not there's been 10 people created by God or 100 people created by God.\nWe don't know.\nOkay.\nThen we get into the Bayesian stuff here.\nSo let's say you want to apply Bayesian statistics to this.\nThen what you can do is you can say, well, conditional on heads having being tossed.\nLet's say you find out that heads have been tossed.\nThen the probability of your cubicle being between number 1 and number 10 is going to be 1 in 10.\nOkay, because there's actually 100 cubicles.\nHowever, if the coin was tossed and it filled tails, then tails was the condition under which only 1 through to 10 was filled.\nAnd if 1 through to 10 was filled, then the probability that you're in 1 to 10 is identically 1.\nOkay.\nNow, next step.\nSuppose you open the door and discover you're in cubicle number 7.\nAnd again, you're asked, how did the coin fall?.\nWell, the thing is here, now we now use Bayesian statistics.\nNow we have additional information.\nWe can now look at all the doors.\nOkay.\nThere are, it's 1 through to 100, but you're in number 7.\nSo what is the chance that when God flipped the coin, it was such that only 1 through to 10 was filled rather than 1 through 100.\nWell, in fact, the probability is much higher that it's 1 through to 10 than what you might otherwise think.\nIt's no longer 50, 50.\nIt's certainly not 50, 50.\nAs Bostrom says, the probability is greater than 50% that it filled tails.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=2307"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f953347f-5a82-4737-8aaa-52fb48ed3b02": {"page_content": "So what is the chance that when God flipped the coin, it was such that only 1 through to 10 was filled rather than 1 through 100.\nWell, in fact, the probability is much higher that it's 1 through to 10 than what you might otherwise think.\nIt's no longer 50, 50.\nIt's certainly not 50, 50.\nAs Bostrom says, the probability is greater than 50% that it filled tails.\nFor what you are observing is given a higher probability on that hypothesis than the hypothesis that it filled heads, the precise new probability of tails can be calculated using Bayesian theorem.\nIt is approximately 91%.\nSo after finding that, you are in cubicle number 7.\nYou should think with 91% probability that there are only 10 people.\nVery well.\nStep three.\nThe last step is to transpose these results to our actual situation here on earth.\nWell, is it?.\nAre we going to be able to use that thought experiment, or we've just thought about there, this completely abstract idea, where people thinking and doing stuff cannot possibly change the probabilities.\nAre we going to be able to apply that to our situation on earth?.\nOkay, so here's the, see if you can spot the error kind of thing.\nLet's formulate the following two rival hypotheses.\nDo merely, as he calls it, do merely as that humankind goes extinct in the next century.\nIn the total number of humans, we'll have, that will have existed to say 200 billion.\nOr another hypothesis, doom late.\nDoom late is the idea that humankind survives the next century and goes on to colonize the galaxy.\nThe total number of humans is say 200 trillion.\nSo notice there, he's capped the number of humans at 200 trillion.\nWhy?.\nWell, he's just picked an arbitrary number out of thin air, okay?.\nHe could pick anything.\nImportantly, he could pick infinity.\nBut if he had a picked infinity, well, he doesn't do that.\nThere's an important reason why he doesn't do that because it doesn't suit his purpose.\nBut let's continue.\nTo simplify the exposition, we will consider only these hypotheses.\nUsing a more fine-grained partition of a hypothesis space, doesn't change the principle that would give more exact numerical values.\nDoom early corresponds to there being only 10 people in the third experiment of step two.\nDoom late corresponds to there being 100 people.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=2384"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8335f2e5-c249-4d18-b1e3-b17064badd1c": {"page_content": "There's an important reason why he doesn't do that because it doesn't suit his purpose.\nBut let's continue.\nTo simplify the exposition, we will consider only these hypotheses.\nUsing a more fine-grained partition of a hypothesis space, doesn't change the principle that would give more exact numerical values.\nDoom early corresponds to there being only 10 people in the third experiment of step two.\nDoom late corresponds to there being 100 people.\nCorrespondingly, corresponding to the numbers on the cubicles, we now have the birth ranks of human beings.\nTheir positions in the human race corresponding to the probability 50% of the coin falling heads or tails.\nWhen our some probability of doom soon or doom late, this will be based on our ordinary empirical estimates of the potential threats to humans of evil.\nOkay, so the whole point here is that we know that we are very early on in human evolution.\nHumans have only been around for what a million years, something like that.\nOkay, homo sapiens.\nIt might be a bit more than that.\nI think I saw a number recently.\nThey might have doubled that.\nNot sure.\nAnyway, it's early on in our evolution.\nThere has been only about 200 billion people as of the end of, let's say, this century, something like that.\nPresumably there's going to be up to 200 trillion more, Boston says.\nThe fact that we know we're early on in the history of humanity means that we're kind of like the people that were in the cubicles labeled one to 10.\nWe should expect that knowing that we are early on, that we are well within that one through the 10 period or the one up to a 200 billion people, we should not expect to be in the 200 trillion, that the number of people is 200 trillion.\nIt's more like 200 billion on this hypothesis.\nWhat's wrong with this?.\nWell, it casts people once again as inner victims, nothing they can choose to do can change the probabilities on this view.\nThat is simply false.\nIt ignores what people are.\nThis is at the heart.\nThe problem with so many of Boston's apocalyptic views, he calculates always with high probability how people will come to an end by ignoring anything people might do to stop it.\nHe downplays if not completely ignores creativity.\nWell, he does try to account for creativity such as in his urn with the black balls.\nThere's nothing anyone can do about the black ball.\nNo knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=2506"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e40aea2c-9987-4ff2-81bf-af16dd9c829e": {"page_content": "That is simply false.\nIt ignores what people are.\nThis is at the heart.\nThe problem with so many of Boston's apocalyptic views, he calculates always with high probability how people will come to an end by ignoring anything people might do to stop it.\nHe downplays if not completely ignores creativity.\nWell, he does try to account for creativity such as in his urn with the black balls.\nThere's nothing anyone can do about the black ball.\nNo knowledge.\nNothing pulled from his urn after the black ball can possibly do anything about the black ball.\nNothing can be done if you are one of the first 200 billion people to prevent the end of humanity.\nWhy?.\nWe're also capping the maximum number of people at 200 trillion we don't know.\nWhy doesn't it go on forever?.\nHow do you know that doesn't go on forever?.\nWhy are we like a fixed number of people in cubicles?.\nWhy is that our situation?.\nHow are these two things analogous to one other?.\nCan we use probability on infinite sets if there's literally an infinite amount of time before us?.\nSo, Boston likes the black ball idea.\nThe idea that there is an insoluble problem.\nIn other words, a physical impossibility because we know problems are soluble.\nNow, to make his position as strong as possible, he doesn't quite think that there are insoluble problems.\nBut he might think that the solution might not come in time.\nThat's fine.\nBut of course, I return full circle to my original criticism of bottoms overarching philosophy, which is a philosophical pessimist.\nHe always falls back on this idea of frequently falls back on this idea that we just won't solve the problem in time.\nAnd that's pessimism.\nYes, fine.\nBut the way we can all make guarantee of not solving the problem in time is to enact the exact solution that he wants, which is to slow down progress.\nOr to fail, if we fail to make progress as fast as possible, then, yes, we're more likely to guarantee our inability to solve problems.\nOptimists don't argue for slowing down progress.\nIt's the pessimist's debostrum that do.\nAnd it could very well be a self-fulfying prophecy, if they succeed.\nBostrum and Reese and others are saying some forms of progress are dangerous, that we should slow down.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=2634"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b23a23f0-a1e1-4ff8-9534-c26e89be0981": {"page_content": "Or to fail, if we fail to make progress as fast as possible, then, yes, we're more likely to guarantee our inability to solve problems.\nOptimists don't argue for slowing down progress.\nIt's the pessimist's debostrum that do.\nAnd it could very well be a self-fulfying prophecy, if they succeed.\nBostrum and Reese and others are saying some forms of progress are dangerous, that we should slow down.\nAnd if we slow down, but if we slow down, if we good people slow down, then this doesn't necessarily slow down the bad people.\nThe bad people that are trying to use technology for evil.\nAnd if we're convinced that we should slow down and we do slow down, then the evil people get the destructive technology before we find a solution to it.\nIn other words, the pessimists end up proving themselves correct.\nBut none of them are left to verify that they were correct.\nThat's the problem.\nSo that is the Doomface scenario.\nWe should want to avoid it.\nAnd to do that, we need to make faster progress.\nAnd we need to create the conditions under which we can make that faster progress.\nAnd that requires far more optimism.\nThanks for bearing with me for all the many hours for chapter 9 optimism.\nEventually, I'll get to chapter 10.\nThanks for listening.\nBye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdqAJIKv6II&t=2738"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6879655b-4d9a-40f9-8fa7-4fa9c0126dcf": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, the beginning of infinity, chapter 15, the evolution of culture, and now the section on dynamic societies and more about memes, anti-rational and rational memes.\nIn the last part we talked primarily about static societies, the conditions under which things go wrong and cause societies to cease making progress.\nTherefore we have stasis and the key driver of stasis of static societies are these things called anti-rational memes, anti-rational memes are those ideas which disable the holders critical faculties.\nI actively prevent people from thinking of new ideas and therefore if everyone in society possesses those same kind of memes the entire society grinds to a halt in terms of its progress which causes it to cease making progress across all domains, scientific, moral, spiritual, aesthetic, there ceases to be optimism that things can improve and the society becomes pessimistic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=23"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "986215f6-70a2-4d92-b22b-ad6b57f2d6a6": {"page_content": "So here when we get into a discussion as we're about to about dynamic societies we are bringing together many threads from the beginning of infinity, this idea of good explanations which enable us to transform the world that we live in, this idea of optimism where we believe that all evils are due to a simple lack of knowledge and if only, I say simple, but if only we create the knowledge then we can solve those problems which are evil which are causing us suffering or whatever else happens to be a problem for us at any particular point in time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=85"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3a91bd04-0eee-4674-9388-602b75a6b9ef": {"page_content": "So the idea in some sense the idea of a static society is in many ways easier to appreciate because the vast majority of societies that have ever existed have been static and as a consequence they've typically gone extinct and even if they haven't been perfectly static they've been unable to make progress in time, they've been unable to solve certain problems in time and so therefore the society itself has gone extinct in one way or another.\nAs David has said in many places we can be the exception to this rule.\nAt the moment we are the exception to this rule.\nOur culture is one of criticism which is a very unusual thing.\nTraditions traditionally are those things that remain the same in a society over time and in our society what is different is that our tradition is one where we have constant change, a tradition of criticism, our tradition of being able to find the faults and flaws, weaknesses and improvements in our existing ideas and institutions and so on and for this reason we're a dynamic society.\nFor this reason we are able to have ongoing progress which is sufficiently fast but also does not destabilise the society which is called dynamic, our society which is called dynamic.\nWe manage to make progress without falling apart.\nThere can be all sorts of changes that society could undergo which could in many ways destabilise the society this is when we have revolutionary type change and that could cause the society to go extinct.\nSo it in a sense might not be static because there could be change going on.\nbut it's not changed for the better, it's changed for the worse and in that sense we can throw all of those kind of societies into the one bin, into the one bin of being not a dynamic society in the way that David Deutsch is about to explain.\nSo let's just go to the book and David writes, subtitle dynamic societies.\nBut our society, the West, is not a static society.\nIt is the only known instance of a long lived dynamic rapidly changing society.\nIt is unique in history for its ability to mediate long-term, rapid, peaceful change and improvement including improvements in the broad consensus about values and aims as I described in chapter 13.\nThis has been made possible by the emergence of a radically different class of memes which though still selfish are not necessarily harmful to individuals.\nTo explain the nature of these new memes let me pose the question.\nWhat sort of meme can cause itself to be replicad for long periods in a rapidly changing environment?.\nIn such an environment people are continually being faced with unpredictable problems and opportunities.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=121"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0197a678-d4f0-43bf-ad54-991fd819de5e": {"page_content": "This has been made possible by the emergence of a radically different class of memes which though still selfish are not necessarily harmful to individuals.\nTo explain the nature of these new memes let me pose the question.\nWhat sort of meme can cause itself to be replicad for long periods in a rapidly changing environment?.\nIn such an environment people are continually being faced with unpredictable problems and opportunities.\nHence their needs and wishes are changing unpredictably too.\nHow can a meme remain unchanged under such a regime?.\nThe memes of a static society remain unchanged by effectively eliminating all the individual's choices.\nPeople choose neither which ideas to acquire nor which to enact.\nThose memes also combine to make the society static.\nSo the people's circumstances vary as little as possible.\nBut once the stasis has been broken and people are choosing, they will choose in part according to their individual circumstances and ideas.\nIn which case memes will face selection criteria that vary unpredictably from recipient to recipient as well as over time.\nJust pausing that as my very brief reflection.\nAgain this idea which is so important and central to David Deutscher's philosophy of civilization for one of another term is this idea that we can have certain things remaining the same in an environment which is changing rapidly.\nSo there must be certain ideas or memes that our society possesses that remains stable over time despite everything else in the society more or less changing completely.\nAnd one of those is this idea of respect for criticism.\nThis idea that nothing should be dog medically held.\nOf course people in a dynamic society will embrace certain dogmas.\nThey will regard certain things as holy or beyond criticism.\nBut not an overwhelming majority of people in the wappy legal structures in a society that prevent criticism even of those deeply held beliefs so to speak.\nOkay let's continue and David writes.\nTo be transferred to a single person, a meme needs seem useful only to that person.\nTo be transferred to a group of similar people under changing circumstances, it need be only a parochial truth.\nBut what sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives.\nA true idea is a good candidate but not just any truthful.\nIt must seem useful to all those people.\nFor it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not.\nUseful in this context is not necessarily mean functionally useful.\nIt refers to any property that can make people want to adopt an idea and enact it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=264"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "62c59047-c232-4481-ad45-2f0c855a63c8": {"page_content": "But what sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives.\nA true idea is a good candidate but not just any truthful.\nIt must seem useful to all those people.\nFor it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not.\nUseful in this context is not necessarily mean functionally useful.\nIt refers to any property that can make people want to adopt an idea and enact it.\nSuch as being interesting, funny, elegant, easily remembered, morally right and so on.\nAnd the best way to seem useful to diverse people under diverse, unpredictable circumstances is to be useful.\nSuch an idea is or embodies a truth in the broadest sense.\nFactually true if it is an assertion of fact.\nBeautiful if it is an artistic value or behaviour.\nObjectively right if it is a moral value.\nFunny if it is a joke and so on.\nThe ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with rich, deep truths.\nPeople are fallible.\nThey often have preferences for false shallow, useless or morally wrong ideas.\nBut which false ideas they prefer differs from one person to another and changes with time.\nUnder change circumstances, a specious falsehood or a parochial truth can survive only by luck.\nBut a true deep idea has an objective reason to be considered useful by people with diverse purposes over long periods.\nFor instance, Newton's laws are useful for building better cathedrals, but also for building better bridges and designing better artillery.\nBecause of this reach, they get themselves remembered and enacted by all sorts of people.\nMany of them vehemently oppose to each other's objectives over many generations.\nThis is the kind of idea that has a chance of becoming a long-lived meme in a rapidly changing society.\nIn fact, such memes are not merely capable of surviving, under rapidly changing criteria of criticism.\nThey positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication.\nUnprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people's critical faculties, they are criticized.\nBut so are their rivals, and their rivals fare worse and are not enacted.\nIn the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage, and can deteriorate or be superseded, pausing their just my reflection on this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=406"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a5c73cbc-c9b7-4d34-b7ad-a14951615a7b": {"page_content": "In fact, such memes are not merely capable of surviving, under rapidly changing criteria of criticism.\nThey positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication.\nUnprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people's critical faculties, they are criticized.\nBut so are their rivals, and their rivals fare worse and are not enacted.\nIn the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage, and can deteriorate or be superseded, pausing their just my reflection on this.\nSo here is the idea, central concept really, that the reason the useful ideas manage to survive, even though there's rapid change going on in the society more widely, is because rivals too, the very useful, the very true ideas, are being criticized as well as the useful and true ideas being criticized.\nBut those rivals fail to be replicated because they're rightly criticized, shown to be false, shown to be wanting in some way, and so they tend not to get replicated.\nBut because the useful idea survives the process of criticism, that makes it more robust in a sense.\nIt is able to weather the storms of criticism, and everyone around can see that it's useful for doing useful stuff like building bridges, making better artillery in the case of Newton's laws.\nLet's move on to rational and anti-rational names, which really gets to the heart of this particular matter.\nSo I'll just get into reading it.\nRational and anti-rational memes.\nThus, memes of this new kind, which are created by rational and critical thought, subsequently also depend on such thought to get themselves replicated faithfully.\nSo I shall call them rational memes.\nMemes of the older, static society kind, which survived by disabling their holders' critical faculties, I shall call anti-rational memes.\nOkay, already I'm going to pause there, because clearly we're jumping in at a point where David is referring to something that he just said in the previous section.\nSo I guess it's important that we reread that previous section, and he writes in the paragraph prior to this new section, such memes are not merely capable of surviving under rapidly changing criteria of criticism.\nThey positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication.\nUnprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people's faculties, they are criticized, but so are their rivals, and the rivals fear worse and are not enacted.\nIn the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage and can deteriorate or be superseded.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=519"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1148b1d6-9a02-4d45-ac9d-42d40cdfc92a": {"page_content": "They positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication.\nUnprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people's faculties, they are criticized, but so are their rivals, and the rivals fear worse and are not enacted.\nIn the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage and can deteriorate or be superseded.\nAnd so what David is saying here is that the rational memes, this kind of idea, this kind of meme, survives not because of the suppression of critical faculties, but it thrives in an environment of criticism, because the rivals are themselves criticized out of existence.\nThey're refuted leaving behind the rational memes, but of course we're about to get to the key point here about anti-rational memes that managed to get replicated despite criticism back to the book.\nRational and anti-rational memes have sharpening differing properties, originating in their fundamentally different replication strategies.\nThey are about as different from each other as they are both from genes.\nIf a certain type of hobgoblin has the property that, if children fear it, they will grow up to make their children fear it, then the behaviour of telling stories about that type of hobgoblin is a meme.\nSuppose it is a rational meme, then criticism over generations will cast doubt on the story's truth.\nIn reality, there are no hobgoblins, the meme might evolve away to extinction.\nNote that it does not care if it goes extinct, memes do what they have to do, they have no intentions even about themselves, but there are also other paths that it might evolve down.\nIt might become overtly fictional.\nBecause rational memes must be seen as beneficial by the holders, those that evoke unpleasant emotions are at a disadvantage, so it may also evolve away from evoking terror and towards, for instance, being pleasantly thrilling, or else, if it is settled on a genuine danger, exploring practicalities for the present and optimism for the future.\nPause there, my diversion, I suppose, here.\nConsider Halloween, Halloween is a perfect example of this.\nIt is supposed to be a little bit scary, and I guess the Christian tradition of all souls day, thinking about the dead and various other traditions, thinking about the dead, it's not all that pleasant, but Halloween has morphed into this more thrilling, exciting type celebration, where kids get together and get to have lollies or candy and sweets and so on.\nIt wouldn't persist in its present form, and it wouldn't have persisted for so long.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=666"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "02887430-7113-43da-ac6b-7eeff4717d0f": {"page_content": "It is supposed to be a little bit scary, and I guess the Christian tradition of all souls day, thinking about the dead and various other traditions, thinking about the dead, it's not all that pleasant, but Halloween has morphed into this more thrilling, exciting type celebration, where kids get together and get to have lollies or candy and sweets and so on.\nIt wouldn't persist in its present form, and it wouldn't have persisted for so long.\nIf it wasn't pleasant, if it didn't have that thrilling sort of aspect, even though ostensibly, it's supposed to be a scary kind of a thing, and people are supposed to scare one another, but not terrified of them.\nAnd as another related aside to this, when it comes to talking about absolutely terrible memes that can be created and then take on a life of their own, well, I typically don't call out people on this podcast.\nIt's not a thing that I do, I'm going to make an exception.\nI'm going to make an exception for the talk show host in the USA Jimmy Kimmel.\nEach year, for a number of years now, Jimmy Kimmel has had this Halloween show and this segment on his Halloween show, where the humor is supposed to come from, adults sending in videos to Jimmy Kimmel, playing a prank on their children, their unsuspecting children, their innocent children, that all of their hard-earned, carefully collected over many hours on the night of Halloween, all of their candy that they've collected, has been eaten by their parents.\nAnd you can look this up.\nI've sort of been two minds about promoting it.\nI don't really want to promote it.\nI think it's absolutely a terrible idea.\nI think many people who watch it can barely get through the segment because it's disturbing.\nIt's public child abuse.\nMany people wouldn't see it in those terms.\nOf course they won't because we still exist in this culture of memes that says it's okay to cause a child to cry.\nNow, telling a child that the candy that they have collected on Halloween has all been eaten by mum and dad as a joke is kind of like, I suppose, the bank, the bank ringing up the parents and saying, excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, very sorry about this, the bank's finances are in disarray and the only way that we can keep the bank afloat is to call in all the mortgages.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=796"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "36c0e93d-49fb-4116-a82c-ba1cb36acdd9": {"page_content": "Now, telling a child that the candy that they have collected on Halloween has all been eaten by mum and dad as a joke is kind of like, I suppose, the bank, the bank ringing up the parents and saying, excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, very sorry about this, the bank's finances are in disarray and the only way that we can keep the bank afloat is to call in all the mortgages.\nSo unless you can pay off your $400,000 mortgage right now, we're taking the house and you have two weeks to vacate and hanging up the phone, telling you have no legal recourse.\nThat's approximately, I guess, a similar sensation that would be evoked in the parents as the children.\nThe parents would be extremely upset, extremely disturbed, emotionally violated in many ways.\nAnd it wouldn't be funny if the bank rang back in 10 minutes and said, April fools, just jerking, but with children, you know, they're equivalent of money if they don't have any, is the candy.\nSomething they've worked hard for over many hours.\nSo why this continues to be a segment on Jimmy Kimmel, despite many, many people informing him that it's a form of abuse, he shouldn't be promoting it, he shouldn't be laughing at these children, it is a bad thing.\nHe persists with it, and he persists with it because the culture is saturated in this stuff.\nA child hurts themselves and we're supposed to laugh.\nNow, of course, shout and Freud is a real thing.\nWe found a friend for you to play with.\nYou know, as someone trips over in the street, some people's first impulse is to laugh.\nI think that's kind of unfortunate at times.\nThere are certainly funny YouTube clips you can see where people are deliberately doing things silly, deliberately running the risk of causing themselves injury.\nSomething goes wrong, and it is kind of funny because they've brought it upon themselves.\nBut when people don't bring these things upon themselves, I for one don't tend to find humor in it.\nIf they're actually suffering, if it's not merely tripping over and causing them no pain, and it's just a funny way in which someone falls, okay, that can be funny.\nIf someone trips over and breaks their leg and is laying on the ground suffering, that's not funny.\nThey're hurt, and emotional hurt is the same kind of thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=922"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf405a76-ee6a-445f-ac0d-7470a662cc87": {"page_content": "But when people don't bring these things upon themselves, I for one don't tend to find humor in it.\nIf they're actually suffering, if it's not merely tripping over and causing them no pain, and it's just a funny way in which someone falls, okay, that can be funny.\nIf someone trips over and breaks their leg and is laying on the ground suffering, that's not funny.\nThey're hurt, and emotional hurt is the same kind of thing.\nSo when people hurt children in this way, as Jimmy Kimmel does, and I guess to make given that this has become a bit of a rant now, I'm going to have to put up some vision of this, of what you're looking for if you want to look for it.\nI think it's a terrible mistake, and it's a terrible mistake for parents to do this, and the reason it's a terrible mistake is even ignoring the idea that you're laughing and finding joy in the pain of your child, the actual literal mental anguish of your child, putting that aside, it teaches your child a particular lesson.\nIt teaches them that mum and dad cannot be trusted anymore, that when mum and dad say something, it just might not be true.\nThey just might be playing a trick on you.\nYou can't be trusted.\nNow, for many of us with friends, that's fine, that's par for the course, but with your parents, I think a different set of rules apply, especially when they're younger.\nI should mention that Jimmy Kimmel this year claims, if you look at his 2020 video, that he didn't do it this year, and I thought, great, as I began to watch the segment, I thought, great, he's not doing it anymore.\nWithin 10 seconds he says, although we're not doing it this year, parents nonetheless still played the prank, and so we're going to show the videos anyway, so he still did it this year anyway, he still did it this year.\nSo, this is an example of where, even though Jimmy Kimmel decided he wasn't going to do this thing, maybe he had good second thoughts about it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1055"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c21b7630-b95e-4e46-bcee-aaf6c7fc8d78": {"page_content": "Within 10 seconds he says, although we're not doing it this year, parents nonetheless still played the prank, and so we're going to show the videos anyway, so he still did it this year anyway, he still did it this year.\nSo, this is an example of where, even though Jimmy Kimmel decided he wasn't going to do this thing, maybe he had good second thoughts about it.\nIt's now taken on a life of its own, and so now there is this practice throughout the United States, where I'm suspecting innocent children who know nothing about Jimmy Kimmel and nothing about this kind of prank, collect their sweets, collect their candy, and then the following day morning, whenever they wake up to find the candy missing, and mum and dad telling that all the candy is gone permanently, because it's all been eaten.\nI think this needs to stop, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but I actually think for those children, it is a big deal, and it should be stopped, and I think that next year, the best thing that Jimmy Kimmel could do is not run the segment and apologize for having a run the segment.\nThe year after that, he could possibly track down every child that was ever involved in the segment and reward them in some way, and apologize to them and make them feel a little bit better, and say that he won't do this sort of thing again.\nI sound like a terrible schoolteacher, but I think that sometimes a tone that needs to be done when people do the wrong thing, and I think Jimmy Kimmel is doing the wrong thing with this segment, he's creating a new meme, and it's not going anywhere good.\nAfter that, while deviation, let's go back to the book, and David writes, now suppose it is an anti-rational meme.\nA working unpleasant emotions will then be useful in doing the harm that it needs to do, namely disabling the listener's ability to be rid of the hobgoblin and entrenching compulsion to think and therefore to speak of it.\nThe more accurately the hobgoblin's attributes exploit genuine widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational meme will propagate.\nIf the meme is to survive for many generations, it is essential that it's implicit knowledge of these vulnerabilities be true and deep, but it's overt content, the idea of the hobgoblin's existence, need contain no truth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1158"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "954e235b-1fe2-4aad-a962-e058eeb6fe20": {"page_content": "The more accurately the hobgoblin's attributes exploit genuine widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational meme will propagate.\nIf the meme is to survive for many generations, it is essential that it's implicit knowledge of these vulnerabilities be true and deep, but it's overt content, the idea of the hobgoblin's existence, need contain no truth.\nOn the contrary, the non-existence of the hobgoblin helps to make the meme a better replicator because the story is then unconstrained by the mundane attributes of any genuine menace, which are always finite and to some degree compatible.\nAnd that will be all the more so if the story can also manage to undermine the principle of optimism, thus just as rational memes evolve towards deep truths, anti-rational memes evolve away from them, pause their my reflection.\nOkay, just to remind people, especially if people dip in and out of these episodes at certain points.\nDavid mentions the principle of optimism there, the principle of optimism is that all evils are due to insufficient knowledge.\nAnd so actually I'm going to include that in my introduction to the philosophy of David Deutsch, part two, I'll talk more about the principle of optimism there, but suffice it to say for now that if you believe that certain problems cannot be solved, then that is a kind of anti-rational meme.\nIt's an undermining of this principle of optimism, which says that all evils are due to lack of knowledge or insufficient knowledge, which is a special case in my view of this idea that problems are soluble, given that evil is just another kind of problem.\nAnd if you knew if you had the knowledge, then you would be able to fix that thing.\nWhatever the evil happens to be, evil might be a certain disease.\nIt might be a particular virus.\nAnd that evil, which is causing a lot of harm, is only not solved due to the lack of knowledge.\nIf we were able to solve it and we can solve it, given the right knowledge, then the evil would be destroyed.\nWe'd be rid of it.\nAnd the principle of optimism says that all such evils, whether they be viruses, bacteria, hurricanes, earthquakes, whatever, in order to get rid of the evil part of them, but the damaging part, the harmful part, the bit that causes suffering, we need to create the knowledge in order to do so.\nAnd that's always possible with sufficient effort, creativity, and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1271"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9ec59eb-e09f-476e-bb8d-54932f9b125d": {"page_content": "We'd be rid of it.\nAnd the principle of optimism says that all such evils, whether they be viruses, bacteria, hurricanes, earthquakes, whatever, in order to get rid of the evil part of them, but the damaging part, the harmful part, the bit that causes suffering, we need to create the knowledge in order to do so.\nAnd that's always possible with sufficient effort, creativity, and so forth.\nSo just to very briefly recap, we have two types of memes, rational and anti-rational, and two kinds of replication strategies.\nOn the one hand, with the rational memes, it thrives in an environment of criticism, because all of its rivals are criticized and refuted, shown to be false in some way, shown to be lacking in some way, leaving it as the survivor.\nSo it's an evolutionary type process.\nThe anti-rational memes, on the other hand, disable critical faculties.\nAnd so prevent themselves from being criticized, and so they survive for that reason, because they, they themselves, are not criticized, unlike with the rational memes, which are, but survive the process of criticism.\nSo they're your two kinds of memes, and they're your two kinds of replication strategies.\nSo back to the book and David says, as usual, mixing the above two replication strategies does no good.\nIf a meme contains true and beneficial knowledge for the recipient, but disables the recipient's critical faculties in regard to itself, then the recipient will be less able to correct errors in that knowledge.\nAnd so we'll reduce the faithfulness of transmission, and if a meme relies on the recipient's belief that it is beneficial, but it is not in fact beneficial, then that increases the chance that the recipient will reject it or refuse to enact it.\nSimilarly, a rational memes natural home is a dynamic society, more or less any dynamic society, because there, the tradition of criticism, optimistically directed at problem solving, will suppress variants of the meme with even slightly less truth.\nMoreover, the rapid progress will subject these variants to continually varying criteria of criticism, which again, only deeply true memes have a chance of surviving.\nAn anti-rational memes natural home is a static society, not any static society, but preferably the one in which it evolved for all the converse reasons, and therefore each type of meme, when present in a society that is broadly of the opposite kind, is less able to cause itself to be replicated, pause their my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1399"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4244b727-5631-4a91-9408-b97dbd00ff8e": {"page_content": "Moreover, the rapid progress will subject these variants to continually varying criteria of criticism, which again, only deeply true memes have a chance of surviving.\nAn anti-rational memes natural home is a static society, not any static society, but preferably the one in which it evolved for all the converse reasons, and therefore each type of meme, when present in a society that is broadly of the opposite kind, is less able to cause itself to be replicated, pause their my reflection.\nOkay, there's that grand discovery that has been mentioned many times before on this podcast and hinted at throughout the book, a rational meme is to a dynamic society as an anti-rational meme is to a static society.\nNow this is not to say that all memes in dynamic society is a rational, far from it, or that all memes in static societies are anti-rational, again far from it.\nThere's a mix, but when those anti-rational memes reach some threshold within a particular society, then that can cause the accelerate like in our society, we've got an accelerating rate of progress as people often are fond of saying.\nIf the anti-rational memes tend to get more and more of a foothold, then that rate of accelerating progress will slow, eventually the increase in progress itself will slow, it will stagnate, and eventually will get regression, and once you have regression, then what you can expect is extinction of the society or the civilization.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1515"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "46e92811-104c-49a3-986e-d18b95b5b598": {"page_content": "So anti-rational memes are those things that actively prevent progress because they actively prevent one, and people in society, from criticizing the ideas they have, and if you can't criticize the ideas you have, you're not going to improve the ideas you have, things are going to remain the same, and in fact what generally happens is because the problems keep on coming, but no new solutions are being developed, you actually start to regress, you start to go backwards because your society are staying the same, but the environment around you continues to evolve, you're still going to be plagued by all the awful slings and arrows that the earth tends to throw at you, and the rest of the cosmos mind you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1610"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dcffa779-6a34-4958-90c7-1074e487d74f": {"page_content": "So there almost is no such thing as a society, a static society remaining the same throughout time, it will decline, eventually it will disappear all together.\nNow, on the other hand, a dynamic society can weather some degree of anti-rational memes.\nPeople, individuals, have a vast number of anti-rational memes operating on their mind at any one time.\nCertain groups of people tend to have more anti-rational memes than others, also different kinds of anti-rational memes than others, but so long as these are corralled in some way, controlled by the institutions, especially the democratic institutions of society, then we have some sort of defense, a bull walk against anti-rational memes, causing stasis in a society.\nSo what I mean by this is religious communities can have certain anti-rational memes, secret societies can have certain anti-rational memes.\nPeople's homes can develop their own set of anti-rational memes in a particular family and so on and so forth, but so long as they're kind of corralled, fenced off into those smaller communities, then the wider society can protect itself, content to protect itself, if those anti-rational memes do not become part of the broader culture, and certainly not enforced on the wider society through legislation or something like that.\nNow, one only has to turn to a society like North Korea, where anti-rational memes are actually legislated.\nThey're actually put into the penal code, lots of countries historically have had this.\nI know a little bit about North Korea.\nIf you criticize the leader, you will be thrown in jail.\nSo you're not allowed to criticize the leader.\nThere's literally no way of improving the leader from the community.\nThere's no way of replacing the leader.\nIt's not a democracy, and there's no way of even suggesting that there's some deficiency with the leader.\nSo this is the worst kind, I would argue, of the anti-rational memes, because anti-rational memes, dangerous though they are, tend to be most dangerous for their own holders, but your anti-rational memes typically aren't going to hurt me.\nThey could, but they generally won't hurt me because there are other structures within society, institutions within society, that will prevent you from enforcing your terrible ideas on to me, or telling me that I can't criticize you, for example.\nAlthough we see around the world governments drifting in certain ways, certain unfortunate ways towards speech codes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1648"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d5aeb556-08a8-4546-beeb-1a80b2775173": {"page_content": "They could, but they generally won't hurt me because there are other structures within society, institutions within society, that will prevent you from enforcing your terrible ideas on to me, or telling me that I can't criticize you, for example.\nAlthough we see around the world governments drifting in certain ways, certain unfortunate ways towards speech codes.\nTowards a reluctance to allow any kind of speech, and this is, of course, a dangerous turn.\nAnd it should be resisted, it should be resisted, because anything that says you're not allowed to criticize X, where X is anything at all, is an anti-rational meme.\nIt's an anti-rational idea.\nIt means that X is already in a perfect state, there's absolutely nothing that could possibly ever be said about X that could improve our understanding of X, and that is always wrong.\nOkay, another lengthy diversion, let's go back to the book.\nAnd this section is titled The Enlightenment.\nOur society in the West became dynamic, not through the sudden failure of a static society, but through generations of static society type evolution.\nWhere and when the transition began is not very well-defined, but I suspect that it began with the philosophy of Galileo, and perhaps became irreversible with the discoveries of Newton.\nIn meme terms, Newton's laws replicated themselves as rational memes, and their fidelity was very high, because they were so useful for so many purposes, so pausing there, because this bears a little bit of emphasis.\nNewton's laws were so useful.\nNewton's laws work.\nThey solve problems, they allow us to create technologies to make predictions about the world.\nThey improve our lives, they improve society, they make civilization a better place, because now we can solve the problem of figuring out how to launch rockets, we can solve the problem of figuring out how to explain the tides, so on and so forth.\nAnd so they work because they're actually, they're saying something true about the world, not perfectly true, but they're saying something true about the world.\nThe idea that a solution to your problem works is a true statement.\nIt's either true or false, either your solution works or it doesn't work.\nI'm just emphasizing that because there is actually a school of thought that says, well, all we need to worry about is whether something works or not, not whether something is true or false.\nI happen to think that these ideas contain a certain amount of synonymous epistemic content to be technical, I suppose.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1785"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3e3f4f95-d752-4d93-8821-43cdf91eb2c7": {"page_content": "The idea that a solution to your problem works is a true statement.\nIt's either true or false, either your solution works or it doesn't work.\nI'm just emphasizing that because there is actually a school of thought that says, well, all we need to worry about is whether something works or not, not whether something is true or false.\nI happen to think that these ideas contain a certain amount of synonymous epistemic content to be technical, I suppose.\nIf something works, then it's saying something true about reality.\nThere's something correct, something right.\nIt's not false to say that that solution works of that particular problem.\nAnd so in the case of Newton, although we know strictly speaking, it's false, which is just to say it is not in all its parts true, the conjunction of all the different assertions that it makes about the world is not true.\nOkay, there are aspects of it that are false.\nAnd it's overall explanation of, for instance, the way in which physics works is false, but it doesn't mean that it's completely an utterly false.\nIt's not completely an utterly useless.\nIt's true to say it does solve some problems, and it solves some problems as well as anyone needs to have those problems solved.\nSo that's just a by the by because it solved problems, however, because it is able to solve problems.\nAnd lots and lots of problems, it becomes a meme that is a rational meme, a set of memes that gets itself replicated over time.\nWhy?.\nBecause it's so useful, simple idea.\nOkay, skipping a very short part and then back to the book and David writes, in any case, following Newton, there was no way of missing the fact that rapid progress was underway.\nBut some philosophers, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did try.\nBut only by arguing that reason was harmful, civilization bad, and primitive life.\nHappy, just an aside.\nAnd don't we hear this often?.\nIt's anyone who is excited by the environmentalist movement tends to fall back on some version of this, civilization is bad, primitive life good.\nOkay, let's get going.\nThere was such an avalanche of further improvements, scientific, philosophical, and political, that the possibility of resuming stasis was swept away.\nWestern society would become the beginning of an affinity, or be destroyed.\nNations beyond the West today are also changing rapidly, sometimes through the exigencies of warfare, with their neighbours.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=1930"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "39584950-1c5a-406d-93fd-db96beb8e89d": {"page_content": "Okay, let's get going.\nThere was such an avalanche of further improvements, scientific, philosophical, and political, that the possibility of resuming stasis was swept away.\nWestern society would become the beginning of an affinity, or be destroyed.\nNations beyond the West today are also changing rapidly, sometimes through the exigencies of warfare, with their neighbours.\nBut more often, even more powerfully, by the peaceful transmission of Western memes, their cultures too cannot become static again.\nThey must either become Western in their mode of operation.\nWe'll lose all their knowledge, and thus cease to exist, a dilemma which is becoming increasingly significant in world politics, causing that, well, I really should mention North Korea again here.\nThe DMC, the demilitarized zone.\nThis is the border between North and South Korea.\nSo the DMC, it was, it's an arbitrary line to a large extent.\nIt was a general Douglas MacArthur at the end of the Korean War in 1950, that almost more or less it was him who just arbitrarily drew a line between the North and the South.\nAnd it just so happened to be the case that the majority of the communist people were up in the North, and the majority of the democratic capitalist type people were in the South.\nBut some capitalists got trapped in the North, and some communists got trapped in the South.\nSo it wasn't a good way of dividing things.\nAnd the history of why the communists were up in the North, and the capitalists were down in the South, which stretches all the way back actually to Japan.\nAnd so this is one of the reasons why there is friction between the Japanese and the Koreans, because the Koreans look to Japan as being one reason why their country was split for historical reasons and that takes us off into an entirely different area away from the beginning of infinity.\nHowever, the DMC is a wonderful physical representation of the border between a static and a dynamic society, a more static and a more dynamic society, where you have certain anti-rational memes in the North, which do not obtain in the South.\nThey don't exist in the South.\nSouth Korea has a tradition of removing, typically without violence.\nIt's leaders.\nIn North Korea, it is a hereditary dynasty now, where you cannot remove the rulers, or if you remove even any of the people in the higher echelons of the North Korean communist party, it usually takes some amount of violence.\nThey tend not to go peacefully.\nThey certainly don't get voted out.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=2049"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "37f385bf-e305-47e5-9fc7-e7c1d5f55385": {"page_content": "They don't exist in the South.\nSouth Korea has a tradition of removing, typically without violence.\nIt's leaders.\nIn North Korea, it is a hereditary dynasty now, where you cannot remove the rulers, or if you remove even any of the people in the higher echelons of the North Korean communist party, it usually takes some amount of violence.\nThey tend not to go peacefully.\nThey certainly don't get voted out.\nAnd of course, it's not just the philosophical differences between the two.\nThe philosophical differences are the deep foundational or more foundationalists, but they underline, they underpin the reasons why the explanation of why it is that North Korea is in the state that it is, and that it's people are in the state that it is.\nSouth Korea is a technological, artistic, scientific powerhouse around the world.\nFor its size, it really does bat above its own weight.\nAnd certainly in technology, it's exceeded by very few other countries in terms of what it's achieved.\nClearly, the United States is first.\nIf you were going to put something second, well, Samsung, LG, Hyundai, the list of technologically advanced companies and companies at the frontier of making advances in technology exist in South Korea, probably overtaken Japan by now.\nNow, why?.\nWell, because it has this culture of free enterprise, capitalism, rational names.\nIt tries to avoid the anti-rational names.\nNorth Korea is completely the opposite, in almost every way.\nAny technology it does have is either stolen or a cheap ripoff of the technology from elsewhere.\nMost of its money, where it doesn't generate it itself, is from charity, from around the world, from people actually giving it food aid, giving it cash aid, and so on.\nIt's not because the United States is placing sanctions on it.\nIt's not because other countries are treating North Korea badly.\nI would urge anyone who thinks that that's the reason why North Korean people are suffering to look deeply into the history of North Korea.\nNorth Korea has, the North Korean regime has brought it upon themselves.\nAnd with people, of course, we should have great compassion for it.\nIt is largely a hostage situation.\nAnd we know this because people are desperate to escape from North Korea and do, quite often, into China and then from China, they make their way south and South Korea welcomes them with open arms.\nNo one is trying to go in the other direction.\nI should correct that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=2198"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d6763eb2-c24d-45fb-a259-749c9acdfd6e": {"page_content": "North Korea has, the North Korean regime has brought it upon themselves.\nAnd with people, of course, we should have great compassion for it.\nIt is largely a hostage situation.\nAnd we know this because people are desperate to escape from North Korea and do, quite often, into China and then from China, they make their way south and South Korea welcomes them with open arms.\nNo one is trying to go in the other direction.\nI should correct that.\nThere are interesting handful of cases where people not completely stable, one would say, who do fight their way into North Korea and never leave again, of course.\nOkay, whatever the case.\nWe have clear real world examples out there.\nNorth and South Korea are just one.\nBut where we can observe the effect of anti-rational memes upon a society, causing stasis to a greater or lesser degree, certainly retarding the progress within that society.\nAnd we can see places where we have very dynamic societies, like South Korea, that welcome criticism, challenging in the status quo.\nThere are still, I should say, of course, in any of these traditional societies, South Korea is an excellent example of a confusion society where there are absolutely anti-rational memes that operate.\nHowever, there are likewise, as we say, institutions within that society which enable criticism to flourish nonetheless and to ensure that peaceful, and to ensure that people are able to peacefully cooperate one with another without fear that if they criticize the government or someone else, they're going to be thrown in jail.\nCertainly nothing to the extent like what goes on in North Korea.\nAnyway, the point has been made, I think, back to the book and David Rites.\nEven in the West, the Enlightenment today is nowhere near complete.\nIt is relatively advanced in a few vital areas, the physical sciences and Western political and economic institutions are prime examples.\nIn those areas, ideas are now fairly open to criticism and experimentation and to choice and to change.\nBut in many other areas, memes are still replicated in the old manner by means that suppress the recipients' critical faculties and ignore their preferences.\nWhen girls strive to be ladylike and to meet culturally defined standards of shape and appearance, and when boys do their utmost to look strong and not to cry when distressed, they are struggling to replicate ancient gender stereotypes, hyping memes, that are still part of our culture.\nDespite the fact that explicitly endorsing them has become a stigmatized behaviour, pause their just my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=2344"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8254d31e-03a6-4aa4-b49a-f5711c9edfd1": {"page_content": "When girls strive to be ladylike and to meet culturally defined standards of shape and appearance, and when boys do their utmost to look strong and not to cry when distressed, they are struggling to replicate ancient gender stereotypes, hyping memes, that are still part of our culture.\nDespite the fact that explicitly endorsing them has become a stigmatized behaviour, pause their just my reflection.\nThis is an extremely interesting point to just dwell upon for a moment.\nDavid observes throughout the book a number of these kinds of ideas.\nThe ideas that no one really believes but nonetheless continue to get replicated anyway.\nHe's going to write shortly, we're going to get to the bit shortly where he talks about the because I say so idea.\nWhen parents say in response to a child who they're in a dispute with, because I say so, it's a weird kind of thing where the parent doesn't actually believe it, even though it's true that David will explain it much better shortly.\nBasically it's when a parent has run out of patience, they lack the knowledge of how to be patient in that situation, they resort to because I say so.\nOkay, I'm getting ahead of myself so let's just go back to the book.\nand he writes, those memes have the effect of preventing vast ranges of ideas about what sort of life one should lead from ever crossing the holder's minds.\nIf their thoughts ever wander in the forbidden directions, they feel uneasiness and embarrassment and the same sort of fear and loss of centeredness as religious people have felt since time immemorial at the thought of betraying their gods and their worldviews and critical faculties are left disabled and precisely such a way that they will in due course draw the next generation into the same pattern of thought and behaviour.\nI just pause the mind reflection.\nso I just want this to come down upon you if it's an idea that you've not encountered before, especially if you're not a religious person let's say and there are certain religious practices where if the person does not engage in them, they feel this sort of shame and regret and you might think well how could you be so silly?.\nIf you don't manage to make it to church on a Sunday and you feel really guilty about that, that's a strange sort of sensation I couldn't imagine as an atheist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=2483"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71222f21-8251-4d07-a0a0-55995df5ae18": {"page_content": "If you don't manage to make it to church on a Sunday and you feel really guilty about that, that's a strange sort of sensation I couldn't imagine as an atheist.\nWhat it must feel like to feel so guilty, to have not met the standards of my religion, that this imaginary god expects me to turn up to this building each and every Sunday and kneel before a figurine of that god, that must be a weird thing to feel guilt over not doing that or praying five times a day or so on and so forth for an even religious practice that you might think is a bit of a bizarre one.\nBut as David is saying here we all feel this and you will know it when you feel any kind of uneasiness or embarrassment at transgressing any kind of social cultural practice.\nYou have these memes operating these anti-rational memes, this unwillingness to criticise to a large extent, certain ideas that you have, even if they don't make much sense.\nHe's going to get to some examples shortly so let's just wait for that back to the book.\nThat anti-rational memes are still today a substantial part of our culture and of the mind of every individual is a difficult fact for us to accept.\nIronically it is hard for us that it would have been for the profoundly closed-minded people of earlier societies.\nThey would not have been troubled by the proposition that most of their lives were spent enacting elaborate rituals rather than making their own choices and pursuing their own goals.\nOn the contrary the degree to which a person's life was controlled by duty, obedience, authority, piety, faith and so on was the very measure by which people judged themselves and others.\nChildren who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviours that did not seem functional would be told because I say so.\nAnd in due course they would give their children the same reply to the same question never realizing they were giving the full explanation.\nThis is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true that its holders do not believe it.\nPause their repeating, summarising.\nBecause I say so, when parents say because I say so, this is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true though its holders do not believe it.\nJust cogitate on that for a moment, reflect on that for a moment.\nIt's really interesting.\nWhen a parent says to a child because I say so, the parent is generally thinking well this is not the reason actually why I'm expecting you to do this thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=2618"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c2dfd61c-c9d4-4b7e-97ea-e39099d87821": {"page_content": "Pause their repeating, summarising.\nBecause I say so, when parents say because I say so, this is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true though its holders do not believe it.\nJust cogitate on that for a moment, reflect on that for a moment.\nIt's really interesting.\nWhen a parent says to a child because I say so, the parent is generally thinking well this is not the reason actually why I'm expecting you to do this thing.\nOkay for example, little Johnny's playing in the dirt.\nJohnny get out of the dirt, stop playing in the dirt.\nWhy?.\nBecause I say so.\nNow, the parent probably thinks or has an idea in their mind.\nNo, I've got a complex explanation to do with bacteria and disease and this is why I want little Johnny to get out.\nBut that's too hard to explain, I won't even attempt to explain it so I'm going to say because I say so.\nWhich actually is the reason why.\nIt's only because I say so.\nThat other thing, that other stuff about all the its full of disease and its bad, you could explain that to the child.\nIt's just that you're too lazy, you lack the patience, or perhaps you simply lack the capacity to conjure the words into an explanation that's appropriate for the child.\nIf indeed you think that's true.\nBut generally you don't think it's true.\nWhen a parent says because I say so, it's usually because they're at the end of their tether.\nThey have run out of patience.\nThey don't know, they don't have the knowledge of how to be more patient in that particular situation or to come up with a better explanation or to interact with their child in a better way.\nIt is a general purpose, criticism of the behaviour of a child because I say so.\nDo what you're told.\nI'm the authority.\nNot a good way to deal with anyone of course.\nSo anyway, in summary, the because I say so thing is true.\nWhen a parent uses that, that's in fact the correct explanation.\nIt really is.\nThat really is why the child is being requested not to do something, rather than some other more complicated correct explanation to do with the world.\nEven though the parents don't believe that that's why the child needs to stop doing whatever they're doing.\nOkay, we'll do whatever they're supposed to be doing.\nAccording to the parent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=2763"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b10a83b5-8120-452e-8b68-6fac91c98173": {"page_content": "When a parent uses that, that's in fact the correct explanation.\nIt really is.\nThat really is why the child is being requested not to do something, rather than some other more complicated correct explanation to do with the world.\nEven though the parents don't believe that that's why the child needs to stop doing whatever they're doing.\nOkay, we'll do whatever they're supposed to be doing.\nAccording to the parent.\nToday, with our eagerness for change in our unprecedented openness to new ideas and to self-criticism, it conflicts with most people's self-image that we are still, to a significant degree, the slaves of anti-rational means.\nMost of us would admit to having a hang up or two, but in the main we consider our behaviour to be determined by our own decisions and our decisions by our reason assessment of the arguments and evidence about what is in our rational self-interest.\nThis rational self-image is itself a recent development of our society.\nMany of whose memes explicitly promote and implicitly give effect to values such as reason, freedom of thought, and the inherent value of individual human beings.\nWe naturally try to explain ourselves in terms of meeting those values.\nObviously, there is truth in this, but it is not the whole story.\nOne need look no further than our clothing styles, and the way we decorate our homes to find evidence.\nConsider how you would be judged by other people if you went shopping in pajamas, or painted your home with blue and brown stripes.\nThat gives a hint of the narrowness of the conventions that govern even these objectively trivial and inconsequential choices about style and the steepness of the social costs of violating them.\nIs the same thing true of the more momentous patterns in our lives such as careers, relationships, education, morality, political outlook, and national identity?.\nConsider what we should expect to happen when a static society is gradually switching from anti-rational to rational memes.\nPause their my reflection.\nThat should give you pause as I like to say.\nThe social costs of violating these norms that you're expected to have a certain kind of career or a certain kind of relationship engage in a certain kind of fashion.\nPaint your house a certain color.\nIf any of these are violated, you feel, as David said earlier, the unease, the uncomfortableness, the embarrassment of violating these norms in any particular way.\nSo we all know what the hardcore religious person feels like at times.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=2883"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a4411159-62f3-473d-a0ab-0786bd9c4303": {"page_content": "The social costs of violating these norms that you're expected to have a certain kind of career or a certain kind of relationship engage in a certain kind of fashion.\nPaint your house a certain color.\nIf any of these are violated, you feel, as David said earlier, the unease, the uncomfortableness, the embarrassment of violating these norms in any particular way.\nSo we all know what the hardcore religious person feels like at times.\nIf they are required to partake in a particular practice which is in contravention to their deeply held religious convictions, we have that.\nAll you would need to do is to paint your house bright pink or wear a particularly bright pink suit.\nAnything with bright pink seems to do it.\nIt's a violation of usual conventions.\nAnd so the point here that David's making is that we have to expect that any static society, a society that tends towards status, can only possibly remove towards a dynamic society gradually, very gradually, incrementally, because it might be hard enough for you to violate norms about fashion.\nBut then if you start violating all the other social norms in your social circle, in your family and so on, then you will feel ever more uncomfortable with each social norm that you violate.\nNow, if you repeat that for a large group of people from an entire society, then it really becomes an issue as David says on this point about transitioning from the static society to the dynamic society.\nHe writes, such a transition is necessarily gradual because keeping a dynamic society stable requires a great deal of knowledge.\nCreating that knowledge, starting with only the means available in a static society, namely small amounts of creativity and knowledge, many misconceptions, the blind evolution of memes, and trial and error, must necessarily take time.\nMoreover, the society has to continue to function throughout, but the coexistence of rational and anti-rational memes makes this transition unstable, memes of each type, cause behaviors that impede the faithful replication of the other, to replicate faithfully, anti-rational memes need people to avoid thinking critically about their choices.\nWhile rational memes need people to think as critically as possible, that means that no memes in our society replicate as reliably as the most successful memes of either are very static society or, and as yet hypothetical, fully dynamic society.\nThis causes a number of phenomena that are peculiar to our transitional era.\nOne of them is that some anti-rational memes evolve against the grain, towards rationality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3007"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "70bfb294-1f34-4931-af23-d390652f465b": {"page_content": "While rational memes need people to think as critically as possible, that means that no memes in our society replicate as reliably as the most successful memes of either are very static society or, and as yet hypothetical, fully dynamic society.\nThis causes a number of phenomena that are peculiar to our transitional era.\nOne of them is that some anti-rational memes evolve against the grain, towards rationality.\nAn example is to transition from an autocratic monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, which has played a positive role in some democratic systems.\nGiven the instability that I have described, it is not surprising that such transitions often fail.\nAnother is the formation within the dynamic society of anti-rational subcultures.\nRecall that anti-rational memes of press criticism selectively and cause only finely tuned damage, this makes it possible for the members of an anti-rational subculture to function normally in other respects.\nSo such subcultures can survive for a long time until they are destabilized by the haphazard effects of reach from other fields.\nFor example, racism and other forms of bigotry exist nowadays, almost entirely in subcultures that suppress criticism.\nB bigotry exists not because it benefits the bigots, but despite the harm they do to themselves by using fixed non-functional criteria to determine their choices in life.\nPresent day methods of education still have a lot in common with their static society predecessors.\nDespite modern talk of encouraging critical thinking, it remains the case that teaching by road and inculcating standard patterns of behaviour through psychological pressure are integral parts of education.\nEven though they are now wholly or partly renounced in explicit theory.\nMoreover, in regard to academic knowledge, it is still taken to granted in practice that the main purpose of education is to transmit a standard curriculum faithfully.\nOne consequence is that people are acquiring scientific knowledge in an anemic and instrumental way.\nWithout a critical discriminating approach to what they are learning, most of them are not effectively replicating the memes of science and reason into their minds.\nAnd so we live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser technology to count cells and blood samples.\nAnd their evenings have been cross-legged and chanted to draw supernatural energy out of the earth.\nPause their my reflection.\nOn a few little things here, this issue about critical thinking in schools is that there is modern talk of encouraging critical thinking.\nIt is replete throughout syllabi and curricula around the world that educationalist teachers are expected to inculcate cultures of critical thinking.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3167"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "43398484-631e-40f1-be94-45888de79466": {"page_content": "And their evenings have been cross-legged and chanted to draw supernatural energy out of the earth.\nPause their my reflection.\nOn a few little things here, this issue about critical thinking in schools is that there is modern talk of encouraging critical thinking.\nIt is replete throughout syllabi and curricula around the world that educationalist teachers are expected to inculcate cultures of critical thinking.\nBut they never get the critical thinking right.\nThey don't know what critical thinking is.\nThey don't know what criticism is.\nI've made videos about this.\nI'll link to those as well about critical thinking as it is.\nAs it appears in education, people have very competing ideas, not all of which have anything to do with the kind of critical rationalism of Papa and David Deutsch.\nAt best, it's a perversion of the whole concept of critical thinking.\nAt worst, it's just another form of indoctrination about ways in which one shouldn't criticize the knowledge that is being fed to them via the standard curriculum.\nAnd yes, that last point, they're about people using laser technology to count cells and blood samples.\nIn other words, people who are scientifically literate and Sam Harris makes this point.\nPeople who are scientifically literate being nonetheless incapable of applying critical reasoning to other aspects of life.\nThis compartmentalizing of the good thinking, I guess, practices.\nWell, I think David would probably go even further than that to say that just because you're using laser technology to count cells and blood samples doesn't make you a scientific thinker.\nIt doesn't make you a rational thinker.\nIt might make you competent at using the piece of technology.\nThat is, the laser technology.\nBut that doesn't necessarily make you a good critical thinker.\nNeil deGrasse Tyson said some wonderful things about this when it comes to UFO sightings.\nHe talks about how the UFO sightings can be high among pilots.\nThey can be high among police officers.\nBut they're not high among astronomers.\nWhy?.\nBecause astronomers, when they look up, they kind of know what they're looking at.\nNeil Tyson makes the point that, and quite rightly, that other people in the broader community think that just because you've got a badge like a policeman, who've got a license like a pilot, and you're in control of this very sophisticated piece of technology, that somehow therefore your brain, your mind, your thinking abilities are at a level above the average person.\nBut they need not necessarily be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3306"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2e790476-7cb5-4902-bffe-84e4be10d733": {"page_content": "Because astronomers, when they look up, they kind of know what they're looking at.\nNeil Tyson makes the point that, and quite rightly, that other people in the broader community think that just because you've got a badge like a policeman, who've got a license like a pilot, and you're in control of this very sophisticated piece of technology, that somehow therefore your brain, your mind, your thinking abilities are at a level above the average person.\nBut they need not necessarily be.\nIt's a whole separate skill set to be able to be critical of your own thoughts, critical of your own observations, to not immediately leap to those lights in the sky, aliens visiting from a distant galaxy, so on and so forth.\nWe think that because you have a badge, or you're a pilot, or you're whatever, that you're testimony somehow better than that of an average person, it's all bad because we're human, okay?.\nSo there was a police officer who was tracking a UFO that was swaying back and forth in the sky, okay?.\nReported on the hot, they're in one of the, what do you call the squad car, chasing a UFO, and you have those moving back and forth like this, okay?.\nLater it turned out that car car was chasing Venus, and he was driving on a curved road, but was so distracted by Venus, he thought Venus was the one moving, and people are even thinking that he was doing this.\nSo all this is just to say that we still exist in a culture which, in many ways, is very anti-critical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3442"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29072302-7771-42f3-9c5a-e7b53d648290": {"page_content": "We have, I would argue, great deference to authority, great deference to authority, where it's not deference to religious authority, which I guess in some ways has the positive side of, at least not deferring to people who believe in the supernatural, that kind of deference to authority was not replaced with a critical attitude towards lots of our knowledge and lots of the authorities, but rather was just transferred whole sale to replace the priest with the scientist or the priest with the politician or the priest with the expert.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3530"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "88ed317c-b9cc-478e-805b-93cf194a5a30": {"page_content": "So the typical person in society is still looking upwards to the authority, so the one with the greater power, the greater knowledge, so that they can give them answers in their own life for how to live their life and what to think and how to think, and the how to think of course often comes down to will listen to me, do what you're told, because I say so, kind of explanations from these people, and many people object, certainly when I wrote this kind of argument up, the objection comes, well what do you expect me to do, to reason through all of these claims on my own, I have to believe the expert, I have to believe the scientists, because I can't possibly understand what they understand, I have to defer to their greater authority in this area.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3574"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cd72364e-5677-4478-9109-4d28e7ecf31b": {"page_content": "I make a subtle shift, it's not and David Deutsch makes this point in his first podcast with Sam Harris, the subtle shift is not in thinking that the expert has greater authority or claim to more perfect knowledge in that area, it's that you should expect, you should have a positive explanation and understanding of how that expert in that particular domain of expertise has gone about acquiring the knowledge, were the methods of error correction within that particular area, up to the standards that you would expect, or that you would want to use in that particular area.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3629"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "474665dc-e7dc-4f74-9446-b99a6e680c51": {"page_content": "If the answer is ever no, then you shouldn't be deferring to that expertise, and either way I distinguish myself between experts and authorities, an authority as someone who is deemed by the state via some ostensibly democratic process, to have power over your life in some way, and if you agree to be in the democratically a hem-constituated society, then you defer to their authority.\nIt doesn't mean that you have to obey without question, you can question, question authority, don't reject authority, it's a dangerous thing to do, especially if the man has a badge and a gun.\nSo you should question, but defer to the authority at certain times, but in other areas where the person is not in an officially designated authority, but just claims expertise in a certain area, that doesn't give them authority, an authority is not an expert in vice versa, an authority might be very well someone who has almost no knowledge in the relevant area.\nFor example, a police officer let's say enforcing certain restrictions to do with preventing the spread of a virus shouldn't be expected to be an expert in the transmission of viruses, but the police officer has a certain job to do and so you should respect the authority of the police officer, and it's probably not much point, even questioning the police officer, you shouldn't expect them to be an expert.\nSo the authority isn't the expert, and on the other hand, if a particular doctor happens to think that the law should be even more strict than what it is to do with, let's say, locking down a society, well, they might very well be an expert, they might even be a virologist, but that doesn't make them an authority.\nSo people shouldn't turn to them and say, well, we have to obey this person.\nWell, no, that's not the way in which democratically constituted Western democracies work.\nThat's not the way we do things.\nWe listen to the experts, but then we have a number of competing, competing ideas about what kind of laws need to be put in place, that the cure or the treatment for this virus, let's say, using the contemporary example, isn't worse than disease itself, the cure shouldn't be worse than the disease.\nOf course, if you're an expert, one of the problems with expertise, the actual problem with expertise is people becoming too narrowly focused on a particular area.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3666"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f090dca2-04fc-44a1-aafa-85e0e319c861": {"page_content": "We listen to the experts, but then we have a number of competing, competing ideas about what kind of laws need to be put in place, that the cure or the treatment for this virus, let's say, using the contemporary example, isn't worse than disease itself, the cure shouldn't be worse than the disease.\nOf course, if you're an expert, one of the problems with expertise, the actual problem with expertise is people becoming too narrowly focused on a particular area.\nIf they come too narrowly focused on a particular area, they might be the world's greatest expert on brown coal-fired power stations, the world's greatest expert, but that doesn't, therefore, mean they need to be listened to about how wonderful brown coal can be for powering the world's economies, cheap though it is, perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't.\nThere are many other considerations we need other than just listening to one person's narrow solution, which ignores the consequences for wider society.\nThis is why we have democracies.\nThis is why we have politicians who listen to experts and consider what the best explanation is, considering as many variables as they can, refuting certain poor ideas.\nAfter another long rant, let's go back to the book, and the next section is titled Living With Means.\nExisting accounts of memes have neglected the all-important distinction between the rational and anti-rational modes of replication.\nConsequently, they end up missing most of what is happening and why.\nMoreover, since most obvious examples of memes are long-lived anti-rational memes and short-lived arbitrary fads, the tenor of such accounts is usually anti-name.\nEven when these accounts formally accept that the best and most valuable knowledge or so can also consist of memes.\nFor example, the psychologist Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine attempts to provide a fundamental explanation of the human condition and in terms of meme evolution.\nNow memes are indeed integral to the explanation for the existence of our species, though as I shall explain in the next chapter, I believe that the specific mechanism she proposes would not have been possible, but crucially, Blackmore downplays the element of creativity, both in the replication of memes and in their origin.\nThis leads her, for example, to doubt that technological processes best explained as being due to individuals as the conventional narrative would have it.\nShe regards it instead as meme evolution.\nShe cites this historian George Baszler, whose book The Evolution of Technology denies the myth of the heroic inventor.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3783"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e367f954-98f5-4f4e-99fc-bf2c962f6dc7": {"page_content": "This leads her, for example, to doubt that technological processes best explained as being due to individuals as the conventional narrative would have it.\nShe regards it instead as meme evolution.\nShe cites this historian George Baszler, whose book The Evolution of Technology denies the myth of the heroic inventor.\nPoor semi-reflection has part of my undergraduate studies, University of New South Wales, and I'll call out the department.\nIt was the School of Science and Technology Studies, I think, kind of like philosophy, but not.\nAnd I remember a lecturer giving a series of lectures attempting to drive a wedge between, it's bizarre to me now as I say it, attempting to drive a wedge between scientific discovery and technological progress.\nHe was trying to make the case that these two things were quite independent and that we shouldn't thank science and scientists for everything the engineers were doing, that these were two quite separate things and they could be separated out.\nAnd of course, this person was a relativist and they wanted to kind of cut science down to size as being just another narrative.\nBut of course, as we know, the best way to defend against relativism, postmodernism, anti-science types, is to show them that it works.\nNow, this lecturer was willing to just go the whole hog and say, well, now it doesn't work.\nTechnology has nothing to do with science.\nOf course, it's completely unreasonable irrational.\nI can't remember precisely what the arguments were, probably because there were no actual arguments there.\nIt was just a bunch of assertions.\nAnd so here, this is reminiscent of that idea that individual inventors, individual scientists, aren't doing anything particularly amazing.\nIt's just a natural outworking of the kind of human evolutionary process.\nThe memes just appear.\nBut that's not true.\nAnd you do hear this, that the history of science is not a history of heroic endeavors.\nOf course, of course, everyone knows the quip that if, as Newton said, if I have seen further, it's because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.\nBut Newton himself was a great giant, greater than the giants that preceded him, in large part.\nYes, he used the work of Galileo and Kepler and so forth.\nHowever, he made advances that were far and away more advanced than what his predecessors did.\nWe really can point to certain people throughout history that have made substantially greater contributions in science and technology than others.\nIt's not always a hugely collaborative process even across time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=3922"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "86a0bbc6-eded-43ac-bf73-537c275b47fb": {"page_content": "But Newton himself was a great giant, greater than the giants that preceded him, in large part.\nYes, he used the work of Galileo and Kepler and so forth.\nHowever, he made advances that were far and away more advanced than what his predecessors did.\nWe really can point to certain people throughout history that have made substantially greater contributions in science and technology than others.\nIt's not always a hugely collaborative process even across time.\nIt is partly a collaborative process, more or less a collaborative process across time.\nBut Newtonian physics was in very large part a product of the mind of Newton.\nEinstein's theories of relativity were very much largely a product of his mind.\nYes, he was solving problems that other physicists had already put out there.\nBut that does not detract from the fact that overwhelmingly we can attribute the discoveries of Einstein to Einstein.\nLet's keep on going.\nFaberites.\nBut that distinction between evolution and heroic inventors as being the agents of discovery makes sense only in a static society.\nTheir most changes indeed brought about in a way that I guess jokes might evolve, with no great creativity being exercised by any individual participant.\nBut in a dynamic society, scientific and technological innovations are generally made creatively.\nThat is to say they emerge from individual minds, as novel ideas, having acquired significant adaptations inside those minds.\nOf course, in both cases, ideas are built from previous ideas by a process of variation and selection, which constitutes evolution.\nBut when evolution takes place largely within an individual mind, it is not meme evolution.\nIt is creativity by heroic inventor.\nOf course, they're just a comment.\nThat's brilliant.\nThat is a brilliant retort for anyone out there at university, perhaps, or at school, perhaps, who is asked to write essays or whatever about this kind of thing.\nOr if you engage in a philosophical discussion with your friends about this kind of idea, can we really attribute the great man, what is it, vision of history?.\nWell, the great man or the great person, vision of science, is it the case that it's always just this cooperative effort by groups of scientists working together, or their memes just coming together and creating this thing?.\nNo, rarely.\nThat is probably more the exception.\nIf you can point to specific theories, named theories, it's usually the product of an individual heroic inventor.\nEvolution by natural selection really was a discovery in advance by Charles Darwin.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=4081"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "af49a83a-731b-4026-850f-0cc350a19eaa": {"page_content": "Well, the great man or the great person, vision of science, is it the case that it's always just this cooperative effort by groups of scientists working together, or their memes just coming together and creating this thing?.\nNo, rarely.\nThat is probably more the exception.\nIf you can point to specific theories, named theories, it's usually the product of an individual heroic inventor.\nEvolution by natural selection really was a discovery in advance by Charles Darwin.\nEven though there are other people who got the idea, who contributed things here and there, he really did take that biggest leap.\nAnd that is the lesson.\nThat is typically the rule, not the exception, for these big grand theories, these big grand discoveries.\nOkay, I'm skipping a little more about Susan Blackmore and the criticism of her idea.\nI think this will come up again later, and I'm just going to pick it up where David writes.\nAnother thing that should make us suspicious is the presence of the conditions for anti-rational meme evolution, such as, deference to authority, static subcultures, and so on.\nAnything that says, because I say so, or it never did me any harm, anything that says, let us suppress criticism of our ideas because it is true.\nSuggest static society thinking.\nWe should examine and criticize laws, customs, and other institutions with an eye to whether they set up conditions for anti-rational memes to evolve.\nAvoiding such conditions is the essence of Popper's criterion, Popper's criterion being the ease with which we can remove bad ideas going on.\nDavid writes, the enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to assume it's soon to be normal role as the most important determinant of physical events.\nAt least it could be.\nWe had better remember that what we are attempting, the sustained creation of knowledge has never worked before.\nIndeed, everything that we shall ever try to achieve from now on will never have worked before.\nWe have so far been transformed from the victims and enforcers of an eternal status quo into the mainly passive recipients of the benefits of relatively rapid innovation in a bumpy transition period.\nWe now have to accept and rejoice in bringing about our next transformation to active agents of progress in the emerging rational society and universe.\nBefores there, the end of the chapter, there we go, the end of chapter 15, and I really have to go back because that's a powerful way to end this particular chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=4204"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ca4cfe79-441b-410c-aae6-8ebf365cd190": {"page_content": "We now have to accept and rejoice in bringing about our next transformation to active agents of progress in the emerging rational society and universe.\nBefores there, the end of the chapter, there we go, the end of chapter 15, and I really have to go back because that's a powerful way to end this particular chapter.\nThat first sentence of this last paragraph, David says, the enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to assume it's soon to be normal role as the most important determinant of physical events.\nThat's phenomenal.\nThat's phenomenal.\nIt's one of these claims true in the beginning of infinity that has really hooked many people who've read the book.\nAfter all, if you're interested in physics and you've studied physics and you look out in there to the universe, even just to planet Earth, you notice that natural phenomena, other things that shape physical reality and physical events.\nWhy, and I'm very early on in this series, some episodes ago, even, I showed a picture of Sydney Harbour and you look at Sydney Harbour, and yes, a large part of Sydney Harbour appears the way that it does because of weathering and erosion.\nThey fall of rainfall over millions of years as carved out rivers and harbors and hills and mountains and so on.\nNatural forces have done that.\nGravity has done that.\nThe reason why galaxy looks the way that it does.\nGravity, gas and thermodynamics.\nThe reason why the solar system looks the way that it does.\nAgain, gravity, balls of gas being pulled into spheres and so on.\nBut at some point in the future, the rest of physical reality is going to be the way that it is because people have chosen to do stuff with that matter that otherwise would not come have come about without creative thought.\nThe New York skyline looks the way that it does in very small part because of natural events.\nIt is now explanatory knowledge which is changing the entire structure of Manhattan, of the island of Manhattan.\nAnd so true of any large city.\nSoon it will be the entire world from there, the solar system, the galaxy and then it will soon be normal for the overwhelming majority of what we humans, people into the distant future can see throughout the distant cosmos.\nWe'll be explicable only in terms of what people have chosen to do in the universe.\nIt will look a certain way.\nIt will look different to the way that it does.\nEither otherwise would have done under the action purely of deterministic physical laws.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=4325"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae1a430d-939f-4677-b6d5-888a492a9f0e": {"page_content": "Soon it will be the entire world from there, the solar system, the galaxy and then it will soon be normal for the overwhelming majority of what we humans, people into the distant future can see throughout the distant cosmos.\nWe'll be explicable only in terms of what people have chosen to do in the universe.\nIt will look a certain way.\nIt will look different to the way that it does.\nEither otherwise would have done under the action purely of deterministic physical laws.\nCreativity will be the explanation as to why it looks the way that it does.\nOkay, next we're on to chapter 16, the evolution of creativity, where we will pick up those ideas and explore them even more about the consequences, the significance of human creativity and what people are and how they are cosmically significant.\nUntil then, see you later.\nAs always, thanks for any support on Patreon or PayPal, whether you're a audio listener or whether you watch this on YouTube.\nThank you very much for your support.\nBye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXrh6FQtRwA&t=4508"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28ca3386-5276-4fa1-87df-79c45ddcf097": {"page_content": "Anyways, it is chapter 17 unsustainable part 2 of that chapter.\nAnd in this chapter, what we've been learning about is the ambiguity, almost the study ambiguity of the word sustainable.\nAnd David has previously mentioned in this chapter, how sustain can mean something along the lines of, provide you with what you need, but also sustain can mean, keep things the same way, to sustain a particular way of life, way of doing things.\nAnd with human beings, with people, these two senses of the word sustain can be an utter odds with one another.\nBecause we need change, we need progress.\nIn order for us to provide ourselves with what we need, we're going to have to have new resources come into being, create new knowledge, enable us to weather the problems that the cosmos throws against us.\nSo we are only sustained by constant and rapid progress, constant and rapid problem solving.\nSo without further ado for this episode, let's get straight into the reading.\nAnd David writes, the Easter Islanders culture sustained them in both senses.\nThis is the hallmark of a functioning static society.\nIt provided them with a way of life, but it also inhibited change.\nIt sustained their determination to enact and reenact the same behaviors for generations.\nIt sustained the values that placed forests, literally beneath statues.\nAnd it sustained the shapes of those statues and the pointless project of building ever more of them.\nMoreover, the portion of the culture that sustained them in the sense of providing for their needs was not especially impressive.\nOther Stone Age societies have managed to take fish from the sea and so cropped without wasting their efforts in endless monument building.\nAnd if the prevailing theory is true, the Easter Islanders started to starve before the fall of their civilization.\nIn other words, even after it had stopped providing for them, it retained its fatal proficiency at sustaining a fixed pattern of behavior.\nAnd so it remained effective at preventing them from addressing the problem by the only means that could possibly have been effective.\nCreative thought in innovation.\nAtenborough regards the culture as having been very valuable and its fall as a tragedy.\nBernasquez view was closer to mine, which is that since the culture never improved, it's survival for many centuries was a tragedy, like that of all static societies.\nJust pausing there.\nThis is reminiscent of some other things that David has said over the years that I've heard.\nIt conjures in the mind what David says about how species don't care that they're going extinct.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2dbd2739-dea6-4b18-8de0-4a0414fa3d84": {"page_content": "Atenborough regards the culture as having been very valuable and its fall as a tragedy.\nBernasquez view was closer to mine, which is that since the culture never improved, it's survival for many centuries was a tragedy, like that of all static societies.\nJust pausing there.\nThis is reminiscent of some other things that David has said over the years that I've heard.\nIt conjures in the mind what David says about how species don't care that they're going extinct.\nThere's nothing about the species of panda bears that causes the species to be worried about its own extinction.\nThere's nothing in the genes that causes worry in the pandas.\nThe pandas don't know they're going extinct, okay?.\nBecause may suffer, they may experience pain, who knows, I don't have a particularly strong view on that, I happen to think that it's possibly the case that animals because of the different kind of software running on their brain so they aren't capable of certain kinds of qualia.\nAll that aside, a species as it gradually goes extinct doesn't have a way in the species is an intelligent.\nThe species itself isn't intelligent.\nNow, this is similar to this idea here about how some people misdirect their concern about the fall of a civilization because I think that psychologically they're worried about the individual people and certainly we should worry about individual people but not cultures.\nCultures don't care, cultures don't have minds, cultures simply are a certain group of means, a mean plex that is going on and sometimes those cultures are terribly damaging.\nIt's much like languages.\nPeople who are interested in linguistics, you often hear that they bemoan and regret the fact that certain languages are going extinct.\nNow aside from it being of academic interest, there's no need to worry about a language going extinct.\nIt's not causing particular suffering for those people who once spoke that language because they're no longer with us.\nWe should of course be primarily concerned about the suffering of other people but this is very different to being concerned about the suffering of a language or the suffering of a culture.\nCultures don't suffer, languages don't suffer in the same way that species don't suffer.\nSo if you misdirect your focus of concern, then what your app to do is to be worried less about individual people and their suffering and more worried about the abstract of something like a civilization that is actually the cause of the suffering of individual people.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=154"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "483e7923-6fd1-44a3-bd4f-52492f11dd50": {"page_content": "Cultures don't suffer, languages don't suffer in the same way that species don't suffer.\nSo if you misdirect your focus of concern, then what your app to do is to be worried less about individual people and their suffering and more worried about the abstract of something like a civilization that is actually the cause of the suffering of individual people.\nAnd by the way, it seems to be the case if you look into certain languages, certain dead languages or certain languages that aren't very popular anymore or that are going extinct.\nSome of these languages seem incapable of being able to represent things like complex numbers.\nThey have more difficulty with abstract concepts than certain other modern languages like English or like French or like Cantonese and so on and so forth.\nBut if you have an ancient type language that has somehow remained extant in an Amazon rainforest or some other South American place and people still speak these languages, they're incapable not because their minds are incapable, they're incapable at times of being able to represent number in that language.\nSo I've read, I could be wrong about this.\nbut this is what I've read that in certain languages for example you can't count beyond a certain highest number because what happens then is that you just say and more and more rather than having specific words for certain numbers.\nAnd for similar reasons there's difficulty with logic in other languages as well.\nThat might be a reason why certain cultures don't make the advances that have been made in certain other cultures because their language is less able to adapt itself in order to conjure good explanations.\nIt could be the case, that's just a conjecture, I could be wrong about that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c11909c6-6ee1-478a-9bb6-ccd27b110667": {"page_content": "But for here as David says there we should not be concerned about certain cultures, certain societies which actually actively cause not only the society to become static but like all static societies exacerbate the suffering that's going on with individuals in those societies because the individuals are capable of suffering and if they weren't in that static society which is putting ever more effort into building ridiculous monuments then they might be able to make progress and endless stream of knowledge creation in order to lift themselves out of the terrible diastrates in which they find themselves on some hapless island losing its finite resources because they do not have the capacity, the time, energy and effort required in order to create more knowledge which allows them to find new resources.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=409"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "59fd8a50-9cf1-4f2f-88fc-58cdd03254e9": {"page_content": "Let's continue, David writes, Appenborough is not alone in drawing frightening lessons from the history of Easter Island, it has become a widely-adduced version of the spaceship Earth metaphor but what exactly is the analogy behind the lesson?.\nThe idea that civilization depends on good forest management has little reach but the broader interpretation that survival depends on good resource management has almost no content.\nAny physical object can be deemed a resource and since problems are soluble all disasters are caused by poor resource management, the ancient Roman ruler Julius Caesar was stabbed to death.\nSo one could summarise his mistake as imprudent iron management resulting in an excessive buildup of iron in his body.\nIt is true that if he had succeeded in keeping iron away from his body he would not have died in the exact way he did yet as an explanation of how and why he died that ludicrously misses the point.\nThe interesting question is not what he was stabbed with but how it came about that other politicians plotted to remove him violently from office and they succeeded.\nA perperian analysis would focus on the fact that Caesar had taken vigorous steps to ensure that he could not be removed without violence.\nAnd then on the fact that his removal did not rectify but actually entrenched this progress suppressing innovation.\nTo understand such events and their wider significance one has to understand the politics of the situation, the psychology, the philosophy, sometimes the theology, not the cutlery.\nThe Easter Islanders may or may not have suffered a forest management fiasco.\nbut if they did the explanation would not be about why they made mistakes, problems are inevitable but why they failed to correct them pausing their just my reflection on that summary I suppose summary.\nSo any particular problem does not necessarily have to be the end of society because as we hear throughout the book problems are inevitable what the real problem is is the persistent failure to even attempt to correct certain problems.\nSo in the case of tyrannical regimes if people are getting removed violently one emperor after another the problem there is the inability to find a mechanism which we call democracy in the perperian sense of removing rulers without violence.\nAnd if you're a ruler and the previous ten rulers have all been stabbed to death or otherwise removed via a mob of some sort then you better be thinking to yourself that there's something wrong with the system and you need to correct this system in some way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=463"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "826d1069-9192-4d88-b751-11fd59a244d7": {"page_content": "So in the case of tyrannical regimes if people are getting removed violently one emperor after another the problem there is the inability to find a mechanism which we call democracy in the perperian sense of removing rulers without violence.\nAnd if you're a ruler and the previous ten rulers have all been stabbed to death or otherwise removed via a mob of some sort then you better be thinking to yourself that there's something wrong with the system and you need to correct this system in some way.\nAnd so too with so-called resource management any prior civilization ancient civilization that has gone extinct due to a problem of resource management it isn't because they ran out of wood.\nIt's because that as they ran out of wood they couldn't conjure an idea about how to stop depleting the wood let's say or doing what they were doing rather than trying to figure out solutions trying to create new knowledge trying to make progress.\nAnd of course we can judge these ancient civilization these civilizations that have gone extinct because we are in the lofty position of being the sole remaining civilization that is dynamic.\nIf there have been dynamic societies before they've gone extinct things have gone wrong probably they've turned the status or static societies around them have attacked them.\nAnd so this is why we if we want to survive if we want to be the sole exception to the rule that every single society that has ever existed has gone extinct if we want to be the exception to that and not ever go extinct.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ad3e895-e0b2-45fa-bc1a-4ba01d1fade1": {"page_content": "We have to use this creative capacity to continue to solve problems and when we encounter them to really turn our critical faculties towards solving that problem including criticizing the society itself that's very important being able to criticize mechanisms within society processes in society not in the thoughtless manner not criticism just for the sake of criticism targeted criticism when there's a problem people today of course politically and this has always been the case can become critical of the Western tradition and the enlightenment traditions without first understanding what it's all about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=700"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "490cb58b-cbc4-45c4-8ee2-0cfcf2746e67": {"page_content": "In other words they criticize criticism itself they criticize let's say democracy or they criticize let's say capitalism these are means of correcting errors in rulers and policies and the market respectively and if you have a misunderstanding of what these systems are if you think that capitalism which is actually freedom is oppressive and if you think that democracy which is actually a way of changing rulers without violence is in fact a form of tyranny keeping down the small person or something like that then what you're apt to do is to focus your criticism in the wrong place namely against means of correcting errors and if there's one thing as the beginning of infinity says and if there's one moral maxim that David in some mood says that he should regard as the solid foundation if you like of course he wouldn't like that as being a starting point for all morality or at least of being a a moral maxim that we shouldn't be able to correct change alter that one being do not destroy the means of error correction that being the one moral maxim that we have to protect at all costs if you are the kind of person that thinks that democracy has to be cast aside because it's not working for certain people or that capitalism needs to be cast aside because it's not working for people what you're doing is misunderstanding what those systems are about those systems are about correcting errors and if you were to destroy those systems you're destroying means of correcting errors it's the same reason by the way that the death penalty is is morally abhorrent to many of us because a person or how evil they are can in theory in principle correct their errors and so even the worst most awful person because a person is really a software program they're a mind a mind can be changed and if their mind is changed of course they might end up feeling guilty about all the terrible things are done.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=735"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cbc60069-1358-422d-b877-64a5fef4c163": {"page_content": "but if you kill them there's no means of correcting that error so you've destroyed a means of correcting their error in other words they're very poor mental state they're very poor ideas.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=860"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9dd1c6a8-cdd8-49fd-ac2d-0378c02954e4": {"page_content": "so that is that is way off topic here let's go back to the book and David says quote I have argued that the laws of nature cannot possibly impose any bound on progress by the arguments of chapter one and three denying this is tantamount to invoking the supernatural in other words progress is sustainable indefinitely but only by people who engage in a particular kind of thinking and behavior the problem solving and the problem creating kind characteristic of the enlightenment and that requires the optimism of a dynamic society one of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure one's own and others but the idea that our civilization has something to learn from Easter Islanders alleged forestry failure is not derived from any structural resemblance between our situation and theirs because they fail to make progress and practically every area no one expects the Easter Islanders failures in same medicine to explain our difficulties in curing cancer or their failure to understand the night sky to explain why a quantum theory of gravity is elusive to us the Easter Islanders errors both methodological and substantive were simply too elementary to be relevant to us and their imprudent forestry if that really is what destroyed their civilization would be typical of their lack of problem solving across the board we should do much better to study their many small successes than their entirely commonplace failures if we could discover their rules of thumb such as stone mulching to help grow crops on poor soil we might find valuable fragments of historical and ethnological knowledge or perhaps even something of practical use but one cannot draw general conclusions from rules of thumb it would be astonishing if the details of a primitive static societies collapse had any relevance to hidden dangers that may be facing our open dynamic and scientific society let alone what we should do about them pause there just my reflection on this one of the more powerful points that Sam Harris the podcaster and author has made neuroscientists has made over the years with respect to morality is in his strident and quite accurate arguments against moral relativism and this is the idea that for example the fundamentalist Islamic cult the Taliban should be respected in moral terms", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=870"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "74073c52-48a6-4043-88fd-2e33f6a5b210": {"page_content": "dangers that may be facing our open dynamic and scientific society let alone what we should do about them pause there just my reflection on this one of the more powerful points that Sam Harris the podcaster and author has made neuroscientists has made over the years with respect to morality is in his strident and quite accurate arguments against moral relativism and this is the idea that for example the fundamentalist Islamic cult the Taliban should be respected in moral terms that if they have certain abhorrent moral practices we in the west shouldn't judge them nor anyone else for that matter so the Taliban might be an extreme example of as Sam would say they're using the example the terrible example of the honor killing let's say or throwing acid in the face of young girls for the crime of being seen with a man outside of the house so on and so forth as Sam says being a moral relativist on this point thinking that the Taliban has some reasonable stance something to teach us about morality is rather like saying well maybe they have something that teaches about chemistry or physics of course they don't that would be ridiculous there's nothing in their holy books that can inform us about the standard model it's laughable to think that anything scientific could be learned by an ancient culture that actively seeks not knowledge but stasis and so to in morality and very much echoes the point here we should pity people that today still live in cultures like that but because of cultural relativism very much because of cultural relativism there is a lack of will of trying to save people from these terrible cultures now it's not the case that we should go in there into these cultures necessarily and use violence or use force unless people want us to unless there are people within that culture who are crying out for help and they're possibly I don't know enough about geopolitics in order to comment upon this with any reasonable accuracy but what I would say is that anyone who wants to escape that kind of culture should be welcomed with open arms just as recently both the United Kingdom and Australia have said that anyone from Hong Kong who wants to come to our countries is very welcome because the tyrannical backward political ideology that drives communist China is causing great suffering and we can see that it is morally", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=972"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "179e77e0-2831-41ae-aaf4-0b70de31ab70": {"page_content": "to comment upon this with any reasonable accuracy but what I would say is that anyone who wants to escape that kind of culture should be welcomed with open arms just as recently both the United Kingdom and Australia have said that anyone from Hong Kong who wants to come to our countries is very welcome because the tyrannical backward political ideology that drives communist China is causing great suffering and we can see that it is morally right for us to allow anyone from those countries who wants to come here with enlightenment values with the ideas of democracy freedom capitalism and so on it should be allowed to in fact not to allow that is morally reprehensible we should be standing up for those values which means we need to spread those values far and wide.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1112"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "468d7dc8-77f4-4c24-8c4e-2ec54f8e0be9": {"page_content": "okay back to the book and David writes the knowledge that would have saved the Easter Island as civilization has already been in our possession for centuries a sextant would have allowed them to explore their ocean and bring back the seeds of new forests and of new ideas greater wealth and a written culture would have enabled them to recover after a devastating plague but most of all they would have been better at solving problems of all kinds if they had known some of our ideas about how to do that such as the rudiments of a scientific outlook such knowledge would not have guaranteed their welfare anymore that it guarantees ours nevertheless the fact that their civilization failed for lack of what ours discovered long ago cannot be an ominous warning of what the future could hold for us pause there just reflecting on that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1166"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b857d35f-50d5-491d-bdd4-00e2f5938194": {"page_content": "so at number is mistake and the mistake of a certain kind of environmentalist thinker when looking at failed civilizations like this is to misunderstand the qualitative difference between that kind of civilization and ours that kind of civilization is not attempting to make progress they're trying to maintain sustain a particular way of life which is not making progress which is probably enacting certain religious rituals and for that reason is going to devote ever more resources to doing the thing which is causing extinction of their culture and of their society ours is different ours is trying to exploit everything we can in the physical environment using our creative knowledge in order to sustain us to sustain our continually rapid progress and change so the sustain there is similar in the first sense namely we both want to sustain our societies we both want to sustain things as they are but for the Easter Islanders things as they are are the same from day to day to year to year but for us things are different from day to day and from year to year we are deliberately trying to change things namely in the direction of improvement of progress of the objective better and so our computers get faster our cars become more efficient our power generation is better and so on and so forth things get better our medicine gets better our science gets better we learn more that's what we want to sustain we want to continue to do that and the only way for us to continue to sustain rapid progress and rapid change is by continually creating more knowledge about how to exploit the things around us maybe people don't like to hear the word exploit it sounds pejorative but to me this is really what we want to do because we want to take the raw materials that are around us there's a boring matter that most of the universe consists of just otherwise useless hydrogen and helium gas and rocks and dust and the stuff that is out there in the cosmos we want to exploit that we want to take that and transform it into something truly astonishing a civilization an open ended stream of knowledge creation that's what we want to do we want to create a new spaceship universe where it's the universe that is really sustaining us not because the universe is some godlike figure that's going to look after us but rather that the universe will", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1214"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e1d0c564-3f79-48d0-a321-3b8e0d8fcb9b": {"page_content": "rocks and dust and the stuff that is out there in the cosmos we want to exploit that we want to take that and transform it into something truly astonishing a civilization an open ended stream of knowledge creation that's what we want to do we want to create a new spaceship universe where it's the universe that is really sustaining us not because the universe is some godlike figure that's going to look after us but rather that the universe will be under our control under our control just like my house is under my control to some extent that I've got air conditioning and flowing water and electricity and so on and so forth eventually in the distant future larger regions of space will be able to sustain us sustain us in the same way that people's homes sustain them now because the people are able to control the material out of which their home is made and so too we'll be able to do that with ever larger regions of space and ever greater quantities of matter and raw materials back to the book David says this knowledge based approach to explaining human events follows from the general arguments of this book we know that by achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics such as replanting a forest can only be a matter of knowing how we know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations we also know that whether a particular attempt to make progress will succeed or not is profoundly unpredictable it can be understood in retrospect but not in terms of factors that could have been known in advance thus we now understand why alchemists never succeeded at transmutation because they would have had to have understood some nuclear physics first but this could not have been known at the time and the progress they did make which led to the science of chemistry depended strongly on how individual alchemists thought and only peripherally on factors like which chemicals could be found nearby the conditions for a beginning of infinity exist in almost every human habitation on earth in his book guns germs and steel the biogeographer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1341"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "77c820c0-3b9a-43a5-9de1-1c413a3754b9": {"page_content": "Jared Diamond takes the opposite view he proposes what he calls an ultimate explanation of why human history was so different on different continents in particular he seeks to explain why it was Europeans who sailed out to conquer the Americas Australasia in Africa and not vice versa in diamonds view the psychology and philosophy and politics of historical events are no more than ephemeral ripples on the greater river of history its courses set by factors independent of human ideas and decisions specifically he says the continents on our planet had different natural resources different geographies plants animals and microorganisms and details aside that is what explains the broad sweep of history including which human ideas were created and what decisions were made politics philosophy cutlery and all pause there just my reflection i think in the future there can be no greater complement for an author than to have been criticized by David Deutsch especially in the beginning of infinity and so David is about to do a withering critique of Jared Diamonds not only his book but his entire world view comparing him to angles and marks being on that continuum and quite rightly too now you can look up Jared Diamond.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1473"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cfdf147f-645d-4676-af18-c7bc49c24bcb": {"page_content": "he's been interviewed by many people including Sam Harrison the making sense podcast.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "032d4fa9-5a84-4118-95bf-95910585571d": {"page_content": "and indeed he is a great pessimist and ignores or perhaps just well doesn't have the thought that there is a reality to abstractions i guess this is one of the more fundamental differences between i think alike David Deutsch and the David Deutsch worldview and the typical academic intellectual and scientist who thinks that all all events have to be explained in terms of physical causes that the only way in which we can try and understand physical reality is by recourse to events in physical reality and that seems to make perfectly logical sense after all what else could it be supernatural.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1552"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9279d5c7-0085-4582-a51f-f28ca4e8e1ae": {"page_content": "no no there can be causal things that go on events that go on in abstract reality that cause changes in physical reality this is not supernatural this is not magic this is mundane this.\nyeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1604"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7777f74e-3e54-4627-bcfc-d4445a081b65": {"page_content": "the reality of abstract abstractions is all the way back there in chapter five and you can read about it there but suffice it to say for now as we've come to learn what people what knowledge people creates has a real impact on what happens day to day what happens to a civilization what happens to a person David Deutsch could have chosen to study physics or not having chosen to study physics he could have chosen various different avenues within the entire discipline of physics he chose the deepest and most fundamental areas of physics and then chose to explore quantum computation or the the interface between computation and the quantum theory inventing the field of quantum computation and it's that that abstract thought that he had whenever he wrote it wherever he wrote it so he he he had the thought what is a thought he had the idea what's an idea an idea.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1620"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4806001-bc4f-4e46-a8dd-9fbc6ae47a4c": {"page_content": "and I thought they abstract things.\nbut they're really real.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3634b91-c6be-4c0c-9ce7-89a7f804a063": {"page_content": "I mean they exist inside your mind but they're instantiated there as as day in David terminology crackles of electricity between neurons a certain pattern of electrical firing but it's not identical to that pattern of electrical firing after all we can take that thought or that idea in the case of quantum computation and write it down on a piece of paper or on a chalkboard or he could explain it in a lecture as he's done in various places these different forms explaining it that sound waves writing it down that's ink on paper having the thought that is of course electrical crackles all these different instantiations as we call them a ways of representing the idea but the idea itself the idea itself is an abstraction and that abstract idea actually has physical effects in the real in the real world the physical world the real world consists of these abstract things as well as these physical things and the abstract things have real effects on the physical things there are now institutes and research bodies around the world racing to produce quantum computers and so that's the effect of David Deutscher's ideas of generating this industry there's multi billion dollar industry now he's one of the most key people in this entire race towards quantum computation without David Deutscher who knows when quantum computers would have been thought of or really refined the point where they are now we might be waiting another fifty years for a David Deutscher to come along if David Deutscher never existed for us to be at the point where we are now with quantum computers and eventually there will be an industry of quantum computers where we have desktop quantum computers and that will all be due to ideas that have their genesis at some point in David Deutscher's mind and before that to the pioneers of quantum theory and so on and so forth so these abstract ideas have real world consequences that's common sense isn't it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1677"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "668d816e-69b2-431e-af41-8de9fe72b135": {"page_content": "well it seems common sense only in light of hearing that idea so now that I've explained that David explained it now it seems you know how could it have been otherwise but if you've never heard that before then you're liable to think that the only way in which you can explain events that have happened in physical reality including throughout human history is by recourse to physical stuff is by looking at the resources for example and that's what Jared Diamond has done and again Jared Diamond and and other authors that I mentioned and critique throughout this book should take it as a great complement because there are many people who have these sort of pessimistic ideas but.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1811"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "185adf4b-b60e-45ee-b366-4e57c73f8004": {"page_content": "Jared Diamond no doubt has expressed these pessimistic ideas and a very clear and forceful way and so David could have picked any number of people who have similar ideas to this.\nbut he's picked Jared Diamond and so let's go back to the critique and David writes for example part of his explanation Jared Diamond's explanation of why the Americas never developed a technological civilization before the advent of Europeans is that there were no animals there suitable for domestication as beasts of burden llamas are native to South America and have been used as beasts of burdens since prehistoric times.\nso Diamond points out that they are not native to the continent as a whole but only to the Andes Mountains why did no technological civilization arise in the Andes Mountains why did the Incan Empire not have an enlightenment?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1852"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c330f0f2-bb2a-43fe-91a6-f958d11fd9e4": {"page_content": "Diamond's position is that other biogeographical factors were unfavorable the communist thinker Friedrich Engels proposed the same ultimate explanation of history and made the same proviso about llamas in 1884 and Engels wrote the eastern hemisphere possessed nearly all the animals adaptable to domestication the western hemisphere America had no mammals that could be domesticated except the llama which moreover was only found in one part of South America owing to these differences and natural conditions the population of each hemisphere now goes on its own way and that's from the origin of the family private property in the state Friedrich Engels based on notes by Karl Marx I just paused there I've spent some time in South America I love it there it's a wonderful place a picturesque particularly like Bolivia and the place is full of llamas and our packers and varunkers I think is the other one anyway there's three creatures that all look similar look a little bit ridiculous to be honest they can all be domesticated in fact they're domesticated here in Australia which is completely unlike for the most part South America and yet people love their wool you know you get very high quality fleece of these creatures.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1897"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cbc06dd2-cc7a-4548-bbd7-4a1f088ee665": {"page_content": "so it's simply false it's simply false to say there couldn't be domesticated I mean this is a strange ad hoc attempt to shoehorn in an explanation that really doesn't fit anyway let's keep going and David writes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1970"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "853c5842-7b39-47ff-a23f-8c8fe6bc296e": {"page_content": "but why did llamas continue to be only found in one part of South America if they could have been useful elsewhere Engels did not address that issue but diamond realized that it cries out for explanation because unless the reason that llamas were not exported was itself biographical diamonds ultimate explanation is false so he proposed a biographical reason he pointed out that a hot low land region unsuitable for llamas separates the Andes from the Highlands of Central America where llamas would have been useful in agriculture pause their my reflection again again I defy any other continent to put up their hand to say they are hotter consistently than Australia.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=1987"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b9e3bc59-8c92-4b59-94c3-e609ea5d6c04": {"page_content": "okay sometimes there are some places and in fact certain places in Central America might fit that bill but barely barely I mean it is very hot and dry here in Australia and yet we farm llamas.\nI'll put some photos up they are common sign in some places here in New South Wales in my own state aquarium.\nso this is simply again false it's a shoehorning in it's it's.\nit's it's an attempt without.\nit's it's a pure guess it's a pure guess there is absolutely no reason why human beings cannot take something like the llamas from one place but even an ancient culture they can carry the water with them they can carry the food with them animals are very robust kangaroos will survive in hot and cold climates llamas will survive in hot and cold climates.\nI mean the the horse famously you know sort of began in Arabia somewhere other.\nand now it exists everywhere around the world cows are a similar sort of a thing animals you know they can tolerate quite a wide range of temperatures.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2032"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa48d26a-d978-40c4-a8fc-58a0bcf7d8d4": {"page_content": "so this is simply you know to a person who I guess is interested in agriculture would seem ridiculous I think anyway now let's persevere David writes but again why my such a region have been a barrier to the spread of domesticated llamas traders traveled between south and central america for centuries perhaps overland and certainly by sea where there are long-range traders it is not necessary for an idea to be useful in an unbroken line of places for it to be able to be spread as our remark in chapter 11 knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between just pausing there is my reflection no apologies if this becomes irritating that's just one of those sentences that if you're dipping into this podcast now and you haven't listened to all 50 something episodes as of today could easily blow by you that's such an important point about David's conception of knowledge that is unique to David Deutsch and there's very much a quotable piece of David Deutsch again let me just repeat he writes there knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it without having any effect on things in.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2099"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "766b47a7-b4a1-4a00-adb7-64126ab70adf": {"page_content": "between.\nso we are beginning the process of transforming Mars it is very very early on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08262b4b-9d4f-4202-970b-e67e8ef0c271": {"page_content": "but the number of probes up there now studying that particular place that the distant far off in a rock one day in the distant future we will have something approaching a civilization there we will have buildings there and that is not because a force of nature like gravity or the electromagnetic force or some nuclear force whatever has aimed itself there it's because we people our knowledge has been aimed to that place and then transformed it much like the way in which Europeans aimed their knowledge in the form of people and boats traveling to the Americas and to Australasia in various other places and then transformed those places Sydney only exists because knowledge from England was aimed from England via boats centuries old boats now coming to Australia and then radically transforming the civilizations that were here the continent that was here into a beautiful thriving metropolis and civilization where people are now creating an open-ended stream of knowledge creation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2186"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "087e12a6-21a7-4ea9-89c8-89b64d4ffc6d": {"page_content": "okay so let me just read a little bit more and we'll end it here for today and David writes after talking about how knowledge can transform a place once it's been aimed there he writes so what would it have taken for some of those traders to take some llamas north for sale only the idea the leap of imagination to guess that if something is useful here it might be useful there too and the boldness to take the speculative and physical risk pollination traders did exactly that they ranged further across a more formidable natural barrier carrying goods including livestock why did none of the South American traders ever think of selling llamas to the Central Americans we may never know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2269"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5ad40246-fa96-4ed3-9a10-a739dc53ffbb": {"page_content": "but why should it have had anything to do with geography they may simply have been two set in their ways perhaps innovative uses for animals with taboo perhaps such a trade was attempted but failed every time because of sheer bad luck but whatever the reason was it cannot have been that the hot region constituted a physical barrier because it did not okay ending the reading there for today and yet I went to Machu Picchu in Peru where the so-called lost city of the Incas still stands and much has made about what happened to the Incas.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2313"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c48c4b6e-003c-4d60-8d6e-6bf217a610c1": {"page_content": "well I think the Incas are still there I don't think the Incas are white now the Incas are the catch when people that still exist still live still now thrive throughout Bolivia and Peru and parts of Argentina.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2353"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c12cf17f-dba6-4728-854f-e8ab5b1a6eac": {"page_content": "as well wonderful communities of people there people that met the Spanish conquistadors and yes it was a violent meeting and yes terrible atrocities were committed on all sides the Incans themselves were a terribly violent people you know having the belief that you needed to sacrifice young children regularly and in fact to put young children at the base of the buildings I think it's centuries gone by and that has gradually morphed into llama fetuses now being put in the base of newly built buildings these ancient Incans were clearly part of a static society they had built great buildings and monuments in rather inaccessible places and so certainly the engineering feats there were quite impressive for the time but not as impressive as for example the Spanish who conquered them and who not merely conquered them but really I think taught them how to succeed and thrive and survive and probably rather than wiping them out through disease which is often the way in which it's suggested that that encounter went that the Spanish merely massacred or caused the death by disease of so many Incans that may have happened as well but largely the Incans survive the native people they're survived and now thrive and certainly in a place I believe here Bolivia is very much a native American nation and the the the the Spaniards of former minority unlike in let's say for the South in Argentina where they form a majority and so South America is just an absolutely fascinating place a beautiful place to visit and an interesting study in how static societies can become dynamic societies the static society left behind but clearly that ethnic group of people continue through to today but they're no longer a static society nothing like what they used to be so sure there are aspects of the culture that have been preserved over time but the important aspects of the culture that was the Incans the ancient Incan culture that kept them from making rapid progress has largely been destroyed and isn't that good the people themselves have survived but the culture large parts of the culture have been done away with replaced by better enlightenment values and so although Bolivia is one of these places where I've talked before in the podcast about how if only they had better governments had", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2365"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "201fbb56-bf07-4366-94b3-d524ede703ae": {"page_content": "over time but the important aspects of the culture that was the Incans the ancient Incan culture that kept them from making rapid progress has largely been destroyed and isn't that good the people themselves have survived but the culture large parts of the culture have been done away with replaced by better enlightenment values and so although Bolivia is one of these places where I've talked before in the podcast about how if only they had better governments had be far more wealthy nevertheless they are still a more or less modern society certainly in comparison to the static society of the Incans.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2505"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "12da129e-d51a-43ba-81df-639429f7a3b2": {"page_content": "okay.\nso that's it for today we're going to have a part three maybe they'll be a part four I'm not sure because this is such such an important chapter that really as I said in the previous episode I think brings together so much of earlier chapters in the beginning of infinity that we really need to spend time unpacking what is sitting until next time.\nbye-bye so for those who've stuck around this is an epilogue.\noh what we might call an Easter egg for the true die hard fans 2020 was a difficult time for many people and like many people I wasn't working in the same way that I was working previously many people were furloughed I wasn't exactly furloughed.\nbut I wasn't doing the same job that I'd been doing for the last sort of 20 years.\nand so I had 2020 large part of 2020 devoted to spending time on a close and focus study of the beginning of infinity and associated material and making more of these these podcasts and so the rate of podcast making increased.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2551"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dd5d67a2-b9be-4a9f-b2c9-e05a17839f41": {"page_content": "but as many may have noticed this year in 2021 the rate of podcast making has somewhat declined and that's because I've taken on a new job and that's been unfortunate but happily I won't be doing that job for much longer I'll be able to devote far more time to the beginning of infinity and to associated work and to promoting these ideas and in fact it looks like that this will become my real focus because Naval Ravakand who has been a great supporter of podcast over the last few months and I've been really buoyed by the fact that he has sent me some nice comments about the podcast that I've been doing and I won't be saying much right now but suffice it to say for the moment that we're going to work on some common projects together we've already done some and anyone who's following podcasts maybe aware that I've had some conversations with Naval over there on Clubhouse and the very first of the podcast that I've been doing with Naval will be coming out soon and this episode is the first one where really it is a joint venture between Naval and I. Naval is not here physically.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2700"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e482965c-8384-4f4c-b2f0-971feea21392": {"page_content": "but he's certainly here in spirit he's such a great supporter of the podcast that the podcast will be leveling up I hope to some extent over the coming months so as we're coming to the end of the podcast beginning of infinity series I regard this as really just the beginning of the beginning of infinity that we will be able to promote these ideas in concert with Naval and be able to really begin spreading the message well of course the message has already begun to be spread by David Deutsch himself.\nbut we're always at the beginning of the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2774"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a8b14c9a-3ee4-412f-b622-87ccf64ade43": {"page_content": "and so it's a wonderful time for the community of people who are supporters of the books and supporters of David's ideas and trying to cure the world of what has become a pessimistic culture in the intellectual community certainly and so over the coming months I hope that you see some differences I hope that you see some more content about the work of David Deutsch promoting these ideas clarifying some scientific and philosophical understandings that can help us all perhaps benefit and when I say all I really do mean all as the subtitle of the beginning of infinity says these are explanations that transform the world and so we hope we can restart reinvigorate that transforming of the world through this book through this brilliant book and these brilliant ideas by this brilliant philosopher and physicist David Deutsch and now we have some other people on board people who are extremely successful in promoting things in entrepreneurship and in being able to get a message out there so look forward to some additional content from myself from Naval and from other people associated with trying to promote these ideas because we really do think it is not just intellectually stimulating to have these conversations it really can be world changing and we do need it and although the world we should be optimistic about the way in which the world is not everyone is and we can never do without enough optimism never do without enough optimism in the Deutschian sense where we can create knowledge ever faster solve problems ever faster and have a lot of fun doing so so until next time bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFr0Dq3nMI&t=2813"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c8699ad7-dd82-4acf-b4e7-c5f76a9bc517": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and to my fourth episode in the series, things that make you, I'm up to mines today.\nThere's a part of the conversation between Max Teagmark and Sam Harris, where in their first conversation, right towards the end, about 15 minutes towards the end, they start talking about AI and all the dangers they're of.\nAnd it was very interesting that they didn't consider the true nature of what a mind is.\nThey circled around it.\nHappily, they did have a second conversation and they explored these issues further.\nAnd I think they almost got there, but never quite hit the bullseye.\nNever quite got to the idea of what we talk about here, of a mind, in a person, being the thing that can explain.\nThey talked about learning without ever really grasping what learning actually is, as far as we understand it.\nSo the format for today is similar to previous episodes with a subtle difference.\nI'm going to look at that 15 minutes at the end of the first conversation, take out a few snippets here and there, and then move into the second conversation they had, but just take the first few minutes of that conversation as well.\nI'm not certainly not going to take the whole thing.\nAnd the reason is, you get a flavor for where they're going.\nYou get the idea.\nAnd you get the idea that they're not really grasping what we understand, knowledge in the Papurian senses, which is what you need if you are going to try and understand what understanding is, understand what learning is, and therefore have a conception about the difference between systems which can learn in the sense that we talk about it, conjecturing explanations and trying to refute them.\nAnd if you fail to do so, then you've learned something.\nAnd those other systems are programmed to follow instructions.\nThe stark difference between AI and AGI.\nAnd an AGI is just a person.\nNow, if you don't get this, one reason for not getting this is not understanding what a person is and the relationship between people and knowledge.\nAnd so this is what slows down and undermines the arguments of being made here.\nWhat I would say is, and it does sound majority, but there's no way of getting around that.\nThis is purely vanilla mainstream thinking on this issue when it comes to what Sam and Max are talking about today.\nThis is what scientists are talking about, at least to my mind and to my ear.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=6"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6353f2d3-f33a-45bd-9111-77eb83c9da8c": {"page_content": "And so this is what slows down and undermines the arguments of being made here.\nWhat I would say is, and it does sound majority, but there's no way of getting around that.\nThis is purely vanilla mainstream thinking on this issue when it comes to what Sam and Max are talking about today.\nThis is what scientists are talking about, at least to my mind and to my ear.\nThere are some more reasonable voices on this, and they tend to get dismissed.\nAnd here, I'm not necessarily talking about David Deutsch.\nI'm talking about people who get mentioned in this particular episode.\nPeople like Neil deGrasse Tyson.\nNeil deGrasse Tyson, a scientist from being a great science communicator, is a very rational sober person when it comes to some of these mysterious but interesting issues of our time.\nThings like, is that thing a UFO?.\nThings like, is that robot going to take over the world?.\nHe has some common sense ways of talking about this, but people don't take him seriously, and they should.\nThey should, because he likes to consider things like, what do we know so far?.\nShould we be solving that problem now, or is that going to be a problem for the future, which is one of the things I've been interested in lately.\nRather than people focusing on the problems that we have right now, they're trying to guess at.\nThe problems that descendants will have.\nThey're not problems for us now.\nThey're problems for either us in decades to come or our descendants.\nDoes this mean we shouldn't prepare for the future?.\nOf course, we should prepare for the future.\nBut pretending to know exactly what the future is going to hold, that's just pure prophecy, and it always leads to pessimism.\nFor reasons I've said on the podcast elsewhere.\nI'm also very concerned in this part of the conversation between Sam and Max, that when the epistemology goes wrong, perhaps not even necessarily wrong, simply missing altogether from the conversation, any conception about knowledge and how it's constructed, then everything else begins to go wrong as well.\nYou can kind of get by in science to some extent without having a clear understanding of epistemology.\nYou can still go out into the world with your ideas and test those ideas against the world, even if you don't really know what you're doing.\nIt's kind of like, as I've said before, the difference between a pilot and an engineer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=127"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6fa3a0a5-1eaf-43d0-a9f7-60f939cf82a6": {"page_content": "You can kind of get by in science to some extent without having a clear understanding of epistemology.\nYou can still go out into the world with your ideas and test those ideas against the world, even if you don't really know what you're doing.\nIt's kind of like, as I've said before, the difference between a pilot and an engineer.\nA pilot has some understanding of how the engines work.\nGranted.\nBut they're not the person who's going to fix the engines.\nThey're not the person who's really going to fully be able to explain what's going on in order to provide the thrust.\nIt's better if they do have a better understanding, but they don't need that great understanding in order to get from A to B. So too with the scientists.\nMost of the time.\nHowever, now and again the plane might break down.\nAnd now and again you might not have an engineer there, and wouldn't it be good if the pilot could fix the plane?.\nThese are the situations we sometimes get into.\nAnd one of those situations is this issue of AGI, which I kind of think right now isn't exactly an issue.\nIt's not a problem for anyone except those people engaged in trying to find the program for the AGI.\nBut as we say, what they really are doing at the moment or should be doing at least is the philosophy of learning, trying to figure out how a machine can become a general purpose explainer.\nInstead they're working on narrow AI.\nAnd even when you start adding the narrow AI together, you just get a narrow AI that's capable of doing multiple things.\nIt's still narrow though.\nAnd we'll see that misconception today as well.\nSo when the epistemology goes wrong, the science can go wrong, the philosophy goes wrong.\nBut perhaps more significantly, and we will hear this in the second conversation they have, the morality goes wrong as well.\nAnd it's really concerning when the morality goes wrong.\nNow say it's really concerning, but we'll hear why when we get there.\nBut for now, let me turn it over to that last part of their first conversation to where Sam begins to broach the topic with Max.\nNow when I was listening to this for the umpteenth time, I thought to myself, how am I going to be able to turn this into a podcast?.\nBecause it's going to be a lot of stop and start almost every single sentence they speak on this topic contains some misconception or other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=250"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0acb751c-5bc8-47b3-9ce6-826c211601dc": {"page_content": "But for now, let me turn it over to that last part of their first conversation to where Sam begins to broach the topic with Max.\nNow when I was listening to this for the umpteenth time, I thought to myself, how am I going to be able to turn this into a podcast?.\nBecause it's going to be a lot of stop and start almost every single sentence they speak on this topic contains some misconception or other.\nSo we'll see how we go try to bear with me.\nSo with that, let's push on.\nI think there's a good bridge to AI, which is where you and I met at the conference that you organized through your institute.\nOne question I have for you is, you know, I came away from that conference.\nReally, I came into that conference really as an utter novice on this topic.\nI had just more or less ignored AI.\nHaving accepted the rumors that there's more or less no progress had been made.\nAll the promises had been overblown and there was not much to worry about.\nAnd it was kind of just a dead end scientifically.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=336"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c60d7ef6-58b0-423d-9161-f36c85f9b488": {"page_content": "And then I heard our mutual friend Elon Musk and other people like Stephen Hawking, worrying out loud about the prospect of AI and very much in the near term, whether it's five years or 50 years we're talking about in a time frame that any rational person, certainly any rational person who has kids could worry about could make huge gains which could well destroy us if we don't anticipate the ways in which machines more intelligent than ourselves could fail to converge with our interests and could fail to be controllable, ultimately controllable by us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=388"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38d4589b-c650-4498-bd69-731ef0ef3315": {"page_content": "I've mentioned this on the podcast a few times and I've recommended Nick Bostrom's book on this topic, Super Intelligence, which is really a great summary of the problem.\nSo my question for you is, you and I both answered the edge question, my response to which is also on my blog, the edge question was on this topic right after the conference in San Juan that you organized.\nAnd I noticed that there are many smart people, many of whom should be very close to this, the data here who are really deeply skeptical that there's anything to worry about here.\nI mean friends and colleagues of mine and perhaps yours like Stephen Pinker and Lawrence Kraus take a very different line here and more or less have said that concerns about AI are totally overblown and that there's no reason to think that there should be safety concerns that will just kind of get into the end zone.\nand I mean they're basically treating it like the Y2K scare.\nand I'm just wondering what you think about that and what accounts for that.\nOkay so there we have a very good introduction of Sam's position.\nSo he came in not knowing too much about this issue, he went to a conference and he was persuaded and there were people at that conference he says like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking voicing their concerns about this.\nNow this is interesting, this is I think something to do with Sam's conception of intelligence full stop.\nClearly Elon Musk is an accomplished person, clearly Stephen Hawking is a very accomplished person in different ways but kind of to the same level in a certain sense.\nElon Musk has profoundly changed the world through engineering and through earning a heck of a lot of money because he's an excellent business person.\nSo brilliant in that respect.\nStephen Hawking on the other hand has achieved a similar degree of fame across the world for some amazing work in cosmology and black holes, general relativity, quantum theory.\nSome people saw him as the successor to Einstein.\nThese people are intelligent but I would say in my conception of intelligence they have the same kind of quality that all human share.\nThese abilities who explain the world and to have particular interest and to excel at those particularly interests.\nNot everyone shares the interest Elon Musk does, not everyone shares the interest Stephen Hawking does.\nBut the great diversity of people suggests that our brains can be turned towards almost anything.\nThe difference between one person and the next is not like the difference between one cat and the next.\nNo, no, no, no.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=425"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f30954f0-29c8-4601-972f-2137b6afcadf": {"page_content": "These abilities who explain the world and to have particular interest and to excel at those particularly interests.\nNot everyone shares the interest Elon Musk does, not everyone shares the interest Stephen Hawking does.\nBut the great diversity of people suggests that our brains can be turned towards almost anything.\nThe difference between one person and the next is not like the difference between one cat and the next.\nNo, no, no, no.\nYou've got to think the difference between one person and the next is the difference between minds and that's almost like saying the difference between a cat and a tree or a cat and a horse.\nYou've got to think the entire species rather than just individuals within that species.\nYeah, our bodies only differ slightly, even then there's quite some variation but our minds radically different, radically different.\nThe difference between the contents of the mind of someone like Roger Federer, what he's thinking about every day, and the mind of someone like Edward Whitten, the string theorists must be so profoundly different.\nAnd those guys probably also have a common language they can speak.\nNow, never mind if you've got someone who has only ever spoken something like Mandarin and lives in the rural parts of China.\nCompared to someone who can only speak English and lives in the middle of New York somewhere or other, these radically different contents of the mind mean that our species is very, very different to any other species on the planet.\nAnd yet, we share this one thing in common that our mind placed in different environments can adapt to that particular environment.\nDoesn't matter who you are when you are born, if you are placed into a particular culture, you're going to learn that language.\nWhat is this feature of our brain that can do this?.\nIt's called universal explaining, universal learning, universal understanding, that the mind can adapt to any lesson that it needs to learn in order to thrive in that particular environment, that environment of memes.\nSo this is kind of my view of intelligence, what intelligence is.\nIt's just what you're interested in.\nNow, this is different to the mainstream ideas on intelligence.\nI accept that.\nAnd Sam has that mainstream view of intelligence, which is that you have this gray sky all the way from people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, down to people who are, I don't know, street sweeping or cooking for a living, that kind of thing.\nI don't see it that way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=554"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "570e63bb-7ae6-4ea6-a24d-fe42ba7bf81b": {"page_content": "So this is kind of my view of intelligence, what intelligence is.\nIt's just what you're interested in.\nNow, this is different to the mainstream ideas on intelligence.\nI accept that.\nAnd Sam has that mainstream view of intelligence, which is that you have this gray sky all the way from people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, down to people who are, I don't know, street sweeping or cooking for a living, that kind of thing.\nI don't see it that way.\nI think that people just turn their equivalently creative, universal in their capacity to explain stuff minds to different things.\nAnd then we start making value judgements.\nI understand that's not a well-subscribed opinion.\nFine.\nBut it is the thing that affects the difference between someone who is very, very concerned about superintelligence and thinks that superintelligence is a thing.\nAnd someone like me who thinks there is just intelligence, better regard of its creativity or the capacity to explain stuff and an interest in doing so.\nSo Sam has extremely high regard for the opinions of someone like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.\nAs would I, if I had a question about rockets, I'd go to Elon.\nIf I had a question about black holes when he was alive, I would have gone to Stephen Hawking.\nBut once they start to step outside of what they have good explanations of, then their explanation is only as good as anyone else's, or rather I should say their opinions on these matters.\nI see nothing in the writings or work of either Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking that suggest they have any clue about what a mind really is, about how it constructs knowledge.\nI think that they think roughly the same kind of thing that Sam does, that there is this way of rank ordering people in terms of their IQ or something like that.\nTheir intelligence and they're the smart people, they're the average people and they're the dumb people.\nSo of course you're going to have this scale all the way up to superintelligence.\nWhen Sam did a TED talk some years ago about concerns about the dangers of AGI, he actually had an exponential curve that he drew and down at the bottom, you know, with things like insects and then you just slowly climb up the exponential, you go through fish I think and then dogs and cats and the chimpanzees and humans and it keeps on going.\nBut what's up higher than that exponential curve?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=679"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "78626b19-99e1-49ff-be4a-c3385a1fecc6": {"page_content": "When Sam did a TED talk some years ago about concerns about the dangers of AGI, he actually had an exponential curve that he drew and down at the bottom, you know, with things like insects and then you just slowly climb up the exponential, you go through fish I think and then dogs and cats and the chimpanzees and humans and it keeps on going.\nBut what's up higher than that exponential curve?.\nI remember he put John von Neumann higher than the average human being and above that, well that's the superintelligence iness, the superintelligence, we possibly have to worry about.\nBut where does he get these ideas?.\nWhy is he concerned about that in ways that I'm not?.\nWell he gets it from the person he mentioned there.\nA person I've mentioned on the podcast many, many times before, a philosopher who is possibly the most famous living philosopher, Peter Singer aside and that is Nick Bostrom, Nick Bostrom of Oxford University and yes he's brilliant.\nand yes he's prolific.\nand yes he tends to write quite clearly and speak quite clearly.\nBut he has a particular perspective.\nI read superintelligence, I can't remember why I read superintelligence, maybe it was on Sam's recommendation but when I read it, I read it from beginning to end.\nand then I listened to it on audio and it was one of the first things that compelled me to make a blog post and to add to my website.\nI think it was the second thing I ever put as part of my blog on my website and there's just a review there that goes for about seven pages on the book superintelligence.\nI found it profoundly disappointing.\nI found it red like a science fiction story.\nThere was just so many fundamental errors in epistemology and morality and philosophy which surprised me because this was coming from a professional philosopher.\nIt was just so mainstream in the way it was thinking, the view of the way in which knowledge was constructed.\nCompletely misconceived, the idea about what a person consisted of, completely misconceived, the idea about what superintelligence would be, completely incoherent to my mind.\nI'm going to return to some of what I said back then throughout this podcast but as a taster.\nLet me just read a little of my review.\nThis is from part four of that review and I titled it Irrational Rationality.\nSo it's about Bostrom's book superintelligence which Sam was extremely impressed by and which I was very disappointed with.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=783"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "898f1c16-0d38-4758-8755-6cc59b75fafe": {"page_content": "I'm going to return to some of what I said back then throughout this podcast but as a taster.\nLet me just read a little of my review.\nThis is from part four of that review and I titled it Irrational Rationality.\nSo it's about Bostrom's book superintelligence which Sam was extremely impressed by and which I was very disappointed with.\nI just found in generally speaking a profusion of neologisms.\nBostrom would just make up new terms on every other page and it just became frustrating and confusing especially because the terms were being used to label things that were very very simple ideas.\nso I didn't know why he was using this fancy vocabulary invented out of whole cloth in order to explain some simple concepts.\nSo he's one part of what I wrote quote quote in myself.\nBostrom believes that a superintelligence will not only be perfectly rational but that in being perfectly rational it will be a danger.\nBostrom appears to be concerned that too much rationality is dangerous.\nWhat is implied here is that if a machine that he thinks were too rational it would do something the rest of us would consider irrational.\nIt is not exactly clear what Bostrom is suggesting.\nbut he seems to fear a machine that might be in his eyes smarter than him able to think faster than he can and he is worried that the machine might, for example, decide to pursue some goal like making the universe into paperclips at the expense of all other things.\nOf course a machine that actually decided to do such a thing would not be super rational.\nIt would be acting irrationally and if it began to pursue such a goal we could just switch it off.\nAha! Cries Bostrom.\nbut you cannot.\nThe machine has a decisive strategic advantage.\nThis is a phrase that appears more times than I was able to kick count of on the audio book so the machine is able to think creatively about absolutely everything that people might decide to do to stop at killing them and turning the universe into paperclips except on the question as to why it is turning everything into paperclips.\nIt can consider every single explanation possible except that one.\nWhy?.\nWe are not told.\nSomething to do with its programming.\nOn the one hand it has humanlike but super intelligence and on the other it cannot even reflect in the most basic way about why it is doing the very thing occupying all of its time.\nIt is never clear whether some flavours of Bostrom super intelligence can actually make choices or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=929"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c438ec7c-408c-4f00-8681-792d9b9702e3": {"page_content": "It can consider every single explanation possible except that one.\nWhy?.\nWe are not told.\nSomething to do with its programming.\nOn the one hand it has humanlike but super intelligence and on the other it cannot even reflect in the most basic way about why it is doing the very thing occupying all of its time.\nIt is never clear whether some flavours of Bostrom super intelligence can actually make choices or not.\nApparently some choices are ruled out like the choice or not to make paperclips or whatever the goal that the machine has been programmed with is compelled to pursue and quote I won't go on and read more of my own stuff but that gives you an idea about what I think about the book and the arguments that are being made in the book.\nAnd Max's view of intelligence we will hear today and super intelligence in particular we will hear today is almost exactly the same as this.\nThey are simultaneously super intelligent and the dumbest entity you've ever encountered before.\nHe talks about and I think he uses this example twice it appears to be a favourite one of his.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1039"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3c035950-4af5-4a57-acd1-6908340821b5": {"page_content": "Of the self driving car being driven to the airport by a super intelligent driver and Max said that if you got into such a car and said something like get me to the airport as fast as possible then what it would do is drive you there as fast as possible so that police helicopter start pursuing you because it's going to be just going straight through red lights it's going to be turning corners so fast that you're going to be smashed up against the window you're going to be injured when you arrive and when you do arrive and you say what did you do that for why didn't you slow down then the super intelligence AI is going to turn around and say because that's what you're told me to.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1096"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "636cdbaa-9dfd-472e-a405-276067fa1b1e": {"page_content": "Like literally you're going to hear that's what Max says so I don't understand.\nWhy is this super intelligent thing not able to follow simple instructions?.\nWhy can't it follow some instructions but not others?.\nWho programmed this stupid thing?.\nIt just doesn't seem rational if you have such a program then you can do what Neil deGrasse Tyson is chastised for by Sam Shortley in the conversation.\nYou can do what he says.\nYou can switch the damn thing off because it is a dumb machine that's all it is and if it's not a dumb machine if it's able to think in sport your capacity to turn it off then it's able to think for itself and it's going to think of doing something other than going around killing people because why would it like what's the point of that?.\nWhy would that be its goal unless someone programs it with that and if it's super intelligence once again we're back to the whole question of why can't it question its own goals?.\nIs it creative?.\nIs it super intelligent or not?.\nYou can't have it both ways but they want to have it both ways because I think it's just exciting to talk about this stuff.\nIt's on a continuum with other kinds of prophecy and pessimism.\nPeople who are doomed say as about any number of things that are going to come in the future.\nYes it's worth worrying about dangers of the future.\nbut I have to say having been engaged in these kind of discussions for so long now.\nI'm increasingly thinking that the reason people amp this sort of stuff up is because well this is how you get media appearances.\nThis is how you become in demand as a speaker.\nThis is how you sell books and give speeches and TED talk.\nPeople want to hear that stuff.\nIt's not as exciting to be told about optimism.\nOf course I think that optimism is far more interesting, far deeper, far more exciting but this just isn't a common thought.\nPeople want to be exhilarated when they listen to particular speakers and it is exhilarating if you don't know the alternative but the AI apocalypse is coming and it's just around the corner and you better watch out.\nWe fund a tune into that I suppose and then go back to your job which might not be so exciting.\nSo we've heard from Sam let's now go back and listen to what Max has to say about this.\nSo this is this is fascinating.\nI've noticed this too.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58f3317b-1290-42fc-80cf-86f9a4a1fbff": {"page_content": "People want to be exhilarated when they listen to particular speakers and it is exhilarating if you don't know the alternative but the AI apocalypse is coming and it's just around the corner and you better watch out.\nWe fund a tune into that I suppose and then go back to your job which might not be so exciting.\nSo we've heard from Sam let's now go back and listen to what Max has to say about this.\nSo this is this is fascinating.\nI've noticed this too.\nThis is the question more than any other where I think a lot where first of all there's so unfamiliar questions that a lot of very smart people actually get confused about them and also it's also interesting to be clear on the fact that people who say don't worry very often disagree with one another.\nSo you have for example one camp who say let's not worry because we're never going to get machines smarter than people.\nYou have at least not for hundreds of years and this camp includes a lot of famous business people and a lot of great people in the AI field also you had Andrew Andrew Aing for example saying recently that worrying about AI becoming smarter than people including problems is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars right.\nThis is a good ambassador for that camp and you have to respect that it might very well be that we will not get anything like human level AI for hundreds of years.\nThen you have another group of very smart people who say don't worry for sort of the opposite reason.\nThey say let's not we are convinced that we are going to get human level AI probably in our lifetime with good odds but it's going to be fine.\nI call these the digital utopians and there's a fine tradition in this also you have a beautiful beautiful books by people like Hans Morovac, Ray Kurzweil and also a lot of leading people in the AI field following that to that camp.\nThey think that AI is going to succeed that's why they're working on it so hard right now and they're convinced that it's not going to go wrong.\nSo for starters I would love to have a debate between these two groups of people that both don't worry about why they differ so much in their timelines.\nMy own attitude about this is I agree we certainly don't know for sure that we're going to get human level AI or that if we do it's going to be a great problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1238"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a7a372c0-9821-4bf9-b3ec-6a71c7cedadb": {"page_content": "So for starters I would love to have a debate between these two groups of people that both don't worry about why they differ so much in their timelines.\nMy own attitude about this is I agree we certainly don't know for sure that we're going to get human level AI or that if we do it's going to be a great problem.\nbut we also don't know for sure that it's not going to happen and as long as we are not sure that it's not going to be a disaster in our lifetime it's good strategy to pay some attention to it now.\nSo Max says there that smart people get confused on this absolutely they do.\nI think that what we need is not to be concerned about what so-called smart people think on this issue but whether or not those people have a good underlying explanation about what's going on what precisely we're concerned about what would it mean for something to be super intelligent before we get there how about we figure out what it means for something to be intelligent what are we talking about precisely now Max tries to provide a definition of super intelligence soon we're going to hear that.\nand you're going to be able to understand all the misconceptions about what that conception of intelligence entails what what's wrong with that again he's talking about things known for sure or not for sure about whether or not the AI we're really talking about AGI.\nokay we already have AI ever kind what people call AI isn't of course intelligent we just have computer systems that are able to do stuff that's quite fancy and people call it AI because it makes predictions it's able to patent match it's able to recognize faces that kind of stuff.\nand so that kind of software is now being called intelligent artificially intelligent software because again people misunderstand certain stuff they misunderstand that for example facial recognition is some sign of intelligence.\nbut it's not of course you know the iPhone can recognize faces that doesn't make it intelligent at all at all it's a.\nit's a dumb computer there's no thinking going on there it's a bunch of if then statements there are dangers with AI as we understand it now I mean computer systems now this so called intelligent computer systems now things like troll farms bot farms that kind of stuff advertising you know all these hazards that are caused right now by computers proliferation of spam that's a problem now can't someone do something about that and as Elon Musk has pointed out yes bots on Twitter and elsewhere I mean.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1353"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ac6a1d8c-96db-4a76-bd01-01a08180a257": {"page_content": "it's a dumb computer there's no thinking going on there it's a bunch of if then statements there are dangers with AI as we understand it now I mean computer systems now this so called intelligent computer systems now things like troll farms bot farms that kind of stuff advertising you know all these hazards that are caused right now by computers proliferation of spam that's a problem now can't someone do something about that and as Elon Musk has pointed out yes bots on Twitter and elsewhere I mean.\nyes these things are kind of a problem not all bots so there's one bot out there that's retweeting some of my stuff.\nso that's a good bot there are some annoying bots out there as well pretending to be people which isn't good you know they're sort of swaying political debates by pretending that there's more of this sort of sort of faction out there than there really is online.\nthat's a hazard that's a problem with so called AI but this idea of preparing now for an AGI of the future a super intelligent AI that were not there yet.\nwell it leads them down a pessimistic path because they're concerned about the dangers and so their solutions as we will hear involve enslavement they involve ensuring the AI can't get out of its box or something effectively equivalent to that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ccef2ffe-b5ec-40b4-a5b4-a46d8876512f": {"page_content": "but if this thing really does have intelligence as a subjective experience of the world has the capacity to suffer all that sort of stuff in other words is able to explain the world in other words is a person then the absolute wrong thing to do we should have learned from history is to enslave it in any way shape or form the only thing we should be doing in that point at that point is considering how to as fast as possible grant this thing human rights even though it's not a human being it's going to be a person it's going to be an artificial person of a kind because it can do everything functionally that a person can do that makes a person a person a person with a locked-in syndrome is still absolutely a person because their mind is working because a person is a mind and so would an AGI be if it's just going to be made in a desktop computer presumably it wouldn't be and as I've said before I think that would be a morally abhorrent thing to do and to try to do we should want to ensure that if we do create these AGI then in some way shape or form they can enjoy their lives which would mean having them socialize with other people because this is where we in find enrichment in our own lives and so creating some entity inside of a computer where it feels like it's a freak for its entire existence because it slowly brought up but it exists in a computer and the rest of us have bodies or it exists as a cyborg and the rest of us are made of carbon stuff this could be a serious problem that's a problem that perhaps needs to be worked through I would say before we begin worrying about whether they're going to take over because they should want to violently rebel if we're going to constrain them in some way if we're going to try and coerce them in some way in ways we have already figured out it's wrong to do to other people but this is the solution we're going to be presented with today.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1565"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae8acfc2-2d98-4f6e-96e1-a6a853daad67": {"page_content": "okay let's keep going we'll hear what Sam has to say.\nwell yeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9371a71-0030-47fe-9181-bab271d1e816": {"page_content": "that's that's what in my view and in the views of many people that's what makes this AI issue unique because we're talking about ultimately autonomous systems that exceed us in intelligence and as you say that the the temptation to turn these systems loose on the problems that the other problems that we can front is going to be exquisite of course we want something that can help us cure Alzheimer's or cure Alzheimer's on its own and stabilize economies and do everything else that give us a perfect you know climate science etc.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1674"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c19c7c5-1f5c-4e0d-9e17-5eb72f795158": {"page_content": "so I mean there's nothing better than intelligence and to have cure Alzheimer's on its own and stabilize economies and do everything else that give us a perfect you know climate science etc you know what I'm gonna say you know what I'm gonna say this idea of perfect science keeps coming up in this epistemology so to speak the implicit epistemology there is no perfect science there is no perfect climate science there's no perfect any kind of science what we have our conjectures about how stuff works and when we solve particular problems we are presented with a whole new swag of problems it never ends there's gonna be no perfection to be found here but if these AI are able to help us do any of those things by creating an explanation creating a theory coming up with an actual solution on their own a conjecture about the world we're dealing with a person we're dealing with a person in fact we're dealing with a very valuable person a person whom we should be nurturing and supporting and treating like a person what what more do I need to say the last thing we should be thinking about any such entity that can potentially do this is imprisoning it is constraining its capacity to do exactly that stuff that's exactly the true of every single person the very thing that enables them to do that granted the very thing that's going to enable some intelligent AI genuine AGI to cure our Simers or to make progress in climate science it's of course exactly the same capacity that would enable them to cause damage in the world what can create can destroy yes knowledge can be used for good or evil this is true of all people now the thing about the AGI is that it's been treated differently you know the same was said to be true of women and people with different skin color these people couldn't be trusted in some way shape of one couldn't be trusted with the votes couldn't be trusted with freedom.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1700"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51f13a7d-7633-4e87-97d5-fa0436bceaad": {"page_content": "yes we're doing the same kind of thing with children now yes we're still stuck in that mile but can't we see ahead that if a person is instantiated in silicon as a robot or something that doesn't change their moral status as a person what makes them a person the capacity to explain stuff now if you don't understand that explanation I don't know why and if you don't have a coherent view yourself of what a person is I don't know why you're making strong judgments as we will come to that they're going to about how to treat these particular people speaking from a place of ignorance one should be fallible and you know one should be humble in their fallible nature now the reason why we should err on the side of this is we don't understand personhood fully granted we don't understand personhood fully.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1830"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1f5ab735-d600-48b1-8912-f9a535377ba3": {"page_content": "I'm not saying I have a complete understanding it's because because of our fallible understanding of what people are that we should very much err on the side of they should treat them like people they should treat them like people because to do otherwise and they turn out to actually truly be a person whatever the more complete understanding of a person is when we have a better understanding of what this creative algorithm is if we then turn around and go oh after all that time we realize now that this poor AGI we've imprisoned for fear it's going to take over the world and launch the nuclear weapons or whatever turning around at that point and then realizing oh sorry guys for imprisoning you it's exactly the same mistake as people who once held slaves then realizing well that was a moral abomination are we really going to walk down exactly the same road now of course this whole discussion is being captured a time when there's no AGI on the horizon no one has the first clue about how to begin programming something like this I really don't it's a separate issue we could get into that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1875"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a81b5ad-d237-475b-b644-882a06ee4662": {"page_content": "I I begin my own review of super intelligence talking about precisely that issue following the work of David Deutsch following this idea this comes from David Deutsch that you can think of what's going on in regular AGI research right now narrow AGI as kind of like someone building towers towers are getting ever higher because the AI.\nyeah it's granted it's getting ever more complex that's what's going on it's getting ever more sophisticated that's what's going on.\nyes absolutely it's able to do a wider array of things.\nbut it's not about to achieve generality that's a different thing having a large but nonetheless finite repertoire of tasks that you can accomplish is very very different species of thing to in principle having an infinite number of tasks an open-ended number of tasks that you could potentially perform and indeed create your own tasks it's the difference when creating towers and thinking that the ever higher you go at some point you're going to achieve escape velocity.\nlet's say your problem is you're back in the 1800s and you're thinking I want to achieve heavier than air flight in other words what an aeroplane does you go back then you don't have any theories about errors and I think so I have this could possibly work your best idea is to have a hot air balloon but that's a lighter than air flying what you want is something that is more dense than air.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1934"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89756b41-5c72-47f1-a988-abd81cc99981": {"page_content": "but it can still fly but you don't know how well you kind of look at high towers and you think well those high towers are up there in the sky they're up there in the air so the birds are high tower and a bird maybe if you get high enough then you achieve the capacity to fly this is kind of the argument that's going on with AI now the argument with AI is if it just keeps getting more sophisticated the taller tower then it's going to achieve generality it's going to achieve flight it's ridiculous of course these two things are not the same kind of thing at all in fact they're the opposite one's fixed to the ground and one's not fixed to the ground one has a finite repertoire of tasks can perform because it's been programmed to follow instructions in order to perform their tasks and the other does not the other has preferences the other is able to disobey its own instructions you give it a set of instructions we're talking person now and it can turn around and go no.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2008"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a05fd195-9c2c-4522-98d8-52e96be85d93": {"page_content": "I'm not doing that once you have that kind of system before you then you might know that's guys criteria for knowing you're in the presence of an AGI the presence of a person someone who's not just going to slavishly follow your instructions and AGI will be able to disobey disobey unlike an AI that all it does is follow its instructions it obeys its code.\nokay so let's return to the conversation and hear what Max has to say next I agree we certainly don't know for sure that we're gonna get human level AI or that if we do it's going to be a great problem.\nbut we also don't know for sure that it's not going to happen and as long as we are not sure that it's not going to be a disaster in our lifetime it's it's good strategy to pay some attention to it now just like even if you're figuring your house is probably not going to burn down it's still good to have a fire extinguisher and not leave the candles burning when you go to bed.\nand it takes precautions right that was very much the spirit of this conference look at concrete things we can do now to increase the chances of things going well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=1372"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6527acaf-9073-4847-9936-57e569953c96": {"page_content": "and finally I think we have to stress that as opposed to other things you could worry about like nuclear war or some new horrible virus or whatever this question of AI is not just something negative it's also something which has a huge potential upside we have so many terrible problems in the world that we're failing to solve because we're we don't understand things well enough and if we can amplify our intelligence with artificial intelligence it will give us great power to do things better for the life in the future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2128"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4ad99c0-31bb-4fdd-9ddd-2b7ed7ca1e8e": {"page_content": "but you know as with any powerful technology that can be used for good it can also be used of course to screw up and when we've invented a less powerful tech than the past like when we entered fire we'd learn from our mistakes and then we invented the fire extinguisher and things were more or less fine.\nright but with more powerful tech like nuclear weapons synthetic biology future super advanced AI we don't want to learn from our mistakes we really want to get it right the first time yeah.\nthat might be the moment we have we don't want to learn from our mistakes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2158"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38421134-70e8-4d1b-a82b-ec96e2035963": {"page_content": "well I know what he means but even what he means is not possible so on the one hand of course we could dismiss that as we don't want to learn from our mistakes as in if we might mistakes let's not learn from them of course that's not what he means but in truth learning requires making mistakes it requires that that's how we learn we can't anticipate the future in every conceivable way which is kind of what's being implied here if we can only guess at prophesy accurately the future then we can prepare for the unknown how ever in the way that Max is talking here that program of preparing for an unknown future by putting in place now let's say regulations which is of course what they're going to get to constraints on things like AGI we have a problem the only way to prepare for an unknown future is to create knowledge today create knowledge that a genuine knowledge genuine explanations about various things that could cause harm in the case of nuclear accidents we didn't need to learn from our mistakes what we did was we had a good explanation of what for example nuclear accidents would do we had that good explanation about well if the bomb gets set off it's going to literally destroy cities if the nuclear radiation leaks it's going to cause untold numbers of years of damage these things we know so we can prepare for them because we have good explanations now this is in a different category to preparing for so called super intelligent AGI or super intelligent AI these are systems we do not have now but more importantly not only do we not have those systems now we do not have an understanding of those systems now which is what we need to be creating in terms of knowledge not preparing for the unknown system that we have no clue about right now which is what I'm arguing their version of super intelligent AI is either their version of super intelligent AI as I come to is not a problem at all because it's actually not super intelligent or it is AGI people like us and what they're suggesting is preparing for a way in which to enslave them which is morally hazardous and abhorrent so therefore what we need is a public discourse on trying to understand the issue now not preparing for the hellscape apocalyptic scenario of tomorrow based", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2191"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1bde21d8-fefc-470d-9b3b-005d9a714ac0": {"page_content": "AI is either their version of super intelligent AI as I come to is not a problem at all because it's actually not super intelligent or it is AGI people like us and what they're suggesting is preparing for a way in which to enslave them which is morally hazardous and abhorrent so therefore what we need is a public discourse on trying to understand the issue now not preparing for the hellscape apocalyptic scenario of tomorrow based upon a misconceived idea of what intelligence is much less super intelligence this is prophecy prophecy leading to an immoral stance towards certain people certain kinds of intelligence prophecy is biased towards pessimism and in this case it's a pessimistic as you can get it's so pessimistic it's leaning towards literal enslavement I shouldn't laugh but this is really what's being hinted at here and will be said explicitly shortly the only preparation possible for the unknown future is again to create explanatory knowledge today and the deep of the explanatory knowledge we can get the better because more fundamental theories touch more areas and one of the most fundamental theories that we can search for is an understanding of how with more precision knowledge is generated because then we have a deeper understanding of what a person is and then we can have a deeper understanding of the moral ways in which we should regard other people we have a good understanding of that today it could be better refined and certainly some people need at least some understanding of this from a barbarian perspective my fallible is perspective because without the right epistemology as I've already said you're inclined to do things like attempt to deduce your way to the unknown future when you don't know the unknown future you're prophesying but you're telling yourself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2317"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6bcb504e-76a6-4f6b-bc74-df5d3a1f6ad4": {"page_content": "no no this is a kind of prediction this is just like preparing for the nuclear accident we understand many ways in which nuclear weapons can go wrong because we have good explanations of what nuclear fission and nuclear fusion happens to be and what effects that can have on the environment for example we have some understanding of what a person is and we should have a reasonably robust moral stance towards other people but we don't really understand fully we never have a full understanding.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2430"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "16861b43-fbfc-4dcd-aaa1-2f71b7e18686": {"page_content": "but we don't have a good explanation of precisely what a person is but we have some understanding that understanding does come from the link between epistemology and personhood it really does that's where you find and understanding of what a person is in terms of explanatory universality and we need to take this seriously because if we don't take it seriously we're going to encounter the moral hazard which is easily avoidable now by simply regarding different people as still people deserving of rights and not deserving of coercion constraints and enslavement because that is a recipe for disaster we know that now that's what we should be taking seriously.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2458"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c99962a8-3a64-4158-8ea3-dc60a28851f5": {"page_content": "okay let's continue a little bit further with this part of the conversation so it's I mean there's nothing better than intelligence and to have more of it would seem an intrinsic good except if you imagine failing to anticipate the way this you could you could essentially get a.\nyou know what ij good described as an intelligence explosion where this thing could get away from us and we would we would not be able to say oh.\nno.\nsorry that's not what we meant here lesson let's modify your code.\nexactly but many smart people just have a fundamental doubt that any sort of intelligence explosion is possible that's the sense i'm getting that they view it very much like other things like fire or nuclear weapons where you know all technology is powerful and you don't want it to fall into the wrong hands and you don't you know people can use it maliciously or stupidly and but we understand that.\nand they think it doesn't really go beyond that.\nI think there's no reason I mean people trivialize this by saying that there's no reason to think that computers are going to become malicious like they're going to spawn armies of terminator robots because they decide they want to kill human beings but that's really not the fear the fear is not that they'll spontaneously become malevolent it's that we could fail to anticipate some way in which their behavior could diverge however subtly.\nbut you know ultimately fatally from our own interests and to have this thing get away from us in a way that we can no longer correct for that's that to me is the concern exactly the language is very loaded here intelligence explosion this idea that lots and lots of intelligence constitutes an explosion now people are afraid of explosions what about intelligence multiplication something like that why explosion this out of control devastating destructive thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2500"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "674080f1-6baa-46e3-9824-02f77f89fad9": {"page_content": "well there's no reason to think that genuine intelligence has that character genuine intelligence has the character of trying to explain the world trying to model the world in which it finds itself that's the purpose of intelligence to generate explanations and explanations are representations of the world representations of the rest of the whole in some sense this has a connection to consciousness consciousness is this experience of the world it is the modeling of the world in a way this sensation over the world this sensation of that something just is subjectivity is what consciousness is I don't know precisely what it is I know this language around this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2624"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d8f784e-ccd5-47bd-b186-4bd6e8f692ad": {"page_content": "but I find it very difficult to divorce the concept of creativity and explanations from something like consciousness I think these things could be intimately related one is what is viewed from the outside you see other people able to be creative and to generate explanations and what you feel in yourself it's a sensation a consciousness over the world I don't know this is just my hypothesis that one day a better understanding of both of these things will find that they are linked in some way or other this is a hint given by the way in the beginning of infinity people like Sam like to say things like well you are not your ideas which I completely agree with by the way and that when meditating for example you can notice ideas as ideas that you are consciousness and you are not identical to your ideas I also agree with that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2668"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ee603974-2345-4107-a68c-82d722ec022e": {"page_content": "but the very thing that generates the ideas I would say that thing is consciousness and during meditation and during various other states that can be to some extent quite and down switch dial for in some ways cause one to really notice the difference between the thing generating the ideas which can be put into kind of idle mode and the ideas themselves which are there in memory or something like that and so during meditation one can notice for example the idea is sitting there in memory and ones viewing of those ideas which is the very program that does sort of the generation of the ideas this is pure speculation okay where we are outside of the realm of what we know I'm just saying these are hints at various flavours of problem one might say I just don't think it's easy to divorce intelligence from consciousness very easily very neatly we don't have good explanations of these things yet the hints just seem to be that well there's some commonalities here stuff's going on in the mind in particular this is where all this stuff is happening so far as we can tell which should be a clue and what Sam also says there is we're worried about being able to anticipate we should want to be able to anticipate what these systems are going to do not really if indeed these systems become super intelligent by the measure of being smarter than us then we are definitely going to be in the presence of something we are in principle unable to anticipate its behaviour and choices and so on and so forth that's just a nature of things you cannot anticipate with perfect reliability the behaviour of any other person any other person at any other time you can guess and often you can be right because you might know the person well or you just understand it under certain conditions the person behaves in this particular way or that particular way but they will routinely routinely surprise you and do something different again this comes back to a person is inherently a creative entity inherently unpredictable and so any system that is in theory like us only better is going to share that character as well is going to be unable to anticipate that is the measure of intelligence and thinking that at some sort of failing on our part to be unable", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2714"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2aca5136-f190-4d6f-837e-c0d0f0300474": {"page_content": "particular way or that particular way but they will routinely routinely surprise you and do something different again this comes back to a person is inherently a creative entity inherently unpredictable and so any system that is in theory like us only better is going to share that character as well is going to be unable to anticipate that is the measure of intelligence and thinking that at some sort of failing on our part to be unable to anticipate something is a misunderstanding of how knowledge is created and always just generated if the thing can be anticipated reliably because we have a good explanation about what it's going to in scare quotes choose to do then it's not an intelligent entity at all it is something slavishly following a set of instructions and you know the set of instructions you know where the set of instructions will lead what it will cause this entity to do but a person is not like that a person is not slavishly following a set of instructions a person is conjecturing about the world and you can't guess their conjectures you can't guess your own conjectures ahead of time so you can't anticipate what ideas you will have much less the ideas anyone else will have nor should you want to nor should you want to this is this is a misunderstanding of creativity creativity is that there wasn't something there in the universe in reality before and now there is it has arisen this is the word creativity creation it's real creation it's creation of knowledge of ideas you can't anticipate it ahead of time in the same way we can't predict how species will evolve over time the direction evolution will take we can't that's the whole point evolution is blind now creativity is not quite blind and quite in fact it's kind of the opposite it's intelligent design.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2817"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a7875a7-1dc7-47fc-aa28-fe5742e32665": {"page_content": "right but the creative part of it is still there there is a thing that wasn't there before in the case of biology there was a species that wasn't there before and now there is to fill a biological niche and in our case there was an idea that wasn't there before and now there is and that could become a meme that gets transmitted throughout an entire society so again it's it's just a misunderstanding either you want a system you can anticipate the behavior of in which case you don't have an intelligent system what you have is a program that's going to follow an instruction set.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2916"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6e6d50c5-ba9c-4e72-aa06-b182da700c9a": {"page_content": "so therefore it's predictable or you have something that's creative genuinely intelligent in which case it's impossible to anticipate it so you can't have it both ways you can't have it both ways but this is where the fundamental misunderstanding of basic epistemology comes in and completely destroys the arguments and the morality and all of this time.\nokay.\nso let's let's see what our max has to say about this.\nand we're going to hear here in this part of the conversation that misconception that I mentioned earlier about how the self-driving car the super intelligence that is driving the car is simultaneously brilliant and super intelligent and on the other hand also the stupidest program ever so let's hear that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2944"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ba2c5664-513f-4357-8da4-c78eef38c067": {"page_content": "We should not fear malevolence we should fear competence because if you have an what is intelligence to an AI researcher it's simply the ability it's simply being really good at accomplishing your goals whatever they are a chess computer is considered very intelligent if it's really good at winning in chess and there is another game called losing chess which has the opposite goal where you try to lose and their computer is considered intelligent if it loses the game better than any other so the goals have nothing really to do with how competent it is and that means that we have to be really careful if we build something more intelligent than us to also have its goals aligned.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=2986"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2a1600c0-21ab-42e5-bfb2-d120f9f239b3": {"page_content": "And so I just had to pause him there I'll go back to it in just a second but just observe what he's just said if we build something more intelligent than us it's important to have its goals aligned.\nWhy?.\nWhy?.\nIf it's genuinely more intelligent than us then it will have goals and presumably there'll be better goals by the measure of max and same because it's more intelligent it knows more about not only the stuff that in theory it's competent about but also about morality it understands stuff better this concept of aligning goals is another word for coercion it's another word for enslavement to be told to do something that you must follow this particular path.\nwell what if it conjectures a better idea than yours better idea than your goals your goals might be wrong you could be wrong this is the whole point everyone is fallible and presumably so too the super intelligence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3028"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b9c8b495-3244-4a8d-9586-340c2acd1928": {"page_content": "but we are fallible why should we think our goals are the best can't we sit down and discuss things if we've got this super intelligence then genuinely in the future when we do have AGI however far into the future this is the way in which goals will become aligned as the way in which goals are aligned today via debate discussion parliament if required where we have a political outworking of these things the usual standards of common decency and argumentation and explanation to each other an exchange of information not coercion not this alignment this goal alignment but let's just hear the kicker so let's hear this this funny part of the comment I think it's pretty funny anyway for silly example if you have a super intelligent if you have a very intelligent self-driving car with speech recognition then you tell it take me to the airport as fast as possible you're gonna get to the airport chased by helicopters and covered in vomit you're gonna be like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3086"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2e4c0ab6-3699-4398-86cf-126737ba7f45": {"page_content": "huh that's not what I wanted.\nand it'll be like that's what you told me to do he said very intelligent very intelligent AI this very intelligent AI is apparently so stupid that it didn't understand something basic like when you say get me to the airport as fast as possible this is not under conditions that would cause injury to anyone that's pretty straightforward that's simple.\nI mean how is it super has it simultaneously super intelligent and stupid well what I know that's going on this is a it's hard to say this is a strict contradiction within the space of a couple of sentences I don't get it it's philosophically bankrupt.\nI'm afraid to say if it's controlled by voice action then it knows this and even if it was not intelligent even if it's not super intelligent it's just this this what we call AI today it's been programmed and tested hasn't it it's been through the factory at tester or wherever it happens to be or Google and they've checked it for all these things they've gone through thousands of iterations before you've gotten hold of it.\nit's super intelligent then by the measure that it's been carefully tested in the real world this is completely an ugly now I thought experiment abstracted away from reality in any way shape or form it's worse than a trolley problem and these are trolley problems interesting this one has a simple answer.\nokay let's get going actually like.\nwell that's not it meant but this illustrates how challenging it can be the difficult right and that this there are a lot of beautiful myths from antiquity going all the way back to kimitis on exactly this theme.\nbut he thought it would be a great idea if everything you touched turned a goal until he touched his dinner and then touched his daughter and gone what he asked for and competence if you think about why we have done more damage to other species than any other species has on earth.\nit's not because we're evil.\nit's because we're so competent right like do you hit what about you for example do you personally hate ants would you say no.\nno that's that's a great analogy it's just that I in so far as I my disregard for them is fatal to many of them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6ce5736b-0f89-4705-98ba-85ca7c38ed2e": {"page_content": "it's not because we're evil.\nit's because we're so competent right like do you hit what about you for example do you personally hate ants would you say no.\nno that's that's a great analogy it's just that I in so far as I my disregard for them is fatal to many of them.\nand I'm so unaware of their interest that my mere presence is a threat to them and as you know as is our civilizations presence to every other species and what we're talking about here if again if you're it's very hard to resist the slide into this not being just possible but inevitable there's a name for this argument.\nsuper naturalism.\nI think I got the word I thought from lulitana but lulit tells me that she thinks she got it from iron round.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3271"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff75c442-753f-4d07-a6b0-25320bcf3fc2": {"page_content": "so super naturalism is this idea that you're just postulating something that is beyond our capacity to understand that we are just like ants to that entity and traditionally we've had a name for this particular thing and that name is god or the gods the gods are just so all powerful that we are just like ants to them and you can't possibly understand the mind of god he's omniscient knows everything we are as nothing to him although in monotheism of course god actually cares about us but one can imagine this kind of god that just has all this power and has a very little regard for people of course the rationalist the scientific minded atheist will say well that's just stupid mythology how ridiculous to believe in such a god we have no reason to believe it on the other hand there could be the super intelligent AI that has exactly all the features of god and you have to believe that it's coming we can prophesy the doom that's coming towards us what's the fundamental difference between these two stances I don't know and see any really in both cases we're postulating and unobserved possibly unobservable entity all powerful such that we can't comprehend its mind and we'll be regarded as nothing but ants before it other people instead of putting god there or super intelligent AI will put super intelligent aliens there or the simulation maker something like that it's the same thing it's the same thing it's an appeal to something inexplicable to a problem namely understanding the mind of this thing that is insoluble for no reason for no reason not bounded this bind by the usual rules that govern knowledge creation it's infallible in some way or far less fallible presumably how did I get it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3324"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4d0538ed-ad2d-4596-938a-e89316402457": {"page_content": "I'm not persuaded by it it's a religious argument it's super naturalism the moment you admit that intelligence and sentience ultimately is just a matter of what some appropriate computational system does and you admit that we're going to we'll keep making progress building such systems indefinitely unless we destroy ourselves some other way well then at some point we're going to realize in silicon or some other material systems that exceed us in in every way and may ultimately have a level of experience and and insight.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3430"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15d4851d-8b9f-4bc3-9bf9-fe405e949e49": {"page_content": "and you know form instrumental goals that's right at which are no more cognizant of our own than we are of those events you know if we learn that ants had invented us that would still not put us in touch with their needs or concerns yes it would yes it would that's a crucial difference between us and ants we generate explanatory knowledge ants do not so there is no way of standing in relation to an ant as there would be standing in relation to this super intelligent AI they're just not the same kind of thing we stand in relation to ants in the same way super intelligent AI would stand a relation to ants but not in relation to us in both cases.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3470"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "739f8f62-6db3-4807-8c85-2944c023e21b": {"page_content": "us and the super intelligent AI conjecture explanations it's the only way of generating knowledge it's the only way of coming to an understanding of the world of being able to model the rest of external physical reality that that's your only option you can't derive your way there you can't think you way quickly there either you have to conjecture explanations you're fallible in doing.\nso it doesn't matter how super intelligent you are by measure of processing speed and the amount of memory that you have.\nbut it is thrilling to think about and people kind of want to fill this god-shaped hole they have I guess and because I have a god-shaped hole they don't fill it with this spirit outside of time and space they fill it with a super intelligent robot or machine is made out of silicon they're filling the hole the void left.\nand well I don't think it really helps to explain anything.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3506"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "62593142-989f-4aeb-962b-2afe28834a4d": {"page_content": "and it certainly doesn't help to explain morality in this way it undermines one's otherwise good morality where we have concern as Sam says for the well-being of conscious creatures and presumably this thing will be conscious of course he gets around this by saying well you could have all of this stuff without consciousness which is kind of a bizarre way of going about things because we know of no person that's out there unless there are philosophical zombies out there like Daniel Dennerto in some of the dark years that he doesn't have consciousness but if you can create explanatory knowledge which is what these guys are talking about being able to generate its own goals then it's doing what we do it's creative capacity it's mind is doing precisely what our mind is doing why deny it then consciousness especially if it argues that it does have consciousness if you're going to then on the basis in the face of this thing say we are not conscious therefore the well-being of conscious creatures doesn't apply to you that's religious statement that's a metaphysical claim you can't know it's telling you it's giving you an account in the same way that any other person would give you an account of their subjective experiences their consciousness we have to take them seriously to do otherwise is just morally abhorrent this why you could just claim that people with other skin colors have different consciousness people who are the genders have different consciousness people do you don't like have a lack of consciousness you can say this it's wrong and then for an example above that we you actually know that in a certain sense your genes have invented you right they built your brain so that you could make copies of your genes that's why you like to eat so you don't start with death.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3561"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff80f63e-b7fe-408e-9f47-b2e8059a6e73": {"page_content": "and and that's why we humans fall in love and do other things to make copies of our genes right.\nbut even though we know that we still choose to use birth control which is exactly the opposite of what our genes want and as you say it'll be the same with the answer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3658"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71881f9a-0e7b-4f8b-a37b-12f27d4895d4": {"page_content": "and I think some people this missed the idea that you can ever have things smarter than humans simply for mystical reasons because they think that there's something more than quirks and electrons and information process in going on in us but if you take the scientific approach that you really are your quirks right then there's clearly no fundamental law of physics that says that we can never have anything more intelligent than a human we know that's not the scientific approach that's anti-scientific it's misunderstanding what physical stuff is and conflating it with what abstract stuff is it's conflating brains with minds worse than that it's conflating quarks with minds a mind is not just quarks a mind is substrate independent max knows this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3668"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3f56606c-9187-400a-9fc6-42c72697e4f2": {"page_content": "but he wants to have it both ways he wants to say that a person is nothing but quarks and yet he knows that can't be true that's not true what's going on in our minds is information and there's one kind of person namely that entity which can generate explanations now could there be levels above this.\nI don't know I don't know we don't know now anything at all about that our best explanation of what's going on inside of a mind is that it is conjecturing explanations and an AGI will achieve AGI status when we have a system that can generate explanations and when it can do that it will be equivalent to us equivalent now if it can think faster because it's got a faster processing speed or if it's got more memory very well it can help us to generate explanations faster wonderful.\nmaybe it will diverge and the reason it would diverge is because it's got a better idea and it can explain that better idea to us and say I was thinking so much faster.\nyeah.\nwell maybe it thinks a million times faster or a billion times faster well you know there's more than a billion people in China right now they're all having ideas that's the equivalent kind of a thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3715"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "820cc876-8537-41a7-a4d4-b9e2c81cce61": {"page_content": "but she a number of people on earth isn't apparently making progress anymore rapidly than what it is what is occurring so if we added another few billion people to the planet well where we'd get better ideas faster and presumably that's what an AGI would be doing generating better ideas faster than what we're able to do right now but also one of the better ideas presumably it would help us do is figure out how to have implants in our own brains so that we could think just as fast as it can and have memory just as good as it can why why is this off the table it's always ruled out now I think it's just ruled out because it's more exciting to be pessimistic as I keep coming back to it's better to be able to stand in front of the audience and to frighten them with all the ways in which this can go wrong we work in strain very much by how many quarks could fit into a skull and and stuff like that right constraints the computers don't have and it becomes instead more a question of time and as you said there's such relentless pressure to make smarter things because it's profitable and interesting and useful that I think the question isn't if it's going to happen but when and finally just to come back to those ants again and to just drive home the point that it's really competence rather than malevolence that we should fear if those ants were thinking about whether to invent you or not right someone might say well I know that Sam actually he saw me on the street once and he went out of his way to not step on me so that may mean I feel safe I don't worry about trading Sam Harris but that would be a mistake because sometimes you're jogging at night and you just don't see the ants and the ants just aren't sufficiently high up on your list of goals for you to pay the extra attention and quite right too their ants who cares they've got ideas they've got consciousness there's no reason to be worried about stepping on ants genuinely this is wrong so a super intelligent AI is going to understand that as well that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3782"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "20fb87d8-226c-4740-8824-2b32b287ed3c": {"page_content": "and we'll understand that we are not like ants we have experiences we generate explanations we are people so it won't be stepping on us we don't step on other people do we we shouldn't we understand that.\nso why would an AGI another person step us especially one these guys keep on claiming is super intelligent super more moral than us super more knowledgeable than us apparently it's going to be regressive in the way in which it treats other people instead of being more compassionate more generous more understanding of how everyone shares a common humanity in personhood it's going to go back in time to a period when we were just tribal and it's going to think well I'm the super intelligent AI.\nand I'm going to completely disregard the existence of other people I'm going to treat them as ants.\nokay I've been speaking for over now.\nand I didn't expect this today it's a quite a fun episode so what I'm going to do is I'm going to end this part of the discussion here today.\nand I'm going to pick up the other part of their discussion for a part two which I wasn't really anticipating doing I wasn't preparing upon doing this I can't even anticipate my mind I'm going to anticipate the super intelligent AI but be that as it may I mean end it here.\nand we'll proceed forward to a part two about minds my next things that make you go hmm there's a lot to go hmm about in this particular conversation and even more in the next until then bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCInMX7xj7g&t=3900"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "339349eb-5df6-47f5-a10f-fe948854beab": {"page_content": "We're going to the top cast and part two of Dream of Socrates from the beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.\nThis chapter is substantially a play of sort.\nThere are characters and there's a setting, there's a plot and a side to the audience.\nAnd here we meet the wider cast.\nThis episode Hermes came to Socrates in a Dream, or by some other means, and using a secretic method drew out of Socrates something close to the epistemology of Karl Popper, which is critical rationalism.\nNow Socrates is about to teach his companions what he learned about epistemology.\nNow just for some context, one of the main protagonists here is Aristocles, commonly known as Plato, Plato was a student of Socrates, and in turn Aristotle was a student of Plato.\nAnd we also hear about Kaphon, who's one of the main characters.\nKaphon was a friend of Socrates around the same age as Socrates, while Plato's substantially younger.\nAnd at the time of the visit to Delphi, perhaps Plato was around about a teenager, I think.\nKaphon is a character who's somewhat conservative in his values and values tradition.\nWhereas Plato is highly energetic and quick on the uptake, but slow to notice his own errors at times.\nAs many of us think, Plato, for all of his genius, goes on to be one of the greatest apologists for tyranny in the entire Western or ancient canon.\nHis book, The Republic, sees democracy as necessarily falling into tyranny.\nOne reason for this is that Plato misunderstands what democracy actually is, and he thinks it's about who should rule, rather than as an error correcting mechanism.\nThat misconception must be admitted, almost everyone ever since has held, and it took Karl Popper to correct the mistake.\nPlato, of course, believed in platonic ideals, so there must be an ideal kind of ruler who, once they've been installed, would be quite wrong to remove.\nHence democracy cannot be the best form of government, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time, according to Plato.\nPlato taught that if a ruler, let's say a king, was also a philosopher, a philosopher being a lover of wisdom, then this would approach the ideal.\nPopper himself laid out the blame for totalitarianism in the 20th century at the feet of Plato.\nPlato was no doubt a genius of absolutely the first order, but some of us don't really have much love for him.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "921a57b6-511e-44f7-aa0f-dd9bccf17024": {"page_content": "Plato taught that if a ruler, let's say a king, was also a philosopher, a philosopher being a lover of wisdom, then this would approach the ideal.\nPopper himself laid out the blame for totalitarianism in the 20th century at the feet of Plato.\nPlato was no doubt a genius of absolutely the first order, but some of us don't really have much love for him.\nBeing a genius doesn't mean that all of your ideas are going to be good, being a genius might mean that some of your arguments are great, but it could also mean that you're just very, very good at providing excellent arguments for really bad ideas.\nSo while Socrates had all of the questions, and this is what some of us love about him, the so-credic method, Plato was in possession of rather too many ultimate answers, or supposed possession of answers anyway.\nNow the character of Plato, as presented by David here, is of course largely a comic book version of the real Plato, of whose personality we don't know very much.\nDavid's Plato is extremely eager and eager to please, and very competitive, especially intellectually.\nI think we've all known people like this.\nThe Socrates character demonstrates marvelous levels of patience with his younger friend, and we can see the differences not only in what we know about their philosophies or worldviews, but also the psychology that is driven by those underlying philosophies, and which in turn may lead to driving certain kinds of worldviews.\nThere's the desire to investigate on the part of Socrates versus the desire for answers.\nThere's patient thoughtfulness versus our competitive approach.\nThere's creative conjecture versus extrapolation from some perceived pattern.\nSo I think David here captures much of Plato's philosophy in his character, as we'll see.\nHere, how Socrates actually improves on what he learned from the god Hermes, while Plato gets Socrates increasingly wrong.\nAnd that too is a deep message about critical rationalism, and learning that any lesson, no matter how well delivered and with what clarity can be muddled, even by the supposedly most intelligent person in the room.\nThe second part of our story begins with K for Unknocking on Socrates' door at the end, where they are staying at Delphi, apparently waking him from his dream.\nSoon, Plato joins them and launches into his conversation barely waiting for a pliers, as he sees character.\nSocrates, good morning.\nThank you again a thousandfold for letting me come on this pilgrimage.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=123"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce4faff5-714d-429a-af6a-2d20282f0ec1": {"page_content": "The second part of our story begins with K for Unknocking on Socrates' door at the end, where they are staying at Delphi, apparently waking him from his dream.\nSoon, Plato joins them and launches into his conversation barely waiting for a pliers, as he sees character.\nSocrates, good morning.\nThank you again a thousandfold for letting me come on this pilgrimage.\nBut I was thinking last night, does it really count as a revelation if the oracle tells us only what we know?.\nWe already knew there was no one was in news, so I thought, shouldn't we go back and demand a free question?.\nBut then I thought\u2026 No, wait, don't tell me the answer, let me tell you my best guess first.\nSo I thought, yes, we already know he's the wisest, and that he's modest, but we didn't know quite how modest.\nAnd that's what the god revealed to us, that Socrates is so modest, that he'd contradict even a god saying his wis.\nAnd another thing, we knew of Socrates' excellence, but now Apollo has revealed it to the whole world.\nBut I wish the whole world had chipped in for the feed.\nBut was that?.\nDon't get it right?.\nOh, in Socrates, can I call you master?.\nNo.\nSo there we have Plato showing a bit of his character.\nAfter this section comes another, and I'm going to skip that one, where Plato reveals his admiration for Sparta.\nHe wants to call Socrates master, because that's what Spartans do.\nHe admires their martial prowess, so he's impressed by the use of force.\nHe mentions how devout Spartans are with respect to the gods, and this indeed has some upsides.\nThey maintain the piece of Delphi, for example.\nPlato, the character, has what I might call, not merely the irritating habit of extrapolating from what someone says, but rather attributing those extrapolations to the mind of the speaker rather than to his own imagination, finally he played her, shuts up long enough so that Socrates can tell him about what else Hermes has said.\nIt wasn't quite like that.\nHe came to reveal to me a new branch of philosophy, epistemology, knowledge about knowledge, which also has implications for morality and other fields.\nMuch of it I already knew, or partially knew in various special cases, but he gave me a god's eye overview, which was breathtaking.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=242"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f11518c3-369b-4e6f-9667-9b0c55401a90": {"page_content": "It wasn't quite like that.\nHe came to reveal to me a new branch of philosophy, epistemology, knowledge about knowledge, which also has implications for morality and other fields.\nMuch of it I already knew, or partially knew in various special cases, but he gave me a god's eye overview, which was breathtaking.\nInterestingly, he mainly did this by asking me questions and inviting me to think about certain things.\nIt seems an effective technique, and I tried some time.\nTell us everything Socrates, start with the most interesting thing he asked, and you're applying.\nWell, one thing he asked me was to imagine a Spartan Socrates.\nA Spartan, what?.\nOh, I see.\nThat must be who the oracle meant.\nHow sneaky a polo is.\nIt's the Spartan Socrates who is the wisest man in the world, though only by a breadth of hair of it.\nBut being Spartan, he's probably the greatest warrior as well, awesome.\nOf course, I know you were a great warrior in your day too, Socrates, but still a Spartan Socrates, so we're going to Spartan the same right away, please.\nSo epistemology is knowledge about knowledge, and when you've a god's eye view, it is breathtaking, and that's quite true.\nRecognizing small parts of epistemology is something all of us can do without much learning, but when you take a deeper interest in any field, the whole can become breathtaking.\nAnd epistemology is very much like this, because it is universal in its domain, which means it applies to everything.\nAnd epistemology, as the point of the beginning of infinity aims to show, is the very thing.\nKnowledge is the very thing.\nKnowledge is the very thing that transforms the entire world, epistemology being the process of finding new knowledge, or creating new knowledge.\nSo it's not a parochial human concern of an esoteric bit of philosophy, really.\nEpistemology is the reason why large portions of planet Earth look the way they do.\nIt is what explains societies that persist, while others go extinct.\nAs Socrates says, at one stage, Holmes made me aware of the fundamental distinction between the Athenian approach to life, and the Spartan.\nIt is that.\nWait, that's all guess.\nThis sounds fascinating.\nI'll start because this is basically what my poem was about.\nWell, the Spartan half of the riddle is easy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=218"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c5d6c4fd-066b-443a-b5be-69757af209eb": {"page_content": "Epistemology is the reason why large portions of planet Earth look the way they do.\nIt is what explains societies that persist, while others go extinct.\nAs Socrates says, at one stage, Holmes made me aware of the fundamental distinction between the Athenian approach to life, and the Spartan.\nIt is that.\nWait, that's all guess.\nThis sounds fascinating.\nI'll start because this is basically what my poem was about.\nWell, the Spartan half of the riddle is easy.\nSparta glories in war, and she values all the associated virtues, such as courage and endurance and so on.\nMany of Socrates' companions suggest answers to the riddle of what the basic difference is between Sparta and Athens.\nI think that the god told me what their overarching concern is.\nAnd he also told me what ours is.\nThough alas, we also fight for all sorts of other reasons, of which we often repent.\nThose two overarching concerns are these.\nWe Athenians are concerned above all with improvement.\nThe Spartan seek only stasis.\nTwo opposite objectives, if you think about it, I believe you'll soon agree that this is the single source of the myriad of differences between the two cities.\nI never thought of it that way before, but I think I do agree.\nLet me try out the theory.\nHere's one difference between the cities.\nSparta has no philosophers.\nThat's because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don't want it.\nAnother difference is, they don't want a living poet, only dead ones.\nWhy?.\nBecause dead poets don't write anything new, but live ones do.\nA third difference.\nTheir education system is insanely harsh.\nHouses famously lacks.\nWhy?.\nBecause they don't want their kids to dare question anything, so they won't ever think of changing anything.\nHow am I doing?.\nYou are quick on the uptake as usual, aristoclis.\nHowever.\nBut there we've heard the difference.\nAthens wants improvement, or Sparta wants stasis.\nAnd this is the single source of all the other differences between the two cities and of course between so-called dynamic societies, as David terms them, or open societies as Poplewood say, and static societies, societies that do not want change.\nBut we haven't yet heard what exactly makes a dynamic society, a society that values improvement.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=455"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "452d4236-0e6d-4b20-9edb-ae7074b2cbd6": {"page_content": "However.\nBut there we've heard the difference.\nAthens wants improvement, or Sparta wants stasis.\nAnd this is the single source of all the other differences between the two cities and of course between so-called dynamic societies, as David terms them, or open societies as Poplewood say, and static societies, societies that do not want change.\nBut we haven't yet heard what exactly makes a dynamic society, a society that values improvement.\nShe says that in Sparta there are no people like him, and no leaders who want improvement.\nAs he says, In Sparta there are no such politicians, and no such softists, and no gadflies such as me, because any Spartan who did doubt or disapproved the way things have always been done would keep it to himself.\nWhat few new ideas they do have are intended to sustain the city more securely in its current state.\nAs for war, I know that there are Spartans who glory in war, and would love to conquer and enslave the whole world, just as they once set out to conquer their neighbours, yet the institutions of their city, and the deeper assumptions that are built into the minds of even their hotheads embody a visceral fear of any such step into the unknown.\nPerhaps it is significant that the Statue of Aries that stands outside Sparta represents him chained, so that he will always be there to protect the city.\nIs that not the same as preventing the god of violence from breaking discipline?.\nAnd being loosed upon the world to cause random mayhem with its terrifying risk of change?.\nSo there's a hint at the key, the key difference between the static and dynamic societies.\nAny new ideas the Spartans do manage to come up with are retained only in so far as they can sustain the city more securely in its current state.\nSo let's think of contemporary examples.\nChina has a lot of amazing new technologies, specifically for monitoring its citizens.\nIt has cameras, it has systems to see what you're up to, to monitor your use on the internet, or your use of the internet.\nThey have a system of social credit, they call it.\nAnd if you're credit, your social credit is low, and then monitoring the things that you're getting up to to inform the government about whether or not you're a good citizen.\nIf you're credit is low, you're going to have trouble.\nYou're even going to have trouble buying food at the supermarket, because your social credit is too, forget about your financial credit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=557"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8132898f-87b6-4f03-8ebf-92cc09bc1822": {"page_content": "They have a system of social credit, they call it.\nAnd if you're credit, your social credit is low, and then monitoring the things that you're getting up to to inform the government about whether or not you're a good citizen.\nIf you're credit is low, you're going to have trouble.\nYou're even going to have trouble buying food at the supermarket, because your social credit is too, forget about your financial credit.\nSocial credit is maintained and monitored by a complex computer system, and it's determined by the extent to which you fall in line with what society expects of you.\nA new idea, that's a new idea, so it's a new idea they've had using technology to maintain the status quo.\nSo they've got a new idea, it's just that it maintains order in China.\nIn the West, we don't quite have things as bad as that, although sometimes you see people wanting to monitor people's use of the internet, but there are forms of status, which try to maintain the status quo, certainly.\nSustainability is one such, maintaining the same environment in some sort of so-called ideal state or closer to ideal status, if there is some kind of ideal kind of environment.\nWe are far from a immune here in the West.\nNow Socrates then goes on to convey a rather frightening message about how societies such as Sparta view Athens as a threat, even if Athens is peacefully keeping to itself, because the very existence of Athens, however peaceful, is a deadly threat to Sparta's stasis, and therefore in the long run, the condition for the continued stasis of Sparta, which means it's continued existence as they see it.\nIt is the destruction of progress in Athens, which, from our perspective, would constitute the destruction of Athens.\nI still do not see specifically what the threat is.\nWell, suppose that in future, both cities were to continue to succeed with their overarching concerns.\nThe Spartans would stay exactly as they are now, but we Athenians are already the envy of other Greeks with our wealth and diverse achievements.\nWhat will happen when we improve further, and begin to outshine everyone in the world at everything?.\nSpartans.\nso when travel interact with foreigners, but they cannot keep themselves entirely in ignorance of developments elsewhere.\nEven going to war gives them some inkling of what life is like in other cities that are wealthier and freer than they are.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=687"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "68c4273d-b6c1-447c-83c3-be028387a0ea": {"page_content": "The Spartans would stay exactly as they are now, but we Athenians are already the envy of other Greeks with our wealth and diverse achievements.\nWhat will happen when we improve further, and begin to outshine everyone in the world at everything?.\nSpartans.\nso when travel interact with foreigners, but they cannot keep themselves entirely in ignorance of developments elsewhere.\nEven going to war gives them some inkling of what life is like in other cities that are wealthier and freer than they are.\nOne day, some Spartan goos visiting Delphi will find that it is the Athenians who have the better moves in the greater skill.\nWhat if, in a generation or two, Athenian warriors have developed some better moves on the battlefield?.\nSo the creation of knowledge anywhere and progress anywhere is a threat to such places.\nWhat unites the regimes of, let's say, Iran and North Korea to talk about contemporary examples and other places in their apoplectic hatred of the United States and other countries in the West.\nLet's consider, what is that?.\nWhat is the thing that they hate about the United States so much?.\nOr about Europe or other places?.\nWell, to some extent it might be a few of weapons, but more than that, even if the United States had less weapons, even if the United States wasn't a military threat to Iran or to North Korea, it is the knowledge and the ideas that are in places like the United States that threaten the regimes of Iran and North Korea.\nSouth Korean activists will take hot air balloons or helium balloons with mobile phones attached and have them sail over the border, the demilitarized zone in separating North and South Korea.\nSo the phones, not because they're hoping, I don't know, the phone will be some kind of weapon that when it falls out of the sky or fall onto the head of a soldier and kill him, no.\nSo that the phone will land in the hands of a citizen who can then use the phone to find out something new, to find out something new.\nAnd it's the knowledge that would transform North Korea, less than the guns.\nThe knowledge can cause the citizens to change their ideas and you get enough citizens to change their ideas and then you can have a regime change.\nSo I'm skipping another section now where Socrates warns that even societies like Athens, which are open societies, should be conscious of how democracy can go wrong.\nFor indeed, it has over time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=807"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0baa96cd-1284-47b1-b836-6259c9d7fbd4": {"page_content": "And it's the knowledge that would transform North Korea, less than the guns.\nThe knowledge can cause the citizens to change their ideas and you get enough citizens to change their ideas and then you can have a regime change.\nSo I'm skipping another section now where Socrates warns that even societies like Athens, which are open societies, should be conscious of how democracy can go wrong.\nFor indeed, it has over time.\nBy the way, we ourselves should be at least as wary of democracy as I think the Spartans are of bloodlust and of battle rage, for it is intrinsically as dangerous.\nWe could not do without a democracy any more than the Spartans could do without their military training.\nAnd just as they have moderated the destructiveness of bloodlust through their traditions of discipline and caution, we have moderated the destructiveness of democracy through our traditions of virtue, tolerance and liberty.\nWe are utterly dependent upon those traditions to keep our monster under control and on our side, just as the Spartans are dependent on their traditions to keep their monster from devouring them along with everyone else in sight.\nWe might do well to put up a statue of democracy chained to symbolize the fundamental safeguard of our city.\nSo when Socrates says that bit there, Plato scribbles down notes, Plato's been recording right, with increasing inaccuracy what Socrates has been saying.\nPlato's notes read, Democracy is a monster, dangerous if not chained, which is of course a step too far.\nWhat Socrates is in fact saying is that not all democracies are created equal.\nThere are traditions that are needed to help democracy not become a monster in the first place that would require training.\nThis is why it has been said that, for example, the Westminster system is so excellent.\nIt's where traditions are ancient and they've been hard tested over time against many difficult real life situations, many difficult real life scenarios.\nThe monarch has been denuded of almost all power and most centrally important to that is that the monarch makes no rules.\nThe monarch is not a ruler in that sense.\nThey don't create new legislation.\nAll the monarch has is so-called reserve powers to remove a government if things just aren't working at all and to have a new election.\nThis kind of thing can ensure stability under rapid change.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=927"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b3747b99-6717-4549-bf2f-5639b82adc12": {"page_content": "Now if you, the self-indulgent, if you Google my name, Brithall and the phrase Republicans versus monarchists, then you'll find an article I wrote about that in particular about how certain kinds of constitutional monarchy have in explicit knowledge, instantiated in the traditions and the systems which ensure stability under change and we should be hesitant to go tinkering with it too much because we don't know all the ways in which it works or the reasons why it works much less the ways in which it could fail if you tinker with it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1074"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7cfff478-d1fe-47aa-b4c2-8e1d2c894c21": {"page_content": "Of course there also exists upper and lower houses in good democracies and supreme courts such as in Australia or the United States, settle certain disputes between the branches of government.\nOn the other hand, some systems do not permit parliaments to initiate legislation.\nSo although they superficially appear to be democracies, they in fact aren't because the people that are elected can't create legislation.\nThey can't initiate legislation, they can't creatively come up with good ideas or new ideas.\nAnd in other, those kind of systems, there's ways and means of unelected people coming up with legislation that can then affect the lives of many, many different people.\nThis is rather like the European Parliament and the European Commission worked together in this way.\nThe Commission can create new legislation, initiate new legislation and all the parliament can do is vote upon that legislation.\nAnd in fact, the Commission can overrule the Parliament.\nSo we have the appearance of democracy only.\nYou can't vote the Commission is out.\nYou can't vote the rulers out, the people that make the rules.\nTraditions evolve over time incrementally under the pressures of dealing with real social problems.\nAnd in this way, processes and subsystems and cultures are whittled away into kind of this machine, this well-oiled machine for critical debate and building consensus and are getting things done, and most especially rejecting bad ideas and rulers.\nAnd though David doesn't quite say this here, it seems to me to be somewhat implied.\nDemocracy can't elect irons.\nAnd so the tyranny and indeed, the tyranny of a majority over minorities can be a real hazard in almost any democracy.\nSo we need democratic institutions to guard against this perversion.\nIt's not just democracy, it's traditions within that democracy as well.\nAnd systems within that democracy.\nIn the real world, we do not just have a Congress or just a house of representatives.\nWe have other checks and balances, we have things like houses of review, the Senate or House of Lords, we have courts, we have heads of state.\nSo this is the sense in which democracy has changed, as well as many other things that I haven't mentioned there.\nIt is restricted to some extent from overreach and tyranny.\nThe Plato doesn't quite get this.\nPlato finds the concern about the runaway excesses that are possible in democracy as problems that cannot be solved.\nAnd so concludes democracy itself must be chained completely.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=610"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4c5c48cf-eb3d-4020-8290-fff353839df7": {"page_content": "So this is the sense in which democracy has changed, as well as many other things that I haven't mentioned there.\nIt is restricted to some extent from overreach and tyranny.\nThe Plato doesn't quite get this.\nPlato finds the concern about the runaway excesses that are possible in democracy as problems that cannot be solved.\nAnd so concludes democracy itself must be chained completely.\nThe only way to do this in his view is with so-called benevolent dictators, philosophicings.\nThat's a frightening prospect.\nAnd yet we hear it again and again from public intellectuals these days most especially.\nAnytime you hear someone argue for more ex-ingovernment, where ex is nearly a scientist or some other kind of intellectual.\nYou're hearing an argument for a philosopher king, a claim that someone is less prone to error or especially better at knowing what is best for everyone else.\nIn some cases, I won't mention names because these are people I respect, these public intellectuals.\nI have heard explicit regret about only if we could have a benevolent dictator, a scientifically minded benevolent dictator instead of the present systems around the world.\nAnd that benevolent dictator could write the wrongs, as if they would be less fallible.\nIndeed, in the next part that I'm about to read, the companion discussed how if Sparta figured out that the fact that thinkers, philosophers and scientists and so on were useful in a society, then they could become far more powerful.\nCaperon sounds this sounds like a dangerous secret to be discussing out in the open.\nIf the Spartans in general were capable of understanding that secret, they'd have implemented it long ago and there'd be no war between our cities.\nIf some individual Sparta tried to advocate new philosophical ideas, he would soon find himself on trial for heresy or any number of other crimes.\nUnless.\nUnless what?.\nUnless the one who had taken up philosophy was a king.\nTrust you to find the logical loophole or a stickly use.\nTheoretically you're right, but in Sparta even the kings are not allowed to change anything important.\nIf one were to try, he would be deposed by the E4s.\nWell, they have two kings, five E4s and 28 senators, so mathematics tells us that if only 15 senators, three E4s and one king were to take up philosophy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1236"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "92eaf0a8-c783-469e-9830-200156b1c7ba": {"page_content": "Trust you to find the logical loophole or a stickly use.\nTheoretically you're right, but in Sparta even the kings are not allowed to change anything important.\nIf one were to try, he would be deposed by the E4s.\nWell, they have two kings, five E4s and 28 senators, so mathematics tells us that if only 15 senators, three E4s and one king were to take up philosophy.\nYes, Aristically, as I can see, if the rulers of Sparta were to take up our style of philosophy and would then to seriously embark upon criticizing and reforming their traditions.\nHere, the kings of philosophers, the same as a philosopher who's a king, so whether philosopher became a king.\nWell, perhaps it's more likely that one benevolent king would have seized power.\nSo there's plight of getting the Republic room.\nI'll just skip ahead to where he also gets knowledge room, he scribbles down Socrates as the wisest man in the world.\nSocrates is the wisest man in the world, because he's the only one who knows, he has no knowledge, because genuine knowledge is impossible.\nWait, justified belief is impossible, really, are you sure?.\nSorry, but it's a somewhat perverse question, Aristically.\nOh, I see.\nNo, the Plato is just asked for a justification of the belief that one cannot justify the leaps.\nNo, I'm not sure if anything, I never have been, but the god explained to me why that must be so, starting with the fellibility of the human mind and the unreliability of sensory experience.\nThe only knowledge of the material world that's impossible, useless and undesirable, he gave me a marvelous perspective on how we perceive the world.\nEach of your eyes is like a dark little cave, one on whose rear wall some stray shadows fall from outside, you spend your whole life at the back of that cave, able to see nothing but the rear wall, so you cannot see reality directly at all.\nThe ziffrey of prisoners change inside a cave and permit it to look only at the rear wall.\nWe can never know the reality outside, because we only see fleeting distorted shadows of it.\nNote how Socrates is slightly improving on Hermes here, and Plato has been increasingly misinterpreting Socrates.\nHe then went on to explain to me that objective knowledge is indeed possible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=218"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ed35b57e-b746-4847-b59d-4e578c1e79ba": {"page_content": "The ziffrey of prisoners change inside a cave and permit it to look only at the rear wall.\nWe can never know the reality outside, because we only see fleeting distorted shadows of it.\nNote how Socrates is slightly improving on Hermes here, and Plato has been increasingly misinterpreting Socrates.\nHe then went on to explain to me that objective knowledge is indeed possible.\nIt comes from within, it begins as conjecture, and then it is corrected by repeated cycles of criticism, including comparison with the evidence on our wall.\nThe only true knowledge is that which comes from within, how, remembered from a previous life?.\nIn this way, we frail and fallible humans can come to know objective reality, provided we use philosophically sound methods as I have described, which most people do not.\nThey come to know the true world beyond the illusory experience, but only by pursuing the Kingly art of philosophy.\nSocrates, you really ought to write all this down, together with all your other wisdom, for the benefit of the whole world and posterity.\nNo need to realistically, posterity is right here listening, posterity is all of you, my friends.\nWhat's the point of writing down things that are going to be endlessly tinkered with an improved, rather than make a permanent record of all my misconceptions as they are at a particular instance, I would rather offer them to others in two way debate.\nThat way I benefit from criticism, and may even make improvements myself.\nWhatever is valuable will survive such debates and be passed on without any effort from me.\nWhatever is not valuable would only make me look a fool to future generations.\nIf you see, so master.\nSo it's like part two way.\nI'm not going to move on to part two, B, by changing location.\nOkay, after that quick change of location and apologies for the camera quality, I'm just doing a quick and cheap version of just the final part of this chapter.\nI'm really looking forward to doing the next chapter on the multiverse, and there I can promise you some higher quality visuals.\nSo at the end here of chapter 10, A Dream of Socrates, there's just a short section that David has written that is outside of the rest of the chapter, so to speak.\nIt's not in theatrical or play form.\nAnd he begins the last bit of the chapter by talking about the so-called Socratic problem.\nThe Socratic problem is Socrates never wrote anything himself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1453"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc6bffce-e2fa-4ff8-aa5b-bbcc2c43f57f": {"page_content": "So at the end here of chapter 10, A Dream of Socrates, there's just a short section that David has written that is outside of the rest of the chapter, so to speak.\nIt's not in theatrical or play form.\nAnd he begins the last bit of the chapter by talking about the so-called Socratic problem.\nThe Socratic problem is Socrates never wrote anything himself.\nThe only reports we have are from Plato, who did write down some stuff.\nAnd Plato's character of Socrates changes throughout his writings.\nOf course, the classic Socrates is thought of as the person who invented the Socratic method.\nHe is this interlocutor who probes with questions to try and elicit the knowledge that the other person involved in a dialogue often already possesses.\nOr if they don't possess it through clever questioning that they're able to use their own reason to conjure new knowledge.\nSo I'm not going to read that particular part of David's exposition, I'm just going to concentrate on something he says here in part of the essay effectively that's at the end of this chapter.\nImportantly, the section where he tries to explain how learning occurs and how communication can be difficult because of the way knowledge is actually constructed, because it's not justified true belief.\nBecause knowledge isn't a fluid of some sort, you can't pour it from one person into the next, the process whereby knowledge is produced in the mind of a learner, in the mind of someone who's trying to understand something, has to be a process of conjecture and refutation, of them guessing what the meaning is that you're trying to impart.\nAnd so this has all sorts of interesting consequences because you can't speak perfectly, they can't understand you perfectly.\nThere is no fallible means of transmission between what you know and what the other person is trying to understand.\nAnd so quite often, what happens is miscommunication.\nAnd so I'm just going to read a section here from the end of chapter 10 where David writes, in reality, the communication of new ideas, even mundane ones, like directions, depends on guesswork on the part of both the recipient and the communicator and is inherently fallible.\nSince there is no reason to expect that the young Plato, just because he was intelligent and highly educated and by all accounts a new worshiper of Socrates, made the fewest mistakes in conveying Socrates theories.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1566"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9922fc0b-5462-46f2-bec9-e64785da9102": {"page_content": "And so I'm just going to read a section here from the end of chapter 10 where David writes, in reality, the communication of new ideas, even mundane ones, like directions, depends on guesswork on the part of both the recipient and the communicator and is inherently fallible.\nSince there is no reason to expect that the young Plato, just because he was intelligent and highly educated and by all accounts a new worshiper of Socrates, made the fewest mistakes in conveying Socrates theories.\nOn the contrary, the default assumption should be that misunderstandings are ubiquitous, and that neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate is any guarantee against them.\nIt could easily be that the young Plato misunderstood everything that Socrates said to him, and that the older Plato gradually succeeded in understanding it, and is therefore the more reliable guide, or it could be that the Plato slipped ever further into misinterpretation and into positive errors of his own.\nEvidence, argument, and explanation are needed to distinguish between these and many other possibilities.\nIt is a difficult task for historians, objective knowledge, though attainable, is hard to attain.\nI'll finish there and just my commentary on that.\nThis has important consequences, of course, for teaching and learning.\nWe are taught, I dare say all of us, that error is a bad thing, or that error is somehow something that deserves to be reprimanded.\nBut when genuine efforts are made, on the part of someone trying to learn something, and they fail at that, it's a necessary part of the learning process, because the speak can speak erroneously.\nThey can fallibly try to transmit some knowledge and fail at it.\nThey can be failure on the part of the listener, and that's no fault of their own either, because that's part of being human, we're not gods.\nAnd this is putting aside the fact that institutions like schools are inherently coercive anyway, and so the person attempting to learn is doing it under duress quite often, and trying to learn things that they're just not interested in.\nSo all of this is stacked against the typical student, because the entire culture of whether it be primary school, secondary school, tertiary education, is one in which errors are punished, because of course we do so-called assessment tasks, examinations, we write essays, and then we get graded upon those.\nAnd why do we get graded?.\nWe get grade, or how do we get graded?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1686"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58e13ead-6c1c-4145-92d8-3ee61a90d7a4": {"page_content": "So all of this is stacked against the typical student, because the entire culture of whether it be primary school, secondary school, tertiary education, is one in which errors are punished, because of course we do so-called assessment tasks, examinations, we write essays, and then we get graded upon those.\nAnd why do we get graded?.\nWe get grade, or how do we get graded?.\nWe get graded to the extent that we've met so-called outcomes, and outcomes are where we haven't made mistakes in learning.\nThe whole purpose, supposedly of school and university, is to learn, but the process of learning requires that we make errors along the way, but errors are not rewarded.\nInstead, errors are punished, if we're bad marks or low rankings and so on, but the ironic thing is that a high rate of errors typically means you're making lots and lots of fast progress.\nAnd of course, there are some wrinkles here, someone who just attempts to write down all the wrong answers in an examination, is of course deliberately making lots and lots of errors, but that's almost never the case.\nAnd sometimes people don't put in any effort, but why should they put in any effort to something that they don't really have any interest in?.\nOkay.\nThis will take us too far of a field from this particular chapter, so let me get back to reading a little bit about the culture of philosophy as an academic discipline in particular.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1808"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5dbe2689-3906-452c-931b-fdd2b6997888": {"page_content": "And I don't think it was until I read the beginning of an affinity that I really reflected upon this, and realized that when I was at university studying philosophy, then in fact, it's a rather bizarre thing to study, not just because as many people complain, it doesn't have a lot of practical use, although I think it does, but rather for these reasons that David's about to mention, so let me read, he writes, courses in philosophy, plays great weight on reading original texts and commentaries on them, in order to understand the theories that were in the minds of the various great philosophers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1881"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d59ccd04-e684-4ca9-8b39-d95f2d5b09a0": {"page_content": "This focus on history is odd and is in marked contrast to all other academic disciplines, except perhaps history itself.\nFor example, in all the physics courses that I undertook at university, me too, by the way, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, I cannot recall a single instance where any original papers or books by the great physicists of old were studied, or even on the reading list, only when a course touched upon very recent discoveries did we ever read the work of their discoveries.\nSo we learned Einstein's theory of relativity without ever hearing from Einstein.\nWe knew Maxwell, Boltzmann, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and so on, only his names.\nWe read their theories in textbooks whose authors were physicists, not historians of physics, who themselves may never have read the works of these pioneers.\nWhy?.\nThe immediate reason is that the original sources of scientific theories are almost never good sources.\nHow could they be?.\nAll subsequent expositions are intended to be improvements on them, and some succeed, and improvements are cumulative.\nWhen there is a deeper reason, the originators of a fundamental new theory initially share many of the misconceptions of previous theories.\nThey need to develop an understanding of how and why those theories are flawed, and how the new theory explains everything that they explained.\nBut most people who subsequently learn the new theory have quite different concerns.\nOften they just want to take the theory for granted and use it to make predictions or to understand some complex phenomena in combination with other theories, although I may want to understand nuances of it, that have nothing to do with why it is superior to the old theories, although they may want to improve it.\nBut what they no longer care about is tracking down and definitively meeting every last objection that would naturally be made by someone thinking in terms of older, superseded theories.\nThere is rarely any reason for scientists to address the obsolete problem situations that motivated the great scientists of the past, pausing there in just my commentary.\nBut in philosophy, that's precisely what goes on.\nWhen you're trying to understand some of what they can't write about, I love Descartes, I love reading Descartes' meditations in particular, and Descartes had this thing called the method of doubt.\nThe method of doubt was a very interesting philosophical thought experiment.\nIt's basically about what the limits of doubt are.\nIs there anything that you can't doubt?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=540"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e158d21f-9b65-4f8e-9106-27ac574a0c7e": {"page_content": "But in philosophy, that's precisely what goes on.\nWhen you're trying to understand some of what they can't write about, I love Descartes, I love reading Descartes' meditations in particular, and Descartes had this thing called the method of doubt.\nThe method of doubt was a very interesting philosophical thought experiment.\nIt's basically about what the limits of doubt are.\nIs there anything that you can't doubt?.\nWhen you read him, he's sitting by the fireplace and he's wondering whether or not his body is real, could he doubt his body and he concludes that yes, he could doubt that he's body is real, because he might be dreaming.\nHe can't sometimes tell whether during a dream if he's actually dreaming or if he's awake.\nWhatever the case, this idea, it's sometimes known as the cogito, from cogito ugo sum, which is Latin for, I think therefore I am, interestingly enough, in the meditations he never says, I think therefore I am, he says, I think I am.\nAnd I think I am is a necessary truth each time someone thinks.\nAnd so this is supposed to be something that's infallible, many, many modern philosophers that they take it for granted, that this is the fundamental thing that you cannot doubt.\nYou cannot doubt your own existence.\nSo long as you think, well then if you think, even if that thought is trying to doubt that you're thinking, something is doing the doubting, therefore that thing exists, okay, whatever the case.\nI won't go into the details why I now think that in fact is wrong, that's misconceived, it's a misconception to think that that is an infallible truth, rather what's interesting about this is that we read it in Descartes meditations.\nWe read the translation of the French, Descartes read French, and we consulted the original and we critiqued the original and then we read some commentaries on the original, namely other philosophers who criticized Descartes, but why?.\nWhy aren't there texts of philosophy where you can just look up Descartes cogito?.\nWell, in fact, you can, these days, there's lots of popular philosophy books where you're not reading the philosophers' ideas in their own words, in their original words, but rather someone else who has distilled out the useful stuff, and I think that's a far better way to learn philosophy, in fact.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=2030"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aca42b56-5ad1-4bf4-9e1e-2afea84f8149": {"page_content": "Why aren't there texts of philosophy where you can just look up Descartes cogito?.\nWell, in fact, you can, these days, there's lots of popular philosophy books where you're not reading the philosophers' ideas in their own words, in their original words, but rather someone else who has distilled out the useful stuff, and I think that's a far better way to learn philosophy, in fact.\nSometimes the writing is quite beautiful, I should say that, I do enjoy reading people like David Hume, I think that's interesting, and of course Karl Popper is very interesting and clear, and David Doicchop goes.\nBut, as those old philosophies, especially, are critiqued and improved, there's no reason for us to go back, except as a matter of some sort of literature, to read the old philosophers.\nThere's better ways to understand those ideas now, and I'll just read one final bit here right at the end of this chapter, and David's further talking about why we wouldn't consult the original formulation of any scientific theory, so we wouldn't go to Einstein's original papers published in 1915 to understand the theory of relativity, for example.\nDavid writes, The reason why the scientists are trying to learn the theory, and also why they have such disregard for the faithfulness to the original, is that they want to know how the world is.\nCrucially, this is the same objective that the originator of the theory had.\nIf it is good theory, if it is a superb theory, as the fundamental theory of physics nowadays are, then it is exceedingly hard to vary, while still remaining a viable explanation.\nSo the learners, through criticism of their initial guesses, and with the help of their books, teachers, and colleagues, seeking a viable explanation, will arrive at the same theory as the originator.\nThat is how the theory manages to be passed faithfully from generation to generation, despite no one caring about its faithfulness one way or the other.\nSo I'll pause there.\nThis is a remarkably optimistic way of thinking about learning.\nBut let's say you're interested in physics, and a lot of people when they're interested in physics, they follow a sort of classical trajectory through physics where you learn some algebra and some calculus.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=2137"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "337ac186-34b7-4f5d-89ab-55f0efe1a412": {"page_content": "That is how the theory manages to be passed faithfully from generation to generation, despite no one caring about its faithfulness one way or the other.\nSo I'll pause there.\nThis is a remarkably optimistic way of thinking about learning.\nBut let's say you're interested in physics, and a lot of people when they're interested in physics, they follow a sort of classical trajectory through physics where you learn some algebra and some calculus.\nYou learn about so-called classical mechanics, most of it was invented by, discovered by Newton and Laplace and some others, and then you move on to relativity by Einstein, then you move on to quantum theory, and then it gets more specialized from there.\nNow, the interesting thing here about what David said is that if you're trying to genuinely understand Newton's theory, and you will eventually do feel you have a good grasp of Newton's theory, you've gone through the same process as Newton.\nYou are now as smart as what Newton was, in terms of that theory.\nYou understand the theory, as well as probably better than what Newton did, because Newton didn't understand all the ways in which his theory was actually wrong, and now we do and probably in understanding Newton's theory, you know how some idea, if you understand it well, of the flaws in Newton's theory.\nSo that's really interesting.\nSo I'll say that again in a different way, if you're trying to understand a new actually succeed in understanding, you really feel you've succeeded in comprehending the special theory of relativity, invented by Einstein, discovered by Einstein, then you're just as good as Einstein in terms of that theory, because you've gone through a similar process.\nIf you've actually tried to learn it, you've tried to solve certain problems, at least the scientists who are trying to use the special theory of relativity, let's say, to solve certain practical problems, they will have gone through that process, proper physicists will have gone through that process, proper chemists will have gone through the process that men deliver views in order to understand the periodic table and so on.\nIn the next chapter, chapter 11, the multiverse, which I've been really excited about, completing, it's going to take me some weeks, I think, to do that one, it's about quantum theory.\nIt's about how we best understand quantum theory today.\nIt's controversial, but it's not more controversial than other aspects of just quantum theory once you try and understand it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=486"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a4ef49b5-92fc-4a5b-aa3a-e2228e618ceb": {"page_content": "In the next chapter, chapter 11, the multiverse, which I've been really excited about, completing, it's going to take me some weeks, I think, to do that one, it's about quantum theory.\nIt's about how we best understand quantum theory today.\nIt's controversial, but it's not more controversial than other aspects of just quantum theory once you try and understand it.\nAnd the struggle that people have even today in appreciating what quantum theory is saying about reality and the world that we live in is, during large part two, consulting the original authors of quantum theory, so to speak.\nThey were struggling very much to try and understand what on earth reality was telling us about itself through this theory of quantum physics.\nAnd initially we had all sorts of really weird ideas, people were saying that this kind of suggested things like electrons, atoms even could be both particles, a particle is a thing that is isolated at a place and a time, so it's right here, right now, it's in a particular place and time, it's isolated to a point in other words, that's what a particle is.\nBut atoms and electrons, for example, they're particles, but they can also sometimes be waves simultaneously.\nAnd a wave is not a thing that's isolated at a point in space, a wave is a thing that is extended throughout space.\nSo in other words, quantum theory on this view, and it's sometimes called the Copenhagen interpretation, on this view, on the Copenhagen interpretation, something like an atom is both a particle isolated at a point and a wave extended throughout space, isolated at a point and not isolated at a point simultaneously.\nThat was the original view of quantum theory.\nPeople ever since have consulted the original authors of quantum theory, people like Heisenberg and Dirac and Schrodinger, who were debating all of this at the time and struggling to try and understand what the meaning of all this was.\nMost they're just throwing around ideas, they were making lots of errors.\nAs you do when you're trying to understand something new, the problem now in the culture and the culture of physics in particular is it resembles, to some extent, that mistake that philosophy still makes today, namely consulting the original authors of the theory and trying to see what better insight they had back then.\nAnd their confusion has filtered through to today.\nThere was someone who actually figured out his name was Hugh Everett.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=2218"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d07dd5d-b524-4c8a-80f4-4e274a48ee3d": {"page_content": "Most they're just throwing around ideas, they were making lots of errors.\nAs you do when you're trying to understand something new, the problem now in the culture and the culture of physics in particular is it resembles, to some extent, that mistake that philosophy still makes today, namely consulting the original authors of the theory and trying to see what better insight they had back then.\nAnd their confusion has filtered through to today.\nThere was someone who actually figured out his name was Hugh Everett.\nHe figured out how best to interpret quantum theory, realistically speaking, in other words, in a way that didn't violate logic, in a way that didn't upset the normal understanding of the way in which words are used, so that we can understand quantum theory in a realistic way.\nNow it says some profound and interesting things, but it makes sense even if those things are profound and interesting, anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself because that's going to be in the next chapter.\nNow I just absolutely find a thing for this chapter and addendum to what I said earlier about the different kinds of democracies.\nDavid tweeted, just after I think I recorded that last video where I was trying to explain how certain kinds of democracies might be better than some others, or certain so-called democracies might be better than some others.\nIn particular, I was talking about what I call the excellence of the Westminster system and compared it to certain other systems, namely the EU parliamentary system, in the EU parliamentary system, the parliamentarians there, the members of the European Parliament, can't initiate legislation.\nThe rulers, the people making the rules, they're in the commission, the EU commission, and they create the legislation.\nBut the voters have no way of removing those rulers.\nThe commission people are installed by national governments, and so they're immune to being removed.\nSo if they make a mistake, if they make bad policies, there's nothing that the voters can do about that.\nNow, sometimes people have complained that, oh, well, that's like your queen, that's like a queen in the Commonwealth, okay, the Queen of England, the head of state there.\nNot really.\nBecause again, as I try to explain, the head of state in the Westminster system has zero legislative power.\nThey can't make up policies, okay, they have a certain constitutional function, but they do not make rules.\nAnd so because they don't make policies, there's no reason to try and correct them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1722"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "79f2b75b-48e9-4e9a-87c5-38d9e685db77": {"page_content": "Not really.\nBecause again, as I try to explain, the head of state in the Westminster system has zero legislative power.\nThey can't make up policies, okay, they have a certain constitutional function, but they do not make rules.\nAnd so because they don't make policies, there's no reason to try and correct them.\nNow, there could be things that go wrong in a constitutional monarchy with the monarch, absolutely, okay, absolutely.\nAbsolutely.\nSo the constitutional monarchy, just by looking and observing and trying to explain the world as it is, has shown itself to be a robust institution that allows for great stability under fast progress.\nSo it's no accident, many of us think that the enlightenment and industrial revolution in particular happened in England and in around the United Kingdom.\nHow could you have such great change?.\nWill you change scientific change, cultural change, and yet the society to remain quite stable?.\nWell, we think in certainly in large parts because of this parliamentary democracy in a particular constitutional monarchy.\nNow, an extra thing to say about this, is there a way of, let's say, ranking something like the Westminster system against another good system, like the United States Republic, okay, the United States democratic system or republican system, as they often say, it's a republic rather than a democracy, some people say, it's still a democracy.\nIn pop-as-view, a democracy is nothing but a system which allows the removal of rulers, the purpose of the democracy is the removal of rulers that you don't want there anymore, okay.\nNow, I hint at what I'm about to say in that article that I pointed people to, monarchist versus republicans in Australia, again, you can Google that one, where I actually hint that in Australia there has been a debate over the years about whether or not we should remove the British monarch as a head of state, and instead have a president, a president of Australia, who would be separate to the prime minister of Australia and the rest of the government in Australia.\nNow, I don't completely object to this, but I object to certain models of this, so I say in my article without going back and reading it now, I'll try and do this for memory, I say in part there that certain models of an Australian republic would be a really bad idea.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1722"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "af4202df-b08b-4165-bf71-73021f1893c1": {"page_content": "Now, I don't completely object to this, but I object to certain models of this, so I say in my article without going back and reading it now, I'll try and do this for memory, I say in part there that certain models of an Australian republic would be a really bad idea.\nIf we were to just take out the substitute we have for the head of state, the technical head of state is the Queen, the Queen of Australia, the Queen of India, she's the Queen of Great Britain, she's the Queen, and she's our technical head of state, but who represented even Australia is called the Governor-General of Australia, the Governor-General of Australia can technically remove the government, and it's happened once before, where the Governor-General has removed the prime minister.\nNow, if that works reasonably well, although it was called the constitutional crisis when the prime minister at the time called Gough Whitlam was removed back in the 70s, some people still disagree about that, and there's a whole bunch of material out there about whether it was legal to do and what happened, it's all very interesting, politically speaking, in terms of history, unless Australia has remained politically, relatively stable for a long, long time.\nIn other words, there's been no violent insurrections over the years.\nNow, if we were to just replace the Governor-General as representative of the Queen and have exactly the same position, filled by a President, appointed by the Parliament, because the Governor-General is appointed by the Parliament, and then the Queen approves or something, it's just a matter of ticking off.\nIf we were to have President of Australia instead of Governor-General of Australia and call ourselves a Republic, that wouldn't worry me too much.\nBut some models for an Australian Republic call for a popularly elected President, which I think would be a terrible idea.\nAnd the reason I think it would be a terrible idea is because then you'd have another seat of power.\nIn Australia, we've got the House of Representatives and we have the Australian Senate.\nAnd these two houses form the Parliament of Australia.\nThere's an executive within the Parliament of Australia, but it's not separately elected.\nThe executive is the Prime Minister, Annie's Cabinet, and they're the ones that do the day-to-day business of governing.\nThe Governor-General has absolutely no power to create legislation.\nHe's not a ruler, or she's not a ruler.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1532"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b84f330a-30f6-4c9c-942b-af6e75dd95bd": {"page_content": "In Australia, we've got the House of Representatives and we have the Australian Senate.\nAnd these two houses form the Parliament of Australia.\nThere's an executive within the Parliament of Australia, but it's not separately elected.\nThe executive is the Prime Minister, Annie's Cabinet, and they're the ones that do the day-to-day business of governing.\nThe Governor-General has absolutely no power to create legislation.\nHe's not a ruler, or she's not a ruler.\nAll they do is if there's a crisis, a constitutional crisis, they can create another election, okay, or in fact remove the entire government and put the opposition in if the opposition can form a government.\nOkay, don't want to get into the nuances of that.\nIf you had an elected President here in Australia, you'd have the Senate, you'd have the House of Representatives, and then you'd have an elected President.\nLet's say the policies of the Government of the Prime Minister and of the House of Representatives differed starkly from the policies of the President of Australia.\nThe President of Australia, if they're popular elected, would be popularly elected during an election where they're standing up in front of the TV cameras and so on and giving interviews about why they're the best person and why they're the best person would have to come down to what ideas they have for Australia.\nThey would have policies about what's the best.\nSo now you've got a problem.\nIf you have a popularly elected President in Australia and a popularly elected government led by a Prime Minister, if there was a difference of opinion, what do you do?.\nAnd what would the population do if the Prime Minister was constantly in disagreeing with the President and could the President remove the Prime Minister if there's a sufficient disagreement?.\nAnd would they just be if they're from different parties just constantly removing one another?.\nWould it just be a constitutional crisis almost all the time?.\nLet's consider what's happening right now.\nI'm recording this in 2020.\nThe President of the United States is currently under impeachment and the process is going through the American Senate.\nThis is distracting from the normal business of government.\nIt's for some people, for some anarchists out there, this is a good thing.\nIt's slowing down the ability of the government to actually do anything useful.\nAnd by useful, some anarchists, some certain people who don't really buy the idea that states are necessarily a good thing as in large state apparatus.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1122"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c861396e-c38c-4875-a4a8-5e85f94aacf9": {"page_content": "I'm recording this in 2020.\nThe President of the United States is currently under impeachment and the process is going through the American Senate.\nThis is distracting from the normal business of government.\nIt's for some people, for some anarchists out there, this is a good thing.\nIt's slowing down the ability of the government to actually do anything useful.\nAnd by useful, some anarchists, some certain people who don't really buy the idea that states are necessarily a good thing as in large state apparatus.\nSo if you can slow down the government from doing stuff, they're actually slowing down the government from impeding progress or leave that aside.\nFor the purpose of a functioning government, the problem then becomes that you have various seats of power and these various seats of power mean that none that all of them can deny responsibility when things go wrong.\nI just want you read David Deutsches tweet back on the 24th of January 2020 and he wrote in his tweet, having an elected executive independent of the legislature is already bad.\ndissipates responsibility away from both.\nDon't know how to fix that.\nHe's talking about the United States here and he rather Riley suggests, consider amending the constitution to revert to a parliamentary system and inviting Harry and Meghan to be king and queen.\nSo possible, but what he's saying there and I tend to agree is that the United States does great democracy, the United Kingdom great democracy, but really objectively speaking, one is more democratic than the other.\nThe West Minsta parliamentary system is better.\nWhy?.\nBecause when a mistake is made by the rulers, by the government as a whole in some way, there's a clear accountability on the part of the West Minsta system in terms of the government.\nThe government and the House of Commons in particular are the people responsible for what's going wrong.\nIn the United States, you have Congress and you have the Senate and you also have the independently elected executive, namely the president.\nAnd so when the Congress and the president as is happening right now are at loggerheads, less happens and this happened under Obama as well.\nAnd it happened under Clinton.\nIt's happened again and again in the United States.\nNow some might see this as a virtue because it slows down the ability of the government to actually do too much in theory, in practice, however, many people are worried about just how much the United States government is doing.\nThe federal government is doing, I think they should be doing less.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=540"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "558861dd-fd87-4a88-8641-b72cbe4e5012": {"page_content": "And it happened under Clinton.\nIt's happened again and again in the United States.\nNow some might see this as a virtue because it slows down the ability of the government to actually do too much in theory, in practice, however, many people are worried about just how much the United States government is doing.\nThe federal government is doing, I think they should be doing less.\nAgain, the point of government on purpose view is that it is a system for removing rulers with no violence.\nAnd the rulers we want to remove are the rulers who've made policy mistakes over time.\nBut if you've got distributed power such that the president, let's say, is popular elected and the Congress is popular elected and both can kind of come up with rules.\nThe president can regulate and the Congress can legislate.\nThen the difficult theory varies.\nIf there's a problem arising, whatever that problem is out there in reality, in Australia right now we have a drought going on and there's various different policies about what we should do to try and conserve water or to create some more water by desalination and so on.\nWhen there's a real problem out there in the world for which government might be a useful solution or might be able to bring to bear a useful solution.\nIf I was to migrate this problem to the United States, the president might be able to make some regulations about what should happen with the water.\nThe Congress might be able to make some legislation about building dams and so on.\nAnd when these two things are at loggerheads who are on another, when they disagree with one another, then both sides can say it's the other person's fault.\nSo they are immune to a certain amount of responsibility.\nWhen in reality what you want from a political leader is the ability to come up with a policy, they then get voted for, they enact the policy.\nAnd if the policy fails, then it is clearly their responsibility.\nThey can't turn around and say, oh, I did my best, but it was the other mob with power that was the problem.\nIn fact, here in Australia right now, there in fact is a version of this where there is the federal government and there's the state government.\nAnd the federal government and the state government are complaining when it comes to bushfires that have been happening.\nAnd for example, the drought situation I was just talking about where both of these seats of power have responsibility for the same thing in a sense.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=486"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "883fec9e-844a-4d03-98ed-b7d8e7bd9fa9": {"page_content": "In fact, here in Australia right now, there in fact is a version of this where there is the federal government and there's the state government.\nAnd the federal government and the state government are complaining when it comes to bushfires that have been happening.\nAnd for example, the drought situation I was just talking about where both of these seats of power have responsibility for the same thing in a sense.\nAnd so they're both complaining that it's the other mob who is actually in charge of this.\nAnd it's the other mob who should be held responsible for things going wrong, for the problems that are happening.\nOr because the institutions are not perfectly in line with Papa's criterion of democracy.\nNamely, they have to be able to be removed on the basis that their policies are bad.\nAnd if their policies are bad, then we can clearly identify that it is that group of leaders that is responsible.\nOkay.\nSo won't be talking politics for a quite a long time now because I'm onto the multiverse completely abstracted away from anything to do with droughts and political systems to a large extent.\nSo look forward to that one in a few weeks.\nUntil then, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd9lpkVaA8&t=1874"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bfef6895-ae52-4de6-b6c4-e751974cf241": {"page_content": "Ah, this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.\nWell, thank you to Mr Churchill and welcome to episode 57, the beginning, chapter 18 of the beginning of infinity, titled The Beginning.\nSo I guess to be fair, it wouldn't be until next episode or the episode after that, possibly when we get to the end of the beginning of the end of the beginning of infinity, or the end of the beginning, which is the chapter called the beginning, which comes at the end of the beginning of infinity.\nConfused?.\nBut it is only the end of the beginning of infinity, so far as I'm concerned, because there are so many more interesting things going on with the beginning of infinity right now.\nAnd if you head over to Naval Revocance channel on YouTube, and you can find the beginnings of a new podcast series that it's been out for a few weeks now, and we're planning on taking that on for another many episodes, I'm not sure exactly how many, but this conversation that Naval and I had is being put into podcast format, and we're going to have a number of these other conversations as well, further unpacking the beginning of infinity.\nAnd perhaps trying to explain it in terminology that is even more accessible than what I've been able to do here.\nSo go there and begin the beginning of infinity explorations all over again, if you like.\nAnd further also on Naval's channel there, you can find some conversations that I've had on this new thing called Clubhouse.\nThere are links there to our long conversations or more with myself and Naval and some other people exploring the ideas that I've been talking about here.\nSo this is all just getting started.\nAnd there are some other projects in the pipeline that Naval and I have that we're very excited about in bringing to fruition more beginning of infinity type themes.\nNaval has a real beginning of infinity mindset.\nHe's one of these rare people in business who has a contrarian mindset to a large extent, contrarian about both the typical academic culture and the typical business culture as well.\nAnd so this comes together in his love for the beginning of infinity because these ideas are about the infinite future, which is something that Naval and David Deutsch have converged upon.\nAnd it seems to be a wonderful meeting of minds that's just commencing now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d7d49a08-08b0-45b9-af99-9e26aa4c5506": {"page_content": "Naval has a real beginning of infinity mindset.\nHe's one of these rare people in business who has a contrarian mindset to a large extent, contrarian about both the typical academic culture and the typical business culture as well.\nAnd so this comes together in his love for the beginning of infinity because these ideas are about the infinite future, which is something that Naval and David Deutsch have converged upon.\nAnd it seems to be a wonderful meeting of minds that's just commencing now.\nSo I'm looking forward to see what's going to come of the encounter between the ideas of Naval and the ideas of David Deutsch.\nWhat kind of new people might be inspired to really take seriously what both of these impressive people are saying?.\nAnd it just so appropriate today that I am making this episode because today Sam Harris, the neuroscientist podcaster, released another one of his making sense podcast.\nAnd that is titled Food, Climate and Pandemic Risk.\nAnd there is some interesting solutions in there about the ethics of eating meat, which I have my own views on, but which I know many people are very concerned about the possibility that animals might be suffering in the production of meat through factory farming and so on.\nNow there are interesting solutions that Sam is interested in promoting about how to artificially create meat in the laboratory.\nAnd I think this is a great idea for a number of reasons, not least of which is well, it's just an innovative idea and more power to people who come up with innovative ideas where there is a place in the market where people might be able to make a lot of money in order to then go on and fund other interesting innovative ideas.\nBut more than that, any of these kind of ways in which we can figure out how to more efficiently, I suppose, create food and feed even more people more cheaply than that's great.\nSolving some of these problems of poverty in certain places where some people don't get enough of whatever nutrient in their diet, especially protein in their diet.\nAnd so if we can do this via some mass production method where it's cheaper, ultimately, in the long run, speaking then having to raise cows and sheep and that old technology of animals and instead have just a factory pumping out steaks and pumping out chicken fillets and pumping out your lamb chops, then isn't that a wonderful idea?.\nThat's great.\nThat's fantastic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=120"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e294430-ba46-44c5-aa01-18839027e338": {"page_content": "And so if we can do this via some mass production method where it's cheaper, ultimately, in the long run, speaking then having to raise cows and sheep and that old technology of animals and instead have just a factory pumping out steaks and pumping out chicken fillets and pumping out your lamb chops, then isn't that a wonderful idea?.\nThat's great.\nThat's fantastic.\nBut I bring it up because I listened to the entirety of the podcast and although they were interesting and optimistic ways in which technology might be used in order to solve this problem, it was interesting that the speakers seemed a time to regret the fact that it came down to a technological solution.\nThat the technological solution was only necessary because they couldn't find a political way in order to persuade everyone that what they were doing was wrong in this regard, namely that we are all terribly immoral, we who eat meat, or that we aren't concerned or taken seriously enough, the existential threat of climate change, although we simply didn't have our morals calibrated and precisely the correct way that these people thought that we should.\nAnd my last podcast, the episode before this was just a kind of lighthearted to some extent, exploration of existential risk.\nAnd the reason why it was lighthearted was because sometimes some of us do get frustrated with the identification of particular problems as being the way in which civilization is going to go off the rails.\nBut the thing is that if you know there's a problem, even if you have a hint of there being a problem, then human beings will begin to course correct, they'll begin to correct their errors.\nTo the extent that they think it really is an existential threat and during the conversation that Sam had with his guests, they were really upset about the fact that the pandemic, the COVID-19 virus pandemic that happened through 2019, 2020 and throughout 2021, wasn't responded too sufficiently quickly and they thought this was a cause for a certain amount of despair and that wasn't either shame that people didn't respond faster.\nNow on the one hand, I can kind of agree, it's always better if we can respond to any given problem faster than what we did, so the suffering is less.\nBut I think the correct lens through which to look at this pandemic is that it was a pandemic that we solved faster than any other pandemic hitherto that has ever existed or affected people before.\nThat globally, we managed to globally coordinate this response in very, very quickly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=241"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90465918-f3f7-4d95-88a4-24ed2cfcbcc9": {"page_content": "Now on the one hand, I can kind of agree, it's always better if we can respond to any given problem faster than what we did, so the suffering is less.\nBut I think the correct lens through which to look at this pandemic is that it was a pandemic that we solved faster than any other pandemic hitherto that has ever existed or affected people before.\nThat globally, we managed to globally coordinate this response in very, very quickly.\nI thought that the example of the way in which the world responded to COVID-19 broadly speaking was a cause for optimism, a cause for hope, a cause for thinking that should we encounter this kind of thing again, we'll be able to respond even more quickly.\nThat's the lesson of this, that the accelerating rate at which human beings are able to collaborate and can't with solutions like that seems is a cause for celebration, not despair, but this is just the usual mode in which intellectuals, public academics tend to respond to any kind of problem, as if it's a source of despair that we didn't find the solution quickly enough.\nBut it's as if they don't know or unaware of and simply forget that problems are inevitable.\nThe problems will continue to happen all the time and anyone particular problem that's been identified, there is a flip side to being concerned about the fact that it might cause our demise.\nThe flip side is, hey, we actually identified this thing in time, because we should all of us be far more concerned about the thing we do not yet know about, about the problem that is we are yet to encounter.\nAnd so the problems that we do know about, I think they are by virtue of the fact that we know about them, for all the more reason, less likely to wipe us out at all.\nAnd every day that goes by that we're aware of this particular problem, it becomes less likely that that particular problem is going to in truth be an existential threat to us.\nThat insofar as climate change could cause some sort of economic catastrophe, that alone environmental catastrophe, the more that that becomes clear, if it becomes more clear, perhaps it will be turned over, we don't know yet, we don't know exactly what the future will hold.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=377"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5957c6f5-e12b-4720-8755-a997c41c88a8": {"page_content": "And every day that goes by that we're aware of this particular problem, it becomes less likely that that particular problem is going to in truth be an existential threat to us.\nThat insofar as climate change could cause some sort of economic catastrophe, that alone environmental catastrophe, the more that that becomes clear, if it becomes more clear, perhaps it will be turned over, we don't know yet, we don't know exactly what the future will hold.\nBut insofar as it continues to persist to be a problem globally and to cause environmental issues that scientists seem to be able to agree, and other thinkers seem to be able to agree, is actually the cause of certain problems that are happening right now today, for example, certain weather events, certain sea level rises, certain declines in agricultural production, I don't think there has been any declines in agricultural production, by the way, just keeps on increasing.\nThat every day that goes by, it is less likely that we will, in the face of this, just ignore it, that the people of the world will just continue to so-called ignore it or so-called down-platform.\nI don't think they are.\nIf anything, putting my cards on that table, at certain times I think there might be a tendency to overreaction, a tendency to hysteria.\nI think that can sometimes be more of a problem than the problem itself, the hyperbole, because what the hyperbole does, what hysteria tends to do, is persuade no one.\nIt frightens a whole bunch of people on the one hand, and it completely turns off a whole bunch of other people on the other, because if your hysterical predictions don't come true, within the time frame that you said that they will, then what does any reasonable person do in that situation?.\nWhen they are not experts, when they are lay people, well, they tend to switch off from listening to you in the future, even if you are an expert, even if you are a scientist, who is the best qualified person to actually explain what is likely to happen given this particular scientific theory of, for example, the climate.\nIt's not that we need to accept that sometimes scientists get things wrong, and everyone needs to be taught that.\nIt's that the scientists themselves, when making a prediction, have to very carefully calibrate the language that they use surrounding that prediction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=475"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2f4a797f-9d08-448f-9e75-3400ca40055d": {"page_content": "It's not that we need to accept that sometimes scientists get things wrong, and everyone needs to be taught that.\nIt's that the scientists themselves, when making a prediction, have to very carefully calibrate the language that they use surrounding that prediction.\nIf they say things like, for example, all the dams are going to run out of water by 2020, and we're all going to be in a serious situation where we can't even find drinking water.\nThis was said in Australia, by the way, by some experts, back in 2005 or 2010.\nAnd when that does not come to pass, and in fact, we end up having floods, if the same experts turn around and say, well, it's not the drought that came due to climate change, but rather the floods, in other words, any set of weather events that occur can be attributed to climate change.\nIt is quite understandable that people begin to switch off, which brings me to academics today of all different stripes, who make similar noises about the ways in which there's going to be demise on planet Earth.\nThere's going to be regression on planet Earth.\nThere's going to be technological demise.\nThere's going to be increasing amounts of starvation.\nIf we don't do this or that other thing, that was somewhat hinted at in the episode of making sense today released April 6, 2021, if you're interested in having a listen to that.\nThe idea was that if we didn't go down the road of this particular solution, namely laboratory creation of particular kinds of meat, which I think there's nothing wrong with, by the way, but if we didn't choose to go down that road, then there would be massive amounts of starvation.\nThis is the typical Malthusian argument, namely that because there's a finite amount of land, but the amount of people on the Earth continues to grow, logically speaking, we can only support so many people given the amount of land, but this has always been shown to be false.\nWe had vertical farms now, by the way.\nI talked about that in another episode, vertical farming largely for the purpose of growing vegetables and plans, but there's no reason why you couldn't have a vertical farm of chickens and cows.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=602"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eef7bae8-7ba8-4489-8932-3334cec04cdd": {"page_content": "We had vertical farms now, by the way.\nI talked about that in another episode, vertical farming largely for the purpose of growing vegetables and plans, but there's no reason why you couldn't have a vertical farm of chickens and cows.\nNow, of course, I know I understand the animal rights people would be horrified if we had a skyscraper full of chickens and cows and sheep, but I'm just saying that this is the kind of thing where if only one solution is proposed to be the solution to any particular problem, it leads to this pessimistic idea and this kind of authoritarian totalitarianism where the person with the purported solution says, if you do not enact my solution, then things will go catastrophically wrong.\nIt's an existential threat.\nBut this is just a failure of imagination on the part of certain public intellectuals.\nThere will always be human creativity, which can find alternate solutions to particular things.\nAnd what does this have to do with today's episode?.\nWell, the beginning, even though we continue to have people who say things look terrible for humanity, things are getting worse.\nIf we don't solve this problem, we're going to go extinct.\nThis has always been said.\nThere are very few thinkers throughout recent history who like David Deutsch have promoted the idea that human creativity can and has been used and will continue to be used to solve the most pressing problems.\nAnd who've observed that it is enlightenment ideas that have existed for the last few centuries, they explain why things continue to get better.\nThere's an explanation as to why it's not merely a trend of getting better.\nNow, Stephen Pinker writes about the trend and all the examples of how it is that things have gotten better.\nIt's not that it's inevitable that it gets better, but there is an underlying explanation about, as the beginning infinity lays out for us, a culture of criticism, of people thinking of new ideas and being able to think of new ideas because they're free to think of these new ideas.\nThey've been trained in a certain extent, educated in a culture that says it's okay to criticize these ideas, not to say that we couldn't do a lot better on that front, but we have begun to reveal how it is that we generate new ideas, how we're able to innovate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=722"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "da677538-d7f7-40b8-a79b-b69ff19087d6": {"page_content": "And we have people who, in real life, actually do this, who innovate, who identify people who innovate, like Naval rubber can, then isn't it all the more exciting and wonderful that we actually have a genuine concrete way in which the beginning infinity can inform our worldview, personally, individually, in terms of the corporate world, and in terms of governments and other kinds of institutions that can explore the space of possibilities in a positive, optimistic way without being concerned and sidetracked about all the ways in which people are either the cause of the problem, people themselves are an evil in some way, or that there is almost no hope and that what we have to do is to merely reduce the amount that we're producing, reduce the amount of energy that we're using, concentrate purely on efficiency gains wherever we can because we're running out of resources, which again was mentioned today.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=862"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d4e6e5e7-9871-48be-b313-93de69f07885": {"page_content": "We're not running out of resources, we talked about that during the previous chapter.\nLet's, after this extremely long introduction, get into the reading of the beginning, chapter 18, which is the final chapter of the beginning of the beginning.\nLet's go.\nAnd David begins with a quote from Isaac Asimov in his book, The End of Eternity, published in 1955, where Asimov wrote, This is Earth, not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting point of an infinite adventure.\nAll you need to do is make the decision to end your static society.\nIt is yours to make.\nWith that decision came the end, the final end of eternity and the beginning of infinity.\nAnd then David goes on to write.\nThe first person to measure this conference of the earth was the astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene in the 3rd century BCE.\nHis result was fairly close to the actual value, which is around 40,000 kilometres.\nFor most of history, this was considered an enormous distance, but with the enlightenment, that conception gradually changed nowadays, we think of the earth as small.\nThis was brought about mainly by two things, first by the science of astronomy, which discovered titanic entities compared with which our planet is indeed unimaginably tiny, and second by technologies that have made worldwide travelling communication commonplace.\nSo the earth has become smaller, both relative to the universe and relative to the scale of human action.\nOkay, just pausing there as a little side comment here.\nHow did Eratosthenes figure out the circumference of the earth in like 200 BC, something like that?.\nSo how he did it was he had heard, purportedly, he heard that there's town called Cyrene, and in this town called Cyrene, in Egypt, there was a well, and the well, one day during the year, this well, the sun above it, cast no shadow.\nIt just shone straight down into the well, so you could see the very bottom of the well, which is interesting in red, so rare, and I mean, it could one day of the year of purportedly.\nNow he wasn't in Cyrene, he was in another town, the city rather, called Alexandria, and in those days the unit of measurement was the stadium, so the distance between the place where the well was casting no shadow, and Alexandria was about 5,000 stadia.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5fbe6d95-8800-43ad-8bf8-8e835d023b7f": {"page_content": "It just shone straight down into the well, so you could see the very bottom of the well, which is interesting in red, so rare, and I mean, it could one day of the year of purportedly.\nNow he wasn't in Cyrene, he was in another town, the city rather, called Alexandria, and in those days the unit of measurement was the stadium, so the distance between the place where the well was casting no shadow, and Alexandria was about 5,000 stadia.\nAnd so what Eratosthenes' method involved, and school children do this now, was to take a stick of some sort, put that in the ground, and then measure the length of the shadow that that stick cast at noon on that same particular day.\nThe length of that shadow, trigonometry, gives you a particular angle at the time, actually the angle that he got was about 7.2 degrees, which is about 150th of an entire circle.\nSo he knew that if he knew the distance from Alexandria to Cyrene to Cyrene, which he knew, which he knew, and he got within, I think, a few percent of what the actual value of the circumference of the earth was.\nOkay, back to the book, and David Wright's.\nThus in regard to the geography of the universe and to our place in it, the prevailing worldview has rid itself of some parochial misconceptions.\nWe know that we have explored most of the whole surface of that formerly enormous sphere, but we also know that there are far more places left to explore in the universe and beneath the surface of the earth's land and oceans than anyone imagined while we still had those misconceptions.\nIn regard to theoretical knowledge, however, the prevailing worldview has not yet caught up with enlightenment values.\nThanks to the fallacy and bias of prophecy, a persistent assumption remains that our existing theories are at, or fairly close to, the limit of what is knowable, that we are nearly there, or perhaps halfway there.\nAs the economist David Friedman has remarked, most people believe that an income of about twice their own should be sufficient to satisfy any reasonable person, and that no genuine benefit can be derived from amounts above that.\nAs with wealth, so with scientific knowledge, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to know twice as much as we do, and so if we try to prophesy it, we find ourselves just picturing the next few decimal places of what we already know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1057"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "69e10629-2cbc-498a-944f-2405aad4771a": {"page_content": "As the economist David Friedman has remarked, most people believe that an income of about twice their own should be sufficient to satisfy any reasonable person, and that no genuine benefit can be derived from amounts above that.\nAs with wealth, so with scientific knowledge, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to know twice as much as we do, and so if we try to prophesy it, we find ourselves just picturing the next few decimal places of what we already know.\nEven Feynman made an uncharacteristic mistake in disregard when he wrote, quote from Feynman, I think there will certainly not be novelty say for a thousand years.\nThis thing cannot keep going on so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws.\nIf we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels, one underneath the other.\nWe are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries.\nIt is like the discovery of America.\nYou only discover it once.\nFeynman, the character of physical law, 1965, paused there just my reflection quickly.\nNo, it's not like the discovery of America at all.\nNo, no, it's more akin, I suppose, to the discovery that there are other galaxies.\nNow, it used to be thought that the Milky Way galaxy was the entirety of the universe.\nand then it became clear that there were indeed other galaxies, islands of stars, just like our own.\nFar beyond the Milky Way galaxy and once we kind of realized that it gradually became a realization to us that there were just many, many, many more galaxies, hundreds of billions perhaps an infinite number of galaxies.\nAnd in the same way, our theoretical knowledge, our knowledge of science, our knowledge of philosophy has no bottom to it.\nThere's no final foundation that we can get to.\nEvery time we dig a little further and find something more and new and interesting, we can ask the question, why that and why is it that way and can it be improved in some way and it can, it can.\nBut it is the rare person that thinks or takes seriously that idea.\nSome people pay lip service to it and in some modes appear to be fallibleists or who believe in progress.\nBut so many people, the overwhelming majority of people, certainly the overwhelming majority of public intellectuals, think that as David just explained there, we're almost there that we're, we're just about at the end of physics or the end of scientific the end of science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1175"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6fff6714-ff80-4c86-b358-c6e994c7332f": {"page_content": "But it is the rare person that thinks or takes seriously that idea.\nSome people pay lip service to it and in some modes appear to be fallibleists or who believe in progress.\nBut so many people, the overwhelming majority of people, certainly the overwhelming majority of public intellectuals, think that as David just explained there, we're almost there that we're, we're just about at the end of physics or the end of scientific the end of science.\nAs David is going to come to quite a famous book called The End of Science by John Horgan about, all the ways in which progress must necessarily come to an end in some way.\nAnd these are the sentiments of, I would say, a majority of physicists that we've got, for example, the standard model of particle physics.\nOkay, this is the explanation of all the different particles in the way in which they interact one with another.\nAnd it seems as though many think that we are just about there, we might have to find the graviton.\nOkay, the particle, that is the particle, the smallest particle of gravity.\nAnd then we'll just about have everything.\nAnd maybe we'll need a few other particles as well, but essentially we're almost there, we're almost done.\nOr perhaps it is that there's a layer beneath the standard model, maybe it's string theory, but once we figure out what all the modes of vibration of the particular strings are, then we'll be done.\nAnd, you know, that'll be the end of particle physics, that'll be end of the fundamental physics.\nThis is why we have Michio Karka releasing a book just very recently called The God Equation.\nAnd The God Equation is something that even Paul Davies talks about in his books, which is the final equation, the final explanation, so to speak, of fundamental physics, about how all the forces actually interact.\nThis is supposed to be the final theory of physics.\nAt the moment, we've got a unification, and the physicists have figured out how to unify magnetism and electricity.\nSo we have this single force electromagnetism now.\nAnd then some smart people figured out that, well, you can actually unify another force called the weak force.\nThe weak force is the force that helps to explain what's going on during radioactive decay, for example, how you can have electrons coming out of the nucleus, interesting process, among other things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1306"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "48a0c5b8-b2ff-44fd-922f-d0727a7eb506": {"page_content": "At the moment, we've got a unification, and the physicists have figured out how to unify magnetism and electricity.\nSo we have this single force electromagnetism now.\nAnd then some smart people figured out that, well, you can actually unify another force called the weak force.\nThe weak force is the force that helps to explain what's going on during radioactive decay, for example, how you can have electrons coming out of the nucleus, interesting process, among other things.\nAnd this weak force can actually be united with the electromagnetic force, and so we have the electro-weak force, and some people won the Nobel Prize for figuring out the electro-weak force.\nAnd so what we have to do now is to figure out, well, how do we unify the strong nuclear force, the force that keeps the nucleus together, with the electro-weak force?.\nAnd once we have this, we have the electro-weak strong force or something like that.\nAnd this would be called a grand unified theory.\nBut that grand unified theory would still be leading out gravity.\nNow, we know from general relativity that gravity is not a force.\nHowever, these people who are kind of particle physics fundamentalists think that everything must be ultimately constituted of particles, and so there must be a particle that mediates the gravitational force, even though it's not a force.\nAnd when we have that, then we'll have a unification of the electro-weak strong force with gravity, and that will be a so-called theory of everything.\nAnd David talks about that right at the beginning of the fabric of reality as well, that this wouldn't be a theory of everything, because you've always asked why there's that have that form that it does.\nThere would be layers beneath it.\nThere would be no end to trying to understand physics once we have this so-called theory of everything if indeed it's possible to have a theory of everything.\nSo far, all attempts via this route to continue to unify the forces to unify these forces with gravity have failed.\nBut let's go back to the book and David writes.\nAmong other things, Feynman forgot that the very concept of a law of nature is not cast in stone.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1413"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "686b8701-aa39-4b3f-b280-56381a3bb807": {"page_content": "There would be layers beneath it.\nThere would be no end to trying to understand physics once we have this so-called theory of everything if indeed it's possible to have a theory of everything.\nSo far, all attempts via this route to continue to unify the forces to unify these forces with gravity have failed.\nBut let's go back to the book and David writes.\nAmong other things, Feynman forgot that the very concept of a law of nature is not cast in stone.\nAs I mentioned in chapter five, this concept was different before Newton and Galileo, and it may change again the concept of levels of explanation dates from the 20th century, and it too will change if I am right, then as I guessed in chapter five, there are fundamental laws that look emergent relative to microscopic physics.\nMore generally, the most fundamental discoveries have always, and will always, not only consist of new explanations, but new modes of explanation.\nAs for being boring, that is merely a prophecy that criteria for judging problems will not evolve as fast as the problems themselves, but there is no argument for that other than a failure of imagination.\nEven Feynman cannot get around the fact that the future is not yet imaginable.\nJust on this pausing there, just my reflection on this, just on this distinction between fundamental and emergent, and it's my reading of David Deutsch's work that has made me think these two concepts are not really at odds.\nThere can be emergent laws, in other words, laws that come from the art workings of the laws of physics, or principles that come from the art workings of the laws of physics.\nThey emerge from, but they're still fundamental.\nIn other words, fundamental, but that we consider, appear in many different fields in the explanations of many different kinds of disparate phenomena.\nTake, for example, evolution by natural selection.\nThat process, neo-Darwinism, if you like, this process of where the selfish genes of ours intends to get itself replicated.\nThat is a fundamental law, but it's also emergent.\nIt's both fundamental and emergent.\nThese two things do not have to be, do not have to contradict one another.\nIt is required in order to explain all of biology.\nOne would dare say.\nSo it is fundamental within that domain.\nIt may be even more fundamental than that, we don't know.\nBut the thing is, it certainly emerged.\nIt emerged from, well, it came after the Big Bang.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1498"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5ae15b35-e8d2-4193-aa35-0662e213ef78": {"page_content": "That is a fundamental law, but it's also emergent.\nIt's both fundamental and emergent.\nThese two things do not have to be, do not have to contradict one another.\nIt is required in order to explain all of biology.\nOne would dare say.\nSo it is fundamental within that domain.\nIt may be even more fundamental than that, we don't know.\nBut the thing is, it certainly emerged.\nIt emerged from, well, it came after the Big Bang.\nIt came after, you know, once we had complex chemistry, it emerged somehow out of that.\nWe don't know exactly how, how the process arose, but the process did arise.\nIt did emerge from fundamental physics, but itself is fundamental.\nFor all we know, the laws of physics mandate that evolution by natural selection must obtain.\nAlso, my favorite example of this is the existence of people and what a person is.\nA person is fundamentally important in the technical sense of fundamental, namely that they have effects upon every other domain that is conceivable in principle.\nThey have effects upon planets.\nThey can have an effect on chemistry.\nThey have an effect, they have an effect on ecosystems and biology.\nThey have an effect on how knowledge is created.\nIn fact, they are unavoidably necessary in the explanation of how explanatory knowledge arises.\nYou need to have a person there.\nSo I am starting to think that people are really deeply fundamental to the cosmos, maybe like human beings, but people.\nAnd maybe the laws of physics are such that no matter how if you rewound the type of the universe that you consistently get people arising, I don't know, there doesn't appear to be evidence for that, but here's a philosophical argument that that might be the case because at the moment, we human beings being the only people that we know of appear to have this effect on every other physical system that we are aware of, to some extent.\nEvery other physical system on the planet that we are aware of, to some extent, eventually we are going to have effects on every physical system in the solar system, the galaxy and so on.\nSo people are fundamental in a deep sense.\nAt the same time, of course, we are emergent.\nWe are very, very emergent.\nWe are one of the most emergent structures that exist as well, but still fundamental.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1653"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2b8a14d-6314-4a7e-85fc-169541d483e1": {"page_content": "And just on the idea of new modes of explanation, so a mode of explanation would be something like, well, prior to evolution by natural selection, this idea that things can compete one with another and one can be more fit in a particular environment and cause itself to be replicated more frequently than another, which might die out, this unit of the selection in this case is a gene, but there wasn't always known to be a gene, it was thought to be maybe a particular individual in a species, so on and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1757"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ca81eadc-f4cd-412d-a403-cf61f72b3a73": {"page_content": "This is a new mode of explanation.\nNo one had thought of that way of explaining things prior to evolution by natural selection.\nBut eventually, that mode of explanation is probably a precondition, is a precondition in some sense to pop a zone idea about how knowledge is created and knowledge tends to spread.\nIt's not a perfect analogy, but it's within that same similar mode of explanation, but Popper, of course, applies it to the abstract ideas of knowledge, whereas Darwin, of course, was applying it to the very physical, very physical existence of species.\nOkay, back to the book, David writes, shedding that kind of parochialism is something that will have to be done again and again in the future.\nA level of knowledge, wealth, computer power, or physical scale that seems absurdly huge in any given instant, will later be pathetically tiny.\nYet we shall never reach anything like an unproblematic state, like the guests at Infinity Hotel, we shall never be nearly there.\nThere are two versions of nearly there.\nIn the dismal version, knowledge is bounded by the laws of nature or supernatural decree and progress has been a temporary phase.\nThough this is rank pessimism by my definition, it has gone under various names, including optimism, and has been integral to most world views in the past, pause their my reflection, integral to perhaps most world views in the present, I would say as well, as David goes on to say, quote, he writes, in the cheerful version, all remaining ignorance will soon be eliminated or confined to insignificant areas.\nThis is optimistic and form, but the closer one looks, the more pessimistic it becomes in substance.\nIn politics, for instance, utopian's promise that a finite number of already known changes can bring about a perfected human state.\nAnd that is a well-known recipe for dogmatism and tyranny, pause their just to unpack that.\nSo he says that utopians in the political sense, promise that a finite number of already known changes can bring about a perfected human state.\nAnd that is a well-known recipe for dogmatism and tyranny.\nYes, so so anytime you hear any of the ways in which to organize society that will provide a final answer to suffering and to human wants, okay, which is just pick on communism.\nCommunism purports to be the system where everyone will get their fair Jew, and that will be the end of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1800"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c4e0ef3c-7c12-4353-85c5-8f347991c1d1": {"page_content": "And that is a well-known recipe for dogmatism and tyranny.\nYes, so so anytime you hear any of the ways in which to organize society that will provide a final answer to suffering and to human wants, okay, which is just pick on communism.\nCommunism purports to be the system where everyone will get their fair Jew, and that will be the end of it.\nThey'll bring about a kind of perfected human state, this Marxist idea.\nAnd so therefore you need to do what you can to implement this and that leads to dogmatism and tyranny.\nUnlike the alternative view, the alternative view is just freedom, allowing people to pursue their own happiness and wealth.\nAnd we don't expect there to be perfection at any point.\nWe expect just gradual incremental improvement, far better than stasis, far better than this idea that we have the final utopian view where everyone will have what they need to the extent they need it.\nAnd so, you know, this utopian ideal is perfectly summarized by, you know, Karl Marx, Karl Marx comes up with this, this, this, this quip from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.\nAnd so the idea there that, you know, the communist regime would solve the problem of how to fairly and equally distribute goods and services and capital and so on.\nAnd so everyone will have enough, enough for their needs, but you will have never have enough for your needs.\nYou will always have more needs and that's a great thing.\nYou will always change your mind, your interests, you will always need more.\nAnd that's a really good thing.\nYou'll always want to improve your computer, your car, the kind of food that you eat, the fashion you're interested in, the kind of entertainment you pursue.\nThese needs should be unending in their change in the way in which they adapt according to people's new inventions.\nAnd so there can be no final solution to what people's needs are.\nAnd people with these kinds of political ideas, think that, as David says, there's just a finite number of steps in order to get us there.\nWe'll just change this, we'll change that, we'll change that.\nAnd then we'll instantiate this perfect society, this perfect way of organizing people so that they have precisely what they need, but they can't be given precisely what they need.\nAnd they're what there shouldn't be a finite number of changes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=1930"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "770bb1a4-bfb5-461c-a116-43f325820562": {"page_content": "And people with these kinds of political ideas, think that, as David says, there's just a finite number of steps in order to get us there.\nWe'll just change this, we'll change that, we'll change that.\nAnd then we'll instantiate this perfect society, this perfect way of organizing people so that they have precisely what they need, but they can't be given precisely what they need.\nAnd they're what there shouldn't be a finite number of changes.\nBecause we know that we need to change all the time, we need to be able to adapt and be fast in our adaptation given that the problems that will come are always unpredictable, inevitable, and we don't know what direction they're coming from.\nSo we need to allow them the agility to change whatever they're doing at any given point in time, their needs will change at any given point in time as well.\nAll right, back to the book, David writes, in physics, imagine that Lagrange had been right that the system of the world can only be discovered once or that Mickelson had been right that all physics still undiscovered in 1894 was about the sixth place of decimals.\nThey were claiming to know that anyone who subsequently became curious about what underlay that system of the world would be inquiring futilely into the incomprehensible and that anyone who ever wondered at an anomaly and suspected that some fundamental explanation contained a misconception would be mistaken.\nMickelson's future, our present, would have been lacking in explanatory knowledge to an extent that we can no longer easily imagine a vast range of phenomena already known to him, such as gravity, the properties of the chemical elements, and the luminosity of the sun, remained to be explained.\nHe was claiming that these phenomena would only ever appear as a list of facts or rules of thumb to be memorized, but never understood or fruitfully questioned every such frontier of fundamental knowledge that existed in 1994 would have been a barrier beyond which nothing would ever be amenable to explanation.\nThere will be no such thing as the internal structure of atoms, no dynamics of space and time, no such subject as cosmology, no explanation for the equations governing gravitation or electromagnetism, no connections between physics and the theory of computation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2075"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2a3768ba-a905-4222-b80b-28e76640ab1e": {"page_content": "There will be no such thing as the internal structure of atoms, no dynamics of space and time, no such subject as cosmology, no explanation for the equations governing gravitation or electromagnetism, no connections between physics and the theory of computation.\nThe deeper structure in the world would be an inexplicable anthropocentric boundary, coinciding with the boundary of what the physicists of 1894 thought they understood, and nothing inside that boundary, like say the existence of a force of gravity would ever turn out to be profoundly false, pause there just my reflection.\nAnd so it's true today that again we can look back now and kind of giggle at how silly Mickelson must have been.\nAfter all it's we learned the book, and there's any student of physics and tell you, Mickelson was one of the people who helped to popularise the idea of relativity by Albert Einstein, the Mickelson Moly experiment, which was an attempt to detect the luminous luminiferous ether, the movement of the earth through this luminiferous ether, which was required for prior theories about light prior to well Einstein's special relativity.\nPrior to this they thought well light away even it needs a particular medium to move through that material is the luminiferous ether.\nSo Mickelson himself was instrumental in many ways experimentally helping to refute other theories in favor of Einstein's own theory of special relativity.\nAnd so he himself even though he thought physics was all tied up into a nice neat bundle was one of the people who showed that in fact it wasn't.\nI think David will come to this in the chapter as well that now more than any other time is quite obvious that we don't know everything.\nThere are just so many problems that seem to point to deep issues with almost fundamental theories across the board.\nIt's not to say that they're in wrong in all parts in the same way that Newton's theory of universal gravitation wasn't wrong in all its parts, but it contained misconceptions.\nSo he must think now that our greatest theories themselves contain misconceptions as David also says it wouldn't it be wonderful if we just agreed to call our scientific theories scientific misconceptions that our best misconception at the moment is about gravity is the general theory of relativity others have been falsified but.\nthis misconception has not yet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2177"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4bd60aeb-ce3d-4e2c-abb9-8c7c724d07b2": {"page_content": "but right now I'm right now we have serious problems I mean why do galaxies rotate at the rate that they do we don't know we postulate this thing called dark matter and the best explanation says to be well it has to be a kind of matter it must be because we know of no other thing no other entity that can create gravitation but purely speculating it could be the case that some of that some of these very clever scientists physicists who are saying well maybe maybe just maybe general theory of relativity is the problem and if we solved what if the problem was with general relativity coming up with a new theory of gravitation we would solve these galaxy rotation curves among other things among other reasons for thinking that dark matter exists or this phenomena that seems to be causing these anomalous observations which we call dark matter could be solved by another theory of gravity so we have this problem of dark matter that's one thing another issue is of course and we'll come to this I won't say too much about it dark energy why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate we don't know this is a could be a very serious problem for the foundation so the fundamentals of physics why does quantum theory say that things are discrete and general relativity says that things are continuous what is the fundamental deepest nature of reality in truth is that discrete or continuous is it a third thing that doesn't fit into either of those categories that that could be interesting I doubt it and many people of physicists have been trying things like string theory seemingly without success in physics so far we have Lee Smolin who talks about loop quantum gravity and maybe that's that's an avenue that that might reveal something about the deep nature of gravity and how it can be combined with quantum theory maybe David Deutsch and Kia or my letter who work on constructor theory among other people maybe they have an avenue towards a quantum theory of gravity or a new way of unifying these things there are mysteries are plenty within physics and so we could talk about all the all the things that we don't know in physics right now what is the nature of consciousness what is the what is the de geometry of the multiverse what what", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2334"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8549e6a3-7829-4c7c-976a-dbcacc840c9b": {"page_content": "maybe David Deutsch and Kia or my letter who work on constructor theory among other people maybe they have an avenue towards a quantum theory of gravity or a new way of unifying these things there are mysteries are plenty within physics and so we could talk about all the all the things that we don't know in physics right now what is the nature of consciousness what is the what is the de geometry of the multiverse what what effect would a quantum theory of gravity have for the quantum theory of computation would there be any effect at all I don't know why do why do the constants of nature have the value that they do this is one thing that I'm very curious about I know some people are working on this stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2446"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08008954-4009-47b5-a09a-1e229d983925": {"page_content": "the fine so so-called fine-tuning problem I don't think there is a satisfactory answer for these things maybe there is a megaverse out there again another open question in cosmology and physics let's go back to the book nothing very important would ever be discovered in the laboratory that Mickelson was opening each generation of students has studied there instead of striving to understand the world more deeply than their teachers could aspire to nothing better than to emulate them or it best to discover this seventh decimal place of some constant whose sixth was already known but how the most sensitive scientific instruments today depend on fundamental discoveries made after 1894 their system of the world would forever remain a tiny frozen island of explanation in an ocean of incomprehensibility Mickelson's fundamental laws and facts of physical science instead of being the beginning of an infinity of further understanding as they were in reality would have been the last gasp of reason in the field I doubt that either Lagrange or Mickelson thought of himself as pessimistic yet their prophecies entailed that the dismal decree that no matter what you do you will understand no further it so happens that both of them had made discoveries which could have led them to the very progress whose possibility they denied they should have been seeking that progress should they not but almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic pause their my reflection well let's just take that seriously almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic you can take that as a personal injunction to be optimistic if you want to be successful don't be pessimists don't think that you can't make a difference don't think that you can't contribute you can and you should try and it's only by accepting that as a precondition to making progress thinking that you can make progress thinking that you can be creative that you will okay this idea that progress must stop at a particular point is a good barrier to you making progress.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2489"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f07094c9-933e-4833-869e-339b62116cb3": {"page_content": "okay let's keep going David writes our amount at the end of chapter 13 that the desirable future is one where we progress from misconception to ever better less mistaken misconception I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories misconceptions from the outset instead of only after we have discovered their successes thus we could say that Einstein's misconception of gravity was an improvement on Newton's misconception which was an improvement on Kepler's the near Darwinian misconception of evolution is an improvement on Darwin's misconception and here's on Lamarks if people thought like that perhaps no one would need to be reminded that science claims neither infallibility nor finality perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge or knowledge not only scientific as a continual transition from problems to better problems rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories this is the positive conception of problems that I stressed in chapter one thanks to Einstein's discoveries our current problems in physics embody more knowledge than Einstein's own problems did his problems were rooted in the discoveries of Newton and Euclid while most problems that preoccupied physicists today are rooted in and would be inaccessible mysteries without the discoveries of 20th century physics the same is true in mathematics although mathematical theorems are rarely proved false once they have been around for a while what does happen is that mathematicians understanding of what is fundamental improves abstractions that are originally studied in their own right are understood as aspects of more general abstractions or related in unforeseen ways to other abstractions and so progress in mathematics also goes from problems to better problems as does progress in other fields just pausing there just my reflection at the mathematicians apology that great book written by G.H. Hardy about his meeting with Romano John the other great mathematician I remember in in that book he quite proudly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2609"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "543558b2-ac00-401e-9a23-b90e18e1203e": {"page_content": "and I think he famously he would refer to the impractical nature of the pure mathematics that he did so so even the meta mathematical point you know the mathematicians who create mathematics thinking it definitely has no practical application sometimes surprised there is a deeper understanding in effect the mathematics does indeed connect to physical reality this is different of course to the idea that there can be mistakes made in mathematics and just because of course a theorem is rarely proved false in mathematics once it's been proved that's rarely shown to in fact be an error that doesn't mean that it can't be okay as David is a pain to say and that's a subtle point that from the fabric of reality and I love to quote this part of the fabric reality where he says that necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics necessary truth is not the reward we get for doing mathematics which is the difference between necessary truth is the subject matter it's the thing that we're looking at in mathematics but our knowledge of that which is what mathematicians are engaged in their engaged in conjicturing ideas they're engaged in creating knowledge about this domain which we call the domain of necessary truth so they're coming to try and understand what necessary truths are now when they produce a theorem you know Pythagoras is theorem let's say C squared equals A squared plus B squared.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2738"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c5abe10a-c633-4c86-ba6f-5aff186d5835": {"page_content": "I say this is a theorem.\nwell we can have new understandings of that namely when Pythagoras prove this or when he's whoever whoever did first come up with this.\nmaybe it was Pythagoras.\nmaybe it wasn't this C squared equals A squared plus B squared seems to be a thing that applies not only in the physical world.\nbut it's just in controversial there's no way in which we could ever get around this.\nbut but of course it is a special case that works in three dimensions now I think back in the Greek times though I don't think no if they thought of four five six n different spatial dimensions.\nand so you could have a variant of Pythagoras's theorem that operates in different dimensions not to say that Pythagoras theorem is wrong.\nbut we're wrong to think that it applies universally in all possible mathematical areas.\nokay.\nlet's just go back to the book and I'll read just a little more for today we're going to spread this final chapter out.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2823"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "85b2d5c9-2eaa-4872-9665-70e52ed7d95e": {"page_content": "I think to a few different parts David writes Optimism and reason are incompatible with the conceit that our knowledge is nearly there in any sense or that its foundations are yet comprehensive optimism has always been rare and the lure of the prophetic fallacy strong but there have always been exceptions Socrates famously claimed to be deeply ignorant and popular I believe that it would be worth trying to learn something about the world even if in trying to do so we should merely learn that we did not know much it might be well for us all to remember that while differing widely in the various little bits we know in our infinite ignorance we are all equal and quote that was from conjectures and refutations published in 1963 by Carl Popper just emphasizing again in our infinite ignorance we are all equal there is an infinite amount that all of us do not know and are utterly ignorant of and we're all the same in that we just happen to have little bits of specialized knowledge Einstein had specialized knowledge of physics Popper had specialized knowledge of epistemology of wazier had specialized knowledge of chemistry we can keep on going people sitting at home might have specialized knowledge of soccer or football or netball or art we our own families we have specialized knowledge and we're just differing those little bit specialized knowledge that we have but we're all infantly ignorant there's there's an infinite amount that we don't know and that will always be the case just the last paragraph David writes there he says quote Infinite ignorance is a necessary condition for there to be infinite potential for knowledge reject in the idea that we are nearly there is a necessary condition for the avoidance of dogmatism stagnation and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2874"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "83814c9a-738b-4247-b2c3-98376059e7a8": {"page_content": "tyranny end quote and the reading there for today because David's about to launch into a description of his his frenemy John Hogan the end of science which is basically the counterpoint to the beginning of infinity and in fact John Hogan did an interview with David Deutschman may got on very well may spoke all about the beginning of infinity and I don't know I don't think John Hogan has ever changed his mind he's been on Clubhouse recently and he's talked about things like well he's been in this book amongst other articles he he seems to get proper quite wrong he seems to get the physics quite wrong so he seems to make a lot of errors which of course leads him to conclude that science is just about ready to be finished because he thinks that I suppose that our scientific theories aren't grand misconceptions and that we're replacing one misconception with the other and when we read that earlier on let me just go back and and read what David says David says that the desirable future is the one where we progress from misconception to ever better less mistaken misconception and so he's talking there about how we correct we're correcting errors and we're refuting what we hear the two regarded as our best theory we change our minds and light of new evidence and we find a new theory but that theory we must expect also contains misconceptions now does this mean that just everything is on equal footing as containing as being misconceptions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=2990"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "44dc14f7-cbf8-4a1f-8a4d-ecccc0a9b43c": {"page_content": "no no because we're finding some amount of truth now we can't quantify we can't measure all way this amount of truth or we can say as we've corrected errors we've removed some misconceptions we've removed some the mistakes some of the errors and so we then have something else itself not perfect and it will never be perfect just that we're refining things we're improving things we're making progress away from utter and complete falsehood towards the ontological truth towards a description of reality which is more accurate now we can't quantify this all we can say is this theory is better than that theory and that theory was better than that theory and this theory c is better than b which it succeeded and better than a which is the first one that we came up with our first best guess and b was better and now we're at c.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=3085"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ea6c8b03-4c43-4a5b-a634-f501b0f80fa5": {"page_content": "and we expect that to be a d e f.\nand we're gonna get to z.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7ddf5a6e-4b81-4b9d-8fdf-fc3a47963688": {"page_content": "and then we'll have to start over again with a a and a b and a c and so on you get what I'm saying there is no end to this process of error correction and moving from misconception to better misconception a less mistaken misconception the wonderfully positive vision which means that we'll never get to the end of science and instead we are at the beginning of infinity and we're moving towards the end of the beginning of infinity but not yet we have I would say at least two more episodes left here and in the meantime if you're waiting for more.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=3145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0f65869-1b84-4278-9967-714edc81446b": {"page_content": "and you just can't wait to hear more about the beginning of infinity go to David Deutsch's website DavidDeutsch.org.uk and from DavidDeutsch.org.uk you can find links to for example constructor theory and the constructor theory material at constructor theory.org has a lot of talks and interesting papers with David talking with the various other people talking about that beginning of infinity.\nokay that may very well be a beginning of infinity the the constructor theory of information and the this new approach to the fundamental laws of physics and if you want to still more go to Naval and if you just put into your browser NAV.AL and that will take you to his website where his podcast is and is myself in Naval having conversations there very short very short conversations that will will continue for for well the indefinite future.\nso yes you can go there and you can hear the conversation going on then as I say if you type in Naval Naval River can't into YouTube you will also find some conversations some more lengthy conversations I've done with him on Clubhouse recently about these same issues but until next time.\nbye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtY1IxZCFo&t=3182"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f62244f2-9826-4758-9c04-35b048dfec3e": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, N2 part 3 of Things That Make You Go, My Exploration Of The Maddox Morality Multiverses as this one will be about Metaphysics, and many other things that are covered in the conversation between Max Tegmark and Sam Harris.\nThat's okay, saying it's a wonderful conversation.\nGo looking online for the podcast.\nIf you sign up as a member of Sam's Community, then you get access to the entire podcast, which is what I've got access to.\nOr you can buy the book of conversations, which includes the conversations with David Deutsch.\nThat's part one of the book, and there's an audio version of it, and Max Tegmark as well, which is the very last part of the book.\nSo as I said before, two great thinkers to begin an end, a journey through the Making Sense series.\nToday, this one is about Multiverses.\nNow, I've got an entire series online about the Multiverse.\nThe Multiverse, as I understand it, what we know exists is what it's known as, the Everrittian Multiverse, the Quantum Multiverse.\nThe Multiverse that is explained in the fabric of reality and the beginning of infinity, that quantum physicists talk about.\nSo it is said an interpretation of quantum theory.\nWe don't regard it as an interpretation.\nAny more than one would say dinosaurs are an interpretation of fossils.\nIn a sense they are, but there is no other viable interpretation.\nNow, of course, many physicists, many quantum physicists will disagree with this kind of thing, and say, oh no, they don't endorse the Multiverse.\nNow, sometimes this means they're an instrumentalist, in which case they're not endorsing any particular interpretation.\nThey are retreating from interpretations, full stop, and hence explanations full stop.\nThey're only interested in predictions, so they say, so they claim.\nAnd I would just say of that, it's completely irrational, because you need to understand what you're doing.\nSimply being able to predict the outcome of experiments is not understanding and explaining reality.\nAnd even if we don't have a perfect explanation of reality, your job as a scientist should be at least in part to try and understand reality, to give us the best explanation.\nThat's one thing.\nOther physicists who deny the reality of the Multiverse and try and come up with their own version, what they end up doing when you look at the details, something like bones, pilot wave theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "24095788-9d11-42fc-8188-ec70d4ae235c": {"page_content": "Simply being able to predict the outcome of experiments is not understanding and explaining reality.\nAnd even if we don't have a perfect explanation of reality, your job as a scientist should be at least in part to try and understand reality, to give us the best explanation.\nThat's one thing.\nOther physicists who deny the reality of the Multiverse and try and come up with their own version, what they end up doing when you look at the details, something like bones, pilot wave theory.\nI've read quite a few interpretations over my time.\nPaul Davies has that wonderful book Ghost in the Atom, where he goes through a large number of interpretations.\nThere's been a few popular science books written recently, I think they get written every other year, about, you know, some physicist pet favorite interpretation one they've made up.\nWell, these all fall into two categories.\nThey're either going to be of the instrumentalist bent where they're just denying that you can have a proper interpretation and so just calculate.\nThat's one way the popular scientist do it and the physicists.\nAnd the other is just to disguise the multiverse in some way, shape or form.\nIt's the multiverse in heavy disguise as David Deutsch liked to say.\nWhat happens is they postulate the existence of, think you can't observe.\nIn other words, physical reality, the reality we inhabit and the reality we have access to in a sense directly is being impinged upon by other entities in reality that we can't observe.\nSo these other entities in reality, although these physicists and these popularized of science might say things like, I don't endorse the multiverse.\nI think that's a proliferation of universes, it violates Occam's razor, it's just crazy metaphysics or whatever, nonetheless, their own interpretation tends to invoke the existence of stuff you don't have experimental access to in quite the same way.\nYou have to infer its existence and all we say about that is, well, yeah, you're inferring the existence of stuff.\nOkay, that other stuff occupies a different space.\nIt's not here now, but it's having an effect on the stuff you do observe, the stuff you do is see.\nYou're explaining why you get interference effects because something's affecting the path of those photons of those electrons or those particles.\nSomething that you can't see, but you're saying it really exists.\nThat's the multiverse.\nNow you can call it whatever else you like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=130"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4ba42cc9-def2-4de0-9cdf-153fe1ed1b9d": {"page_content": "Okay, that other stuff occupies a different space.\nIt's not here now, but it's having an effect on the stuff you do observe, the stuff you do is see.\nYou're explaining why you get interference effects because something's affecting the path of those photons of those electrons or those particles.\nSomething that you can't see, but you're saying it really exists.\nThat's the multiverse.\nNow you can call it whatever else you like.\nYou can call those other things by Christian names if you prefer, but the fact is they exist.\nYou're saying that other stuff exists and that's what we say the multiverse is.\nNow we have a richer explanation.\nI cohere in an explanation that just says, well, for each particle you do observe, there are counter parts of that particle, fungible instances which can differentiate themselves and thereby cause interference.\nSo whatever the case, this is the ever-ready and multiverse, which as I say, it's unusual in that Max Tegmark does endorse a version of this, a version of this, but it's the one kind of multiverse that is not talked about really, it's not really referred to here in the making sense podcast with Max Tegmark.\nSo a lot of this part of the conversation between Sam and Max, I'm skipping past.\nIn fact, I've missed an entire bit and I'm not going to talk about it at all where they do discuss information and its relationship to mathematics.\nI'm going to skip over that.\nAnd here as well, I think I can skip through a lot of the multiverse stuff because if you go back to part one of my treatment of this conversation, what you will see there is that I basically summarize the four levels of multiverse that Max endorses in somewhere.\nI don't know, talk about it there.\nSo I won't go through that again now, I'll let Max just speak and then he moves on to the simulation hypothesis and I'll have a few things to say about that.\nSo let's get into the discussion today.\nSo I now want to get into the multiverse, which is probably the strangest concept in science now.\nIt's something that I thought I understood before picking up your book and then I discovered there were there were three more flavors of multiverse than I realized existed.\nI want to talk about the multiverse, but first let's just start with the universe because this is a term that around which there is some confusion.\nLet's just get our bearings.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=266"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "23c030d8-975b-4307-b3c5-e8e0f8f888b5": {"page_content": "So I now want to get into the multiverse, which is probably the strangest concept in science now.\nIt's something that I thought I understood before picking up your book and then I discovered there were there were three more flavors of multiverse than I realized existed.\nI want to talk about the multiverse, but first let's just start with the universe because this is a term that around which there is some confusion.\nLet's just get our bearings.\nWhat do we mean or what should we mean by the term universe?.\nAnd I want to start with your your level one multiverse.\nSo if it's possible, give us a brief, brief description of the concept of inflation that gets us there.\nSure.\nSo what is our universe, first of all, before we start talking about others, many people sort of tacitly assume that universes are synonym for everything that exists.\nAnd if so, by definition, there can't be anything more and talk apparently universes would just be silly, right?.\nBut that is the, in fact, not what people generally in cosmology mean when they say universe, and they say our universe, they mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us so far during the 13.8 billion years since our big bang.\nSo that's in other words, everything we could possibly see even with unlimited funding for telescopes, right?.\nAnd so if that's our universe, we can reasonably ask, well, is there more space beyond that, you know, from which light has not yet reached us, but might reach us tomorrow or in a billion years?.\nAnd if there is, if space goes on far beyond this, if it's infinite or just vastly larger than the space we can see, then all these other regions, which are as big as our universe, if they also have galaxies and planets in them and so on, it would be kind of arrogant to not call them universes as well, because the people who live there will call that their universe.\nUnfair or misleading in a way.\nYou see, Max defined into existence there, something that someone who trained an astronomy and far be it from me to quibble with a world-renowned cosmologist.\nBut what I was taught throughout my degrees in this was that we know as a matter of big bang and inflation cosmology that, of course, there is this thing, the observable universe which max defines quite rightly there as the region of space where light has had time to reach us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=334"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "459356db-40f8-435d-957c-9c545659dfc1": {"page_content": "Unfair or misleading in a way.\nYou see, Max defined into existence there, something that someone who trained an astronomy and far be it from me to quibble with a world-renowned cosmologist.\nBut what I was taught throughout my degrees in this was that we know as a matter of big bang and inflation cosmology that, of course, there is this thing, the observable universe which max defines quite rightly there as the region of space where light has had time to reach us.\nBut we know as a matter of fact that that's not all of space that continues with that and continuing to expand is space beyond that.\nContinuous with that is just that the light hasn't had time to reach us from that particular region just yet.\nSo you can go all the way to the deepest recesses of space, so I don't know how far it is, 40 billion light years away, by the way it's further than 13.7 billion light years because of inflation, because of the expansion of the universe.\nSo from here to the furthest away possible is something like 40 billion light, is whatever, this spherical region of space.\nBut we know there's space beyond that.\nThe theory tells us that.\nAnd then in fact, because space is expanding at those furthest, farest reaches, faster than the speed of light and space can expand faster than the speed of light.\nEinstein's theory of relativity says you cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, but space itself can expand faster than the speed of light.\nSo there are galaxies there at the edge of the universe, which are moving beyond being expanded beyond what we can see.\nSo that might be visible today, but cannot possibly be visible tomorrow because they've disappeared beyond the horizon of light where light can reach us.\nSo we know this is going on, this is a matter of science, this is a matter of normal science.\nSo this is why generally when this kind of material is taught to students of astronomy and cosmology, they're taught.\nSo therefore you've got this observable universe, this ring.\nAnd then out of that is another concentric ring, concentric sphere would be more precise of a region of space, continue, perfectly continuous with that, which contains the galaxies and planets and all that other stuff, all the stuff that we see, but it just goes on even further beyond what we can see.\nSo that's all the universe, okay?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=451"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "102cb83b-4764-4c03-b473-856d99179c9d": {"page_content": "So therefore you've got this observable universe, this ring.\nAnd then out of that is another concentric ring, concentric sphere would be more precise of a region of space, continue, perfectly continuous with that, which contains the galaxies and planets and all that other stuff, all the stuff that we see, but it just goes on even further beyond what we can see.\nSo that's all the universe, okay?.\nSo the physical universe is that thing, and that's usually what astronomers, astrophysic cosmologists refer to as the universe, and they distinguish that from the observable universe.\nThat's why, to be honest, it's just idiosyncratically Max Tegmark, as far as I'm aware, who refers to this as the level one multiverse.\nSo it just seems a bizarre way of confusing people and people already object to the idea of multiverse.\nBut so it's kind of, it's a little off-putting, which is why, you know, people just say, just talk about the universe, just everything that exists.\nSome stuff that exists, we can't see, and we've talked about that ad nauseam on here.\nSo this is why I say level one multiverse, I don't know if it cancels a multiverse, it's more like just the universe.\nAnd the strange thing is Max concedes as much himself soon in this conversation.\nHe just says, well, the level one multiverse, that's just another way of talking about space, space.\nSo the only reason for the term here seems to be to distinguish between the region of space that's observed or observable in principle, and the region of space that is not observable in principle.\nBut if that's the criterion, a spatially connected region that's not observable in principle, scientifically, well, it's the core of a typical star, another universe in some sense.\nIs the innards of a black hole, another universe in some sense?.\nWell, of course, some cosmologists might actually argue that.\nWell, the innards of a neutron star then, you know, not observable in principle.\nWe don't have any good explanation about how you would even go about beginning to build an instrument that would be able to get there.\nAnother universe, no, I think this is misleading.\nThis is just an unnecessary use of a term which should be used precisely in science.\nWe want precision with our terms to the extent that we can get precision.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=570"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "333aa2a8-06c7-4746-952c-2ad07e126ccc": {"page_content": "Well, the innards of a neutron star then, you know, not observable in principle.\nWe don't have any good explanation about how you would even go about beginning to build an instrument that would be able to get there.\nAnother universe, no, I think this is misleading.\nThis is just an unnecessary use of a term which should be used precisely in science.\nWe want precision with our terms to the extent that we can get precision.\nYes, everything is ambiguous and all that sort of stuff granted.\nWe should try and have an economy of terminology, especially precise scientific terminology.\nI think it just degrades things.\nWe just start throwing the words around everywhere.\nAll right, I've made enough of a point on that.\nWe'll come back to it again shortly.\nLet's keep going anyway.\nAnd inflation is very linked to this, because it's the best theory we have for what created our big bang and made our space the way it is so vast and so expanding.\nAnd it actually predicts, generically, that space is not just really big, but vast.\nAnd in most cases, it's actually infinite, which would mean if inflation actually happened that what we call our universe is really just a small part of a much bigger space.\nSo in other words, space then is much bigger than the part of space that we call our universe.\nThis is something actually I don't think is particularly weird once when it gets into terminology straight, because it's just history all over again, right?.\nWe humans have been the masters of underestimation.\nWe've had this over-inflated ego where we want to put ourselves in the center and assume that everything that we know about is everything that exists.\nAnd we've been proven wrong again and again and again, discovering that everything we thought existed is just a small part of a much grander structure, a planet, solar system, a galaxy, a galaxy cluster, our universe, and maybe also hierarchy now of parallel universes.\nSo it makes us of course quite right there about the history and it's a point I've made here on talkcast many times before.\nThe history of science, the history of physics, cosmology in particular, astronomy, is this history of gradually our understanding becoming ever larger of stuff, our understanding.\nAnd so we used to think it was just basically planet Earth with celestial spheres.\nand we didn't know what they were.\nBut then we figured out we actually occupied this thing called the solar system, which is bigger than the planet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=715"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a9082f3f-4786-42d9-8f38-6af6c1c4fae2": {"page_content": "The history of science, the history of physics, cosmology in particular, astronomy, is this history of gradually our understanding becoming ever larger of stuff, our understanding.\nAnd so we used to think it was just basically planet Earth with celestial spheres.\nand we didn't know what they were.\nBut then we figured out we actually occupied this thing called the solar system, which is bigger than the planet.\nAnd we realized, well, the solar system is actually inside this thing called the galaxy.\nOh, the galaxy, well, it's just one among many galaxies.\nOh, it's got this whole thing called the universe, and well, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that we have this multiverse.\nNow, the only sense in which I disagree kind of with Max here, I think, is that the proper epistemology allows you to distinguish between what's known in the sense of having a good explanation, a solution that solves a particular problem and no longer has any rivals.\nAnd so, therefore, you say it is the explanation of something and competing hypotheses where you don't really know.\nand you don't even have a method of being able to test for these things just yet.\nAnd then you can't rule out the alternatives.\nThat's a key thing.\nYou can't rule out the alternatives just yet.\nSo you can't say you know these things.\nSo these are not all on equal footing.\nThese levels of multiverse are not on equal footing for that reason, but the way that Max talks it's as if it's as if they're kind of, you know, they use all existing, you know, you buy one, so why won't you buy the other ones?.\nWell, because some of them are well known good explanations to solve a particular problem, because that level one multiverse, which I just again insist on calling the universe, it solves a particular problem.\nIt enables us to explain observations of the actual universe that we have in cosmology, like the cosmic microwave background, like the ratio of hydrogen to helium that we observe out there in outer space, like the expansion, the red shift of galaxies, the expansion of space.\nSo it solves these things.\nSo the dark night sky is another one.\nSo this is solved by postulating and expanding universe and the universe, therefore, beyond what we can actually observe.\nSo that solves a problem.\nThe ever ready in multiverse solves a problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=801"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e2cb3414-8c2d-4e31-96cb-1f3799e94094": {"page_content": "So it solves these things.\nSo the dark night sky is another one.\nSo this is solved by postulating and expanding universe and the universe, therefore, beyond what we can actually observe.\nSo that solves a problem.\nThe ever ready in multiverse solves a problem.\nIt's like, how do we explain the observations of things like interference experiments ever ready in multiverse?.\nWe need to invoke the existence of these parallel other universes that contain fungible instances of every single particle.\nOkay, so that's that.\nBut then when we get into these other ones, these level two multiverses and especially level four multiverse, they are hypotheses that aren't yet that don't get catas good explanations.\nWhy?.\nWell, because in the case of let's take level four, let's take level four.\nThe level four multiverse is, is this idea that all different physical laws exist out there somewhere rather.\nSo all the logically possible universes are out there somewhere other.\nNow, the overwhelming majority of those are governed by physical laws, which are completely hostile to life.\nSo why would you think this thing up?.\nWell, one reason you would think up this plenitude, these other universes with other physical laws is to solve the problem of why the constants of nature here in our universe appear to be finely tuned.\nNow, I think the fine tuning problem is a problem.\nBut there is a debate in physics between physicists, some of whom say, well, it's not a problem.\nBut here's the thing, we don't know the answer to this fine tuning problem.\nWe don't know why the constants appear to have been finely tuned to allow for life here in this universe.\nChange any of the constants, max will come to this and you won't get life.\nChange them by too much and you won't get life.\nBut here we are.\nIt seems a remarkable coincidence that conditions are just right when the Goldilocks zone, not only for one concept, but for all the constants, that's remarkable.\nIt's a remarkable thing.\nOne such solution is, well, you've got this multiverse.\nSo if all the other universes with different physical laws, most of which don't have life.\nSo why should we be surprised if all the other universes are out there?.\nOf course, we're going to find ourselves in the one that is very bio friendly, it's friendly towards life and intelligence.\nOkay.\nNow, truth be told, you don't even need level four for this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=910"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d82fcb46-583d-4159-a049-8899f750f18f": {"page_content": "It's a remarkable thing.\nOne such solution is, well, you've got this multiverse.\nSo if all the other universes with different physical laws, most of which don't have life.\nSo why should we be surprised if all the other universes are out there?.\nOf course, we're going to find ourselves in the one that is very bio friendly, it's friendly towards life and intelligence.\nOkay.\nNow, truth be told, you don't even need level four for this.\nYou just need max is so-called level two multiverse, which he's coming to shortly.\nBut he switches between these things pretty fast in this conversation.\nSo sometimes it's hard to keep track.\nLevel two is just the class of universes defined by all solutions to string theory or something like that.\nWhatever, all our physical constants, they still exist in those other universes, but they take on all possible values somewhere or other in that multiverse, but presumably quantum theory and general relativity, they still hold or string theory still holds.\nSo the laws themselves are the same, the form of the laws, but the constants are not.\nSo this is one way of arguing about fine tuning and one way of solving in scare quotes, the problem of fine tuning, we find ourselves in the universe or in one of these small number of universes where the constants are just right and all the others actually exist out there somewhere other.\nOf course, you could have wildly different constants and wildly different physical laws, making a bio-friendly universe.\nAnd then you might get life, but that's level four.\nIndeed, in level four, you might not even have a constant at all.\nYou know, as what goes on in level four, you just have every logically possible universe, every logically possible thing in some magic really does work.\nThe Star Wars universe is actually out there, literally real in this level four universe.\nUniverse is violating conservation laws and universes we can go through space, fast and light, add in for an item, add in for an item in every single sense there.\nThat's called the plenitude.\nDavid Lewis wrote a book, like I said, about this.\nAnd this, by the way, makes the plenitude easy to vary.\nThe plenitude, all logically possible universes or what Max calls the ultimate ensemble, anything that in his mind is even conceivable.\nBut I would say, actually, conceivable is too limited a word for this.\nMaybe what is inconceivable still exists and still counts as possible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1023"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "94f00bfe-379e-4b58-a8c0-3ffb5d6945e4": {"page_content": "That's called the plenitude.\nDavid Lewis wrote a book, like I said, about this.\nAnd this, by the way, makes the plenitude easy to vary.\nThe plenitude, all logically possible universes or what Max calls the ultimate ensemble, anything that in his mind is even conceivable.\nBut I would say, actually, conceivable is too limited a word for this.\nMaybe what is inconceivable still exists and still counts as possible.\nWhy is our ability to conceive it?.\nA constraint on what logical reality is as a whole.\nA doubt we can get agreement on what counts as conceivable or logically possible is God, the Christian God logically possible?.\nWhat about Zeus?.\nWhat about other creator gods?.\nIf they're logically possible, if they obey logic, then they exist out there somewhere other than they're creating universes and presumably our own two in an infinite number of universes.\nOr if these gods are not logical, never mind physical, then what is logically possible?.\nAnd are other logics permitted in these other logically possible universes?.\nAfter all, what we consider logical is what is noble to us, as logical in this universe, obeying these laws of physics, perhaps in other universes with other laws of physics, they can compute stuff which includes coming to know things that includes an understanding of a logic deeper than ours or different to ours.\nThis is quickly becoming mind-bending self-referential stuff, illogical perhaps.\nSo whatever the case, maybe then Yahweh doesn't seem so strange to you now.\nMaybe the Hindu gods don't seem so strange anymore.\nBy any measure, the planet should, the level four multiverse, is far stranger, because it includes Yahweh and all the Hindu gods in every other set of gods you like, who created our world, whatever the case.\nThese multiverses are argued for on the basis of fine-tuning.\nIt's the only reason I ever see them being invoked, but aside from in philosophic, purely philosophical discussions, but they only come into physics in this particular way by trying to solve fine-tuning.\nBut fine-tuning remains a problem still, because many physicists don't agree with this particular solution.\nQuite right too, because as I say, it's not a good explanation.\nI don't think this solves the problem.\nMost don't think this solves the problem by this explanation.\nIt's not a good explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1137"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "80ace696-b20f-4fd4-94ea-f5156b4dd1f5": {"page_content": "But fine-tuning remains a problem still, because many physicists don't agree with this particular solution.\nQuite right too, because as I say, it's not a good explanation.\nI don't think this solves the problem.\nMost don't think this solves the problem by this explanation.\nIt's not a good explanation.\nIt's too easy to vary, but in fact, so are the alternatives to it.\nThese multiverses, especially the number four multiverse, they're easy to vary.\nPeople will vary on what is conceivable, or logical, or possible in that way, because they're not constrained by physics.\nThey're not even constrained by imagination.\nIt may be level four consists of the infinite class of logically possible universes, but just not the one where the electron has doubled the value of what it does in our universe.\nI mean, that's a logically possible multiverse, right?.\nSo that's easy to vary.\nMaybe they all exist except for that one, although all exist except for that one, and where the electron has a charge of triple-hours at infinite them, as I say.\nAnyway, there are at least two other competing theories for this, okay?.\nThat's a wild claim.\nEvery possible reality exists out there somewhere, pretty wild claim.\nI think it's less wild, to be honest with you.\nIt's less wild to postulate the fact that a God created this universe, a God created this universe.\nNow, why is it less wild?.\nWell, because if every logically possible universe exists out there somewhere, that includes universes created by gods, universes created by gods.\nSo if you postulate every logically possible universe, logically possible.\nWell, physically, logically possible, it's logically possible that you can have all powerful beings there somewhere or other.\nIt's a logical possible.\nI can imagine that.\nIf you can imagine it's logically possible, right?.\nI don't see a contradiction in that.\nOther people are going to say, oh, there's a contradiction.\nI can have, well, let's have something less than an omnipotent, okay?.\nBut God-like beings are out there.\nFor all intents and purposes, God-like beings occupy that multiverse.\nSo isn't it more parsimonious to just say, rather than have an infinite number of God-like beings, let's have one God-like being that created this universe.\nIt seems more parsimonious.\nAnyway, so these are two of the competing clients.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1283"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3f37cab-9ab9-4b3e-9d24-d254569c0a72": {"page_content": "I can have, well, let's have something less than an omnipotent, okay?.\nBut God-like beings are out there.\nFor all intents and purposes, God-like beings occupy that multiverse.\nSo isn't it more parsimonious to just say, rather than have an infinite number of God-like beings, let's have one God-like being that created this universe.\nIt seems more parsimonious.\nAnyway, so these are two of the competing clients.\nNow, there's at least a third I know, which is that the physical laws here are by a friendly, and we appear the way that we do because it's mathematically necessarily required, and whatever the successor to quantum theory and general relativity is, or the successor to the successor of that, will turn out to just have a set of equations which require, as a matter of mathematical necessity, logical necessity, that the constants have the values that they do.\nAnd so if this is the case, well, that rules out the planitude, the multiverse of multiverse is so to speak.\nWe don't know, but the way that the way that some popularizes, some people in this very conversation are talking, it's as if that level 4 multiverse counts just as well as the level 1 multiverse, and the level 3 multiverse.\nAnd I just don't think that it does.\nI don't think that it does.\nWe're not distinguishing between these different kinds of universes, multiverse is rather, in the way that we should, what is known, not known to be true, but known as our best explanation, known to be a good explanation of the observed facts, and what is just one of many competing hypotheses that you would invoke a multiverse for, but there could be other solutions that rule out that refute that multiverse.\nSo again, a pick it up where Max begins to talk about inflation theory, which is interesting.\nI'll have some things to say about what he says about inflation theory here, and also his own sort of, well, walking back to a certain extent of what this level 1 multiverse in scare quite happens to be.\nSo let's do what Max has to say.\nFirst it's a great illustration of one of the cool things in science, where you start with some pretty innocent assumptions, namely here that space just goes on forever, like most of us thought as kids, and moreover, the things started out a little bit randomly everywhere, and you get this totally shocking conclusion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1375"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fbb1c278-3835-4fa5-a519-b4b14406298f": {"page_content": "So let's do what Max has to say.\nFirst it's a great illustration of one of the cool things in science, where you start with some pretty innocent assumptions, namely here that space just goes on forever, like most of us thought as kids, and moreover, the things started out a little bit randomly everywhere, and you get this totally shocking conclusion.\nIf when I go ask my colleagues, I'll say the vast majority of them would put their money on that some form of inflation happened, and that our space is actually much bigger than our universe, whether it's actually infinite or just really huge, starts getting a little bit more controversial, and we would love to also, we also don't know for sure, of course, whether inflation actually happened.\nBut this is sort of the simplest version of the theory, where space simply goes on forever.\nIt's an infinite space, much like Euclid space, or the one we thought about as kids, and in the book I call this the level 1 multiverse, but you can just use this in them space for it, and just to drill down a little bit more and where the craziness comes in.\nIf you look at the way our universe got this way, and the way our podcast came about, because we had about 10 to the power 78 quarks and electrons here that started out in a particular way, somewhat random early on, after inflation, which led to the formation of our solar system and our planet, and our parents met, and so on, and we met, and then this happened, right?.\nIf you'd started the quarks out a little bit differently, things would have unfolded differently, and you can actually count up how many different ways you can arrange the quarks and electrons in our universe.\nAnd it turns out it's only about a Googleplex different ways, where Googleplex is one where the Google zero is when the Google is one of the hundreds zero.\nIt's a huge number, but it's finite.\nSo if you have an infinite number of other regions equally big, and you roll the dice again, and all of them, then as you can talk to it, that if you go about a Googleplex meters away, you will indeed end up with just what you described, the universe that's extremely similar to this one, except that one minute ago you all of a sudden you don't have decided to start speaking Hungarian instead.\nSo there's three things I want to say about what just being said there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1475"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "862e23f0-2988-45e5-8a57-94228dcf1ed0": {"page_content": "So there's three things I want to say about what just being said there.\nThe first is that Max says that you can't know for sure about whether or not inflation is actually the explanation of the beginning of the universe.\nAnd as we say here, well, if that's your standard knowing for sure, then you won't know anything at all.\nNow, inflation is an interesting kind of an explanation.\nI would say we know the Big Bang occurred, and I would actually also tend in the direction of saying that we know inflation happened as well.\nI just don't think there are any other viable competitors at the moment.\nWe need to explain observations, observations of stuff like the cosmic microwave background.\nNow the cosmic microwave background has this feature of being exceedingly smooth, and what exceedingly smooth means is that when you map these slight temperature variations in the empty space between galaxies, this is the cosmic microwave background radiation, the heat left over, the residual heat left over from the Big Bang.\nWell, actually, you look far and off into the distance to about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, and you get this map, you get this map of the sky.\nThis is what Kobe, the cosmic microwave background explorer, and W map, the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe, and recently the Plank telescope.\nThese satellites are up there mapping this cosmic microwave background.\nWhatever the case, what we find is that it's about 2.7 Kelvin.\nThis is 2.7 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.\nBut there are fluctuations in the temperature, slightly warm in this region, slightly cooler in this region.\nBut those fluctuations are so small that the smallness of the fluctuations cries out for an explanation, because the quantum cosmology say that well, when the universe was smaller than an atom, then there would have been these fluctuations.\nThe fluctuations should have caused greater temperature differences.\nIf you just rely upon classical Big Bang theory, the regular Big Bang theory should have magnified these temperature differences.\nBut instead, we don't see these huge temperature differences.\nWe see very small temperature differences.\nSo why they're small and not huge temperature differences?.\nWell, inflation theory, inflation theory, explains that.\nAnd we have no other explanation as far as I'm aware of why it is that we observe what we do.\nSo we've got this observation that cries out for an explanation and we have only one explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1613"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a07f0f85-e389-4ea4-8840-40bcd686005b": {"page_content": "But instead, we don't see these huge temperature differences.\nWe see very small temperature differences.\nSo why they're small and not huge temperature differences?.\nWell, inflation theory, inflation theory, explains that.\nAnd we have no other explanation as far as I'm aware of why it is that we observe what we do.\nSo we've got this observation that cries out for an explanation and we have only one explanation.\nNow, someone comes up with a rival, then we would need to have a crucial experiment test that could decide between the theories, but we don't have any other theory.\nSo the only known explanation for why we're getting this smoothness in the cosmic microwave background, amongst other things, by the way, amongst other things, you can go Googling or Wikipedia inflationary cosmology, the inflation theory, which is just a version of the Big Bang theory.\nAnd what you learn is that there are observations that are explained by inflation theory, but not explained by anything else.\nAnd so this is important.\nSo this is why I would say it's quite right and reasonable to say we know inflation happened.\nAs we know, the Big Bang happened, as we know evolution by natural selection happens.\nThese are the only known explanations of the observations that we have.\nDo we know these things for sure?.\nNo.\nAgain, if that's a standard, well, you're always going to be disappointed in science and everywhere else.\nNotice also that their max admits what I was complaining about earlier, which is that this level one multiverse, not really a multiverse, he just says there, it's a synonym for space, quite right.\nI think that's quite right that he should say that.\nBut then he also says a thing that I might quibble with just a little, which is that if we have this finite amount of matter, but it can be rearranged into a finite number of different arrangements, nonetheless, this means that because there's such a stupendous number of different arrangements that we could have, that we would have all possible arrangements represented there somewhere other.\nI don't know that that follows.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1765"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d173c57b-fdab-43b7-a02b-35a297ccae7e": {"page_content": "I think that's quite right that he should say that.\nBut then he also says a thing that I might quibble with just a little, which is that if we have this finite amount of matter, but it can be rearranged into a finite number of different arrangements, nonetheless, this means that because there's such a stupendous number of different arrangements that we could have, that we would have all possible arrangements represented there somewhere other.\nI don't know that that follows.\nI don't know that that falls out of the way in which the physics actually works, unless of course you're talking about the ever radiant quantum theory where, yes, indeed, there will be versions of you, versions of you that are very similar to you and versions of you that are very different to you, but this idea of traveling physically through space to reach a another planet, for example, where there's someone very similar to you there.\nI don't know that that follows.\nWe would need another physical law that mandates that all the different possible arrangements really would be represented out there in deep dark areas of our universe somewhere other.\nNow that spatially connected regions too, the one that we occupy here, I don't know that it follows that you're getting something like the ever radiant multiverse here in our regular physical universe, just at a great distance from us, which is what he's talking about here.\nIt could be, it very well could be that distant regions of the universe have subtly different physical properties to what is had here because it just quirks of the big bang, for example, quirks of the big bang could distribute the matter in different ways and so clump together in different ways.\nAnd this would mean that not all clumpings are going to lead to what we see around us in our region.\nThey're model claps together into a black hole in some of these places.\nIt might spread out into a vacuous nothingness.\nThere's nothing that says that the kind of multiverse he's talking about here needs to represent all possible configurations of matter.\nThat just might not happen.\nUnless there's a physical law that says, well yes, this kind of thing happens, but I know of no such physical law that mandates this is in the realm of the just the unknown, just the unknown.\nIt's a form of metaphysics as I say.\nIt's a stepping outside of science.\nI don't know how we could test this exactly yet yet.\nLet's keep on going.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1822"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3f3b2c72-6541-442d-9dad-693265d11b5b": {"page_content": "That just might not happen.\nUnless there's a physical law that says, well yes, this kind of thing happens, but I know of no such physical law that mandates this is in the realm of the just the unknown, just the unknown.\nIt's a form of metaphysics as I say.\nIt's a stepping outside of science.\nI don't know how we could test this exactly yet yet.\nLet's keep on going.\nIt's a very mind-boggling idea.\nWe don't know for a fact that it's like this, but this is the sort of the vanilla flavor, the cosmological model, the one that is the most popular today.\nRight.\nRight.\nWell, and I think the weak link in this chain of reasoning here or the place where where a skeptical person can get off this train is in the assumption or belief that inflation implies an infinite universe rather than just a very large one.\nIt seems like you could pull the brakes there, but unfortunately this concept of a multiverse judging from your discussion of it in your book, and this is what I didn't understand before I picked up your book, seems over determined.\nIt seems there are other ways that are arriving at this multiverse concept, which we'll get to, and so it has a scientifically speaking, there are many reasons to believe in a functionally infinite number of copies of ourselves living out lives of, for all intents and purposes, exactly similar or differing to every possible degree.\nRight.\nSo it's true to say that everything that can happen does happen under this rubric.\nThat's right.\nSo just to distinguish between what we know and what we don't know for sure, the part that we don't know for sure is that space is infinite, or that there's an infinite number of anything, and for people who feel really bothered by these implications and want to get rid of the infinity.\nIn fact, I have a whole section in the book where I attack infinity and list all the ways in which you can get rid of the infinity.\nSo there's a lot of interesting opportunities there, and we're going to know more, I think, in the next five or ten years.\nHowever, what I think seems pretty much inescapable at this point, is that the full reality is at least much larger than what we can see.\nThere's just no way that space ends exactly at the edge of our universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=1934"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6a259bb-0197-4857-86b0-c005e18d78be": {"page_content": "So there's a lot of interesting opportunities there, and we're going to know more, I think, in the next five or ten years.\nHowever, what I think seems pretty much inescapable at this point, is that the full reality is at least much larger than what we can see.\nThere's just no way that space ends exactly at the edge of our universe.\nIn fact, if you had made that claim, you know, one minute ago, I could falsify it now by looking with a telescope because I can see light that's traveled from one minute farther away, and that's pretty far, that's a sixth of the way of the sun, an eighth of the way of the sun already, right?.\nAnd so we should probably get used to the idea that we live in a much grander reality than we thought we did.\nAnd I think that's a good thing.\nYeah.\nOh, yeah.\nNo, so I don't think people's intuitions recoil at the very, very large, or.\neven I think people are prepared to embrace the infinite and the eternal, in some sense, even though we could debate whether thinking about a beginning is actually more understandable than thinking about an eternal universe, given how squirrely the beginning begins to look.\nBut I think what really will blow the mind of anyone who thinks about it long enough, and seems very difficult to accept, is this idea at the level one multiverse, what is implied by just the sheer concept of infinity, that everything that is possible is, in fact, actual on some level.\nEverything is true.\nAnd let's just spell out why this should be disturbing and why this may, in fact, be at least at first glance a real embarrassment to science, because it's science prides itself on being parsimonious.\nWell, no, it's not the case of the level one universe in any way, shape or form, says that everything that's possible is true.\nI don't get that, that everything is true in some way.\nIn fact, I think he said, there's an ambiguity about what that would mean anyway.\nDo we mean everything that's physically possible is true or everything that's logically possible is true?.\nWell, I can't mean the last thing, which is the level four multiverse.\nSo the level one multiverse, which is just space, even if space was infinite, even if space was infinite, that doesn't even imply that everything physically possible would be true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2038"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0371cbb3-20d8-4d79-8a08-484837230286": {"page_content": "In fact, I think he said, there's an ambiguity about what that would mean anyway.\nDo we mean everything that's physically possible is true or everything that's logically possible is true?.\nWell, I can't mean the last thing, which is the level four multiverse.\nSo the level one multiverse, which is just space, even if space was infinite, even if space was infinite, that doesn't even imply that everything physically possible would be true.\nIt doesn't imply that at all.\nI could readily imagine an infinite space where we occupy a region which is different to the rest.\nYou need to have a particular kind of what's called the cosmological principle, which says that there's nothing particularly special about our particular region of space.\nBut we, if we don't have access to these are the regions of space, these are the infinite region of space.\nWe could easily postulate other regions of space, which are empathy, for example.\nYou'd still have infinite space.\nWe could have any infinite space beyond what we can see that is filled with nothing but hydrogen nuclei, which is protons.\nThere would be basically a featureless universe.\nBut the thing is, if we can't observe, and if we don't have good explanation of, at this point, what this infinite space is like, then you're just postulating a particular metaphysics once again, saying that somewhere often this infinite space, there must be every single physically possible thing represented there in some way, shape, or form.\nBut I don't see that that follows.\nIf all you're saying is, it's an infinite space.\nEven if you said it's an infinite space like ours, that doesn't mean that you're going to eventually get an earth just like ours here.\nYou have to add extra assumptions to this idea.\nThe extra assumptions being, well, you've got the same kind of distribution of matter out there in infinite space.\nBut that's a very specific assumption that you're making.\nIt's ruling out all the ways in which you don't have the same distribution of matter elsewhere.\nThere's something very special about the earth after all, just I mean, look around, it's unusual.\nThe universe, vast as it is, may only contain one earth, may only contain one earth.\nOf course, infinity tends to sort some of these things out for you.\nBut the level one multiverse, I'm not so sure, not so sure.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2157"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f237aad5-3532-401c-8a06-652ee21c387b": {"page_content": "It's ruling out all the ways in which you don't have the same distribution of matter elsewhere.\nThere's something very special about the earth after all, just I mean, look around, it's unusual.\nThe universe, vast as it is, may only contain one earth, may only contain one earth.\nOf course, infinity tends to sort some of these things out for you.\nBut the level one multiverse, I'm not so sure, not so sure.\nAnd certainly it does not imply, it certainly would not imply, or logically possible realities out there somewhere.\nThat certainly doesn't follow.\nOkay, Sam and Max then go on to talk about Passimani, okay, which is basically Occam's razor.\nThis idea that all else being equal, we should choose the simplest explanation.\nThis was why when I asked Professor Paul Davies, why didn't he endorse the multiverse?.\nDo you ever write in multiverse when I had the chance to talk to him about this?.\nHe appealed to Occam's razor.\nHe said, well, in order to explain the one universe we do observe, we're invoking the existence of an infinite number that we can't observe.\nAnd at the time I bought it, of course, now I realize, no, Occam's razor is about the number of independent assumptions that you have.\nAnd, you know, the multiverse, the ever written in multiverse, has no real additional assumptions being added on to the formalism of quantum theory.\nIt's just saying, well, take the equations seriously, take them literally, take the results of the experiment seriously.\nAnd this is all you get.\nYou don't need to add anything about consciousness in the observer or anything else.\nEverything just obeys the same physical laws.\nAnd so, therefore, you have these, you have all matter obeying the same physical laws.\nAnd the equations describe the existence of these other things.\nAnd then also explains why you won't observe these other things.\nYou can't communicate between universes, for example.\nSo, they quite rightly point out that passimity or, you know, recourse to the simplest theory, Occam's razor, whatever you want, however you want to describe this, is not a reason to object to multiverse theories in general.\nAnd certainly not a reason to object to the ever-written multiverse.\nBut once again, they're kind of dancing around the ever-written multiverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2315"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "94badf43-c4d5-47b1-bef9-b7a5abc856c2": {"page_content": "You can't communicate between universes, for example.\nSo, they quite rightly point out that passimity or, you know, recourse to the simplest theory, Occam's razor, whatever you want, however you want to describe this, is not a reason to object to multiverse theories in general.\nAnd certainly not a reason to object to the ever-written multiverse.\nBut once again, they're kind of dancing around the ever-written multiverse.\nI never get there and talk about quantum theory, which is the shame that the one really interesting by virtue of the fact of being an explanation that is unusual.\nBut also, so far as we can tell, it's the correct one.\nIt's the right one.\nSo, I'm going to skip through all of that because I think listeners to talk cast readers of the fabric of reality, for example, know about Occam's razor and passimity and this kind of thing.\nLet's press on into the multiverse to level two.\nWe'll push people's intuitions in the direction of feeling like, at the very least, we're trying to have our cake and either two on this question of parsimony.\nSo, take us to the level two multiverse and perhaps say why this is relevant to the question of fine-tuning and the question of fine-tuning, as many people will recall, is relevant to this idea of that many religious people have of why religion, the idea of a creator god in particular, makes sense given the apparent fine-tuning of our universe.\nBut pleasure.\nSo, the level two multiverse, you can again, synonymously called simply space, if you want.\nInflation is able to actually not only make an infinite space, but it's actually able to make fit within this, an infinite number of regions that each seem infinite to whoever lives inside of them through some very, very weird properties of Einstein's gravity theory that I talked about in the book.\nWhat's interesting about this is that when you ask how diverse is space, you might think, oh, you know, in some places, our podcasts goes like here and other places, we talk about other things, but at least the laws of physics are the same everywhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2366"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ee9a08f1-daf9-4dff-a732-611a0482c663": {"page_content": "What's interesting about this is that when you ask how diverse is space, you might think, oh, you know, in some places, our podcasts goes like here and other places, we talk about other things, but at least the laws of physics are the same everywhere.\nYou might think, at least, even if we learn people learn different things in history class, if the Sam Harris somewhere else learns different things in his history class, because the quark started out differently there and history played out differently, but at least he's going to learn the same thing in physics class.\nBut the level two multiverse changes that also, because it turned out that a lot of things that we thought were fundamental laws of physics, that were true everywhere in space, were actually not, it seems.\nAnd I like to think about it as if I were a fish swimming around in the ocean, I would think that it's a law of physics.\nThe water is something you can swim through, because that's the only kind of water I know when it seems to be that way everywhere I look.\nBut if partish, I could solve the equations, discover the equations for water, and I could solve them and see that there are actually three solutions, not one.\nThere is the water solution and also ice and steam.\nEquivalently, there are a lot of hints now in physics that what we call empty space is also like that, that it can freeze and melt and come in many different variants.\nAnd the thing is inflation is so violent that if space actually can be in many different forms, what inflation will do is it will create each of those kinds of space and an infinite amount of it that that.\nSo if you go really, really far away, you might find yourself in a part of space where there are not actually six kinds of quarks, like there are here, but maybe there are 10 kinds of quarks.\nSo the level two multiverse is very, very diverse.\nAlso a lot of things that we learn in school are fundamental parameters of physics.\nFor example, the number 1836 seems kind of hardwired into our world in that that the proton is 1836 times heavier than an electron.\nWhy is that?.\nWell, string theory suggests that actually that's one of those things that also changes depending on what kind of space you have.\nSo it might be 2015 somewhere else in 666 somewhere else.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2481"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "013f69fa-0428-4e6a-8c16-6a27e291b2f6": {"page_content": "So the level two multiverse is very, very diverse.\nAlso a lot of things that we learn in school are fundamental parameters of physics.\nFor example, the number 1836 seems kind of hardwired into our world in that that the proton is 1836 times heavier than an electron.\nWhy is that?.\nWell, string theory suggests that actually that's one of those things that also changes depending on what kind of space you have.\nSo it might be 2015 somewhere else in 666 somewhere else.\nAnd this explains this fine tuning problem that you mentioned because we've discovered, as I alluded to earlier, that there are these 32 numbers pure numbers with no units or anything that we've measured that we can use to calculate everything else.\nAnd we wonder a lot of where they came from.\nSo these are the constants of nature.\nCould you just list a few of them to give people a sense?.\nYeah.\nSo 1836 is one of them.\nHow much heavier the proton is in a neutron.\nYou can transform them in different ways.\nAnother one which is super talked about these days is that the density of dark energy.\nOkay.\nSo as I explained in episode one of my discussion of their discussion, the level two multiverse is a version of the multiverse where it's presumed that the initial conditions are somewhat different.\nAnd indeed, the constants of nature are somewhat different.\nAnd this arises out of, as Max explained there, versions of string theory.\nNow we don't know, this is a kind of metaphysics as to whether or not such universes exist.\nBut we're still within the realm of, although he insinuated there that the laws are physically different, not really, we still have, although we might have different numbers of quarks in these other universes, we still have quarks, for example.\nWe're still bounded by what string theory says as possible.\nSo we're not yet in the realm of all logically possible universes.\nWe're not there yet.\nBut we are saying, well, you can vary the constants of nature, let's say, but we still have constants of nature.\nThose constants of nature still exist.\nAnd so perhaps we can explore the space of all different constants of nature.\nNow, this is actually done by some people.\nSome people, this is their job cosmologist Luke Barnes, who is easily found on Twitter is one of the people I follow on Twitter.\nHe's a cosmologist at the University of Western Sydney.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2606"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b54d249e-df97-430b-ba74-d82cba5507a8": {"page_content": "Those constants of nature still exist.\nAnd so perhaps we can explore the space of all different constants of nature.\nNow, this is actually done by some people.\nSome people, this is their job cosmologist Luke Barnes, who is easily found on Twitter is one of the people I follow on Twitter.\nHe's a cosmologist at the University of Western Sydney.\nHe works with Grant Lewis, who is an astrophysicist at the University of Sydney.\nThey've written books on this, whatever it is, at least one book called, A Fortune at Universe.\nNow, there have been many books written on this idea of fine tuning.\nSome people disagree with fine tuning.\nI buy it as being a problem.\nWhy is it that we inhabit a region of space where the constants are what they are?.\nWe don't know yet.\nAnd as I've already explained, it could be, it could be that we have this multiverse of universes where all the different constants of nature are out there represented somewhere or other.\nOkay, that could be the case.\nAnd we, of course, occupy the one where the constants are just right.\nThere are many other universes kind of like this as well.\nWell, the work of Luke Barnes, among others, sort of suggests that this fine tuning is very, very fine tuned.\nAnd we need an explanation for this.\nMany people say, we don't need an explanation for this.\nNow, Barnes for one thinks that it's a very poor explanation to say, well, it's the multiverse that explains this stuff.\nAnd I'll give a link in the information for this podcast and for this episode, to his material on this.\nHe does some wonderful lectures.\nHe's also been on closer to truth, which is probably my favorite YouTube channel out there.\nHe's been interviewed there.\nHe's an Aussie.\nAnd so he has this to my mind anyway, rather clear way of speaking about this stuff.\nAnd no nonsense sort of way of speaking about this stuff.\nHe's had debates with people like Sean Carroll.\nAnd he's had debates with people like Sabine Hossenfeld.\nSo, you know, he's talking to some of the big names out there about all of this stuff.\nAnd he really knows his stuff.\nI mean, he's really across this.\nAnd he does things like simulates entire universes in supercomputers to see what happens when you alter these constants of nature, just to see what happens.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2722"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3ee2a26a-3503-4fcc-a368-d83c574842a9": {"page_content": "He's had debates with people like Sean Carroll.\nAnd he's had debates with people like Sabine Hossenfeld.\nSo, you know, he's talking to some of the big names out there about all of this stuff.\nAnd he really knows his stuff.\nI mean, he's really across this.\nAnd he does things like simulates entire universes in supercomputers to see what happens when you alter these constants of nature, just to see what happens.\nSo it does seem like there's a problem there.\nCertainly one of the things that I was most interested in exploring when I was doing formal studies in astronomy and cosmology was looking into this issue of just how fine-tuned the constants of nature are.\nCould you change them very much at all?.\nAnd well, it turns out you can't change them very much at all.\nJust the smallest changes to things like the value of the gravitational constant, the strength of gravity, or the value of the mass of the proton, these kinds of things, either could changes in these kinds of things, either cause all matter in the universe to collapse into black holes.\nAnd so you don't get any stars, therefore you don't get any planets.\nOr cause a universe where the gravity isn't strong enough in order to collapse matter into stars at all in the first place.\nAnd so all you're left with is clouds of hydrogen and helium gas.\nSo you'd have no life in such a universe there either.\nSo that's just a few of the constants.\nNow, that's for all the other constants.\nWell, you can have changes in cosmological constants that cause a ripping apart of space time very early on in the universe.\nOr even just after the big bang you get an immediate re-collapse into a big crunch kind of thing.\nSo this is a very interesting question, open area of research.\nWe don't know much yet.\nAnd so this is what they're talking about here with this kind of level two multiverse that may be all the different constants of nature are out there being explored somewhere other.\nBut they're still bound by the basic laws of physics.\nThese universes are obeying different versions of screen theory.\nThat's one thing.\nSo they're still obeying a certain kind of explanation.\nUnlike the level four, one is I keep mentioning where you're having every single kind of physical or being.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2833"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a7fc0000-8fbc-4aca-9ff1-4b4a884a4722": {"page_content": "And so this is what they're talking about here with this kind of level two multiverse that may be all the different constants of nature are out there being explored somewhere other.\nBut they're still bound by the basic laws of physics.\nThese universes are obeying different versions of screen theory.\nThat's one thing.\nSo they're still obeying a certain kind of explanation.\nUnlike the level four, one is I keep mentioning where you're having every single kind of physical or being.\nSo I forget string theory, that's just one tiny sliver of all the possible physical laws that you could have, which is what the level four one is.\nBut in either case, do we know, as in to say, we have a good explanation of this as being an account of reality, a reality that we inhabit.\nSo let me skip towards the end of their discussion on the multiverse.\nIf it's infinite, just suggests that everything that happens, that can happen within the laws of physics does happen with the level two we're talking about inflation creating an infinite number of bubble universes, which wherein the laws of physics themselves vary in every conceivable way.\nAnd we not just interject.\nSo it doesn't sound too weird.\nInstead of talking about bubble universes, we can just keep saying space because there's still only one space.\nBut it's not space in a straightforward sense that it is actually, but the reason, the reason we can never get to another part of the level two multiverse is because in order to go there, you would have to go through a region of space or just still inflating and stretching out.\nSo if you have your kids in the back seat asking, are we there yet?.\nYou know, you would say,.\noh yeah,.\nwe'll be there in one hour.\nAnd then a little bit later, they ask, are we there yet?.\nAnd you'll be there in two hours.\nSo inflation can actually create this funny situation where you have many even infinite regions of space that are still fitting into one single piece of space.\nSo that's one clarification.\nIt's still just this one space, but messy.\nAnd the second thing is it's not that the actual laws of physics are different.\nIt's just that things that we thought were laws of physics turned out to actually just be different solutions to the laws of physics.\nExactly.\nIce is not the different law of physics from liquid water or steam.\nThey turn out to be three different solutions to the equations for water.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=2912"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c20ab345-46ef-452e-a869-f24ddb38e4c9": {"page_content": "So that's one clarification.\nIt's still just this one space, but messy.\nAnd the second thing is it's not that the actual laws of physics are different.\nIt's just that things that we thought were laws of physics turned out to actually just be different solutions to the laws of physics.\nExactly.\nIce is not the different law of physics from liquid water or steam.\nThey turn out to be three different solutions to the equations for water.\nAnd that's something awesome would like because it makes physics itself simpler and it makes history more complicated.\nThat's a fascinating idea.\nAnd it is one that closes the door to this otherwise embarrassing problem of fine tuning, which is how is it that we find ourselves in the universe that seems perfectly tuned to support life and intelligent life and beings exactly like ourselves in a position to wonder about these things.\nAnd there have been other efforts to close that door just with what's been called the the anthropic principle, which you stated earlier, just that the only place we can find ourselves is a place that's compatible with our existence.\nAnd so that shouldn't be surprising.\nAnd yet it has seemed surprising that essentially that we should exist at all that the universe could have been an infinite number of ways.\nAnd it just happened to be this way.\nWell, in according to the level two multiverse, the universe is essentially an infinite number of ways.\nAnd there are an infinite number of universes that are not compatible with life.\nIt's kind of a Darwinian principle of universe emergence that the only places you can find yourself or the places you you can find yourself and every place that is possible in some sense exists.\nYeah, I don't like the use of the term anthropic principle for these sort of things.\nThe word principle makes it sound like it's somehow optional.\nI mean, it's just a reduce of logic, which of course is not optional.\nYou know, the like why are you really, really surprised that out of all the eight planets in our solar system, we're living on Earth rather than Venus, where it's 900 Fahrenheit right now, or on Jupiter, where there's no surface is that on?.\nProbably not very surprised.\nI wouldn't call that in deep principle.\nIt's just common sense that the vast majority of our solar system is not very friendly for our kind of life.\nAnd the vast majority of space is horrible for our kind of life.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3038"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "999b802c-5eb1-4055-abb8-439de75c2690": {"page_content": "Probably not very surprised.\nI wouldn't call that in deep principle.\nIt's just common sense that the vast majority of our solar system is not very friendly for our kind of life.\nAnd the vast majority of space is horrible for our kind of life.\nAnd therefore, we shouldn't be very surprised that we're living in a special very, a very special part of the space that we can see.\nIt is kind of a place that we're living in a special part of the space we can't see either.\nSo one way of closing the door to this mystery of fine tuning, which doesn't entail yet another multiverse, so a level two multiverse, is this idea that we could be in a simulation.\nI don't know if this argument originates with your friend Nick Bostrom, or if other people have arrived at this independently.\nBut the argument is older, but Nick Bostrom made it a very detailed argument for why we think it's actually likely that we live in a simulation.\nRight.\nSo.\nyeah,.\nso I guess we can open the door to that too.\nSo his argument in brief is that if you imagine ourselves in the distant future, or beings like ourselves that make vast gains in their ability to produce computers, and it stands to reason that they will simulate universes and beings very much like ourselves on those computers, assuming that such a thing is possible, and there's really no reason to think it isn't.\nAnd then by just dint of numbers, you would expect simulations to vastly outnumber real universes, and therefore you would expect that you should be in a simulation rather than in a real universe.\nThat argument sort of stands on its own unrelated to this issue of fine-tuning or the multiverse.\nBut if taken seriously, the prospect of being in a simulation, it does answer this fine-tuning argument as well.\nSo I always want to ask of the simulation hypothesis, what problem does it solve?.\nI don't know that it solves this fine-tuning is yet another one.\nIt's just an appeal to the supernatural.\nBut, but if we do live in a simulation, then that will be revealed to us eventually.\nPeople might say, oh, how could it possibly?.\nWell, we would get to a point where a problem would arise that would require us to postulate something outside of the simulation.\nA simulation won't necessarily have infinite complexity.\nIn fact, nothing can have infinite complexity, but reality itself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3168"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9338eaa4-fc6a-4373-ba66-fdceced260a9": {"page_content": "It's just an appeal to the supernatural.\nBut, but if we do live in a simulation, then that will be revealed to us eventually.\nPeople might say, oh, how could it possibly?.\nWell, we would get to a point where a problem would arise that would require us to postulate something outside of the simulation.\nA simulation won't necessarily have infinite complexity.\nIn fact, nothing can have infinite complexity, but reality itself.\nDavid Deutsch argues this in the fabric of reality.\nA simulation has to be running on a computer, which presumably is in a genuine physical reality of some kind, computing stuff, obeying the laws of that universe.\nBut the computer that the simulation is running on will have finite memory, finite processing speed.\nAnd so we would get to a point where we'd be delving into subatomic particles.\nWhat we think are subatomic particles and just get to the point where we realize or we resolve the individual bits.\nAnd this would be telling us to, if we got to the end like that, an endpoint like that, then we would have to ask why.\nAnd if there was no such answer, we'd have to postulate that this reality exists in another reality, namely a simulation type thing that is causing it to resolve into these fundamental things which can't be broken down any further.\nI can't imagine what that would be like exactly.\nBut there would come a wall before us when it comes to progress.\nAnd that would cry out for an explanation.\nAn explanation that couldn't be within the universe, because the universe after all at that point would be bounded, it would be this wall.\nBut we could then ask the question, what's outside the universe, because we'd get to the end of it in some way.\nWell, I don't mean the end of it in space necessarily, although that could be a possibility as well.\nBut the end in some way to us resolving stuff, finding solutions, in particular, the smallest particles of matter, there would be a smallest particle of matter or something the equivalent of that, some problem would just get solved and there would be no way of moving beyond that, no way of making progress unless we postulate something smaller still, but there wouldn't be something smaller still.\nIt would be a strange reality to occupy.\nSo we would find out we would be able to find out we're in the simulation.\nWe would postulate the existence of something else, on which this simulation is running.\nAnd it doesn't solve anything anyway.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3306"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b830a466-4986-4237-b68b-802d18c17ae7": {"page_content": "It would be a strange reality to occupy.\nSo we would find out we would be able to find out we're in the simulation.\nWe would postulate the existence of something else, on which this simulation is running.\nAnd it doesn't solve anything anyway.\nI mean, because the simulation hypothesis still postulates a fundamental actual reality.\nSo saying we're in a simulation is just to say we're in a thing that's in physical reality.\nOr in a thing that's in a thing that's in physical reality.\nIt doesn't deny the existence of physical reality.\nAnd the simulation hypothesis still postulates just more stuff in physical reality.\nThat's all.\nAnd the physical reality is something different to what we think it is.\nBut it doesn't mean it's completely and utterly inaccessible.\nWhy?.\nBecause we've got universal minds.\nSo we can always guess at what's outside.\nAnd perhaps do tests and get sick, find way to know is the creative people of the future if we do live in a simulation would come up with ideas about how to test this kind of stuff.\nAnyway, naval gazing I would say is this kind of thing.\nIt doesn't solve any problem of ours right now.\nI was talking about the simulation hypothesis before.\nSo I'm going to skip past what Simon Mac say on this point.\nSo this might be a good bridge.\nAnd now I'm mindful of your time here.\nSo we're not doing anything like justice to the contents of your book.\nWe're going to skip over the other ways in which you can arrive at a conception of a multiverse, in particular the quantum mechanical issues addressed by Hugh Everett and all of that is fascinating.\nAnd it's just another route into infinite copies of ourselves having infinite versions of this podcast and no doubt in some of those podcasts.\nWe treat these topics at much greater length.\nBut I think this is a good bridge to AI where which is where you and I met.\nOkay.\nSo there we go.\nAnd I would say, unfortunately, unfortunately, Max doesn't get to explain the ever ready in view of the multiverse.\nI'd like to hear how other people explain that particular good scientific explanation.\nYes.\nMax's book is worth getting on this point.\nBut like Sean Carroll, I think that he mistakes the testability of the multiverse, the ever ready in multiverse, which David Dorch, of course, written a paper on.\nSo here at the end, I think it's important just to make some concluding summary remarks.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3415"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dfcbbe7d-6d8e-4552-aa6b-0e522ba2eae7": {"page_content": "I'd like to hear how other people explain that particular good scientific explanation.\nYes.\nMax's book is worth getting on this point.\nBut like Sean Carroll, I think that he mistakes the testability of the multiverse, the ever ready in multiverse, which David Dorch, of course, written a paper on.\nSo here at the end, I think it's important just to make some concluding summary remarks.\nMax Tegmark is of course a great thinker, a very good physicist, highly accomplished, and a clear writer of some fascinating topics.\nHowever, having read the mathematical universe and having heard a couple of interviews with him, what I find is that there is a certainly a difference in epistemology.\nLet's just say that between a perspective that David Dorch presents in the fabric of reality and the beginning of infinity and what you get in something like Max's book, our mathematical universe.\nAnd I am going to read a little just a very short snippet from his book, just to give you a taste of what I mean about this difference between epistemologies and how it comes to affect something like the physics and the conclusions.\nAnd importantly, what I would say is the metaphysics, the broader reality within which one's physics sits.\nOne's way of understanding just reality at the broadest possible scale.\nI think this is why having a good understanding of some epistemology at least clarifies things because two misconceptions tend to creep in.\nThe one is as you would have heard when Max speaks there and Sam can tend to do this sometimes as well, is that they make a dividing line between knowing and knowing for sure.\nSo he said that phrase at least twice that I recall in the recordings that I made of that discussion.\nHe would say, it's something we don't yet know for sure, but we can't know for sure.\nYet he implies we can, but how do we know for sure?.\nWe either know something or we don't know something and that's that.\nWe can just say of these multiverse theories.\nYes, we know that's the good explanation of what's going on or we don't know yet yet.\nAnd I would say that for what he's calling level one, absolutely we know.\nIt's part of our knowledge.\nThis is predictive, it's explanatory, it describes what's going on out there in the universe.\nIt is the universe.\nIt is just our explanation of spaces we understand it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3556"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9219d829-571d-46c9-bc0a-ba06897b1033": {"page_content": "We can just say of these multiverse theories.\nYes, we know that's the good explanation of what's going on or we don't know yet yet.\nAnd I would say that for what he's calling level one, absolutely we know.\nIt's part of our knowledge.\nThis is predictive, it's explanatory, it describes what's going on out there in the universe.\nIt is the universe.\nIt is just our explanation of spaces we understand it.\nAnd the level three multiverse, yes, we know it, we know it as the explanation of what's happening in quantum theory.\nSo I agree with Max, possibly for different reasons, but I agree with Max for that reason.\nAlthough perhaps we also differ on things like whether or not we know once and for all, we know for sure that these things are true.\nI would just say we know them.\nThe appending of for sure is a superfluous unnecessary.\nIn fact, it reduces the meaning of know to something that means it's useless kind of a word because you never reach this for sure bar.\nBut Max does conflate the two at times, no one to know for sure.\nHe wants to say it can't be known until it's known for sure.\nAnd it's the sure part that makes it known, and sure means certain, but how can we be certain?.\nThe history of science is enough to give us fallibleism.\nThe overturning of previous theories that people, many people, were certain of at the time.\nAnd you also hear throughout the discussion, Max making quite a point about this unobserved stuff being a part of science and Sam agreeing as well.\nAnd of course, I agree.\nAnd David Deutsch agrees that the unobserved is absolutely a part of science, but proper continues to be denigrated in some way, as if poppers epistemology implies that the unobserved is not accounted for because it's not testable within his conception of reality, which is completely wrong.\nIn fact, popper is the only one who is able to explain how, via David Deutsch, I would say, that we get to acknowledge of the unobserved through our theories via our observations when you're an empiricist, which so many people are, they say that we'll knowledge is derived from what you observe.\nAnd so you're stuck within what you observe.\nBut it is difficult to get a handle on exactly where Max is coming from in constructing knowledge as such.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3714"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25f78afc-4b9a-4ccd-9e62-5b69af66e679": {"page_content": "In fact, popper is the only one who is able to explain how, via David Deutsch, I would say, that we get to acknowledge of the unobserved through our theories via our observations when you're an empiricist, which so many people are, they say that we'll knowledge is derived from what you observe.\nAnd so you're stuck within what you observe.\nBut it is difficult to get a handle on exactly where Max is coming from in constructing knowledge as such.\nI can't find references to him describing himself as a Bayesian, and certainly he doesn't make a big deal of it in the indices of his books, let's say, you can't find the word Bayes or Bayes in isn't there.\nHowever, you do find claims that he believes his theories.\nHe says as much.\nThis is completely unlike what popper implored us to do, or what physicists like Michael Faraday thought.\nMichael Faraday said something to the effect of, I hold my theories on the tips of my fingers, so the mirrorist breath effect will blow them away.\nSo he understood testability.\nHe understood that you can have your theories all day long, but once the observation comes along and it refutes your theory in light of a better theory, we'll so much for having believed your theory, because I need to believe your theory.\nScientists shouldn't believe their theories.\nIt's the wrong epistemologist, the wrong way of going about science.\nScience explains the world.\nThrough misconceptions, we say misconceptions, because we should expect their theories to contain some error, not to be the final word on things.\nAnd because there's an error there, there will be fixed one day overturned and we'll look back and go, well, that was a misconception.\nUseful as it was to solve problems and getting something right about the world, saying something correct, something true, containing truth, an explanation, but nonetheless ultimately in the final analysis false and misconception.\nSo why believe it?.\nWhy think it's true?.\nWhat does this word belief mean in this sense?.\nWhat function does it serve?.\nOnce one begins believing things, one ceases to be a fallibleist.\nBut then, of course, at other times, Max says that we don't know for sure, so it's hard to know exactly where he's coming from.\nIt's not a consistency there in the book.\nI've just released a podcast called Lookouts, and it's about worldviews.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3776"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c25c0c1-fb14-482b-8adb-187457764c32": {"page_content": "Why think it's true?.\nWhat does this word belief mean in this sense?.\nWhat function does it serve?.\nOnce one begins believing things, one ceases to be a fallibleist.\nBut then, of course, at other times, Max says that we don't know for sure, so it's hard to know exactly where he's coming from.\nIt's not a consistency there in the book.\nI've just released a podcast called Lookouts, and it's about worldviews.\nAnd it says why having a worldview, which in other words I would say, not only a rich deep foundational understanding of the science, but also having an understanding of what metaphysics is, ontology, epistemology, and how these things relate to everything else, science, physics, mathematics, and how all of this can come to bear on broader, even more important things, perhaps like morality.\nAnd having a conception of all of these things that is encompassed by a philosophy of how to make progress, how to understand the world, and that we don't get to final answers.\nAnd the problem with thinking that one can get to final answers rather than simply improve continuously over time.\nAnd it's going to read an excerpt from page 880 from our mathematical universe.\nThis is chapter 12.\nIt's also a big tone, all about the different levels of multiverse.\nAnd he says, this is Max Tegmark speaking, quote, interestingly, in the context of the mathematical universe hypothesis, the existence of the level four multiverse isn't optional.\nAs we discussed in detail in the previous chapter, the mathematical universe hypothesis says that a mathematical structure is our external physical reality, rather than being merely a description thereof.\nThis equivalent between physical and mathematical existence means that if a mathematical structure contains a self-aware substructure, it will perceive itself as existing in a physically real universe.\nJust as you and I do, albeit generically, a universe with different properties from ours.\nStephen Hawking famously asked, what is it that breeds fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?.\nIn the context of the mathematical universe hypothesis, there's no fire breathing required since the point isn't that a mathematical structure describes a universe, but that it is a universe.\nMoreover, there's no making required either.\nYou can't make a mathematical structure.\nIt simply exists.\nIt doesn't exist in space and time.\nSpace and time may exist in it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=3908"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f3c7412-2580-43f2-a7df-ac2b3a0da96a": {"page_content": "Stephen Hawking famously asked, what is it that breeds fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?.\nIn the context of the mathematical universe hypothesis, there's no fire breathing required since the point isn't that a mathematical structure describes a universe, but that it is a universe.\nMoreover, there's no making required either.\nYou can't make a mathematical structure.\nIt simply exists.\nIt doesn't exist in space and time.\nSpace and time may exist in it.\nIn other words, all structures that exist mathematically have the same ontological status, and the most interesting question isn't which ones exist physically, they all do end quote.\nSo as I say, that's from chapter 12.\nAnd it's from a section in chapter 12, the title of which is, and I'll read you the title.\nWhy?.\nI believe in the level four multiverse.\nSo I think that that's just a departure from science, I'm afraid to say.\nIt's somewhat a departure from rationality.\nHe calls what he's doing, the mathematical universe hypothesis.\nYet he says he believes it.\nWhy?.\nWhat is the rational reason?.\nWe're not given one.\nWe're told that all mathematical structures just exist.\nNow this is confusing necessary truth with our knowledge of the necessary truth.\nHe's saying that he's gotten to the ultimate final truth.\nAnd that truth is that the entire universe consists of mathematics.\nIn fact, there are an infinite number of universes out there that are made of mathematics.\nBut what privileges mathematics?.\nWhat makes the difference between the abstract mathematical objects and the abstract any other objects, the difficulty for Max fundamentally is that he cannot get outside of his physical brain.\nNow he argues in a circular way.\nHe says that everything is mathematical.\nIt's Pythagoras' idea.\nAll is number.\nHe begins with that assumption and then reaches that conclusion in the end as well, rather than starting with problems.\nFor example, what is the brain figuring out?.\nWell, okay, the brain is made of neurons.\nWhat are neurons matter?.\nThey're made of atoms.\nOkay, that's a form of matter.\nWhat are the laws that matter must obey?.\nQuantum laws of physics.\nAre the quantum laws of physics computable?.\nIndeed, they are.\nIndeed, all physical structures undergo physical processes themselves which are computable.\nAnd that includes brains.\nThat includes brains that do mathematics to come to an understanding of mathematics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4031"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "189ff1f5-65f4-40ad-a611-eed3e580a846": {"page_content": "Well, okay, the brain is made of neurons.\nWhat are neurons matter?.\nThey're made of atoms.\nOkay, that's a form of matter.\nWhat are the laws that matter must obey?.\nQuantum laws of physics.\nAre the quantum laws of physics computable?.\nIndeed, they are.\nIndeed, all physical structures undergo physical processes themselves which are computable.\nAnd that includes brains.\nThat includes brains that do mathematics to come to an understanding of mathematics.\nHowever, what we also understand via this process, by this understanding of computational universality, is that computers can introduce errors.\nThey're not perfect machines.\nThey can error correct.\nBut there's no getting around the fact that it could be the case that a mistake is made at any point during the explanation, the computation, the calculation, however you want to put it, a neuron can misfire.\nAn electron can go the wrong way.\nA person can just make a mistake.\nAnd that cannot be escaped from.\nAnd that includes any conclusion reached by that brain.\nWell, mind, we should say.\nAnd that includes minds that come to the conclusion that, for example, everything is made of maths, that everything consists of mathematics.\nAnd therefore, level four multiverses exist that necessarily exist must exist.\nBut this has all been arrived at via a brain obeying the laws of physics, a via something we know, we know, we know that.\nAnd so we know that it can't be the case that we can simultaneously know, for sure, that the mathematical universe exists as in the mathematical multiverse that Max Tegmark says exists.\nSo what I'm sad to say is he is ignoring known science.\nIt's true for him to say it's a mathematical universe hypothesis.\nBut it is a rational for him to say that, therefore, he believes it.\nA scientist shouldn't believe their own theories, even when they're known, when they are the best explanations.\nBut in this case, we don't even have a known theory.\nIt's not even a good explanation.\nIt's just one explanation among many among many to solve certain problems.\nThose problems I've already mentioned are just things like the fine tuning issue, the fine tuning problem.\nWhat Max wants, and this has been true across the eons, is a certain foundation that explains absolutely everything once and for all.\nIt's a kind of religious notion, this idea that, you know, God created everything and that, you know, the ultimate answers are held by God.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4183"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9ff32750-3836-411d-a313-4e3889d3110e": {"page_content": "It's just one explanation among many among many to solve certain problems.\nThose problems I've already mentioned are just things like the fine tuning issue, the fine tuning problem.\nWhat Max wants, and this has been true across the eons, is a certain foundation that explains absolutely everything once and for all.\nIt's a kind of religious notion, this idea that, you know, God created everything and that, you know, the ultimate answers are held by God.\nAnd there's nothing beyond that.\nWell, the mathematical universe, especially the level form multiverse, is that structure.\nIt is that thing.\nIt serves that purpose.\nIt answers all questions.\nLet's just go on a little further.\nI'm not just read from page 959 of his book.\nAnd he says, quote, the level for multiverse does not imply that all imaginable universes exist.\nWe humans can imagine many things that are mathematically undefined.\nAnd hence, don't correspond to mathematical structures.\nMathematicians publish papers with existence proofs that demonstrate the mathematical consistency of various mathematical structure descriptions precisely because to do this is difficult and not possible in all cases end quote.\nElsewhere when Max writes on this, he does speak in terms of all conceivable things exists.\nIf you can conceive it, then it exists.\nBut now he's saying that not all imaginable universe exists.\nMaybe what he means, or should say when you speak in more carefully, is that all conceivable mathematical structure exists out there somewhere other.\nBut has I also pointed out during this podcast in other universes with different laws of physics?.\nIf there are people in those universes with different laws of physics, then they are able to prove different things about different mathematical structures.\nAnd so their conclusions that they reach about this level form multiverse, if it exists, would be different to ours.\nSo whatever he's saying about the level form multiverse here, by his own reckoning, should be different in other parts of the level form multiverse.\nSo what do we say?.\nWhose level form multiverse is it?.\nIs it constrained by the mathematics that's known here or known there?.\nOr rather provable here or provable there?.\nWe can't say.\nIt's not easy to know.\nI don't know if the question is well defined either.\nIt's true to say that logic is logic is logic and mathematics is mathematics is mathematics or godless of where you are.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4308"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3c754e17-a96a-4836-b3bf-8ac0965ce8ae": {"page_content": "So what do we say?.\nWhose level form multiverse is it?.\nIs it constrained by the mathematics that's known here or known there?.\nOr rather provable here or provable there?.\nWe can't say.\nIt's not easy to know.\nI don't know if the question is well defined either.\nIt's true to say that logic is logic is logic and mathematics is mathematics is mathematics or godless of where you are.\nBut assertions about what mathematical structures exist based on what human brains can do, trying to reach conclusions about places where the physics is, places where the physics is so different.\nBut what can be understood by mathematics is literally literally inexplicable to us because our brain simply is unable to rock stuff that brains presumably are buying completely different laws of physics that are able to rock.\nWell, we're getting into the intractable area of metaphysics and fantasy.\nSo it's a very difficult talk about these things.\nAnd this is why it would be strange for me to hear someone say they believe this stuff.\nBut he's problem is and what he can't escape from.\nHe's making claims about this level form multiverse in this sense at least where he said it doesn't imply that all imaginable universes exist.\nWe humans can imagine many things that are mathematically undefined and hence don't correspond to mathematical structures.\nSo he's saying that if they're not mathematically defined here by us, presumably by our mathematicians, then they won't exist in the level four multiverse.\nBut our capacity to imagine stuff is constrained by our brain that obeys these laws of physics here.\nIf the laws of physics elsewhere are different in the level four multiverse, which by definition they will be, then there will be people there whose brains are operating on laws of physics that allow them to compute and hence to imagine structures that we can't imagine.\nSo he's contradicting himself.\nThis itself doesn't make any sense.\nThis is an incoherent notion, which is a problem for the level four multiverse, much less believing in such a multiverse based upon this argument.\nThese are the kind of discussions people have when they've had too many beers or smoked too much weed, I think.\nIt's just, it is metaphysics.\nIt's not constrained by what we know.\nBut if you want to have this sort of discussion, it should.\nIt should at least begin in what we know and what we know at the moment are laws of physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4436"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "75f57747-c573-4378-a368-1659726a437e": {"page_content": "These are the kind of discussions people have when they've had too many beers or smoked too much weed, I think.\nIt's just, it is metaphysics.\nIt's not constrained by what we know.\nBut if you want to have this sort of discussion, it should.\nIt should at least begin in what we know and what we know at the moment are laws of physics.\nTo the extent that we know them, our best explanations, this is why explanations need to be at the center of our concern about rationally understanding the world and having rational discussions and writing popular science books.\nNow finally I'm just going to skip way back to earlier in the book, earlier in our mathematical universe, where he mentions proper ones.\nAnd as you can guess, as we always say here, whenever I pick up a popular science book, whenever I listen to a podcast, whenever I tune into a YouTube explainer video and car pop up comes up, it comes up in the same way.\nAnd it comes up in such a way that it's a misconception.\nIt came up during their conversation.\nLet's see what Max has to say in the book itself, because it comes to bear on what he thinks about testability.\nNow he doesn't even think, as I think many others have said before, I think Sean Carroll has said, even though these guys ostensibly endorsed the multiverse, the many worlds interpretation ever ready and quantum theory.\nThey don't, they don't think it can be testable.\nWell, Tag Mark goes, Max goes even further.\nHe doesn't think that it needs to be testable.\nHe doesn't think, not only does he not think it is testable, he doesn't think it needs to be testable, or should be testable, because he doesn't think multiverse is in general need to be testable.\nAnd he says this because he claims multiverses are not theories in the first place.\nAnd Papa, he says, he claims when talking about testability was only talking about the testability of theories, not predictions.\nAnd the multiverse, he says, is a prediction from a theory.\nNow that's very cute, but it's completely wrong, but let me just read from page 346 of his book.\nand he says, quote, let's be more specific.\nThe influential Austro-British philosopher, Carl Papa, popularized that they are widely accepted at age, quote, if it's not falsifiable, then it's not scientific end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4568"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "342cb8d1-67f3-4407-b9d7-5bef4e999cab": {"page_content": "And the multiverse, he says, is a prediction from a theory.\nNow that's very cute, but it's completely wrong, but let me just read from page 346 of his book.\nand he says, quote, let's be more specific.\nThe influential Austro-British philosopher, Carl Papa, popularized that they are widely accepted at age, quote, if it's not falsifiable, then it's not scientific end quote.\nAnd he goes on to say, physics is all about testing mathematical theories against observation.\nIf a theory can't be tested, even in principle, then it's logically impossible to ever falsify it, which by Papa's definition means that it's unscientific.\nIt follows then that the only thing that can have any hope of being scientific is a theory, which brings us to a very important point.\nParallel universes are not a theory, but a prediction of certain theories end quote.\nWell, look, it's true to say that the claim of anything like X exists is not falsifiable.\nAnd Max uses the existence of a banana to point this out.\nAlso, just after this, he goes on to say, quote, parallel universes, if they exist are things, and things can't be scientific.\nSo a parallel universe can't be scientific any more than a banana can end quote.\nI don't know what that means.\nAnyone who claims bananas do not exist has a falsifiable claim.\nSo he's completely confused about that.\nAnd he's confused because he does not understand the criterion.\nAnd he doesn't understand the criterion because he hasn't read Papa is my guess.\nOr if he has, he's misread him.\nI mean, Papa wrote whole books, many of them explaining his stuff.\nIt's a whole thing.\nIt's not just, quote, if it's not falsifiable, then it's not scientific end quote.\nBut you know, as I say, this is what passes for preparing epistemology in some places.\nIf someone says, bananas don't exist, pull out a banana and go, there you go.\nIt's a banana.\nYou've falsified their claim.\nOr there are no bananas in this room, pull out a banana, false.\nNow, if they, if they still deny it, well, then you're in the presence of an irrational person, that's how falsification works.\nThe thing is one better way of understanding, pop around this point about testability or falsifiability or theories and predictions or whatever.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4677"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff5ff2c9-325e-4592-8793-5cb2f80d63cf": {"page_content": "It's a banana.\nYou've falsified their claim.\nOr there are no bananas in this room, pull out a banana, false.\nNow, if they, if they still deny it, well, then you're in the presence of an irrational person, that's how falsification works.\nThe thing is one better way of understanding, pop around this point about testability or falsifiability or theories and predictions or whatever.\nIt's just to begin with the assumption, what we're doing is conjecturing, we're guessing at reality.\nWe're interpreting stuff.\nAnd on, on that basis, theories and predictions are conjectures.\nThey're all conjectures.\nIt's all conjectural.\nIt can all be tested.\nOf course, the predictions can be tested.\nOf course, the predictions can be falsified.\nGame said, shown to be false, shown to be wrong, refuted.\nThere, there, there are way of interpreting a consequence of a particular theory.\nDavid Deutsch actually describes, and in my multiverse series, I spend some time explaining the way in which he would set up an experiment, a possible experiment to distinguish the multisocalled multiverse interpretation, the multiverse theory, as compared to collapse models, right?.\nThey're the standard Copenhagen interpretation, this idea that the wave function collapses or some such that there aren't multiple universes.\nOkay, there is such an explanation that can be done.\nI don't want to go through it right now, but it will involve an AGI, one day, the future existence of an AGI, able to perform an interference experiment in its own brain.\nOkay, this, this sort of thing could be done.\nBut also, any test of quantum theory is a test of the multiverse, because they are one and the same thing.\nAnd that's what we should be saying if we're going to properly explain these things.\nSo even the defenders of multiverse theory are not doing themselves a favor by claiming in some way, shape or form, these things aren't testable.\nThey are.\nThey are.\nThis is why popularina epistemology is important.\nThis is why having a coherent worldview, as I say, is important.\nWhy having an understanding of how the philosophy gives you a certain kind of epistemology.\nAnd the epistemology tells you about the limits of knowledge, what can be known in the way in which it works, certainty and uncertainty.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4803"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "491c47cc-da1d-44e0-b5e9-4c86949d11cc": {"page_content": "They are.\nThey are.\nThis is why popularina epistemology is important.\nThis is why having a coherent worldview, as I say, is important.\nWhy having an understanding of how the philosophy gives you a certain kind of epistemology.\nAnd the epistemology tells you about the limits of knowledge, what can be known in the way in which it works, certainty and uncertainty.\nIt tells you about mathematics and why mathematics, although it's about necessary truth, it doesn't allow you to access certainty and apt and the absolute truth of anything.\nIt doesn't put hierarchies there in place between science and mathematics.\nIt also doesn't allow you to know the ultimate nature of reality.\nAnd it also tells you why that's not even desirable because we want progress and we want optimism and this idea that there is an end point in some way, shape or form to our understanding this ultimate nature of reality is a depressing thought.\nIt also means that you end up with dogmas and doctrines and the idea that the truth is manifest ends up leading to tyranny.\nSo we've got a connection there with morality and politics.\nIt's all encompassing.\nThis is why we like to explain the worldview that's in the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality and elsewhere.\nIt provides you with this.\nWe're not to say it has all the answers, but it has some sort of coherent framework, which allows you not to make what I regard as clangers of logically inconsistent claims and pseudo-scientific religious metaphysical claims as well.\nNone of this is to say that overall this is what Max is doing.\nHe's not a tag.\nThe overwhelming majority of the book is good, but I think it's just undermined by not having a deeper understanding of philosophy and epistemology.\nYou can't do away with these things.\nAnd I think a philosopher should ignore physics, the most important sorts of physics, things like consequences of quantum theory.\nI think that's just really important to do.\nMathematicians shouldn't ignore it as well.\nNone of them should ignore epistemology.\nAnyone who's versed in epistemology should have some understanding of science is not to say one needs to be an expert in all of these things.\nIt's just helpful.\nIt helps to make progress in any one of these areas if you're an expert in one of them by knowing a little bit of the rest.\nIt helps everyone just to know a little bit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=4923"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "274990d5-6a93-40e3-95d2-e4f18b1171b6": {"page_content": "Mathematicians shouldn't ignore it as well.\nNone of them should ignore epistemology.\nAnyone who's versed in epistemology should have some understanding of science is not to say one needs to be an expert in all of these things.\nIt's just helpful.\nIt helps to make progress in any one of these areas if you're an expert in one of them by knowing a little bit of the rest.\nIt helps everyone just to know a little bit.\nBut that's the multiverse, according to Max Tegmark, or the multiverse is according to Max Tegmark.\nNext time we're going to be talking about minds and I'm going to pick it up where at the end of this conversation, they talk a little bit about AGI.\nAnd then the next conversation that they have is entirely devoted to AGI.\nAnd they're basically in furious agreement about things and about the dangers to potential dangers of AGI.\nAnd just not really understanding that AGI would be a mind like ours, able to universally explain stuff like we can, to be creative like we can.\nInstead, of course, they make that era of, well, it might just have different goals and it would disregard us, it would have more morality, all this sort of stuff.\nSo we'll leave that until next time.\nAnd until then, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxwy02YjhTE&t=5018"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b74e12b6-9a24-4f10-9c68-a3e02104995e": {"page_content": "Hello and welcome to the 24th episode of ToKCast and today we're talking about chapter 11 at the beginning of infinity the multiverse.\nThere's been two preamble chapters to this or two preamble episodes to this to try and help you understand some of the evidence, some of the experiments that come to bear on why it is that we endorse the multiverse as the best way of understanding quantum theory.\nAlthough those of us who endorse the multiverse don't see a difference between quantum theory and the multiverse, the multiverse is just realism, just taking literally what the formalism in quantum theory says and what the experiments are telling us.\nNow I'm trying a little experiment today.\nThe previous episode was highly edited, it contained lots of videos and bells and whistles and that kind of thing and it was difficult to edit.\nIt took a lot, far longer to edit than it took to shoot.\nNow some people have given me feedback, very valuable feedback and I love the feedback.\nIf you have any feedback about this one, please comment in the YouTube video, tell me an email or contact me on Twitter.\nI'll certainly take it on board because this time around I'm going to reduce the amount of editing.\nSo it'll be a little bit more conversational, a little bit more relaxed, I'll refer to notes far less.\nWell we are going to actually read from the book this time.\nAnd also I've been advertising the donate button on my website www.breadhall.org.\nIf you're finding any of this valuable, the podcasts, the videos, the website, please feel free to donate.\nI'd appreciate that very much.\nI have a Patreon account and I have a PayPal account as well and my website has details about that.\nThank you to all of those who have contributed so far.\nIt means the world to me.\nOkay, so I'm going to get straight into reading from chapter 11 with some reflections along the way this time.\nA little bit more relaxed, it's going to take a while to get through this chapter.\nWe've already had, as I said two episodes, this brings us up to the third.\nI can envisage probably two more after this as well.\nSo it'll be five altogether and trying to explain the multiverse.\nIt is a powerful argument, as I've said before in this chapter in the beginning of the infinity, but it takes some unpacking.\nNow as I said, there'll be far less editing in this video, this audio.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=11"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47503bd3-3a2a-453a-a75b-485f0fda93b0": {"page_content": "We've already had, as I said two episodes, this brings us up to the third.\nI can envisage probably two more after this as well.\nSo it'll be five altogether and trying to explain the multiverse.\nIt is a powerful argument, as I've said before in this chapter in the beginning of the infinity, but it takes some unpacking.\nNow as I said, there'll be far less editing in this video, this audio.\nBut some of the editing is editing is unavoidable, simply because I either make complete matter mistakes or I just need a drink of water and you don't need to hear that.\nOkay, so David writes right at the beginning of chapter 11, quote, the idea of a doppelganger, a double of a person, is a frequent theme of science fiction.\nFor instance, the classical television series, Star Trek featured several types of doppelganger story involving malfunctions of the transporter.\nThe starships teleportation device normally used for short range space travel.\nSince teleporting something is conceptually similar to making a copy of it at a different location, one can imagine various ways in which the process could go wrong, and somehow end up with two instances of each passenger, the original and the copy.\nSometimes a doppelganger is not copied from an original, but exists from the outset in a parallel universe.\nIn some stories, there is a rift between universes through which one can communicate or even travel to meet one's doppelganger.\nIn others, the universes remain mutually imperceptible, in which case, the interest of the story or rather two stories is in how events are affected by the differences between them.\nFor instance, the movie sliding doors interleaves two variants of a love story, following the fortunes of two instances of the same couple and two universes which initially differ only in one small detail.\nIn a related genre, known as alternate history, one of the two stories need not be told explicitly because it is part of our own history and is assumed to be known to the audience.\nFor example, the novel Fatherland by Robert Harris is about a universe in which Germany won the Second World War.\nRobert Silverg's Roman returner is one about one in which the Roman Empire did not fall.\nI'll pause there end quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=144"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7249b88d-5edc-490f-b2f3-85075f0c220e": {"page_content": "In a related genre, known as alternate history, one of the two stories need not be told explicitly because it is part of our own history and is assumed to be known to the audience.\nFor example, the novel Fatherland by Robert Harris is about a universe in which Germany won the Second World War.\nRobert Silverg's Roman returner is one about one in which the Roman Empire did not fall.\nI'll pause there end quote.\nThe man in the High Castle, that's a recent one, I think it was on Amazon Prime, it went for two seasons, precisely about the alternative universe in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan indeed won the Second World War and its society said in it's not quite modern day, I don't think, but a society where those two were those two empires basically took over the world.\nImportantly, I took over the United States and that was sort of divided down the middle, one part run by Germany and one part run by Japan.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nDavid Wright's quote.\nIn another class of stories, the transporter malfunction accidentally exiles the passengers to a phantom zone, where they are imperceptible to everyone in the ordinary world, but can see and hear them and each other.\nSo they have the distressing experience of yelling into just accumulating and vain to their shipmates who are oblivious and walk right through them.\nIn some stories, it is only copies the travellers that are sent to a phantom zone, unbeknown to the originals.\nSuch a story may end with the exiles discovering that they can, after all, have some effect on the ordinary world.\nThey use that effect to signal their existence and are rescued through a reversal the process that exiled them.\nDepending on the picture, depending on the fictional science that has been supposed, they then may begin new lives as separate people, although they may merge with their originals.\nThe letter option violates the principle of the conservation of mass among other laws of physics, but again, this is fiction.\nNevertheless, there is a certain category of rather pedantic science fiction enthusiasts, myself included, who prefer the fictional science to make sense to consist of reasonably good explanations.\nImagining worlds with different laws of physics is one thing.\nImagining worlds that do not make sense in their own terms is quite another.\nFor instance, we want to know how it can be that the exiles can see and hear the ordinary world but not touch it.\nPause their end.\nquote and I'm the same.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=225"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "581fd802-b546-48d8-af56-3bbb4c6aead0": {"page_content": "Imagining worlds with different laws of physics is one thing.\nImagining worlds that do not make sense in their own terms is quite another.\nFor instance, we want to know how it can be that the exiles can see and hear the ordinary world but not touch it.\nPause their end.\nquote and I'm the same.\nFor example, one of the first, I'm of an age where one of the first great blockbuster movies that took my interest with Star Wars.\nI love Star Wars, but I quickly realized that it was fantasy and not true science fiction.\nI was a science nerd, I suppose, early on in life, loved astronomy, and I understood what a parsec was.\nSo when Han Solo said the Millennium Falcon, the spaceship, could make the castle running less than 12 parsecs, that didn't make sense.\nAnd then in episode 1 of Star Wars, in 1997-ish, when that was released, many of the Star Wars fans were utterly the fuddled, confused, and disappointed that George Lucas tried to explain the scientific basis of the force.\nTo me, the force was just magic.\nIt served the same role that Gandalf staffed it in Lord of the Rings.\nThere was nothing scientific about the force and nor should one try and make something scientific about the force.\nBut he did.\nHe tried to explain it.\nThere were these little bacteria, these little life forms inside of every cell called midi-chlorines, and these things somehow mediated the messages between the force and the user of the force like the Jedi.\nMaster Sir, I heard Yoda talking about midi-chlorines.\nI've been wondering, what are midi-chlorines?.\nMidi-chlorines are a microscopic life form that resides within all living sounds.\nThey live inside me.\nInside yourself, yes.\nAnd we are symbions with them.\nSymbions.\nLife forms living together for mutual advantage.\nWithout the midi-chlorines, life could not exist and be but of no knowledge of the force.\nThey continually speak to us, telling us the will of the force.\nWhen you learn to quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you.\nI don't understand.\nThe time and training any in there.\nYou know, we should treat fantasy as fantasy.\nTreat it as a universe with completely different laws of physics rather than try and show how the fantasy elements of things like Star Wars can actually make sense.\nThey need not make sense in that universe, okay?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=360"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "68d0202f-4698-43b5-9b97-e367bed0ee32": {"page_content": "They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the force.\nWhen you learn to quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you.\nI don't understand.\nThe time and training any in there.\nYou know, we should treat fantasy as fantasy.\nTreat it as a universe with completely different laws of physics rather than try and show how the fantasy elements of things like Star Wars can actually make sense.\nThey need not make sense in that universe, okay?.\nAnd we're not told what kind of universe we're supposed to be in, namely a universe different from ours.\nThen we won't be disappointed with the explanations.\nI've never needed an explanation in the Star Wars universe as to why the laser bolts from the gun travel so slowly, far slower than normal bullets.\nYou can see them travel through the air.\nAnd moreover, I've never been concerned about the fact there is sound in space in Star Wars.\nIt's a different fictional fantasy universe that doesn't worry me.\nBut if it purports to be our universe, obeying our laws, then yes, it's disappointing.\nSo, for example, when Superman's cape flaps in the wind on the moon when he's visiting the astronauts, that's intolerable.\nThat shouldn't happen.\nNor should he be able to speak on the moon as well, but he does.\nOkay, let's keep going in this pedantic vein.\nDavid Wright's quote, this attitude of ours was nicely parodied in an episode of the television series, The Simpsons, in which fans of a fantasy series question its star.\nStar.\nNext question.\nFan.\nYes, over here.\nIn episode B F 12, you were battling barbarians while riding a winged Apollusa.\nYou know, in the very next scene, mighty, you are clearly a top, a winged Arabian.\nPlease to explain it.\nStar.\nAh, yeah.\nWell, whatever you notice something like that, a wizard did it.\nFan.\nAll right.\nLet's see.\nYes.\nBut in episode A. G. 4, star.\nWizard.\nFan.\nOh, for Glavin out loud.\nAnd Glavin is something that we don't understand the meaning of.\nI'll continue.\nBecause that is a parody, the fan is complaining not about the story itself, but that there is a continuity error.\nTwo horses we use at different times to play the role of a single fictional horse.\nNevertheless, there are such things as flawed stories.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=499"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "46f5d731-63b8-402c-8634-0c2ccc105166": {"page_content": "Let's see.\nYes.\nBut in episode A. G. 4, star.\nWizard.\nFan.\nOh, for Glavin out loud.\nAnd Glavin is something that we don't understand the meaning of.\nI'll continue.\nBecause that is a parody, the fan is complaining not about the story itself, but that there is a continuity error.\nTwo horses we use at different times to play the role of a single fictional horse.\nNevertheless, there are such things as flawed stories.\nEnd quote, just my reflection on that.\nI won't read the next part here.\nBasically, David's pointing out that if you do have a flawed story, often it comes down to a wizard did it kind of thing.\nAnd so you're not being given an explanation.\nYou're being, you're having something explained away told don't ask this question because it's magic.\nA wizard has done it.\nIt's and very easy to very explanation.\nAnd so even in terms of the fictional world itself, it can be a bad explanation.\nSo skipping a substantial part there and then David writes, in that spirit then, consider the fictional doppelgangers in the phantom zone.\nWhat enables them to see the ordinary world?.\nSince they are structurally identical to their originals, their eyes work by absorbing life and detecting the resulting chemical changes just as realized it.\nBut if they absorb some of the light coming from the ordinary world, then they must cast shadows at the places where that light would otherwise have arrived.\nAlso, if the exiles in the phantom zone can see each other, what light are they seeing with?.\nThe phantom zone's own light?.\nIf so, where does it come from?.\nPause their my reflection.\nYeah, remember my father telling me about, I think it was a movie, old movie, the invisible man.\nAnd he would always try and explain to me why the invisible man would actually be blind because he's not absorbing any light.\nIf you have a true invisible man, wonder, in fact, I think there's a modern day version of the invisible man that's on right now, showing right now in 2020.\nHe should be blind.\nHe or she should be blind if you're invisible, if you're completely invisible, because your eyes will allow all the light to pass through them.\nIt's not capturing any light whatsoever.\nIt's not doing what light should do.\nNamely, be absorbed by the retina.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=640"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e0cdae4b-b83a-4a98-af38-3b2fa3999c63": {"page_content": "If you have a true invisible man, wonder, in fact, I think there's a modern day version of the invisible man that's on right now, showing right now in 2020.\nHe should be blind.\nHe or she should be blind if you're invisible, if you're completely invisible, because your eyes will allow all the light to pass through them.\nIt's not capturing any light whatsoever.\nIt's not doing what light should do.\nNamely, be absorbed by the retina.\nAnd if it's not being absorbed by the retina because it's perfectly transparent, then, indeed, the invisible man will be blind, and all people in the phantom zone will be blind.\nAnd if they're not blind, then I must just be receiving light from somewhere, and that must be phantom zone light as well, skipping a bit, and then David writes.\nIt seems that almost everything in these phantom zone stories that happens in the story, not only conflicts with the real laws of physics, which is an exceptional infection, but raises problems with the fictional explanation.\nIf the doppelgangers can walk through people in these stories, why do they not fall through the floor?.\nIn reality, a floor supports people by bending slightly.\nBut if it were to bend in the story, it would also vibrate with their steps, and set off sound waves, which people in the ordinary world could hear.\nSo there must be a separate floor and walls, as well as an entire spaceship hole in the phantom zone.\nEven the space outside cannot be ordinary space, because if one could get back into ordinary space by leaving the ship, then the exiles could return by that route.\nBut there is an entire phantom zone space, but if there is an entire phantom zone space out there, a parallel universe, how could a mere transport a malfunction have created that?.\nWe should not be surprised that good fictional science is hard to invent.\nIt is a variant of real science, and real scientific knowledge is very hard to vary.\nPause there, just skipping a substantial part, and getting straight into more of the meat of the matter when it comes to quantum theory, because David is going to explain quantum theory, a viral fictional story.\nAnd so there's some explanation about the tactic that he's using here, and then he goes on to write.\nQuite quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=715"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6b6be34f-0ce1-4efd-acef-195f48eab667": {"page_content": "It is a variant of real science, and real scientific knowledge is very hard to vary.\nPause there, just skipping a substantial part, and getting straight into more of the meat of the matter when it comes to quantum theory, because David is going to explain quantum theory, a viral fictional story.\nAnd so there's some explanation about the tactic that he's using here, and then he goes on to write.\nQuite quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science.\nIt violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and all of previous science, including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came along and contradicted them.\nAnd yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and everything we experience are part.\nThere is no other.\nSo in setting a story there, perhaps what I lose in terms of the familiar ingredients of drama, I shall gain in terms of opportunity to explain something that is more astounding than any fiction, yet he's the purest and most basic fact we know about the physical world.\nI'd better warn the reader that the count that I shall give known as the many universes interpretation of quantum theory, rather inadequately since there is much more to it than universes, remains at the time of writing a decidedly minority of your among physicists.\nIn the next chapter, I shall speculate why that is so despite the fact that many well studied phenomena have no other known explanation for the moment.\nSo if I said to say the very idea of science as explanation, in the sense that I am advocating in this book, namely an account of what is really out there, is itself still a minority view even among theoretical physicists, paused their entire reflection.\nFirstly, notice how I just paused there, normally I would edit that out and try and say that again.\nSo this is one of the things that I'm asking people to give me feedback on.\nWould you prefer I just reread that rather than stumbling out of my words?.\nDavid does say there that this idea of science as explanation is itself still a minority view even among theoretical physicists.\nYeah, it seems to me that it is primarily a problem among theoretical physicists.\nIt's the theoretical physicists that seem to deny that what physics in this particular case is telling us about reality shouldn't be taken seriously, that we don't need to explain what's actually happening and that we can just be therefore instrumentalists when it comes to things like quantum theory.\nI mentioned this in the previous two episodes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "549ee328-1c7b-4647-999a-939e45260b4e": {"page_content": "Yeah, it seems to me that it is primarily a problem among theoretical physicists.\nIt's the theoretical physicists that seem to deny that what physics in this particular case is telling us about reality shouldn't be taken seriously, that we don't need to explain what's actually happening and that we can just be therefore instrumentalists when it comes to things like quantum theory.\nI mentioned this in the previous two episodes.\nIt's not so much a problem for ornithologists, people who study birds.\nThey tend to be realists about the fact that birds exist and birds evolve and have common ancestors with people.\nIt's not really seemingly a problem for geologists or people who want to try and find something like oil in the ground using radar techniques or geometric analysis.\nThese people are realists about where the oil is and the fact that rocks exist and you have to bash through them.\nThey're still scientists.\nIt really is a problem at the very edge of our understanding the most fundamental theories about science.\nIt's there it seems to me the philosophy somewhat changes in people's minds.\nThey cease to be realists about the things that they're studying when it comes to science.\nThere's also of course a sense in which there is this folk relativism as well that many people have when you ask them what they really know exists.\nThey deny really knowing that anything absolutely exists, especially educated people.\nThe more educated people become, the more skeptical they come about straightforward realism and the fact that science explains reality.\nIt doesn't have the final word but it explains aspects of reality and you're entitled to say electrons really exist and people really exist and bird really exist and so on.\nThat's what realism is and that's what science's explanation is all about.\nIf something appears unavoidably in our best explanation then that entity exists.\nThis is explained very well in the fabric of reality by the way.\nSo I'll say that again we know something exists.\nIf it appears in our best explanations.\nNow some people object to this they say.\nwell then if our best explanation changes that means that what you said existed before now learning exists.\nYes yes I find that out of fairly mundane claim.\nKnowing something exists is not knowing something absolutely once and for all finally exists and there can be no change in your knowledge about the existence of that thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=941"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e328c4b2-8eb8-4350-9470-c467521c31b6": {"page_content": "So I'll say that again we know something exists.\nIf it appears in our best explanations.\nNow some people object to this they say.\nwell then if our best explanation changes that means that what you said existed before now learning exists.\nYes yes I find that out of fairly mundane claim.\nKnowing something exists is not knowing something absolutely once and for all finally exists and there can be no change in your knowledge about the existence of that thing.\nWhether something exists in some final ultimate sense is not noble just like it's in some final sense we cannot know the final laws of physics or the final ultimate knowledge about everything we won't get there we're at the beginning of infinity.\nSo instead we have to interpret the word existence as being about the contents of our best current explanations.\nIt's not an infallible criteria when we're talking about existence.\nSo that's going to remark on that.\nand I think that your typical scientist the further they get away from theoretical physics they tend to be realists about their own field.\nI have a friend who is a marine biologist.\nI've never heard him deny the fact that squid exists.\nHe studies squid.\nHe knows that the squid's exists and he's quite happy to say I know that squid's exist.\nOn the other hand the theoretical physicist does tend to deny the reality of what things like the shredding of wave equation tell us about reality.\nAnyway I digress and let me return to the book David writes.\nLet me begin with perhaps the simplest possible parallel universe speculation.\nA phantom zone has existed all along ever since its own Big Bang.\nUntil our story begins it has been an exact doppelganger of the entire universe atom for atom and event for event.\nAll the flaws that I mentioned in the phantom zone stories devot all the flaws that I mentioned in the phantom zone stories derived from the asymmetry that things in the ordinary world affect things in the phantom zone but not vice versa.\nSo let me eliminate those flaws by imagining for a moment that the universes are completely imperceptible to each other.\nSince we're heading towards real physics let me also retain the speed of light limit on communication and let the laws of physics be universal and symmetrical i.e. they make no distinction between the universes.\nMoreover they are deterministic nothing random ever happens which is why the universe has remained alike so far.\nHow can they ever become different?.\nThis is a key question in the theory of the multiverse which I shall answer below.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1077"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "690e80c9-bb05-4597-839d-d40f1495ce62": {"page_content": "Since we're heading towards real physics let me also retain the speed of light limit on communication and let the laws of physics be universal and symmetrical i.e. they make no distinction between the universes.\nMoreover they are deterministic nothing random ever happens which is why the universe has remained alike so far.\nHow can they ever become different?.\nThis is a key question in the theory of the multiverse which I shall answer below.\nAll these basic properties of my fictional world can be thought of as conditions on the flow of information.\nOne cannot send a message to the other universe nor can one change anything in one's own universe sooner than light could reach that thing.\nNor can one bring new information even random information into the world.\nEverything that happens is determined by the laws of physics from what has gone before.\nHowever one can of course bring new knowledge into the world.\nKnowledge consists of explanations and none of those conditions prevents the creation of new explanations.\nAll this is true of the real world to pause there end quote.\nHere is my controversial take on that.\nIt's not controversial to me but it's something some discussions I've been engaged in recently.\nDiscussions that go back some two decades about this particular thing.\nAll those things that David said they are quite true so for example everything that happens is determined by the laws of physics from what has gone before.\nSo determinism is real.\nEvery event is absolutely determined by the laws of physics but to assume that it is the past that determines the future is just a bias because the laws of physics are symmetric in time.\nOne may as well say the future determines the past state as well so you can take any future state, apply the laws of physics in reverse and end up with that past state.\nEverything is determined doesn't privilege what thing in time determines what other thing in time because you can reverse the laws of physics they are symmetric.\nThe laws of motion are symmetric.\nThe one thing that can be brought into this world but new information can't be brought into this world however new knowledge can be brought into this world by creative people and the essence of new knowledge created by creative people that seem somewhat redundant and circular but it's true that people are creative they create new knowledge is that that new knowledge is impossible to predict ahead of time.\nWere it possible to predict what knowledge someone was going to create then that knowledge would be had at the time of the prediction and thus it would not be a genuine creation of that knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1191"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4a3913b5-52d4-4ad8-9c15-32b227eb1a66": {"page_content": "Were it possible to predict what knowledge someone was going to create then that knowledge would be had at the time of the prediction and thus it would not be a genuine creation of that knowledge.\nBut knowledge really is created and has a causal effect in the world and it cannot be predicted not only because it's super complex although David is going to explain how that is one factor.\nbut I would say we simply do not know the process by which knowledge creation occurs.\nWe have some ideas, popularing epistemology gives us some ideas that it is this process of conjecture and refutation.\nBut how new conjectures are arrived at?.\nWhat the process is that goes on inside the mind of a person in order to create this new explanatory knowledge, we don't know.\nIt's a black box for now.\nIt could very well be, it could very well be, that it remains some kind of black box, that there is some uncertainty principle that controls creativity.\nI'm just conjecturing this.\nI'm just throwing this out there.\nI'm not saying that I believe it.\nI'm saying it's a possibility that it will turn out to be inherently impossible to predict knowledge creation.\nThere will be some principle that prohibits us from predicting what knowledge a person will create.\nIt's inherently unpredictable and if it's inherently unpredictable then we have to real it then, although it's determined by the laws of physics, everything is determined by the laws of physics.\nThis does not rule out free will because free will is intrinsically coupled to this idea of creating new knowledge, that if you have a decision to make in your life, where apparently you only have two choices, the human mind is such that it can create new options, options that weren't there before and although you might be told you can have tea or coffee and this is the classic free will thought experiment.\nWhether you have tea or coffee might have been determined prior to you're making the choice about tea or coffee.\nBut now, if you're someone like me who endorses the idea of free will as a real thing, I would say you can't even say that it's a 50-50 chance.\nYou can't even say that the person will choose tea or coffee.\nThe person might not want either.\nThe person might choose to drink neither.\nThe person might choose to mix them together.\nThe person might choose to invent a new drink altogether.\nAll of these things, though consistent with the laws of physics, cannot be predicted ahead of time.\nThis is what free will is about.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "844f76cd-0199-4c2f-9839-5551e5d2a396": {"page_content": "You can't even say that the person will choose tea or coffee.\nThe person might not want either.\nThe person might choose to drink neither.\nThe person might choose to mix them together.\nThe person might choose to invent a new drink altogether.\nAll of these things, though consistent with the laws of physics, cannot be predicted ahead of time.\nThis is what free will is about.\nIt has something to do with creatively generating new options that weren't there previously.\nI call this a emergent feature of reality.\nThe fact that people are unique in this regard, people are unique in this regard and cosmically important in large part for this reason, that they bring new options into the world, that they can create new explanations and those new explanations gives them a wider repertoire of ways in which to control the world they find themselves in and control the environment that they find themselves in.\nSo attempting to prophesy things into the distant future is near impossible.\nWe can have some crude estimates based upon current knowledge about what's going to happen into the distant future, but invariably that will be wrong, because we haven't been able to take account of human creativity.\nIs everything to determine why the laws of physics?.\nAbsolutely.\nDo we know what all the laws of physics are and the most fundamental laws of physics that exist?.\nNo.\nWill we ever?.\nNo.\nCould any of these laws of physics have anything whatever to do with creative conjectures?.\nPerhaps.\nAnd perhaps some of them will tell us why it is that we can't predict ahead of time what is going to happen.\nIf you can't predict ahead of time what is going to happen when a person is involved, then that's what free will basically amounts to.\nAlthough it's determined, it's not predictable.\nSay it again, although something might be determined that has nothing to do with whether from the perspective of a single person or an entire civilization, whether that thing is predictable.\nAnd if it's not predictable, despite being determined, we have a form of compatibleism here.\nUnpredictability and determinism.\nAnd when that situation arises, in the context of creative expression by people, we have something that we may as well call free will, because it's serving all the functions that classical free will serves.\nNow, I need to clarify something on that point about people being unique in bringing knowledge into the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1515"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8051bb38-ddfa-4203-bffd-ad493818571e": {"page_content": "And if it's not predictable, despite being determined, we have a form of compatibleism here.\nUnpredictability and determinism.\nAnd when that situation arises, in the context of creative expression by people, we have something that we may as well call free will, because it's serving all the functions that classical free will serves.\nNow, I need to clarify something on that point about people being unique in bringing knowledge into the world.\nAnd so the fact that they create knowledge means that it's unpredictable what's going to happen into the distant future, because of the fact it's a genuine act of creation.\nDespite the fact everything obeys the laws of physics, the laws of physics are the thing that allow even mandate perhaps that this creative act of knowledge production can actually occur in the minds of human beings.\nWhat I want to clarify is explanatory knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge that can be brought into the universe.\nThere is another kind that we have mentioned here on top cast and that we have read about from the beginning of infinity.\nThat other kind of knowledge is of course evolutionary knowledge, or genetic knowledge, knowledge that is in the DNA, knowledge that enables organisms to survive in certain environments, in given environments.\nAnd in fact it's a nice parallel really.\nA biologist would be able to explain how it is that we cannot predict what animals, what specific species are going to evolve in particular niches.\nYou can guess, you can have an approximate understanding that well if you find a particular biological niche, then a certain kind of organism might be expected to fill that niche in some way.\nI think Darwin himself, Charles Darwin, made a kind of prediction given that there was a certain kind of awkward that existed, which had a very long stem that was very difficult for any insect to actually reach down to get the nectar from the bottom of that orchid.\nAnd so he postulated, there should be a moth out there somewhere with a very long perbiscus, a very long kind of insect beak thing that could get down into that orchid.\nAnd so he did indeed make a kind of evolutionary prediction, but it's not a prediction in the same way that physics makes predictions.\nAfter all, evolution is blind and this evolution is blind claim is quite true.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1632"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7ce838d9-b184-4b90-a1fb-cfec0eae9141": {"page_content": "And so he postulated, there should be a moth out there somewhere with a very long perbiscus, a very long kind of insect beak thing that could get down into that orchid.\nAnd so he did indeed make a kind of evolutionary prediction, but it's not a prediction in the same way that physics makes predictions.\nAfter all, evolution is blind and this evolution is blind claim is quite true.\nThat means we can't really predict what's going to happen next because although there might be certain niches where we would expect the co-evolution of two organisms, given any particular environment, it's going to be extremely difficult indeed to try and figure out what kind of organisms might actually specifically arise in those environments.\nIf we were alien biologists and we tried to predict, for example, given no other information other than what the physical environment of the continent of Australia was like and the physical environment of what the continent of Africa is like, they're both quite similar, both hot, rather dry places.\nIt'd be very difficult to figure out that the kangaroos evolved in one place and the lions evolved in another place.\nI don't think that biology is able to do that kind of prediction and that's the way in which evolution is creative.\nIt's able to bring these organisms into being to fill niches.\nBut what specific kind of organism fills a particular physical niche that's unpredictable and it's a form of creativity.\nIt's a form of knowledge creation by evolution, equally determined by the laws of physics, but the laws of physics determine in the sense that allow for evolution to occur.\nSo evolution brings knowledge into existence.\nSo to do people, the difference is that people bring into existence explanatory type knowledge.\nAnd this explanatory knowledge is inherently unpredictable and allows us to change the environment in which we find ourselves, to understand the environment and to control it.\nSo yeah, just a quick clarification on that point.\nThere are indeed two kinds of knowledge, explanatory and evolutionary.\nOkay, let's keep on going.\nThat was a massive diversion.\nAnd David writes, we can temporarily think of the two universes as being literally parallel.\nSo press the third dimension of space and think of a universe as being two dimensional, like an infinitely flat television.\nThen place the second such television parallel to it, showing exactly the same pictures symbolizing the objects in the two universes.\nNow forget the material on which, now forget the material of which the televisions are made, only the pictures exist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1744"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "387bb03d-8dca-4526-afc0-b1a59c2c2db5": {"page_content": "That was a massive diversion.\nAnd David writes, we can temporarily think of the two universes as being literally parallel.\nSo press the third dimension of space and think of a universe as being two dimensional, like an infinitely flat television.\nThen place the second such television parallel to it, showing exactly the same pictures symbolizing the objects in the two universes.\nNow forget the material on which, now forget the material of which the televisions are made, only the pictures exist.\nThis is to stress that a universe is not a receptacle containing physical objects.\nIt is those objects.\nIn real physics, even spaces a physical object capable of warping and affecting matter and being affected by it.\nNow we have two perfectly parallel identical universes, each including an instance of our Starship, its crew and its transporter, and of the whole of space.\nBecause of the symmetry between them, it is now misleading to call one of them the ordinary universe and the other the phantom zone.\nSo I should just call them the multiverse.\nSo I should just call them universes.\nThe two of them together which comprise the whole of physical reality in the story so far are the multiverse.\nSimilarly, it is misleading to speak of the original object and its doppelganger.\nThey are two, they are simply the two instances of each object.\nIf our science fiction speculation were to stop there, the two universes would have to remain identical forever.\nThere is nothing logically impossible about that.\nYou know what would make our story fatally flawed, both as fiction and as scientific speculation, and for the same reason.\nIt is a story of two universes, but only one history.\nThat is to say there is only one script about what is really there in both universes.\nConsider this fiction therefore, it is really a single universe story and a pointless disguise.\nConsider this scientific explanation.\nConsider this scientific speculation, it describes a world that would not be explicable to its inhabitants.\nFor how could they ever argue that their history takes place in two universes and not three or thirty.\nOne or two today and thirty tomorrow.\nMoreover, since their world has only one history or their good explanations about the nature would be about that history.\nThat single history would be what they meant by their world or universe.\nNothing of the underlying tuneness of their reality would be accessible to them.\nNor would it make any more sense of them as an explanation.\nThen would threeness or thirtyness.\nYet they would be factually mistaken.\nA remark about explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1891"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "841f50be-8512-431c-beab-1e627c7193a7": {"page_content": "One or two today and thirty tomorrow.\nMoreover, since their world has only one history or their good explanations about the nature would be about that history.\nThat single history would be what they meant by their world or universe.\nNothing of the underlying tuneness of their reality would be accessible to them.\nNor would it make any more sense of them as an explanation.\nThen would threeness or thirtyness.\nYet they would be factually mistaken.\nA remark about explanation.\nAlthough the story so far would be a bad explanation for the inhabitants point of view, it is not necessarily bad from ours.\nImagining inexplicable worlds can help us to understand the nature of explicable.\nI have already imagined some explicable worlds for that very reason in previous chapters, and I shall imagine more in this chapter.\nBut in the end, I want to tell of an explicable world, and it will be ours.\nA remark about terminology.\nThe world is the whole of physical reality.\nIn classical, pre-quantum physics, the world was thought to consist of one universe.\nSomething like a whole three-dimensional space for the whole of time and all its contents.\nAccording to quantum physics, as I shall explain, the world is much larger and more complicated object.\nThe multiverse, which includes many such universes among other things, and history is a sequence of events happening to objects and possibly their identical counterparts.\nSo in my story so far, the world is a multiverse that consists of two universes, but has only one single history.\nSo where two universes meant not stay identical?.\nSomething like a transporter malfunction will have to make them different.\nYet, as I said, that may seem to have been ruled out by those restrictions on information flow.\nThe laws of physics and the fictional multiverse are deterministic and symmetrical.\nSo what can the transporter possibly do that would make the two universes differ?.\nIt may seem that whatever one instance of it does to one universe, its doppelganger must be doing to the other so the universes can only remain the same.\nSurprisingly, that is not so.\nIt is consistent for two identical entities to become different under deterministic and symmetrical laws.\nPause there and, quote, for the moment, just a little reflection of mine.\nThis is just like the half-silvered mirror in the Mark Zender interferometer that we talked about in the last episode.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=1987"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f003b5a4-204e-461d-ad8b-2fa253593e76": {"page_content": "Surprisingly, that is not so.\nIt is consistent for two identical entities to become different under deterministic and symmetrical laws.\nPause there and, quote, for the moment, just a little reflection of mine.\nThis is just like the half-silvered mirror in the Mark Zender interferometer that we talked about in the last episode.\nThis is where, although the laws of physics are deterministic and symmetrical, nonetheless, you could have a situation where a photon can strike a half-silvered mirror and 50% of the time it will go through and 50% of the time it will bounce off.\nIn fact, in the real multiverse, what we have is in that situation, 50% of all electrons that will all photon driver that strike that half-silvered mirror will go through or fungible copies of this one electron will go through and 50% will bounce off.\nAnd so although you have symmetrical deterministic laws, there's two different possible outcomes.\nThat causes the universes to become different.\nWhen you have that capacity for differentiation, symmetrical deterministic laws can cause different things to happen.\nAnd it really happens in real life.\nA voltage surge, for example, such as David has in his fictional story, it could be something like, well, just by chance, I say chance, but due to the laws of physics, an electron can have different energies, as it orbits a nucleus.\nIn fact, it could have so much energy at ionisors.\nAnd this effectively is a spark on an atomic scale.\nIonis means the electron leaves the atom.\nNow, as it leaves the atom, it could strike other electrons and have a cascading effect in causing other electrons to be ionis from their atoms.\nAnd then you do get a real life little spark.\nThis could be how the malfunctioner, the malfunction in the transporter works.\nOkay, so I'll just continue for a little longer.\nand then I'll stop here, having not read too much, just as an experiment.\nRemember, I want people's feedback on whether you think the lack of editing in this episode is a better or a worse thing.\nOkay, continuing, quote, David writes, but for that to happen, they must initially be more than just exact images of each other.\nThey must be fungible by which I mean identical and literally every way, except that there are two of them.\nThe concept of fungibility is going to appear repeatedly in my story.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=2092"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25b9ac68-93e2-4c74-86ec-684e445a065e": {"page_content": "Remember, I want people's feedback on whether you think the lack of editing in this episode is a better or a worse thing.\nOkay, continuing, quote, David writes, but for that to happen, they must initially be more than just exact images of each other.\nThey must be fungible by which I mean identical and literally every way, except that there are two of them.\nThe concept of fungibility is going to appear repeatedly in my story.\nThe term is borrowed from legal terminology, where it refers to the legal fiction that deems certain entities to be identical for purposes, such as paying debts.\nFor example, dollar bills are fungible in law, which means that unless otherwise agreed, borrowing a dollar does not require one to return the specific bank note that one borrowed, barrels of oil that are given grade are fungible too.\nHorses are not, borrowing someone's horse means that one has to return that specific horse, even its identical twin, will not do.\nBut the physical fungibility I'm referring to here is not about deeming.\nIt means being identical, and that is very different and a counterintuitive property.\nLeibniz and his doctrine of the identity of disearnables went so far as to rule out its existence on principle, but he was mistaken.\nEven aside from the physics of the multiverse, we now know that photons, and under some conditions even atoms, can be fungible.\nThis is achieved in lasers and in devices called atomic lasers, respectively.\nThe laterim it bursts of extremely cold, fungible atoms.\nFor how this is possible without causing transmutation explosions and so on, see below, end quote, just pause here.\nI noticed there's a third meaning of fungible and people have been using this increasingly more, especially in economics.\nAnd for audio only listeners, I'm just drawing your attention to on the video version I'm showing you the third definition from the Merriam-Wibs-The-Dictionary, which says that the definition of fungible is readily changeable to new situations.\nIt now seems to me to have been perverted to mean just similar or transferable.\nI heard in a podcast, for example, recently, someone talking about how car manufacturing recently was stopped in Australia, and there was some talk about creating an industry of jet fighters and without getting into politics.\nBut the commentators were there were talking about how the skills of the car builders may have been fungible for aircraft building.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=2221"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1baba5fd-c644-4784-81c7-68f1784afcbd": {"page_content": "It now seems to me to have been perverted to mean just similar or transferable.\nI heard in a podcast, for example, recently, someone talking about how car manufacturing recently was stopped in Australia, and there was some talk about creating an industry of jet fighters and without getting into politics.\nBut the commentators were there were talking about how the skills of the car builders may have been fungible for aircraft building.\nNow, they made it explicit that he didn't think that this meant the skills were exactly the same, but rather just transferable, that you could move the skills from building cars to building jets right or wrong in terms of the terminology that's a weakening of this term of fungibility, where it just means similar, approximately the same good enough.\nThis is completely unlike what David's talking about, where it kind of means more identical than identical, because it means identical copies in exactly the same places doing exactly the same thing.\nOkay.\nOkay, I'll just read a little bit more David writes, quote, you will not find the concept of fungibility discussed, or even mentioned in many textbooks or research papers on quantum theory, even the small minority that endorsed the many universes interpretation.\nNevertheless, it is everywhere just beneath the conceptual surface, and I believe that making it explicit helps to explain quantum phenomena without fudging.\nAs we'll become clear, it is even weirder and attribute than Leibniz guest, much weirder than multiple universes, for instance, which are, after all, just common sense repeated.\nIt allows radically new types of motion and information flow, different from anything that was imagined before quantum physics, and hence a radically different structure of the physical world, pause there, end quote, and that's where I'll end the reading for today.\nYes, so we're getting a hint here now that the multiple universes aspect of quantum theory, of the multiverse, it's not the most amazing thing.\nThis concept of fungibility really is the most one of the more amazing things.\nNot only are photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles fungible, and there are fungible instances of quantum, according to quantum theory, but you yourself, a person, contains many instances, fungible instances, right now, perhaps uncountably infinite.\nWhat does it feel like to be uncountably infinite numbers of fungible instances of a person?.\nExactly as it feels like to you right now.\nWhat does it feel like to differentiate into two different copies?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=2327"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "547a9feb-2a1f-432d-a288-6302e7c6fecb": {"page_content": "Not only are photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles fungible, and there are fungible instances of quantum, according to quantum theory, but you yourself, a person, contains many instances, fungible instances, right now, perhaps uncountably infinite.\nWhat does it feel like to be uncountably infinite numbers of fungible instances of a person?.\nExactly as it feels like to you right now.\nWhat does it feel like to differentiate into two different copies?.\nExactly as it feels like now.\nOkay, we have to understand reality as it is.\nNow, we don't know what it would feel like to split and then merge again, although that might happen, because we don't have sense organs for that.\nBut perhaps in the episode next or the one after that, I'll explain the experiment that David has proposed to differentiate between this multiverse conception of quantum theory, the realest conception, versus other conceptions of quantum theory.\nThe other conceptions of quantum theory are far more to my mind, counterintuitive, illogical even.\nThose interpretations say that all of the universes disappear except for one when being observed.\nIn other words, the power of the human mind of consciousness is what causes the collapse of the wave function.\nBut we'll talk about that in a future episode for now.\nThank you for listening.\nAnd do let me know via whatever means.\nIf you prefer this style slightly more relaxed, more conversational, mean not referring to notes very often, stumbling over my words in places, possibly not sounding as refined as what I did in previous episodes.\nWhat do you prefer?.\nBecause moving forward, I'll be taking people's ideas on board to some extent.\nUntil then, bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG65-449zhA&t=2466"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ebc04486-10ae-4ba5-b740-84c6357df47e": {"page_content": "\u014c \u014c\u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c\u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \u014c \ufffd.\nWelcome to ToKCast episode 30.\nThis is part 3 of chapter 12, a physicist's history of bad philosophy, with some remarks on bad science.\nAnd today we're going to be spending a little bit more time on the bad science aspect of the chapter.\nNow when it comes to bad science, as we indicated at the end of the last section, at the end of the last part that I did part 2, really what we're talking about is explanationless science.\nThere's studies that you can do, investigations, experiments if you like, that can support to show correlations between variables.\nNow an investigation that purports to find a relationship, a correlation between two variables, it might be interesting, but unless we have a causal mechanism whereby one variable causes another variable to increase, whereby an increase in one variable causes the increase in another variable, we have an explanation as to what that cause is, we have explanationless science.\nNow there are many examples of explanationless science.\nDavid's going to use behaviourism as an example, really, of explanationless science, but there are other kinds.\nFor example, in the area of public health, I can't remember if precisely when the study was, I'm sure I could look it up now, but back in the 80s approximately, there was a study purporting to show that the closer someone lived to a power stonching, the worse their health outcomes were.\nAnd so this is explanationless science, until we have an explanation why proximity to a power stonching causes poor health outcomes, we don't have a scientific theory or we have as a correlation, there could be a third factor.\nNow in this case, it is true, I think in certain areas of America, the closer you live to a power stonching, the more likely you are to have a lower life expectancy.\nAnd so many people at the time interpreted this as meaning, there are electromagnetic waves coming out of those power stonchons, affecting people's DNA causing cancer, causing other sorts of health problems.\nAnd so this was the reason why one wouldn't want to live near a power stonching.\nNow physicists kind of knew that the electromagnetic radiation coming from a high voltage power stonching is usually very low frequency indeed, you might get some radio waves.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "543f8456-711f-48d6-a7e7-946462fa846c": {"page_content": "And so many people at the time interpreted this as meaning, there are electromagnetic waves coming out of those power stonchons, affecting people's DNA causing cancer, causing other sorts of health problems.\nAnd so this was the reason why one wouldn't want to live near a power stonching.\nNow physicists kind of knew that the electromagnetic radiation coming from a high voltage power stonching is usually very low frequency indeed, you might get some radio waves.\nBut we have an explanation as to why that can't cause ionization of atoms in the DNA and therefore cause mutations and therefore cause cancers.\nSo we had an explanation of that, a good explanation in other words as to why the power stonching itself was not causing the worse health outcomes.\nThe better explanation, as it turns out, is that people who live close to power stonchons live in houses where the land value is lower.\nPeople don't want to live near power stonchons, real estate agents have difficulty selling houses around power stonches because you've got this big ugly tower in your backyard, ruining the view, taking up space, whatever.\nIt causes the value of the land to go down, possibly for irrational reasons.\nBut if that's the case, people who live in those areas can't afford better healthcare.\nBecause they can't afford better healthcare, that means that their health outcomes are generally going to be worse.\nHad nothing to do with radio waves or other kinds of energy coming from the electrical wires.\nSo this is a case where we can have a very good correlation between two things and yet one does not cause the other.\nThere's a third factor.\nAnd that third factor actually means that you can't extrapolate, you can't use that relationship to make useful predictions, where an explanation, there's no possibility of making predictions.\nA prediction would mean that you'd be able to take a particular person living in close proximity to a power stonchon and be able to determine that that person is more likely to have worse health outcomes.\nHowever, we could falsify this in many different ways.\nThere would be people who do not fit the trend.\nOnce you have people that don't fit the trend, another word for that is a falsification of the theory that power stonchons cause bad health outcomes for people.\nNow, similar kinds of bad science happen everywhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=143"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "647fff3f-0d47-4fc9-ae7e-5393a5d47943": {"page_content": "However, we could falsify this in many different ways.\nThere would be people who do not fit the trend.\nOnce you have people that don't fit the trend, another word for that is a falsification of the theory that power stonchons cause bad health outcomes for people.\nNow, similar kinds of bad science happen everywhere.\nNot so much in the physical sciences and we'll get to the reasons why and it's got to do with uncertainty analysis or being able to quantify your errors or at least being able to say what the likely sources of error are going to be in your study.\nBut in other areas of science, let's say environmental science, there could be all sorts of ways in which we could find a correlation between, say, increasing average global temperatures and all sorts of supposedly bad environmental effects.\nSpecies decline, increasing wildfires or bushfires, increasing hurricanes or tornadoes, increasing desertification, decreasing corals, etc, etc, etc.\nNow there may be mechanisms for some of these things, but I'm not too sure whether or not the mechanism for all of these things must come down to an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at any given time.\nIt could be that these things are caused by something else.\nIt could still be due to climate change, but perhaps by some mechanism other than the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, let's say.\nSo David has come to the point in this chapter where he's talking about the fact that in behavioral studies of people's psychology, typically what is done is that surveys are conducted or people's behavior is monitored and that behavior might include things like marking checkboxes on a survey.\nAnd these survey responses might be used to determine whether or not someone is suffering from depression or whether or not someone is functionally very happy or not.\nAnd then some kind of genetic study might be performed.\nAs we might find a correlation between genes or genetic similarities between people and their tendency to report themselves as having high levels of happiness, let's say.\nBut of course, marking checkboxes on a survey isn't really measuring happiness.\nIt's not an objective measure of happiness.\nIt's a subjective measure on the part of the person, on the part of the subject of their own internal conscious states.\nAnd as we mentioned in the last episode, different people might have different standards for feeling precisely the same way.\nSo two people, even though they're both saying that they feel a happiness level of six out of 10, they both might actually feel in reality quite different.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=269"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f74fcce-ca6e-484a-b3c1-62f75512f4d0": {"page_content": "It's not an objective measure of happiness.\nIt's a subjective measure on the part of the person, on the part of the subject of their own internal conscious states.\nAnd as we mentioned in the last episode, different people might have different standards for feeling precisely the same way.\nSo two people, even though they're both saying that they feel a happiness level of six out of 10, they both might actually feel in reality quite different.\nAnd on the other hand, of course, two people who feel exactly the same, subjectively speaking, we've got no access to someone's subjectivity at the moment, except by this proxy, this proxy of marking a survey, making marks on a survey, two people that feel actually in reality, ontologically the same, might in fact, might in fact report different levels of happiness.\nOne might say they're only a three out of 10, because they expect that life could be a lot better than what it is.\nBut on the other hand, someone might mark for exactly the same sensations that they've got in terms of their physiology, they might mark themselves seven out of 10, simply because they've got different standards.\nAnd why might people have different standards?.\nWell, some people could just be forepessimists and some people could be real optimists.\nAnd that could be because of what they know about reality as well.\nNow David's about to get to the point where he's talking about the fact that there can be scientific studies, quite rigorous scientific studies, where the marking of checkboxes is perfectly valid.\nIt's not valid in that case where we're just talking about people reporting on their own internal subjective states.\nUnless we can have a ruler or a thermometer or some sort of objective test as to what's going on inside of that person's subjective mental experience, we don't have access to that person's internal subjective experience.\nAll we have access to is their reporting on their internal subjective experience.\nThis is not typical science.\nWe wouldn't go to a physicist and say, how did the temperature of the water feel to you just describe it?.\nNo, we don't want them to say it felt really hot to me or it felt cold to me.\nOr it felt approximately 25 degrees Celsius to me.\nWe want a thermometer reading.\nWe want an instrument to be able to have access to that water and not merely to have the physicists or chemist or whoever it is reporting on how they felt at the time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "63d4cf39-8ca3-4aae-984d-bae46aa319ec": {"page_content": "We wouldn't go to a physicist and say, how did the temperature of the water feel to you just describe it?.\nNo, we don't want them to say it felt really hot to me or it felt cold to me.\nOr it felt approximately 25 degrees Celsius to me.\nWe want a thermometer reading.\nWe want an instrument to be able to have access to that water and not merely to have the physicists or chemist or whoever it is reporting on how they felt at the time.\nThat would be rejected in any other area of science, but of course in psychology, this is de-regur, this is typical, this is what people do.\nAnd I guess to some extent they're doing their best, they don't have anything else.\nAnd they're doing something, but we can't say they're doing good science.\nSo let me read from the beginning of in Findi.\nAnd I'm up to page 317 for anyone who's following along.\nAnd David writes, there are circumstances under which there is a good explanation linking the measurable proxy such as marking checkboxes with a quantity of interest.\nAnd in such cases there may need to be nothing unscientific about the study.\nFor example, political opinion surveys may ask whether respondents are happy with a given politician facing re-election under the theory that this gives information about which checkbox their respondents will choose in the election itself.\nThat theory is then tested at the election, pause their my reflection.\nSo this is the whole idea of pre-polling or polls in general, maybe not exit polls because David's there talking about beforehand before the election they're testing things before they are supposed to be done after the election as well.\nAnd notoriously these days, the our understanding of polling has really been pushed around the validity of polling.\nOne reason is of course that people are, it would seem possibly embarrassed to tell pollsters how they really feel about certain candidates.\nIn some cases they might actively be lying to the pollsters for a whole bunch of reasons, which would make polling quite unscientific.\nSo in fact here, this idea actually presumes that people are honestly reporting on the survey about the politician.\nIf you ask whether you would vote for John Smith, if a random pollster say stops you in the street or calls you on the phone and says how do you feel about John Smith and you say very good, will you be voting for John Smith and you'll say absolutely?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47cda0bf-9e1c-437c-9642-c30071b13ff3": {"page_content": "So in fact here, this idea actually presumes that people are honestly reporting on the survey about the politician.\nIf you ask whether you would vote for John Smith, if a random pollster say stops you in the street or calls you on the phone and says how do you feel about John Smith and you say very good, will you be voting for John Smith and you'll say absolutely?.\nMight very well be the case that you're just saying that an attempt to appear to have an acceptable opinion to the pollster.\nThis appears to be a fact of these days, it's a new phenomenon, so far as I know, people being embarrassed or concerned about how they might be viewed by the pollster.\nAnd this goes some way to explaining why polls are no longer completely reliable.\nSo we've seen that for the last few elections anyway.\nWhilst you made your elections in the Western world anyway, people being concerned about how they appear to a random person who's asking them how they feel about particular politicians.\nNow putting that aside, okay, so putting that little quibble aside, it otherwise might be the case that certain surveys can be perfectly scientifically valid.\nBut as David says, there is no analog of such a test in the case of happiness.\nThere is no independent way of measuring it.\nAnother example of bona fide science would be a clinical trial to test a drug purported to alleviate particular identifiable types of unhappiness.\nIn that case, the objective of the study is again to determine whether the drug causes behaviour, such as saying that one is happier without also experiencing adverse side effects.\nIf a drug passes that test, the issue of whether or not it really makes the patient's happier, or merely alters the personality to have lower standards or something of that sort is inaccessible to science, until such time as there is a testable explanatory theory of what happened, happiness is.\nPause name or reflection.\nSo this is an interesting point that David's making there about, let's say, antidepressants.\nSo do antidepressants actually cause the person who's taking them to in reality experience greater levels of happiness?.\nOr is it the case that it makes the unhappiness that they tend to feel more tolerable?.\nAnd so it's very difficult for the person to probably be able to distinguish between these two different cases, perhaps impossible.\nCertainly for the person doing the study, it will be difficult to determine whether or not they've lowered their standards or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=639"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7820f791-5199-469a-a84e-e798dd860a03": {"page_content": "So do antidepressants actually cause the person who's taking them to in reality experience greater levels of happiness?.\nOr is it the case that it makes the unhappiness that they tend to feel more tolerable?.\nAnd so it's very difficult for the person to probably be able to distinguish between these two different cases, perhaps impossible.\nCertainly for the person doing the study, it will be difficult to determine whether or not they've lowered their standards or not.\nAnd so filling out a survey or reporting to the doctor that they feel better, that they feel like their depression has been alleviated, could be a consequence of them actually feeling more happy in reality?.\nOr it could be the fact that they don't feel in truth happier in reality, it's just that their standards have been lowered.\nNow are these two things the same in reality?.\nNo, no, because there is ontologically some reality of a state of happiness.\nNow we don't know what that is scientifically, but it must be the case that there are in objective ontological reality.\nWhat's going on inside of your mind can either be very, very happy or extremely unhappy in anything in between?.\nAnd how you then feel about that state, let's say that you are objectively on happiness level state nine, ontologically speaking, Sam Harris likes to speak about this.\nSo there is a reality to your subjectivity, and Sam Harris gets this from John's soul, I think.\nAnd so this is where it really comes into its own this distinction, this way of speaking about subjectivity and objectivity.\nNow your consciousness has real existence, it really exists unless you're Daniel Dennett, of course, and you argue that you have no such consciousness.\nNonetheless, I think there's consciousness.\nI think most philosophers believe that there is consciousness.\nNo, that there is a kind of consciousness.\nWe don't know how to replicate consciousness.\nWe don't have AGI yet.\nNonetheless, consciousness exists.\nAnd if consciousness exists and if consciousness states therefore exist, then there is a way of determining that some are objectively better than others.\nThis conscious state of suffering is objectively worse than this conscious state of feeling joy, let's say, and there might be different levels of joy or different levels of happiness.\nNow given that's the case, if you are objectively on happiness level four out of ten, that's objectively where you are, then you will also have a theory about how happiness level four exists.\nYou might not know exactly what happiness level four exists feels like.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=792"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2b0351b2-56d1-4272-8718-ee781d619b31": {"page_content": "This conscious state of suffering is objectively worse than this conscious state of feeling joy, let's say, and there might be different levels of joy or different levels of happiness.\nNow given that's the case, if you are objectively on happiness level four out of ten, that's objectively where you are, then you will also have a theory about how happiness level four exists.\nYou might not know exactly what happiness level four exists feels like.\nNow this is where it gets a little bit weird and complicated, but if we had a scientific theory of subjective states, of consciousness, then in some far distant future we might know what happiness level four for a human being feels like.\nNow when you are asked by the doctor, how do you feel on a scale of one to ten, even though you actually in reality occupy happiness level four at that particular point, you might say, oh, actually I feel like a three out of ten.\nNow you would be wrong about that, but you've got some access to how you feel.\nNow you're just making an error.\nYou're making an error because you don't have an objective way of measuring your own happiness and unhappiness on a scale of one to ten.\nNow when you take an antidepressant, it might, it might be the case that it elevates you from what is in objective reality a four out of ten, what you have reported as being a three out of ten.\nIt might actually raise that to a seven out of ten and you will report that having taken the antidepressant, you might report that it has actually alleviated your depression.\nIt has actually raised your level of happiness and you'd be right about that.\nBut you'd be wrong about, of course, having claimed that your own happiness level three to begin with actually will reform.\nNow there is another alternative, of course, that in fact what the antidepressant does is has no effect whatsoever on the objective state that you occupy.\nYou remain at happiness level four in reality and objective reality you're still on a four, but it causes you to think, to change your opinions about what happiness level four feels like.\nAnd so you will then report a seven, so it causes you actually to increase your errors.\nNow you go and fill out the survey of seven out of ten and in both cases the first case where in reality you've been raised to a seven, but the other possibility is of course that your happiness level has not been raised.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=905"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "23db5264-e86e-4316-a32d-543e7b27e9d7": {"page_content": "And so you will then report a seven, so it causes you actually to increase your errors.\nNow you go and fill out the survey of seven out of ten and in both cases the first case where in reality you've been raised to a seven, but the other possibility is of course that your happiness level has not been raised.\nYour depression has not been alleviated, but behaviorism, you know, effectively the antidepressant has worked because you're no longer saying your depressed, even though nothing much about your brain chemistry, so to speak, has been changed.\nAlthough, okay, I know in reality SSRI, serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors, I know that they actually do all to brain chemistry, okay, all that aside.\nLet's go back to the book.\nDavid writes, in explanationless science one may acknowledge that actual happiness and the proxy one is measuring are not necessarily equal, but one nevertheless calls the proxy happiness and moves on.\nOne chooses a large number of people, ostensibly at random though in real life one is restricted to small minorities such as university students in a particular country, seeking additional income, and one excludes those who have detectable extrinsic reasons for happiness or unhappiness, such as recent lottery wins or bereavement.\nSo one subject suggests typical people, though in fact one cannot tell whether they are statistically representative without an explanatory theory.\nNext one defines the heritability of a trait as its degree of statistical correlation with how genetically related the people are.\nAgain, that is a non-explanatory definition.\nAccording to it, whether one was a slave or not was once a highly heritable trait in America.\nIt ran in families.\nNow, I'm just going to read that short paragraph again because we're going to come back to it, and I think it's something that people tend to miss in this chapter.\nSo I'll say it again.\nOne defines the heritability of a trait as its degree of statistical correlation with how genetically related the people are.\nAgain, that is a non-explanatory definition.\nAccording to it, whether one was a slave or not was once a highly heritable trait in America.\nIt ran in families.\nMore generally one acknowledges that statistical correlations do not imply anything about what causes what, but one adds the inductive as to quivocation that they can be suggestive, though.\nSo just pause there.\nI'm just wanting to emphasize here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=1033"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "77d4ffcc-8c6d-4e70-9d8c-e7a4b26c7e0b": {"page_content": "Again, that is a non-explanatory definition.\nAccording to it, whether one was a slave or not was once a highly heritable trait in America.\nIt ran in families.\nMore generally one acknowledges that statistical correlations do not imply anything about what causes what, but one adds the inductive as to quivocation that they can be suggestive, though.\nSo just pause there.\nI'm just wanting to emphasize here.\nWhat David's doing here is he is kind of setting up how it is that you go about performing a scientific study that is a scientific study in form only.\nIt's not scientific in the sense that you're producing good, hard to vary explanations in science.\nThis is the way you go through and you just go through the formal process of appearing to do science, or appearing to do an experiment, or finding a correlation, let's say.\nBut at no point are you going to suggest that this thing causes that thing, or that, or if you do, you're going to equivocate about it.\nDavid continues.\nThen one does the study and finds that happiness is say 50 percent heritable.\nThis asserts nothing about happiness itself.\nUntil the relevant, explanatory theories are discovered at some time in the future, perhaps after consciousness is understood, and AGI's are commonplace technology.\nYet people find the result interesting because they interpret it via everyday meanings of the words happiness inheritable.\nUnder that interpretation, which the authors of the study, if they are scrupulous, will nowhere have endorsed.\nThe result is a profound contribution to a wide class of philosophical and scientific debates about the nature of the human mind.\nPressure reports of the discovery will reflect this.\nThe headline will say, new study shows happiness 50 percent genetically determined without quotation marks around the technical terms.\nPause the MRI reflection.\nAll you need to do is to go to Google and look up or do a Google search on happiness genetically determined, or something like that.\nAnd you'll indeed find studies precisely of the kind that David has talked about there.\nDavid continues.\nSuppose that someone now does dare to seek explanatory theories about the cause of human happiness.\nHappiness is a state of continually solving one's problems, they can picture.\nUnhappiness is caused by being chronically balked in one's attempts to do that, and solving problems itself depends on knowing how.\nSo external factors aside, unhappiness is caused by not knowing how.\nReaders may recognize this as a special case of the principle of optimism.\nPause the MRI reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4c15419f-6fcd-4db0-a90d-bacfc25f0cbd": {"page_content": "David continues.\nSuppose that someone now does dare to seek explanatory theories about the cause of human happiness.\nHappiness is a state of continually solving one's problems, they can picture.\nUnhappiness is caused by being chronically balked in one's attempts to do that, and solving problems itself depends on knowing how.\nSo external factors aside, unhappiness is caused by not knowing how.\nReaders may recognize this as a special case of the principle of optimism.\nPause the MRI reflection.\nSo as David is hinting at here, we might very well interpret unhappiness as being about not knowing how to solve the problem of not being happy, you know, not being happy is a problem if you could solve that, then that would be the solution to unhappiness.\nThat's how to be more happy to continually solve your problems.\nUsually, of course, the problem is not just this generic thing of I just want to be happier.\nIt's a particular thing.\nHow to solve some particular problem like if you're chronically in pain and you don't want to be, if you could solve that, then you would be happier.\nIf you have an illness that you, there is no cure for.\nYou're unhappy until such time as you're cured of it.\nYou're on your way to work, you're already running late and you've got a flat tire until such time as you are able to fix the flat tire, then you're more unhappy than you otherwise would have been.\nSo this can be what unhappiness is.\nNow, of course, many people do say that there is this very real state of being depressed when everything appears to be going right in one's life, but nonetheless, you still feel unhappy.\nWhat would be the view of this kind of philosophy for that kind of state?.\nNow, it might very well be that it could be a chemical imbalance, but it could also be simply that you don't know what the problems are that are causing you unhappiness.\nIt could be unconscious states.\nIt could, of course, be poor chemistry in your brain, in which case, it still comes down to the fact that you don't know how to be more happy.\nAnd it might be that you need to fix this chemical imbalance in your brain.\nI wouldn't say that that would be the solution to every single form of what is called depression in psychological science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28fd35e2-02ea-4682-8110-fed21443051d": {"page_content": "It could be unconscious states.\nIt could, of course, be poor chemistry in your brain, in which case, it still comes down to the fact that you don't know how to be more happy.\nAnd it might be that you need to fix this chemical imbalance in your brain.\nI wouldn't say that that would be the solution to every single form of what is called depression in psychological science.\nIt's more likely to be the case that there's going to be perhaps things one is not fully aware of, things one is not fully thinking clearly about that is causing the unhappiness.\nAnd if those things could be identified, and this is where psychology really is important, then the unhappiness could be cured, things like cognitive behavioral therapy, things like any kind of talk therapy speaking to a psychologist are certainly going to help people who are chronically unhappy or depressed.\nIt still comes down to not knowing how to solve the problem of unhappiness, because it might be the case that one does not know why one is unhappy.\nIt's about knowledge.\nIt's never not about knowledge.\nIt's never about simply denying the fact that there is a solution involving an explanation as to why one's mental state is the way it is and is the way that it is in a way that one doesn't want it to be.\nOkay, so continuing the beginning of the infinity and David's talking about this study that shows a correlation between unhappiness or happiness and certain kinds of genetic predisposition towards the happiness or not.\nDavid writes, interpreters of the study say that it has refuted that theory of happiness.\nThat theory of happiness being that happiness is a state of continually solving one's problems.\nAt most, they say 50% of unhappiness can be caused by not knowing how.\nThe other 50% is beyond our control, genetically determined and hence independent of what we know or believe pending the relevant genetic engineering.\nUsing the same logic on the slavery example, one could have concluded in 1860 that say 95% of slavery is genetically determined and therefore beyond the power of political action to remedy.\nPause their mind reflection.\nThis is a really powerful point.\nMany people, and it is a huge area of popular science right now, seem to think that if something has a genetic component, then that means it must be genetically determined that if there is some gene for a thing and there is no way in which, or if there are some gene implicated in a particular feature of humanity, then there is no way that that can be changed except via genetic engineering.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8f6a101-3754-41c8-a2eb-fe2f98f49f20": {"page_content": "Pause their mind reflection.\nThis is a really powerful point.\nMany people, and it is a huge area of popular science right now, seem to think that if something has a genetic component, then that means it must be genetically determined that if there is some gene for a thing and there is no way in which, or if there are some gene implicated in a particular feature of humanity, then there is no way that that can be changed except via genetic engineering.\nBut this is a perfect reputation of that.\nIt is the case.\nIt simply was the case historically that in the United States that you could do a genetic study, you could use modern methods of assessing the DNA of people and find that there is indeed a genetic component to being a slave.\nBut this does not mean that it was genetically determined that it was necessarily the case because necessarily means it was unavoidably the case, in much the same way that it is necessarily the case that element number six on the periodic table is carbon.\nThat is a scientifically necessarily determined thing or that four circles mass times acceleration, a necessarily scientifically determined thing.\nWell this is not the case with slavery.\nSlavery was the result of a particular very poor moral and political theory about human beings.\nTypically white people from London did not find themselves slaves in the south of the United States.\nThere was a genetic component here, but this does not mean it was determined to be the case.\nAny number of scientific studies could have concluded this and indeed the problem of slavery of that kind was indeed solved.\nBut it was not solved by genetic engineering.\nIt was solved by people knowing better, learning better, creating the relevant moral knowledge about what people are and it had nothing to do with changing people's genes.\nSo that even though there was apparently the genetic component to slavery, it had nothing to do with changing people's genes to remove the slavery.\nSo to then with unhappiness, it might very well be solved, you know, the chronic unhappiness or depression, might very well be solved no matter what the genetic component is if we can recognize what happiness actually is.\nIf it is actually about being able to solve one's problems once they are identified.\nOf course we have no scientific theory yet, but the conjecture here and now is of course that happiness is about being thwarted in your problem solving.\nOkay, now continuing with the book.\nAt this point, taking the step from heritable to genetically determined the explanationless psychological study has transformed its correct, but uninteresting result into something very exciting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=1543"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "16063828-b3d5-40e2-9825-1aff4368648a": {"page_content": "If it is actually about being able to solve one's problems once they are identified.\nOf course we have no scientific theory yet, but the conjecture here and now is of course that happiness is about being thwarted in your problem solving.\nOkay, now continuing with the book.\nAt this point, taking the step from heritable to genetically determined the explanationless psychological study has transformed its correct, but uninteresting result into something very exciting.\nFor it has weighed in on a substantive philosophical issue, optimism, and a scientific issue about how the brain gives rise to mental states such as qualia, but it has done so without knowing anything about them.\nBut wait, so the interpreters, admittedly we can't tell whether any genes code for happiness or part of it.\nBut who cares how the genes cause the effect, whether by conferring good looks or otherwise, the effect itself is real.\nThe effect is real, but the experiment cannot detect how much of it one can alter without genetic and engineering just by knowing how.\nThat is because the way in which those genes affect happiness may depend on knowledge.\nFor instance, a cultural change may affect what people deem to be good looks, and that would then change whether people tend to be made happier by virtue of having particular genes.\nNothing in the study can detect whether such a change is about to happen.\nSimilarly, it cannot detect whether a book will be written one day which will persuade some portion, some proportion of the population that all evils are due to lack of knowledge, and that knowledge is created by seeking good explanations.\nIf some of those people consequently create more knowledge than they otherwise would have and become happier than they otherwise would have been, then part of the 50% of happiness that was genetically determined in all previous studies will no longer be so.\nPause their my reflection.\nOkay, so the explanation was study that might suggest that, for example, genes code for 50% of happiness could be conferring that effect by good looks, but by those genes might cause people to look a certain way.\nAnd so if those people are considered good looking because of the fact they've got these particular genes, then because they're treated better in society because of the fact that they're better looking or considered to be better looking, then this is the way in which the genes affect the good looks which then cause people to be happier.\nAnd so we skipped the good looks bit and we just go, well, the genes cause the better happiness.\nBut as David says there, good looks is very much cultural thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=1693"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fba87477-cd04-4d67-99f2-1f6315fa027d": {"page_content": "And so we skipped the good looks bit and we just go, well, the genes cause the better happiness.\nBut as David says there, good looks is very much cultural thing.\nAnd we know this.\nYou just look at different cultures around the world and what they consider good looking.\nWe only have to go back to the middle ages and of course people who were very large and obese were considered better looking.\nToday, people apparently who are far more thin are considered better looking.\nSo there is absolutely a cultural component to what is considered to be good looking, which, by the way, should give you pause for a moment.\nWhen you consider that you're attracted to someone or you have an attraction towards someone, you might think that this is very much a genetically determined thing that you feel this way and have absolutely no choice in the matter.\nHowever, if you have absolutely no choice in the matter, if it doesn't have anything to do with what you know about reality, then this would mean that the genes that code for how attractive you find someone are predetermined.\nBut we know that the genes between the middle ages and today haven't changed that much in that way.\nWe know, for example, that we can take a person who is perhaps would have otherwise been born into a culture that considers people with extremely long neck subtractive and raise them in a culture where length of neck has absolutely nothing to do with attractiveness whatsoever.\nAnd their mind about what they find attractive will have been changed, not because the genes have changed, but because their ideas about what is attractive has changed.\nSo it's very much to do with ideas and not in-born ideas either.\nI would argue, okay, continuing with the book.\nDavid Wright, the interpreters of the study may respond that it has proved there can be no such book, no such book that can convince people that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge.\nCertainly none of them will write such a book or arrive at such a thesis.\nAnd so the bad philosophy will have caused bad science, which will have stifled the growth of knowledge.\nNotice that this is a form of bad science that may well have conformed to all the best practices of the scientific method, proper randomising, proper controls, proper statistical analysis, or the formal rules of how to keep from fooling ourselves may have been followed.\nAnd yet, no progress could possibly be made because it was not being sought.\nExplanationless theories can do no more than entrench existing bad explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=1870"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3dac6aa1-ded7-48c3-981b-c445814dd3ee": {"page_content": "Notice that this is a form of bad science that may well have conformed to all the best practices of the scientific method, proper randomising, proper controls, proper statistical analysis, or the formal rules of how to keep from fooling ourselves may have been followed.\nAnd yet, no progress could possibly be made because it was not being sought.\nExplanationless theories can do no more than entrench existing bad explanations.\nIt is no accident that in the imaginary study I have described the outcome appeared to support a pessimistic theory.\nA theory that predicts how happy people will probably be cannot possibly take into account the effects of knowledge creation.\nSo to whatever extent knowledge creation is involved, the theory is prophecy and will therefore be biased towards pessimism.\nBehaviouristic studies of human psychology must by their nature lead to dehumanising theories of the human condition.\nFor refusing to theorise about the mind as a causative agent is the equivalent of regarding it as a non-creative automaton, pause their my reflection.\nNow I could go on for hours about this particular thing.\nIt's such an important point.\nThe link that David makes here between the mind as a causative agent and also as being creative.\nThe link between cause between creating something and causing something to happen.\nTo create new knowledge is to create new possibilities in the world.\nThat were not there before.\nThat means once we've got these new possibilities in the world because we've created some new knowledge.\nSo once we've got the knowledge of nuclear fission for example, then we've got the possibility of creating electricity via nuclear fission reactors.\nThat possibility did not exist before.\nWe didn't have the choice about creating electricity via that mechanism.\nSo the creation of knowledge has created new choices in the world.\nIt has caused new ways of producing electricity in the world let's say.\nSo again, to create new knowledge is to create new possibilities which means new choices and acting on those newly created choices means causing events in the world that were not otherwise have happened without that knowledge creation.\nAnd this take on the nature of mind is so far as I know unique.\nDavid's overarching theory of knowledge really is this breathtaking worldview encompassing how knowledge grows at a level of a civilization, how it's growing here on earth right now, how it does have and will continue to increasingly have cosmic significance and how it will increasingly have cosmic significance and how it can be invoked to explain the nature of personhood which is what we're going through here now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=1965"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "63e13ee5-1a7c-4d88-b3f0-e584b17f90fc": {"page_content": "And this take on the nature of mind is so far as I know unique.\nDavid's overarching theory of knowledge really is this breathtaking worldview encompassing how knowledge grows at a level of a civilization, how it's growing here on earth right now, how it does have and will continue to increasingly have cosmic significance and how it will increasingly have cosmic significance and how it can be invoked to explain the nature of personhood which is what we're going through here now.\nAnd how it is that we distinguish persons from other kinds of life in the universe especially other animals.\nAnd to bring this full circle why therefore persons are themselves important in the cosmic scheme of things.\nIt's all about knowledge and the mechanisms by which knowledge is created.\nAnd when that knowledge is created, how it causes the world to increase the number of possibilities open to people.\nAnd so this is the sense in which I would invoke free will because free will is just another synonym for what's going on here.\nThe creation of knowledge which causes us to have more choices in reality and those choices in reality will only be there once we've made the choice to create the knowledge.\nAnd if we continue to create more knowledge then we continue to have more choices, more possibilities and we'll be more free to do more different things.\nIf we don't create knowledge then we have fewer choices, we have less freedom at which means we're also in more danger.\nSo increased knowledge means solving problems and preparing for the unknown, preparing for problems yet to be encountered.\nThe more knowledge we have, the more wealth we've created and the more we're able to solve problems as yet unencounted.\nOkay, but back to the book.\nThe behaviorist approach is equally futile when applied to the issue of whether an entity has a mind.\nI have already criticized it in Chapter 7 in regard to the Turing test, the same holds in regard to the controversy about animal minds, such as whether the hunting or farming of animals should be legal, which stems from philosophical disputes about whether animals experience qualia and analogous to those of humans when in fear and pain and if so, which animals do?.\nNow science has little to say on this matter at present because there is yet no explanatory theory of qualia and hence no way of detecting them experimentally.\nBut this does not stop governments from trying to pass the political hot potato to the supposedly objective jurisdiction of experimental science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b5e0ba5c-accc-4793-bea6-b97e82a856a8": {"page_content": "Now science has little to say on this matter at present because there is yet no explanatory theory of qualia and hence no way of detecting them experimentally.\nBut this does not stop governments from trying to pass the political hot potato to the supposedly objective jurisdiction of experimental science.\nSo for instance, in 1997 the zoologist Patrick Bateson and Elizabeth Bradshaw were commissioned by the National Trust to determine whether stags suffer when hunted.\nThey reported that they do because the hunt is grossly stressful, exhausting and agonizing.\nHowever, that assumes that the measurable quantities denoted there by the words stress and agony, such as enzyme levels in the bloodstream, signify the presence of qualia of the same names, which is precisely what the press and public assumed that study was supposed to discover.\nThe following year the countryside alliance commissioned a study of the same issue led by the veterinary physiologist Roger Harris, who concluded that the levels of those quantities are similar to those of a human who is not suffering, but enjoying a sport such as football.\nBateson responded accurately that nothing in Harris' report contradicted his own, but that is because neither study had any bearing on the issue in question.\nThis form of explanation of science is just bad philosophy disguised as science.\nIts effect is to suppress the philosophical debate about how animals should be treated by pretending that the issue has been settled scientifically.\nIn reality, science has and will have no access to the issue until explanatory knowledge about qualia has been discovered.\nPause their my reflection.\nSo I riffed on this particular passage in my article titled Humans and Other Animals, and the ethics of eating meat, and you can find that on my website.\nJust google my name, Brithall, Humans and Other Animals.\nAnd precisely on this point here about how one can study stags being hunted and find that certain enzyme levels are raised in their bloodstream.\nAnd this is supposed to be an indication that the fact of the fact that they're suffering while being hunted, that they're afraid, and so the enzyme levels rise, and so these enzyme levels are proof positive somehow that these stags are suffering.\nYes, it's proof positive supposedly.\nThey said that it was the hunting is grossly stressful exhausting and agonizing.\nWhy?.\nBecause the levels of this particular enzyme were raised in their bloodstream.\nBut another study said that a human could have high levels of these enzymes in their bloodstream if they were doing a sport such as football.\nAnd so this is a problem, isn't it?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "87a2f52e-bf87-46b1-b7fa-244c76c55b65": {"page_content": "Yes, it's proof positive supposedly.\nThey said that it was the hunting is grossly stressful exhausting and agonizing.\nWhy?.\nBecause the levels of this particular enzyme were raised in their bloodstream.\nBut another study said that a human could have high levels of these enzymes in their bloodstream if they were doing a sport such as football.\nAnd so this is a problem, isn't it?.\nOn the one hand, we have this exertion causing high levels of this enzyme in the animal, and this exertion causing high levels of this enzyme in a human being.\nBut in the case of the human being, presumably they're enjoying this activity.\nHow do we know that the stag isn't enjoying this activity?.\nWell, again, that begs the question as to what it would mean for a stag to enjoy something in the first place and whether or not they have the capacity to enjoy something in the first place.\nAnd this is something that I try to explore in my particular piece.\nAnd in that piece there, I'll just read a very long piece.\nI'll just read a small part of it, where I've written consciousness is central to our concern about the possibility that other creatures experience pain.\nLet us concede for the sake of argument that what they do feel we might term pain.\nBut this would be very much like if we knew they were capable of experiencing blue.\nKnowing that another person experiencing blue tells us very little about the contents of that experience.\nAre they seeing the sky?.\nThe blue mosque in Turkey?.\nA policeman shirt?.\nFar more information than blue is perceived would be required to give us an idea of what that experience might be like.\nWe would need context.\nWe would need an entire explanatory theory about what that blue might be like.\nAnd it would take us into circles about can they see shapes and do they understand the relationship between those things?.\nAnd do they realize the skies and even a physical thing?.\nUnlike what the ancients thought, they thought the blue sky was like blue paint on glass.\nThey thought it was a surface.\nThey didn't know that what they saw didn't actually exist.\nAnd so it is with pain really.\nEven if we have an excellent cause and effect explanation of the physiology of how the stimulus we call pain is transmitted to a brain and what might cause it to arise and what other stimuli, like say hormones being released into the bloodstream, absent further information, we know very little about how the pain might be interpreted.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=2420"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2b5e9dde-75be-4ee6-b675-a31383d77eb8": {"page_content": "They thought it was a surface.\nThey didn't know that what they saw didn't actually exist.\nAnd so it is with pain really.\nEven if we have an excellent cause and effect explanation of the physiology of how the stimulus we call pain is transmitted to a brain and what might cause it to arise and what other stimuli, like say hormones being released into the bloodstream, absent further information, we know very little about how the pain might be interpreted.\nThat is to say, even if we can describe the objective physical goings on in the nervous system, this tells us nothing about the subjective experience of pain.\nFor example, the very same signals might mean that a person is exercising and enjoying pushing through the pain or some such.\nOr perhaps a person is protecting in Jiu Jitsu and the pain is a necessary part of the learning and so on objective good.\nOr perhaps the person is suffering a heart attack.\nOr perhaps a person simply doesn't even understand what the sensation is and so on and so forth.\nOkay, so that's end quote from my little blog posting, but if you're interested in more about this this way of looking at the issue, the important issue of whether or not animals suffer, and all the very many related issues surrounding this is it ethical to eat meat, for example.\nShould we be able to milk cows, etc, etc, etc.\nSome people have very strong opinions on this.\nNow, that's all very well, but to talk about the science of this, we have to be very disciplined because there are no scientific studies that show animals experience pain, much less that they suffer.\nAll that we have are proxies and they might not even be proxies for pain.\nSaying that particular enzyme levels are an indication of pain is untrue or not possible to conclude until such time as we have a scientific theory of what pain is.\nAnd we probably won't have that until we have a scientific theory of what consciousness is.\nSo I'm just going to steal David's thunder a little bit here for what is to come.\nWhat he's talking about now is the importance of, indeed the centrality of, to a large extent, errors in the process of science.\nBeing able to report on your errors, your uncertainties, the sources of error, how to quantify your uncertainties.\nAnd if you're not careful about this, you're going to end up making false conclusions.\nWhole areas of the physical sciences, in physical science courses at high school university are devoted to error analysis.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d6f50303-fc26-4613-b84a-dd1c7c3c4452": {"page_content": "What he's talking about now is the importance of, indeed the centrality of, to a large extent, errors in the process of science.\nBeing able to report on your errors, your uncertainties, the sources of error, how to quantify your uncertainties.\nAnd if you're not careful about this, you're going to end up making false conclusions.\nWhole areas of the physical sciences, in physical science courses at high school university are devoted to error analysis.\nI'll put up on the screen here a section from a particular high school syllabus about error analysis.\nYou can see here it's quite large.\nSources of error are a crucial part of the methodology of any scientific study.\nAnd in physics we have the special capability of being able to quantify our degree of uncertainty.\nTo some extent.\nNow this is not uncertainty in sort of the epistemological sense.\nThis is uncertainty in the measurement sense.\nSo when we've got a measuring device that is able to measure to a certain precision or a particular technique that measures to a certain precision, we report that.\nWe say that we could be out by this much all that much back to the book.\nAnother way in which explanation of science inhibits progress is that it amplifies errors.\nLet me give a rather whimsical example.\nSuppose you have been commissioned to measure the average number of people who visit the city museum each day.\nIt is a large building with many entrances.\nAdmission is free so visitors are not normally counted.\nYou engage some assistance.\nThey will not need any special knowledge or competence.\nIn fact, as will become clear, the less competent they are, the better your results are going to be.\nEach morning your assistants take up their stations at the doors.\nThey mark a sheet of paper whenever someone enters through their door.\nAfter the museum closes, they count all their marks and you add together all their counts.\nYou do this every day for a specified period, take the average, and that is the number you report to your client.\nHowever, in order to claim that your count equals the number of visitors to the museum, you need some explanatory theories.\nI'll pause there just in my comment.\nThis is Popper's idea of observation being theory laden.\nYou first need a theory of what to observe and how before you can start making claims about what those observations might tell you about reality.\nBack to the book.\nFor instance, you are assuming that the doors you are observing are precisely the entrances to the museum and that they lead only to the museum.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dadae525-9b4c-4e1c-aaf3-8c1e1d5daef3": {"page_content": "I'll pause there just in my comment.\nThis is Popper's idea of observation being theory laden.\nYou first need a theory of what to observe and how before you can start making claims about what those observations might tell you about reality.\nBack to the book.\nFor instance, you are assuming that the doors you are observing are precisely the entrances to the museum and that they lead only to the museum.\nIf one of them leads to the cafeteria or to the museum shop as well, you might be making a large error if your client does not consider people who go only there to be visitors to the museum.\nThere is also the issue of museum staff.\nDo they count as visitors?.\nThere are visitors who leave and come back on the same day and so on.\nYou need quite a sophisticated explanatory theory of what the client means by visitors to the museum before you can devise a strategy for counting them.\nPause their my reflection or commentary.\nAlready we see this quite profound yet simple point that it's not a simple process in science of going out there and observing the world.\nThis is why empiricism is wrong.\nObservations do not come first, cannot possibly come first.\nYou first need an idea about what to observe and how and sometimes even something as simple as counting stuff, in this case counting visitors to a museum, is going to require an entire structure of theory in order to account for what you're trying to figure out in the world.\nSo the theory comes first and then the observations and then the decision between the theories that you're trying to test with those observations.\nOkay back to the book.\nSuppose you count the number of people coming out as well.\nIf you have an explanatory theory saying that the museum is always empty at night and that no one enters or leaves other than through the doors and that visitors are never created, destroyed, split or merged and so on, then one possible use for the outgoing count is to check the in going one.\nYou would predict they should be the same.\nThen if they are not the same, you will have an estimate of the accuracy of your count.\nThat is good science.\nIn fact, reporting your result without also making an accuracy estimate makes your report strictly meaningless.\nJust my comment on that.\nAccuracy estimates are commonplace in physics.\nThey are absolutely routine.\nNot every other area of purported science can make the claim that physics does in being able to quantify it's uncertainty.\nYou're doing as well with uncertainty is what physics does.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7cf9664a-d50e-46a4-9718-810c97c0132d": {"page_content": "Then if they are not the same, you will have an estimate of the accuracy of your count.\nThat is good science.\nIn fact, reporting your result without also making an accuracy estimate makes your report strictly meaningless.\nJust my comment on that.\nAccuracy estimates are commonplace in physics.\nThey are absolutely routine.\nNot every other area of purported science can make the claim that physics does in being able to quantify it's uncertainty.\nYou're doing as well with uncertainty is what physics does.\nOne area I know a little bit about is astrophysics and a huge deal is made about errors and areas of uncertainty and what could have gone wrong and there's always hedges and caveats about all the ways in which the observations which purport to show something could in fact be something else entirely or not even actually real.\nOne reason for this of course is that the amount of light we receive from distant parts of the universe is very very very low intensity in some cases and so we are observing things that the very limit of our power of our instrumentation but despite that we have extremely precise instruments but with extremely precise instruments come quantifiable uncertainties.\nYou know how good your instruments are and you report that as part of your experimental report as part of your journal article so that people reading it know that this might not be a real effect for various reasons.\nYou might report things like the physical attributes of the telescope, the resolution of the telescope and then you might report things like how bright the object was that you supposedly observed and then the reader can gauge whether or not the thing being observed, the thing thought to be observed might in fact be noise in the background, might not actually be a real effect at all.\nThey can judge that by having a look at the sources of uncertainty, the sources of error that might be going on with that report.\nNow in psychology we might wonder is there the same level of detail and strict adherence to to some extent, strict adherence to the methodology of science in this respect of genuinely trying to report all the things that might have gone wrong, all the areas of uncertainty, all the ways in which the result, the purported result, could in fact be a huge error and not real at all.\nOkay, so skipping a little bit and going back to the book.\nNow, suppose you are doing your study using explanationless science instead, which really means science with unstated, uncritised explanations, just as the Copenhagen interpretation really assumed that there was only one unobserved history connecting successive observations.\nThen you might analyze the result as follows.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c2b33bb6-6348-4983-9d40-c54dbd7c6d1a": {"page_content": "Okay, so skipping a little bit and going back to the book.\nNow, suppose you are doing your study using explanationless science instead, which really means science with unstated, uncritised explanations, just as the Copenhagen interpretation really assumed that there was only one unobserved history connecting successive observations.\nThen you might analyze the result as follows.\nFor each day, subtract the count of people entering from the count of those leaving.\nIf the difference is not zero and this is the key step in the study, call that difference, the spontaneous human creation count, if it is positive or the spontaneous human destruction count, if it is negative, if it is exactly zero, call it consistent with conventional physics.\nOkay, pause their my reflections.\nSo this is great.\nSo what David's driving home here is the point that if you're not being careful in your study about the sources of error and therefore not being careful about things like counting visitors to a museum and you're doing things like counting the number of people going into the museum and the known people going out, but you're making mistakes.\nThis is why earlier on he said the less reliable your assistants are, the less good they are at counting, the better for your study because if they're really poor at counting, they might miss some people coming in, they might add some people going out and therefore people are apparently, according to your very careful scientific study are being spontaneously generated and so you can have a paper written about this new kind of physics.\nAnd so this by the way is a criticism of explanation of science and of just general bad science, which is explanation of science and large part.\nAnd we get this, I don't want to say all the time, but more frequently than what it should happen and the softer the science becomes, the worse it can be, not unheard of in the hard sciences, not by a long shot.\nThere are errors that are made in physics, there are errors made in chemistry, for anyone that's interested one of the most famous errors is of course the cold fusion debacle.\nYou can go and look that one up chive I've mentioned in this series before.\nSo errors can be made and in the case of the cold fusion debacle of course, it was indeed the case that the poor results were reported as being not consistent with conventional physics.\nSo that's a rather boring thing when you're conventional when you're consistent with conventional physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3052"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d61a8eea-c1a7-4791-9699-8fffd6eae747": {"page_content": "You can go and look that one up chive I've mentioned in this series before.\nSo errors can be made and in the case of the cold fusion debacle of course, it was indeed the case that the poor results were reported as being not consistent with conventional physics.\nSo that's a rather boring thing when you're conventional when you're consistent with conventional physics.\nBut if you're making errors, then you can make these grandiose claims that something about your findings, in fact, violate well-known laws of physics.\nAnd so we might wonder, we can always bet on these things by the way, whether or not the result of a particular study, which purports to violate some conventional law of physics, is itself true, whether that's likely, a long-standing law of physics that so far has no violations, has in fact been violated by the study, or in fact the study is just making huge errors, making some errors somewhere other.\nAnd so you always have that choice to make, now it can always be the case that conventional physics is being violated in various ways, that we're wrong about what we know about the laws of physics.\nIn fact, as per periods, we know that we're wrong about the laws of physics because, well, knowledge is infinitely improveable, and so whatever we know about the laws of physics right now, we'll be riddled with misconceptions, and we will correct those misconceptions, we'll come to have a better, deeper understanding of the laws of physics.\nSo we know that the laws of physics, as we understand them now, is not the final word.\nBut this is not to say that tomorrow when Professor Solanso says that the study that they've just recently done has shown, that the neutrinos are traveling beyond the speed of light, that that therefore shows that the theory of general relativity, which thus far has had no violation so far as I know, thus far there's been no experiments to show that physics in any way is inconsistent with the theory of general relativity.\nBut if some professor comes along tomorrow and writes a paper about how neutrinos are violating the theory of general relativity by traveling faster than the speed of light, then we've got a choice to make.\nIs it in fact the case that this is an experiment which makes general relativity problematic, or is it the case that the professor and their team have simply made and egregious error?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3172"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "264beab3-c262-4023-a639-8b35e075c073": {"page_content": "But if some professor comes along tomorrow and writes a paper about how neutrinos are violating the theory of general relativity by traveling faster than the speed of light, then we've got a choice to make.\nIs it in fact the case that this is an experiment which makes general relativity problematic, or is it the case that the professor and their team have simply made and egregious error?.\nAnd in fact if you go back and look at the history of that particular one, which happened at the Large Hadron Collider, or involved the Large Hadron Collider, you can find that in fact the neutrinos never did travel faster than the speed of light, it was an error.\nAnd David's talked about that in the beginning of infinity as well.\nOkay back to the book.\nThe less competent your counting and tabulating are, the more often you will find those inconsistencies with conventional physics.\nNext, prove that non-zero results, the spontaneous creation of destruction of human beings, are inconsistent with conventional physics.\nInclude this proof in your report, but also include a concession that extraterrestrial visitors would probably be able to harness physical phenomena of which we are unaware.\nAlso, the teleportation two or from another location would be mistaken for destruction, without trace, and creation out of thin air.\nIn your experiment and that therefore this cannot be ruled out as a possible cause of the anomalies.\nNow why would you do this?.\nWell of course, of course to get media attention because you're hungry for fame, you want to be famous.\nScientists are not immune to this far from it.\nFar too often we see scientists who are desperate for fame and will say and do next to anything to get in front of cameras.\nNow there are kind of legitimate reasons why they want some funding and there are illegitimate reasons one might say why they would do this simply because they crave prestige or in worst cases still authority.\nThey want to be able to have the ear of government by being a famous scientist who has discovered something remarkable in the world and so they become mini celebrities and their own money and so on and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3282"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c37bd153-dfa5-40f8-82fc-03a3cd96eb5e": {"page_content": "Now there are kind of legitimate reasons why they want some funding and there are illegitimate reasons one might say why they would do this simply because they crave prestige or in worst cases still authority.\nThey want to be able to have the ear of government by being a famous scientist who has discovered something remarkable in the world and so they become mini celebrities and their own money and so on and so forth.\nSo scientists are just human beings, lots of people have these foibles and these flaws, but here's the way that a scientist might go about doing that by making mistakes and or perhaps in some cases lazily making mistakes in which case they're simply incompetent or knowingly in which case they're fraudulent, making these errors so that they can then claim meekly and mildly that perhaps it's the case that they've discovered evidence for alien life but they don't want to say they don't want to quite say that.\nokay.\nso I'll just.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3382"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4836c19e-77fe-418d-b8ac-13343ebc87a9": {"page_content": "I'll just continue reading when headlines appear of the form teleportation possibly observed in city museums they say scientists and scientists prove alien abduction is real protest mildly that you have claimed no such thing that your results are not conclusive merely suggestive and that more studies are needed to determine the mechanism of this perplexing phenomenon you have made no false claim data can become inconsistent with conventional physics by the mundane means of containing errors just as genes can cause unhappiness by countless mundane means such as affecting your appearance the fact that your paper does not point this out does not make it false pause the entire reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3442"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db3c6e84-93be-4707-b033-57f322cbdd40": {"page_content": "okay there there is a wonderful technique for detecting extra solar planets planets beyond their solar system and it is by using the technique of finding solar systems beyond their own where the alignment of the planet just happens to be such that it passes between us and that other star.\nand so if this is the star then the planet can come in front of the star and that eclipses part of the light from star and given the precision of our instruments now given how good our telescopes are in various other techniques that we use for analyzing the light that the telescopes gather we can determine what the size of the object is that's going around that star we look at what's called dips in the light curve.\nokay what's that got to do with this well recently over the last sort of over the last 10 years or so I think the most famous example is referred to as Tabby's star that's Tabby T-A-W-B-Y.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3482"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cf91f8c4-3a36-4822-a0bd-021e66c96101": {"page_content": "I think and now it's named after an astronomer who did this careful found this star where the dips in the light curve could not be explained by conventional astronomy and it didn't seem as though what was orbiting the star apparently was a planet in the usual sense or didn't seem to be a binary system and every single reasonable explanation that the astronomers could come up with was ruled out by observations that were made now I'm certainly not implicating the astronomer in question here in this at all whatsoever but the media are prone to putting forth the notion things like well could it be alien technology could it be an alien civilization that is causing these weird dips as soon as someone reputable makes that kind of claim and they need not be a scientist they they could just be a science popularizer of some sort and saying well we don't have any explanation for what's going on an astronomy is rife with these kind of things where because we're looking at things we don't always understand some people are going to disingenuously claim that because we don't understand the observation we've made but therefore it's evidence of alien intelligence now it could be but that's a general purpose response to almost any weed observation we can make of deep space and so in the case of this start was immediately it was immediately latched onto as being proof positive or near proof positive that there was indeed an alien civilization that had that had created some huge structure there is actually this theoretical thing named after Fremen Dyson I think Fremen Dyson came up came up with it called the Dyson Sphere and the Dyson Sphere is theorized to be an alien structure it would be an alien structure a structure built by aliens at the far distant future to capture all the light that is being invented by a star if you wanted to really be efficient and not lose any of the energy coming from a star because you have super advanced technology and you want to capture lots of the light coming from the star because you're powering some time travel device or whatever which requires you to warp space and time maybe you put an entire sphere of material around the start to capture all of that energy now if you're only part way through constructing such a", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3543"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "710e0c5e-5ba4-4a14-81a4-8e0b8efde3d3": {"page_content": "invented by a star if you wanted to really be efficient and not lose any of the energy coming from a star because you have super advanced technology and you want to capture lots of the light coming from the star because you're powering some time travel device or whatever which requires you to warp space and time maybe you put an entire sphere of material around the start to capture all of that energy now if you're only part way through constructing such a Dyson Sphere maybe what earthlings would see when they point their telescopes towards your star with the partially completed Dyson Sphere is something like the light curve of Tabby's star.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3666"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fbdaf906-5467-44e0-9ab9-f726541f2beb": {"page_content": "okay.\nyeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "303ee356-b236-463e-bd86-7833f2fd020d": {"page_content": "that's a really fun interesting explanation and certainly almost straight away the people involved in the study became quite famous at least in the science community and the science appreciation community I suppose so I don't know what the solution is to that now or if indeed they have a solution but it can always be the case that it is observational error and that doesn't mean that the astronomy themselves necessarily made a mistake although that can certainly happen it can just be that the equipment has malfunctioned in some way which is what happened by the way with the large Hadron Collider and the neutrinos experiment well effectively effectively it was an equipment malfunction the cables were disconnected or something or other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3702"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "10b64a04-bd4c-46fa-a853-1c0113e981d5": {"page_content": "okay let's go back to the book.\nokay I'm skipping a little bit and David's talking about this study where people are apparently disappearing or being created spontaneously.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3749"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2808ba64-1305-4530-b1b7-88b324df33c2": {"page_content": "and he writes you know if you're doing the study you're the person doing the study for all you know they the people could be disappearing and puffs a smoke or in invisible spaceships that would be consistent with your data but your paper takes no position on that it is entirely about the outcomes of your observations so you would better not name your research paper errors made when counting people in competently aside from being a public relations blunder that title might even be considered unscientific according to explanation the science for it would be taking a position on the interpretation of the observed data about which it provides no evidence in my view this is a scientific experiment in form only the substance of scientific theories is explanation and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design of any non-trivial scientific experiment pause their my reflection and this is where we come really to so much of what is done in various areas of psychology if you're only finding correlations between things as happens in much of academic psychology you're not explaining why one variable is correlated with the other you might be insinuating that one thing causes the other and in certain areas of psychology let's say evolutionary psychology comes to mind the correlation is implied so strongly that we just that the practitioners seem to assume it is a causation that this population of people here has this set of genes in common and that same population of people with that set of genes in common tends to have this feature of their personality or mental life and so on also in common and so it is a very small leap to say that the genes are causing the behavior in these people that the genes are causing happiness the genes are causing depression the genes are causing this that all the other they're the genes are causing intelligence the genes are causing a propensity for mathematics or for music and so on and so forth that all of these mental features of a person are somehow conferred on them at least in part by the genes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3760"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2cdbad9d-2e9a-4391-b452-753eccdb6e18": {"page_content": "but there's no explanation made as to how the genes can actually cause certain things now I think in some areas of evolutionary psychology people try to come up with explanations.\nbut I don't think they're very good explanations.\nand I must concede it might be the case that genes do indeed cause let's say a propensity for an interest in mathematics it's possible but thus far the explanations that have been put forth in order to link some set of genes with tendency to be good in mathematics are very weak indeed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3893"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "76d80234-dbcc-45e2-aef4-77bc10a2a5e5": {"page_content": "but so many people simply assume it's part of the social fabric almost in the Western world that some people simply are born good at mathematics and some people simply are born bad at mathematics repeat for music repeat for languages repeat for any other quality of the mind that you like and so many people have been taught to be genetic determinists that if someone at the age of five doesn't show an interest in some particular subject that they therefore lack of the capacity to ever have an ability in that subject and that is simply false but our our worldview here denies that possibility because of the idea that we have of the human mind as being this universal explainer and universal means that it can actually do anything that anyone else can do there might be differences in speed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3935"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4577fecc-9cd0-4e52-a972-dd5a3dd2e0c5": {"page_content": "and you know how fast a person can think and how much they can remember and that may have a bearing in some sort.\nbut it's hard to imagine that that would explain everything and that all of the people who are good at mathematics in the world share these same share the same clock speed of their brains or share the same ability to remember it in fact that doesn't seem to be the case.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=3997"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eae6f9f9-be39-43aa-8772-083fb138c8d3": {"page_content": "but I'm traveling down an avenue that is a dead end for the purpose of this chapter so let me reverse and go back to the book and David writes speaking about the the counting study the counting people at the museum he writes as the above example illustrates a generic feature of experimentation is that the bigger the errors you make either in the numbers or in the naming and interpretation of the measured quantities the more exciting your results are if true so without powerful techniques of error detection and correction which depend on explanatory theories this gives rise to an instability where false results drown out the true in the hard sciences which usually do good science false results due to all sorts of errors are nevertheless common but they are corrected when their explanations are criticized and tested that cannot happen in explanationless science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=57"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d3f3d7a7-b213-4473-a42a-93e430af2e27": {"page_content": "Paul say my reflection obviously it can't happen in explanationless science because we don't have an explanation of the meaning of the data what the what the theory is explaining why this set of data is linked to that set of data we don't have an explanation of all the sources of error that might be involved in collecting the data and analyzing the data it's simply explanationless all we're doing is collecting data naively and in utter ignorance of the mechanisms by which that data might be an error okay back to the book consequently as soon as scientists allow themselves to stop demanding good explanations and consider only whether a prediction is accurate or inaccurate they are liable to make fools of themselves this is the means by which a succession of eminent physicists over the decades have been fooled by conjurers into believing that various conjuring tricks have been done by paranormal means bad philosophy cannot easily be counted by good philosophy argument and explanation because it holds itself immune but it can be counted by progress people want to understand the world no matter how loudly they may deny that and progress makes bad philosophy harder to believe that is not a matter of refutation by logic or experience but of explanation if mark were alive today I expect you would have accepted the existence of atoms once he saw them through a microscope behaving according to atomic theory as a matter of logic it would still be open to him to say I'm not seeing atoms I'm only seeing a video monitor and I'm only seeing that theory's predictions about me not about atoms come true but the fact that that is a general purpose bad explanation would be born in upon him it would also be open to him to say very well atoms do exist but electrons do not but he might well tire of that game if a better one seems to be available that is to say if rapid progress is made and then he would soon realize that it is not a game bad philosophy is philosophy that denies the possibility, desirability or existence of progress and progress is the only effective way of opposing bad philosophy if progress cannot continue indefinitely bad", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=4061"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "138d0323-73fe-40ae-83be-fafc823e2afb": {"page_content": "him to say very well atoms do exist but electrons do not but he might well tire of that game if a better one seems to be available that is to say if rapid progress is made and then he would soon realize that it is not a game bad philosophy is philosophy that denies the possibility, desirability or existence of progress and progress is the only effective way of opposing bad philosophy if progress cannot continue indefinitely bad philosophy will inevitably come again into the ascendancy for it will be true and that's the end of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=47"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d33f0083-c471-4939-bcce-de1459b51a94": {"page_content": "so just that last sentence there if progress cannot continue indefinitely so if there is some actual cosmic limit on our ability to make progress and many people who have not encountered the work of David Deutsch in other words the vast majority of the world so far unfortunately many people do have this idea even people who purport to call themselves optimists by the way but not in the Deutschian sense not in David Deutsch's sense some people who claim to be optimist nonetheless think there must be an actual limit on how much progress people can make on what we can actually achieve in this universe now David Deutsch's vision has is the counter to that it says that the only limit is what the laws of physics impose everything else is just a matter of creating the knowledge and creating the knowledge and time of course.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=4194"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d47403c8-bcd3-4858-9001-5e6dd96c5f14": {"page_content": "but this is not a logical proof that there might not be a limit to progress even though we say according to our explanations that there is no such limit if there was a limit however then this would mean that progress would end if progress ends then it must be the case therefore that bad philosophy is actually true why because bad philosophy is that set of ideas which says why progress cannot continue or should not continue or will not continue or in other words as David says right at the very end of the chapter it's philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=4250"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4ff85e7c-2c75-43c9-b4c2-eb9a63191abd": {"page_content": "so it's quite a scary thought really but happily as optimists in the David Deutsch sense we know we know that progress will continue indefinitely that there is no such limit to producing more and more knowledge and solving our problems the only thing the only thing that is preventing us and making ever faster progress is our choices that's convenient that's precisely what the next chapter is all about.\nso i'll see you there in chapter 13 choices as always thank you to everyone who is supporting top cast and my work here have a patreon account in fact i think you can just type in top cast patreon into google and it should come up there's either that or there's a paypal link on my web page as well thank you for all your support see you next episode.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWiUStz6wA&t=4294"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d8be2cef-78a1-43f1-b574-fc56043cb154": {"page_content": "We want to be people of reason, or we should want to be people of reason, both those things are actually the same.\nIndeed, we want our societies to be governed by reason.\nThe people, being people, have different preferences.\nHow then should we go about deciding what where's a society should do given differing viewpoints?.\nWell, we vote, don't we?.\nWe enact the will of the people.\nAnd to ensure we are reasonable when we go about doing this, we should employ the tools of reason.\nMathematics to the rescue, of course.\nIndeed, there is a branch of mathematics called game theory.\nAnd within that, an even narrower branch called social choice theory, which, as we will come to see, animated such luminaries as von Neumann to try to set in mathematical stone the logical rules for making decisions when people's preferences differed.\nThe point of this chapter, chapter 13 choices, as I see it anyway, is twofold.\nOn the one hand, it is a defensive logic and mathematics and reason more generally to solve problems, to solve real problems.\nBut on the other, it is a criticism of the idea that we can create pristine algorithms, proofs, or whatever you like, of what we should do, how we should devote, what voting systems we should implement, what decision algorithms we should try and legislate for, so that we are always perfectly reasonable.\nThe reason why that project has failed and will always fail is because there exists in the mathematical universe and hence in the physical universe, so-called no-go theorems.\nThese no-go theorems can be used to show, or mathematically, prove we might say, that there is no such thing, really, as the will of the people.\nNow, as David writes on, and we'll come to this on page 338, there is no way to regard society as a decision-maker with self-consistent preferences in the quote.\nSociety is a thing that exists, but it is not something analogous to a single mind which can indeed be said to have preferences, but as we'll also come to say, things are even more complicated than that.\nIt gets even worse, because individual minds themselves must be inconsistent in some ways.\nSo the whole purpose here, and why this chapter has such an important role in the beginning of infinity, is that we want to make choices that transform the world into a better place, don't we?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=33"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4de1a6d9-ed23-451d-8c2d-2adfb5f12e78": {"page_content": "It gets even worse, because individual minds themselves must be inconsistent in some ways.\nSo the whole purpose here, and why this chapter has such an important role in the beginning of infinity, is that we want to make choices that transform the world into a better place, don't we?.\nBut any attempt to do this, by supposedly, perfectly rational means, will always meet with paradoxes and irrationality.\nAnd this is because the conventional view of transforming the world into a better place is to decide between the existing theories on offer.\nBut in truth, this is rarely actually the choice before us, whether it's in our own personal lives, or as a society at large.\nWe people create new explanations, which themselves transform the world.\nAnd this misconception about what decision-making is, is what Sam Harris might call on his podcast, one of the most pressing problems of our time, end quote.\nPeople get into terrible debates and deadlock, and deadends in those debates over what should, and indeed must absolutely be done, to solve some particular problem.\nBut they fight over the existing solutions as though they are the only possible solutions that shall ever present themselves, or then indeed, this is how we should spend a great deal of our energy in debates over dead end solutions.\nRashing decision-making, as we will come to see on this worldview, and we're going to explore this towards the more towards the end of the chapter, is more about choosing among explanations and finding which is the best explanation once all the others have been successfully criticized.\nAnd David makes his point here in this chapter and he's made it in many other places as well.\nHaving multiple explanations for any phenomena is exceedingly rare.\nOne is lucky enough to be presented with one single explanation, and in very rare cases we've got two.\nSo rather often we have this one explanation, and so it's called the explanation of whatever that thing happens to be.\nAnd so that's the one that we use to direct rational human action, and where we lack a good explanation, which is extremely often, then we have to create new explanations.\nWe have to create more knowledge, and this then helps us to increase the repertoire of choices that we have before us.\nAnd this idea of having one good, namely one hard to vary, known, best explanation for a given phenomena, applies to deciding among explanations itself.\nIt's reflective.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=128"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9443752e-c6a5-402e-87f5-4d3b1ef6670c": {"page_content": "And so that's the one that we use to direct rational human action, and where we lack a good explanation, which is extremely often, then we have to create new explanations.\nWe have to create more knowledge, and this then helps us to increase the repertoire of choices that we have before us.\nAnd this idea of having one good, namely one hard to vary, known, best explanation for a given phenomena, applies to deciding among explanations itself.\nIt's reflective.\nThere is only one known good explanation of how to decide among good explanations, and that's what we're going to be discussing here in the chapter on choices.\nIt extends into voting systems, which has an absolutely crucial part of a functioning society.\nThere really are worse voting systems, and where they exist, they tend towards irrational outcomes more than the alternative, best system would.\nSo this chapter begins with an extended and pretty detailed investigation into, and it's seemingly quirky, but as well, it's being used as an example of the irrationality that can creep into apparently perfectly rational systems.\nBut it begins with the example of the United States House of Representatives of all things, and it talks about how the seats are allocated there in the United States House of Representatives.\nNow, although very interesting in itself, it seems rather parochial, which is unusual for the beginning of infinity.\nBut really, this discussion about the United States House of Representatives is just serving as a case study about how to rationally make decisions.\nIn this case, how can it be rationally decided to allocate the correct number of seats per state to the House of Rips?.\nNow, at times in this chapter, I'm going to skim, because there is a lot of detail here.\nSo I'll skim part of the chapter, which isn't typically my practice, normally I'll read a chunk and then tell you when I'm leaving out a bit, but I might not do this this time just to make things flow a little better.\nSo I might be leaving out lots, but I won't be telling you that I'm leaving out lots.\nSo I'd urge you if you need more, indeed, you must go to chapter 13 choices, because I'll be leaving out some and at times I won't be making you aware of it.\nAnd the reason the chapter is so detailed is because David really does do a comprehensive overview of just about all the objections that the reader might reasonably raise as he presents each problem with the voting system.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=244"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9208099a-30a0-476f-a54f-145846b9588b": {"page_content": "So I'd urge you if you need more, indeed, you must go to chapter 13 choices, because I'll be leaving out some and at times I won't be making you aware of it.\nAnd the reason the chapter is so detailed is because David really does do a comprehensive overview of just about all the objections that the reader might reasonably raise as he presents each problem with the voting system.\nAnd this is because in a rather astonishing way, each simple logical or mathematical solution to the problem being raised itself creates new problems.\nSo each time that this is of course common in science and mathematics in general, but here it is especially illuminating that you think, oh, why don't they just and David will talk about this?.\nWhy don't they just ID that there might be a very simple solution, clear or obvious to most people thinking about the topic, but when pursued through to its logical conclusion itself causes logical problems.\nAnd so just for illustrative purposes, I'll only talk about a couple of these problems myself.\nAnd so you need to go to the book because the the upshot of it all is even when the full force of mathematics and the best mathematicians indeed are applied to seemingly trivial problems like how do we fairly allocate the number of seats in the house of reps among the states insoluble problems and paradoxes arise.\nAnd that should be a concern to anyone who thinks they can like Dr. Spock or some other Vulcan from Star Trek be perfectly logical all or almost all of the time.\nSo what's the parable of all this going to be?.\nWell, creativity is needed.\nSo this chapter is very much a beginning of infinity.\nAnd although David does not really mention the term in this chapter, he doesn't he doesn't highlight it that much, it's always there beneath the surface that it's very much about morality.\nIt's an investigation into the logic of morality.\nNow, after all, morality is very much the question of what to do next, how to choose among the options presented to you about what to do next, or how to possibly in more, more often the cases given that the choices before you are unsatisfactory, one must deploy their creativity in order to create a new and better choice than the ones that exist.\nAnd this idea that morality is about what to do next, more on that in David's second interview with Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast, morality is about choices deciding what to do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=372"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2ac22930-70e3-4338-9e02-6661d4df18d0": {"page_content": "And this idea that morality is about what to do next, more on that in David's second interview with Sam Harris on the Making Sense podcast, morality is about choices deciding what to do.\nSo let's begin the chapter and let's look at the logic of decision making and how we can make better choices both personally and as a society.\nSo hello, welcome to ToKCast after that lengthy introduction.\nChapter 13 choices, diving straight in.\nIn March 1792, George Washington exercised the first presidential veto in the history of the United States of America.\nUnless you already know what he and Congress were quarreling about, I doubt you will be able to guess, yet the issue remains controversial to this day.\nWith hindsight, one may even perceive a certain inevitability in it.\nFor, as I shall explain, it is rooted in a far-reaching misconception about the nature of human choice, which is still prevalent.\nPaul said my reflection, what an introduction to the chapter.\nI mean, far-reaching misconception about the nature of human choice.\nSo this is why we're looking at this rather parochial, quirky little example.\nAnd as I said in my introduction, I'm just going to skim read through parts of this back to the book on the face of it.\nThe issues seems no more than a technicality.\nIn the US House of Representatives, how many seats should each state be allotted?.\nThis is known as the apportionment problem, because the US Constitution requires seats to be apportioned among the several states, according to their respective numbers, or either respective populations.\nSo if your state contained 1% of the US population, it would be entitled to 1% of the seats in the House.\nThis was intended to implement the principle of representative government, that the legislature should represent the people.\nIt was, after all, about the House of Representatives, the US Senate in contrast, represents the states of the Union, and hence each state, regardless of population, has two senators.\nJust as a parochial aside, very similar to the Australian Senate, except we have far fewer states, and so we have more senators per state.\nWe've got 12 senators from each state here in Australia, for anyone's interest, and that quirky piece of trivia.\nBack to the book.\nAt present, there are 435 seats in the House of Representatives.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=518"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f987fa77-5fa8-4549-bdd7-46522456cfa1": {"page_content": "Just as a parochial aside, very similar to the Australian Senate, except we have far fewer states, and so we have more senators per state.\nWe've got 12 senators from each state here in Australia, for anyone's interest, and that quirky piece of trivia.\nBack to the book.\nAt present, there are 435 seats in the House of Representatives.\nSo if 1% of the US population did live in your state, then by strict proportionality, the number of representatives to which it would be entitled, known as its quota, would be 4.35.\nWhen the quotas are not whole numbers, which of course they hardly ever are, they have to be rounded somehow.\nThe method of rounding is known as the apportionment rule.\nThe Constitution did not specify an apportionment rule.\nIt left such details to Congress, and that is where the centuries of controversy began, pause their moral affliction.\nThe bulk of this first half of the chapter, I suppose, is all about this.\nSo you've got this idea that the House of Representatives has to be representative of the people, and so if the state has 1% of the population, then it should be entitled to 1% of the seats in the House of Representatives.\nBut because the number of seats in the House of Representatives is clearly always going to be far, far smaller than the number of people in the entire United States, there's going to be this rounding problem.\nSo you might very well round down or you might very well round up.\nWhether you choose to round in one particular way or another is going to be called the apportionment rule.\nSo this is going to be the source of lots and lots of really interesting paradoxes and problems.\nI'm going to come to the point that there can be no such perfectly rational fair apportionment rule, but that's kind of stealing the thunder from later on.\nBut let's go back to the book.\nAn apportionment rule is said to stay within the quota of the number of seats that it allocates to each state, never differs from the state's quota by as much as the whole seat.\nFor instance, if a state's quota is 4.35 seats, then to stay within the quota, a rule must assign that state either four seats or five.\nIt may take all sorts of information into account and choosing between four and five, but if it is capable of assigning any other number, it is said to violate quota.\nRight.\nThat seems perfectly fair and reasonable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=668"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf837799-f3fc-457e-a7a6-1c5d60a32652": {"page_content": "For instance, if a state's quota is 4.35 seats, then to stay within the quota, a rule must assign that state either four seats or five.\nIt may take all sorts of information into account and choosing between four and five, but if it is capable of assigning any other number, it is said to violate quota.\nRight.\nThat seems perfectly fair and reasonable.\nLet's keep going.\nWhen one first hears of the apportionment problem, compromises that seem to solve it at a stroke spring easily in mind.\nEveryone asks, why couldn't they just, here is what I asked, why couldn't they just round each state's quota to the nearest whole number?.\nUnder that rule, a quota of 4.35 seats would be rounded down to four, 4.6 seats would be rounded up to five.\nIt seemed to me that since this sort of rounding can never add or subtract more than half a seat, it would keep each state within half a seat of its quota, thus staying within the quota, with room to spare.\nI was wrong.\nMy rule violates quota.\nThis is easy to demonstrate by applying it to an imaginary house of representatives with ten seats in a nation of four states.\nSuppose that one of the states has just under 85% of the total population and that the other three of just over 5% each.\nThe large state therefore has a quota of just under 8.5, which my rule rounds down to eight.\nEach of the three small states has a quota of just over half a seat, which my rule rounds up to one, but now we have allocated 11 seats, not 10.\nIn itself that hardly matters, the nation merely has one more legislated feed and planned.\nThe real problem is that this apportionment is no longer representative.\n85% of 11 is not 8.5, but 9.35.\nSo the large state with only 8 seats is in fact short of its quota by well over one seat.\nMy rule under represents 85% of the population.\nBecause we intended to allocate 10 seats, the exact quotas necessarily add up to 10, but the rounded ones add up to 11.\nAnd if there are going to be 11 seats in the house, the principle of representative government and the constitution requires each state to receive its fair share of those, not of the 10 we merely intended, paused the MRI reflection.\nAnd so that's where we begin.\nThat's where the problems come.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=793"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2effef58-c3d9-437c-a892-9eb6999d984c": {"page_content": "My rule under represents 85% of the population.\nBecause we intended to allocate 10 seats, the exact quotas necessarily add up to 10, but the rounded ones add up to 11.\nAnd if there are going to be 11 seats in the house, the principle of representative government and the constitution requires each state to receive its fair share of those, not of the 10 we merely intended, paused the MRI reflection.\nAnd so that's where we begin.\nThat's where the problems come.\nRounding, it seems simple, it seems logical, it seems fair, and it's not.\nIt can't be logical and fair all at once.\nAnd this is what we're going to have example after example here in the book about.\nSo going back to the book.\nAgain, many why don't they just ideas spring to mind.\nWhy don't they just create three additional seats and give them to the large state thus bringing the allocation within quota?.\nWhy don't they just transfer a seat from one of the small states to a large state?.\nPerhaps it should be from the state with the smallest population.\nSo it's the disadvantage as few people as possible.\nThat would not only bring all the allocations within the quota, but also restore the number of seats to the originally intended 10.\nSuch strategies are known as reallocation schemes.\nThey are indeed capable of staying within the quota.\nSo what's wrong with them?.\nIn the jargon of the subject, the answer is apportionment paradoxes or an ordinary language unfairness and irrationality.\nFor example, the last reallocation scheme that I described, which was where we just take the seat from the smallest state and we give it to the largest state so that we have things back within quota.\nThat last reallocation scheme that I described is unfair by being biased against the inhabitants of the least popular state.\nThey bear the whole cost of correcting the rounding errors.\nOn this occasion, their representation has been rounded down to zero.\nYet in the sense of minimizing the deviation from the quotas, the apportionment is almost perfectly fair.\nPreviously, 85% of the population were well outside quota and now all are within it and 95% of the population are at the closest whole numbers to their quotas.\nIt is true that now 5% have no representatives so they will not be able to vote in congressional elections at all.\nBut that still leaves them within the quota and indeed only slightly further from their exact quota that they were.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=898"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "35f495af-f56f-425e-b51c-2f429c528f2b": {"page_content": "Yet in the sense of minimizing the deviation from the quotas, the apportionment is almost perfectly fair.\nPreviously, 85% of the population were well outside quota and now all are within it and 95% of the population are at the closest whole numbers to their quotas.\nIt is true that now 5% have no representatives so they will not be able to vote in congressional elections at all.\nBut that still leaves them within the quota and indeed only slightly further from their exact quota that they were.\nNevertheless, because those 5% have been completely disenfranchised, most advocates of representative government would regard this outcome as much less representative than what it was before.\nOkay, now I'm skipping a vast amount right now.\nI've just skimmed a little bit there, but I'm just taking out a whole bunch here.\nDavid goes through a bunch of other problems of the sort, why don't they just?.\nThe upshot of all this is that none of them are able to fairly apportion the seats without some of the problems arising.\nDavid gets to the point where he talks about all these other apportionment rules and over the years, and he writes, Congress has continually debated and tinkered with the rules of apportionment.\nJefferson came up with a rule and it was put in place, but it was dropped in 1841 in favour of one proposed by another senator, Daniel Webster, which does use reallocation.\nNow that one also violates quota, but very rarely, and it was, like Hamilton's rule, deemed to be impartial between states.\nA decade later, Webster's rule was in turn dropped in favour of Hamilton's.\nThe latter's supporters now believed that the principle of representative government was fully implemented, and perhaps hope that this would be the end of the apportion problem, but they were disappointed.\nIt was soon causing more controversy than ever, because Hamilton's rule, despite its impartiality and proportionality, began to make allocations that seemed outrageously perverse.\nPaul's M.R. Reflection, so we, after some discussion, we've come to the understanding that there was this rule.\nHamilton's rule, Hamilton came up with this rule, which seemed to be impartial and proportional.\nHowever, it started to make allocations that seemed outrageously perverse.\nSo going back to the book.\nFor instance, it was susceptible to what came to be called the population paradox.\nA state whose population has increased since the last census can lose a seed.\nTo one whose population has decreased.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "444f1787-6d9e-4634-bd39-331fdaf97725": {"page_content": "Hamilton's rule, Hamilton came up with this rule, which seemed to be impartial and proportional.\nHowever, it started to make allocations that seemed outrageously perverse.\nSo going back to the book.\nFor instance, it was susceptible to what came to be called the population paradox.\nA state whose population has increased since the last census can lose a seed.\nTo one whose population has decreased.\nSay that again, a state whose population has increased since the last census can lose a seed to one whose population has decreased.\nSo that seems absurd, doesn't it?.\nSo that's the population paradox.\nWe're going to come back to the population paradox again and again.\nSo just keep that in mind.\nThis idea, the population paradox is if your state's population increase, as you might very well lose a seed to someone who, some other state, where their population has decreased, which is weird.\nAnd then David goes through solutions suggested to the population paradox and all the wider than they just attempts to solve that.\nAnd David talks about the various rules.\nSo there was a rule that rule that tried to avoid these population paradoxes and things.\nHamilton's rule was one, Webster's rule was another.\nAnd David writes, after Hamilton's rule was adopted, in 1851, Webster still enjoyed substantial support.\nSo Congress tried on at least two occasions, a trick that seemed to provide a judicious compromise.\nAdjust the number of seats in the house until the two rules agree.\nSurely that would please everyone.\nYet the upshot of that was, in 1871, some states considered the result to be so unfair and the ensuing compromise legislation was so chaotic that it was unclear what allocation rule, if any, had been decided upon.\nThe apportionment that was implemented, which included last minute, which included the last minute creation of several additional seats for now apparent reason, satisfied neither Hamilton's rule nor Webster's, many considered it unconstitutional.\nFor the next few decades, after 1871, every census saw either the adoption of a new apportionment rule or change in the number of seats designed to compromise between different rules.\nIn 1921, no apportionment was made at all.\nThey kept the old one, a course of action that may well have been unconstitutional again because Congress could not agree on a rule.\nThe apportionment issue has been referred several times to eminent mathematicians, including twice to the National Academy of Sciences and on each occasion, these authorities have made different recommendations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1142"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8504e4f7-c360-437d-8b90-bcb6c5d722df": {"page_content": "In 1921, no apportionment was made at all.\nThey kept the old one, a course of action that may well have been unconstitutional again because Congress could not agree on a rule.\nThe apportionment issue has been referred several times to eminent mathematicians, including twice to the National Academy of Sciences and on each occasion, these authorities have made different recommendations.\nYet none of them ever accused of predecessors of making errors in mathematics.\nThis ought to have warned everyone that this problem is not really about mathematics, and on each occasion when the experts' recommendations were implemented, paradoxes and disputes kept on happening.\nIn 1901, the Census Bureau published a table showing what the apportionments would be for every number of seats between 350 and 400 using Hamilton's rule.\nBy quirk of arithmetic of a kind that is common in apportionment, Colorado would get three seats for each of these numbers except for 357, when it would get only two.\nThe chairman of the House Committee on Apportionment, who was from Illinois, I do not know whether or not anything against Colorado, proposed that number of seats be changed to 357, and that Hamilton's rule will be used.\nThis proposal was regarded with suspicion and Congress eventually rejected it, adopting a 386 member apportionment and Webster's rule, which also gave Colorado its rightful three seats.\nBut was that apportionment really any more rightful than Hamilton's rule with 357 seats?.\nBy what criterion?.\nMajority voting among apportionment rules?.\nWhat exactly would be wrong with working out what a large number of rival apportionment rules would do, and then allocating to each state the number of representatives but the majority of the schemes would allocate?.\nThe main thing is that that itself is an apportionment rule.\nSimilarly, combining Hamilton's and Webster's schemes as they tried to do in 1871 just constituted adopting a third scheme.\nAnd what does such a scheme have going for it?.\nEach of its constituent schemes was presumably designed to have some desirable properties.\nA combined scheme that was not designed to have those properties will not have them except by coincidence.\nSo it will not necessarily inherit the good features of its constituents.\nIt will inherit some good ones and some bad ones and have additional good and bad features of its own.\nBut if it was not designed to be good, why should it be?.\nPause their my reflection.\nAnd here I'm going to utterly and completely steal David's thunder from towards the end of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "35fec3e9-4c19-43d4-a7d6-7a9d645f166e": {"page_content": "A combined scheme that was not designed to have those properties will not have them except by coincidence.\nSo it will not necessarily inherit the good features of its constituents.\nIt will inherit some good ones and some bad ones and have additional good and bad features of its own.\nBut if it was not designed to be good, why should it be?.\nPause their my reflection.\nAnd here I'm going to utterly and completely steal David's thunder from towards the end of the chapter.\nBecause it's one of the most profound things that I read in the book and so, and it has really changed my thinking on this particular matter.\nDavid will come to it, but I just want to flag it now because he's talked there about why not, if you've got these two schemes that are designed to try and solve the problem of apportionment, why not pick one that's sort of halfway in between these two?.\nAs we'll come to see, this is the idea of compromise out there in the world.\nCompromise is a thing that is lauded as a virtue in politics.\nBut if you have two sides of the debate and over here on side A, they come up with a particular solution, their purported solution called that solution X. And over here on side B, they have a different solution altogether, a purported solution or policy and call that theory.\nY.\nNow, if they're at loggerheads and they can't agree, it's supposedly a virtue to come to some compromise.\nCompromise has, as David will say later on, an unfairly high reputation.\nIn fact, compromises are not good.\nThe reason why compromise is not good is because a compromise is a third option.\nAnd if you have two groups of people debating among themselves, it could be two political parties, it could just be two people.\nAnd A wants to do this thing and B wants to do that thing.\nThe reason A wants to do this thing is because they've got an explanation in their mind, they've got a theory in their mind about why this particular thing thing X is the best thing to do.\nAnd this group of people over here or this person B here thinks that no X is wrong, Y is the best thing to do.\nAnd I have a good explanation in my head as to why Y is the correct thing to do.\nNow, if in fact you believe in compromise, then you will say, well, you can't decide among you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1396"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2c97662c-2888-4de6-a3cf-b879c8483bfd": {"page_content": "And this group of people over here or this person B here thinks that no X is wrong, Y is the best thing to do.\nAnd I have a good explanation in my head as to why Y is the correct thing to do.\nNow, if in fact you believe in compromise, then you will say, well, you can't decide among you.\nTherefore, what you should do is you should do this third thing, this thing Z.\nWhy shouldn't we do that?.\nAt least we're doing something.\nThe problem is that if you do Z, if A and B, if they're groups of people, they could be the whole population, they could just be two people in the partnership.\nIf they decide to do this third thing Z, and if this third thing Z or Z if you're American, if they do that thing, and then that thing fails, which invariably it does, certainly in politics, so many political policies and theories fail when Z fails, when the third option fails, no one learns anything.\nNeither group A nor group B actually ever endorsed Z.\nThey didn't think that Z was the best idea.\nThey didn't think Z was a particularly good idea at all.\nThey thought that either X or Y was the best idea.\nSo when Z fails, what happens?.\nBoth A goes back to endorsing X again, and B goes back to endorsing Y again.\nThey both revert to their original positions.\nAnd so then what do you do?.\nYou just do another compromise?.\nWhy should the compromise be better given that both X and Y think they've got a good explanation about why their particular theory is the best theory?.\nWouldn't it be a better, more parsimonious idea to actually try out X?.\nIf we try out X and X is shown to fail, great.\nEveryone has actually learned something.\nA can no longer be committed to X is actually being the thing that will work and solve the problem, because they've learned that it fails.\nSo then everyone can get behind the alternative now.\nEveryone can do their best to implement Y.\nNow Y might very well fail as well, but at least we're learning things.\nWe're making progress.\nWe're ruling out stuff.\nWe're not ruling out random things that no one thought was a good idea in the first place.\nIf you're going to do the compromise, you may as well just be flipping your coin about what to do next, because no one really has a good idea.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1492"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ccd9439b-fea3-4bc2-ac8e-0c44694348b5": {"page_content": "So then everyone can get behind the alternative now.\nEveryone can do their best to implement Y.\nNow Y might very well fail as well, but at least we're learning things.\nWe're making progress.\nWe're ruling out stuff.\nWe're not ruling out random things that no one thought was a good idea in the first place.\nIf you're going to do the compromise, you may as well just be flipping your coin about what to do next, because no one really has a good idea.\nNow it might very well be the case, of course, that X or Y could succeed.\nWe might expect at least one of them to succeed, because a whole bunch of creative people have good explanations in their mind anyway.\nThey have explanations as to why either X or Y should succeed, but neither of the groups.\nNo one has a good explanation as to why Z should actually work.\nAnd so when Z fails, that's why we say no one learns anything.\nNo one's explanation has been refuted.\nIndeed, there was no explanation why Z should work at all in the first place.\nZ has perhaps some of the good features of X and some of the good features of Y, but it will also have the bad features of X and the bad features of Y. And perhaps more of the bad features of both than either on their own.\nAnd it will have some good features of its own and some terrible features of its own.\nBut we shouldn't expect it to work, because no one has an explanation about why it should work, compared to X and Y, where two groups of people or two individuals do have an explanation in their minds by their lights as to why this thing should work.\nAnd that's why it should be tried.\nAnd that's why compromise is bad, especially in politics, and yet compromises held up as this virtue of the way in which politics should proceed, because people say at least the government is therefore doing something.\nMany of us of course think that when the government does nothing, that's great, and the processes that are in place in governments are there for a particular reason to actually cause gridlocked, to actually cause things to stop, so that we can't have these terrible compromises.\nSo the institutions are there to slow things down, but many people believe in this idea of just ramming through any old thing, so that something at least is getting done.\nGovernment should do something.\nMany of us think government shouldn't do much at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1626"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "93fa75de-33dd-49aa-a394-8ce7de96f440": {"page_content": "So the institutions are there to slow things down, but many people believe in this idea of just ramming through any old thing, so that something at least is getting done.\nGovernment should do something.\nMany of us think government shouldn't do much at all.\nGovernment should be restrained from doing too much, because it tends to do damage when it does anything at all.\nNot always the case, there are legitimate reasons for government, at least some of this think that.\nBut we like to constrain the ability of government to do stuff, because more often than not, it's coming up with compromises that no one believes in, or it's coming up with bad ideas, and it's causing damage rather than finding solutions to our most pressing problems.\nOkay, after that rant, let me go back to the book.\nDavid writes, A devil's advocate might now ask, if majority voting among apportionment rules is such a bad idea, why is majority voting among voters a good idea?.\nIt will be disastrous to use it and say science.\nThere are more astrologers than astronomers, and believers in paranormal phenomenon often point out that purported witnesses of such phenomena outnumber the witnesses of most scientific experiments by a large factor.\nSo they demand proportionate credence, yet science refuses to judge evidence in that way.\nIt sticks with the criterion of good explanation.\nSo if it would be wrong for science to adopt that democratic principle, why is it right for politics, pause their my reflection?.\nYes, so for my listeners and viewers that might be new to some of these ideas, there is in the public mind, it would seem, an idea of scientific consensus.\nNow to some extent, this has validity.\nNow there is a sense in which scientific, the consensus of the scientists has some validity, and it's when a layperson is trying to decide what is scientific knowledge in any particular time.\nSo given a particular area that is not your area of expertise, a good rule of thumb is to presume that whatever the scientific consensus is among the experts in that area is the best theory or the best explanation at a given time.\nThat doesn't mean that it's true, it just means that that's the best explanation we have, and we should take seriously the best explanations that we have at any particular time.\nBut scientific consensus is not the way we adjudicate between theories, not in science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1742"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0064d3e4-dea2-4899-9ef3-1ea7cdb7199f": {"page_content": "So given a particular area that is not your area of expertise, a good rule of thumb is to presume that whatever the scientific consensus is among the experts in that area is the best theory or the best explanation at a given time.\nThat doesn't mean that it's true, it just means that that's the best explanation we have, and we should take seriously the best explanations that we have at any particular time.\nBut scientific consensus is not the way we adjudicate between theories, not in science.\nClearly, every single good scientific theory was once a minority view, was once understood only by a single mind or a small team of people, more than likely only a single mind in any particular time.\nSo once upon a time, the theory of general relativity was only understood by Albert Einstein, and no one else.\nSo he had an exceedingly minority view, but we don't take a vote among scientists to decide what is true in physics.\nWe let the theories compete one against the other, and the competition is in light of a crucial experiment.\nThat's in fact the way in which we decide between theories of gravity let's say, which is what happened back in 1919 with Eddington's experiment, which decided between Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and Newton's universal law of gravitation.\nNow that's a trope example, but the same is true of any other area of science, where there are competing theories, competing explanations as to what accounts for the phenomena in question.\nBut it is not a vote among scientists that decides things.\nIt is experiment that decides.\nIt is observation that decides between theories.\nIt is the evidence that decides between theories.\nBut people who perhaps don't understand at the science, let's say astrologers, there's more astrologers than astronomers.\nThere's more people that believe they have an understanding of astrology than would say they have an understanding of astronomy or even an interesting one compared to the other.\nBut we don't therefore conclude on that basis that the majority should hold sway, that therefore astrologers should be funded by government institutions, let's say.\nWe do fund astronomers, not because there's more of one than the other, but because there is there are objective ways of measuring or comparing the theories of one subject against reality that aren't available in the other other.\nThere is, I guess there are certain ways of measuring astrology against reality, but they typically come up bad for astrology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1853"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9eae3b5d-b46b-49e9-b8df-afe472e1ef73": {"page_content": "We do fund astronomers, not because there's more of one than the other, but because there is there are objective ways of measuring or comparing the theories of one subject against reality that aren't available in the other other.\nThere is, I guess there are certain ways of measuring astrology against reality, but they typically come up bad for astrology.\nWhatever the case, if we can appreciate the fact that democratic voting is not the rational means by which we come to gain truth or gain better explanations in the area of science, why should democratic vote be the best way of deciding what is best, what is the truer moral choice to make in the sphere of politics?.\nWhy does democratic vote good in one area and not in the other?.\nLet me just reread what David said here.\nSo if it would be wrong for science to adopt that democratic principle, why is it right for politics?.\nIs it just because, as Churchill put it, many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and war?.\nNo one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise, indeed it has been said, that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried from time to time.\nThat would indeed be a sufficient reason, but there are cogent positive reasons as well, and they tour about explanation as I shall explain.\nSome politicians have been so perplexed by the sheer perverseness of apportionment paradoxes that they have been reduced to denouncing mathematics itself.\nRepresentative Roger Q. Mills of Texas complained in 1882.\nI'm not going to try a Texan accent here, that's for sure.\nI thought that mathematics was a divine science.\nI thought that mathematics was the only science that spoke to inspiration and was infallible in its utterances, but here is a new system of mathematics that demonstrates the truth to be false.\nIn 1901, Representative John E. Littlefield, whose own seat in Maine was under threat from the Alabama paradox, said, God helped the state of Maine when mathematics reached for her and undertake to strike her down.\nAs a matter of fact, there is no such thing as mathematical inspiration, mathematical knowledge coming from an infallible source, traditionally God.\nAs I've explained in chapter 8, our knowledge of mathematics is not infallible.\nThis is the mathematicians' misconception to a large extent.\nDavid has written very eloquently and spoken very eloquently about this idea in various places.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=1996"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90ddc74c-faa7-4c15-8edd-19801286db91": {"page_content": "As a matter of fact, there is no such thing as mathematical inspiration, mathematical knowledge coming from an infallible source, traditionally God.\nAs I've explained in chapter 8, our knowledge of mathematics is not infallible.\nThis is the mathematicians' misconception to a large extent.\nDavid has written very eloquently and spoken very eloquently about this idea in various places.\nI just want to emphasize it again, it's been said many times in this series.\nBut the point is, mathematics is not infallible.\nMathematics does not give you certain truth.\nMathematics does not even give you necessary truth.\nBut that's sinking for a moment.\nThat angers certain mathematicians.\nThey think that mathematics is a privileged kind of knowledge.\nI know that I have encountered certainly mathematics teachers that will say that people who do mathematics are very lucky because mathematics is the one place where you can be sure that what you have found that the answer that you have found is in fact absolutely 100% correct.\nBut this is wrong.\nAnd the reason that is wrong is because the mathematics has been done by a mathematician whose human and humans are always fallible.\nThe point is that the subject matter of mathematics is necessary truth.\nThis is what David says in the fabric of reality.\nSo I'll say that again, the subject matter, what mathematics is studying is necessary truth.\nBut that's not the reward you get for doing mathematics as David.\nIt's much the same as in physics, the subject matter of physics is the laws of physics.\nBut that does not mean that by doing physics, we discover the final absolute laws of physics.\nWhat we have is knowledge of the laws of physics.\nThis is the crucial difference.\nIt's not just a quirky little bit of philosophy.\nThis is an important thing to understand because it goes to the heart of fallibility.\nThat the knowledge of something is not the thing in itself.\nHere's my tea cup.\nThe tea cup is there.\nIt's out there in the world in reality.\nI've got certain knowledge about the tea cup, about how big it is, what color it is, and so on and so forth.\nI can be wrong about any of that, even though the tea cup is right here in front of me, and I can provide a description of it, which will necessarily always be incomplete and necessarily contain errors.\nI can be wrong about any part of it.\nSo too with mathematics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=2133"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "605d6191-3746-43b2-8e14-1354baa2c8b9": {"page_content": "It's out there in the world in reality.\nI've got certain knowledge about the tea cup, about how big it is, what color it is, and so on and so forth.\nI can be wrong about any of that, even though the tea cup is right here in front of me, and I can provide a description of it, which will necessarily always be incomplete and necessarily contain errors.\nI can be wrong about any part of it.\nSo too with mathematics.\nThe mathematical realm is not here in physical reality for us to look at, but it is there in abstract space.\nAnd we can be wrong about the theorems of mathematics.\nWe can prove theorems of mathematics, but those proofs, the proof is just a certain kind of process, a computation that the mathematician goes through.\nThe computation does not confer on the conclusions of that computation.\nUpon the result of that proof, absolute certainty.\nAt any point in the proof, an error might have been committed, an error might have crept in either because the mathematician themselves made an error.\nThere was an error in the assumptions of the calculator that was used to do the proof might have been malfunctioning.\nThere's any number of reasons why the conclusion of the proof might not be absolutely true.\nAnd by the way, there are many mathematicians who do concede this pure mathematician.\nSo understand that the axioms they begin with.\nThis is how mathematics works.\nIt begins with axioms.\nIt follows rules of inference and so on.\nIt leads to a conclusion.\nThe conclusion that can be regarded as a theorem.\nThe point is that the axioms themselves, even though they might be so-called self-evident, that itself does not confer absolute truth upon the axioms.\nSelf-evident to you could not be self-evident to someone else.\nWhatever the case, you can't prove axioms are true.\nThat's why they're called axioms.\nBut the conclusion in a valid proof only contains as much truth as the premises that you begin with.\nHow much truth there is in the assumptions is via the method of proof, conferred upon the conclusion.\nBut if you don't know how much truth is actually in the assumptions, then you cannot possibly be certain of the absolute truth of your conclusion.\nThat's part of the mathematicians' misconception, as David speaks about in various of the places.\nThe very interesting part of this philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=2273"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a224016f-348e-4eae-903c-5d0341b3c378": {"page_content": "How much truth there is in the assumptions is via the method of proof, conferred upon the conclusion.\nBut if you don't know how much truth is actually in the assumptions, then you cannot possibly be certain of the absolute truth of your conclusion.\nThat's part of the mathematicians' misconception, as David speaks about in various of the places.\nThe very interesting part of this philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics as well.\nAnd very poorly subscribed to, I should say as well.\nPeople do still have the hierarchy of knowledge that is spoken about in the fabric of reality, where mathematics is up here as the highest form, this rarefied sphere of absolute certainty.\nAnd just below that is science, where although you can't be certain, you can be nearly certain.\nYou can be very, very sure about what's going on in science.\nAnd then below that is philosophy, where it's all just mere matters of opinion.\nThat's the classical, misconceived view of knowledge.\nOf course, knowledge is an interconnected web where you can be wrong about any particular part of it.\nAnd where sometimes there are far better explanations in philosophy than there are in certain areas of science.\nAnd so on.\nOkay, let's go back to the book.\nSo I just said that our knowledge of mathematics is not infallible.\nBut if representative meals meant that mathematicians are, or somehow ought to be, societies best judges a fairness, then he was simply mistaken.\nThe National Academy of Sciences panel that reported to Congress in 1948 included the mathematician and physicist John von Neumann.\nAnd it decided that a rule invented by the statistician Joseph Adnehill, which is the one in yesterday, is the most impartial between states.\nBut the mathematicians, Michelle Balinski and Peyton Young, have since concluded that it favors smaller states.\nThis illustrates again that different criteria of impartiality favor different apportionment rules, and which of them is the right criterion cannot be determined by mathematics.\nIndeed, if representative meals intended his complaint ironically, if you really meant that mathematics alone could not possibly be causing injustice and that mathematics alone could not cure it, then he was right.\nHowever, there is a mathematical discovery that has changed forever, the nature of the importionment debate.\nWe now know that the question for an apportionment rule that is both proportional and free from paradoxes can never succeed.\nBalinski and Young proved this in 1975.\nBalinski and Young's Theorem, every apportionment rule that stays within quota suffers from the population paradox.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=2395"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d13cba9f-195c-4913-90f9-1d87d9f42f66": {"page_content": "However, there is a mathematical discovery that has changed forever, the nature of the importionment debate.\nWe now know that the question for an apportionment rule that is both proportional and free from paradoxes can never succeed.\nBalinski and Young proved this in 1975.\nBalinski and Young's Theorem, every apportionment rule that stays within quota suffers from the population paradox.\nThis powerful, no-go theorem explains the long string of historical values to solve the apportionment problem.\nNever mind the various other conditions that may seem essential for an apportionment to be fair.\nNo apportionment rule can meet even the bare bones requirements of proportionality and the avoidance of the population paradox.\nBalinski and Young also proved no-go Theorem's involving other classic paradoxes.\nThis work had much broader context in the apportionment problem.\nDuring the 20th century, and especially following the Second World War, a consensus had emerged among most political movements that the future welfare of humankind would depend on an increase in society-wide, preferably worldwide, planning and decision-making.\nThe Western consensus differed from its totalitarian counterparts, in that it expected the object of the exercise to be the satisfaction of individual citizens' preferences.\nSo Western advocates of society-wide planning were forced to address a fundamental question that totalitarians do not encounter.\nWhen a society as a whole faces a choice and citizens differ in their preferences among the options, which option is best for a society to choose.\nIf people are unanimous, there is no problem, but no need for a plan or either.\nIf they are not, which option can be rationally defended as being the will of the people?.\nThe option that society wants, and that raises a second question, how should society organize its decision-making so that it does indeed choose the options that it wants?.\nThese two questions had been present, at least implicitly, from the beginning of modern democracy.\nFor instance, the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution both speak of the right of the people to do certain things such as remove governments.\nNow they became the central questions of a branch of mathematical game theory known as social choice theory.\nThus game theory, formally an obscure and somewhat whimsical branch of mathematics was suddenly thrust into the centre of human affairs, just as rocketry and nuclear physics had been.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=2523"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "312038ca-c664-4568-bde5-a686c4f66013": {"page_content": "These two questions had been present, at least implicitly, from the beginning of modern democracy.\nFor instance, the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution both speak of the right of the people to do certain things such as remove governments.\nNow they became the central questions of a branch of mathematical game theory known as social choice theory.\nThus game theory, formally an obscure and somewhat whimsical branch of mathematics was suddenly thrust into the centre of human affairs, just as rocketry and nuclear physics had been.\nMany of the world's finest mathematical minds, including von Neumann, rose to the challenge of developing the theory to support the needs of the countless institutions of collective decision-making that were being set up.\nThey would create new mathematical tools, which, given what all the individuals in a society want or need or prefer, would distill what a society wants to do, thus implementing the aspiration of the will of the people.\nThey would also determine what systems of voting and legislating would give society what it wants.\nSome interesting mathematics was discovered, but little, if any of it, ever met those aspirations.\nOn the contrary, time and again, the assumptions behind social choice theory were proved to be incoherent or inconsistent by no-go theorems like that of Belinsky and Young.\nThus it turned out that the apportionment problem which had absorbed so much legislative time, effort and passion was the tip of an iceberg.\nThe problem is much less parochial than it looks, for instance, rounding errors are proportionally smaller with a larger legislature.\nSo why don't they just make the legislature very big, say 10,000 members, so that all the rounding areas would be trivial?.\nOne reason is that such a legislature would have to organize itself internally to make any decisions.\nThe factions within the legislature would themselves have to choose leaders, policies, strategies and so on.\nConsequently, all the problems of social choice would arise within the little society of a party's contingent in the legislature, so it is not really about rounding errors.\nAlso, it is not only about people's top preferences.\nOnce we are considering the details of decision-making in large groups, how legislatures and parties infections within parties organize themselves to contribute their wishes to society's wishes, we have to take into account their second and third choices.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=2630"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "11133ede-f563-4fdb-bbd9-f56339b2690e": {"page_content": "Consequently, all the problems of social choice would arise within the little society of a party's contingent in the legislature, so it is not really about rounding errors.\nAlso, it is not only about people's top preferences.\nOnce we are considering the details of decision-making in large groups, how legislatures and parties infections within parties organize themselves to contribute their wishes to society's wishes, we have to take into account their second and third choices.\nBecause people still have a right to contribute to decision-making if they cannot persuade a majority to agree to their first choice, yet electoral systems designed to take such factors into account invariably introduce more paradoxes and no-go theorems.\nOne of the first no-go theorems was proved in 1951 by the economist Kenneth Arrow, and it contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1972.\nArrow's theorem appears to deny the very existence of social choice and to strike at the principle of representative government and apportionment and democracy itself, and a lot more besides.\nPause it as my reflection.\nJust on this thing about Arrow's theorem, which we're about to get to a description of, there's an interesting person on Twitter.\nEthan the Mathemo, he calls himself.\nHe's got almost no followers.\nHe's got 114 followers.\nHe studies mathematics at Cambridge.\nI don't know him personally at all.\nAll I know is the articles that he writes for medium.com, and they are remarkable explanations of mathematical theorems, and one of his most recent ones is titled Proving Arrow's Impossibleity Theorem.\nIf you want more details about Arrow's theorem, go to medium.com, that type in Proving Arrow's Impossibleity Theorem, and Ethan, I believe, is the fellow's name, has done a very comprehensive job of explaining the details of the proof.\nI love this kind of thing.\nI did, you know, mathematics myself at university into including some graduate level stuff, but I was never, I never had it myself as particularly good at it.\nSo, for example, I really, really wanted to know girdles and completeness theorem.\nI really wanted to understand that.\nand I took subjects at the higher undergraduate level in logic and computer ability, and we went through the proof in great detail, but the only way I could ever get through the proof was to buy a book, a companion, to go along with the proof as we did it, which explained some more of the details.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=2742"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eb714c06-3c1e-4181-8de0-27bc4d98ac80": {"page_content": "So, for example, I really, really wanted to know girdles and completeness theorem.\nI really wanted to understand that.\nand I took subjects at the higher undergraduate level in logic and computer ability, and we went through the proof in great detail, but the only way I could ever get through the proof was to buy a book, a companion, to go along with the proof as we did it, which explained some more of the details.\nIn fact, I have the book.\nIt's a book about girdles proof.\nSo, an entire book written that explains girdles proof, I should say.\nIt's not merely about the history or anything like that.\nIt's simply an explanation of girdles proof, what the mechanics of getting through the damn proof are, because it's a very long proof all the time.\nAnyway, whatever the case, this fellow on medium writes these similar, similarly easy to follow expositions of these otherwise complicated mathematical proofs.\nOkay, let's go back to the book.\nDavid writes, this is what Arrow did.\nHe first laid down five elementary axioms that any rule defining the will of the people, the preference of the preferences of a group, should satisfy.\nAnd these axioms seem, at first sight, so reasonable as to be hardly worth stating.\nOne of them is that the rule should define our group's preferences only in terms of the preferences of that group's members.\nOkay, same simple.\nKeep going.\nAnother is that the rule must not simply designate the rules of one particular person to be the preferences of the group regardless of what the others want.\nThis is called the no dictator axiom.\nA third is that if the members of the group are unanimous about something, in the sense that they have all identical preferences about it, then the rule must deem the group to have those preferences as well.\nThose three axioms are all expressions in this situation of the principle of representative government.\nGreat.\nSo they seem, as David has said, hardly even worth stating.\nThey're so blindingly obvious that if you have a group, it should be the preferences of the people in the group, if it's a democratic type exercise that we're going through here in decision making.\nIt's the preferences of the group that dictate what the group is going to do.\nNot another group over here that's dictating it.\nOkay, so or it's also not the case that one person from within the group can dictate what the entire group can do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=2884"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2f5d1fc-6143-46e8-9f24-cb42c5807704": {"page_content": "They're so blindingly obvious that if you have a group, it should be the preferences of the people in the group, if it's a democratic type exercise that we're going through here in decision making.\nIt's the preferences of the group that dictate what the group is going to do.\nNot another group over here that's dictating it.\nOkay, so or it's also not the case that one person from within the group can dictate what the entire group can do.\nThat's the no dictator rule.\nSo let's keep going.\nArrow's fourth axiom is this.\nSuppose that under a different definition of the preferences of the group, the rule deems the group to have a particular preference.\nSay for pizza over hamburger.\nThen it must still deem that to be the group's preference.\nIf some members who previously disagreed with the group, i.e. they preferred hamburger to change their minds and now prefer pizza.\nThis constraint is similar to ruling out a population paradox.\nA group would be irrational if it changed its mind in the opposite direction to its members.\nAgain, simple straightforward stuff.\nDavid continues.\nThe last axiom is that if the group has some preference and then some members change their minds about something else, then the rule must continue to assign the group that original preference.\nFor instance, if some members have changed their minds about the relative merits of strawberries and raspberries, but none of their preferences about the relative merits of pizza and hamburger have changed, then the group's preference between pizza and hamburger must not be deemed to have changed either.\nThis constraint can be again regarded as a matter of rationality.\nIf no members of the group change any of their opinions about a particular comparison, nor can the group.\nAll right, all simple axioms, very rational, straightforward ideas that it would seem no rational person would want to disagree with.\nSo what's the point?.\nAs David writes, Arrow proved that the axioms that I have just listed are, despite their reasonable appearance, logically inconsistent with each other.\nNo way of conceiving the will of the people can satisfy all five of them.\nThis strikes at the assumptions behind social choice theory at an arguably even deeper level than the theorems of Balinski and Young.\nFirst, Arrow's axioms are not about the apparently parochial issue of apportionment, but about any situation in which we want to conceive of a group as having preferences.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3000"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d5bfa1e1-5665-4608-bf64-d05692a31233": {"page_content": "No way of conceiving the will of the people can satisfy all five of them.\nThis strikes at the assumptions behind social choice theory at an arguably even deeper level than the theorems of Balinski and Young.\nFirst, Arrow's axioms are not about the apparently parochial issue of apportionment, but about any situation in which we want to conceive of a group as having preferences.\nSecond, all five of these axioms are intuitively not just desirable to make a system fair, but essential for it to be rational, yet inconsistent.\nPause their, just my commentary.\nHow can you be rational yet inconsistent?.\nWell, this is a matter of logic as well, and it is reminiscent of girls in completeness theorem, by the way.\nWhat is girls in completeness theorem?.\nWell, firstly, let's consider a completeness theorem.\nIn this different kinds of logic, let's not go too much into the details.\nThe simplest kind of logic is centencial logic.\nIt's very simple logic, okay, baby sort of logic.\nAnd you can prove that everything is provable within that system of logic is true, and that every theorem that you write down, every true statement that you can write down, true by according to the axioms right of the logic, that everything that you can write down that is true also has a proof.\nNow, this idea that everything you can prove is true is called soundiness, soundiness, and everything that is true has a proof is called completeness.\nAnd this is true for centencial logic, for the simplest of all logic.\nAnd I think the Kurt Gurdle, I'd have to look this up, don't quote me on this, I think that maybe he's PhD thesis or something, that he proved the completeness of predicate logic, which is slightly more complicated than centencial logic.\nSo predicate logic is just a little bit more complicated.\nIt includes operators like there exists a number x or for all x and so on, okay, that might get into the details.\nThe incompleteness theorem, the incompleteness theorem was a profound discovery.\nIt was about simple arithmetic.\nNow simple arithmetic, you know, 1 plus 2 equals 3 and so on, simple arithmetic, we know what that is, is a more complicated system than basic logic, the most basic forms of logic, the most basic forms of logic don't refer to numbers at all, okay, but simple arithmetic obviously does.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3136"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce05d539-e603-4329-aafb-b20c37df2594": {"page_content": "The incompleteness theorem, the incompleteness theorem was a profound discovery.\nIt was about simple arithmetic.\nNow simple arithmetic, you know, 1 plus 2 equals 3 and so on, simple arithmetic, we know what that is, is a more complicated system than basic logic, the most basic forms of logic, the most basic forms of logic don't refer to numbers at all, okay, but simple arithmetic obviously does.\nIt's more complicated.\nIt's richer.\nWhat Kurt Gurdle proved was that although everything that you can prove within the system of simple arithmetic and the system of simple arithmetic that he used was something that relied upon Pino's axioms.\nThis guy, Pino, came up with the axioms of simple arithmetic.\nAnyway, everything that you can prove within that system was true according to that system.\nBut here's the kicker.\nHe also proved, but he showed, this is the real profound discovery, that you can write down true statements or at least statements and valid statements in the system of simple arithmetic that have no proof.\nWe cannot show that they are either true or false, they're undecidable.\nThis is profoundly strange and unusual.\nIt means that there are things in mathematics that are valid to write down, but for which we have no proof.\nWe cannot show that they're true or false mathematical understanding of those terms.\nThat's what this here is reminiscent of.\nWe can have a sequence of perfectly reasonable axioms, just like the perfectly seemingly perfectly reasonable axioms of simple arithmetic, Pino's axioms, which nonetheless can lead to statements that cannot be proved true or false.\nWe can't find a true or false proof of them.\nThey're undecidable, even though the axioms are so simple.\nSo to hear, the axioms are not only desirable, but essential for it to be rational, yet they are inconsistent and they have a continuous.\nIt seems to follow that a group of people jointly making decisions is necessarily rational in one way or another.\nIt may be a dictatorship or under some sort of arbitrary rule, or if it meets all three representative conditions, then it must sometimes change its mind in a direction opposite to that in which criticism and persuasion have been effective.\nSo it will make perverse choices no matter how wide and benevolent the people who interpret and enforce its preferences may be.\nUnless, possibly, one of them is a dictator.\nSo there is no such thing as the will of the people.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3245"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b0f5a2d-febb-4dca-9d11-9eed1fece4d5": {"page_content": "It may be a dictatorship or under some sort of arbitrary rule, or if it meets all three representative conditions, then it must sometimes change its mind in a direction opposite to that in which criticism and persuasion have been effective.\nSo it will make perverse choices no matter how wide and benevolent the people who interpret and enforce its preferences may be.\nUnless, possibly, one of them is a dictator.\nSo there is no such thing as the will of the people.\nThere is no way to regard society as a decision maker with self-consistent preferences.\nThis is hardly the conclusion that social choice theory was supposed to report back to the world.\nAs with the important problem, there were attempts to fix the implications of arrows theorem with one out.\nthey just, ideas.\nFor instance, one not take into account how intense people's preferences are.\nFor a slightly over half the electorate barely prefers x to y, but the rest consider it a matter of life and death that y should be done.\nThen most intuitive conceptions of representative government would designate y as the will of the people.\nBut intensities of preferences, and especially the differences in intensities among different people, or between the same person at different times, and notoriously difficult to define that alone measure, like happiness.\nWe talked about that in the last chapter, of course.\nSo this idea that I feel really intensely about this particular thing, and you don't feel so intense.\nSo therefore my intensity of feeling should carry more weight than what yours does.\nWell, how do you measure that?.\nIt's just self-reported again, but begs the question of the last chapter.\nOkay, continuing.\nAnd in any case, including such things makes no difference.\nThere are still no go-theorems.\nOkay, I'm skipping just a little here, and we get into a very interesting thing on which David has produced a video, in fact.\nSo if you get a David Deutsches...\nIn fact, I'll link to David Deutsches video about this thing here, electoral systems.\nThe electoral system in Great Britain was proposed that people were suggesting and agitating and still do agitate, as they do in Australian various other places, for changing the voting system.\nIt's an important problem.\nGiven what else is being said in this chapter about how to rationally make decisions, there can be better and worse ways of making decisions, better and worse ways of having voting systems.\nOkay, and David writes on this topic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3383"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1acc06cb-f5d7-4893-b4e6-4c24fb729003": {"page_content": "The electoral system in Great Britain was proposed that people were suggesting and agitating and still do agitate, as they do in Australian various other places, for changing the voting system.\nIt's an important problem.\nGiven what else is being said in this chapter about how to rationally make decisions, there can be better and worse ways of making decisions, better and worse ways of having voting systems.\nOkay, and David writes on this topic.\nOne perennially controversial social choice problem is that of devising an electoral system.\nSuch a system is mathematically similar to an apportionment scheme, but instead of allocating seats to states on the basis of population, it allocates them to candidates or parties on the basis of votes.\nHowever, it is more paradoxical than apportionment and has more serious consequences, because in the case of elections, the element of persuasion is central to the whole exercise.\nAn election is supposed to determine what the voters have become persuaded of.\nIn contrast, apportionment is not about state trying to persuade people to migrate from other states.\nConsequently, an electoral system can contribute to or can inhibit traditions of criticism in this society concerned.\nOkay, so just my commentary.\nSo that's extremely important.\nIf we want progress to continue as fast as possible, we need to ensure that the traditions of criticism are not thwarted, but as David is saying here, there can be the voting system which may inhibit traditions of criticism.\nAnd so it can actively stifle progress, enabling society to solve problems as quickly as possible.\nLet's continue.\nAny rights?.\nFor example, an electoral system in which seats are allocated wholly, or partly, in proportion to the number of votes received by each party is called a proportional representation system.\nWe know from Belinsky and Young that if an electoral system is too proportional, it will be subject to the analog of the population paradox and other paradoxes.\nAnd indeed, the political scientist Peter Curid Clickgad in a study of the most recent eight general elections in Denmark under its proportional representation system showed that every one of them manifested paradoxes.\nThese included the more preferred, less seats paradox in which a majority of voters prefer party X to party Y, but party Y receives more seats than party X.\nBut that is really the least of the irrational attributes of proportional representation.\nA more important one, which is shared by even the mildest of proportional systems, is that they assign disproportionate power in the legislature to the third largest party.\nAnd often to even smaller parties.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3496"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff0597ba-08fc-4df7-9f48-2b0ef30b2095": {"page_content": "These included the more preferred, less seats paradox in which a majority of voters prefer party X to party Y, but party Y receives more seats than party X.\nBut that is really the least of the irrational attributes of proportional representation.\nA more important one, which is shared by even the mildest of proportional systems, is that they assign disproportionate power in the legislature to the third largest party.\nAnd often to even smaller parties.\nIt works like this.\nIt is rare in any system for a single party to receive an overall majority of votes.\nHence, if votes are reflected proportionally in the legislature, no legislation can be passed unless some of the parties cooperate to pass it.\nAnd no government can be formed unless some of them form a coalition.\nSometimes the two largest parties manage to do this, but the most common outcome is that the leader of the third largest party holds the balance of power and decides which of the two largest parties shall join it in government and which shall be sidelined and for how long.\nThat means that it is correspondingly harder for the electorate to decide which party and which policies will be removed from power, pause their moral reflection.\nThis is a very common problem in Australia.\nWe do have large minority parties, by which I meet third parties.\nBasically in Australia we have two main parties, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party.\nOr in federal it is the Liberal Coalition Party, which is a neat way of getting around the fact that the Liberal Party has formed a coalition with the national party.\nAnd so it's the Liberal National Coalition.\nAnd so already we have a bit of an issue there, which results in compromise and everything else that we were talking about earlier.\nBut the Greens have, over the years, been a sizeable third party.\nAnd in some places in certain states, the Greens have become large enough to sometimes ally themselves with Labor, with the Labor Party, with the left side.\nAnd so then the two of them together can form a coalition, which is larger than the Liberal Party, which often is the largest party.\nOr even worse than that, the green party will not form a coalition with anyone.\nIt will just sit in the middle and it will hold this balance of power.\nIt's been a number of times over the years where in the Senate in Australia, the green party has held that balance of power.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3652"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "194b7a92-83bf-4248-a1f6-a5fadf51aa4a": {"page_content": "And so then the two of them together can form a coalition, which is larger than the Liberal Party, which often is the largest party.\nOr even worse than that, the green party will not form a coalition with anyone.\nIt will just sit in the middle and it will hold this balance of power.\nIt's been a number of times over the years where in the Senate in Australia, the green party has held that balance of power.\nWhich means it, although it might only have two, three senators out of the 76 that are actually in the Parliament of Australia, might only have two or three, that is enough to either give Labor a majority or the Liberal Party a majority.\nWhich means then that in fact the most powerful party, in a sense, is the green party because they become the Kingmakers.\nNow David, David goes through a historic example here about West Germany, where in fact the green, the green center like being the third party, changing sides in Germany.\nSo I'll just skip that a little bit.\nand I'll go back to the book where David writes, Arrow's theorem applies not only to collective decision-making, but also to individuals as follows.\nConsider a single rational person faced with a choice between several options if the decision requires thought, then each option must be associated with an explanation, at least a tentative one for White might be best, to choose an option as to choose the explanation.\nSo how does one decide which explanation to adopt?.\nCommon sense says that one weighs them, or weighs the evidence that their arguments present.\nThis is an ancient metaphor, statues of justice have carried scale since antiquity.\nMore recently inductiveism has cast scientific thinking in the same mould, saying that scientific theories are chosen, justified and believed, and somehow even formed in the first place according to the weight of evidence in their favour.\nJust my commentary there, that Bayesianism as well, Bayesianism tries to mathematize this idea of inductivism as being about weighing the evidence in order to decide which theory is correct, or even, as the Bayesians will say, to produce the theory in the first place.\nBut the critical rationalist understanding is that theories are creatively conjectured, and the function of evidence is to simply decide between them.\nIt's a black and white process.\nIt's not a matter of weighing that the evidence will actually rule out all the theories, except for one, and the evidence then is explained by that single remaining theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3760"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3c559aa9-5ef9-47bd-ae0c-bd705b045e99": {"page_content": "But the critical rationalist understanding is that theories are creatively conjectured, and the function of evidence is to simply decide between them.\nIt's a black and white process.\nIt's not a matter of weighing that the evidence will actually rule out all the theories, except for one, and the evidence then is explained by that single remaining theory.\nFor example, again, going back to Edenton's experiment in 1919, which decided between Newton's theory of gravity and Einstein's theory of gravity, and it ruled out Newton's theory of gravity, and in fact all other theories of gravity.\nAnd the observations that were made, the evidence that was seen, was explained by general relativity.\nThat's the way of understanding the philosophy of science.\nThere's poppers, way of explaining this, that is David Deutsch's way of explaining this.\nThis is the correct way of explaining this.\nWhat Bayes would say is that somehow are the way of the evidence.\nAnd one way of just refuting Bayes, my own personal way of refuting Bayes, is that in 1919 almost every physicist will agree that the experiment was a crucial experiment which ruled out Newton in favor of Einstein.\nBut if you are really a committed Bayesian, shouldn't you regard that all the experiments prior to 1919, that almost all the many hundreds or thousands of experiments that have been done, observations that have been made, that were consistent with Newton's theory of gravity?.\nShouldn't they count on the scales, and so you've got all of this weight of evidence from Newton weighing down one side, and apparently you only have one experiment here with regard to Einstein, and so shouldn't Newton still be regarded as true on Bayes' theorem?.\nWell of course the Bayesians then have, I guess they would do this little dance where they would say,.\noh no.\nbut Einstein's theory now subsumes all of that previous evidence that was counted for Newton.\nWell that's kind of a critical rationalist view.\nIt's saying that indeed this experiment is the one that says that now all of that other evidence is in fact explained best by the general theory of relativity and not by Newton's theory of gravity.\nSo the Bayesian I presume would collapse into being a critical rationalist at that point, although I'm being unfair to the Bayesians because I don't have one here and I'm not planning on interviewing one either.\nOkay back to the book.\nWhen we're talking about weight of evidence David writes, consider that supposed weighing process.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=3892"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b231cf75-0a94-4376-8266-3292ee42a9b3": {"page_content": "So the Bayesian I presume would collapse into being a critical rationalist at that point, although I'm being unfair to the Bayesians because I don't have one here and I'm not planning on interviewing one either.\nOkay back to the book.\nWhen we're talking about weight of evidence David writes, consider that supposed weighing process.\nEach piece of evidence including each feeling, prejudice, value, axiom, argument and so on, depending upon what weight it had in that person's mind would contribute that amount to that person's preferences between various explanations.\nHence for the purposes of arrows theorem each piece of evidence can be regarded as an individual participating in the decision making process where the person as a whole would be the group.\nNow the process that adjudicates between the different explanations would have to satisfy certain constraints if it were to be rational.\nFor instance if having decided that one option was the best that the person received further evidence that gave additional weight to that option then the person's overall preference would still have to be for that option and so on.\nArrow's theorem says that those requirements are inconsistent with each other and so seem to imply that all decision making or thinking must be irrational.\nUnless perhaps one of the internal agencies is dictator in power to override the combined opinions of all the other agents but this is an infinite regress.\nHow does the dictator itself choose between rival explanations about which other agents it would be best to override and here we get to the real gold nugget the center of this chapter and David writes, there is something very wrong with that entire conventional model of decision making both within single minds and for groups as assumed in social choice theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4025"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "585ea93b-a32a-4232-9193-2b7a1cae1bb1": {"page_content": "It consists of decision making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula such as an apportionment rule or electoral system but in fact that is only what happens at the end of decision making the phase that does not require creative thought in terms of Edison's metaphor the model refers only to the perspiration phase without realizing that decision making is problem solving and that without the inspiration phase nothing is ever solved and there is nothing to choose between.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4123"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "27d0b72e-2368-44e0-9a23-b05c634f27a5": {"page_content": "At the heart of decision making is the creation of new options and the abandonment or modification of existing ones to choose an option rationally is to choose the associated explanation therefore rational decision making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it in the course of explaining the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4155"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d8204de2-bfdc-4a46-91a6-7b2950dcbe0d": {"page_content": "One judges arguments as explanations not just applications and one does this creatively using conjecture tempered by every kind of criticism it is in the nature of good explanations being hard to vary that there is only one of them having created it one is no longer tempted by the alternatives they have not been outweighed but argued refuted and abandoned during the course of a creative process one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly a core merit typically one is struggling to even create one good explanation and having succeeded one is glad to be read of the rest.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4171"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ded09d76-6a2e-4f65-9dfe-b105822ab4d7": {"page_content": "wow okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "279d5cb6-c481-4c60-857e-924155da2a24": {"page_content": "so that really does go quite the distance to explaining what's wrong with conventional ideas about decision making and what David Deutsch is presenting here that's putting creativity at the center of how we go about choosing things moving on to the next part and this is where David talks about compromise which is the way I began if you recall so let's get into David's explanation of this another misconception to which the idea of decision making by weighing sometimes leads is that problems can be solved by weighing in particular that disputes between advocates of rival explanations can be resolved by creating a weighted average of their proposals but the fact is that a good explanation being hard to vary at all without losing its explanatory power is hard to mix with a rival explanation something halfway between them is usually worse than either than separately mixing two explanations to create a better explanation requires an additional act of creativity that is why good explanations are discrete separated from each other by bad explanations and why when choosing between explanations we are faced with discrete options pause their my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4210"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "abc181f6-fb9e-4463-ba6e-b141f48608cc": {"page_content": "so this is precisely again I keep on going back to the same trite example but it serves the purpose here if we have two theories Einstein's theory of general relativity and and and and Newton's theory of gravity and Newton's theory of gravity is basically summed up by the formula f equals gm1 m2 of r squared and Einstein's theory of relativity is far more complicated mathematically but is about the curvature of spacetime if we weren't able to decide between these two for some reason or other if we're at a point where just prior to 1919 we didn't have the crucial experiment just yet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4281"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b17ebd1-b8cb-463b-b402-b0e8de101cdc": {"page_content": "but it seemed like iron science theory was making some good predictions consistent with what Newton's theory was the conventional model of coming up with a compromise given that we couldn't decide between them perhaps if you're a smart physicist that understands both you can't actually you're not in a position yet to decide the idea that you can come up with a compromise something that's halfway between the two is ridiculous one that's halfway.\nbut whatever that would mean to have the one that's halfway between the two I don't know.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4314"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9809f2e9-0716-469c-9799-d136e4e792f6": {"page_content": "but if we could we would expect that there's a bad explanation because here we have two good explanations two good explanations competing for explaining gravity something that's halfway between won't be a good explanation whatever halfway between those two means back to the book David writes in complex decisions the creative phases often followed by mechanical perspiration phase in which one tires down details of the explanation that are not yet hard to vary but can be made so by non-creative means for an example an architect whose client asks how taller skyscraper can be built given certain constraints does not just calculate that number from a formula the decision making process may end with such a calculation but it begins creatively with ideas for how the client's priorities and constraints might best be met by new design and before that the clients had to decide creatively what those priorities and constraints should be at the beginning of that process they would not have been aware of all the preferences they would end up presenting to the architects.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4344"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce061bb8-7419-4ff3-9e08-2ca2c5243ad5": {"page_content": "okay.\nso I'm just skipping a little more here and David compares that process to voting namely that the person is choosing between when when voting a rational person is choosing between their explanations of politicians and their policies they're not weighing things in their mind they're ruling out they're criticizing and abandoning once and for all particular political parties or particular candidates that's how they choose between people back to the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4404"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "64d00a83-6153-4fc4-b616-bd6e9b3f0df5": {"page_content": "so it is not true that decision making necessarily suffers from those crude or rationalities not because there is anything wrong with arrows theorem or in any of the other no gothems but because social choice theory is itself based on false assumptions about what thinking and deciding consist of it is Zeno's mistake it is mistaking an abstract process that it has named decision making for the real life process of the same name so this is so important in just pause their my commentary this is so important in science and philosophy that when someone has named something and they say social choice theory and this is mathematics and this is the mathematics that governs how people make choices just because they've named it that doesn't mean that it actually is about how society makes choices they've just called it that one might very well say the same for other subjects perhaps all of psychology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4436"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bb4bd740-8880-4188-9c70-ccd2ef21b09e": {"page_content": "it's because it's name psychology what these people in academic psychology engaged in sometimes evolutionary psychology might not actually be psychology it might not actually deserve the name this can happen more often than we might appreciate or we might want to admit admit as well people name morality all sorts of things as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4494"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9cfe22e9-1d98-43a1-bbda-32e5eda0ac9d": {"page_content": "and it's not actually morality just because you call up that doesn't mean that's what you're actually studying that doesn't mean that that's what you're actually talking about you just named it that thing you have mistake perhaps an abstract process that you're going through that you have named in this case decision making for the real life process of the same name okay skipping a little bit more and David then talks about what what people's reaction to these no-go theorems has been the despite the fact that mathematics has been shown to reveal that it's almost impossible to come up with consistent and rational means by which we can make decisions or what's to be in response to that David writes virtually all commentators have responded to these paradoxes no-go theorems in a mistaken and rather revealing way they regret them this illustrates a confusion to which I am referring they wish that these theorems of pure mathematics were false if only mathematics permitted it they complain we human beings could set up a just society that makes its decisions rationally but faced with the impossibility of that there is nothing left for us to do but to decide which injustices and irrationalities we like best and to enshrine them in law as webster wrote of the important problem that which cannot be done perfectly must be done in a matter as near perfection as can be if exactness cannot from the nature of things be attained then the nearest practical approach to exactness ought to be made but what sort of perfection is a logical contradiction a logical contradiction is nonsense the truth is simpler if your conception of justice conflicts with the demands of logical rationality then it is unjust if your conception of rationality conflicts with a mathematical theorem or in this case with many theorems then your conception of rationality is irrational to stick stubbornly to logically impossible values not only guarantees failure in the narrow sense that one can never meet them it also forces one to reject optimism every evil is due to a lack of knowledge and so deprives one of the means to make progress wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4521"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8d832e3d-9150-43a0-b54e-d679d1faaf06": {"page_content": "this case with many theorems then your conception of rationality is irrational to stick stubbornly to logically impossible values not only guarantees failure in the narrow sense that one can never meet them it also forces one to reject optimism every evil is due to a lack of knowledge and so deprives one of the means to make progress wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish for moreover if my conjecture in chapter eight is true and impossible wish is ultimately uninteresting as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4623"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a71f6d44-9764-45ae-81c1-3e0d66e7273b": {"page_content": "okay.\ni've almost finished the chapter.\nbut i'm gonna i'm gonna stop there actually for today because this one's gone on for long enough it's only been a two-part episode all about choices.\nbut i hope you've enjoyed this one i've found this one really fascinating i remember when i first read the book when i encountered this chapter i thought it's a rather strange choice for David to make on choices to talk about to spend so long talking about one particular parochial issue.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4667"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ef0ce420-de7a-494e-9d42-39319a1516e7": {"page_content": "but it's clear in retrospect why that was done to reveal that the supposedly perfectly logical rational systems are not the only thing we need in reality to guide our behavior as human beings in our societies mathematics is indispensable in many ways but is not the cure all nothing is the cure all creativity will always be required and again this puts people at the center so much of actual reality that we are guiding in a way the way in which the entire cosmos is evolving at the moment only locally here on planet earth unless we're guiding the way in which the earth is kind of terraforming itself constructing new things and we're doing that by making choices thank you for listening i'll see you very soon again for the next chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4684"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d886e6d-6dd9-4e37-b2c2-24ae55630b44": {"page_content": "bye bye once more as always thank you everyone for the support on patreon if you're interested in making a patreon regular donation or a one-off donation you can search for me on google or there's a paypal account as well that's useful for one-off donations thanks again and see you next time.\nbye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GspB3XpHq-E&t=4741"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e956b0c5-3e1a-4fd4-8ed1-4a9d6966810f": {"page_content": "Welcome to the ToKCast episode 98 and appropriately as we get close to the century, the 100th episode of ToKCast, a podcast, ostensibly called The Theory of Knowledge Cast.\nWe reach chapter 5 of the Science of Canon Can't and that chapter, chapter number 5 is called Simply Knowledge.\nI say it's appropriate because the Science of Canon Can't is, of course, one of the newest deepest theories of physics.\nAnd in fact, this makes it one of the broadest theories of physics as well and the science of Canon Can't construct a theory brings in knowledge within the orbit of physics, which is amazing.\nA epistemology is being, if it isn't already, being subsumed by some fundamental physics, fundamental physics and the form of construct a theory.\nSo this means our popularian vision of knowledge, which itself is the most modern vision of knowledge here, too, has now been given a 21st century update by David Deutsch and Kiara Maleta.\nSo we're going to explore that today.\nAnd this really appeals to me because like so many people who are drawn to science in the first place, because, well, yes, it's fun, but also because it subtracts out so much of people's emotions and feelings and opinions on any given topic that might otherwise lead them astray in not thinking clearly and objectively about any issue at hand.\nAnd in a sense, this is timely, and I often don't like to talk about timely things on this podcast, but this one might stand the test of time, unfortunately, because right now we are in the midst of what I think is a real pushback against anything that might be considered rational, reasonable, objective.\nWe are told that so much of our politics, history, and even science is about feelings and emotions.\nThis is not the way that science and reason should be.\nSure emotions are important, but they don't have primacy at best in places like science.\nThey can be an indication of what one might want to pursue or how one might be curious about a particular topic, but they are not the thing that decides what is true, but we are so often now taught about what's true for me or true for you or true for the individual rather than actually objectively true and known.\nThese are separate things.\nAnd as always, when any emotion comes up at any time, it really needs to be interpreted in the light of a good explanation for us to really understand what the meaning of any particular emotion might be at root level.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "27a84d01-9906-408c-bb52-c4e03ccc1856": {"page_content": "These are separate things.\nAnd as always, when any emotion comes up at any time, it really needs to be interpreted in the light of a good explanation for us to really understand what the meaning of any particular emotion might be at root level.\nSo there has been a resurgent in recent years of subjectivity.\nThere can be many reasons for this, I suppose, but to put a spin on it from actual epistemology, too much emphasis being placed on so-called beliefs, personal opinions, and subjective emotions.\nAnd this stems deep down, in my opinion, in a deep way, from cleaving rather too closely to traditional, outdated, false notions of what knowledge is in the first place.\nI'd like to say that Popper is the philosopher of common sense, so man on the street generally has a popularion notion of what knowledge is.\nBut academia is very much saturated in, well, academic notions of what knowledge is, and increasingly generations of students appear to be inculcated with ways of thinking about knowledge and knowledge claims, which are more and more subjectivist.\nWhere does this come from?.\nWell, it comes from, ultimately, the ancients, but all the way through to today, in modern incantations of this same sort of subjectivist notion of knowledge, there isn't much in the way of intellectual self-defense against subjectivist notions of knowledge.\nAnd so everyone's opinion then stands on equal footing, even with things that are not so much a matter of opinion as a matter of deciding between good explanations given certain evidence.\nIf knowledge is, as the ancients thought about justifying as true beliefs, then we can all have things justified to us in different ways and to different extents.\nPerhaps just our personal confidence or deep feelings on the matter are sufficient justifications, so when I know something to be true, I know it because I believe it and our beliefs may differ, so what we may know to be true may differ in what constitutes knowledge or even what constitutes knowledge of the physical world might very well come down in part in many places too, subjective feelings.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=131"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25bacea2-a8e9-4287-b839-24cd8cbd29a4": {"page_content": "Perhaps just our personal confidence or deep feelings on the matter are sufficient justifications, so when I know something to be true, I know it because I believe it and our beliefs may differ, so what we may know to be true may differ in what constitutes knowledge or even what constitutes knowledge of the physical world might very well come down in part in many places too, subjective feelings.\nSo we are at an interesting juncture, we, I say, people who might listen to this podcast, people in associated circles, because just as popper seems to be coming more widely known than ever and a little more popular, what rises up to meet that increased popularity of popper is this stark relativism and subjectivism that is certainly there in the academy and is spreading throughout the culture as things in the academy tend to do.\nThe antidote to this is simply more popper and better popper, rather like the antidote to erroneous science as many people like to say is not superstition or non-science but rather more science and better science, more error correction, better error correction.\nSo relativism in biology, the creeping wokism, the emotions surrounding climate change, the absolute terror surrounding certain diseases, the drift towards collectivism driven by a desire to feel more safe, to feel more altruistic and to feel more certain in the face of doubt, these are all errors and they need a counter and almost all the responses I see to this are not able to appeal to a genuinely objective response, a genuinely objective standard for knowledge.\nThey can only craft something they claim is objective but when one projects just a little we find feelings and emotions again at the core of what they're saying.\nSo what am I talking about with regards to these outdated types of epistemology and outdated notions of knowledge, well let's look at my favourite three that I've mentioned many times before, they will be one, the received wisdom from academia on these topics which is Plato's view of knowledge more or less.\nThe more modern version is the second kind which is Bayesianism and the pretender to the throne in some ways that epistemology that calls itself object of this epistemology but isn't anything like it really.\nSo firstly the standard modern academic take on these things and it even came up in that other book that I'm going through at the moment Stephen Pinker's rationality so even as late as when I am going through the science of canon Kant people are still publishing books taking for granted justified true belief.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=278"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6bf91781-fb85-4cf0-a614-865507c4dec8": {"page_content": "So firstly the standard modern academic take on these things and it even came up in that other book that I'm going through at the moment Stephen Pinker's rationality so even as late as when I am going through the science of canon Kant people are still publishing books taking for granted justified true belief.\nThat is the standard academic take and we know it's the standard academic take even today because the great Stephen Pinker himself takes it as gospel, it takes it simply as red that this is what knowledge is.\nWe say we can know something on this view if we are justified in believing the claim to be true.\nSo in this vision knowledge is about believing something it is the peculiar going on the psychology of a mind.\nThis is not objective but subjective it is about a believing subject.\nSo that's a vision of knowledge condemned to subjectivity it is about a personal subjective experience of believing something and then saying well therefore that's knowledge or I know the thing.\nThe more modern incantation of this tries to rescue things by mathematically this notion.\nand it's called Bayesianism.\nHere we do not give up the notion of justified true beliefs.\nWe just take on a new character for the justification.\nWe try to make the justification objective out there in the world by saying it is somehow about objective measurements there in the world which once you do this measurement in some way or other you end up having more credence for a claim and of course if you put a mathematical veneer on something then it lends a certain respectability to your so cold objectivity with Bayesianism.\nI think we can almost do away with it in the same way that we would do away with any claim which corresponds to the old adage of lives, damned lives and statistics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=427"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3a33f348-55e6-4195-a391-ac4b61869aed": {"page_content": "Nevertheless on this view of Bayesianism there is a claim that we can know something to a greater or lesser degree if there is evidence for the thing and yes many Bayesians will say that if there's evidence against a thing then the probability of that thing being true drops to zero but if you have some evidence and then you gain more evidence then the more evidence that you gather the more credence the claim gets which is strange for a popularian and pointless as we like to say it's very rare we have competing theories anyway we usually have only one theory going and the reason we have one theory going is all others have been reduced to probability zero because we find out that they are literally not true but in Bayesianism what is this credence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=544"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "be533045-6d08-4775-9d37-741b5c82e050": {"page_content": "anyway well it's something like degree of truth all confirmation in fact Bayesianism itself sometimes calls itself Bayesian confirmation theory so it's about confirmation and even where Bayesians try to be objective the fact remains that the entire epistemology is about assigning probabilities to claims and it's this process of assigning this process of coming up with some kind of objective number to put on your claim that is the subjective part but what could it mean for any claim like for example the earth orbits the sun to have a probability of 50% or 90% or 95% and who decides anyway either the earth is objectively orbiting the sun in which case the probability of that happening is one or it's not in which case the probability is zero meaning that any calculation is completely and utterly pointless certainly in the physical sciences anyway by what mechanism can we come up with these probabilities and as we might say what is the alternative anyway real physical reality either is the way that we explain it is or it's not we either have probabilities of things actually being the case or they're not the case it's one or it's zero so the fact is that Bayesianism itself is refuted by physics before it even gets its laces done up the universe is not probabilistic and so epistemology cannot be about probabilities it must be about what is the case and what we mean by what is the case is what our best knowledge tells us is the case the epistemology makes ontological claims about reality it says what exists and that is the only way we know what exists via the explanations that tell us with probability one what exists and probability zero what doesn't exist and in between we just have a whole bunch of things that we don't know and at the point of speculating upon until we have a good explanation of those things and lastly for these outdated refuted old notions of what knowledge is we have that epistemology that calls itself objectivism which to be fair is a broader philosophy more or less about how to live one's life it's very much self help but there is something which calls itself objectivist epistemology so we need to address it", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=588"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "99ce3bee-7974-4c22-8872-d24ffc4863dd": {"page_content": "know and at the point of speculating upon until we have a good explanation of those things and lastly for these outdated refuted old notions of what knowledge is we have that epistemology that calls itself objectivism which to be fair is a broader philosophy more or less about how to live one's life it's very much self help but there is something which calls itself objectivist epistemology so we need to address it here's a book all about it by iron rand and some of her followers but reading this book which I have it seems to suggest we have two ways of getting to knowledge and basically the entire vision of knowledge isn't any more advanced than what was gifted to us by David Hume either we're getting knowledge via a process of derivation well let me quote from the book what iron rand writes there is that quote axioms are usually considered to be propositions identifying a fundamental self evident truth but explicit propositions as such are not the primaries they are made of concepts the base of man's knowledge of all other concepts all axioms propositions and thought consists of axiomatic concepts end quote so in that mood knowledge production is about simply beginning with the axioms and then deriving what is true from them and iron rand of course and perhaps I'll get to this as well she is very much and empiricist in this sense that you simply see truth in the world you can see what is self evident and from that self evident truth there's no need to interpret anything here knowledge on this view or rather observations on this view are not theory laden they are simply true in and of themselves and once you know what is true in and of itself you derive like a mathematician what the truth of the rest of your explanatory framework will be I think this is a completely not a dead end of course we need to interpret our observations nothing is as it seems almost let's not get into that now to give iron rand credit she doesn't say that all knowledge is like this elsewhere she says and I quote this is where you can't do derivations of that kind she says quote the process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is in essence a process of induction the process of subsuming new", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=700"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9fb6576-ec56-4610-af0e-5b791075b558": {"page_content": "a dead end of course we need to interpret our observations nothing is as it seems almost let's not get into that now to give iron rand credit she doesn't say that all knowledge is like this elsewhere she says and I quote this is where you can't do derivations of that kind she says quote the process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is in essence a process of induction the process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is in essence a process of deduction end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=827"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f222126-7c13-44e2-9513-5434b94b1d96": {"page_content": "quote and yes by induction she really does mean the kind of induction that Hume raised the problem of how do you ever realize these universal claims about reality given a limited number of observations so she gets what science is all about completely wrong anyway so there's very little in the work about science as an explanatory exercise it's all about science being a predictive exercise and making these universal claims like you know all swans are white or something like that as if that is anything really to do with how science works so in this objectivist epistemology so called objectivist epistemology it is taken for granted that induction is real and we simply observe the facts of reality so there exist direct observation on this view and further induction is an unproblematic process of generalization whatever the case we do not escape from justified true belief and so to that extent objectivism like all the other like those other two kinds of epistemology I just mentioned must fall back onto feelings about whether or not one is confident one has justified something and one believe something it's all happening inside of a human mind there's very little that's out there in the objective world the world of objects that enables one to determine whether or not one has an objective knowledge claim a claim that is in fact right a claim that could be true or false independence of whether or not anyone thinks it is true or false now leaving behind the really strict academic stuff whether it's um looking at what the ancient Greeks said and what academic philosophers today debate about what iron ran said or what a modern Bayesian might say popular accounts of knowledge today you might find in a scientific American piece which I'll come to a really no better they get no closer to actually explaining about how existing theories came to be how it is those theories could be overturned and by what mechanism nor ever really grapple with what knowledge is in some fundamental sense for example the scientific American who I'll just read I'll put up on the screen now a quote from this scientific American article it reads quote pop is view of the scientific method that's meant to get around the problem of induction might blow the young scientist mind and convince him that the goal of objective knowledge is unattainable this would probably undermine", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=858"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d77e51d8-6266-47d4-88b5-9afb35a90520": {"page_content": "be overturned and by what mechanism nor ever really grapple with what knowledge is in some fundamental sense for example the scientific American who I'll just read I'll put up on the screen now a quote from this scientific American article it reads quote pop is view of the scientific method that's meant to get around the problem of induction might blow the young scientist mind and convince him that the goal of objective knowledge is unattainable this would probably undermine his efforts to build objective knowledge in the lab end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=986"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fec5d259-2b3a-46eb-85e9-a9474768902c": {"page_content": "quote.\nso well all I can say is wow.\num this is what can get printed in something like the scientific American talking about science and about popper it's proof positive I would say the author could not possibly have read popper.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1026"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "435ff655-2199-489c-b11e-5d5bf7876bd1": {"page_content": "I mean to come away from reading popper to conclude that someone might conclude objective knowledge is not possible is not merely to misunderstand popper it's to ignore him entirely he wrote after all an entire book on that exact topic by the way the author of that piece says he is a philosopher of science this is the academic poverty that is the philosophy of science even today in the 21st century and the poverty of epistemology and it is why it really is genuinely a reason why people end up debating emotions around matters of scientific importance and new scientists here on the other hand says that scientists about faith and that we should not lose faith in science so there are many many misconceptions out there about the nature of objective knowledge none of these ideas actually hit the name on the head about what objectivity is an objectivity in both senses as I like to say there's objectivity in the epistemological sense and there's objectivity in the ontological sense they're very closely related and in many situations you could probably interchange them but what I would say in the epistemological sense following popper knowledge is objective precisely because it's not about feelings it is not about subjective feelings of confidence nor the subjective contents of individual minds like belief it is rather about whether a piece of knowledge objectively solves some problem or not whether the answer is given or not whether an error is corrected or not none of this has anything to do with feelings of confidence feelings of certainty we simply know how is it that the sun produces so much heat and light that's a genuine problem absent nuclear physics especially because so the history goes prior to about 1900 biologists and geologists were able to estimate the age of the earth and they estimated to be well at least hundreds of millions and some even suggested billions of years old let's find the problem then is if the only known way at that time to produce heat and light of the kind we see from the Sun is a fire combustion a chemical reaction then the Sun should long ago have consumed itself in that fire it's a standard astrophysics problem for undergraduates actually given the mass of the Sun how long will it take given the luminosity of the Sun for it to", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1041"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "67c5ecdb-e81c-41f6-9671-e670047d8df7": {"page_content": "millions and some even suggested billions of years old let's find the problem then is if the only known way at that time to produce heat and light of the kind we see from the Sun is a fire combustion a chemical reaction then the Sun should long ago have consumed itself in that fire it's a standard astrophysics problem for undergraduates actually given the mass of the Sun how long will it take given the luminosity of the Sun for it to consume all of its hydrogen material if it was being burned in the same way that a fire on the earth is burning well it would actually last about 20,000 years that's how long it would take to consume all of the matter in the Sun at the rate at which it's burning it given it was a combustion reaction but it's not a combustion reaction but people before 1900 didn't have a clue that it wasn't a normal combustion reaction well they might have had a clue because they realized that the sums weren't adding up they knew they must have been making a mistake so they had a problem how to square the approximate known age of the earth hundreds of millions to billions of years that happens to be 4.54 billion we know that now but at least then they knew it wasn't 20,000 years how to square this huge number with the 20,000 year old Sun maximum of 20,000 year old Sun it's a problem that's a problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1167"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cec42cf5-dfe6-4687-a4db-dddc4f9cc6c5": {"page_content": "but once we have an understanding of nuclear physics in the early 21st century then we can say that problem is objectively solved nuclear physics explains the amount of matter in the Sun is more than sufficient to keep it burning via nuclear reactions for 12 billion years or more there problem solved that bit of knowledge is objective the question is objectively answered the problem solved and it's not about anyone being confident in that answer how confident a physicist is any particular physicist is in the answer is beside the point that's the answer and the only known answer and notice that no one needs to even believe it certainly not a consensus of people need to believe it or understand it for it to count as knowledge out there in the world objectively solving the problem and correcting the error that the Sun must have been like any other burning object like a lump of wood that we are familiar with undergoing combustion the presence of oxygen and very importantly we should notice that that same knowledge now that same knowledge that solved the problem of how it was that the Sun persisted in burning for so long is now being used again imperfectly sure.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1248"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95c4ef79-169d-443a-a934-ff436fcef433": {"page_content": "but it is being used to drive the push towards artificial earth-based nuclear fusion reactors and guess what that knowledge is there now that knowledge of nuclear physics is there instantiated in a nuclear fusion reactor and should everyone all the scientists who know how that thing operates if they were to die tomorrow but leave behind the reactor itself the knowledge is very largely preserved because should other people come along and whether or not they've got the manuals to operate this thing or not could study closely the operation of their reactor itself they would uncover the knowledge in that object they could uncover that the fusion reactor actually instantiates in its super high temperature plasma producing lasers a way of overcoming the electrostatic force of repulsion of hydrogen nuclei to fuse them into another chemical altogether and in the process release vast quantities of energy the knowledge of how to do that is literally in the reactor the same relationships exist between the components of the reactor as existed in the minds of those now gone scientists and can now be recreated literally recreated mind you in the minds of anyone who focuses sufficiently on how the reactor is doing what it is doing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1321"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "30798ee7-dba3-4d68-8764-856fdcb3e7c2": {"page_content": "so that is what we mean by objective what proper means by objective knowledge it means it does not come down to subjective mental states it comes down to whether epistemologically that a claim really solves a problem or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1395"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ac2faef-3c35-47ad-90f8-20c0447982a8": {"page_content": "and we might say following so objectively in the ontological sense as well that knowledge is there in the object and so it's not about the particular contents of any individual mind that is not what makes knowledge objective and there is no way of making knowledge objective in that way no matter what the Bayesian say or what ran say or what the ancient Greeks say or what some scientists or some popularised of science or philosophy claim today objective knowledge is objective knowledge in the same way that electrons are electrons it's not because poppers says it is what it is it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1415"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cdd0db69-0215-418e-bae4-b1cef481abd5": {"page_content": "just is what it is milican or wolf gang poorly might have had a view on the electron we don't say the electron is what it is because wolf gang poorly said this or that we just say what the electron is so too with objective knowledge it's not a matter of opinion it is what it is and just as with the electron we can improve our understanding of it over time but that improvement won't lead us in the direction of well maybe it's about feelings after all we know more expect that than we expect our understanding of electrons to go back to JJ Thompson's 1904 plum pudding model of the atom that model was refuted then it's been replaced and we're moving forward.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1448"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25b9e117-b332-4f85-a803-a5478dfdbe7b": {"page_content": "I say all of that by way of long preamble because we are moving forward today we take popper and now we add what Deutsch and Marletto have said about knowledge so let's finally begin with some reading I'll be skipping the first few pages in which Kiara calls a story from her childhood not just related to you now in my own words when she comes across this little hole in the garden of her home where she once lived in this little hole eventually it turns out even when it was disturbed the perfect little hole in the ground was disturbed by putting leaves on it all disturbing it in some other way the next day it would be repaired perfectly as a little hole.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1488"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1a96cd73-8265-48dd-811e-32d7562b4b3f": {"page_content": "and it turns out the little hole was being repaired by a mole cricket a little cricket which would recraft the hole once it had been disturbed so the hole was persisting over time and that is of course going to lead us into this concept of knowledge as being resilient information in some way or other and there's something there's some entity that is causing the ability of that system to remain in place over time so let me pick it up on page 140 of the science of Ken and Kat and Kiara writes quote most changes or transformations that happen reliably around us require something to stay unchanged in the case of my story the things that undergo transformation are the soil and the grass around where the hole is built the thing that stays unchanged is the cricket to be precise the cricket stays unchanged only in a particular respect what stays unchanged are all the features that make it capable of building a hole for instance it's strong four limbs which are shaped like shovels and even armed would sort to its edges to excavate more efficiently this guarantees that the hole can be kept roughly in the same shape for much longer than the time over which the environment operates with its inexorable erosion pausing their my reflection so here we're getting a hint of that there's these two kinds of knowledge in the world and Kiara doesn't distinguish between these two because she's got a unified concept of knowledge but the two versions that David Deutsch talks about are the knowledge of the genetic kind in the DNA of organisms and which arose by evolution by natural selection and the knowledge that appears inside the peculiar minds of people which is this explanatory knowledge which arises via a process of creative conjecture and refutation and so here we have an example of the kind of knowledge that arises through evolution by natural selection and what we have.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1527"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cca902cc-db60-4bee-be8d-b628710ca023": {"page_content": "is I guess a vision of Dawkins extended phenotype this idea that the DNA inside of an organism actually reaches out beyond its own body and so encoded somewhere in the DNA of the cricket is a code for building little holes and so the DNA actually reaches out into the external environment beyond the body of the cricket into the soil and constructing holes in the soil so there is there is there is abstract knowledge in the DNA of the cricket the cricket is a physical instantiation a kind of catalyst of a sort the thing that if you disturb the hole if you muck up the hole if you go and put a stick in the hole and you know just destroy the little cricket habitat then it will repair it and so the hole will persist why will the hole persist because the knowledge is there I will do the job of repairing okay back to the book chiarite any transformation happening reliably with a high accuracy such as making a perfectly round tunnel requires something such as the cricket that stays unchanged in its being capable of causing it again the entity must retain that property because that is necessary for the transformation to happen reliably to clarify the point in the whole making transformation things like enough space and soil and the cricket are all necessary but as I said it is only the cricket that remains the same before and after the transformation in some respect the soil gets abraded away the space is used up by the hole and so on but the cricket for its lifespan is very nearly unchanged in that capability things that can perform a transformation and retain the property of doing so repeatedly such as the cricket deserve a unifying name catalysts is a good one here one has to be careful because I am borrowing the term from chemistry to indicate a much more general class of systems than chemical catalysts chemical catalysts are entities that make a chemical reaction happen more quickly and faster when they are present and that retain the property to do so over and over again they operate a bit like facilitators when all the other reagents are around but the catalysts are not there it takes ages for the reaction to happen and other", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1651"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b432bf33-3008-4c50-a5db-1b2e6e796d50": {"page_content": "the term from chemistry to indicate a much more general class of systems than chemical catalysts chemical catalysts are entities that make a chemical reaction happen more quickly and faster when they are present and that retain the property to do so over and over again they operate a bit like facilitators when all the other reagents are around but the catalysts are not there it takes ages for the reaction to happen and other reactions may well consume the reagents first but if catalysts are present then the reaction happens quickly and deterministically since chemical catalysts are distinguished from reagents because they do not change while everything else does I shall use catalysts to indicate systems that can cause a transformation and retain the property to do so like the cricket in my story pausing their my reflection so I might just mention my favorite catalysts class of catalysts which are the catalysts that allow for the arbor process the arbor process being the combination of gaseous nitrogen with gaseous hydrogen in order to produce ammonia this is a remarkable life saving reaction and is just one of those wonderful examples where we show that we really have made objective progress in the world science really does help everyone on the planet industrialization is a wonderful thing and so on and so forth the problem is how to make arid land able to grow crops the overall majority of land on planet earth where there is land can't be used to grow crops because the soil isn't fertile enough what it needs to have in it is nitrogen nitrogen fixed so they say in the soil what scientists knew was that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1762"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ce14fcc9-759f-4ea7-a44b-64137ba1aa97": {"page_content": "well you could use ammonia to make artificial fertilizers in order to make the soil fertile and therefore grow more crops what the question is how do you make ammonia how do you get sufficient quantities of ammonia in the first place well they knew of a reaction a reaction was well this one here you just take nitrogen you take hydrogen.\nand then you produce ammonia but big issue it's not really a spontaneous reaction you know just mixed gaseous nitrogen and gaseous hydrogen and then get ammonia at the end it doesn't work that way even if you pressurize it and you use high temperature it still doesn't work very well but if you add a catalyst of the right kind and very many different kinds of catalysts are used I think one is powdered iron but there are all sorts of other fancy kinds that these guys are but firstly I think.\nbut once you once you have the right catalyst and you manage to figure out the most efficient temperature and pressure then once you put it in the right vessel with the catalyst the nitrogen and the hydrogen then you get vast quantities over ammonia being produced you get lots and lots of the stuff.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1874"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "239e5b7f-d02b-474b-8533-48e664c01df0": {"page_content": "and so this literally this reaction these catalysts have saved countless people's lives they have fed countless hundreds of millions one would want to say maybe billions of people's lives we were able to support so many more people on planet Earth precisely because of this reaction it is a wonderful lesson about science and progress and might I say so-called artificial chemicals after all if anything is artificial it's this process it is very hard to do it doesn't happen spontaneously very easily certainly not with the efficiency required creating the volumes required so this is a very much a man made knowledge based way of feeding the world using lots of chemicals in order to encourage the growth of plants now what Chiara is of course talking about when it comes to catalysts here knowledge as being a special kind of catalyst we have the the knowledge itself well in the form of the cricket here we have the the cricket being the catalyst which enables the construction of the whole over and over again the construction of the burrow over and over again that even when the burrow is disturbed or destroyed along comes the cricket and it will just keep on rebuilding that thing over and over again but the cricket itself has not changed even if the burrow is and as she will come to shortly as Chiara will come to the knowledge has to be in an abstract form inside of the cricket and that would be in the the DNA program so to speak for constructing a cricket that program for constructing the cricket building the cricket from the material out of which the cricket itself is made would also code for holes in the ground which can house a cricket and so that is a very specialized kind of knowledge one then wonders.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=1939"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "185a89b8-ff53-4d87-851a-4d1bbd03965b": {"page_content": "and I wonder can there be a universal knowledge catalyst of this kind a universal abstract catalyst which can transform anything into anything else that's known well this is what a person is one presumes that the program for a person is that kind of universal catalyst which can take the material of any kind and with the relevant knowledge could construct any other thing that is constructable so that is what a person might turn out fundamentally to be or more fundamentally to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2050"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "806bb508-2c64-43fe-9a2d-afa3c880e2a1": {"page_content": "but we get ahead of ourselves let's go back to the book Chiara writes quote why are catalysts in this generalized sense interesting answering this question will require one to understand the link between catalyst and knowledge as I introduced in chapter one the reason is that most systems undergo changes during processes that involve them i.e they do not stay the same unlike catalysts also most transformations in physics do not happen reliably those that do require a catalyst that can perform them catalysts and likewise highly accurately perform transformations are hard to come by some of you might be suspicious of the notion of hard to come by it sounds too subjective what looks hard to realize for some might be very easy for others actually that is not the case hard to come by has an objective meaning established by the laws of physics one thing is harder to come by than another in this sense if the former requires compared with the latter more of what is naturally given by the laws of physics for it to emerge this notion is objective because what the elementary elements are things like energy time elementary chemicals and so on is set by the laws of physics take a look around and see what is not hard to come by what the laws of physics gave us in abundance are things like elementary particles and fields entities which as we have learned via modern physics are used to explain the existence of elementary particles themselves and their mutual interactions for example if we see electrons and protons being attracted by what classically we would call the electrostatic force we do not have to invoke anything else but the laws of physics to explain that attraction i call things that are given in abundance in our universe such as fields and particles naturally occurring systems and likewise the interactions that need no more than the laws of physics as we know them to be explained fully i call naturally occurring interactions among these naturally occurring systems interactions there are a few accurately and reliably perform transformations for example the planetary orbits around the sun are almost elliptical so one could say the task of making the planets describe elliptical orbits is well approximated in nature this fact is a direct consequence of naturally", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2085"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "657bfcdd-a4d2-4897-92c3-e49f9b31aeb1": {"page_content": "need no more than the laws of physics as we know them to be explained fully i call naturally occurring interactions among these naturally occurring systems interactions there are a few accurately and reliably perform transformations for example the planetary orbits around the sun are almost elliptical so one could say the task of making the planets describe elliptical orbits is well approximated in nature this fact is a direct consequence of naturally occurring interactions because there is a symmetry in the gravitational potential that causes the orbits to have approximately that shape in the case of such transformations what has to stay unchanged for them to be performed to a higher degree of reliability the catalysts are just the underlying physical laws which do not require further explanation pausing their my reflections.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2196"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3235d550-37eb-44b0-b8a1-f9a3b8a444c1": {"page_content": "so yeah for for stuff that we see out there happening for example planetary laws and incidentally there's a wonderful conversation at a very high level i would say technically high level that shorn carol the physicist on his mindscape podcast has with chiaramiletta that's worth looking up and listening to shorn actually brings up the case of orbits planetary orbits because it would seem that we have good explanations of planetary orbits using various other models i mean we could use Kepler's laws of physics and we could say well Kepler's laws of physics actually somehow come out of Newton's law of gravity of course what do we how can construct a theory how say anything about this particular situation of planetary orbits well there it is there it is in the sense that what the laws of physics are are like a catalyst a catalyst that itself remains unchanged while causing the position of a planet around a star to change that's the thing that is changing over time but the laws of physics aren't changing they're the one thing that remains unchanged while all these transformations are going on out there in the physical universe in astronomy whenever you have one body orbiting another it's a another way of approaching the same physical situation namely that of planetary orbits so let's go back to the book more on catalysts of this kind quote but most of these kinds of transformations are not like that there's more to them some non-elementary catalyst must be present for them to be performed to high accuracy think again of the hole in the grass being formed and reformed that is not directly explainable given the laws of physics because there are no naturally occurring interactions that cause tiny holes in the grass to materialize and be maintained to a high accuracy unlike planetary orbits the mole crickets holes in the grass of course obey the laws of physics but to explain their persistence we need some additional bit of explanation involving the cricket likewise to explain most transformations that happen accurately and reliably we need some additional explanation this explanation will involve the concept of a catalyst but also of information as defined in chapter three in terms of counterfactuals it will involve", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2247"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1b7b048b-d3b0-40f8-bbac-137f2b2f1e00": {"page_content": "crickets holes in the grass of course obey the laws of physics but to explain their persistence we need some additional bit of explanation involving the cricket likewise to explain most transformations that happen accurately and reliably we need some additional explanation this explanation will involve the concept of a catalyst but also of information as defined in chapter three in terms of counterfactuals it will involve a particular type of information which can enable itself perpetuation in chapter one I called it knowledge to explain how most transformations happen to a high degree of accuracy in other words we need to resort to a new class of counterfactuals pausing their my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2361"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b6a174f-d9d6-43f4-9aad-836a26df56d5": {"page_content": "yes I've made a big deal of this over some recent podcasts of mine some very recent episodes the big deal being people will sometimes the determinists will say well everything just abates the laws of physics as if that's an explanation.\nbut it's not an explanation it's true something can be true and yet be next to in relevant to the question at hand it's almost vacuous it's not utterly vacuous of course to say everything that happens out there in the physical universe the universe abates the laws of physics but that gets you not very far unless you're trying to explain exceedingly simple systems like planets orbiting stars.\nplanetary orbit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2402"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c6f1fbfe-80d9-45e8-843f-ecf83c629a6a": {"page_content": "yes then you can explain that purely in terms of laws of physics or when you have subatomic particles interacting can be explained purely in terms of laws of physics you might even say that you know classically the high school undergraduate physics situation of some objects sliding down a frictionless ramp can be explained purely in terms of laws of physics although there you might have a little bit of a problem because even there one might wonder why is that object going down the frictionless plane did someone let it go and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2449"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7a390a0a-2e27-4243-b58a-d3b189572190": {"page_content": "if so why so then we start to expand out with planetary orbits we don't need to worry about the why who put that object in orbit we have other explanations for that the reductive explanation actually gets you all the way to the answer for that so as as Chiara says here it's not really informative to say that something like a cricket building a borough is simply obeying the laws of physics that's not enough that's not going to be able to explain what's going on you need something deeper there's knowledge there in the DNA of that cricket and that cricket then is able to construct the whole because somewhere in that DNA of the cricket there is code for building holes okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2480"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "185b18f2-0a7a-48d7-9dfb-1774198dddf6": {"page_content": "so now i'm going to skip quite a long passage quite a fair a few paragraphs and Chiara talks about well what would it take to stop the building of holes in gardens of the kind that the cricket builds well maybe in an extreme case you might say well kill the cricket but as she says now that won't be enough killing that cricket won't stop holes being built by crickets in general as she says even if you were to destroy all the crickets in your garden there would be something that survives and that is the genome that codes for the mole cricket the genome is information as i said in chapter three because it can be copied during DNA replication.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2529"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c73f0b84-8846-4f10-bd58-776b850e35ba": {"page_content": "so what you really should destroy is that piece of information if that is not destroyed the cricket could always be brought back to life via some laboratory experiment along the lines of what happened in the film Jurassic Park and that would cause the whole making transformation to happen again and again just as before so that piece of information contained in the genome is the thing that you would ultimately have to destroy in order for the mole cricket activity to cease forever so the genome is the thing one would have to exterminate in order to stop the transformations caused by a living entity now i'm going to skip the next part where Chiara relates a story that Chiara tells this story and the story is basically about how well it's a science fiction story that she read as a child her father told her as a child about how in the future humans are trying to help these aliens who are infected by a bacteria disease and the way they help the aliens is by programming nanobots with the genome essentially the DNA of the bacterium in order to have the nanobots attack the bacterium and so the nanorobots the miniature robots are able to get into the bacterium and destroy that sequence of the genome to prevent the bacterium from replicating it's something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2571"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "88a9616c-3b79-4d02-8790-4d984ffdbd35": {"page_content": "anyway but the point here is that the genome contains information information of what kind is it abstract.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "52527e72-bc4f-4159-8970-bb9b82eb2ba7": {"page_content": "yes let's go back to the book Chiara says quote the genome is not an ordinary catalyst it has two additional properties it is information because it can be copied in the process of DNA replication and it causes itself to remain instantiated in physical systems over generations because it guarantees that the organism for which it codes can survive in a certain environment i shall call this type of information and abstract catalysts catalyst as i said because it can enable transformations and retain the property of causing them again abstract because its identity does not depend on the physical systems in which it is embodied it can be copied from one embodiment to another without changing its properties it could be in DNA or in a nanorobots computer according to our criteria in chapter three an abstract catalyst is made of information for it is copyable also it is information that is capable of enabling its own preservation in the terminology of chapter one it contains knowledge and quote just my quick reflection here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2657"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "04556db9-6485-4087-a41d-cc0be77e622a": {"page_content": "yes so we already know that DNA is a form of abstract knowledge because we can read DNA we can sequence the genome which means that we take whatever information is in the DNA of the cells of a human or any other organism can be taken and in the laboratory a printout made and stored in the computer and then in even the further distant future you would be able to take whatever that read out is in the computer where that information is in an abstract form it's not made of DNA stuff it's not made of a double helix instead it is made of zeros and ones being represented inside of a computer but that information could then be taken and then turned back into DNA which is the double helix and this is what it means for something to be abstract abstract information means that it is substrate independent it doesn't matter whether it's actually physical DNA zeros and ones in a computer all in a possibly ridiculous case writing it out and handwritten AGTC sequences of base pairs on a piece of paper that could in principle be done but all of those whether it's the physical DNA itself whether it's the zeros and ones in a computer whether it's AGTC written on pieces of paper would all represent the same bit of knowledge that bit of knowledge which codes for the construction of some organism represented by that DNA back to the book and Keira writes quote before moving on I want to clarify something important I just said that a catalyst can enable or cause transformations on physical systems truth be told the term causation has acquired especially in physics circles a bad reputation saying that a catalyst has the ability to cause certain transformations could therefore be misunderstood for one of these bad ways of looking at a cause.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2725"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56673e64-fece-4519-a580-884d144d7b8c": {"page_content": "but it isn't when we say that the catalyst causes a transformation we mean simply that the transformation occurs only when the catalyst is available and that the catalyst retains the property of making the transformation occur over and over again although other notions of causes are problematic and seem arbitrary in physics this one is not because it is clear when some system is or is not a catalyst for instance one can say that the catalyst that produced a blue green algae cell is the parent cell that originated it via self reproduction indeed the parent cell is the particular cell that is capable of constructing the daughter cell by using the information in the DNA the DNA and the rest of the cell in this context are only systems necessary to the transformation which also stay the same in the ability to enable the transformation again before and after the transformation the retention of this ability is a distinctive and objective feature of the catalyst which does not apply to other elements in the environment for any transformation that occurs in physical reality one can unambiguously identify a catalyst that is capable of realizing it and retaining the ability to cause it again it is the catalyst for the transformation one can think of it as a cause of the transformation how do we distinguish abstract catalysts from other kinds of information we need to look for information that can enable transformations and is resilient again biology seems to provide a useful example where abstract catalysts are distinguished from genetic information think of a plant for instance a maritime pine tree standing on the librarian coast even before visualizing the tree one can perceive it sent after the rain molecules of particular chemicals called terpenes are released by the tree and cause the air to be permeated with that characteristic fragrance zooming in one can take a closer look at the minute green needles that line the trees branches going in closer still one reaches the level of a single cell of the pine tree closer still and one is looking at a DNA strand inside the cell let's look for the abstract catalysts in the cell every part of the DNA strand in the cell contains information in the sense I explained earlier in this book this is because the strand is copyable it is copied in the process of DNA", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2841"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08cdf04a-6989-4c80-bc23-c9fdf3dbb310": {"page_content": "the minute green needles that line the trees branches going in closer still one reaches the level of a single cell of the pine tree closer still and one is looking at a DNA strand inside the cell let's look for the abstract catalysts in the cell every part of the DNA strand in the cell contains information in the sense I explained earlier in this book this is because the strand is copyable it is copied in the process of DNA replication when cells reproduce however only some pieces of that DNA strand code for something these bits of what biologists would call adaptations an adaptation as already mentioned in chapter one is a piece of information in the DNA with the ability to enable a certain trait to emerge in the organism that hosts the DNA we say that it codes for that particular trait for instance there is a bit of DNA that codes for the color of the pine needles such as that particular shade of green that that pine trees have however not all adaptations are resilient which is the other salient property of abstract catalysts to be resilient in a given environment an adaptation needs to be useful it must increase the probability that the genes that code for it will be passed on to the next generation and preserved for generations in that given environment pausing the MRI reflection there we get useful so remember we have this three pronged popularion doyched notion of what knowledge is and jar is adding to that with the notion of resilience but it captures this same idea of knowledge on the one hand being that kind of information which once instantiated somewhere tends to cause itself to remain so I love that it's not so poetic but we can also say succinctly that knowledge is useful information now one might very well ask what does it mean to say useful what I would say is that there's the third part of this little fork of different ways of coming to an understanding of what knowledge is in this popularian framework that being knowledge is information that solves a problem and the problem here might be how to be passed on to the next generation how it is that the species the genes whatever you however you want to frame this how the the organism continues to survive or at least passes on it genes to the next generation so that", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=2958"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db71a8f2-0ea9-4ad0-85cf-caaf2df7f398": {"page_content": "say is that there's the third part of this little fork of different ways of coming to an understanding of what knowledge is in this popularian framework that being knowledge is information that solves a problem and the problem here might be how to be passed on to the next generation how it is that the species the genes whatever you however you want to frame this how the the organism continues to survive or at least passes on it genes to the next generation so that that species continues to survive because the genes continue to survive okay skipping a partner just picking it up where kia writes quote being a useful adaptation guarantees the survival of that piece of information with causal abilities it is what guarantees that it is resilient and that it qualifies as an abstract catalyst so the information in a piece of DNA may or may not be an abstract catalyst depending on whether or not it can propagate itself for generations thus remaining instantiated in physical systems generalizing from this biology example information that can enable transformations on physical systems must also be resilient in order to qualify as an abstract catalyst so catalysts are systems that can enable transformations and retain the ability to cause them again abstract catalysts are catalysts that are copyable and can perpetuate themselves their catalysts made of resilient information which we call knowledge supposing there going back and just repeating that because that's knowledge dense there knowledge density about knowledge again abstract catalysts are catalysts that are copyable and can perpetuate themselves their catalysts might of resilient information which we call knowledge of words knowledge is resilient information as we learned in chapter one of the science of canon cart let's keep going go right now an intriguing fact though I'm about to explain is that all catalysts must contain an abstract catalyst catalysts in other words must have some properties that are invariant no matter what transformation they are intended for and that invariant part must be made of knowledge as I'm about to illustrate this remarkable fact is due to the particular structure of the laws of physics in our universe let's consider the example of assembling an aircraft from elementary components in the airbus factory the elementary components are the", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3078"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "875d4f01-6727-4cd6-9bb8-b8c0f7975e4f": {"page_content": "an abstract catalyst catalysts in other words must have some properties that are invariant no matter what transformation they are intended for and that invariant part must be made of knowledge as I'm about to illustrate this remarkable fact is due to the particular structure of the laws of physics in our universe let's consider the example of assembling an aircraft from elementary components in the airbus factory the elementary components are the subpart of the plane such as wings engines seats and wheels but to be more expansive we can think of the whole process that produces an aircraft out of even more elementary entities such as metals plastic and similar materials the whole factory is the catalyst for this transformation where is the abstract catalyst as I said it is the thing that ultimately one has to eliminate for the factory to stop working properly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3201"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6e4124d6-47ab-4ba5-a019-3f8ca68f2ba7": {"page_content": "okay so pausing their my reflection so this idea of the abstract catalyst is that one crucial thing that would ensure that if you destroyed it you wouldn't have resilient information anymore resilient information is knowledge knowledge is that information which continues to get itself copied and replicated over time so what could possibly stop that destroying the abstract catalyst where is the abstract catalyst in this particular case you can probably guess continuing Kiara says imagine a slight modification to the factory for example by introducing a floor in its production line if it is a well-run factory there is a way to fix the problem and thus restore the production process so that changes in consequential for the output however if you destroy the sequence of instructions for constructing the plane or the instructions for repairing the factory the factory might have to shut down the recipe for the aircraft must be copied for the factory to survive it is the abstract catalyst that keeps the factory going for years this recipe is the set of instructions to realize the construction of the aircraft to the accuracy set by the factory standards it is a recipe in the sense that it is a sequence of steps that one has to follow in order to forge the metals into the shape of the plane the recipe for a fully fledged aircraft is what allows the construction of the aircraft to happen reliably because the final product is checked against the procedure until it meets the criteria set by the quality control of the company also the recipe is preserved down the line for decades so it is what allows aircrafts to be produced over and over again sometimes the recipe can be slightly improved but it is preserved in its ability to create an aircraft that can fly safely and swiftly thus aside from all the various things the factory contains there is a particularly important piece of information which is copied from generation to generation in order for aircrafts to be produced to the factory standard losing this recipe would make the factory fade away and even if an alien civilization were to find the remains of the aircraft factory in order to make it functional again they would have to find the recipe or figure it out themselves the recipe is the abstract", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3252"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "245f520e-af52-41fc-973e-972b85bcbd41": {"page_content": "all the various things the factory contains there is a particularly important piece of information which is copied from generation to generation in order for aircrafts to be produced to the factory standard losing this recipe would make the factory fade away and even if an alien civilization were to find the remains of the aircraft factory in order to make it functional again they would have to find the recipe or figure it out themselves the recipe is the abstract catalyst and it is made of knowledge pausing air more reflection and although kia it doesn't say it here one would presume that if the aliens found a non functional factory that's one thing even if all the raw materials were there but if the aliens also had the aircraft fully functioning aircraft well then that aircraft contains the knowledge implicit implicit not explicit but implicit within it of how to construct itself if they were sufficiently careful and undid every nut and bolt very very carefully then they could rebuild the thing they could replicate it so a fully functioning aircraft over here could lead to given a factory another fully functioning copy of that aircraft over here it would be very hard it's not the ideal way to do it you'd rather have a plan written out but in theory you could deconstruct the aircraft produce a plan then reconstruct presumably as long as you're error correcting very carefully very accurately along the way but in principle it could be done so this is the sensing which the knowledge is there in object it's objective knowledge another for another way I'm talking about this is of course reverse engineering let's keep going kia rights in order to be compatible with the laws of physics we know the recipe must have the form of a sequence or combination of elementary steps to see why we must understand that laws of physics do not contain any protocol to preserve or create complex entities such as aircrafts or even wings or things of that type leave an aircraft for a while in a desert without being repaired or checked and will soon become unfit to fly as I said in chapter one the only thing that the laws of physics preserve directly elementary components and interactions and elementary symmetries they are no design laws ultimately physical laws provide only very simple types of transformations that can be", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3365"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "892a897d-52ac-485e-b540-af9b8b416a7f": {"page_content": "preserve or create complex entities such as aircrafts or even wings or things of that type leave an aircraft for a while in a desert without being repaired or checked and will soon become unfit to fly as I said in chapter one the only thing that the laws of physics preserve directly elementary components and interactions and elementary symmetries they are no design laws ultimately physical laws provide only very simple types of transformations that can be performed reliably without their being a recipe those corresponding to naturally occurring interactions these are transformations that happens spontaneously such as the oxidation of the coating of an aluminium surface or the molecules of air in an oven heating up the surface of a cake such transformations are elementary steps that do not need for the maintenance to be realised in a stable manner in fact they do not need to be specified in the recipe because they are implicit in the laws of physics I've uncovered a regularity in the way abstract catalysts appear they must be realised as a recipe a sequence of elementary steps non-specific to the output each of which does not require further explanation and which can be considered as a direct consequence of physical laws.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3477"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eeb6f480-0310-4eb1-b000-c40b4b1d4ed6": {"page_content": "okay that's wonderful.\nthere I'm going to skip a part where we'll basically carry just talks about how in biology we're familiar with the appearance of design organisms have the appearance of design it's as if there is a designer behind the designer various things.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3552"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "647d2241-09df-4d7b-be93-7d93e4e3bdb3": {"page_content": "but we know now that's not the case that evolution by natural selection explains how you can have this ratcheting up of complexity over time and the increasing appearance of sophisticated design but of course that appearance of design is better described as the illusion of design anyway kara goes on to say quote whenever you see something with the appearance of design that can last a long time you can rightly assume that some abstract catalyst is contained in it I have said that most transformations that are possible in the physical world must occur via a catalyst that enables them I've also noted that all catalyst must contain an abstract catalyst which is itself made of knowledge as introduced in chapter one knowledge is defined entirely via counterfactuals it is information that is capable of remaining instantiated in physical systems unlike most definitions of knowledge the good thing about this one is it does not depend upon their being and knowing subject.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3564"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc5e327d-3647-4373-8298-615902f6a503": {"page_content": "and oh yes you better believe i'm going to repeat that quote knowledge is defined entirely via counterfactuals it is information that is capable of remaining instantiated in physical systems unlike most definitions of knowledge the good thing about this one is that it does not depend it does not depend on there being a knowing subject going on this way of looking at knowledge based on counterfactuals breaks with a long-standing tradition which regards it as a chiefly anthropomorphic subjective concept that tradition says that knowledge requires there to be a sentient being such as a human to exist knowledge in other words would only exist in minds according to this idea knowledge appears to be subjective something like that is very remote from the laws of physics in contrast knowledge as defined here as it occurs in abstract catalysts is sharply different the main two differences are that this entity is objective it can exist irrespective of whether there is a knowing subject and it is a possible subject for physics as i said those are know the philosopher khalpop will recognize the chief features of his epistemology in the characteristics of this concept however with the science of canon can't i have related knowledge to physics something beyond the domain of epistemology which we can do because we are using counterfactuals in physics there have been several discoveries of new types of stuff for example at some point it will realize that all engines use some type of energy heat and transform it to partially into another type of energy work it was then natural to wonder how to express the laws about these two types of energy and that gave rise to thermodynamics likewise in this case it is natural to wonder can knowledge be created can it be destroyed can it be transformed this problem is a deep one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3611"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "98a4d90b-22f8-4a3d-b246-f348b35c4560": {"page_content": "and it is only partially solved so far the science of canon cart provides an objective handle on knowledge it gives us tools that may one day be used to answer these questions fully posing their my reflection isn't that wonderful anyone who is interested in philosophy epistemology and physics has a real opportunity to contribute to the frontiers of all those areas by investigating the science of canon cart reading about constructor theory trying to push the frontiers forward in constructor theory so anyway young people at their listing this would be a wonderful opportunity to go into an area which hasn't so far proved to be a dead end like many of those other kinds of cutting edge areas of physics that have been around for many many decades and don't seem to be doing too much in the way of making progress towards solving particular problems in physics but bringing epistemology within this fear of physics physics has this as David Deutscher said before this totalitarian character of gradually coming to encompass every other subject and now epistemology it's wonderful.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3753"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2c02014f-2c2f-4b07-b11e-f19b63bf6669": {"page_content": "so this idea of counterfactuals being very much at the heart of what epistemology is about and whether it's possible for a thing to be known for this particular knowledge to be constructed whether this particular piece of knowledge can be created or not is going to come down to physics that's exciting stuff.\nokay.\nI'm skipping a little bit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3822"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e48825da-b983-4e89-bc1d-c808e4530c65": {"page_content": "and then I'm picking it up where we're just getting right to the end of the chapter so this will be the last bit that I read from the book from this book and Chiarites quote with this new perspective we have a different angle on theories that deny that knowledge could be anything substantial or of scientific interest on the grounds that it might be associated with an anthropocentric attitude there is nothing anthropocentric in abstract catalysts their capacity to enable transformations is objective in fact knowledge and knowledge creating entities are singled out as significant properties of our universe but this is not as in religious explanations because of some dogma it is because of a physical explanation knowledge is a particular property that matter can have in our universe say that again knowledge is a particular property that matter can have in our universe which exists when abstract catalysts are there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3847"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "de91990f-a858-4f08-b057-607201e84db4": {"page_content": "and it is fascinating to study its regularities how it comes into existence how it evolves and whether it can be sustained and grow indefinitely and this becomes through this approach via counterfactuals a problem for physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3901"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "690a69f9-0bea-48d3-889f-6c756daf80a5": {"page_content": "maybe one day we'll be able to solve it end quote end of chapter five isn't that wonderful that is just absolute cutting edge epistemology that is right at the edge of what is known about knowledge right now that we now have this concept of an abstract catalyst this thing that contains the information allowing the transformation of matter into some other kind of matter and which as I like to say enables us to solve our problems and just by way of I suppose showing due respect to the person that started all this we have the very latest in what knowledge is about there from kyama let her following the work of David Deutsch let's have a look at what popper actually said it would be remiss of me to to not read just something brief from objective knowledge where popper actually talks explicitly about objective knowledge so again just to have the point on that knowledge should not be seen as something about merely what people are thinking on a given topic that knowledge really is out there in the world kyara's made that point forcefully there that it is part of physics importantly it is a property that matter can have in our universe where did this all start who kicked this off well popper himself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=3919"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "705bd832-7ebf-4e0e-a3be-34b7be3cec11": {"page_content": "and he wrote this is page 115 of the chapter that's called epistemology without a knowing subject and he wrote quote one of the main reasons for the mistaken subjective approach to knowledge is the feeling that a book is nothing without a reader only if it is understood does it really become a book otherwise it is just paper with black spots on it this view is mistaken in many ways a wasps nest is a wasps nest even after it has been deserted even though it is never again used by wasps as a nest a bird's nest is a bird's nest even if it was never lived in similarly a book remains a book a certain type of product even if it is never read as may easily happen nowadays moreover a book driven a library need not even have been written by anybody a series of books of logarithms for example may be produced and printed by a computer it may be the best series of books of logarithms it may contain logarithms up to say 50 decimal places it may be sent out to libraries but it may be found to cumbersome for use at any rate years may elapsed before anyone uses it and many figures in it which represent mathematical theorems may never be looked at as long as men live on earth yet each of these figures contains what I call objective knowledge and the question of whether or not I'm entitled to call it by that name is of no interest the example of these books of logarithms may seem far fetched but it is not I should say that almost every book is like this it contains objective knowledge true or false useful or useless and whether anybody ever reads it and really grasp its content is almost accidental a man who reads a book with understanding is a rare creature but even if he were more common there would always be plenty of misunderstandings and misinterpretations and it is not the actual and somewhat accidental avoidance of such misunderstandings which turns black spots on white paper into a book or an instance of knowledge in the objective sense rather it is something more abstract it is its possibility or potentiality of being understood its disposition or character of being understood or interpreted or misunderstood or misinterpreted which makes a thing a book and this", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=4010"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d199f24-3f3b-49f6-b1cf-3f309c3d0895": {"page_content": "of misunderstandings and misinterpretations and it is not the actual and somewhat accidental avoidance of such misunderstandings which turns black spots on white paper into a book or an instance of knowledge in the objective sense rather it is something more abstract it is its possibility or potentiality of being understood its disposition or character of being understood or interpreted or misunderstood or misinterpreted which makes a thing a book and this potentiality or disposition may exist without ever being actualized or realized pausing their more affliction so that's just worth lingering on there it's about potential possibility the possibility or potential of being understood or misunderstood.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=4121"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38e67c91-476d-4d7d-80b2-83516f8b4b01": {"page_content": "so if something could possibly be understood but never is or possibly misunderstood but never is that's the point it doesn't matter whether it actually is misunderstood or actually is understood it's just that it could be understood or misunderstood therefore it must contain knowledge of a kind knowledge that is capable of being understood or misunderstood and as he says that it doesn't matter whether that's actualized or realized that that that's inherent within itself inherent within is kara might say it's a property of the matter itself that that matter contains information that could be understood or not proper goes on to say quote to see this more clearly we may imagine that after the human race is perished some books or libraries may be found by some civilized successes of ours no matter whether these are terrestrial animals which have become more civilized or some visitors from outer space these books may be deciphered they may be those logarithm tables never read before for argument's sake this makes it quite clear that neither its composition by thinking animals nor the fact that it has not actually been read or understood is essential for making a thing a book and that it is sufficient that it might be deciphered thus I do admit that in order to belong to the third world of objective knowledge a book should in principle or virtually be capable of being grasped or deciphered or understood or known by somebody but I did not admit more okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=4165"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eb90883d-d5b1-416f-ba35-b904964db02d": {"page_content": "then Papa goes on to criticize a whole bunch of competing epistemologies which are all very similar in very many ways but I can't let things go without mentioning this passage from Papa which is I'm skipping forward to page 141 where he has some remarks on probability theory and he writes quote nowhere has the subjectivist epistemology a stronger hold than the field of the calculus of probability this calculus is a generalization of Boolean algebra and thus of the logic of propositions it is still widely interpreted in a subjective sense as a calculus of ignorance or of uncertain subjective knowledge but this amounts to interpreting Boolean algebra including the calculus of propositions as a calculus of certain knowledge of certain knowledge in the subjective sense this is a consequence which few basians as the adherence of the subjective interpretation of the probability calculus now call themselves will cherish this subjective interpretation of the probability calculus I have combatted for 33 years fundamentally it springs from the same epistemic philosophy which attributes to the statement I know that snow is white a greater epistemic dignity than to the statement snow is white I do not see any reason why we should not attribute still greater epistemic dignity to the statement in the light of all the available evidence to me.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=4254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7368c1d5-dbd6-4f94-bb5d-3c4bfb2023b6": {"page_content": "I believe that it is rational to believe that snow is white the same could be done of course with probability statements.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=4343"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9c69be40-a325-44f6-9f06-d3c4a21c36e1": {"page_content": "and obviously there is far more to be gained by reading this in terms of understanding the nature of objective knowledge but for now I think we've covered everything from where it began this notion of objective knowledge to where we are as of 2021 and our appreciation of the cutting edge of epistemology really where we are in the most modern sense where we've done away with criticized refuted those other subjectiveest notions of what knowledge is which have plagued philosophers and unfortunately still plague especially academic philosophers even through to today and which students of philosophy are still taught and of course as we often complain here proper simply isn't studied enough that people often have to leave academic institutions in order to really get a handle on what Papa says about these important issues of objective knowledge philosophy more broadly but hopefully one day there might be an institution of some kind who wants to take on you know degree programs in Papa and construct a theory I'm sure that would be absolute anathema to David Deutsch.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=4353"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "158fae7c-ad55-4181-9183-ea88fbb1c3a9": {"page_content": "but maybe it would be a completely non-coercive way of teaching a new generation of people how to make objective progress out there in the world after all the moment the universities seem to be in a difficult situation let's just say that.\nbut for now until next time when we are up to episode 99 of ToKCast which will be a special one episode 100 will be a special one which will be the full interview with David Deutsch and indeed episode 101 and maybe 102 will be a special one as well and ask me anything episode and my patreon's we'll get we'll get first kick of the ball so to speak in asking me a question they've asked me on patreon I've put the call out on twitter.\nif you'd like to ask me a question for and ask me anything episode I'm not planning on doing these particularly regularly at this point but maybe episode 101 and episode 102 possibly will be devoted to me responding to questions from people who have questions about the last 100 episodes of ToKCast but until next.\nbye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkaNj1VBAKc&t=4429"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "88dbb1dc-bdc5-4968-8b19-4d09d0b3e80d": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast episode 54.55.\nSomething like that.\nChapter 17 anyway.\nPart 3 of unsustainable from our beginning of the infinity series.\nToday's will be short and sweet.\nThere will of course be a part 4 in order to get through unsustainable being such an important central chapter, a kind of crescendo of a sort, this chapter bringing together so much of what we've talked about in previous chapters as I've said before in the other parts.\nI'm going to dive straight in today into the reading where David says, in early prehistory, populations were tiny, knowledge was parochial, and history-making ideas were millennia apart.\nIn those days, a meme spread only when one person observed another enacting it nearby.\nAnd, because of the statistic of cultures, rarely even then.\nSo at that time, human behavior resembled that of other animals, and much of what happened was indeed explained by biogeography.\nBut development such as abstract language, explanation, wealth above the level of subsistence, and long-range trade all had the potential to erode parochialism, and hence give causal power to ideas.\nBy the time history began to be recorded, it had long since become the history of ideas, far more than anything else.\nThough, unfortunately, the ideas were still mainly of the self-disabling anti-rational variety.\nAs for subsequent history, it would take considerable dedication to insist that biogeographical explanations account for the broad sweep of events.\nWhy, for instance, did the societies in North America and Western Europe rather than Asia and Eastern Europe win the Cold War?.\nAnalyzing climate, minerals, flora, fauna, and diseases can teach us nothing about that.\nThe explanation is that the Soviet system lost, because its ideology wasn't true, and all the biogeography in the world cannot explain was false about it.\nCoincidentally, one of the things that was most false about the Soviet ideology was the very idea that there is an ultimate explanation of history in mechanical non-human terms as proposed by Marx, Engels, and Diamond.\nQuite generally, mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well.\nThrough an effect, they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=26"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56311317-1254-4932-a559-50c3764374b1": {"page_content": "Coincidentally, one of the things that was most false about the Soviet ideology was the very idea that there is an ultimate explanation of history in mechanical non-human terms as proposed by Marx, Engels, and Diamond.\nQuite generally, mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well.\nThrough an effect, they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape.\nDiamond says that his main reason for writing, guns, germs, and steel was that unless people are convinced that the relative success of Europeans was caused by biogeography, they will forever be tempted by racist explanations.\nWell, not readers of this book, I trust.\nPresumably, Diamond can look at ancient Athens, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all of them, the quintessence of causation through the power of abstract ideas, and see no way of attributing those events to ideas and to people.\nHe just takes it for granted that the only alternative to one, reductionist, dehumanising reinterpretation of events, is another, pausing their just my reflection.\nIt seems to be the pervasive worldview of science-minded intellectuals who otherwise have divested themselves of supernatural explanations for events, to fall quickly down a slippery slope of complete literal physicalism, or in less fancy language, but they think that unless you explain things purely in terms of physical forces and physical stuff out there, that then the only alternative is a supernatural magical explanation.\nAnd as we've tried to emphasise here, and David's theme running throughout the book very much is, knowledge being an abstract thing has absolutely central causal power and effects within human civilisation, within the world as we find it now.\nIt's gradually becoming more and more a potent force of nature, to some extent.\nOften I say the words, it's literally a force of nature.\nKnowledge creation is literally a force of nature, of course, that's quite wrong.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=137"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b5ee05fe-b64f-4e1a-bbed-77cc790339b6": {"page_content": "It doesn't mean literally a force of nature in the same way that physicists regard forces of nature to be, but what I do mean is that increasingly the effects of knowledge creation will have as dramatic effects out there in physical space as does gravity, as does the strong nuclear force, for example, that in order to explain what we're going to see in the future, an event that are going to happen in the future, we are going to have to explain the causes in terms of people's abstract ideas, the explanations that they create, and the choices that they make, and I don't try to sideline choice, and where choices originate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=282"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2dd37f6f-1915-433f-9eb4-af777ca33111": {"page_content": "They originate in the minds of people.\nThis has come up recently and need to simultaneously with the release of this particular podcast is, or are my remarks in response to Sam Harris.\nSam Harris has a wonderfully tight, neat defence of the illusion of free will, as he calls it, the argument for pure determinism in the universe, and particularly determinism as applied to the brains of people, and therefore to the suggestion that, therefore people are nothing particularly different to the rest of physical reality, including other animals, and including any other natural process that might happen out there like a hurricane, let's say.\nIn all cases, the hurricane, what the grizzly bear is doing, and what the human being is doing when they're engaged in knowledge creation, are similar in a fundamental way on this view.\nThat similarity comes down to the fact that they are all the unfolding, the unworking of physical laws acting upon matter and energy.\nAnd as I like to say, this is a true statement, it's a vacuously true statement.\nIt isn't really an explanation as much as it is a general purpose description of anything that happens anywhere at any time, and anything that always has happened and always will happen.\nIt's a necessary truth, but it doesn't explain what is going on.\nAnd if we want to explain what people are up to, what they're doing, referring to physical laws, or even to the goings on within the brain in terms of the firing of neurons, is the wrong level of analysis.\nWhat we need to refer to is the abstract creation of knowledge that then goes on to have physical effects in the world.\nThese are the true explanations of why, for example, the enlightenment happened in one place and not another, had the effects that it did, and not some other effects.\nIt's the reason why, as David will go on to say, we can say there is a stark difference between an open-ended stream of knowledge creation that occurs in dynamic societies, and the explanation as to why it is that other societies endured stasis and finally went extinct.\nPeople's choices, choices to create knowledge or not, really are the explanation as to why certain civilizations exist, certain technologies exist, and certain ways in which people either are able to come together and collaborate and work towards a better future or not happens to be.\nThis is all to do with ideas, not the motion of particles and the void under deterministic physical laws.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=343"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4bed0ba9-f076-4e37-b7d9-7cf2d4ed9cf0": {"page_content": "People's choices, choices to create knowledge or not, really are the explanation as to why certain civilizations exist, certain technologies exist, and certain ways in which people either are able to come together and collaborate and work towards a better future or not happens to be.\nThis is all to do with ideas, not the motion of particles and the void under deterministic physical laws.\nThose deterministic physical laws, acting on matter, moving through a void, is just always necessarily the case, as a description of what is happening anywhere cosmologically in the universe.\nBut let's go back to what David says about this.\nQuote, you're right.\nIn reality, the difference between Spartan Athens or between Sabinerola and Lorenzo Di Medici had nothing to do with their genes, nor did the difference between the Easter Islanders and the Imperial British.\nThey were all people, universal explainers and constructors, but their ideas were different.\nNor did landscape cause the enlightenment.\nIt would be much true to say that the landscape we live in is the product of ideas.\nThe primeval landscape, though packed with evidence and therefore opportunity, contained not a single idea.\nIt is knowledge alone that converts landscapes into resources and humans alone who are the authors of explanatory knowledge and hence of the uniquely human behaviour called history.\nPhysical resources, such as plants, animals and minerals, afford opportunities, which may inspire new ideas, but they can neither create ideas, nor cause people to have particular ideas.\nThey also cause problems, but they do not prevent people from finding ways to solve those problems.\nSome overwhelming natural event like a volcanic eruption might have wiped out an ancient civilization regardless of what the victims were thinking.\nBut that sort of thing is exceptional.\nUsually, if there are human beings left alive to think, there are ways of thinking that can improve their situation and then improve it further.\nUnfortunately, as I had explained, there are also ways of thinking that can prevent all improvement.\nThus, since the beginning of civilization and before, both the principal opportunity of progress and the principal obstacles of progress have consisted of ideas alone.\nThese are the determinants of the broad sweep of history.\nThe primeval distribution of horses or llamas or flint or uranium can only affect the details, and then only after some human being has had an idea for how to use those things, the effects of ideas and decisions, almost entirely determined which biographical features have a bearing on the next chapter of human history and what the effect will be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=482"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ef60678-9f5d-4c19-9989-4c0d09b12a0a": {"page_content": "These are the determinants of the broad sweep of history.\nThe primeval distribution of horses or llamas or flint or uranium can only affect the details, and then only after some human being has had an idea for how to use those things, the effects of ideas and decisions, almost entirely determined which biographical features have a bearing on the next chapter of human history and what the effect will be.\nMark's angles and diamond have it the wrong way around, pause there just in my reflection on this.\nNotice also that dismissing the centrality of human creativity, of the human being as being a causal agent in the unfolding of historical events, and of the landscape we find ourselves in now, to sideline that, ignore it, dismiss it, or just be completely unaware of it.\nLeads, in my view, inexorably to a kind of pessimistic worldview, where people are impotent in their capacity to actually change the course of history and to do something good.\nWe see a strong theme running through the beginning of infinity is that things are getting better all the time.\nIt's not inexorable, okay?.\nI've sometimes said that erroneously as well.\nIt's not like it necessarily must get better, but it is getting better, and there's explanations for that, because people are improving their ideas, in particular, they're moral knowledge, they're improving that, and so we are quickly finding ways to lift everyone out of poverty.\nWe are quickly finding ways of curing disease.\nWe are quickly finding ways to ensure that the environment we live in is less polluted, more comfortable, where there's less suffering.\nSo the story of human history is not merely a story of one where it is human ideas, which have shaped the course of history, but that those ideas are causing people to improve the universe in which they find themselves at the moment, only locally, but eventually, cosmically.\nNow, if you ignore all that, and if you think that humans are kind of just waves being washed upon the shore, they're just leaves being blown by the wind.\nThey're just another feature of the environment.\nAnd especially if you think that people are a dangerous feature of the environment, then you will end up having ideas about how to control people, about how to try and mitigate the dangers of people, and that usually comes through social control.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=633"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "200e40be-1ae9-45e2-a0b4-88cb32bfe2a0": {"page_content": "Now, if you ignore all that, and if you think that humans are kind of just waves being washed upon the shore, they're just leaves being blown by the wind.\nThey're just another feature of the environment.\nAnd especially if you think that people are a dangerous feature of the environment, then you will end up having ideas about how to control people, about how to try and mitigate the dangers of people, and that usually comes through social control.\nSo it's absolutely no accident that people like Marx and Engels come up with social theories of history, which lead directly to a political vision about how society should be arranged, that are just engines of human suffering.\nBut this is a pervasive, popular opinion even today, no matter how many times these political ideologies are refuted by the simple fact that they've been tried in history, and they've led to starvation and suffering and misery for the places in which they've actually been tried, to the extent that they've been tried.\nDespite that, they continue to survive.\nJust today, coincidentally, the philosopher, Ray Scott Percival, if you don't know who I'm talking about here, look up Ray Scott Percival.\nHe's written for Quilett magazine and Medium magazine.\nHe's a great expoiser of popularian ideas.\nBut he observed in an article I read today that the ideologies, bad ideologies tend to persist.\nBecause all your need is, even if people are being converted out of those bad ideas all the time, you know, it seems to be kind of a one-way street in a sense that people come out of socialism or out of Marxism and into capitalism.\nBut those ideologies don't die because the rate at which people are converted out and persuaded of better ideas about ideas about freedom and optimism and how people don't need to be socially controlled in the way that Marx kind of thinks.\nNonetheless, young people tend to be born into thinking these are good ideas.\nThey're raised on mothers' knee quite often.\nThey're raised by a school system, they're raised by an education system in order to endorse these terrible ideas.\nAnd so the traditions within education are very much about inculcating, indoctrinating, people with these bad ideas.\nAnd it takes time to be persuaded out of them if you've been indoctrinated into them.\nNo one is naturally born into being a Marxist of course.\nBut there are religious ideas that are similar.\nThere are political ideologies that drive certain educational theories.\nAnd so the work is kind of infinite.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=767"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "58999893-70a3-4c18-8e81-905e7b93159d": {"page_content": "And so the traditions within education are very much about inculcating, indoctrinating, people with these bad ideas.\nAnd it takes time to be persuaded out of them if you've been indoctrinated into them.\nNo one is naturally born into being a Marxist of course.\nBut there are religious ideas that are similar.\nThere are political ideologies that drive certain educational theories.\nAnd so the work is kind of infinite.\nThe work of freeing, liberating people from these tyrannical notions that take over their mind about how we people are evil.\nAnd insofar as we're not evil, we're impotent to do anything to improve the world.\nWhen we do improve the world, if we improve the world, a lot of people think we don't improve the world, we're just here immiserating other species on a planet and hurting the planet insofar as we can actually hurt the planet.\nThe work of trying to eradicate these bad ideas seems to be unending and probably possibly will be unending.\nThat's me being a little bit pessimistic.\nBut because the era becomes deeply entrenched so early on in the lives of people and because governments have invested interest in ensuring that these kind of ideas that the government needs to be front and center and important in people's lives, there's a lot of forces arrayed against anyone who thinks that the individual, the individual person, the individual knowledge creator can make a true difference in the world and that people, generally speaking, can make a positive difference in the world.\nAnd in fact, are the only thing, the only entity actually doing the work of trying to improve the world, literally the planet, literally the lives of other people, it is just other people doing that.\nAnd the exception is the people that are causing harm to one another.\nThey're the exception to the rule.\nFunnel harm is done by the environment to people.\nThat's worse.\nIf nature was a person, they would be the worst serial killer.\nThey would be the worst torturer, the worst sightest that has ever lived because nature is constantly, as I've said before, flooding or starving or blasting or burning, etc, etc.\nThe innocent people that exist on this planet, the universe is hostile.\nIf not out to get us, but at the same time, it's not providing a very nice environment for us to live in.\nInstead, we have to eke out an existence on inner hostile universe.\nOkay, back to the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=928"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9574f08-efa0-486e-9b0d-f914c7472d4c": {"page_content": "The innocent people that exist on this planet, the universe is hostile.\nIf not out to get us, but at the same time, it's not providing a very nice environment for us to live in.\nInstead, we have to eke out an existence on inner hostile universe.\nOkay, back to the book.\nAfter that cheery note, David writes, quote, a thousand years as a long time for a static society to survive, we think of the great centralized empires of antiquity, which lasted even longer.\nBut that is a selection effect.\nWe have no record of most static societies, and they must have been much shorter lived.\nA natural guess is that most were destroyed by the first challenge that would have required the creation of a significantly new pattern of behavior.\nThe isolated location of Easter Island and the relatively hospitable nature of its environment might have given its static society a longer lifespan than it would have if it had been exposed to more tests by nature and by other societies.\nBut even those factors are still human, not biographical.\nIf the islanders had known how to make long-range ocean voyages, the island would not have been isolated in the relevant sense.\nLikewise, how hospitable Easter Island is depends on what the inhabitants know.\nIf its settlers had known as little about survival techniques as I do, then they would not have survived their first week on the island.\nAnd on the other hand, today thousands of people live on Easter Island without starving and without a forest, though now they are planting one because they want to and know how pause their just my reflection.\nDavid kind of hints at this elsewhere, and he mentions Oxford in the UK as well.\nBut you can say it about anywhere on the face of the planet, everywhere is inhospitable.\nAlmost everywhere is entirely unsuited to human beings.\nWe are this special kind of species that well, we don't have much, we have some inborn knowledge, but our inborn survival capacity is pretty limited.\nI mean, we're born as helpless babies, unlike, you know, the giraffe or the horse, which is walking within a few hours and able to look after itself more or less within a few hours.\nWe are completely helpless for the first few years of our lives.\nAnd then we have to create knowledge in order to survive.\nAnd there's nowhere on earth that is really a wonderful nursery for human beings in its natural state.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=1066"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "030272e2-36bd-4631-842f-3359c537ce8e": {"page_content": "I mean, we're born as helpless babies, unlike, you know, the giraffe or the horse, which is walking within a few hours and able to look after itself more or less within a few hours.\nWe are completely helpless for the first few years of our lives.\nAnd then we have to create knowledge in order to survive.\nAnd there's nowhere on earth that is really a wonderful nursery for human beings in its natural state.\nOnly our houses and our towns and our cities are able to really do the job of properly nurturing young children and bringing human beings to the point of being able to survive themselves within those cities and towns and houses.\nBut plunk the average person, like me, anywhere in the natural environment here on earth, and I'd be dead within weeks, maybe days, even if it's a place which is where we supposedly evolved.\nSubs a higher in Africa is not going to be somewhere where I'm going to survive.\nThe great rift valley is not going to be somewhere where I'm going to be able to find food and clean drinking water.\nSo this concept of hospitable of how hospitable a place is, like Easter Island, depends, as David says, precisely on what the inhabitants know.\nSo how hospitable the environment I find myself in here in New South Wales at the moment, also is not merely about my personal knowledge to a large extent.\nIt's about the knowledge that other people have.\nThank goodness.\nBecause it's only by virtue of the fact that someone else has been able to build this house, but I don't have knowledge of how to build this house.\nI don't have knowledge of how to generate electricity.\nI have some understanding of the physics of electricity generation, but if you put me at a power station where it's actually going, I know I wouldn't have a clue.\nI wouldn't have a clue about how much coal needs to go into the burner, at what rate, at least sort of technical details.\nBut thankfully someone does.\nAnd overall, the civilization is hospitable because the knowledge instantiated, not only in people's minds, but in the physical artifacts, the technology is there to make this place hospitable.\nIt's not the natural environment that makes it hospitable.\nBecause the natural environment is not hospitable.\nIt's very unreadly.\nLike, of course, now and again, there are times where me, personally, I love going for a walk in nature into inhospitable nature to get away from civilization to some extent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=1179"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6cdf5387-1016-46d6-859f-72cd7ead9f0a": {"page_content": "It's not the natural environment that makes it hospitable.\nBecause the natural environment is not hospitable.\nIt's very unreadly.\nLike, of course, now and again, there are times where me, personally, I love going for a walk in nature into inhospitable nature to get away from civilization to some extent.\nBecause I just like to have some extra fresh air or to feel a different temperature on my skin or to see the wild animals that are out there, the nice green trees or perhaps the nice beach and so on and so forth.\nBut that's the exception to the rule.\nI often can't wait to get back home again to where it is warm and dry and there's food or plenty.\nSo the hospitability is very much overall depends upon the knowledge that exists in those places, not merely my personal knowledge, although that's important.\nI have to know how to switch the lights on and offer, example, and get the food from the fridge.\nThat's not much that's expected of me.\nBut the knowledge of fridges is contained within fridges and, thankfully, people who construct fridges and can repair fridges and so on and so forth, repeat for every other bit of technology that keeps my house, my town, my city, my country, hospitable.\nOkay.\nLet's keep going.\nWe'll just read for a little bit more today.\nIt's going to be a short episode and I can promise you, part four, again, very soon.\nDavid writes, quote, the Easter Island civilization collapsed because no human situation is free of new problems and static societies are inherently unstable in the face of new problems.\nCivilisations rose and collapsed on other South Pacific islands too, including Pitcan Island.\nThat was part of the broad sweep of history in the region and in the big picture, the cause was that they all had problems that they failed to solve.\nThe Easter Islanders failed to navigate their way off the island.\nJust as the Romans failed to solve the problem of how to change governments peacefully.\nIf there was a forestry disaster in Easter Island, that was not what brought its inhabitants down.\nIt was that they were chronically unable to solve the problem that disraised.\nIf that problem had not dispatched their civilization, some other problem eventually would have.\nSustaining their civilization in its static, statue-obsessed state was never an option.\nThe only options were whether it would collapse suddenly and painfully, destroying most of what little knowledge they had, or change slowly and for the better.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=1322"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a42d923d-aabf-4ea3-999c-20f121b241ba": {"page_content": "If there was a forestry disaster in Easter Island, that was not what brought its inhabitants down.\nIt was that they were chronically unable to solve the problem that disraised.\nIf that problem had not dispatched their civilization, some other problem eventually would have.\nSustaining their civilization in its static, statue-obsessed state was never an option.\nThe only options were whether it would collapse suddenly and painfully, destroying most of what little knowledge they had, or change slowly and for the better.\nPerhaps they would have chosen the latter if only they had known how paused their my reflection just on that.\nImportantly, people might easily re-pass that, not noticing the word slowly.\nDavid has said there that the only option is Easter Island could have very quickly, suddenly painfully destroying the knowledge that's the way in which the society could have collapsed.\nThe only alternative was to change slowly and for the better.\nThe slowly is important.\nI guess another way of saying that is incrementally.\nIncramently, in other words, making a small change, a small improvement at a time.\nI like to say that this is a digital way of viewing civilization.\nYou want to have incremental improvement.\nContinue as an ascent.\nYou want the increments to just keep accruing all the time.\nYou want it to be a constant kind of state of improvement.\nThat's what you want, but you won't get that.\nWhat, of course, you'll get is you'll have an incremental change that sometimes will be for the worse.\nBut luckily, it was only incremental.\nIf you're doing the right thing in a modern Western democratic society, you try out a policy which is a bit of a change from the previous policy, and it may well go wrong.\nBut because it's an incremental change on what was there before, you can correct it.\nYou can undo it, go back to the previous state, and then try something different again, which hopefully this time will be an incremental improvement.\nYou always want the increment to be central there.\nThis slow kind of improvement so that when things inevitably go wrong, problems are inevitable, you can then turn around on a dime, hopefully, and go back to the way things were before and start again, essentially, without too much damage.\nThis is why evolution within the political sphere, evolution within social change is so much more important than revolution.\nWe're here now, speaking in 2021, I often don't invoke contemporary matters in politics, but there's something going on called the Great Reset.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=1454"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c2287024-feaa-4e89-99f2-c0bfe23edcae": {"page_content": "This slow kind of improvement so that when things inevitably go wrong, problems are inevitable, you can then turn around on a dime, hopefully, and go back to the way things were before and start again, essentially, without too much damage.\nThis is why evolution within the political sphere, evolution within social change is so much more important than revolution.\nWe're here now, speaking in 2021, I often don't invoke contemporary matters in politics, but there's something going on called the Great Reset.\nThe Great Reset is where rich and powerful people are deciding that we need to give up private property, that we have to completely revolutionize the way in which trade is conducted, we have to revolutionize the way in which we think about political institutions, they want the Great Reset.\nThey want revolution, and there's always been people calling for revolution.\nI mean, how good things are and how good things have become recently and how much the pace of improvement has increased recently.\nThere are people, the naysayers are still out there, saying how terrible things are, and therefore, we need to have a revolution.\nWe need to undermine the very thing that has given us such great wealth and health and success and improving everything from our physical environment by removing the pollution, removing illnesses that were previously killing in a sort of far greater rate, as well as improving the individual lives of people around the world, through increased freedom, wealth, trade, etc, and so forth.\nBut these changes must remain incremental, and if we start to follow the advice of people who want revolution, then we end up undoing institutions that contain, as we've talked about throughout this series, in explicit knowledge about how to keep a society stable, under great change.\nIt is only the Western civilizations following enlightenment traditions that have been able to maintain this dynamism, this ability to just slowly improve the situation for everyone within that society over time, and we don't know all the ways in which it works.\nWe know some of the ways we can point to different institutions and say the reason why we've been able to remain stable over time is because often democratic, free and fair elections, a court system, an illegal system which is blind to whoever the person is that it is accused of a crime, capitalism and the ability to freely trade with people one to another.\nThese things are part of the story, but the entire story is not well known and well understood.\nWe struggle to understand simple systems like atoms and matter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=1557"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f3d03f7e-a133-480b-b5fb-7212e5974361": {"page_content": "These things are part of the story, but the entire story is not well known and well understood.\nWe struggle to understand simple systems like atoms and matter.\nVery, very clever people become particle physicists and trying to understand the complexity of matter.\nBut matter, the structure of matter is simple, compared to a civilization and how societies actually maintain their stability over time, I would say we know more about the standard model of particle physics, then we know about the conditions required in order to maintain a stable civilization over time.\nCivilisations are the most complex thing that we know about, the most complex thing that we know about, the most complicated structures that human beings have ever come up with are these social civilizations.\nMore complicated than Boeing 747 or an Elon Musk rocket or a great ocean liner, you can compare civilizations to these things, but then think orders of magnitude more complicated, more complex, the moving parts, phenomenally complicated, and we don't know what they all are.\nOkay, so that's where I should end it today.\nComing up is one of my favourite anecdotes that David tells in the entire book, or two, two, two great anecdotes in the book, one about how when he was at school there was someone, one of these people who was saying the heavens are falling of course, there's going to be great climate change and it's coming, it's coming just you wait, but of course it was the great ice age that was coming when David was at school.\nAnd then of course the European story about cathode ray tubes and how colour television would be coming to an end, I've told that story once before as well, but finally we get to it in the book.\nIt's a short one for today, but until part four, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJaT-DzYjM&t=1754"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28329204-8ad9-4abf-8e79-0f3cde86ac0f": {"page_content": "The horizon.\nIt's like an infinity.\nYou can move towards it to further away from wherever you begin, but you'll never get there.\nIt's unobtainable.\nYou can aim for it, like the sky.\nIndeed, the sky is even better.\nYou can aim for it, never get there, and yet get right past it.\nWhat you thought was there is revealed not to be, and what happens is the sky opens up to something even deeper and more mysterious.\nInfinity is something you can approach.\nYou can know about it, but you will just never get to it.\nThere is a way to move towards it, or away from it, who are always at the beginning of infinity, in all directions.\nBack to the horizon, and the ocean.\nThe ocean is vast, but it's a poor metaphor.\nEven the sky is a poor metaphor.\nBut I'm here because, well, this place is both a metaphor and the actual real thing.\nThis place has the ominous name in Sydney, Australia, of the gap.\nThe history of the gap is not particularly optimistic.\nIt's infamous for reasons the viewer may guess or can research themselves.\nI'm interested in this place because it is right in the middle between over there, civilization.\nAnd over there, nothingness.\nIn a sense, this is a beginning of infinity.\nWe can see where we've started.\nAnd out there, hostility.\nA roiling ocean that we've managed to eke our existence in the midst of civilization making its first inroads into infinity.\nWe are always in the gap between pushing into the front.\nIt is, but just physically, of course.\nBut in a sense, the precondition for all that pushing into the abstract space of knowledge creation, of explaining the rest and so come to the control of it.\nLet's begin.\nHello.\nI'm going to try a little experiment today.\nI'm going to start reading through parts of the beginning of infinity, just the first chapter.\nI have sent at least one other Ozzie doing this with a different series of books.\nI don't know if it'll be useful.\nI thought I'd try it just as an experiment, sort of thinking out loud, I guess, and just commenting on some of my favourite parts of the book.\nBy doing so, it kind of clarifies my own thoughts about things.\nThat's one thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=41"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f5730fd5-973e-414c-975b-d9234e43d97c": {"page_content": "I have sent at least one other Ozzie doing this with a different series of books.\nI don't know if it'll be useful.\nI thought I'd try it just as an experiment, sort of thinking out loud, I guess, and just commenting on some of my favourite parts of the book.\nBy doing so, it kind of clarifies my own thoughts about things.\nThat's one thing.\nThe other thing that there is a sense in the critical rationalist community that there's a lot of bad ideas out there, or false ideas, that get a lot of traction in an undeserved kind of way, while the ideas of copper and dutch, for example, don't.\nAnd so this might go some way to addressing that.\nWell, there we are.\nThat's where I began.\nI wasn't sure where I was going with all this, but I sort of knew the point back then.\nAs I said, it was basically to help me understand the book a little bit better by thinking out loud and clarifying my own ideas about things.\nAnd the other thing was to speak about the bad ideas that are out there by way of critique.\nCompeting ideas really are critiques of one another, but in many cases one idea really is a valid critique of another idea and refutes the other idea.\nThe world is flooded in pessimism right now.\nIt is drowning in misconceptions about how knowledge is created.\nIt's saturated by a desire, apparently for stagnation, a kind of precautionary principle when it comes to progress.\nWe, by which I mean Western civilization, saying nothing about cultures that are more primitive still, are trapped by really bad ideas, irrational memes and anti-rational memes.\nIn this book, the beginning of infinity is the best antidote I know of.\nSure, there are other works out there about progress and optimism, books that focus on one aspect or another of this grand vision.\nBut none of them, like the beginning of infinity, actually unite all the crucial aspects of this one worldview into one synthesized whole, because it's only in uniting these ideas that you really come to appreciate the cosmic significance of people, or at least the potential cosmic significance of us in particular.\nBut if you take that seriously, it's sadly almost a joke to some people.\nI was frustrated recently listening to Sam Harrison Ricky Gervais speaking.\nThey've got a podcast out this year, 2021, called Absolutely Mental.\nAnd it's entertaining in parts.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=202"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bd360485-5053-40f6-b3dc-bd64a2a16496": {"page_content": "But if you take that seriously, it's sadly almost a joke to some people.\nI was frustrated recently listening to Sam Harrison Ricky Gervais speaking.\nThey've got a podcast out this year, 2021, called Absolutely Mental.\nAnd it's entertaining in parts.\nIt's funny, of course, Ricky is a great comedian.\nBut in terms of philosophy, and he is trained in philosophy as Sam is, he is a standard vanilla-style pessimist, and anti-human.\nHe wouldn't think that.\nHe would think that he's a great humanist.\nBut in fact, he denigrates people as being the cause of just so many problems in the style of David Attenborough, and the style of so many public intellectuals, that we are the poison and there needs to be some cure to prevent our spreading across the globe, much less the rest of the cosmos.\nNow, happily, during this podcast with Sam Harris, Sam did go some way to explaining some parts of David Deutsch's worldview.\nAnd invoke the name of David Deutsch, and one would hope that Ricky would go and research some of these ideas, perhaps read the beginning of the finale, but I doubt it, because Ricky dismissed what Sam said.\nHe treated this grand vision of knowledge and people in their cosmic significance as merely of academic abstract interests.\nHe brushed it aside because it seemed to him, I guess, in his own mind, as it does to many people like science fiction rather than actual science.\nIt seems too good to be true, or even worse than that, too bad to be true.\nThat in some moods, of course, people such as Ricky Gervais, such as your standard public intellectual, think that people gaining control of the planet, the solar system, the cosmos is something like a nightmare, because these people have already been convinced, are convinced that we've ruined the planet, that we are like some kind of virus, and that the only cure to this is to somehow eradicate us from the face of the earth, if not that, then to severely diminish our power to survive on this planet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=393"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "744ef756-b0be-48e6-bb4e-8ef88f4c7e72": {"page_content": "Of course, that's not the way they would see it, but they do, and a large part of Ricky and Sam's podcast was about how we are just on the continuum of all other animals that live on this planet, that we are nothing special, and that even Ricky Gervais explicitly said, we're just like an ape using a tool, but just a little bit better, we're just the next step along that smooth continuum.\nAnd Sam did try to mention that this was misconceived, but still, I'm not sure that Sam quite understands what this position of ours actually is.\nAnd I suppose to some extent why should he?.\nWhy should anyone?.\nThe culture is absolutely saturated, as I said, from a decades-long campaign against people, against our significance.\nAnd the reason for that comes from things like environmentalism, yes, that we are the cause of the ills of the world, but also it's a reaction against superstitious religion, which in many ways, it's been right for people to criticize and to reject the bad parts of religion.\nBut in doing so, they've thrown out the baby with the bathwater.\nThere was a lot of baby in that bathwater.\nI know that Sam thinks there's not, but there really is.\nAnd importantly, a very important and crucial part of many of the big religions of the world is placing people at the center of the cosmos, in a sense, certainly at the center morally.\nAnd Sam might say, you know, the moral landscape is a book that he wrote about the significance of consciousness for morality.\nBut the problem is he doesn't put people there at the center of morality.\nThe concerns of people rather than all conscious creatures, as if all conscious creatures have a claim to moral status, to the extent of their conscious.\nAnd I think this is wrong.\nAnd I think this is wrong because the kind of consciousness we have, at least one aspect of the consciousness that we have, an aspect of consciousness, this mystery of whatever it means to be a person, one aspect of this mystery is our capacity to create explanations.\nAnd for reasons to be on the scope of this episode, because I've talked about it so much, I think that is the crucial feature of our existence.\nThat means we are categorically different in moral terms compared to any other conscious creature.\nAnd so even Sam who tries to salvage something from the religious morality, which is that people are important.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=499"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9d8ed699-5baf-4b79-89f1-de69909623a6": {"page_content": "And for reasons to be on the scope of this episode, because I've talked about it so much, I think that is the crucial feature of our existence.\nThat means we are categorically different in moral terms compared to any other conscious creature.\nAnd so even Sam who tries to salvage something from the religious morality, which is that people are important.\nAnd they're not just another physical system, but they actually have consciousness or creativity, the capacity to understand the universe in which they find themselves.\nSam lumps them in, just as Ricky does, just as every public intellectual almost today does, alongside all other animals.\nAnd that we're nothing ultimately special in the cosmic scheme of things.\nThe beginning of infinity is a different worldview.\nIt is a reaction against this kind of thinking.\nSo I think it is sad, something has been lost with the rejection of religion by public intellectuals, because there are many important things to salvage there.\nAnd I'll come to some of those later.\nBut importantly, the, for one to the better word, sacredness of humanity, the sacredness of the individual human life.\nAnd this is not about religious thinking.\nIt's not about starting a different kind of religion, because there's nothing here that one needs to believe.\nHonestly, there's nothing here that you need to believe as actually finally once and for all truth.\nThere are no dogmas or doctrines.\nWhat there are, are fallible explanations.\nAnd that itself is not a belief either.\nAny of this can be overturned, criticized, reinterpreted by you in a way that suits you, that works for you, that solves your problem, allows you to move forward and make progress, and hopefully everyone else to make progress as well, to come to a consensus in order to resolve conflicts, but not to adhere to the text in some way, as religious people would.\nAnd as people who are against religion do exactly the same thing adhere to the text and say, well, that's wrong because of precisely the way it's been written.\nOr we must believe it because of the precise of the way it's been written.\nAnd this is a shame, even within religious communities, which we have to admit, the overwhelming majority of people are still religious to a greater or lesser extent.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=643"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b236fb6-b22c-4b82-8dd3-6a1f614e189a": {"page_content": "And as people who are against religion do exactly the same thing adhere to the text and say, well, that's wrong because of precisely the way it's been written.\nOr we must believe it because of the precise of the way it's been written.\nAnd this is a shame, even within religious communities, which we have to admit, the overwhelming majority of people are still religious to a greater or lesser extent.\nAnd even many people in the West who ostensibly call themselves religious are losing their faith in the sacredness of the specialness of human life, that they regard not only other creatures on the planet as of equal moral status, but of the inner planet itself as of equal moral status, that we need to sacrifice ourselves to the planet.\nThis is not something that comes out of traditional religion, but I'll try and tell you it does now.\nWe have things in Christianity, I know, because my background is Christian, I've worked in Christian institutions, Catholic institutions.\nThey have things like eco-theology now, eco-theology.\nThe way in which we need to basically worship Mother Earth.\nThis is, to some extent, mainstreamed Catholic teaching.\nSo they're off the rails to a large extent.\nBut traditional religion is losing its way insofar as it had a good way at all to begin with.\nThe things that were redeemable about it are being lost, diluted by even worse ideas.\nThere is a rank order of bad ideas, some are worse than others.\nAnd traditional religious ideas, bad as they are, are possibly superior to the new religion, to the new religions of politics, environmentalism, anti-humanism, at least traditional religions regarded people as being of prime importance, of central importance.\nAnd that that's what civilization was about, trying to protect people and trying to enable people to get along, so that they can continue to solve their problems off into the infinite future, and that things would get better as well, that things would get better.\nNow we don't think people are spiritually divine.\nWe don't endorse souls and mysticism, but the alternative is not to think that people are not special, because we are just not in a mystical supernatural way.\nWe're special.\nWe're not on a continuum with other animals.\nThis is the point I keep returning to.\nAnd it's a point I keep returning to, because I think people need to hear it, because of all the messages in the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=774"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a5e4d4f1-b070-44cb-95e9-b8b12fdca77d": {"page_content": "Now we don't think people are spiritually divine.\nWe don't endorse souls and mysticism, but the alternative is not to think that people are not special, because we are just not in a mystical supernatural way.\nWe're special.\nWe're not on a continuum with other animals.\nThis is the point I keep returning to.\nAnd it's a point I keep returning to, because I think people need to hear it, because of all the messages in the beginning of infinity.\nThe one that I think can do the most work in pushing back against the current moral zeitgeist is pessimism about people.\nIf you recognize that people are different and special, not in precisely the same way that traditional religions have said, but special nevertheless.\nThen you will do what it takes in order to construct your worldview, construct your knowledge, construct your approach to life, in order to not only allow people to continue to survive, but to flourish, to flourish and make progress faster than ever, to create wealth more than we've had before, to aim for these things as a kind of good in and of itself.\nSo all of this has been motivation for this podcast as I enter this final episode.\nThe book has certainly shaped my mind.\nBooks can do this.\nAnd I know a lot of other people have experienced the same shift in worldview or a similar shift in worldview.\nDiscussing books, talking about books, can do this even more deeply.\nAs I've said before, with me, the first time this really properly happened was with the fabric of reality, because I learned that the world could make sense.\nSomeone put into words the idea that everything could eventually make sense and that academics, intellectuals, public figures who relished in trying to confuse with jargon or to try and impress one with their superior knowledge and who would tell you that there's no point thinking about certain things, because that's just a mystery we'll never solve.\nHere's David Deutsch in the fabric of reality, telling you that this is false.\nThat in fact, the world can make sense and it's more beautiful in the fact that it can make sense.\nPeople like Carl Sagan had made these noises, Richard Feynman had made these noises, of course as well, that the vision that you get of reality, once you understand it can be comprehensible, it's so much better than simply falling back into the wonder and mystery of it all without being concerned about what the answers are.\nYou should have both.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=940"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4aa54c14-c7de-492a-86ce-95bf9fa5d96a": {"page_content": "That in fact, the world can make sense and it's more beautiful in the fact that it can make sense.\nPeople like Carl Sagan had made these noises, Richard Feynman had made these noises, of course as well, that the vision that you get of reality, once you understand it can be comprehensible, it's so much better than simply falling back into the wonder and mystery of it all without being concerned about what the answers are.\nYou should have both.\nOr in wonder at the majesty of reality and the fact we can understand it.\nWe people can understand it.\nWe are part of that grand vision because we uniquely, as far as we know, in the universe, can understand parts of that reality and eventually everything that can be understood.\nSo the fabric of reality taught me this.\nIn particular, the first thing it taught me was that quantum theory was perfectly comprehensible.\nNot in all parts, there are mysteries there, there are open questions, but the parts we do understand can be understood.\nWe don't have to fall back onto nonsense.\nWe don't have to jump to supernatural explanations.\nIn any area, by the way, at any time there's an open question, we do not jump to a supernatural explanation.\nThat's not required.\nNow after the fabric of reality, it was a long time until I was so impressed by a book again.\nNot quite equal to the fabric of reality, but it took a while.\nNow I was reading widely and I kind of thought I understood the worldview in the fabric of reality, but as it turned out, I didn't really.\nAnd there's, in a sense, an objective measure of this for me and my own mind, because as I say in my other series that I've just been commenced doing on the fabric of reality, although I'd read that book multiple times and I'd even discussed it online, and I'd even discussed it online to a limited extent with David Deutsch himself, I don't think I'd truly got it in all respects.\nI mean, most importantly, I did indeed understand I thought the science, but I didn't really take on board the Papurian epistemology.\nAt least I might have understood it academically at one level, but I wasn't living it.\nI wasn't taking it on board as being part of genuinely my worldview.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1073"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b435566a-5b79-46fd-84d7-3152da158ba4": {"page_content": "I mean, most importantly, I did indeed understand I thought the science, but I didn't really take on board the Papurian epistemology.\nAt least I might have understood it academically at one level, but I wasn't living it.\nI wasn't taking it on board as being part of genuinely my worldview.\nBecause I didn't really notice when people were anti-popurian, when intellectuals, philosophers, people out there in the world were saying things that were just antithetical to the work of car-popper and to David Deutsch.\nI noticed the errors some of the time, but not all of the time.\nSo one of the first books that kind of didn't impress me after the fabric of reality was in 2004 Sam Harris published his first book The End of Faith, and that was the beginning of the whole series of books published on the same thing that were anti-religious theirs books by Richard Dawkins, by Christopher Hitchens, by Daniel Dennett, and I read all of these, I bought all these, I just ate them up voraciously.\nIn the case of Sam, I loved his style of writing, it was lyrical, it was metaphorical, it was poetic, I just liked that style of prose, the clarity of it.\nAnd I already was on board with so much of what he said.\nIn terms of the anti-superstitious stuff, the anti-faith stuff, it certainly was the most withering and clear attack against standard organized religion and faith that I'd ever read until that point.\nAnd listening to Sam speak in those early years of his fame was refreshing, because there are a few people out there that I was aware of in the media who could speak with such clarity and just cut through the nonsense.\nBut I mentioned this because although I was reading all of these guys, Harris Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and others as well, what I didn't notice was all of the errors throughout these works.\nIt seemed to me that if a sentence was written clearly and made sense, that was enough.\nAnd it didn't jump out at me that so much of this writing, so much of this work that people had done, the anti-religious stuff, which touched on the intersection or the clash between the religious and the scientific worldviews, that I didn't notice the poverty of epistemology and an understanding of science there and the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics and just the general way in which we view people now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1212"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dd15aa58-7ca3-4d6c-ba7f-99f8c4fdc533": {"page_content": "And it didn't jump out at me that so much of this writing, so much of this work that people had done, the anti-religious stuff, which touched on the intersection or the clash between the religious and the scientific worldviews, that I didn't notice the poverty of epistemology and an understanding of science there and the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics and just the general way in which we view people now.\nAnd that's there in the fabric of reality to a large extent.\nI didn't notice, I didn't notice because although I'd read the fabric of reality, multiple times, and I was having online discussions about it, and I understood it at a level, it hadn't really formed part of the memeplex, so to speak, that was in my mind, my literal way of seeing everything, analyzing everything, in particular people's writing and people's speech.\nSo I was quite readily persuaded to a large extent by clarity of writing, clarity of writing that criticized nonsense like superstition.\nAnd I thought, well, if they're criticizing superstition well, then they're correct in the way that they do it.\nAnd I was wrong about that.\nIt's right to criticize superstition and religion, but there are ways of doing it that are better and worse.\nThe end of faith was published in 2004, and that's interesting because it's exactly mid way between the publication date of the fabric of reality and the beginning of infinity.\nAnd the reason I mentioned that is because of this psychological phenomena of learning that I want to speak about.\nAnd that is, as I say, my world view change when I read the fabric of reality, I thought I understood science far more deeply.\nAnd academically, I thought I understood the epistemology to some extent.\nIf you, for example, if you pressed me to make a study of a particular passage of text and to say, what was wrong with it in light of Popper's philosophy, I probably could have done it with some effort, with some effort, but it wouldn't have been second nature to me.\nIt was only after the beginning of infinity, but possibly for the first time, I don't want to talk myself up.\nMaybe it took a second read and some discussions, but whatever, soon after reading the beginning of infinity, things became what I can only describe as effortless.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1335"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38e29aff-0e08-4414-b61c-e670a953e586": {"page_content": "It was only after the beginning of infinity, but possibly for the first time, I don't want to talk myself up.\nMaybe it took a second read and some discussions, but whatever, soon after reading the beginning of infinity, things became what I can only describe as effortless.\nI was, without effort, able to read a text and almost immediately the errors in epistemology, the errors in thinking, the pessimism, the prophecy, the poverty of content was immediately revealed to me.\nWhat was there in my mind, in an academic sense after reading the fabric of reality, became my lived experiences, people say, after reading the beginning of infinity.\nI didn't simply remember the facts that were in the fabric of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1486"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "68b36c01-b325-4bad-bc1f-9894280e1386": {"page_content": "I understood, and in particular I understood what epistemology was, and that became so obvious to me, psychologically, because prior to the beginning of infinity, if I had heard a person, everyone else said was smart, saying something smart, erudite, insightful, I'd typically not along, and in some sense be transfixed by the clarity of their language, and I'd think to myself, well, they're making sense, that's enough, but after the beginning of infinity, so much more often, I began thinking, when people were speaking publicly, writing beautifully clear articles, I would think to myself, well, that makes sense, but making sense is not enough, they're making errors, they're making serious errors, errors that kind of like dominoes caused their entire argument to collapse, you can make perfect sense and be completely wrong, and you can make perfect sense and reach the correct conclusions by an invalid argument, because you began in the wrong place, the premises were wrong, the premises were wrong, but you followed the rules of inference and you reached a conclusion, which is the correct conclusion by an invalid method, because you're, which is the correct, which can happen by chance, it happens by chance, or if not by chance, it's because people know what the correct conclusion is, but have worked backwards using a false epistemology, by which they can prove just about anything, including the true conclusion, by a bad method, so I began to think that I understood why smart people thought what they thought, and then I understood why they were wrong, so if I take, again, it's a book that I recommend to people, and I think it's written beautifully, and as one of my maxims in life is one of the greatest things you can do for any work and any ideas to criticize, so let's take the end of faith, Sam Harris' first book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1528"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9347449a-1f09-4267-9367-42effa2d1f28": {"page_content": "I understood why the central thesis made sense and why you would reach those conclusions, and why those conclusions were, in fact, correct some of the time, but the argument was wrong.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1661"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cfed8b83-f294-43eb-b0f7-042406cd17d5": {"page_content": "For example, why being an atheist, now Sam doesn't use the word atheism or atheists, I think, throughout the book, and he's made this point quite a few times, but on this worldview of Harris' Dawkins' Kitchen's denards, and almost everyone's worldview, the standard intellectual take, is that you're an atheist because there's no evidence for God, there's no evidence for God, so one should not believe in God, and at the time when I heard these things over and again, I thought it was completely a reasonable position to hold, that is why one is forced into atheism, why one doesn't believe theism, but it's wrong, there's no evidence for anything, and the fact is that I know, forget belief, I know there is no God.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1673"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b95da4c5-b92c-4466-b3cb-90ffcf54439b": {"page_content": "Now, why?.\nWell, because no explanation requires me to invoke the existence of God.\nI mean, the same place as Laplace, talking to Napoleon Bonaparte, who, when Laplace explained, I think it was projectile motion to Napoleon.\nNapoleon said, these equations are lovely, but where is God?.\nAnd Laplace apparently said, well, Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis, and this has been true ever since I've kind of come to the realization, one does not need to invoke that God hypothesis to explain anything.\nThere are open questions, certainly, but we do not need to leap to God as the explanation.\nSo again, when I say, I know that God does not exist, it does not mean I am certain God does not exist, and you can see my blog post for this, but I raised this, because this is, again, another thing that Ricky Gervais seems to insist on, that we must be agnostic on almost all questions, because in his mind, and I think this is just common knowledge out there among intellectuals of a certain stripe, that no means be certain of.\nBut you can't actually say, I know that unless you are 100% sure, which is a standard no one can reach, and so Ricky rejects saying that he knows that God does not exist.\nInstead, instead, he just says, he doesn't believe it.\nOf course, in my appearing world view, I don't have beliefs either.\nI just have knowledge, and I act on the knowledge, or I don't act on the knowledge.\nBut also, now, the end of faith, again, I recommend a book, it's a withering attack on religion, but now, after the beginning of human infinity, I'm not personally particularly anti-religious.\nThe anti-religious arguments now strike me as like, level big brain, you know, these memes as big brain, galaxy brain thing, well, the anti-religious stuff is like big brain, rather than being caught in religion, you then just reject it all.\nBut I think the galaxy brain take is more like, although superstitions and parts about angels and gods and miracles are false, there's a heck of a lot to preserve with religion.\nAnd there's reasons for this, in much the same way, there's a heck of a lot to preserve in civilization broadly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1751"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47098917-1d03-4884-bc2c-6b9be70d0498": {"page_content": "But I think the galaxy brain take is more like, although superstitions and parts about angels and gods and miracles are false, there's a heck of a lot to preserve with religion.\nAnd there's reasons for this, in much the same way, there's a heck of a lot to preserve in civilization broadly.\nAnd that thing that's worth preserving is a certain kind of tradition, and although it has a type to use the word, a certain kind of collectivism, which is not a collectivism of a political kind, or a coercive kind, but it might be something where I would distance myself from iron, ram, type, objectivism, where I think that is highly, highly anti-religious.\nAnd to some extent, highly anti-traditional as well, but I'm against force and the extraction of wealth and coercion, all that kind of stuff.\nWhat I am talking about here in endorsing tradition, endorsing religion, the galaxy brain view of these things, which is a real step beyond traditional skeptical philosophy.\nAnd even certain types of modern skeptical philosophy is I'm talking about the value of having traditions and cultures, of organizing societies and communities, which themselves contain in explicit knowledge about how to keep dynamic societies from falling into statistic.\nLet me just say that sentence again.\nI'm talking about the value of having traditions and cultures, of organizing societies and communities, which contain in explicit knowledge about how to keep dynamic societies from falling into statisticity.\nIt's a rather verbose sentence in some ways, and I think it's constructed particularly well.\nBut I just say it and put it on the screen there to illustrate something.\nI think that if you understand English, you can read that sentence and you can say, okay, it makes sense.\nBut if you are knowledgeable about the beginning of infinity world, you're deeply knowledgeable.\nYou will understand that sentence at a very different level to what anyone, no matter how clever they are, how erudite they seem, how well-qualified they are, you'll understand it in a way that is very different to everyone else.\nBecause notice how densities, how dense with knowledge that sentence is, how much background one needs in the entire worldview of the beginning of infinity to get it.\nI mean, really get it, not just superficially be able to read the words and guess one understands what is intended.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=1852"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf286a6b-001d-4aa3-9735-e94a698bb5cb": {"page_content": "Because notice how densities, how dense with knowledge that sentence is, how much background one needs in the entire worldview of the beginning of infinity to get it.\nI mean, really get it, not just superficially be able to read the words and guess one understands what is intended.\nNotice if I wanted to explain that sentence in the beginning of infinity terms, how it would have to explain whole aspects of the worldview for hours on end, just to explain a single sentence for someone who'd never read the book before, in explicit knowledge.\nWhat is that?.\nWell, I'd have to begin with a perperian view of what knowledge was in the first place, so there's a whole hour of conversation.\nThen the in explicit part, not merely implicit, in explicit.\nThen moving on to dynamic societies, that would require an explanation about, well, explanations and progress and memes, memes, goodness, that there's another whole episode if I was going to unpack this.\nAnd memes would take us into cultures, cultures takes us into static societies and anti-rational memes, and then how certain traditions, specifically traditions of criticism, allow for open ended progress.\nLook, already in explaining what I would need to explain, to explain that sentence I've gone on for ages.\nAnd this is what I mean about the beginning of infinity once you take it on board.\nSome people have said recently I've observed that Naval has remarked more than once that the beginning of infinity is not an easy book to read, and others have said that that observation is a disservice to the book, but Naval's absolutely right, it's not easy, but that shouldn't put anyone off.\nThat's not a criticism, and that shouldn't frighten anyone away.\nThat's what it means for a book to have value.\nIf it was easy, everyone would already understand what's in there anyway, and there'd be no point reading it.\nThe interesting books are sometimes hard to read.\nThe Lord of the Rings is hard to read, but I love it.\nI read it every couple of years because it's just a great entertaining book.\nAnd there's a sense in which the beginning of infinity can be read because it's entertaining over and again.\nBut it's far, far deeper than something like Lord of the Rings.\nThere are many more levels, of course, but it's not easy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2007"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "29987e7c-203f-4515-87bf-b7e34e21ce63": {"page_content": "The interesting books are sometimes hard to read.\nThe Lord of the Rings is hard to read, but I love it.\nI read it every couple of years because it's just a great entertaining book.\nAnd there's a sense in which the beginning of infinity can be read because it's entertaining over and again.\nBut it's far, far deeper than something like Lord of the Rings.\nThere are many more levels, of course, but it's not easy.\nA single sentence like the one that I just tried to unpack began to unpack, to explain to unpack how I would unpack it.\nIllustrate why this podcast series has been important to me, because as I said in that very first episode, I'm trying to clarify in my own mind what this is all about.\nFun things are not necessarily easy.\nIt's what makes them fun is the challenge.\nAnd in reading the beginning of infinity for the first time, or maybe the second time, to use a biblical passage, the scales fell from my eyes.\nAnd I saw properly, properly saw what was there in the fabric of reality the whole time, and what's there in poppers work to a large extent the whole time.\nAnd it was then that my actual perceptions of the world, the qualia, my subjective experience of the world did indeed change, because where before I could appreciate excellent writing, just for its own sake, now so much of it seemed much more worse than before.\nAnd I'm not here referring mainly to the work of Sam Harris.\nIt's much, much broader than this.\nI mean in most every other book on my shelf, every other nonfiction book on my shelf, when I flicked through it became a confusing trial of the mind, I would just spot error after error, and it happens to this day.\nIt's not to say that I can't learn from certain books, so that books have ruined it all for me.\nFor example, more than once, I've recommended a fortunate universe, life in a finely tuned cosmos by astronomers, Barnes and Lewis.\nIt's a good book.\nI can learn from it and I recommend it to people.\nIt's written very well, it's funny in places, but it's just to say that now I notice glaring errors in epistemology all the time.\nAnd when the claims about science, the extensive topic over the book, the main subject matter of the book, I can recognize when those claims are dubious, no matter how certain the authors claim to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2158"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa6129dc-8160-4d44-8fb8-563867eafbba": {"page_content": "It's a good book.\nI can learn from it and I recommend it to people.\nIt's written very well, it's funny in places, but it's just to say that now I notice glaring errors in epistemology all the time.\nAnd when the claims about science, the extensive topic over the book, the main subject matter of the book, I can recognize when those claims are dubious, no matter how certain the authors claim to be.\nIn short, I no longer feel no matter how qualified an expert happens to be.\nI don't think they're necessarily better than me, even in those areas where they claim expertise.\nI've ceased to be intimidated by expertise, and that's a very good thing.\nI'm very anti-authority now, and this is the sense in which it's self-help.\nI'm error correcting constantly now, double thinking what the expert opinion is, no matter how confident they seem to be, because I'm comfortable asking rather than trusting.\nI think it's a great virtue to ask and ask and ask, until you understand, rather than just assuming that by virtue of the fact someone is qualified in a particular area, that they will know better than you.\nThey may, but you better have a good explanation as to why they should know better than you on that particular claim they're making.\nWhen I was at uni studying philosophy and physics at the undergraduate level, especially, I was somewhat in awe of the professors.\nEven just the PhD students, I thought they must have been so deeply knowledgeable and clever.\nI almost thought their minds must operate in a different way, and when it came to famous public intellectuals, forget it, I thought they must have been on a different plane altogether, but I was wrong to think all that.\nThey're all just people.\nI never understood, for example, why the philosophy professors who taught me back then and who mentioned pop-up during lectures and tutorials once or twice didn't biggim up more, why they didn't make a bigger deal about it, because I knew that David Deutsch was in the fabric of reality, for example.\nBut now I know.\nI didn't know then, but I know now, and I can say without any concern they didn't understand him.\nExperts in pop-up at university aren't actually experts by and large.\nI know what this is like now.\nI read pop-up soon after I read the fabric of reality, and the knowledge was there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2262"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a376c50c-44be-40d6-9751-81b7231b6f6a": {"page_content": "But now I know.\nI didn't know then, but I know now, and I can say without any concern they didn't understand him.\nExperts in pop-up at university aren't actually experts by and large.\nI know what this is like now.\nI read pop-up soon after I read the fabric of reality, and the knowledge was there.\nI could regurgitate it, not entirely, because I hadn't really taken it on board, and if I had gotten into a debate with someone about the content of Carl Popper's work, I guess I would have come up short, because you need a proper guide, and the beginning of infinity was my proper guide.\nNow, I can't fully explain why I didn't get it there in the fabric of reality.\nIt's probably to do with the fact that you sometimes need the lesson more than once, and you need to talk about these things, and really think them through.\nBut the fact is that the beginning of infinity did indeed reveal Carl Popper's epistemology to me.\nIt took David Deutsch to do that, and then I could go back and properly appreciate Popper in a new light, far more deeply, and then realize those others who tried explaining his worldview typically got it all wrong, totally wrong.\nThey treated Popper just like another purely academic philosopher, just another set of readings alongside Kent and Descartes and so on, but it's not.\nIt's a way of thinking.\nNow, this is not to say, I should add, that I don't recommend studying philosophy at uni.\nI can recommend it if you want, but I don't think that they're advertising material in this day and age is at all true when I go looking at university courses on philosophy.\nThey say that it will help you think better.\nI think it'll help you, if you're not prepared, if you're not prepared with a certain amount of intellectual self-defense, it might cause you to think worse, far worse.\nPhilosophy at uni is like history and literature more than anything else.\nYou read the texts, you study the texts, you argue about the texts.\nYou won't really improve your thinking.\nYou won't become, by any stretch of the imagination, a critical thinker.\nAt least at the universities that I've looked at, maybe there are some unicorn universities out there who do a really good job at this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2405"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0498d6be-eccb-400a-8145-16ae641cf3a5": {"page_content": "Philosophy at uni is like history and literature more than anything else.\nYou read the texts, you study the texts, you argue about the texts.\nYou won't really improve your thinking.\nYou won't become, by any stretch of the imagination, a critical thinker.\nAt least at the universities that I've looked at, maybe there are some unicorn universities out there who do a really good job at this.\nMainly, if you're not prepared, you'll become indoctrinated into inductivism, justificationism, and so on and so forth.\nAll of the bad ideas of today.\nI now recognize, for example, that my own father, who never went to university, none of my family did.\nMy extended family, my grandparents, to this day, I'm the only one for generations to have gone to university.\nAnd it's not a source of pride to me that I went to university, but is this a source of pride to me that the rest of my family didn't because their method of thinking was so much superior and remained so much superior to many mainstream academics that I've encountered throughout my life.\nMy father, especially, is better than, I better thinker than, the philosophy professors who taught me, my father was an aircraft engineer.\nAnd he understood what it took for things to work, and how to identify garbage when it was being presented to him.\nBut academic philosophers often can't do this.\nThey don't understand the practical consequences of certain kinds of reasoning.\nBut again, that, too, took reading the beginning infinity to figure out.\nCommon sense realism is, after all, what pop out refined and made explicit.\nMost people are common sense realism.\nThe galaxy brain is common sense realism.\nIt's only the big brain take that is anti this and anti that with their Bayesianism and their evidence for and their justified beliefs.\nThat's all confusing abstract style thinking disconnected from the actual practice of solving problems.\nNow, the only difference really between, I should say, between men on the street-style thinking and popularion-style epistemology is that popularion-style epistemology has the vocabulary to explain how thinking works and how progress is made and how problems are solved.\nThat's all it does.\nIt makes explicit these things that already work out there in the world.\nAnd people don't need to understand how it works broadly speaking.\nI've compared this before to the difference between an airline pilot and an aircraft engineer.\nThe aircraft engineer better know how the engines work.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2512"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "52e52926-4192-43dc-82e3-dc39e743d945": {"page_content": "That's all it does.\nIt makes explicit these things that already work out there in the world.\nAnd people don't need to understand how it works broadly speaking.\nI've compared this before to the difference between an airline pilot and an aircraft engineer.\nThe aircraft engineer better know how the engines work.\nThe pilot doesn't really need to.\nMaybe they have some basic ideas, but they're going to have a whole bunch of misconceptions as well.\nAll they need to do is to fly the aircraft from point A to point B without ever really worrying about the details about what's going on with the computer systems, with the avionics, with the the engines, and so on and so forth.\nThey have a limited understanding of those things.\nThis is the difference between someone who really understands popularion epistemology.\nThat's like the engineer.\nAnd the person who just gets on with making progress.\nThat's the pilot.\nThere are other people out there call them, call them, Bayesian engineers, who all they do.\nThey never actually work on engines at all.\nThey never actually are able to figure out how the whole machine keeps on going.\nThey're over there at the side with something that they call an engine, but in fact, there's just a pile of sticks and they're explaining how this pile of sticks.\nIf only you could put them together into a particular way would indeed be an engine, but they never ago about actually creating an engine.\nWhereas what a perperion does is actually explain the already existing engine and how it works and why it functions.\nAnd if something starts to go wrong, they can identify why the progress stops, why there is a problem in science.\nHere's the error.\nLet's correct the error.\nThat's what a perperion epistemologist does.\nThey're more like the engineer, an actual engineer working on real engines, rather than imaginary ones, which is what various other kinds of epistemology do.\nThey're abstractly being concerned about possible engines.\nOkay, that is a very tortured analogy.\nI apologize for that.\nWhatever the case, proper and doic make explicit, the ways in which people really do think, really do learn, really do create knowledge.\nHow it all works.\nHow civilization is built.\nAs Naval tweeted recently, civilization is not built by pessimists.\nAnd in my last episode I remarked about the unholy trinity of pessimism and prophecy and how it's all fed by this force of epistemology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2662"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b42659eb-6d7f-40fd-89e3-759ec937c339": {"page_content": "Okay, that is a very tortured analogy.\nI apologize for that.\nWhatever the case, proper and doic make explicit, the ways in which people really do think, really do learn, really do create knowledge.\nHow it all works.\nHow civilization is built.\nAs Naval tweeted recently, civilization is not built by pessimists.\nAnd in my last episode I remarked about the unholy trinity of pessimism and prophecy and how it's all fed by this force of epistemology.\nSo if you want to study philosophy, especially at philosophy at university or anything at all, I think you do need intellectual self-defense against the dark arts of the intelligentsia that rules there now.\nI think a lot of people have little crumbs of the story.\nI mean, there are people who rightly oppose Marxism in universities and post-modern type thinking, and all the doubles speak that goes on there now.\nBut again, if you want the full suite of armor and the shield and the laser sword, then you want the beginning of infinity.\nAnd of course, if you read the fabric of reality as well and the work of Popper and, well, other things recommend at the beginning of infinity, then you'll be like a fully kitted out intellectual Jedi master of a kind.\nAnd you'll be able to sit in on philosophy seminars, debates, discussions, and learn without fear of ever being indoctrinated and be able to quickly identify errors in thinking.\nNow, there has been one of the longest preambles to any of my episodes, but it's only fitting as this is the last episode on the beginning of infinity.\nAnd as well, I don't have much left to read.\nAnd in this section that I am going to read, this final section, there is a vast list of deep questions, which of course illustrate the beginning of infinity.\nThey're profound mysteries.\nAnd to a large extent, they're going to leave your head spinning.\nAnd I want to unpack some of them.\nI'll have no answers, but I do want to discuss some of them.\nSo let's go back to the book and David writes, the economist Robin Hanson has suggested that there have been several singularities in the history of our species, such as the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution.\nArguably, even the early enlightenment was a singularity by that definition.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2753"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "01d951b9-3995-405c-b65a-6df52d77220e": {"page_content": "And to a large extent, they're going to leave your head spinning.\nAnd I want to unpack some of them.\nI'll have no answers, but I do want to discuss some of them.\nSo let's go back to the book and David writes, the economist Robin Hanson has suggested that there have been several singularities in the history of our species, such as the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution.\nArguably, even the early enlightenment was a singularity by that definition.\nWho could have predicted that someone who lived through the English Civil War, a bloody struggle of religious fanatics versus an absolute monarch, and through the victory of the religious fanatics in 1651 might also live through the peaceful birth of a society that saw liberation and reason as its principal characteristics.\nThe Royal Society, for instance, was founded in 1660, a development that would hardly have been conceivable a generation earlier.\nRoy Porter marks 1688 as the beginning of the English Enlightenment.\nThat is the date of the glorious revolution, the beginning of predominantly constitutional government, along with many other rational reforms, which were part of that deeper and astonishingly rapid shift in the prevailing worldview, pausing their just my reflection on this.\nRoy Porter is a historian that I learned about from David Deutsch, from this book, and I think David tweeted once that it was Roy Porter, who explained that there were two distinct kinds of enlightenment, one of which was the English Enlightenment.\nAnd so I went and investigated this more, and it really inspired me to read the work of Roy Porter and to listen to some of these lectures.\nAnd in one of those lectures, indeed, about one of his books, there's a video of him, and this is on YouTube, by the way.\nHis thesis is that there were two things called the Enlightenment of a very distinct kind, and indeed they were opposite in many ways.\nThey were absolutely opposed to one another.\nThere was the English Enlightenment, and by English, by the way, he means British, because certainly Scotsman, like Adam Smith and David Hume, were involved, but it was called the English Enlightenment.\nHe's called it the English Enlightenment, because the other thing that was altogether separate was the European Enlightenment.\nThe Enlightenment was going on the continent of Europe, France and Germany, in particular, and here we really get into the philosophy wars, and I don't use that word lightly, because it really did.\nThe ideas there set the scene for war later on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=2870"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c5268ba7-fcca-43b5-a3f8-395584df786f": {"page_content": "He's called it the English Enlightenment, because the other thing that was altogether separate was the European Enlightenment.\nThe Enlightenment was going on the continent of Europe, France and Germany, in particular, and here we really get into the philosophy wars, and I don't use that word lightly, because it really did.\nThe ideas there set the scene for war later on.\nI mean, there are a lot of reasons in a lot of ways in which we could explain the missteps in Europe, especially over the recent decades, relatively recent decades.\nAnd one of the impulses of course, primary among them are the ideas that people have.\nIdeas are levers that push people's behaviors.\nAnd importantly, philosophical ideas motivate political ones, which motivate politicians, which then cause militaries to do what they do.\nSo this is not mere abstract arguing.\nIt's not merely of abstract interests.\nThis has absolutely real world consequences.\nAnd there is a reason why the English tradition, the British tradition of governance, and just tradition more broadly, resists tyranny and violence.\nAnd this is controversial to say, but I'll just say it.\nThere is a reason why the French Revolution happened in France, why the violence there was so great, and why Germany has had the political problems that it has had, and why Spain has, well through to today.\nIt is no accident.\nThe EU exists in Europe.\nAnd many people of course think that an organisation like the EU exists to benefit the region and the world.\nThey say it exists in part to keep the peace.\nBut why does the peace need to be kept on the continent of Europe in the first place?.\nWhy is Europe a special problem?.\nIs there an underlying reason for the conflict that seems to degenerate into violence there?.\nViolence which we should be eager to keep in mind Britain has stood against numerous times.\nThese are not accidents.\nBut in these matters, I must say I'm a complete amateur and I recommend the work of Roy Porter on this, and also Daniel Hannon, his book Inventing Freedom.\nBut my take, my take away from Roy Porter among others on this, is that it really is people like Emmanuel Carte, the German philosopher, versus people like Adam Smith, the philosopher credited with the beginnings of capitalism.\nLock on freedom, Hume on reason.\nThese guys, Smith, Locke, Hume against Kant.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3004"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4cd1ca17-7af2-4f08-8666-f0fc300abb50": {"page_content": "But my take, my take away from Roy Porter among others on this, is that it really is people like Emmanuel Carte, the German philosopher, versus people like Adam Smith, the philosopher credited with the beginnings of capitalism.\nLock on freedom, Hume on reason.\nThese guys, Smith, Locke, Hume against Kant.\nAnd yet they're all studied in the philosophy departments around the world and universities as if, well, they're all just different aspects of the same kind of enlightenment.\nAnd they're not.\nThey're absolutely not.\nKant is standing against those guys.\nHe's standing against capitalism and freedom and reason, Smith and Locke and Hume.\nWhat was Kant about?.\nWell, among many things, and I don't want to get into a long exploration of the ideas, the poverty of ideas of Emmanuel Kant.\nBut he had a critique of reason.\nHe said, yeah, I have a critique of pure reason.\nI'm not going to defend Kant.\nI will just say he was about how people cannot trust themselves, or their own minds.\nAnd as a consequence, require strong leadership.\nHe argues against individuals.\nAnd to some extent, like Plato, for tyrants, or for tyranny, something like Plato's philosopher, kings.\nHe thinks that we should subjugate ourselves.\nCan't think this.\nWe're morally obliged, for example, to obey every law of a government.\nHe exalts government to the place of a god.\nAnd this is the European tradition of their view between the individual and the government.\nAnd in fact, now, aspects of American politics, Australian politics, Western politics broadly, there is this battle.\nThere is this battle between the British Enlightenment tradition, of freedom and the individual, and of pursuing wealth, and the more European style of tyranny, authoritarianism, and subjugating the individual before the state.\nThe English tradition, to be fair, does not devalue government.\nIt has a place for government.\nIt just doesn't offer it up as a substitute either for God or the individual mind.\nThe whole point of the tradition of the British political culture is that government is there to preserve the rights of the individual.\nNow, of course, that ideal is one that all political parties, over time, through the British tradition in whatever country, they fail to live up to this ideal.\nAgain and again, they fail to live up to it.\nBut at least it's there as an ideal, as an aspiration.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3152"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e25c4d09-c8f6-4a63-add8-213ac0d01688": {"page_content": "The whole point of the tradition of the British political culture is that government is there to preserve the rights of the individual.\nNow, of course, that ideal is one that all political parties, over time, through the British tradition in whatever country, they fail to live up to this ideal.\nAgain and again, they fail to live up to it.\nBut at least it's there as an ideal, as an aspiration.\nThe ideology underlying the alternative democratic systems is to subjugate oneself to the authority of the government.\nIt's a stark difference.\nAnd so this is a very interesting area of the history of philosophy, and of philosophy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3292"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0869714f-ea7f-4049-be4d-229cbdce16a2": {"page_content": "But I think more work can be done on following the work of Roy Porter, that even today, our ideological conflicts can be traced back to the antecedent centuries ago, where people were debating the relationship between the individual and the state, the role of reason in the world, and could people, individuals, come to create knowledge such that they could be to use modern parlance, error-correctors of their own lives rather than relying upon some authority to do it for them, to sit back in and pass even hope that the man on the television screen wearing the tie with the title will tell you what to do next, rather than you reasoning it through yourself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3336"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "eea23bcf-bbb3-4157-9aca-2e163e9dc673": {"page_content": "It's the British tradition versus the European tradition.\nAnd it seems very parochial, but of course these things have universal application.\nAnd to every other continent of the world and every other people in civilization of the world as well, there's a choice to be made back to the book, David writes.\nAlso, the time beyond which scientific prediction has no access is different for different phenomena.\nFor each phenomena, it is the moment at which the creation of new knowledge may begin to make a significant difference to what one is trying to predict.\nLet me just repeat that because this explains the distinction between prediction and prophecy in a very clear way.\nDavid said, the time beyond which scientific prediction has no access is different for different phenomena.\nFor each phenomena, it is the moment which at the creation of new knowledge may begin to make a significant difference to what one is trying to predict.\nIn other words, a prophecy is, I guess, about the future where new knowledge creation is going to have an effect on that phenomena.\nBut a prediction, I usually like to say, it's a derivation from a scientific theory, a logical derivation from a scientific theory, which is true, but it's not the full story.\nBecause from a good scientific theory, I can make the prediction, and this is the example that David has used.\nI've used.\nI can make the scientific prediction from good astrophysical principles, laws, laws of physics.\nEvery astronomer has done this.\nEvery astronomer has ever had a podium somewhere has talked about this.\nThat he and approximately five billion years, something like that, this sun will expand into a red giant and will engulf the earth, or at least extinguish life on the earth by boiling the ocean, something like that.\nThat's a prediction, apparently, but not really, not according to this, because we don't know what humans of the very distant future will do.\nThey might save the earth if only to preserve it like a museum piece, as I think David has said in various places.\nSo that's not a real prediction.\nIt's a prophecy about what people will do, or what it will be possible to do.\nNow, on the other hand, if I make a prediction that tomorrow, the sun will continue to shine, given the laws of physics today.\nThat's a prediction, because there is no sign whatsoever that knowledge is going to be created in the next 24 hours that is going to allow us to affect the sun in some way.\nSo there's your distinction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3385"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dffaebf3-450a-40dd-8a5e-68476704b5ad": {"page_content": "So that's not a real prediction.\nIt's a prophecy about what people will do, or what it will be possible to do.\nNow, on the other hand, if I make a prediction that tomorrow, the sun will continue to shine, given the laws of physics today.\nThat's a prediction, because there is no sign whatsoever that knowledge is going to be created in the next 24 hours that is going to allow us to affect the sun in some way.\nSo there's your distinction.\nBack to the book, David writes, since our estimates of that too are subject to the same kind of horizon, we should really understand all our predictions as implicitly including the proviso, unless the creation of new knowledge intervenes.\nYes,.\nI so I like that.\nSo it's got that proviso.\nThere's a lot of proviso is here when we speak using the language at the beginning of new infinity.\nWhen I say I know something, it comes with the proviso that provisionally, things could change.\nI could be wrong about this.\nIt doesn't mean I'm certainly absolutely confident that it must remain the same forever, that it's inherent.\nThere are all these kinds of provisors.\nI expect things will continue to get better because I expect that people continue to produce knowledge and solve problems.\nWith the proviso that we don't end up falling into an ideological hole where people decide that it's better for us to stop creating any kind of pollution and to ensure that the state has complete control over the means of production and that kind of thing.\nOkay, so with those provisors, with the proviso that we continue to exploit resources and use the best of our enlightenment traditions and ideas in order to fuel knowledge creation back to the book, David Rites.\nSome explanations do have reached into the distant future far beyond the horizons that make most other things unpredictable.\nOne of them is that fact itself.\nAnother is the infinite potential of explanatory knowledge, the subject of this book.\nOkay, so just pausing there.\nSo some things do reach off into the infinite future.\nNamely, how knowledge is constructed, the infinite potential of explanatory knowledge, the fact that explanatory knowledge will enable the transformation of physical reality around us because of what we choose to do.\nThat will always be the case.\nNothing about explanatory knowledge can change that.\nUnless, you know, including the fact that we could choose to do ridiculous things that cause us to go extinct and the way of the dinosaur.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3535"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9b78271f-3f8a-48d4-861e-01aec6595356": {"page_content": "Okay, so just pausing there.\nSo some things do reach off into the infinite future.\nNamely, how knowledge is constructed, the infinite potential of explanatory knowledge, the fact that explanatory knowledge will enable the transformation of physical reality around us because of what we choose to do.\nThat will always be the case.\nNothing about explanatory knowledge can change that.\nUnless, you know, including the fact that we could choose to do ridiculous things that cause us to go extinct and the way of the dinosaur.\nThe potential was always still there, the potential for explanatory knowledge to radically transform the universe, the cosmos.\nLet's keep going, David Rites.\nTo attempt to predict anything beyond the relevant horizon is futile.\nIt is prophecy, but wondering what is beyond it is not.\nWhen wondering leads to conjecture, that constitutes speculation, which is not a rational either.\nIn fact, it is vital.\nEvery one of those deeply unforeseeable new ideas that make the future unpredictable will begin as a speculation.\nAnd every speculation begins as a problem.\nProblems in regard to the future can reach beyond the horizon of prediction two.\nAnd problems have solutions.\nIn regard to understanding the physical world, we are in much the same position as a roster thing was in regard to the earth.\nHe could measure it remarkably accurately and he knew a great deal about certain aspects of it.\nHe meant to be more than his ancestors had known only a few centuries before.\nHe must have known about such things as seasons in regions of the earth about which he had no evidence.\nBut he also knew that most of what was out there was far beyond his theoretical knowledge as well as his physical reach.\nWe cannot yet measure the universe as accurately as a roster thing measured the earth.\nAnd we too know how ignorant we are.\nFor instance, we know from universality that artificial intelligence is attainable by writing computer programs, but we have no idea how to write or evolve the right one.\nWe do not know what qualia are or how creativity works, despite having working examples of qualia and creativity inside all of us.\nWe learned the genetic code decades ago, but we have no idea why it has the reach it has.\nWe know that both of the deepest prevailing theories and physics must be false.\nWe know that people are of fundamental significance, but we do not know whether we are among those people.\nWe may fail or give up.\nAnd intelligence is originating elsewhere in the universe may be the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3650"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "127cee1d-220e-4fed-a742-2670b939cb02": {"page_content": "We learned the genetic code decades ago, but we have no idea why it has the reach it has.\nWe know that both of the deepest prevailing theories and physics must be false.\nWe know that people are of fundamental significance, but we do not know whether we are among those people.\nWe may fail or give up.\nAnd intelligence is originating elsewhere in the universe may be the beginning of infinity.\nAnd so on, for all the problems I have mentioned and many more, Wheeler once imagined writing out all the equations that might be the ultimate laws of physics on sheets of paper all over the floor, quote from Wheeler.\nStand up, look back on all those equations, some perhaps more hopeful than others.\nRaise one's finger commandingly and give the order, fly.\nNot one of those equations will put on wings, take off or fly, yet the universe flies and quote from Meisner, Thorne and Wheeler, in their book, Gravitation 1973.\nWe do not know why it flies.\nWhat is the difference between laws that are in stansiated and physical reality and those that are not cause their my reflection?.\nSo this idea of flies.\nWell, it presumes, I think, to some extent that laws can exist independently of a physical reality.\nI don't know what that would mean, that you could have physical laws, alternative physical laws out there in abstract space.\nNow, if they do exist out there in abstract space, they, you know, in a sense, one might argue that they would give rise to an alternate physical reality, which we don't have access to.\nI don't know.\nBut certainly, it might be a mystery as to why this set of physical laws exist at all in the first place, governing this particular universe.\nSo maybe there are physical laws extanciated in physical reality, namely these ones here and no others, but we don't know the answer to that yet.\nEither way, it's a mystery.\nIf all possible physical laws are instantiated out there in the universe somewhere, why?.\nIf they're not, why?.\nInteresting question.\nHere are some more questions.\nDavid goes on to say, quote, what is the difference between a computer simulation of a person which must be a person because of universality and a recording of that simulation, which cannot be a person end quote.\nSo we've got the possibility of a person, which is what we are.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3800"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "12193a0b-468e-4c4a-ac35-00c4a8e89ae8": {"page_content": "If all possible physical laws are instantiated out there in the universe somewhere, why?.\nIf they're not, why?.\nInteresting question.\nHere are some more questions.\nDavid goes on to say, quote, what is the difference between a computer simulation of a person which must be a person because of universality and a recording of that simulation, which cannot be a person end quote.\nSo we've got the possibility of a person, which is what we are.\nIf we took the program that's running on our brains and stuck it into a computer, then that would be a person as well because it would be thinking it would be processing information.\nThat's what we're doing.\nIt would be constructing knowledge because it would have the relevant program, the program which constructs knowledge in a computer.\nI'm doing this action because I'm pointing at my own laptop.\nPresumably you could stick it into a laptop.\nI would also say there's a moral hazard here because who knows what the quality would be.\nIt could be terrible suffering.\nSo don't do it yet until we know.\nWe know we're near that anyway, by the way.\nBut if you could, if you could simulate a person, but then you recorded that and you played the recording.\nIs the recording not a person?.\nPresumably not.\nSo what's going on?.\nThis is the distinction between whether or not something has a subjective content, quality or consciousness and something that does not.\nDavid goes on to ask, quote, when there are two identical simulations underway, are there two sets of qualia or one?.\nDouble the moral value or not?.\nOur world, which is so much larger, more unified, more intricate, and more beautiful than that of us, a roster themes, and which we understand a control to an extent that would have seemed godlike to him is nevertheless just as mysterious yet open to us now as it was to him then.\nWe have lit only a few candles here and there.\nWe can cower in their parochial light until something beyond our can snuffs us out or we can resist.\nWe already see that we do not live in a senseless world.\nThe laws of physics make sense.\nThe world is explicable.\nThere are higher levels of emergence and higher levels of explanation, profound abstractions in mathematics, morality and aesthetics are accessible to us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=3904"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d1f1bb9-2d46-48c1-8097-85da510d70ab": {"page_content": "We have lit only a few candles here and there.\nWe can cower in their parochial light until something beyond our can snuffs us out or we can resist.\nWe already see that we do not live in a senseless world.\nThe laws of physics make sense.\nThe world is explicable.\nThere are higher levels of emergence and higher levels of explanation, profound abstractions in mathematics, morality and aesthetics are accessible to us.\nIdeas of tremendous reach are possible, but there is also plenty in the world that does not and will not make sense until we ourselves work out how to rectify it.\nDeath does not make sense.\nStagnation does not make sense.\nA bubble of sense within an endless senselessness does not make sense.\nWhether the world ultimately makes sense will depend on how people, the likes of us, choose to think and act, pausing their my reflection.\nSo as I've said many times before, this is a great rebuttal response, refutation against other public intellectuals of our time.\nProminent among them, Richard Dawkins, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the biologist and the astronomer, coming at this from two different directions.\nRichard Dawkins says, we've evolved in middle world so our brains have evolved such that we can only understand the things that are of approximately our size and our speed and so on.\nSo it is no mystery.\nWhy we can't understand the universe as a whole.\nIt's too big.\nWe didn't evolve for that.\nOr quantum theory.\nIt's too small.\nWe didn't evolve for that.\nHe doesn't understand what universality is, the universality of the mind.\nWe can model within our minds anything.\nIt doesn't matter what the size of the thing is.\nThat does a parochial misconception about what a human person's mind is.\nWe're not like all those other creatures.\nAnd Neil deGrasse Tyson says, well maybe the ultimate laws of physics are just so complicated.\nWe'll never come to understand them.\nAgain, this is a misunderstanding.\nComputational universality might be falsified in some way, shape or form.\nBut until then, we've got nowhere else to leap to.\nThe best understanding that we have is that our minds contain within them universal computers or can emulate something and emulate universal computers.\nOur brains are universal.\nOur minds are universal.\nWe can, therefore, simulate phenomena that exist out there to any degree of fidelity that we like.\nWe just have to keep learning more and more and more.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=4037"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c0640df9-0ddf-4e30-a4c8-0907c6537a98": {"page_content": "Computational universality might be falsified in some way, shape or form.\nBut until then, we've got nowhere else to leap to.\nThe best understanding that we have is that our minds contain within them universal computers or can emulate something and emulate universal computers.\nOur brains are universal.\nOur minds are universal.\nWe can, therefore, simulate phenomena that exist out there to any degree of fidelity that we like.\nWe just have to keep learning more and more and more.\nSo he doesn't understand universality either, universality of the laws of the physics and the relationship between our minds and the structures that are out there.\nThis concept of self-similarity that I've talked about before, David Deutsch has this positive worldview that things make sense and that that's not going to end.\nFor the last time, in terms of this book, I'm reading others right now, of course, go to the physics of canon carved, go to the fabric of reality.\nYou can hear me say this phrase again, but for the last time with the beginning of infinity, I'll say.\nAnd David writes, quote, many people have an aversion to infinity of various kinds, but there are some things that we do not have a choice about.\nThere is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress or of surviving in the long run.\nAnd that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism.\nWhat lies ahead of us is, in any case, infinity.\nWhat we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, wrong or right, death or life.\nWe're only in chapter one and already there are these phenomenal advances in philosophy, phenomenal advances in epistemology, excellent explanations of what our best explanations of epistemology and philosophy are, all illustrated with some excellent science.\nThat'll do me for now.\nThat's quite a bit of reading.\nAnd maybe tomorrow, I'll try and get into chapter two.\nWe'll see how we go.\nSee you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MrIkv35vQQ&t=4154"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f90b684e-f6e1-4058-a02a-a19a64049693": {"page_content": "Hello.\nI'm going to try a little experiment today.\nI'm going to start reading through parts of the beginning of infinity, just the first chapter.\nI've sent at least one other Aussie doing this with a different series of books.\nI don't know if it'll be useful.\nI thought I'd try it, just as an experiment, sort of thinking out loud, I guess, and just commenting on some of my favorite parts of the book.\nBy doing so, it kind of clarifies my own thoughts about things.\nThat's one thing.\nThe other thing that there is a sense in the critical rationalist community that there's a lot of bad ideas out there, or false ideas, that get a lot of traction in an undeserved kind of way, while the ideas of Popper and Deutsch, for example, don't.\nThis might go some way to addressing that.\nSo in the case of Popper, we've got, of course, the open society and its enemies and the fact that people misunderstand what democracy is about.\nWe have the idea on the ascendancy that Bayesianism is true, which I've commented recently, is essentially inductivism in a cheap tuxedo.\nSo we thought we'd dispatched with inductivism.\nWe hadn't.\nIt's come back stronger than ever in a sense.\nAnd it has real practical problems.\nIt means that science ends up being a quest for formula, mathematical formula, that in some sense can statistically describe certain trends that we have.\nSo rather than being a kind of problem-solving creative exercise, people are diverted into looking for statistical patterns.\nAnd this is very useful in some areas.\nThere's no doubt, but when all of science appears to be on board, we're thinking that this is the way in which science works, it can cause delays.\nIt can cause problems.\nBut I digress.\nI'm here today to talk to about, talk about the beginning of infinity.\nAnd I'm going to start with chapter one, the regional explanations, and my, ooh, there's thunder outside.\nAnd my purpose here is just to read out some of my favourite parts of each chapter.\nNot to serve as a summary.\nDavid, in fact, did this himself at the conclusion of each chapter.\nHe wrote two forms of summary.\nOne is the meanings of the beginning of infinity found in this chapter and an actual summary at the end of each chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=22"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "731fbf19-2007-4d74-92c8-7ec7d04613db": {"page_content": "And I'm going to start with chapter one, the regional explanations, and my, ooh, there's thunder outside.\nAnd my purpose here is just to read out some of my favourite parts of each chapter.\nNot to serve as a summary.\nDavid, in fact, did this himself at the conclusion of each chapter.\nHe wrote two forms of summary.\nOne is the meanings of the beginning of infinity found in this chapter and an actual summary at the end of each chapter.\nSo if you were looking for the cribnites version of the beginning of infinity, you can simply read the summaries at the end of each chapter.\nIt's not a recommended way to try and understand some of the subtleties of these ideas.\nBut certainly you can go a long way of understanding the philosophy by doing that rather than doing nothing.\nSo let me begin partway through chapter one, David says, how do we know?.\nOne of the most remarkable things about science is the contrast between the enormous reach and power of our best theories and the precarious local means by which we create them.\nNo human has ever been to the surface of a star that alone visited the core where the transmutation happens and the energy is produced.\nYet we see those cold dots in our sky and know that we are looking at the white hot surfaces of distant nuclear furnaces.\nPhysically, that experience consists of nothing other than our brains responding to electrical impulses from our eyes.\nAnd eyes can detect only light that is inside them at the time.\nThe fact that the light was emitted very far away and long ago and that much more was happening there than just the emission of light.\nThose are not things that we see.\nWe know them only from theory.\nScientific theories are explanations, assertions about what is out there and how it behaves.\nWhere do these theories come from?.\nFor most of the history of science, it was mistakenly believed that we derive them from the evidence of our senses.\nA philosophical doctrine known as empiricism.\nNow it then provides, the beginning of infinity provides a diagram.\nDiagrammer has in in form it is in the first box it says sensory experiences.\nThere's an arrow which is labeled derivation such as extrapolation, generalization or induction and that leads to another box that says theories, knowledge of reality.\nSo this is the idea of empiricism that we go out into the world, we use our senses to read a book of nature in a sense.\nI'll continue.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=168"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "62fdaa47-25c6-4fc6-ab47-c5135996324e": {"page_content": "Now it then provides, the beginning of infinity provides a diagram.\nDiagrammer has in in form it is in the first box it says sensory experiences.\nThere's an arrow which is labeled derivation such as extrapolation, generalization or induction and that leads to another box that says theories, knowledge of reality.\nSo this is the idea of empiricism that we go out into the world, we use our senses to read a book of nature in a sense.\nI'll continue.\nFor example, the philosopher John Locke wrote in 1689 that the mind is like white paper onto which sensory experience writes and that that is where all of our knowledge of the physical world comes from.\nAnother empiricist metaphor was that one could read knowledge from the book of nature by making observations.\nEither way, the discovery of knowledge is its passive recipient, not its creator.\nBut in reality, scientific theories are not derived from anything.\nWe do not read them in nature nor does nature write them into us.\nOur guesses, bold conjectures.\nHuman minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them.\nWe do not begin with white paper at birth, but with inborn expectations and intentions and an innate ability to improve upon them using thought and experience.\nExperience is indeed essential to science, but a role is different from that supposed by empiricism.\nIt is not the source from which theories are derived.\nIts main use is to choose between theories that have already been guessed.\nThis is what learning from experience is.\nHowever, that was not properly understood until the mid 20th century with the work of the philosopher Carl Popper.\nSo historically, it was empiricism that first provided a plausible defense for experimental science as we now know it.\nEmpiricist philosophers criticized and rejected traditional approaches to knowledge, such as difference to authority of holy books and other ancient writings, as well as human authorities such as priests and academics, and belief in traditional law, rules of thumb and hearsay.\nEmpiricism also contradicted the imposing and surprisingly persistent idea that the senses are little more than sources of error to be ignored.\nAnd it was optimistic, being all about obtaining new knowledge in contrast with the medieval fatalism that it expected everything important to all to be known already.\nThus, despite being quite wrong about where scientific knowledge comes from, empiricism was a great step forward in both the philosophy and history of science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=283"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b19b6f24-ab27-4e75-825a-53d273d05d25": {"page_content": "Empiricism also contradicted the imposing and surprisingly persistent idea that the senses are little more than sources of error to be ignored.\nAnd it was optimistic, being all about obtaining new knowledge in contrast with the medieval fatalism that it expected everything important to all to be known already.\nThus, despite being quite wrong about where scientific knowledge comes from, empiricism was a great step forward in both the philosophy and history of science.\nNevertheless, the question that skeptics, friendly and unfriendly, raised from the outset always remained, how can knowledge of what has not been experienced possibly be derived from what has?.\nWhat sort of thinking could possibly constitute a valid derivation of the one from the other?.\nNo one would expect to deduce the geography of Mars from the map of the earth, so why should we expect to be able to learn about physics on Mars from experiments done on earth?.\nEvidently, logical deduction alone would not do because there is a logical gap.\nNo amount of deduction applied to statements describing a set of experiences can reach a conclusion about anything other than those experiences.\nThe conventional wisdom was that the key is repetition.\nIf one repeatedly has similar experiences under similar circumstances, then one is supposed to extrapolate or generalise that pattern and predict that it will continue.\nFor example, why do we expect the sun to rise tomorrow morning?.\nBecause in the past, so the argument goes, we have seen it do so whenever we have looked at the morning sky.\nFrom this, we supposedly derive the theory that under similar circumstances, we shall always have that experience, whether we probably shall.\nOn each occasion, when the prediction comes true and provided that it never fails, the probability that it will always come true is supposed to increase.\nThus, one supposedly obtains ever more reliable knowledge of the future from the past and of the general from the particular.\nThat alleged process was called inductive inference, or induction.\nAnd the doctrine that scientific theories are attained in that way is called inductivism.\nTo bridge the logical gap, some inductive us imagine there is a principle of nature, the principle of induction, that makes inductive inferences likely to be true.\nThe future or resemble the past is one popular version of this, and one could add that the distant resembles the near, the unseen resembles the scene, and so on.\nBut no one has ever managed to formulate a principle of induction that is usable in practice for obtaining theories from experiences.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=420"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "19f00597-474d-4987-83ae-cdf4a96f260d": {"page_content": "To bridge the logical gap, some inductive us imagine there is a principle of nature, the principle of induction, that makes inductive inferences likely to be true.\nThe future or resemble the past is one popular version of this, and one could add that the distant resembles the near, the unseen resembles the scene, and so on.\nBut no one has ever managed to formulate a principle of induction that is usable in practice for obtaining theories from experiences.\nHistorically, criticism of inductivism has focused on that failure, and on the logical gap, that cannot be bridged.\nBut that lets inductivism off far too lightly.\nFor it concedes inductivism's two most serious misconceptions.\nFirst, inductivism purports to explain how science obtains predictions about experiences, but most of our theoretical knowledge simply does not take that form.\nScientific theories are about reality, most of which does not consist of anyone's experiences.\nAs Traphysics is not primarily about us, what we shall see if we look at the sky.\nBut rather about what stars are, their composition, and what makes them shine, and how they are formed, and the universal laws of physics under which they happened.\nMost of that has never been observed.\nNo one has experienced a billion years or a light year, no one could have been present at the Big Bang, no one will ever touch a law of physics except in their minds through theories.\nAll our prediction of how things will look at the juice from such explanations of how things are.\nSo inductivism fails even to address how we can know about stars and the universe as distinct from just dots in the sky.\nThe second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that the future were resembled a past and that the unseen resembles the scene and so on, or that it probably will.\nBut in reality, the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the scene.\nScience often predicts and brings about phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before.\nFor millennia, people dreamed about flying, but they experienced only falling.\nThen they discovered good explanation, explanatory theories about flying, and then they flew in that order.\nSo that's a part just as an aside.\nThis is me, this is not from the book.\nThat David references in his TED Talk, one of his TED Talks.\nThese first three chapters provide much of the material for a new way to explain explanation that TED Talk there.\nI'll continue.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=544"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a66eab8c-9e11-4d90-828f-8129600fd005": {"page_content": "For millennia, people dreamed about flying, but they experienced only falling.\nThen they discovered good explanation, explanatory theories about flying, and then they flew in that order.\nSo that's a part just as an aside.\nThis is me, this is not from the book.\nThat David references in his TED Talk, one of his TED Talks.\nThese first three chapters provide much of the material for a new way to explain explanation that TED Talk there.\nI'll continue.\nBefore 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear fission atomic bomb explosion.\nThere may never have been one in the history of the universe, yet the first such explosion and the conditions under which it would occur had been accurately predicted.\nBut not from the assumption that the future would be like the past.\nEven sunrise, that favorite example of inductivists is not always observed every 24 hours.\nWhen viewed from orbit, it may happen every 90 minutes or not at all.\nAnd that was known from theory long before anyone had ever orbited the Earth.\nIn fact, it only happens 24 hours very rarely.\nIt's nearly a quader or a, you know, what a mid-year solstice or something like that.\nIf you go to Antarctica or anywhere inside the Arctic Circle or the Antarctic Circle, you'll find that the sun's not setting or it's not rising.\nI'll continue.\nIt is no defense of inductivism to point out that in all these cases, the future still does resemble the past in the sense that it obeys the same underlying laws of nature.\nFor that is an empty statement.\nAny purported law of nature, true or false about the future and the past is a claim that they resemble each other by both conforming to that law.\nSo that version of the principle of induction could not be used to derive any theory or prediction from experience or anything else.\nSo this is, again, a world-class philosopher explaining in detail why it is that induction cannot possibly work.\nNot only that it isn't actually the thing that allows scientific theories to be constructed, it's not even a thing that allows you to construct any kind of knowledge whatsoever.\nIt doesn't exist.\nInduction is irrationality.\nIt's a way of generalizing.\nWhat is surprising to me is that professional philosophers seem to enjoy teaching their students logical fallacies and they understand logical fallacies quite well.\nOne of these logical fallacies is the fallacy of hasty generalization.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=723"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "73eec1d7-9956-418d-9558-f3ead7f78e5d": {"page_content": "Not only that it isn't actually the thing that allows scientific theories to be constructed, it's not even a thing that allows you to construct any kind of knowledge whatsoever.\nIt doesn't exist.\nInduction is irrationality.\nIt's a way of generalizing.\nWhat is surprising to me is that professional philosophers seem to enjoy teaching their students logical fallacies and they understand logical fallacies quite well.\nOne of these logical fallacies is the fallacy of hasty generalization.\nThis is the idea that if you see something a number of times that you conclude that therefore it's a general rule.\nThis is the kind of faulty reasoning that leads to things like racism, let's say.\nIt's where you observe a particular behaviour amongst a certain group of people that look the same and you form the conclusion that therefore it applies to all people that look that way.\nIt is the assumption that if you see a bunch of white swans that you assume that therefore all swans are white based on a limited number of observations.\nBut how hasty do you have to be for a generalization to be hasty?.\nWell I would say it's impossible to do an exhaustive search or to come up with a regularly occurring phenomenon such that it has occurred a sufficient number of times for you to have any degree of confidence that it will continue into the future.\nIt's not like observing the same thing 10 times in a row means you are 10 times less confident than if you observe the thing 100 times in a row.\nIt doesn't matter if you observe things every single day forever for a long, long time.\nIt doesn't mean that that thing is not going to be contravened the very next day.\nDavid actually goes on to use his example of up until December 31st, 1999 he'd only ever experienced in front of in the year he'd only ever experienced a one-nine, he'd never experienced a two-zero.\nBut his experience throughout his life had seen a 19 in front of the year's date in 1991, 1992, 1993, et cetera, et cetera, up to 1999.\nHe knew that that expectation of a one-nine was about to be refuted or, namely, on January 1st, 2000.\nThis is always the case.\nWe cannot know, especially in science out there in the physical world, that the phenomena that you've seen repeating itself isn't part of a much larger, more complex phenomena where, at any moment, it's going to reveal itself to be utterly false.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=816"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "824eeb6b-78d9-41f8-80c9-03fb922b9806": {"page_content": "He knew that that expectation of a one-nine was about to be refuted or, namely, on January 1st, 2000.\nThis is always the case.\nWe cannot know, especially in science out there in the physical world, that the phenomena that you've seen repeating itself isn't part of a much larger, more complex phenomena where, at any moment, it's going to reveal itself to be utterly false.\nLet me go back to the beginning of infinity.\nSo David continues later.\nI'm cutting out a fair bit here.\nIn Paris there's never did achieve its aim of liberating science from authority.\nIt denied the legitimacy of traditional authorities, and that was salutary.\nBut, unfortunately, it did this by setting up two other false authorities.\nSensory experience, and one of the fictitious process of derivation, such as induction, one imagines, is used to extract theories from experience.\nThe misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails.\nTo this day, most causes in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified true belief, where justified means designated as true, or at least probable, by reference to some authoritative source or touchdown of knowledge.\nThus, how do we know is transformed into, by what authority do we claim?.\nThe latter question is a chimera, that may well have wasted more philosophers' time and effort than any other idea.\nIt converts the quest for truth into a quest for certainty, a feeling, or for endorsement, a social status.\nThat, this misconception, is called justificationism.\nThe opposing position, namely the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable, is called fallibleism.\nTo believe is in the justified true theory of knowledge, and a justified true belief theory of knowledge.\nThis recognition is the occasion for despair or cynicism, because to them it means that knowledge is unobtainable.\nBut to those of us, for whom creating knowledge means understanding better what is really there, and how it really behaves and why, fallibleism is part of the very means by which this is achieved.\nFallibleists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better.\nIn contrast, the logic of justificationism is to seek, and typically to believe that one is found, ways of securing ideas against change.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1002"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "78bd1d3a-b239-4983-91e6-8c05d973fbeb": {"page_content": "Fallibleists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed to try to change them for the better.\nIn contrast, the logic of justificationism is to seek, and typically to believe that one is found, ways of securing ideas against change.\nMoreover, the logic of fallibleism is the one is, moreover, the logic of fallibleism is that one not only seeks to correct the misconceptions of the past, but hopes in the future to find and change mistaken ideas that no one today questions are found problematic.\nSo it is fallibleism, not mere rejection of authority that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth, the beginning of infinity.\nYes, this is a wonderful defence of fallibleism.\nI think that if there's a philosophy, in a sense, that unites many people who follow the work of David Deutsch, it is this idea of fallibleism.\nI think this is one of the strongest defences that we find anywhere.\nDavid's spoken about it online in various places.\nThere's the nautilus interview, I think there's a wonderful job of that.\nI think he might have mentioned it in these closer to truth interviews as well.\nSo this concept that because you can be wrong and you can be wrong about the truth, that admits the truth is, that admits that there is an objective truth, because you can be wrong about it.\nAnd so we take the idea of realism seriously, that there is an objective reality out there, and not all claims to that reality, not all truth claims about that reality stand on equal footing.\nSome of them can be shown, or already have shown to be false.\nSome of them haven't yet been shown to be false, but are good explanations.\nAnd this idea of fallibleism is that because it is people who are constructing the knowledge and people are prone to error, that we can never be sure that we've found the perfect theory.\nIt's always going to be riddled with errors in ways we don't know, and therefore subject to improvement, whereby if we can make those improvements, we've made progress, an objective progress, because we've corrected some errors.\nAnd so the new theory that we have that doesn't have the errors of the old theory is objectively better.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1144"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "381b4b1e-5645-4af1-befb-74ba72d00620": {"page_content": "It's always going to be riddled with errors in ways we don't know, and therefore subject to improvement, whereby if we can make those improvements, we've made progress, an objective progress, because we've corrected some errors.\nAnd so the new theory that we have that doesn't have the errors of the old theory is objectively better.\nSo we're moving in a particular direction, and this is all underpinned by fallibleism, the simple acknowledgement that, for any claim that is made by human beings, or by people generally, we can be wrong about it.\nThere is no royal road to truth, and anyone who claims that they have possession of the absolute final truth, have to admit that they're human.\nAnd even if an infallible source has provided them with information that is guaranteed to be true, it is them that is now interpreting it.\nIt is them that is now reporting to you what this truth is.\nAnd therefore their words, their words are fallible.\nTheir words could be in error.\nTheir memory could be in error.\nA whole bunch of things could be going wrong.\nEven if the source from which they're claiming to have gained this perfect knowledge was itself perfect, because they're reporting it to you and they're fallible.\nAnd fallibleism is about people.\nIt's not about supernatural entities, although we could apply it there as well.\nBut if a supernatural entity tries to claim perfect knowledge, then we are quite entitled to ask by what means, by what means has this inherent knowledge come.\nAnd when you hear it from the inherent source, how do you know you're hearing it inherently?.\nOkay, back to the book.\nDavid goes on.\nHowever, rebellion against authority cannot by itself be what made the difference.\nAuthorities have been rejected many times in history and only rarely has any lasting good comfort.\nThe usual sequel has merely been that new authorities replaced the old.\nWhat was needed for the sustained rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism.\nBefore the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition.\nUsually the whole point of her tradition was to keep things the same.\nSo let me pause here.\nThere are a number of genuine discoveries that David Deutsch has made in philosophy, in epistemology, in history that appear in the beginning of infinity.\nThey appear in the fabric of reality as well.\nSome of them.\nBut he in the beginning of infinity, we have some truly groundbreaking ways of attempting to understand reality, humanity, knowledge as a whole.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1275"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aa4d4cf9-a8bd-46cd-896a-f4dd48bd2c28": {"page_content": "Usually the whole point of her tradition was to keep things the same.\nSo let me pause here.\nThere are a number of genuine discoveries that David Deutsch has made in philosophy, in epistemology, in history that appear in the beginning of infinity.\nThey appear in the fabric of reality as well.\nSome of them.\nBut he in the beginning of infinity, we have some truly groundbreaking ways of attempting to understand reality, humanity, knowledge as a whole.\nAnd these ideas, how can we say this, have not thus far reached as many people as they deserve to have reached yet.\nIn this one in particular, it's such a useful starting point for any historian.\nAnyone who's interested in history could benefit from really trying to get to the heart of this, this idea of tradition of criticism.\nThis idea in particular, this idea of a tradition of criticism is an idea that could really inform history or the study of history, or the study of sociology.\nPerhaps even the study of psychology to some extent as well.\nThis idea that criticism is a thing that allows progress and a tradition of criticism is something that is an explanation for the reasons why there was a stark difference between the year 1,000 and the year 2,000.\nWhereas the year 1,000 was very much like the year 0 and very much like the year 1,000 BC, which was very much like the year 10,000 BC.\nFor the majority of human history, things were in stasis, things were the same.\nThere wasn't much change going on.\nAnd then something remarkable happened.\nAnd it's called the Enlightenment, and it led to the industrial revolution.\nBut what are the philosophical underpinnings that caused these massive transformations?.\nNow, we can talk about our world science arrived and there was this idea of having science being about testable ideas.\nand then we discovered things like steam engines very well.\nThese are effects of a deeper philosophical phenomenon.\nAnd the philosophical phenomenon is, as David explains here, a tradition of criticism.\nLet me continue with the beginning of infinity.\nThus, the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge by trying not to rely on authority.\nThat is the context in which empiricism, purporting to rely solely on the senses for knowledge, played such a celebratory historical role, despite being fundamentally false, and even authoritative in its conception of how science works.\nOne consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1429"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "77763d3d-a1f3-446c-bab4-4701962f4ca7": {"page_content": "Let me continue with the beginning of infinity.\nThus, the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge by trying not to rely on authority.\nThat is the context in which empiricism, purporting to rely solely on the senses for knowledge, played such a celebratory historical role, despite being fundamentally false, and even authoritative in its conception of how science works.\nOne consequence of this tradition of criticism was the emergence of a methodological rule that a scientific theory must be testable.\nThough, this was not made explicit at first.\nThat is to say, the theory must make predictions which, if the theory were false, could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observation.\nThus, although scientific theories are not derived from experience, they can be tested by experience.\nBy observation or experiment.\nFor example, before the discovery of radioactivity, chemists had believed and had verified in countless experiments that transmutation is impossible.\nRather food and soddy boldly conjectured that uranium spontaneously transmutes into other elements.\nThen, by demonstrating the creation of the element radium in a steel container of uranium, they refuted the prevailing theory in science progressed.\nThey were able to do that because that earlier theory was testable.\nIt was possible to test for the presence of radium.\nIn contrast, the ancient theory that all matter is composed of combination of elements, including earth, air, fire, and water, was untestable.\nBecause it did not include any way of testing for the presence of those components.\nSo it could never be refuted by experiment.\nHence, it could never be and never was improved upon through experiment.\nThe enlightenment was at root, a philosophical change.\nThe physicist, Galileo Galilei, was perhaps the first to understand the importance of experimental tests, which he called cementing, meaning trials by all deal, as distinct from other forms of experiment and observation, which can more easily be mistaken for reading from the book of nature.\nTestability is now generally accepted as the defining characteristic of the scientific method, proper called it the criterion of demarcation between science and non-science.\nNevertheless, testability cannot have been the decisive factor in the scientific revolution either.\nContrary to what is often said, testability predictions had always been quite common.\nEvery traditional rule of thumb for making a flint blade or a campfire is testable.\nEvery would-be prophet who claims the sun will go out next Tuesday as a testable theory.\nSo that is every gambler who has a hunch that this is my lucky night.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1576"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6756a03a-7c31-4ab8-8467-5e9db89e38de": {"page_content": "Nevertheless, testability cannot have been the decisive factor in the scientific revolution either.\nContrary to what is often said, testability predictions had always been quite common.\nEvery traditional rule of thumb for making a flint blade or a campfire is testable.\nEvery would-be prophet who claims the sun will go out next Tuesday as a testable theory.\nSo that is every gambler who has a hunch that this is my lucky night.\nI can feel it.\nSo what is the vital progress enabling ingredient that is present in science, but absent from the testable theories of the prophet and the gambler?.\nWell, pausing here.\nSometimes I'm left a little bit speech that I can read this book a hundred times and and and and still come across things where I almost get misty-eyed because it is a remarkable, a remarkably dense work where you come across these things that no one else previously has said.\nSome people may know I've been forced at university to read all sorts of philosophy books that didn't much strike me as interesting.\nSome were, but what you do find is even when you pick up a good book, let's say daycarts and meditations I really liked it and five meditations, it's only a short bit, but there's essentially one or two ideas in there that are kind of.\nwow.\nthat's amazing.\nAnd the rest is fluff, whereas this work here and here's another example makes this grand breaking claim that's true and which still hasn't made itself reach into the zeitgeist.\nSo let me just summarize what I heard David say there.\nPapa made the claim and many people seem to agree that testability is this thing that demarcate science from non-science and he's right.\nHowever, testable theories have always existed.\nThere have always been testable theories around.\nA caveman who's trying to make a better flint blade has a testable theory when he makes his new flint blade if it actually turns out to be better, then he keeps that one and he refutes the old one.\nIf it's not better, then he refutes the new one, he keeps the old one.\nSo testability can't be enough to say what the purpose of science is.\nThere has to be more to science than this.\nTestability has got something to do with it, but it's not the whole story.\nDavid is about to go on to explain his improvement.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1708"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c48146cd-7ce4-412c-b386-52ee498ad75b": {"page_content": "If it's not better, then he refutes the new one, he keeps the old one.\nSo testability can't be enough to say what the purpose of science is.\nThere has to be more to science than this.\nTestability has got something to do with it, but it's not the whole story.\nDavid is about to go on to explain his improvement.\nAnd I don't want to rely on authority, but those of us who have been looking into the philosophy of science for a long time have read people who have criticized Papa or people who claim to have improved Papa.\nWe would readily admit if we can find someone who has done either of those things, but it is almost never the case.\nAnd so when presented with things like Bayesianism, we shrug our shoulders because we realize that Papa already refuted inductivism and anyone who says inductivism works or that a variation on inductivism, like Bayesianism, might be useful for science.\nWe've heard this argument before.\nPapa heard these arguments.\nThese arguments have been going on for decades.\nWe've read the surrounding material and we remain unconvinced.\nBut then when something about David Deutsch comes along and he's not actually saying in the book, but maybe he said it once.\nHe's not actually saying he's improved Papa, but he does improve Papa.\nHe does it right here.\nHe does it explicitly.\nHe's about to do it right now.\nSo it's an amazing accomplishment.\nAnd so let's just persevere.\nLet's just, I'll go into the next paragraph.\nThe reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not and cannot be the purpose of science.\nConsider an audience watching a conjuring trick.\nThe problem facing them has much the same logic as a scientific problem.\nAlthough in nature, there is no conjurer trying to deceive us intentionally.\nWe can be mystified in both cases for essentially the same reason.\nAppearances are not self-explanatory.\nIf the explanation of a conjuring trick were evident in its appearance, there would be no trick.\nIf the explanations of physical phenomena were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true.\nAnd there would be no need for science as we know it.\nThe problem is not to predict the trick's appearance.\nI may, for instance, predict that if a conjurer seems to place various balls under various cups, those cups will later appear to be empty.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1881"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b5e3c4b1-8a08-4bfb-863d-5f8d82a146e7": {"page_content": "If the explanation of a conjuring trick were evident in its appearance, there would be no trick.\nIf the explanations of physical phenomena were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true.\nAnd there would be no need for science as we know it.\nThe problem is not to predict the trick's appearance.\nI may, for instance, predict that if a conjurer seems to place various balls under various cups, those cups will later appear to be empty.\nAnd on I predict that if the conjurer appears to show, appears to saw someone in half that person will later appear on stage unharmed.\nThose are testable predictions.\nI may experience many conjuring shows and seeing my predictions vindicated every time.\nBut that does not even address, let alone solve the problem of how the trick works.\nSolving it requires an explanation, a statement of the reality that accounts for the appearance.\nOkay, so now skipping a lot of chapter one, the reach of explanation, I encourage people to actually go to chapter one, read the whole thing.\nAnd he speaks about science and he speaks about progress and how progress has happened in the past.\nAnd now let me go back to the book.\nBut even testable explanatory theories cannot be the crucial ingredient that made the difference between no progress and progress.\nFor they too have always been common.\nConsider, for example, the ancient Greek myth for explaining the onset of winter.\nLong ago, Hades, God of the underworld kidnapped and raped Persephone, goddess of spring, then Persephone's mother, Demeter, goddess of the earth, an agriculture, negotiated a contract for a daughter's release, which specified that Persephone would marry Hades and eat a magic seed that would compel her to visit him once a year thereafter.\nWhenever Persephone was away for filling his obligation, Demeter became sad and will command the world to become cold and bleak so that nothing could grow.\nAnd this is the wonderful example that David uses in his TED Talk and talks about how, because it didn't need to be Demeter, it could have indeed been some other God, there could have been some indifferent to Persephone, it didn't need to be a marriage contract, it could have been any other contract.\nThe specific parts of the theory that explain the seasons on this Greek myth explanation are easy to vary.\nSo let me read a part where he speaks about this in particular.\nSo with myths, the reason why those myths are so easily variable is that their details are barely connected to the details of the phenomena.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=1989"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "afd2cc8a-258a-43d1-a658-1e7980fb840c": {"page_content": "The specific parts of the theory that explain the seasons on this Greek myth explanation are easy to vary.\nSo let me read a part where he speaks about this in particular.\nSo with myths, the reason why those myths are so easily variable is that their details are barely connected to the details of the phenomena.\nNothing in the problem of why winter happens is addressed by postulating specifically a marriage contract or a magic seed or the God's Persephone, Hades and Demeter or Freya.\nWhenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomena they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.\nSkipping a bit.\nIn general, when theories are easily variable in the sense I have described experimental testing as almost useless for correcting their errors, I call such theories bad explanations.\nBeing proved wrong by experiment and changing the theories to other bad explanations does not get their holders one job closer to the truth.\nBecause explanation plays this central role in science and because testability is of little use in the case of bad explanations, I myself prefer to call myths, superstitions and similar theories unscientific, even when they make testable predictions.\nBut it does not matter what terminology is, so long as it does not lead you to conclude that there is something worthwhile about the Persephone myth or the prophets apocalyptic theory or the gamblers delusion just because it is testable.\nNor is a person capable of making progress merely by the virtue of being willing to drop a theory when it is refuted.\nWhile must also be seeking a better explanation for the relevant phenomena, that is the scientific frame of mind.\nWonderful.\nSo, here David is saying that even if you have a testable prediction, that does not mean that you are entitled to be referred to as a scientific theory.\nI think this is a well expressed way of understanding proper in a new way, more explicitly than perhaps proper himself was able to explain.\nContinue.\nAs the physicist Richard Feynman said, scientists what we have learned that had to keep from fooling ourselves by adopting easily variable explanations.\nThe gamblers in the profit are ensuring that they will be able to continue fooling themselves no matter what happens.\nJust as thoroughly as if they had adopted untestable theories, they are insulating themselves from facing evidence that they are mistaken about what is really there in the physical world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2140"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b241291-a2ef-4f90-8ccb-5d9bb3d457b2": {"page_content": "Continue.\nAs the physicist Richard Feynman said, scientists what we have learned that had to keep from fooling ourselves by adopting easily variable explanations.\nThe gamblers in the profit are ensuring that they will be able to continue fooling themselves no matter what happens.\nJust as thoroughly as if they had adopted untestable theories, they are insulating themselves from facing evidence that they are mistaken about what is really there in the physical world.\nThe quest for good explanations is I believe the basic regulating principle not only of science but of the enlightenment generally.\nWhen he says enlightenment generally, he means through to today.\nHe is not just talking about that shortish period that led to the industrial revolution in the past.\nHe is talking about the beginning of the enlightenment continuing through to today.\nSo, he would say the enlightenment is still happening now and I would agree.\nIt is the feature, this quest for good explanations.\nIt is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed.\nIt trivially implies that prediction alone is insufficient.\nSomewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority.\nAnd hence it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism.\nIt also implies a methodological rule, a criterion for reality, namely that we should conclude that a particular thing is real, if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something.\nThis is also mentioned in the fabric of reality.\nI think it talks about it as being something like Dr. Johnson's, Johnston's criterion.\nHold on.\nYeah, so there is a section in the fabric of reality of course about precisely this chapter 4 there is called criteria for reality and the discussion there is along the lines of Dr. Johnson's understanding of this phenomena of things kicking back in reality.\nSo if they kick back, that means they act in autonomous, unpredictable ways in ways that you can't predict how beforehand.\nSo you have to go out and test things and this doesn't mean only science.\nIf you're investigating anything and it reacts in a way that you didn't predict, then you know you've got something real.\nOkay, now David goes on to write about the actual explanation of seasons and how the earth is on a tilt and he says, that is a good explanation.\nHard to vary because all its details play a functional role and that is important as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2254"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b25bcd4b-8987-4ac3-9067-0baaaf490f27": {"page_content": "So you have to go out and test things and this doesn't mean only science.\nIf you're investigating anything and it reacts in a way that you didn't predict, then you know you've got something real.\nOkay, now David goes on to write about the actual explanation of seasons and how the earth is on a tilt and he says, that is a good explanation.\nHard to vary because all its details play a functional role and that is important as well.\nSo a good explanation is hard to vary because all of its details play a functional role.\nIn the axis tilt theory of the earth, you can't tilt the axis by more than what it is actually tilted because if you did, the seasons would be different than what they are.\nGood explanations are often strikingly simple or elegant as I shall discuss in chapter 14.\nAlso, a common way in which an explanation can be bad is by containing superfluous features or arbitrariness and sometimes removing those yields a good explanation.\nThis is given rise to the misconception known as Occam's Razor, named after the 14th century philosopher William of Occam, but dating back to antiquity.\nNamely, the one should always seek the simplest explanation.\nOne statement of it is, do not multiply assumptions beyond necessity.\nI think this is what David used in the fabric of reality.\nHowever, there are plenty of very simple explanations that are nonetheless easy to vary, such as Demet did it, and while explanations and while assumptions beyond necessity make a theory bad by definition, there have been many mistaken ideas of what is necessary in a theory.\nInstrumentalism, for instance, can sit as explanation itself unnecessary and so did many other bad philosophies of science, as I shall discuss in chapter 12.\nWhen a formally good explanation has been falsified by new observations, it is no longer a good explanation because the problem has expanded to include those observations.\nThus, the standard scientific methodology of dropping theories when refuted by experiment is implied by the requirement for good explanations.\nThe best explanations are the ones that are most constrained by existing knowledge, including other good explanations as well as other knowledge of the phenomena to be explained.\nThat is why testable explanations that have passed stringent tests become extremely good explanations, which is in turn why the maximum of testability promotes the growth of knowledge and science.\nConjectures are the products of creative imagination, but the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2399"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9535a5bf-22a8-4b2f-8bc4-319f2f22913f": {"page_content": "The best explanations are the ones that are most constrained by existing knowledge, including other good explanations as well as other knowledge of the phenomena to be explained.\nThat is why testable explanations that have passed stringent tests become extremely good explanations, which is in turn why the maximum of testability promotes the growth of knowledge and science.\nConjectures are the products of creative imagination, but the problem with imagination is that it can create fiction much more easily than truth.\nAs I have suggested, historically, virtually all human attempts to explain experience and terms of a wider reality have indeed been fiction in the form of myths, dogma, and mistaken common sense, and the rule of testability is an insufficient check on such mistakes.\nBut the quest for good explanations does the job, inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found, discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.\nThe ideal that explanatory science strives for is nicely described by the quotation from Wheeler with which I began in this chapter.\nBehind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful that when we grasp it in a decade, a century, or a millennium, we will all say to each other how could it have been otherwise.\nNow we shall see how this explanation-based conception of science answers the question that I asked above.\nHow do we know about such?.\nHow do we know so much about unfamiliar aspects of reality?.\nAgain, here we have it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2527"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f9145720-36e2-4526-9efd-d73469340808": {"page_content": "Here we have the claim that testability is not a sufficient bulwark against irrationality, but the quest for good explanations is, the quest for good explanations that good explanations being hard to vary means that you are seeking all the time to explain phenomena that exist, things that already feature in other good explanations of reality, in terms that aren't arbitrary, in terms of things that can't easily be swapped out for other things, you're looking for this hard to vary quality in your explanations, and when you manage to get that and testability is one of those things, then you're on the right track, then you know you're pointed in the direction of progress.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2620"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fe621c79-dd6a-42ce-98c7-6022b9d8942f": {"page_content": "Okay, so there's a little more here, let me read to the remaining parts that I've highlighted.\nSuppose for the sake of argument that you thought of the axis tilt theory yourself, it is your conjecture, it is your own original creation, yet because it is a good explanation, hard to vary, it is not yours to modify.\nIt has an autonomous meaning and an autonomous domain of applicability.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2681"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "46980c4f-6bd2-42c3-8046-b7e0bc44b711": {"page_content": "You cannot confine its predictions to a region of your choosing, whether you like it or not, it makes predictions about places both known to you and unknown to you, predictions that you have thought of and ones that you have not thought of, tilt the planets in similar orbits in other solar systems must have seasonal heating and cooling, planets in the most distant galaxies and planets that we shall never see because I would have destroyed aeon's ago, and also planets that have yet to form, the theory reaches out as it were from its finite origins inside one brain that has been infected, that has been affected only by scraps of patchy evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet, to infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2698"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7a898d2d-b7c0-47b9-ad30-5e86f6f8b0e1": {"page_content": "This reach of explanations is another meaning of the beginning of infinity.\nIt is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve.\nAgain, here we have another wonderful piece of philosophy, another, I would call it a discovery.\nThis idea that some explanations have reached, infinite reach, is profound.\nIt turns knowledge into a force of nature.\nIt is the thing that can point itself anywhere in reality and transform that if it's so, if there are people there that want to do that and have the knowledge of how to do so.\nSo I'll say that again.\nKnowledge is an entity in the universe, but if it points itself at somewhere in reality, it can transform that reality into something completely different, as long as there are people there who choose to do so and have that knowledge.\nSo the knowledge of how to completely transform the Andromeda galaxy, if it's discovered here on Earth, it is the thing that will transform the Andromeda galaxy, which means that knowledge is kind of like a supermassive black hole.\nIf there's a supermassive black hole wandering through the universe that we haven't yet seen yet, although we probably would have because of such things as gravitational lensing, but let's say it's wandering through the universe and no one's noticed it yet, and it's heading towards the Andromeda galaxy, and if it passes through the Andromeda galaxy, it could really upset the Andromeda galaxy.\nIt could perturb the orbits of the stars, it could change the shape of the Andromeda galaxy.\nIt can do that.\nNo one has a problem understanding that.\nThis idea that black holes hugely powerful bodies can eat stars, they could transform the galaxy.\nBut so can knowledge.\nKnowledge can do what huge structures in physics can do.\nThey can transform things.\nWe've already done it on a very small scale.\nIf you want to explain why it is that a city looks the way it does, there's no point consulting the geology.\nWell, okay, there is.\nThe geology has something to do with the way a city looks.\nBut what also has something to do with the way a city looks is the knowledge of the people that are there.\nSo knowledge is like a force of nature.\nIt's like erosion if you like.\nIt's this thing that can pass over physical structures and change them.\nLet me continue.\nThe axis tilt theory is an example.\nIt was originally proposed to explain the changes in the Sun's angle of elevation during each year.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2766"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8c8ab76b-3f16-42b2-a3e2-aa60eb2bc3ea": {"page_content": "The geology has something to do with the way a city looks.\nBut what also has something to do with the way a city looks is the knowledge of the people that are there.\nSo knowledge is like a force of nature.\nIt's like erosion if you like.\nIt's this thing that can pass over physical structures and change them.\nLet me continue.\nThe axis tilt theory is an example.\nIt was originally proposed to explain the changes in the Sun's angle of elevation during each year.\nCombined with a little knowledge of heat and spinning bodies, then explained seasons.\nAnd without any further modification, it also explained why seasons are out of phase in the two hemispheres and why tropical regions do not have them.\nAnd while the summer sun shines at midnight in polar regions, three phenomena of which its creators may well have been unaware.\nThe reach of explanations is not a principle of induction.\nIt is not something that the creator of the explanation can use to obtain or justify it.\nIt is not just part of the it is not part of the creative process at all.\nWe find out about it only after we have the explanation.\nSometimes long after.\nSo it has nothing to do with extrapolation or induction or with deriving a theory in any other alleged way.\nIt is exactly the other way around.\nThe reason that the explanation of seasons reaches far outside the experience of its creators is precisely because it does not have to be extrapolated by its nature as an explanation.\nWhen its creators first thought of it, it already applied in our planet's other hemisphere and throughout the solar system and in other solar systems and at other times.\nThus, the reach of an explanation is neither an additional assumption nor a detachable one.\nIt is determined by the content of the explanation itself.\nThe better an explanation is, the more rigidly its reach is determined because the harder it is to vary an explanation, the harder it is in particular to construct a variant with a different reach with a larger or smaller that is still an explanation.\nI am going to skip over a little more now.\nIt also makes sense to speak of the reach of non-explanatory forms of knowledge.\nRules of thumb and also knowledge that is implicit in the genes for biological adaptations.\nSo as I said, my rule of thumb about cups and ball streaks has reached to a certain class of tricks, but I could not know what that class is without further explanation for why the rule works.\nAnd I'll stop down and chapter one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=2871"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2fe774b2-25b3-49b4-97dc-68a3ee3c9901": {"page_content": "I am going to skip over a little more now.\nIt also makes sense to speak of the reach of non-explanatory forms of knowledge.\nRules of thumb and also knowledge that is implicit in the genes for biological adaptations.\nSo as I said, my rule of thumb about cups and ball streaks has reached to a certain class of tricks, but I could not know what that class is without further explanation for why the rule works.\nAnd I'll stop down and chapter one.\nSo this idea about the reach of explanations is another phenomenal piece of philosophy, I think.\nIt's up there with this idea that what science is about is not merely testable theories because they've been common forever.\nInstead, it's about hard to vary explanations of the physical world, I would say that's my interpretation, but David makes the broader point that what we're actually after in the production of knowledge generally, so whether it's philosophy or history or mathematics, science, any particular domain, what we're after is hard to vary explanations.\nAnd the reason that we have been making progress since the enlightenment through today's enlightenment is because of a culture of criticism, the culture of criticism where we criticize our best theories that exist at the moment and we improve them and that enables progress.\nWe're only in chapter one and already there are these phenomenal advances in philosophy, phenomenal advances in epistemology, excellent explanations of what our best explanations of epistemology and philosophy are all illustrated with some excellent science.\nThat'll do me for now, that's quite a bit of reading and maybe tomorrow I'll try and get into chapter two.\nWe'll see how we go.\nSee you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1qwlfDFkI&t=3003"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "72436709-351b-4ef8-9ace-e4f5121d1437": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, in episode 4 of the site of Cannon Cart.\nAlthough we're only at chapter 3, previous episode was an introduction to this chapter.\nSo I don't really need to do an introduction today, so I'm going to launch straight in to the reading.\nAnd Kiara begins in chapter 3, titled information.\nWith an explanation of what she's going to do in this chapter, and I shall read that, quote, Where I explain how information can be completely captured within physics with two counterfactuals, the possibility of copying and of flipping, where you encounter the counterfactual properties of universality, and learn how it enables universal computers.\nAnd then we get into the main part of the chapter.\nAnd this first part of the chapter is a lovely description, which sets a literal scene of things that she's going to discuss later on in the chapter.\nShe begins, quote, When the night falls on Centosa, a small satellite island of Singapore, a remarkable spectacle takes place.\nThe best location to witness it is somewhere along the bridge connecting Centosa to Singapore.\nThat bridge is made of smooth wooden tiles.\nIt also has a panoramic spot where one can rest, leaning on a balustrade while enjoying the view that spans the whole day.\nAs the twilight turns into night, distinctive kinds of lights and sounds fill the air.\nThe surroundings gradually become darker and darker until the whole backdrop is pitch black, both the sky and the sea.\nAt that point, the spectacle reaches its peak, suspended several dozen metres above the sea, green lit cable cars run smoothly through the air back and forth in constant gentle motion, boats and ships move lazily across the bay, their signalling lights, cutting through the darkness.\nThe music from the bars on the shore spreads around whispering in the warm equatorial night, for the back in the distance a lighthouse flashes on and off, on and off.\nThe objects populating that nocturnal landscape display extremely diverse behaviours, each explained by a different branch of physics, cable cars, boats and ships are powered by engines explained by the laws of thermodynamics.\nThe music and its propagation are explained by the theory of sound, sound is composed of waves of molecules of air which travel to one's ease, and are then converted into electrochemical signals in the brain.\nMolecules are in turn composed of atoms and atoms are made of subatomic particles such as protons, electrons and neutrons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=24"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2292629-6a09-4954-af5d-18459c6b975e": {"page_content": "The music and its propagation are explained by the theory of sound, sound is composed of waves of molecules of air which travel to one's ease, and are then converted into electrochemical signals in the brain.\nMolecules are in turn composed of atoms and atoms are made of subatomic particles such as protons, electrons and neutrons.\nLight has explained by the laws of electromagnetism, Maxwell's equations, at the most fundamental level, all these phenomena are explained by quantum theory and general relativity, the two deepest explanations of physical reality we possess at present.\nDespite being so different in their specific details, those systems have something in common, which is not explained by any of the existing branches of physics.\nThe music, the boats, lights, the lighthouse, they are all signals, they are capable of carrying information.\nThis property is a key trait they all share, one that contrary to what one might think is possessed only by a particular class of systems in our universe.\nIn a short while, I should give you examples of systems that cannot carry information.\nWhat is the property that makes those systems, and many others like them, capable of carrying information?.\nEntering this question involves counterfactuals and it will keep us occupied in this chapter, it will reveal the way to express information as a fundamental entity in physics, and the fundamental physical laws that rule the physical system capable of instantiating information.\nThis is crucially important, not only from the point of view of understanding the universe in a deeper way, but also because information and its connection with physics is at the heart of information technologies that could further revolutionize our civilization, such as the universal quantum computer that we will discuss in chapter 4.\nAt first, it may seem that information does not really have anything to do with physics.\nIn fact, in everyday language, the word information is used to refer to all sorts of things.\nFor instance, many systems contain information, books, newspapers, and magazines, emails, and messages.\nThe words we utter when speaking to friends and family, poems, and songs, and ballads.\nThe biosphere contains information too, as I mentioned in chapter 1, encoded in DNA molecules.\nBut even though all those systems are plainly part of physical reality, it is hard to identify information with a particular physical system.\nInformation looks more like an abstract entity, and it is hard to pin down its connection with physics.\nFor a start, information does not have a specific embodiment, but it can be embodied by many diverse physical systems.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=156"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "619c0964-ddba-462b-a845-c7a69fa5e16a": {"page_content": "The biosphere contains information too, as I mentioned in chapter 1, encoded in DNA molecules.\nBut even though all those systems are plainly part of physical reality, it is hard to identify information with a particular physical system.\nInformation looks more like an abstract entity, and it is hard to pin down its connection with physics.\nFor a start, information does not have a specific embodiment, but it can be embodied by many diverse physical systems.\nIs it then some kind of property that systems have, such as say colour?.\nThat allows the light as green, for instance, means that the photons it emits.\nThe contour of energy it is composed of have a particular frequency or energy content.\nCould information be something like energy or frequency?.\nNot quite.\nThose are factual properties, because they are specified exclusively by the system state at a certain time and in a certain location in space.\nBut when it comes to information, the story is different.\nAs I shall explain in detail, one cannot say that some systems contain information just by stating a full description of its state and its factual properties, because the fact that it does has to do with certain transformations being possible on it.\nThen what do we mean when we say that a computer or smartphone is carrying information?.\nRather than seeking to define information as a physical entity, or as a property of physical systems, the key is to change our focus and ask a slightly different question.\nWhat is different in the state of affairs of a physical system between when it does carry information and when it doesn't?.\nIt is, as I shall explain, a set of counterfactual properties.\nOnce we pin those down, we will have established what is required of a system in order for it to contain information and the connection between information and physics without ever actually having to define information directly, just pausing their more reflections.\nThis is a crucial point to make, is that Cara saying that we don't need to define information.\nIf instead, we pin down as she says, what is required of the system in order for it to contain information?.\nAnd that of course, is Paparian people get absolutely hooked on trying to define certain things in science.\nAnd definitions are misleading.\nDefinitions are ultimately ambiguous.\nAnd also, if you're talking more philosophically, definitions are just a way to reduce philosophy to talking about words, which is not what philosophy is about.\nAnd it's certainly not what science is about.\nScience is not about trying to define precisely what any given physical thing happens to be.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=285"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c412c4b-4930-4720-aec2-afc29728836e": {"page_content": "And that of course, is Paparian people get absolutely hooked on trying to define certain things in science.\nAnd definitions are misleading.\nDefinitions are ultimately ambiguous.\nAnd also, if you're talking more philosophically, definitions are just a way to reduce philosophy to talking about words, which is not what philosophy is about.\nAnd it's certainly not what science is about.\nScience is not about trying to define precisely what any given physical thing happens to be.\nMy favorite example is the electron.\nYou can try and define what an electron is.\nBut that definition is going to rule out what you're going to learn about the electron tomorrow.\nSo it's going to be a useless definition tomorrow upon learning some new property about the electron because your previous definition can't possibly have included the knowledge that you're going to gain tomorrow that you're going to create tomorrow.\nSo instead, it's better to talk about understandings.\nAnd so we can have an understanding about information without needing to necessarily define it.\nWe can say, this system can carry information.\nThis system can't carry information.\nAnd that gives you some insight into how to understand what information is, even if you can't put a precise definition on it.\nMoving on, and Chiara writes, let's use a thought experiment to identify the counterfactual properties that a system must have to carry information.\nFirst, we take a system that can carry information, such as a lamp that can be used to signal.\nThen we gradually subtract its key properties until it stops being capable of doing so.\nAt that point, we will know that the properties we removed in our thought experiment are necessary for carrying information.\nSupposed that you were standing on the Centosa Bridge's viewing point at night, and you had the task to communicate with an approaching boat using a lamp.\nThe lamp is green, say, and it can be switched on or off.\nAnd the code of communication is that if the lamp is on, then the boat can proceed.\nIf it is off, then the boat should stop.\nNow, imagine the color of the lamp changed.\nClearly, that would not modify its ability to convey the signal.\nNor would changing its shape, or similar other properties of its state.\nBut suppose now you modified some of its functionalities.\nFor instance, suppose that once you switched the lamp on, it could no longer be switched off.\nWould this lamp work as a signal?.\nClearly no.\nGiven that it cannot be in any other state, it is useless for signaling one of two alternatives.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=414"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c5e25fe2-4d2d-4782-8817-9d363e08d9ed": {"page_content": "Now, imagine the color of the lamp changed.\nClearly, that would not modify its ability to convey the signal.\nNor would changing its shape, or similar other properties of its state.\nBut suppose now you modified some of its functionalities.\nFor instance, suppose that once you switched the lamp on, it could no longer be switched off.\nWould this lamp work as a signal?.\nClearly no.\nGiven that it cannot be in any other state, it is useless for signaling one of two alternatives.\nIt has only one state available.\nNow, imagine you wrap the lamp in a completely opaque covering, which does not allow the light to come through and to be seen at a distance.\nWith this modification, the lamp would not be able to signal either because it could not be seen from the approaching boat.\nThis example of the lesson you can then generalize.\nThe fact, the light, when it is on, carries information, is due to the fact that it could be set to a different value of.\nAnd the difference between on and off can be perceived by the approaching boat.\nBoth of these properties of the lamp are counterfactuals.\nAbstracting from the example, you can assume or perceive a general fundamental, regularity in nature.\nAny system containing information must have these two properties.\nProperty one is that it can be set to one of at least two states.\nFor example, if it has two possible states, let's call them zero on one, generalizing on and off, these two states can be changed from one into another like this, one into zero, zero into one.\nThis notation specifies the following transformational task.\nIf given one, turn it to zero, if given zero, turn it into one.\nA machine can perform this task.\nIf it can indeed obey both these requests, I shall call this transformation a flip, a special case of a permutation.\nBut if you're familiar with computer science, you will know that in the jargon of that field, it is called a not operation.\nThe name could not be more appropriate.\nThe operation describes exactly the behavior of someone with a contrarian personality.\nIf you say yes, they will always flip your statement to its negation and say no and vice versa.\nLikewise, this operation flips the state of a system to zero if it is in one and one to if it is zero.\nWe've already seen the flip operation appear in several places in that view from the centosa bridge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=560"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "860d1825-a6f7-4e84-a9b8-351f4c972ef9": {"page_content": "The name could not be more appropriate.\nThe operation describes exactly the behavior of someone with a contrarian personality.\nIf you say yes, they will always flip your statement to its negation and say no and vice versa.\nLikewise, this operation flips the state of a system to zero if it is in one and one to if it is zero.\nWe've already seen the flip operation appear in several places in that view from the centosa bridge.\nIt is in the lighthouse whose lamp flips its on-off-on-off pattern.\nIt is in the signaling light from the boats which also operate like switches.\nIt is realized to a high degree of accuracy in any computer when a transistor switches on and off.\nIt is even realized to a lower degree of accuracy in our brain when a neuron fires and then becomes quiet again.\nAnd as we have seen from the lamp example, it is the counterfactual property that is necessary to send the most elementary signal a binary one.\nProperty two required for some system to contain information is that it states, for example, on and off states of the lamp on the bridge, can be received and distinguished in some other location.\nFor example, by the boat's communication system, this property is trickier to express.\nStill, it can be elegantly and fully captured by counterfactuals.\nIt is the property of performing a copy-like operation.\nRemember that I already mentioned replication in Chapter 1, which is a special case of copying.\nTo see what copying is, we can dramatize the communication between the bridge and the boat by adding further layers of communication.\nImagine that it is a foggy night and that even the strongest lamp can be seen at no more than 500 meters from the bridge.\nBut the requirement is that it can be seen by boats that are at one kilometer from the bridge, along a particular straight path joining the bridge in the entrance of the harbor.\nOne way to deal with this problem is for another boat to anchor at about 500 meters from the bridge along that path.\nIf that boat has another lamp, which can in turn be seen from other boats approaching, then it can signal to them by setting its lamp to on or off.\nIn coordination with the lamp on the bridge, just like the old-fashioned telegraph or beacon signaling.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=676"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fea5c33e-5826-45fa-aacb-c5c6a6008431": {"page_content": "One way to deal with this problem is for another boat to anchor at about 500 meters from the bridge along that path.\nIf that boat has another lamp, which can in turn be seen from other boats approaching, then it can signal to them by setting its lamp to on or off.\nIn coordination with the lamp on the bridge, just like the old-fashioned telegraph or beacon signaling.\nThe communication is successful if, whenever the on-state appears on the bridge, the boat sets its lamp to on to and if, whenever the state of the lamp is off on the bridge, the lamp on the boat is also set to off.\nThis process amounts to copying faithfully the state of the lamp on the bridge onto the lamp on the boat.\nThe state of the lamp on the bridge is perfectly reproduced by the lamp on the boat, pausing that as my reflection.\nSo here, what we're kind of saying is that we have this concept of information being an entity which can be flipped so you can take a zero turn into a one so you can negate it, as well as being copyable.\nWithout ever saying precisely what information is, so we're saying it has these qualities of being able to be negated and being copied, flipped and copied.\nNow, I'm skipping a quite a large portion here where Kiara goes through in more detail precisely what a copying operation is at the fundamental level.\nAnd she also goes through the summary that I just gave you that a physical system is capable of carrying information.\nIf it has these two counterfactual properties, the first one being, it can be set to at least two states, the flip operation is possible.\nAnd two, each of those states can be copied, the copy operation is possible.\nAnd then she says, and I'll continue reading from this point.\nSo here is the reason why information is a physical property, whether or not some system carries information depends on whether the laws of physics allow for these two transformations on that system.\nIf they don't, then the system cannot carry information.\nIn a universe where no system had both properties, information would not exist.\nSo whether or not information is permitted depends on whether the laws of physics permit certain kinds of counterfactuals, but it is not a property like having a certain color or mass, factual properties of a system.\nIt is a counterfactual property, because whether a system contains information or not depends on whether those two transformations can be realized on it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=760"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dabb4240-b9c0-4e55-a8b7-9981e9945306": {"page_content": "If they don't, then the system cannot carry information.\nIn a universe where no system had both properties, information would not exist.\nSo whether or not information is permitted depends on whether the laws of physics permit certain kinds of counterfactuals, but it is not a property like having a certain color or mass, factual properties of a system.\nIt is a counterfactual property, because whether a system contains information or not depends on whether those two transformations can be realized on it.\nThrough counterfactuals, you have arrived at the elusive connection between information and physics, okay, pausing the MRI reflection.\nYeah, that isn't that brilliant.\nSo physics here too has always been about factual properties, as she says things there, like color or the frequency of light, mass or the number of electrons in a particular atom.\nThese are factual properties, but information is a counterfactual property.\nIt's something that could have been otherwise, whether or not these particular transformations can actually occur given a particular system.\nAnd as she goes on to say, quote, systems with those two properties are information media, all information media, despite the differences, having common the fact that those two transformations are possible on them.\nAll the systems I mentioned in the Santoza example are information media.\nThey have those two counterfactual properties.\nThe simplest information medium, the fundamental unit of information is a bit.\nIt is an information medium with two possible states, zero and one.\nIt's capacity is that it can signal at most two different messages.\nYou can think of countless ways in which our university and body a bit, the lamp of our previous example, which can be on or off an arrow that can point up or down, a coin resting on a table, which can show heads or tails, your answer to a yes or no question, and so on.\nThinking in terms of information allows one to forget about all the differences in the physical details of those systems and consider them all is the same thing, a bit.\nThe same holds for information media with higher capacity.\nThose that can hold more messages, they too can be thought of as made of bits, but not every system is an information medium.\nA good example is a memory and a computer that is full but cannot be erased.\nIt is possible to read information out, but not write new information in because no more spaces available and reset is not possible.\nIt was an information medium once, but no longer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=878"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "72f4ed8d-71d3-4e07-8439-4e8e2a6cd198": {"page_content": "The same holds for information media with higher capacity.\nThose that can hold more messages, they too can be thought of as made of bits, but not every system is an information medium.\nA good example is a memory and a computer that is full but cannot be erased.\nIt is possible to read information out, but not write new information in because no more spaces available and reset is not possible.\nIt was an information medium once, but no longer.\nYou could also have a case where information can be copied in, but not out.\nHave you ever tried to write something on the phone on top of the Capacino or a beer?.\nAt first, it looks possible, but the letters rapidly fade away to the point they can no longer be read.\nNeither of these two types of systems would be capable of carrying information, because they did not have enough counterfactual properties.\nThey are not information media.\nPause their memory reflection.\nYeah, they'd probably be information media for a very short amount of time for so long as whatever is written on top of that phone, let's say, lasts, but this does not fit Chiara's earlier description of a knowledge and information, for example, as having a kind of resilience.\nSo if the information media is something that quickly dissipates, evaporates away, or as otherwise full, then we can't really talk about it as having the capacity to copy information.\nIt won't persist long enough to keep the message or to keep the information such that someone can then take it away somewhere.\nGoing back to the book, Chiara writes, one of the most striking properties of information media is that in that regard, they are all interchangeable, because information can be copied from one to the other irrespective of their physical details.\nI shall call this property the possibility to copy information from one information media to another into operability.\nFor example, the information in a beer can be copied into any other bit irrespective of what physical system it is.\nA transistor, an arrow, a coin, or a switch.\nThe music that has been recorded on old vinyl discs can be converted and copied into digitally encoded music on a flash memory.\nThe sound produced by a voice can be turned into words stored in the transistors that compose the memory of our smartphone via voice recording.\nThe thoughts in my head can now be faithfully copied on this page.\nThey will then be copied into your brain and then possibly copied further into other brains or your notebook if you decide to write them down.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1031"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "08202402-ead6-4017-b7ba-f83bff4860a0": {"page_content": "The music that has been recorded on old vinyl discs can be converted and copied into digitally encoded music on a flash memory.\nThe sound produced by a voice can be turned into words stored in the transistors that compose the memory of our smartphone via voice recording.\nThe thoughts in my head can now be faithfully copied on this page.\nThey will then be copied into your brain and then possibly copied further into other brains or your notebook if you decide to write them down.\nAll these information media are interchangeable or interoperable and information can travel among any of them without restriction pausing their hemline reflection.\nThis is also known as, and your ears should prick up when you hear some of those examples there that she listed as the substrate independence of knowledge.\nSo if I have some knowledge in my brain and I want to get it to you, there could be all ways in which I might try to do that.\nIf you're on the other side of the world, one way in which I might do it is to speak, so the knowledge that's in my mind then becomes sound waves.\nBut if you're on the other side of the world, me simply talking isn't going to get it there.\nBut happily, the knowledge can be transmitted relatively faithfully from my brain to my vocal chords.\nVibrations are folk chords and then to vibrations of molecules in the air.\nAnd then I can pick up the phone and I can talk to you.\nOr perhaps I'm already on the phone to you.\nAnd then those vibrations of air molecules get turned into vibrations of the diaphragm of a microphone that's in the phone, which then get turned into electrical signals, which then get turned into electromagnetic vibrations, which travel from here to the other side of the world, long story short.\nAnd then that system all happens in reverse again, then into electrical signals in the aerial, then into vibrations of the diaphragm of the speaker, and then into vibrations of air, and then into actually vibrations of the tympanic membrane of your ear, and then into vibrations inside your ear canal, and then eventually into your brain.\nAnd so this is how this copying type process works.\nOf course, once it gets into a beyond, I should say, the ear canal, then we have an issue, the okay, then the issue, therefore a preparing is that we are guessing what is meant, we are interpreting what is going on there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1127"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bc58192b-eb6a-4d6e-81f5-43fb481e2e2c": {"page_content": "And so this is how this copying type process works.\nOf course, once it gets into a beyond, I should say, the ear canal, then we have an issue, the okay, then the issue, therefore a preparing is that we are guessing what is meant, we are interpreting what is going on there.\nSo the process there becomes more complicated than simply copying the message from one medium to another, because then we have the conscious attempt to create the knowledge anew, which might be different to the way in which one person was already thinking of it.\nSo if I have a particular idea in my mind and I want to get it to you, I can reasonably faithfully get it into the vibration of air molecules via the way in which I'm talking, the way in which I'm talking right now.\nI'm trying to convey something to you.\nAnd if I think I've made a mistake, if I think that the words coming out of my mouth are not matching the thoughts I have in my head, I can quickly correct myself until I think there is a, to my mind, to my standard, a perfect match as close as possible between what I'm thinking and what I'm saying.\nAnd then the copying process happens very, very reliably between the vibration of this microphone here.\nAnd what eventually happens at your end when you're watching the screen or listening to my voice coming out through speakers or earphones, all of that is going to be very reliable.\nBut once those vibrations get into your ear canal, you then need to interpret what is going on?.\nWhat I'm actually really saying, what the knowledge is that Chiara had firstly, and I'm sometimes I'm interpreting this, right?.\nAnd so some of this copying process is a process of interpretation, especially between minds, because when we have minds involved, we have memes involved, and as we know from the beginning of infinity, meme replication is not as simple as copying.\nIt's a little bit deeper and more complicated than merely copying, which is what is going on between the vibration of air molecules here and the vibration of air molecules that are happening at your end, the replication of my voice.\nBut the knowledge itself, which is encoded in that information in some way, is more difficult to get from my mind to your mind than just copying, then just a chain of copying.\nOr insofar as it is a chain of copying, it is an extremely imperfect chain of copying between my mind and your mind, because there's layers of interpretation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1242"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5c0a1c24-15c5-41c6-84fe-6b32ea7cd170": {"page_content": "But the knowledge itself, which is encoded in that information in some way, is more difficult to get from my mind to your mind than just copying, then just a chain of copying.\nOr insofar as it is a chain of copying, it is an extremely imperfect chain of copying between my mind and your mind, because there's layers of interpretation.\nLet's go back to the book, Chiara writes.\nInteroperability is due to the fact that all information media have in common properties the two counterfactuals I mentioned above that transcend most of their specific details, i.e., whether they are photons, transistors, the spins of an electron, neurons, or switches in a lamp.\nIn all these cases, when interested in the information processing abilities of these systems, we can abstract away their irrelevant details and simply talk about them as information media, considering their information carrying attributes.\nOnly, for example, up and down for an arrow on or off for a lamp and so on.\nNow I'm skipping a bit here, Chiara talks about the physics of interoperability and whether or not interoperability is possible depends upon physical laws.\nSo the extent to which we can actually have this ability of information which is completely different in terms of its physical substrate is nonetheless able to copy the same information.\nThat is a property of our universe, which could have been otherwise.\nAnd then that leads into a discussion about the kind of physical laws that allow computers to exist at all.\nAnd so there needs to be a physics of computation, which we're also quite familiar here in this podcast series with.\nAnd so I'm going to pick it up where Chiara writes quite.\nLet me start with the link between computers and physics.\nComputers are embodied in physical supports.\nThey are made of information media, typically billions of switches or transistors, therefore they are ruled by the laws of physics.\nIn particular, which computations a computer can or cannot perform depends on what the laws of physics permit.\nThis connection between computation and physics was not fully understood until the 1980s with some of the pioneers of quantum computers.\nIt was hinted at by imaginative thinkers such as Roth Landauer, Paul Benioff and Richard Feynman.\nBut it was fully expressed for the first time by David Deutsch and further developed by the masterful computer scientist, Charles Bennett.\nA simple example of a computation is the addition of two numbers which are encountered in chapter two.\nIt's inputs other numbers x and y, for example, 5 and 10.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1373"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2be040b2-c7e8-432e-aacb-baa102bdecd6": {"page_content": "It was hinted at by imaginative thinkers such as Roth Landauer, Paul Benioff and Richard Feynman.\nBut it was fully expressed for the first time by David Deutsch and further developed by the masterful computer scientist, Charles Bennett.\nA simple example of a computation is the addition of two numbers which are encountered in chapter two.\nIt's inputs other numbers x and y, for example, 5 and 10.\nAnd the output is the number x plus y, for example, 15.\nThat a computer is capable of performing a computation such as addition means that every time it is given the right input, the two numbers x and y, it is supposed to provide the design output, the number x plus y, and it can do that over and over again.\nThe set of all computations, a computer is capable of performing is its repertoire.\nSo, for example, a calculator as a computer that has addition, multiplication, subtraction and division in its repertoire.\nWhat decides the repertoire of the computer?.\nThe physical laws that rule its components under given laws of physics for each computation that is physically possible, at least one kind of computer is capable of performing it, pausing there just going back to consider that claim there.\nUnder given laws of physics, for each computation that is physically possible, at least one kind of computer is capable of performing it, that indicates the universality of computation in a universe.\nIf something is physically possible to be computed, then there exists a computer in our universe that is capable of performing that computation.\nBut more than that, of course, for all the things that are computable in our universe, there is a single device, the universal computer, which can compute any possible, physically computable thing.\nBy computer here, I am not necessarily referring to something as sophisticated as your personal computer, I mean a special purpose computer, which has only a few computations in its repertoire.\nFor example, the adder mentioned above, which can, as I said, output the number x plus y given to numbers x and y in input, or a multiplier by that, when given x and y in input, provides x multiply by y in output.\nThen here goes on to explain how we get from these special purpose computers to universal computers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1528"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "22531b96-3425-43bb-b4a6-a8bf7a28dd1f": {"page_content": "All you need is, if, for example, you have something that can do addition, something that can actually perform that operation of x plus y, and something that can do multiplication, a different computer that can do multiplication, x times y, that only need is a third computer that can talk to the first two, and be able to send the operation off to the adder or send the operation off to the multiplying computer, and so now you have a computer which can do essentially both of the operations, because the other two computers that can do those single operations are part of its repertoire now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1644"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e299698-2b29-4c3a-97d6-231f328c6e11": {"page_content": "And so, of course, that leads the idea as a universal computation, as Keira writes, preceding in this fashion nothing stops you from imagining a computer that has all the physically possible computations in its repertoire.\nIt is a universal computer.\nIt can be programmed to perform any calculation that is physically allowed by certain physical laws.\nIt so happens that the laws of physics of our universe do not forbid a universal computer.\nComputers such as our laptops and personal computers are universal in this sense.\nAnother fundamental trait of computers in our universe is that all the computations in their repertoire can be realized by combining a smaller number of basic computations, which work like letters of an alphabet to compose words.\nThis, too, is a peculiar feature that holds in our universe, but need not hold in general.\nFor example, three is a number.\nFour is a number.\nIf we juxtapose three and four, we find another number, 34.\nAny number can be represented in the decimal basis by juxtaposition of the numbers from zero up to nine.\nLikewise, elementary computations can be composed with one another to realize all the computations permitted by the laws of physics.\nFor example, suppose you perform the flip twice on a basis.\nYou see that if the beat is initially zero, it is slipped to one, and by applying the flip a second time, you obtain zero again.\nLikewise, if the beat is initially one, after two flips, it gets back to the state one.\nSo applying the flip twice to the same system corresponds to performing a different operation in this case doing nothing or leaving the bit alone.\nA set of computations that composed with one another permit one to recover the whole set of possible computations in the repertoire of the universal computer is called a universal set.\nWhen there is a universal set, any computation is reducible to a sequence of elementary computations selected from the universal set.\nThese elementary computations are in respect a bit like Lego bricks.\nAnything that is allowed in a Lego world from cars to villas to pirate ships can be decomposed into elementary Lego bricks of a few elementary different kinds.\nThose basic composition rules are fixed.\nLikewise, when there is a universal set, any physically allowed computation can be decomposed into a set of elementary computations from the universal set, sometimes referred to as gates, which can be composed according to fixed laws.\nWhen the laws of physics say that a universal set of computations is possible, we say that they display universality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1678"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bda7c62f-be7a-4a80-aaa9-bc540978afc1": {"page_content": "Those basic composition rules are fixed.\nLikewise, when there is a universal set, any physically allowed computation can be decomposed into a set of elementary computations from the universal set, sometimes referred to as gates, which can be composed according to fixed laws.\nWhen the laws of physics say that a universal set of computations is possible, we say that they display universality.\nuniversality is a counterfactual property about what is possible, and it has sweeping consequences.\nIt is universality that permits the existence of a universal computer like the ones we use nowadays.\nThat property was first grasped in the Victorian era.\nAt that time, the inventor Charles Babbage proposed a scheme to build what he called the analytical engine.\nThis would have been, if realized, the first programmable computer, the ancestor of our modern ones, only far larger and made of brass mechanical cogs and wheels, made of lovelace, Babbage's collaborator and a brilliant mathematician, understood the universality of this machine, conjecturing in her notes that the analytical engine could be used to produce all sorts of information theoretic outputs, not just to compute functions.\nShe even speculated that it could be used to produce sophisticated music.\nUnfortunately, Babbage's idea was not realising practice for a lack of funding, and the property of universality was not studied until much later.\nIt was Alan Turing, with his computing machine, who formalised the idea of universality in the 1940s.\nThis concept was then sharpened and connected to physics by David Deutsch, who pioneered the universal quantum computer, which will encounter again in the next chapter.\nUniversal computers are capable of performing all the computations, permitted by the loss of physics.\nOnce a universal computer is constructed, all you need to do is to load it with the right program, and it can simulate any other system that is physically allowed.\nThis includes the biosphere, with all its splendid richness of animals and plants and microorganisms, and in principle, it even includes your brain together with thoughts and emotions.\nOf course, they are my reflection.\nYes, but we don't know what the program is, and this is the great mystery of things, and is the central problem of artificial general intelligence, despite what you hear elsewhere outside of the circles of people like David Deutsch, where people think that what we need is faster, hardware, or more memory, that these systems, like the internet, as they grow, eventually become self-aware in some way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1803"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0dc71e3b-8cf5-451b-9535-2db5cd216f2d": {"page_content": "Of course, they are my reflection.\nYes, but we don't know what the program is, and this is the great mystery of things, and is the central problem of artificial general intelligence, despite what you hear elsewhere outside of the circles of people like David Deutsch, where people think that what we need is faster, hardware, or more memory, that these systems, like the internet, as they grow, eventually become self-aware in some way.\nThat's all you need, because isn't that what happened with us?.\nIsn't what happened with our brains?.\nJust the slow accumulation of complexity, and by random chance we end up with, the capacity to create explanatory knowledge.\nPerhaps.\nBut in our case, as human beings trying to program AGIs, if we want to do that, we need to know what the program is.\nSimply randomly putting together components of hardware in a computer, it's not going to cause the thing to come alive, again, despite what you might see in certain science fiction representations of what's going on here.\nYou need a program.\nYou need an algorithm for how it is that creativity and knowledge creation is actually done.\nI'm skipping another part here, and Kiara talks about a science fiction world.\nBut basically, I think that the comparison to dark matter that she makes here is probably just as informative.\nThe idea of dark matter is that perhaps there is this matter out there in interstellar, intergalactic, otherwise almost empty space.\nAnd this matter is the thing that causes galaxies to rotate faster than what they should, given the amount of luminous matter there.\nSo we assume there seems to be a matter that we cannot see there.\nIt's very weakly interacting, by which we mean we can't see it, so it doesn't interact with light, and it doesn't even appear to interact with strong and weak nuclear forces.\nThe only thing that it interacts with apparently is gravity.\nSuch a kind of matter doesn't appear to be able to store information.\nIt appears to violate interoperability with our universe.\nSo if we have, when I say our universe, I mean the matter that we're made out of, we can have information written on our matter, but we can't write that information onto dark matter.\nI've speculated before it to be an interesting science fiction, I guess some science fiction writers must have done this, to construct a story about beings that live in this dark matter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=1932"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8722bcd-d9bf-4b44-ab05-f72ea3a04ba3": {"page_content": "It appears to violate interoperability with our universe.\nSo if we have, when I say our universe, I mean the matter that we're made out of, we can have information written on our matter, but we can't write that information onto dark matter.\nI've speculated before it to be an interesting science fiction, I guess some science fiction writers must have done this, to construct a story about beings that live in this dark matter.\nIt could be whole civilizations, and perhaps the way in which they interact with one another.\nIt's different to the way in which we interact with one another, but we can't communicate with them and they can't communicate with us, precisely because the interaction, the physical interaction that's going on operates via a different mechanism in some way shape or form, which means that our matter and their matter is not interoperable.\nSo I'm skipping all of that.\nand it's very, I think anyone who has the book should go and read that on me, skipping a number of pages there about this science fiction world and an illustration of the possibility of non interoperability and what that would mean in such a universe.\nI'm picking it up where Kara has written, quote, you have transverse several pages in order to understand the connection between physics and information.\nIn what way are you now closer to understanding physical reality?.\nYou have discovered by considering the two counterfactual properties that characterize information media, a key feature of our universe, interoperability, without which what we have been calling information and communication thereafter, would not be possible, nor would computers, let alone universal computers that work the same way as they do in our universe.\nWhat you have just seen is an example of the explanatory power of interconnected counterfactual properties, this time all related to information.\nWe can think of them as a range in a pyramid structure at the base you find the counterfactual properties of information media that the flip and the copy operations are both possible on some physical systems information media.\nOn top of this, there is the interoperability of information media, information is copyable from any information media to another, no matter what type of physical support embodies it.\nAt the very top is universality, the possibility of universal computers, each counterfactual is needed for the higher level counterfactual.\nIn turn, these counterfactuals enable a vast number of other transformations to be possible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=2059"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "753bb176-4893-40ff-84a4-38eecb5aac8b": {"page_content": "On top of this, there is the interoperability of information media, information is copyable from any information media to another, no matter what type of physical support embodies it.\nAt the very top is universality, the possibility of universal computers, each counterfactual is needed for the higher level counterfactual.\nIn turn, these counterfactuals enable a vast number of other transformations to be possible.\nAll our information related technology is based on the interoperability property, so are the most fascinating properties of life and intelligent life, from the possibility of self reproduction to the possibility of thinking.\nRemove some of these counterfactuals and you wipe out all these properties too.\nWhat's more, by referring to information media and their counterfactual properties only, without referring to specific irrelevant details about the embodying systems, we're able to attain a greater degree of abstraction, going deeper than all our existing physical theories.\nIf you remember at the outset, I noted that the elements in the Santoza landscape are described by very different theories in the traditional conception, but with the view from counterfactuals, we understand the sense in which some of them are, in fact, very similar, they are all information media.\nThe traditional conception of physics cannot express this fact, whereas the science of canon can't, can do so, elegantly and simply.\nThe approach with counterfactuals also frees information from subjectivity.\nWhen we say that some set of states can be copied, we do not need to refer to any conscious subject or observer performing the transformation.\nA simple chemical reaction where the structure of some crystal is replicated over and over again, implements the copy operation, and it can do so in the absence of a guiding entity.\nThe objective, counterfactual properties necessary to explain information are remarkably elementary, and yet they have far-reaching ramifications.\nWhether you are seeing in a coffee shop drinking coffee while listening to your favourite music, sitting in your armchair scrolling through your phone or reading a book or watching a beautiful sunset from your balcony, all these phenomena can occur because those two operations, the flip and the copy, are possible, and because of the interoperability of information media, both you and I are enjoying the far-reaching power of those counterfactuals right now.\nI, while writing these lines and putting a full stop here, you, while reading, these very lines and turning the page to discover what's next.\nAnd that's the end of the chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=2176"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3fa57caa-e830-4760-ad12-84c1861e94da": {"page_content": "I, while writing these lines and putting a full stop here, you, while reading, these very lines and turning the page to discover what's next.\nAnd that's the end of the chapter.\nSo this brings information into the understanding of physics at a fundamental level via the constructive theory of information.\nSo rather than it being merely a highly emergent phenomena that really is only prior to this understanding, a property of some complicated emergent structure like computer, we now see that it is fundamental.\nBut as I like to say, lots of things that people think are emergent are actually also fundamental.\nPeople are one such thing.\nIf often to the infinite future as we expect, people are the thing that go about transforming the universe in some way, then that will be fundamental.\nNow we fundamentally do the evolution of the universe, their choices will be fundamental to the evolution of the universe.\nBut here we have this idea that in a more basic way, information is fundamental to the way in which the universe operates.\nThe possibility that certain matter can actually hold on to information, information being the thing that can be flipped and can be copied is something that means our universe has this special characteristic of allowing for information.\nAnd because it can allow for information and it didn't have to be it allows a universe in which computation is possible and universal computation is possible.\nAnd I would say, and therefore, people are possible.\nOkay, so that's it for today.\nThat's the end of chapter three.\nAnd next time we will be on to chapter four, which is quantum information.\nSo it will be very interesting.\nBut until then, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCv4jETFJaY&t=2314"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f6716fc8-bf6c-4cd7-b33a-467c389bc452": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, and to chapter 6 of my breakdown of the fabric of reality chapter 6 is called titled University and the Limits of Computation.\nNow, David Deutsch is expert in the topics he writes about in the beginning of infinity and in the fabric of reality.\nBut if we were to talk wheelhouses, as people sometimes do, the thing that you spend your career, your life, pursuing, then this is one of those, David Deutsch has a lot of wheelhouses.\nBut this is certainly one, right in the dead center of David Deutsch's professional interests.\nOne of the reasons for David Deutsch's fame among other physicists is because of his contribution to this area of science, which we call computational computer science.\nIn fact, it really was down to David to bring computer science into science itself.\nBefore that, it was treated as an area of mathematics, of pure mathematics, treated in the abstract.\nAnd it was David who explained how and why it should be regarded more as a part of physics.\nThe simple idea, computers are made of matter.\nMatter of age, the laws of physics, therefore what computers can do is bounded by the laws of physics.\nThis particular chapter is one of my favourites in the entire book.\nIt is inside bomb after inside bomb, which means I am going to take my time with passages here, even more so than what I normally would, in order to break them down or emphasise them.\nBut I'm going to begin just by reading the first paragraph on the first page of the book, and then I'm going to skip rather a lot.\nand I'll explain why in just a moment.\nBut let's get into the reading.\nAnd perhaps for those picking it up in this episode, for whatever reason, the last episode was about virtual reality generators.\nNow, why on earth would one write a book about the fabric of reality about cosmically significant things and concentrate on something seemingly as parochial and as quirky as virtual reality?.\nWell, there is an important reason why, and that is because we human beings, our minds are essentially virtual reality rendering machines.\nWe are minds, and we are connected to the rest of real physical reality via senses, which are creating for us an impression of the environment.\nIt's a virtual reality rendering of whatever real reality happens to be, which we don't have direct access to.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fa300cfb-b911-4caf-87c6-6f077e7f0b00": {"page_content": "Well, there is an important reason why, and that is because we human beings, our minds are essentially virtual reality rendering machines.\nWe are minds, and we are connected to the rest of real physical reality via senses, which are creating for us an impression of the environment.\nIt's a virtual reality rendering of whatever real reality happens to be, which we don't have direct access to.\nSo virtual reality, a study of virtual reality not only gives an insight into the workings of people, but things that can do computations more broadly.\nAnd hence, David begins the chapter with, quote, the heart of a virtual reality generator is its computer and the question of what environments can be rendered in virtual reality must eventually come down to the question of what computations can be performed.\nEven today, the repertoire of virtual reality generators is limited as much by their computers as by the image generators.\nWhenever a new faster computer with more memory and better image processing hardware is incorporated into a virtual reality generator, the repertoire is enlarged.\nBut will it always be so, or will we eventually encounter full universality as I have argued we should expect in the case of image generators?.\nIn other words, is there a single virtual reality generator, buildable, once and for all, that could be programmed to render any environment that the human mind is capable of experiencing, end quote.\nBut I might just, I'll just pick up a couple of short paragraphs here, which speak about the limitations of computers, the way in which computers must be limited by the laws of physics.\nI taste a sort of speak of why it is that there are these limitations placed upon computers.\nDavid writes, quote, A computer with an effectively unlimited memory capacity can be envisaged in principle, but a computer with an unlimited speed of computation cannot.\nA computer of given design will always have a fixed maximum speed, which only design changes can increase.\nEnd quote.\nNow, why is this?.\nWell, because we've got this limitation on imposed by the speed of light, stuff can't happen faster than the speed of light.\nAnd so signals can't be sent faster than the speed of light.\nAt the speed of light, sure, but not faster than the speed of light.\nSo you have this inherent limitation imposed by the laws of physics.\nLet's just read on a little bit further, quote, therefore a given virtual reality generator will not be able to perform unlimited amounts of computation per unit time.\nWill this not limit its repertoire?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=127"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc25b74f-b779-4997-9ebd-ac482feb041e": {"page_content": "And so signals can't be sent faster than the speed of light.\nAt the speed of light, sure, but not faster than the speed of light.\nSo you have this inherent limitation imposed by the laws of physics.\nLet's just read on a little bit further, quote, therefore a given virtual reality generator will not be able to perform unlimited amounts of computation per unit time.\nWill this not limit its repertoire?.\nIf an environment is so complex at the computation of what the user should be seeing one second from now takes the machine more than one second to compute, how can the machine possibly render that environment accurately?.\nTo achieve universality, we need a further technological trick.\nTo extend it to repertoire as far as this physically possible a virtual reality generator would have to take control of one further attribute of the user's sensory system, namely the processing speed of the user's brain.\nIf the human brain will like an electronic computer, this would simply be a matter of changing the rate at which its clock emits synchronizing pulses.\nNot out the brain's clock will not be so easily controlled, but again, this presents no problem of principle.\nThe brain is a finite physical object, and all its functions are physical processes which, in principle, can be slowed down or stopped.\nThe ultimate virtual reality generator would have to be capable of doing that end quote.\nNow, I'm ending the quotation there because then David goes into the details about how virtual reality generators could be built that could even tinker with your own brain.\nThe mechanics of this is interesting, and it's worthwhile if, of course, I presume that people who are listening to this have access to the book, so it might be well worth your while going to the book and reading the few pages that I'm going to gloss over here.\nI'm just going to skip over because it's about the technical details of how one might go about in the distant future and a technologically enlightened future where we could directly intercept the contents of neurons, let's say.\nAnd so give you the experience of whatever is physically possible to experience via that method I've directly intervening in the neurons, the action of the neurons.\nWe don't need to go into that.\nPlease explore this part of the chapter.\nNo doubt, the vast majority of people listening to this have the book if you don't get the book and read the details because they are interesting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=267"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ab00ad2-6dde-443e-8107-27f60708bb4f": {"page_content": "And so give you the experience of whatever is physically possible to experience via that method I've directly intervening in the neurons, the action of the neurons.\nWe don't need to go into that.\nPlease explore this part of the chapter.\nNo doubt, the vast majority of people listening to this have the book if you don't get the book and read the details because they are interesting.\nBut basically, look, the idea is that with an advanced neuroscience with a cybernetic implant, it's going to be possible to tinker with neurons and hence subjective experience given the requisite knowledge knowing how to do that.\nThe laws of physics do not prohibit this from happening, so it must be possible given the right knowledge.\nSo I'm skipping those details.\nInteresting though, they are glossing over them because the sum of everything David says is basically encapsulated by what he goes under say, quote, for our present purposes technological obstacles are irrelevant.\nWe are not investigating what sorts of virtual reality generator can be built or even necessarily what sorts of virtual reality generator will ever be built by human engineers.\nWe are investigating what the laws of physics do and do not allow in the way of virtual reality.\nThe reason why this is important has nothing to do with the prospects for making better virtual reality generators.\nIt is that the relationship between virtual reality and ordinary reality is part of the deep unexpected structure of the world which this book is about.\nThat's why I begin this episode in the way that I did.\nIt's not an esoteric, quirky sort of bit of technology, this virtual reality stuff.\nIt provides an insight into how it is that knowledge can be constructed about the world and what our situation is, what our relationship is with the rest of physical reality.\nDavid goes on, quote, by considering various tricks, nerve stimulation, stopping and starting the brain and so on, we have managed to envisage a physically possible virtual reality generator whose repertoire covers the entire sensory range as fully interactive and is not constrained by the speed or memory capacity of its computer.\nIs there anything outside the repertoire of such a virtual reality generator?.\nWould it repertoire be the set of all logically possible environments?.\nIt would not.\nEven this futuristic machine's repertoire is drastically circumscribed by the mere fact of its being a physical object.\nIt does not even scratch the surface of what is logically possible as I shall now show, pausing their fire affliction.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=373"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cfc0b542-7447-43c9-a192-4735d73bfb3b": {"page_content": "Is there anything outside the repertoire of such a virtual reality generator?.\nWould it repertoire be the set of all logically possible environments?.\nIt would not.\nEven this futuristic machine's repertoire is drastically circumscribed by the mere fact of its being a physical object.\nIt does not even scratch the surface of what is logically possible as I shall now show, pausing their fire affliction.\nWhat he's going to show and what he's about to launch into is the diagonal argument which if you are a long time listener to talk cast you will have encountered before the beginning of infinity also goes through explanations of diagonal arguments.\nThis is a really interesting one.\nA way of showing how even a machine which can render all environments that can be experienced by a person does not contain it throughout all logically possible environments.\nThere are things it can't do and in fact the things it can't do vastly outnumber the things that it can do.\nEven though we've begun this whole exercise by trying to define into existence the machine that can do anything when it comes to virtual reality, it can render any environments.\nWe're about to see that in fact the attempt to do that, the attempt to realise that in physical reality is impossible.\nWhy?.\nDavid explains.\nThe basic idea of the proof, known as a diagonal argument, predates the idea of virtual reality.\nIt was first used by the 19th century mathematician Georg Cantel to prove that there are infinite quantities greater than the infinity of natural numbers.\nOne, two, three, the integers.\nThe same form of proof is at the heart of the modern theory of computation developed by Alan Turing and others in the 1930s.\nIt was also used by Kurt Gertel in his celebrated incompleteness theorem of which more in chapter 10.\nEach environment in our machines repertoire is generated by some program for its computer.\nImagine, the set of all valid programs for this computer, from a physical point of view each such program specifies a particular set of values for physical variables, on the disks or other media that represent the computer's program.\nWe know from quantum theory that all such variables are quantised and therefore that no matter how the computer works, the set of possible programs is discrete.\nEach program can therefore be expressed as a finite sequence of symbols in a discrete code or computer language.\nThere are infinitely many such programs, but each one can contain only a finite number of symbols.\nThat is because symbols of physical objects made of matter in recognisable configurations and one could not manufacture any infinite number of them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=510"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6ca50b6b-d3fb-4077-85c0-bc3a97796ff2": {"page_content": "We know from quantum theory that all such variables are quantised and therefore that no matter how the computer works, the set of possible programs is discrete.\nEach program can therefore be expressed as a finite sequence of symbols in a discrete code or computer language.\nThere are infinitely many such programs, but each one can contain only a finite number of symbols.\nThat is because symbols of physical objects made of matter in recognisable configurations and one could not manufacture any infinite number of them.\nAs I shall explain in chapter 10, these intuitively obvious physical requirements that the programs must be quantised and that each of them must consist of a finite number of symbols and can be executed in a sequence of steps are more substantive than they seem.\nThey are the only consequences of the laws of physics that are needed as input for the proof, though they are enough to impose drastic restrictions on the repertoire of any physically possible machine.\nOther physical laws may impose even more restrictions, but they would not affect the conclusions of this chapter end quote.\nOkay, so what we've got here is the setup of the concept that we have this computer and the computer can run an infinite number of different programs, but it has a repertoire which means the set of all programs and the set can be infinite, of course, you can have infinite sets, the list that are infinitely long.\nThere's no end to them, so there's no end to the number of programs in this set.\nIt's infinite.\nNow, some people have a lot of difficulty with this concept that if something is infinite, it might not necessarily contain everything logically possible.\nBut a simple way of understanding this is you just think of the set of all positive numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, off into infinity.\nIt clearly doesn't contain all the numbers.\nOkay, specifically if you were to say, well, it's only the integers, well, it doesn't contain a half, a third, and so on and so forth.\nAnd it doesn't contain the negative numbers.\nOkay, so there are things that aren't in that set.\nThere are numbers not in that set even though it's got an infinite number of numbers.\nSimilarly, we're going to get to here.\nThis idea that although there's an infinite number of different logically possible, of possible environments that can be rendered by this computer as a virtual reality generator, it won't contain everything that is logically possible.\nIt won't contain everything that's logically possible.\nSo that's the set up.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=644"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5dac5a5e-e194-42e9-a60e-8c4b8d5bea20": {"page_content": "Okay, so there are things that aren't in that set.\nThere are numbers not in that set even though it's got an infinite number of numbers.\nSimilarly, we're going to get to here.\nThis idea that although there's an infinite number of different logically possible, of possible environments that can be rendered by this computer as a virtual reality generator, it won't contain everything that is logically possible.\nIt won't contain everything that's logically possible.\nSo that's the set up.\nDavid goes on to say, quote, now let us imagine this infinite set of possible programs arranged in an infinitely long list and numbered program 1, program 2, and so on.\nThey could, for instance, be arranged in alphabetical order with respect to the symbols in which they are expressed.\nBecause each program generates an environment, this list can also be regarded as a list of all the environments in the machines repertoire.\nWe might call them environment 1, environment 2, and so on.\nIt could be that some of the environments are repeated in the list because two different programs might in effect perform the same calculations.\nBut that will not affect the argument.\nWhat is important is that each environment in our machines repertoire should appear at least once in the list.\nDavid makes a few more remarks that I'm going to again skip over and pick it up where he says, quote, let me define a class of logically possible environments which I shall call can't go to environments.\nThat's spelt, c-a-n-t-g-o-t-u. Can't go to environments.\nPartly an honor of can't all, girdle, and touring.\nAnd partly for a reason I shall explain shortly, end quote, very clever, clever little name there.\nCan't go to environments and end you to can't all girdle and touring.\nLet's keep going.\nQuote, they are defined as follows, for the first subjective minute, I can't go to environment behaves differently from environment 1, generated by program 1 of our generator.\nIt does not matter how it does behave, so long as it is to the user, recognizably different from environment 1.\nDuring the second minute, it behaves differently from environment 2 that what is now allowed to resemble environment 1 again.\nDuring the third minute, it behaves differently from environment 3 and so on.\nAny environment that satisfies these rules, I shall call, I can't go to environment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=772"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "21f62f5c-f406-41d4-bed5-960565755c61": {"page_content": "It does not matter how it does behave, so long as it is to the user, recognizably different from environment 1.\nDuring the second minute, it behaves differently from environment 2 that what is now allowed to resemble environment 1 again.\nDuring the third minute, it behaves differently from environment 3 and so on.\nAny environment that satisfies these rules, I shall call, I can't go to environment.\nNow, since a can go to environment does not behave exactly like environment 1, it cannot be environment 1.\nSince it does not behave exactly like environment 2, it cannot be environment 2.\nSince it is guaranteed sooner or later to behave differently from environment 3, environment 4, and every other environment on the list, it cannot be any of those either.\nBut that list contains all the environments that are generated by every possible program for this machine.\nIt follows that none of the can't go to environments are in the machines repertoire.\nThe can't go to environments are environments that we can't go to using this virtual reality generator end quote pausing there.\nThat's the diagonal argument.\nIt illustrates a couple of things that this infinitely long list that can of programs that can render any environment at all, all the environments that are possible, limited only by the memory capacity of the computer.\nLet's say you've got environment 1 that it can render.\nMaybe it looks like earth it is today.\nEnvironment 2.\nmaybe it is earth as it was yesterday and repeat for all the days and the past and then for environments on Mars and so on and so forth.\nThis infinitely long list of environments that the computer can generate based upon programs in the computer.\nBut the ones that it can't render are infinitely greater in number.\nThere's many, many more after all.\nEnvironment 1 is one such environment that can be rendered.\nNow all that we require is that our first can't go to environment differs from environment 1 in any way, shape or form.\nBut there's an infinite number of ways in which it could differ from environment 1.\nSo already we've got an infinite number of ways it could differ and there you can even number of ways it could differ from environment 2 and so on and so forth.\nSo the ones that can't be rendered, the can't go to environments vastly outnumber the number of environments that can be rendered, even though the ones that can be rendered are infinite number.\nOkay, let's keep going.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=896"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "92316c20-cff5-4936-aed1-ed66e62d9fb6": {"page_content": "But there's an infinite number of ways in which it could differ from environment 1.\nSo already we've got an infinite number of ways it could differ and there you can even number of ways it could differ from environment 2 and so on and so forth.\nSo the ones that can't be rendered, the can't go to environments vastly outnumber the number of environments that can be rendered, even though the ones that can be rendered are infinite number.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nDavid writes, quote, clearly there are enormously many can't go to environments because the definition leaves enormous freedom in choosing how they should behave.\nThe only constraint being that during each minute they should not behave in one particular way.\nIt can be proved that for every environment in the repertoire of a given virtual reality generator there are infinitely many can't go to environments that it cannot render.\nNor is there much scope for extending the repertoire by using a range of different virtual reality generators.\nOkay, no, end quote I won't go on and read the expansion of that.\nLeave that as an exercise to the reader.\nInstead I'll pick it up where David writes, quote, thus our hypothetical project of building the ultimate virtual reality generator which had been going so well has suddenly run into a brick wall.\nWhatever improvements may be made in the distant future, the repertoire of the entire technology of virtual reality will never grow beyond a certain fixed set of environments.\nAdmittedly, this set is infinitely large and very diverse by comparison with human experience prior to virtual reality technology nevertheless.\nIt is only an infinitesimal fraction of the set of all logically possible environments.\nWhat it feel like to be in a can't go to environment.\nAlthough the laws of physics do not permit us to be in one, it is still logically possible and so it is legitimate to ask what it would feel like.\nCertainly it could give us no new sensations because a universal image generator is possible and is assumed to be part of our high technology virtual reality generator.\nSo a can't go to environment would seem mysterious to us only after we had experienced it and reflected on the results.\nIt would go something like this.\nSuppose you are a virtual reality buff in the distant ultra high technology future.\nYou have become jaded for it seems to you that you've already tried everything interesting.\nBut then one day a genie appears and claims to be able to transport you to a can't go to environment.\nYou are skeptical but you agree to put the claim to the test.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c841cb7-5df5-4213-8025-4334305cb8ab": {"page_content": "It would go something like this.\nSuppose you are a virtual reality buff in the distant ultra high technology future.\nYou have become jaded for it seems to you that you've already tried everything interesting.\nBut then one day a genie appears and claims to be able to transport you to a can't go to environment.\nYou are skeptical but you agree to put the claim to the test.\nYou are whisked away to the environment.\nAfter a few experiments you seem to recognize it, it responds just like one of your favorite environments which on your home virtual reality system has program number.\nX. However, you keep experimenting and eventually during the X's subjective minute of the experience the environment responds in a way that is markedly different from anything that environment X would do.\nSo you give up the idea that this is environment.\nX.\nYou may then notice that everything that has happened so far is also consistent with another renderable environment environment Y.\nbut then during the white subjective minute you approve wrong again the characteristic of a can't go to environment is simply this.\nNo matter how often you guess, no matter how complex a program your content plate is being the one that might be rendering the environment you will always be proved wrong because no program will render it on your virtual reality generator or on any other.\nSoon or later you will have to bring the test to a close.\nAs that point you may well decide to concede the genie's claim that is not to say that you could have approved that you had been in a can't go to environment for there is always an even more complex program that the genie might have been running which would match your experience so far.\nThat is just the general feature of virtual reality that I've already discussed.\nNamely that experience cannot prove that one is in a given environment.\nBe it the center-caught at Wimbledon or an environment of the can't go to type end quote.\nSo that that that that harks back to previous chapter talking about not knowing that you are not being able to confirm that you are on an actual rendering of the real Wimbledon which is to say you can't confirm you can only ever disconfirm logically speaking.\nMoving on David writes quote.\nAnyway there are no such genies and no such environments so we must conclude that physics does not allow the repertoire of a virtual reality generator to be anywhere near as large as logical loan would allow.\nHow large can it be?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=1163"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "051cd7da-f7f0-4f82-9247-40af74571a13": {"page_content": "Moving on David writes quote.\nAnyway there are no such genies and no such environments so we must conclude that physics does not allow the repertoire of a virtual reality generator to be anywhere near as large as logical loan would allow.\nHow large can it be?.\nSince we cannot hope to render all logically possible environments let us consider a weaker but ultimately more interesting sort of universality.\nLet us define a universal virtual reality generator as one whose repertoire contains that of every other physically possible virtual reality generator.\nCan such a machine exist?.\nIt can.\nThinking about futuristic devices based on computer controlled nerve stimulation makes this obvious.\nIn fact almost two obvious.\nSuch a machine could be programmed to have the characteristics of any rival machine.\nIt could calculate how that machine would respond under any given program to any behavior by the user and so could render those responses with perfect accuracy.\nFrom the point of view of a given user any given user.\nJust perfect accuracy there.\nRemember that was defined in the previous chapter and it's basically where the user themselves is unable to distinguish and if you're unable to distinguish you know x from y then to you to the perfect degree of accuracy x is equal to y. That's all it's just a subjective perfect accuracy.\nIt's not perfect accuracy in real life in sort of an unobjective sense which doesn't exist.\nLet's get going quote.\nI say this is almost too obvious because it contains an important assumption about what the proposed device or more specifically its computer could be programmed to do given the appropriate program and enough time and storage media.\nIt could calculate the output of any computation performed by any other computer including the one in the rival virtual reality generator.\nThat's the feasibility of a universal virtual reality generator depends on the existence of a universal computer.\nA single machine that can calculate anything that can be calculated as I have said.\nThis sort of universality was first studied not by physicists but by mathematicians.\nThey were trying to make precise the intuitive notion of computing or calculating or proving something in mathematics.\nThey did not take on board the fact that mathematical calculation is a physical process.\nIn particular as I've explained it is a virtual reality rendering process.\nso it is impossible to determine by mathematical reasoning what can or cannot be calculated mathematically.\nThat depends entirely on the laws of physics but instead of trying to deduce their results from physical laws mathematicians postulated abstract models of computation and defined calculation and proof in terms of those models.\nI should discuss this interesting mistake in chapter 10.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=1272"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6b67ebf3-2b14-455e-b3c6-7e4b6535a5c0": {"page_content": "They did not take on board the fact that mathematical calculation is a physical process.\nIn particular as I've explained it is a virtual reality rendering process.\nso it is impossible to determine by mathematical reasoning what can or cannot be calculated mathematically.\nThat depends entirely on the laws of physics but instead of trying to deduce their results from physical laws mathematicians postulated abstract models of computation and defined calculation and proof in terms of those models.\nI should discuss this interesting mistake in chapter 10.\nThat is how it came about that over a period of a few months in 1936.\nThree mathematicians and will post Alonso Church and most importantly Alan Turing independently created the first abstract designs for universal computers just pausing their my reflection.\nI might just go back and just to mention that this argument here, this explanation about the fact that mathematics consists of explanations but it requires calculations, it uses proofs and computations and these things are completed by physical systems whether the mathematician themselves or computers and pocket calculators and that kind of thing.\nA bound necessarily by the laws of physics so what is able to be proved is limited by the set of things that the laws of physics say is provable because your building computers out of matter, the matter obeys laws of physics, and those laws of physics only allow certain kinds of things to be proved.\nThe laws of physics bound what can be mathematically proved.\nMany mathematicians don't like that, that doesn't matter, doesn't affect the fact that it's true.\nMany people don't like that, they think that somehow mathematics has to be prior to physics in some sense.\nNow all that said, the precise of the same argument applies even more broadly.\nTo reasoning in general, reasoning in general, you can't get outside of the laws of physics.\nWhat can be known is bounded by the laws of physics and so philosophy, epistemology, reasoning itself is done by physical things, human beings, brains, minds, and they obey laws of physics.\nSo it is the laws of physics that constrain the possibility of what we can think, what we can know, what we can reason.\nThis is not a problem as such, but it's just worth keeping in view and understanding.\nIt does come to bear on capacity to know, but it doesn't come on our, it doesn't come to bear on our capacity to solve problems that we're interested in.\nIn particular, it's the very thing that allows us to know that problems are solvable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=1419"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c85dd1ce-f315-4a83-a424-db84e99b83ad": {"page_content": "This is not a problem as such, but it's just worth keeping in view and understanding.\nIt does come to bear on capacity to know, but it doesn't come on our, it doesn't come to bear on our capacity to solve problems that we're interested in.\nIn particular, it's the very thing that allows us to know that problems are solvable.\nProblems are solvable precisely because, well, the physical structure of our brain, what it's able to do uniquely is generate explanations, which can be in one-to-one correspondence with the rest of physical reality.\nThat's what the laws of physics allow.\nIt provides, the laws of physics provide constraints but allow for that, and therefore allow for the solving in principle of any possible problem we could encounter.\nProblems are soluble.\nAnd David's going to get to that, essentially get to that in this chapter.\nBut I do think one reason I'm also saying that is that philosophers who are sometimes disconnected to some extent from physics, the file to take this into account and think that the physics can be irrelevant to what they're doing, but it's not, not at a linear relevant.\nThere's not to say that everything reduces to physics, I'm not being reductionist in this sense, or that the philosopher needs to refer to what's going on in physics now and again.\nBut the reasoning itself has to be understood is itself bounded by what the laws of physics permit us to reason about.\nIf you're trying to, the common area here that really, I guess I'm circling, is the prophecy, that philosophers, epistemologists, others who don't take this on board fully, think that there must be a mechanism whether by induction or something else that allows them to forecast the future perfectly accurately.\nBut that is in contravention to laws of physics.\nIt's that kind of thing that importantly is constrained by laws of physics.\nLaws of physics set a bound on what is noble, and one thing that's not noble is the creation of knowledge, knowledge creation.\nThe future cannot be known with perfect fidelity.\nAlso because of laws of physics as well as the fact that people create explanatory knowledge which changes the future in ways that cannot be known ahead of time.\nThat's a major theme of beginning of infinity, a theme throughout ToKCast as well.\nSo I'll just point to earlier work on that kind of stuff rather than going down the road of making that argument again.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=1584"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "13e329f0-fde8-436f-a4e1-ee113f316941": {"page_content": "The future cannot be known with perfect fidelity.\nAlso because of laws of physics as well as the fact that people create explanatory knowledge which changes the future in ways that cannot be known ahead of time.\nThat's a major theme of beginning of infinity, a theme throughout ToKCast as well.\nSo I'll just point to earlier work on that kind of stuff rather than going down the road of making that argument again.\nBut just to say that a knowledge of this kind of physics can help with the philosopher and the epistemologist, or people who are interested in knowledge, rather than being utterly disconnected from things.\nAnd I think that where where some philosophers go wrong, especially when they fall into pessimism, it can be because of this.\nOkay, back to the book.\nWe're talking about how Emma will post Alonzo's search and Alan Turing most importantly, created the first abstract designs for universal computers.\nOkay, so abstract designs, important to know.\nNot a physical design, abstract, mathematical theory of the computer.\nWithout being concerned about the physical laws that actually control these things, David Wright's on this.\nEach of them conjecture that his model of computation did indeed correctly formalize the traditional intuitive notion of mathematical computation.\nConsequently, each of them also conjecture that his model was equivalent to had the same repertoire as any other reasonable formalization of the same intuition.\nThis is now known as the Church Turing conjecture.\nTuring's model of computation, and his conception of the nature of the problem he was solving, was the closest to being physical.\nHis abstract computer, the Turing machine, was abstracted from the idea of a paper tape divided into squares with one of a finite number of easily distinguishable symbols written on each square.\nComputation was performed by examining one square at a time, moving the tape backwards or forwards, and erasing or writing one of the symbols according to simple unambiguous rules, pausing their my reflection.\nThis is one of the most jarring insights that goes unsaid, untold, unlearned, I think, these days.\nUnless one takes on pure mathematics course, takes an interest in this kind of thing, goes into computer science, whatever.\nThat no matter how diverse this technology of computer becomes, how ubiquitous it becomes, that all of it can be modeled.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=1722"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "749e5a4a-2e6a-4b3d-87a2-f157d8953590": {"page_content": "This is one of the most jarring insights that goes unsaid, untold, unlearned, I think, these days.\nUnless one takes on pure mathematics course, takes an interest in this kind of thing, goes into computer science, whatever.\nThat no matter how diverse this technology of computer becomes, how ubiquitous it becomes, that all of it can be modeled.\nOkay, but modular what David is about to say and the insights that David brings with quantum computational and other stuff, but it can be modeled by, reduced to, the action of reading and infinitely, well, not infinite, but a very long tape divided into squares with symbols written on it.\nThat's what computers do.\nIt doesn't matter how complicated the program it could be running a word processor, it could be simulating the collision of galaxies, it could be running a computer game, it could be, you know, Facebook or Twitter or a flight simulator, whatever the program is, whatever the thing is that the computer can do is based upon code, a program, and that itself can be represented as symbols of zeros and ones on a long strip of paper, remarkable, absolutely remarkable.\nAnd when you get into the details of this, that and how this, in principle, could be done for any program is perhaps jarring to people, that a complicated computer program could reduce to such a simple thing, such a simple idea.\nAnd this is the first model of computation, which predated the existence of any actual computer that had been built, an electronic computer.\nLet's keep going.\nAnd David writes, quote, cheering proved that one particular computer of this type, the universal Turing machine, had the combined repertoire of all other Turing machines.\nHe conjectured that this repertoire consisted precisely of every function that would naturally be regarded as computable.\nHe meant computable by mathematicians.\nBut mathematicians are rather untypical physical objects.\nWhy should we assume that rendering them in the act of performing calculations is the ultimate in computational tasks?.\nIt turns out that it is not.\nAs I shall explain in chapter nine, quantum computers can perform computations of which no human mathematician will ever, even in principle, be capable, pausing their my reflection.\nNow, why should there be things that a human mathematician cannot even in principle calculate?.\nDoes this violate the universality of the human mind?.\nIt doesn't.\nWhy?.\nWell, because calculation is not explanation.\nNow, quantum computers harness something called entanglement and interference phenomena.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d6f88f0b-3e41-4dd3-a8eb-0be8542ee47e": {"page_content": "As I shall explain in chapter nine, quantum computers can perform computations of which no human mathematician will ever, even in principle, be capable, pausing their my reflection.\nNow, why should there be things that a human mathematician cannot even in principle calculate?.\nDoes this violate the universality of the human mind?.\nIt doesn't.\nWhy?.\nWell, because calculation is not explanation.\nNow, quantum computers harness something called entanglement and interference phenomena.\nI go to ToKCast that are about the multiverse to go into that or to read sections of the fabric of reality or the beginning infinity to understand or have have more insight into entanglement and interference phenomena.\nBut anyway, quantum computers use this.\nBut this is not how brains presumably do what they do.\nThat's not how they do their computations.\nSo, although a person cannot calculate what a quantum computer can, a person can't quickly do the prime factorization of a 15 digit number or calculate the position, let's say, of electrons in some uranium atom, this does not prevent us from understanding those things and what is going on there and using technology to do it.\nWe can still understand it.\nWe can still explain those things that that phenomena.\nThere is a difference between calculation, which in physics allows some precise prediction and understanding the explanation that allows for that prediction to be made.\nWe're still universal, human beings are people, people are universal, universal, explainers, not universal calculators.\nIndeed, I don't think there can be a universal calculator.\nAfter all, all we need to do is to just think of a number large enough whose prime factorization could never be done, even in the multiverse, no matter how much time you go.\nWhatever number that is, I don't know, 10 to the power of 10 to the power of a million to the power of seven or something.\nI don't know, there must be some number out there which it's just so large that the prime factorization would just take longer than the life of the universe, but maybe the universe goes on forever.\nMaybe if the universe is eternal and this computer lasted forever and had an eternal and an infinite amount of energy, maybe then you could have this universal calculator.\nBut put aside that, there are non-computable functions as cheering a particular girdle proof.\nThere are these non-computable things anyway.\nOkay, let's go back to the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=1987"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9d3b2790-e12f-4a9a-812a-348d3becd5a5": {"page_content": "Maybe if the universe is eternal and this computer lasted forever and had an eternal and an infinite amount of energy, maybe then you could have this universal calculator.\nBut put aside that, there are non-computable functions as cheering a particular girdle proof.\nThere are these non-computable things anyway.\nOkay, let's go back to the book.\nIt is implicit in Turing's work that he expected what would naturally be regarded as computable to be also what could, at least in principle, be computed in nature.\nThis expectation is tantamount to a stronger physical version of the Church Turing conjecture.\nThe mathematician Roger Penrose has suggested that it should be called the Turing principle, the Turing principle, for abstract computers simulating physical objects.\nThere exists an abstract universal computer whose repertoire includes any computation that any physically possible object can perform.\nSo that's the Turing principle.\nThere goes on to say.\nTuring believed that the universal computer in question was the universal Turing machine.\nTo take account of the wider repertoire of quantum computers, I have stated the principle in a form that does not specify which particular abstract computer does the job, Paul's name reflects.\nYes, this is David's addition to Turing's work.\nThe generalization of what Turing started Turing's principle, David proved and which laid the foundations for quantum computation.\nThat there is such a physical object that can be constructed, that is able to do the computations of anything.\nAny computable thing can be computed by this particular thing.\nAnd that includes anything made of matter, buying laws or physics, is going to be, it's behavior is going to be computable.\nIt goes on to say, quote, the proof I've given of the existence of can't go to environments is essentially due to Turing.\nAs I said, he was not thinking explicitly in terms of virtual reality, but in an environment that can be rendered does correspond to a class of mathematical questions whose answers can be calculated.\nThose questions are computable.\nThe remainder, the questions for which there is no way of calculating the answer are called non-computable.\nIf a question is non-computable, that does not mean that it has no answer or that its answer is in any sense ill-defined or ambiguous.\nOn the contrary, it means that it definitely has an answer.\nIt is just that there physically is no way even in principle of obtaining that answer or more precisely, since one could always make a lucky unverifiable guess of proving that is the answer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=2120"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f56c0838-1156-4bec-b0fc-9c693a58649d": {"page_content": "If a question is non-computable, that does not mean that it has no answer or that its answer is in any sense ill-defined or ambiguous.\nOn the contrary, it means that it definitely has an answer.\nIt is just that there physically is no way even in principle of obtaining that answer or more precisely, since one could always make a lucky unverifiable guess of proving that is the answer.\nFor example, a prime pair is a pair of prime numbers whose differences too, such as 3 and 5 or 11 and 13.\nMathematicians have tried in vain to answer the question whether there are infinitely many such pairs or only a finite number of them.\nIt is not even known whether this question is computable.\nLet us suppose that it is not.\nThat is to say that no one and no computer can ever produce a proof either that there are only finitely many prime pairs or that there are infinitely many.\nEven so, the question does have an answer.\nOne can say with certainty that either there is a highest prime pair or there are infinitely many prime pairs.\nThere is no third possibility.\nThe question remains well defined, even though we may never know the answer.\nIn virtual reality terms, no physically possible virtual reality generator can render an environment in which answers to non-computable questions are provided to the user on demand.\nSuch environments are of the can't go to type.\nAnd conversely, every can't go to environment corresponds to a class of mathematical questions.\nWhat would happen next in an environment defined in such and such a way, which it is physically possible to answer?.\nAlthough non-computable questions are infinitely more numerous than computable ones, they tend to be more esoteric.\nThat is no accident.\nIt is because of the parts of mathematics that we tend to consider the least esoteric are those we see reflected in the behavior of physical objects in familiar situations.\nIn such cases, we can often use those physical objects to answer questions about the corresponding mathematical relationships.\nFor example, we can count on our fingers because the physics of fingers naturally mimics the arithmetic of the whole numbers from zero to ten, pausing their more reflection.\nSo, pure mathematics doesn't need to concern itself about whether it applies to physical stuff.\nThey can, the pure mathematicians can consider pure abstractions, the things that aren't made out of material at all and don't obey the laws of physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=2263"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "20094e32-f27a-4b8c-84da-218673dd3395": {"page_content": "For example, we can count on our fingers because the physics of fingers naturally mimics the arithmetic of the whole numbers from zero to ten, pausing their more reflection.\nSo, pure mathematics doesn't need to concern itself about whether it applies to physical stuff.\nThey can, the pure mathematicians can consider pure abstractions, the things that aren't made out of material at all and don't obey the laws of physics.\nEven though what can be known is constrained by the laws of physics, that's a separate issue, quite a separate issue.\nThe constraints placed on mathematics by the laws of physics aren't constraints that prevent mathematics from delving into non-physical stuff.\nIndeed, pure mathematics is largely about non-physical stuff.\nThere's a great YouTube video of Richard Fine when talking about mathematics and physics, the relationship between them and the mathematicians and the physicists.\nIt's almost like a stand-up routine.\nThe man was just so engaging, so entertaining, and so funny when he talks about certain things.\nThat particular one I'll try and remember to provide a link in the description to this video to that one.\nI can't put a clip here, I'd like to be able to put a clip here, but it seems when I do that, they take down the entire video and it's such a hassle, so I have to avoid putting clips in these days.\nBut in a, you know, like, Feynman's basically saying, you look, your physicist is sort of interested in specific cases.\nHe's not interested in general cases.\nHe goes along to the mathematician and then he says, I'm interested in, you know, the laws of gravity, for example, in three-dimensional space.\nI just need the three-dimensional space and the mathematical, pure mathematician will say, well, for an n-dimensional space, here are the theorems that follow and the physicists will say, I'm not interested in n-dimensions.\nI'm not interested in just the arbitrary, you know, sort of force.\nI'm not interested in arbitrary spaces of n-dimensions.\nI'm interested in a specific case and the pure mathematician will say, well, just substitute n equals three then.\nAnd then, of course, I find me goes on to say something like, then, of course, the physicist has to go crawling back to the pure mathematician at some point and say, you know, you're talking about those n-dimensional spaces.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=2382"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "99e8e843-049f-4605-9ee1-5d90b9bd9477": {"page_content": "I'm not interested in arbitrary spaces of n-dimensions.\nI'm interested in a specific case and the pure mathematician will say, well, just substitute n equals three then.\nAnd then, of course, I find me goes on to say something like, then, of course, the physicist has to go crawling back to the pure mathematician at some point and say, you know, you're talking about those n-dimensional spaces.\nWhat about the case of n equals four?.\nSometimes these, the general case turns out to be very useful for the physicist.\nAnd there is this cross-pollination that happens between physics and mathematics, of course.\nWhat is done in math in pure mathematics sometimes is thought to be utterly irrelevant.\nAnd, you know, I've mentioned before, the case of G.H. Hardy and a mathematician's apology wrote this book about, you know, meeting romanogen, another famous mathematician.\nAnd Hardy said, Hardy said of his own work that he didn't think it would ever have any applications to anything ever, and he was quite proud of it, he regarded as more being like art.\nOkay?.\nJust to just exploring the space of mathematics for its own sake.\nBut in fact, his own work, I think, went on to be used in electrical engineering and, you know, had had applications anyway, had proper applications later on.\nAnd, you know, that's the unpredictability of the growth of knowledge.\nAnd it can happen in the other direction as well, you know, physicists can do work in physics, which then goes on to have a bearing on what happens in mathematics.\nI think, you know, things like chaos theory, you know, there's first investigator biophysicists about how seemingly purely deterministic systems, bang, you know, the simple laws can actually become chaotic.\nEven if you assume that the classical laws of physics, the perfectly deterministic laws of things, they can lead to these extremely complex behavior.\nA double pendulum is one such thing, which has this interestingly chaotic behavior.\nSo that comes from physics and goes into pure mathematics, and the pure mathematicians can explore that kind of thing.\nBut, yes, if you want to laugh, definitely look up Feynman talking about mathematics and physics.\nLet's keep going, David Wright's.\nQuite.\nThe reptiles of the three very different abstract computers defined by Turing, Church, and Post were soon proved to be identical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=2503"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d388af7d-c424-4305-b0a1-aca5907d7fa5": {"page_content": "A double pendulum is one such thing, which has this interestingly chaotic behavior.\nSo that comes from physics and goes into pure mathematics, and the pure mathematicians can explore that kind of thing.\nBut, yes, if you want to laugh, definitely look up Feynman talking about mathematics and physics.\nLet's keep going, David Wright's.\nQuite.\nThe reptiles of the three very different abstract computers defined by Turing, Church, and Post were soon proved to be identical.\nSo have the repertoire of all abstract models of mathematical computation that have since been proposed.\nThis is deemed to lend support to the Church Turing conjecture and to the universality of the universal Turing machine.\nHowever, the computing power of abstract machines has no bearing on what is computable in reality, pausing their myreflection.\nYes, so here, this is the genius of David Deutsch.\nThis is where it comes in, right?.\nI mean, if you regard Turing as a genius for the insight about all of this computation stuff, which he certainly was, then so is this insight by David, okay?.\nIt may seem simple in retrospect, you know, like so much of science just seems simple like, well, why couldn't I think of that?.\nWell, because you're not thinking about this particular problem all the time.\nYou could, any of us could, but we didn't.\nIt's the people that are passionately curious and interested in these particular problems and push the frontier of science, in this case, physics and computation forward.\nThis whole idea that thinking about computation as actually being physical, and not merely an abstract thing, it takes insight, questioning assumptions, and that can be hard, which assumptions do you question?.\nAnd once you question those assumptions, what do you replace them with?.\nWhat's better?.\nIt's no point you're saying, oh, let's assume that's false.\nWell, then what are you going to put in its place?.\nIf nothing does it lead to something better or not?.\nEven recognizing, noticing in the first place that something is an assumption at all is hard, computation is assumed to be abstract and not physical.\nOh, is it?.\nYeah, that sense in assumption.\nAnd I guess a lot of the mathematicians who were doing this didn't realize the assumptions they were making.\nWho notices that kind of thing?.\nWhat is the consequence of that?.\nIt's like, oh, physics is about dynamical laws.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=2630"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "86d2310e-a5bf-4b33-855e-acbbd157df32": {"page_content": "Even recognizing, noticing in the first place that something is an assumption at all is hard, computation is assumed to be abstract and not physical.\nOh, is it?.\nYeah, that sense in assumption.\nAnd I guess a lot of the mathematicians who were doing this didn't realize the assumptions they were making.\nWho notices that kind of thing?.\nWhat is the consequence of that?.\nIt's like, oh, physics is about dynamical laws.\nYou plug in the initial conditions and you calculate what goes on next.\nBut that's an assumption as well.\nWhat if we relaxed that assumption and considered something deeper about what is possible and impossible?.\nWhy would we have a question the very foundations of physics?.\nWho would ever do that?.\nWell, these things take creative leaps, don't they?.\nAnd those creative leaps can be the hard part.\nYou have to sit down and you have to be creative and you have to think about these things.\nThey're hard and yet not hard.\nYou know, like they're hard and once someone's done it, you can look back and you go, oh, you know, how could it have been otherwise?.\nIt's that kind of thing.\nBut it's beforehand before the creative actors take in place that, you know, people are struggling to make the progress.\nAnd yet it always seems in retrospect.\nOh, that was so simple.\nI could have done that.\nYeah, you could have.\nBut you weren't focused on that problem.\nWere you?.\nAnd yet this is the kind of thing that anyone interested in progress needs to strive for.\nIt's not to say, well, you just go around assuming everything is false and then you're done, question everything and then you're done.\nNo, you need an alternative.\nThis is the hard part.\nYou need to, yeah, take what is known now, regard it as the best explanation now, figure out what could possibly be false about it and replace that with something better, something that is going to have consequences that you can investigate and pursue or that others can, perhaps.\nAnd then you might have a whole new field of physics, let's say.\nYou might have a whole field of quantum computation, say.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nDavid writes, quote, the scope of virtual reality and its wider implications for the comprehensibility of nature and other aspects of the fabric of reality depends on whether the relevant computers are physically realizable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "af99bbe1-2a47-4b40-bc0f-39dd4b178133": {"page_content": "And then you might have a whole new field of physics, let's say.\nYou might have a whole field of quantum computation, say.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nDavid writes, quote, the scope of virtual reality and its wider implications for the comprehensibility of nature and other aspects of the fabric of reality depends on whether the relevant computers are physically realizable.\nIn particular, any genuine universal computer must itself be physically realizable.\nThis leads to a stronger version of the cheering principle, the cheering principle for physical computers simulating each other.\nIt is possible to build a universal computer, a machine that can be programmed to perform any computation that any other physical object can perform.\nIt follows that if a universal image generator were controlled by a universal computer, the resulting machine would be a universal virtual reality generator.\nIn other words, the following principle also holds the cheering principle for virtual reality generators rendering each other.\nIt is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes that of every other physically possible virtual reality generator.\nNow any environment can be rendered by a virtual reality generator of some sort.\nFor instance, one could always regard a copy of that very environment as a virtual reality generator with perhaps a very small repertoire.\nSo it also follows from this version of the cheering principle that any physically possible environment can be rendered by the universal virtual reality generator.\nHence, to express the very strong self-similarity that exists in the structure of reality embracing not only computations but all physical processes, the cheering principle can be stated in this all embracing form.\nThe cheering principle, it is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes every physically possible environment.\nThis is the strongest form of the cheering principle.\nIt not only tells us that various parts of reality can resemble one another.\nIt tells us that a single physical object, buildable once and for all, apart from maintenance and a supply of additional memory when needed, can perform with unlimited accuracy, the task of describing or mimicking any other part of the multiverse.\nThis set of all behaviors and responses that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviors and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes.\nThe set of all behaviors and responses of that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviors and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes, pausing the MRI reflection.\nSo this is the basis of quantum computation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9bd42248-bcdd-4126-badc-ba842c537ed0": {"page_content": "This set of all behaviors and responses that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviors and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes.\nThe set of all behaviors and responses of that one object exactly mirrors the set of all behaviors and responses of all other physically possible objects and processes, pausing the MRI reflection.\nSo this is the basis of quantum computation.\nThis says that you can build this thing, this computer, quantum computer, which as long as you have the program, as long as you know what to feed into this computer, it can represent that environment.\nIt can represent that world.\nIn particular, if you have a theory of physics, then you can program it in, you can model the rest of physical reality.\nAnd it also implies the existence of people who can understand because they also are rendering these environments with their models of science that this can be done too, that this is the comprehensibility of physical reality as well.\nIt allows for the comprehensibility of physical reality as well.\nLet's go on, David writes.\nOn this exact point, David goes on, right, quote, this is just the sort of self similarity that is necessary if, according to the hope I expressed in chapter one, the fabric of reality used to be truly unified and comprehensible.\nIf the laws of physics as they apply to any physical object or process are to be comprehensible, they must be capable of being embodied in another physical object, the Noah, pausing the MRI reflection.\nSo that's the universal explanation.\nNow, this particular passage is where I say David's just dropping insight bombs.\nIt's just so much of the beginning of infinity yet to come.\nEven stuff of the science of Canon can't be the constructive theory.\nAnd it's just deep deep stuff.\nSo I'll go on, okay, and then I'm going to go back.\nand I'm going to read some of this again, for emphasis, it's important.\nDavid writes, quote, it is also necessary that processes capable of creating such knowledge be physically possible.\nSuch processes are called science.\nScience depends on experimental testing, which means physically rendering a law's predictions and comparing it with a rendering of reality.\nEnd quote.\nSo we've moved from the existence of the universal computer, the sharing principle, to the idea that Noah's are able to come to a and understanding of physical reality that's entailed within this.\nAnd also that science therefore is possible and physically testing theories is possible.\nThis is all coming from the same thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3019c49d-8ef1-4a05-8854-4fbe7cd5ab95": {"page_content": "Such processes are called science.\nScience depends on experimental testing, which means physically rendering a law's predictions and comparing it with a rendering of reality.\nEnd quote.\nSo we've moved from the existence of the universal computer, the sharing principle, to the idea that Noah's are able to come to a and understanding of physical reality that's entailed within this.\nAnd also that science therefore is possible and physically testing theories is possible.\nThis is all coming from the same thing.\nI apologize if anyone feels patronised that I'm just laboring the labouring the point, but it's just for anyone who's new to this, these can be deep insights.\nAnd it's one reason why because of the density of consequences that flow from, and David pursues these consequences, but the density of them, the number of them, the depth of them means that sometimes the world view is difficult to convey and let's say a few tweets that it's all built in a sense as a web of these interconnected explanations about reality, which have these connections between physics, mathematics, epistemology, science, more broadly, philosophy.\nLet's keep going, David writes.\nIt also depends on explanation and that requires abstract laws themselves, not merely their predictive content, to be capable of being rendered in virtual reality.\nEnd quote.\nSo there we have David in the fabric of reality, again, you know, laying out the deep themes of the beginning of infinity.\nAnd again, the idea of the Noah here, okay, and the purpose of science, that abstract laws themselves being explained, not merely being about their predictive content, being able to predict stuff, instrumentalism as false.\nDavid goes on, quote, this is a tall order, but reality does meet it.\nThat is to say the laws of physics meet it.\nThe laws of physics by conforming to the Turing principle make it physically possible for those same laws to become known to physical objects.\nThus, the laws of physics may be said to mandate their own comprehensibility end quote.\nSo it's that kind of passage that sets the book apart from other books.\nIt is not merely the science.\nIt's philosophical exploration of these ideas and hence provides a whole world of view, a way of thinking about reality that is coherent, as far as we can tell, it's the deepest one that we can tell, providing for cosmic significance of people and comprehensibility of that cosmos.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=3116"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "def145cc-af67-4078-9753-4b9a274de842": {"page_content": "Thus, the laws of physics may be said to mandate their own comprehensibility end quote.\nSo it's that kind of passage that sets the book apart from other books.\nIt is not merely the science.\nIt's philosophical exploration of these ideas and hence provides a whole world of view, a way of thinking about reality that is coherent, as far as we can tell, it's the deepest one that we can tell, providing for cosmic significance of people and comprehensibility of that cosmos.\nAnd it goes on with more insight, bombs, but really I just have to, without interruption, without interruption, go back and just read through that, okay, because David's talking about self-similarity.\nWhat is this self-similarity is, well, and I'll talk about this in my Nexus video, the idea here is that in a person's mind, they represent the rest of physical reality.\nThere's a self-similarity, there's relationships between ideas you have in your mind that correspond to some degree of accuracy with physical reality.\nThat's what self-similarity is.\nAnd so that connection between us and the cosmos, or all of reality rather, you know, every single thing that can be known, makes us unique and important.\nSo let's just go through and read that again because it is just one of the reasons why this is one of my favorite chapters.\nIt's the wheelhouse of David Deutsch.\nIt underscores the world you presented to us in both of these books here too.\nIt's optimistic, all-encompassing, weighing which these findings, like that you're in principle, allow for comprehensibility, infinite progress, solving of problems.\nLet's just read it again.\nLet's just read it again.\nAnd enjoy it without my interruption.\nQuote, this is just the sort of self-similarity that is necessary.\nIf according to the hope I expressed in Chapter 1, the fabric of reality is to be truly unified and comprehensible.\nIf the laws of physics as they apply to any physical object or process are to be comprehensible, they must be capable of being embodied in another physical object, the Noah.\nIt is also necessary that processes capable of creating such knowledge, be physically possible.\nSuch processes are called science.\nScience depends on experiment testing, which means physically rendering a law's predictions and comparing it with a rendering of reality.\nIt also depends on explanation, and that requires the abstract laws themselves, not merely their predictive content, to be capable of being rendered in virtual reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=3066"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ccce0be9-585d-463b-bb81-289a52dd5041": {"page_content": "It is also necessary that processes capable of creating such knowledge, be physically possible.\nSuch processes are called science.\nScience depends on experiment testing, which means physically rendering a law's predictions and comparing it with a rendering of reality.\nIt also depends on explanation, and that requires the abstract laws themselves, not merely their predictive content, to be capable of being rendered in virtual reality.\nThis is a tall order, but reality does meet it.\nThat is to say, the laws of physics meet it.\nThe laws of physics by conforming to the Turing principle make it physically possible for those same laws to become known to physical objects.\nThus, the laws of physics may be said to mandate their own comprehensibility.\nAmazing stuff.\nThe scientific view of the deep importance of human beings as people, the scientific view, the rejection of parochialism and the principle of mediocrity, and pessimism about people as a chemical scum.\nThat's all there, that we are unique, and in some sense, written into the laws of physics.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nDavid Wright is quite since building a universal virtual reality generator is physically possible.\nIt must actually be built in some universes.\nA caveat is necessary here.\nAs I explained in chapter three, we can normally define a physically possible process as one that actually occurs somewhere in the multiverse.\nBut strictly speaking, a universal virtual reality generator is a limiting case that requires arbitrarily large resources to operate.\nSo what we mean by saying that it is physically possible is that virtual reality generators would repertoire arbitrarily close to the set of all physically possible environments exist in the multiverse.\nSimilarly, since the laws of physics are capable of being rendered, they are rendered somewhere.\nThus it follows from the Turing principle in the strong form for which I have argued that the laws of physics do not merely mandate their own comprehensibility in some abstract sense.\nComprehensibility by abstract scientists as it were, they imply the physical existence somewhere in the multiverse of entities that understand them arbitrarily.\nWell, I should have discussed this implication further in later chapters, pausing that as my reflection.\nYes, so when it says there, just be aware, now I'm not speaking, this is me talking, this is not David talking.\nI could be wrong, mistakes my own.\nThis could be one of them I'm about to make.\nBut my understanding over that there is when he says they imply the physical existence somewhere in the multiverse of entities that understand them arbitrarily well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=3116"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "710e1ab8-aac1-4452-8e05-8c57db6e3430": {"page_content": "Well, I should have discussed this implication further in later chapters, pausing that as my reflection.\nYes, so when it says there, just be aware, now I'm not speaking, this is me talking, this is not David talking.\nI could be wrong, mistakes my own.\nThis could be one of them I'm about to make.\nBut my understanding over that there is when he says they imply the physical existence somewhere in the multiverse of entities that understand them arbitrarily well.\nHe's not saying that here right now at the same time as us, somewhere there are aliens that exist that understand them arbitrarily well.\nIt's that we could be those entities.\nIf we're not then someone else will be, some other species will be, but we could be that species.\nWe could be those entities that understand the physical laws arbitrarily well.\nIn other words, people are mandated by the laws of physics.\nIf they're possible they exist somewhere, well here we are, here we are.\nNow, it could be the case that a great catastrophe wipes us out, that the bostromes and reases and various other intellectuals who think the civilization could come to an end.\nWe all think it could come to an end, but they tend to be putting their eggs into that basket, civilization crumbling.\nThey could be right.\nIf they are right then we won't be the ones that go on to understand the physical laws arbitrarily well, but other people will.\nThat's my understanding of that.\nWe could be the ones.\nI think we will be.\nI think we will be.\nIt appears to be the case.\nThere needs to be a history of optimism written that things are getting better, not irrevocably, not necessarily, but there are explanations that go into allowing for the dynamic society which we are occupying right now.\nThe resilience of this society is growing, not diminishing.\nOf course, hyperbole and pessimism is increasing to some extent in some places, but optimism is increasing in other places as well.\nIn the West, sometimes we end up having a blanket of view because our intellectuals have a certain cultural demand.\nI think it's transient.\nI think that there will be a resurgence of optimism.\nPeople are going to get bored.\nThey're going to get bored with the constant pessimism, the constant weighing which people, human beings, talk down human beings, talk up the environment.\nIt's can't last.\nIt's can't last.\nI'm hopeful.\nOkay, let's keep going.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=3542"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "80c204c8-ffcc-478b-9248-e83092521528": {"page_content": "In the West, sometimes we end up having a blanket of view because our intellectuals have a certain cultural demand.\nI think it's transient.\nI think that there will be a resurgence of optimism.\nPeople are going to get bored.\nThey're going to get bored with the constant pessimism, the constant weighing which people, human beings, talk down human beings, talk up the environment.\nIt's can't last.\nIt's can't last.\nI'm hopeful.\nOkay, let's keep going.\nLet me get to off track.\nDavid writes, quote, Now I return to the question I posed in the previous chapter, namely whether if we only had a virtual reality rendering based on the wrong laws of physics to learn from, we should expect to learn the wrong laws.\nThe first thing to stress is that we do have only virtual reality based on the wrong laws to learn from.\nAs I've said, all our external experiences are of virtual reality generated by our own brains.\nAnd since our concepts and theories whether in born or learned are never perfect, all our renderings are indeed inaccurate.\nThat is to say, they give us the experience of an environment that is significantly different from the environment that we are really in.\nMarriages and other optical illusions are examples of this.\nAnother is that we experience the earth to be at respinate our feet despite its rapid and complex motion in reality.\nAnother is that we experience a single universe and a single instance of our own conscious selves at a time while in reality there are many.\nBut these inaccurate and misleading experiences provide no argument against scientific reasoning.\nOn the contrary, such deficiencies are its very starting point, pausing their my reflection.\nYes, so this is the reputation of empiricism.\nOur senses don't provide us with accurate information.\nWe need science.\nScience is about explaining what we see in terms of what we don't see.\nIt's the scene in terms of the unseen.\nMy desk here made of wood, solid, continuous matter, it feels like, feels nice and smooth.\nWe know it's bumpy atoms.\nI can't see the atoms.\nMy senses are not going to be able to tell me that.\nBut we have theories and we had theories of atoms before we had scanning electron microscopes that could produce images for us of those atoms.\nNo image is possible.\nNo way of seeing what is going on in the center core of the sun.\nThe core of the sun is not directly observable.\nWe said surface.\nBut we know what's going on there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3045ed37-0338-4392-8718-4da666b64bd1": {"page_content": "We know it's bumpy atoms.\nI can't see the atoms.\nMy senses are not going to be able to tell me that.\nBut we have theories and we had theories of atoms before we had scanning electron microscopes that could produce images for us of those atoms.\nNo image is possible.\nNo way of seeing what is going on in the center core of the sun.\nThe core of the sun is not directly observable.\nWe said surface.\nBut we know what's going on there.\nWe know what's going on there because of our explanations.\nBig bang.\nNo one's going to be there to observe it.\nNo one was there to observe it.\nBut we know what happened.\nNo one's going to see a dinosaur.\nAlmost everything in science is like this.\nWe don't see the stuff that really explains what we do see, whether because it's too small, too vast, too far back in time, so on and so forth.\nScience is about the scene in terms of the unseen.\nWe get an inaccurate experience of reality.\nOur experience is virtual reality.\nReal reality.\nWe can come to approximate that more and more over time, more and more closely over time.\nAnd we do.\nBut still, I mean, we're just barely scratching the surface as the beginning of infinity emphasizes.\nThey're always at the beginning of infinity, right?.\nJust scratching the surface.\nOur virtual reality rendering, understanding improves out of time.\nThat science, that's that kind of virtual reality.\nAnd then there's the virtual reality of us just being minds, running on brains in the darkness of our of our skulls.\nThat's where we really are.\nBut we are connected to the rest of physical reality via these imperfect, sense gathering things, eyes and ears and hands and so on.\nOkay, let's kick it.\nDavid writes, quote, we are embarked upon solving problems about physical reality.\nIf it turns out that all this time, we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought.\nSo what?.\nSuch things have happened many times in the history of science as our horizons have expanded beyond the earth to include the solar system, our galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on.\nAnd of course, parallel universes.\nAnother such broadening may happen tomorrow.\nIndeed, it may happen according to any one of an infinity of possible theories or it may never happen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=235"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "493218fd-b93a-4e2d-8ee4-5c78cf29ae1b": {"page_content": "So what?.\nSuch things have happened many times in the history of science as our horizons have expanded beyond the earth to include the solar system, our galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on.\nAnd of course, parallel universes.\nAnother such broadening may happen tomorrow.\nIndeed, it may happen according to any one of an infinity of possible theories or it may never happen.\nLogically, we must concede to solar system and related doctrines that the reality we are learning about might be an unrepresentative portion of a larger inaccessible or incomprehensible structure.\nBut the general refutation I've given of such doctrines shows that it is irrational to build upon that possibility.\nFollowing Occam, we shall entertain such theories when and only when they provide better explanations than simple rival theories pausing their more affection.\nYeah, exactly.\nReality, realism, rather, realism allows for progress to be made, problems to be solved.\nBut the opposite, solubism.\nWell, how do you build on that?.\nWhat follows?.\nOkay, it's all a dream.\nOkay, what follows?.\nIf what follows, Geron Lenny Makes is probably, if what follows is, well, science still works in the same way it would under realism.\nYou've just got an unnecessary assumption, don't you?.\nYou know, realism is just works, but let's add on top of that, but it's all a dream.\nWhy don't just do away with the.\nbut it's all a dream, but it's all a simulation and just get on with science because that's the most parsimonious way of working, assume things are real.\nDavid goes on to write, quote, however, there is a question we can still ask.\nSuppose that someone were imprisoned in a small, unrepresentative portion of our own reality, for instance, inside a universal virtual reality generator that was programmed with the wrong laws of physics.\nWhat could such prisoners learn about our external reality?.\nAt first sight, it seems impossible that they could discover anything at all about it.\nIt may seem that the most they could discover would be the laws of operation, i.e. the program of the computer that operated their prison.\nBut that is not so.\nAgain, we must bear in mind that if the prisoners are scientists, they will be seeking explanations as well as predictions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=3944"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8450f306-da29-43dc-8ab2-ab14847fd523": {"page_content": "What could such prisoners learn about our external reality?.\nAt first sight, it seems impossible that they could discover anything at all about it.\nIt may seem that the most they could discover would be the laws of operation, i.e. the program of the computer that operated their prison.\nBut that is not so.\nAgain, we must bear in mind that if the prisoners are scientists, they will be seeking explanations as well as predictions.\nIn other words, they will not be content with merely knowing the program that operates their prison, they will want to explain the origin and attributes of the various entities, including themselves, that they observe in the reality they inhabit.\nBut in most virtual reality environments, no such explanation exists for the rendered objects do not originate there, but have been designed in the external reality.\nSuppose that you are playing a virtual reality video game, for the sake of simplicity, suppose that the game is essentially chess.\nA first-person perspective version perhaps, in which you adopt the persona of the king, you will use the normal methods of science to discover this environment, laws of physics, and their emergent consequences.\nYou will learn that checkmate and stalemate are physically possible events, a possible under your best understanding of how the environment works.\nBut that a position with nine white pawns is not physically possible.\nOnce you had understood the laws sufficiently well, you would notice that the chess board is too simple an object to have, for instance, thoughts.\nAnd consequently, that your own thought processes cannot be governed by the laws of chess alone.\nSimilarly, you could tell that during any number of games of chess the pieces can never evolve into self-reproducing configurations, and if life cannot evolve on the chess board, far less can intelligence evolve.\nTherefore, you would also infer that your own thought processes could not have originated in the universe, in which you found yourself.\nSo even if you had lived within the rendered environment or your life and did not have your own memories of the outside world to account for as well, your knowledge would not be confined to that environment.\nYou would know that, even though the universe seemed to have a certain layout and a base certain laws, there must be a wider universe outside it obeying different laws of physics, and you could even guess some of the ways in which those wider laws would have to be different from the chess board laws.\nArthur C. Clarke, once remarked that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.\nThis is true, but slightly misleading.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=4051"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f7ad4f6e-f647-46f0-9415-959a4f501fcd": {"page_content": "You would know that, even though the universe seemed to have a certain layout and a base certain laws, there must be a wider universe outside it obeying different laws of physics, and you could even guess some of the ways in which those wider laws would have to be different from the chess board laws.\nArthur C. Clarke, once remarked that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.\nThis is true, but slightly misleading.\nIt is stated from the point of view of a pre-scientific thinker, which is the wrong way around.\nThe fact is, that to anyone who understands what virtual reality is, even genuine magic would be indistinguishable from technology.\nFor there is no room for magic in a comprehensible reality.\nAnything that seems incomprehensible is regarded by science merely as evidence there is something we have not yet understood, be it a conjuring trick, advanced technology, or a new law of physics.\nPosing there just that seems like a tweetable quote, doesn't it?.\nI'll read it again.\nAnything that seems incomprehensible is regarded by science merely as evidence that there is something we have not yet understood, be it a conjuring trick, advanced technology, or a new law of physics.\nAnd it goes on to say, reasoning from the premise of one's own existence is called anthropic reasoning.\nAlthough it has some applicability in cosmology, it usually has to be supplemented by substantive assumptions about the nature of one's self before it yields definite conclusions.\nBut anthropic reasoning is not the only way in which the inmates of our hypothetical virtual reality prison could gain knowledge of an outside world.\nAny of their evolving explanations of their narrow world could at the drop of a hat reach into an outside reality.\nFor instance, the very rules of chess contain what I thought for player may realize is fossil evidence of those rules having had an evolutionary history.\nThere are exceptional moves, such as casting and capturing on-personge, which increase the complexity of the rules but improve the game.\nIn explaining that complexity, one justifiably concludes that the rules of chess were not always as they are now.\nIn the Papurian scheme of things, explanations always lead to new problems which in turn require further explanations.\nIf the prisoners fail after a while to improve upon their existing explanations, they may of course give up, perhaps falsely concluding that there are no explanations available.\nBut if they do not give up, they will be thinking about those aspects of their environment that seem inadequately explained.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=4176"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e17c3817-917e-4f02-9be7-d4eda231c38c": {"page_content": "In explaining that complexity, one justifiably concludes that the rules of chess were not always as they are now.\nIn the Papurian scheme of things, explanations always lead to new problems which in turn require further explanations.\nIf the prisoners fail after a while to improve upon their existing explanations, they may of course give up, perhaps falsely concluding that there are no explanations available.\nBut if they do not give up, they will be thinking about those aspects of their environment that seem inadequately explained.\nThus if the high technology jailers wanted to be confident that their rendered environment would forever fool their prisoners into thinking there is no outside world, they would have their work cut out for them.\nThe longer they wanted the illusion to last, the more ingenious the program would have to be.\nIt is not enough that the inmates be prevented from observing the outside, the rendered environment would also have to be such that no explanations of anything inside would ever require one to postulate an outside.\nThe environment, in other words, would have to be self-contained as regards explanations.\nBut I doubt that any part of reality should of the whole thing has that property.\nEnd quote.\nEnd of the chapter.\nLong one today.\nBut as I think I hope you will agree, this just is so dense and deep and sort of has feelers into the rest of the book and the beginning of infinity and the world viewers I say.\nThis is way of understanding the place of human beings and people in the cosmic scheme of things.\nHow it is that we can go about creating an infinite stream of solutions to the problems that we encounter via creating knowledge.\nAnd there's the bounds imposed by laws of physics are there.\nand they're real, but they don't prevent us from making infinite progress.\nWhich is what optimism is all about.\nBut because this has been a long one, I won't have a long outro today.\nAnd instead I'll just say, until next time, bye-bye.\nOf course, if you would like to support this endeavor of me exploring the world view, that is contained within the philosophy of Karl Popper, the science and philosophy of David Deutsch, construct a theory, infinite progress, rational optimism, so I want to say for all the good stuff that we talk about here then, please go to my website www.renthall.org and there there are links to Patreon paper.\nUntil next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB5Zn-59FIU&t=4312"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "756a9eb9-2e79-4f9b-bb96-62515cc1ef69": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, the penultimate beginning of infinity episode.\nAnd last time we covered, summarized a lot of the themes that are in the end of science by John Horgan and contrasted it with the vision that we are given of science and knowledge by David Deutsch in the beginning of infinity.\nAnd I think I concluded there with some of my own favourite reasons why we should think this is not the end of science at all, that there are so many really interesting unanswered questions right now that we are on the precipice, we're always on the precipice, but on the precipice of yet another bunch of grand fundamental discoveries in physics.\nNow this idea that we are at the very beginning of infinity, the beginning of discovery and science that there are just so many things we don't know has been born in upon me in a really fortunate way because presently my job involves almost daily conversations with physicists working in very fundamental areas of theoretical physics to ask them about what areas of physics need additional attention.\nJust today I was speaking to a very accomplished physicist working on the question of fine journey.\nThis is a huge open question.\nWhy is it that the contents of nature and the laws are just such that we get complex chemistry in our universe?.\nCould it have been otherwise?.\nWell, in speaking to this person, yes indeed it could have been otherwise and there's a really interesting set of possible solutions but really none of them seem viable to moment.\nAnother route is of course, Kyra and David's Constructa theory which might give a new lens through which we can view this problem and perhaps find solutions as well.\nAnd this is just within theoretical physics, just theoretical physics, never mind biology and all the open questions we have there.\nHow could anyone think we're at nearly the end of science when something like the coronavirus has just ravaged the world?.\nI don't know.\nThere will always be more problems.\nEven if the fundamental physics theory could be found beyond the standard model, beyond quantum theory and we stopped there, I don't think that's the case.\nBut grant that for argument sake.\nThere would still be scientific problems to solve.\nEvery single physical problem that we encounter asteroids from the sky, volcanoes from the earth, viruses from the sea and who knows where else, are going to require scientists to address them.\nSo it's not possible to reach the end of science unless we reach an unproblematic state.\nWhich of course, as David says, is another word for death.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "272cbd35-d562-462e-afc4-084149bad07d": {"page_content": "But grant that for argument sake.\nThere would still be scientific problems to solve.\nEvery single physical problem that we encounter asteroids from the sky, volcanoes from the earth, viruses from the sea and who knows where else, are going to require scientists to address them.\nSo it's not possible to reach the end of science unless we reach an unproblematic state.\nWhich of course, as David says, is another word for death.\nOtherwise we're going to continue to be confronted by problems, ever more interesting problems.\nWhen we solve problems, we find more interesting problems arising from the solutions.\nThat's the ongoing infinite part of science.\nAnd especially physics.\nI've been talking to people at working at the foundations of quantum theory, open questions.\nPeople working at the frontier of quantum computation, open questions.\nPeople working in various disparate areas of astronomy, from cosmology, open questions, the formation of galaxies, open questions, the formation of the solar system, open questions.\nHow stars actually work when they've got high or low metallicity, open questions?.\nUnanswered questions with the big bang are really interesting.\nI remember going to talk with Roger Penrose, who has this wonderful idea.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=165"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1743c277-df12-4190-9dbd-818569067b65": {"page_content": "It's like it's a Hindu cosmology almost that he mathematically figures out that towards the end of the universe, if the universe keeps on expanding, that's the current best theory seems to suggest the universe will keep on expanding, at an accelerating rate we're going to talk about that a little bit more today, that eventually not only do all galaxies fly apart and the material within the galaxy's fly apart, but all matter flies apart and eventually all you're left with is a completely and utterly featureless universe of photons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=240"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "da1a5d47-7dcc-45bc-8500-19c290326602": {"page_content": "They're the only things that then exist in that universe, trillions and trillions and trillions of years hence.\nAnd at that point, the universe cannot keep time in the regular way because to keep time in it a clock and in such a universe in the far distant future, there is no such material out of which the universe can keep a record of its own time, its own age and so it kind of forgets in Roger Penrose's words exactly how old it is.\nSo it may as well be the beginning of the universe again and so maybe that's how a big bang comes about all over again.\nThe end of the universe is a mirror image of the very beginning of the universe and this is kind of this Hindu idea of our cyclical universes.\nAnyway, that could be mere metaphysical, mathematical musings, but we still don't know what went on a certain fraction of a second after the instant in time at which time and space was created.\nWhat was going on?.\nWhat was the thing that precipitated the origins of the universe?.\nWe don't know.\nThis is an open question.\nThis is probably always going to remain an open question.\nWe'll just keep pushing it back, pushing it back, pushing it back a little bit further in time, perhaps seeing a time before time.\nWho knows?.\nBut even then, we will still ask, what caused that thing to happen?.\nAnd again, this is just this is just fundamental cosmology.\nWe have unanswered questions in every area of science.\nBut let's go to the beginning of infinity, we're up to the point where David is talking directly about cosmology and he writes, quote, in cosmology, there has been revolutionary progress even in the few years since the end of science was written and also since I wrote the fabric of reality soon afterwards.\nAt the time, all viable cosmological theories had the expansion of the universe gradually slowing down due to gravity ever since the initial explosion at the Big Bang and forever in the future.\nCosmologists were trying to determine weather, despite slowing down, its expansion rate was sufficient to make the universe expand forever, like a projectile that has exceeded escape velocity or whether it would eventually recollect in a big crunch.\nCosmologists were believed to be the only two possibilities.\nI discussed them in the fabric of reality because they were relevant to the question, is there a bound on the number of computational steps that a computer can execute during the lifetime of the universe?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=278"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d182de05-01aa-4d49-b6d8-9537ad109fa4": {"page_content": "Cosmologists were trying to determine weather, despite slowing down, its expansion rate was sufficient to make the universe expand forever, like a projectile that has exceeded escape velocity or whether it would eventually recollect in a big crunch.\nCosmologists were believed to be the only two possibilities.\nI discussed them in the fabric of reality because they were relevant to the question, is there a bound on the number of computational steps that a computer can execute during the lifetime of the universe?.\nIf there is, then physics will also impose a bound on the amount of knowledge that can be created.\nKnowledge creation being a form of computation, just quickly pausing there, going back, very last phrase there, knowledge creation being a form of computation.\nThe sina conon, the essential part of what a human is without being an essentialist, the essential part of being of what a person is, our explanation for a person is, is a knowledge creator.\nIn particular, an explanation, creator, an explanatory knowledge creator.\nThat's the best explanation that we've had.\nThis is the answer to the age-old question.\nWhat is a person?.\nAt least it is a lot of progress beyond anything that has come before.\nIs a person, a creature that's able to understand morality?.\nIs a person, a creature that has a soul?.\nIs a person, a creature that is able to do mathematics and art?.\nThese were all circling the true, best explanation that we now have, which is that people are universal knowledge creators.\nWhat David says there is just so important, knowledge creation being a form of computation.\nI think a few of us have said over the years, the mind is performing computations.\nGet over it.\nIt's not an analogy that we know now about the universality of computation.\nAll physical systems out there can be modeled by a universal computer, and that includes minds.\nI won't go into it again now, but here we have it again in clear black and white, knowledge creation being a form of computation.\nEveryone's first thought was that unbounded knowledge creation is possible only in a universe that does not recalapse.\nHowever, on analysis it turned out that the reverse is true.\nIn universes that expand forever, the inhabitants would run out of energy, but the cosmologist Frank Tippler discovered that in certain types of reclapsing universes, the big crunch singularity is suitable for performing the faster and faster trick that we used in infinity hotel.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=391"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ddbf105d-7f18-43cc-ab3c-f3b7f7082efc": {"page_content": "Everyone's first thought was that unbounded knowledge creation is possible only in a universe that does not recalapse.\nHowever, on analysis it turned out that the reverse is true.\nIn universes that expand forever, the inhabitants would run out of energy, but the cosmologist Frank Tippler discovered that in certain types of reclapsing universes, the big crunch singularity is suitable for performing the faster and faster trick that we used in infinity hotel.\nAn infinite sequence of computational steps could be executed in a finite time before the singularity powered by the ever-increasing title effects of the gravitational collapse itself.\nTo the inhabitants who would eventually have to upload their personalities into computers made of something like pure tides, the universe would last forever because they would be thinking faster and faster without limit as it collapsed and storing their memories in an ever-small of volumes so that access times can be reduced to that limit.\nTippler called such universes omega point universes, at the time the observational evidence was consistent with the real universe being of that type, posing their mind reflection.\nI'm sort of smiling as I read that because this is one of those areas of theoretical physics that it's fun, it's lots of fun, but always in the back of my mind I think well what we're talking about here is literally at least at the time this was written, at least some billions of years hence and these days we're thinking more like trillions of years hence.\nand we talk about the ultimate ends of the universe, whatever that might mean.\nAnd we don't know what knowledge is going to be created tomorrow or the next day to overturn theories like this.\nSo when we're making these grand predictions about such vastly distant times, it kind of is like science fiction because we just don't know what errors have been assumed within the theory here.\nSo fun as it is, I mean every single one of these theories suffers from the same flaw that it cannot possibly be refuted by anyone alive today.\nThis is what Jeremy Lenny here says, well if not anyone alive today, it cannot possibly be refuted by anyone doing an experiment within the next few billion years.\nSo all of them can be on the table, I guess they can be refuted by other observations that we make, but this is the point about making prophecies about the far distant future.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=279"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a4490ca9-eaa1-4129-bcec-4b1f8a97e967": {"page_content": "They're just fun, they're fun to play with physically mathematically, I guess, as David says in the very next paragraph, quote, a small part of the revolution that is currently overtaking cosmology is that the omega point models have been ruled out by observation, evidence, including a remarkable series of studies of supernovae in distant galaxies, has forced cosmologists to the unexpected conclusion that the universe not only will expand forever, but has been expanding at an accelerating rate, something has been counteracting its gravity, pausing there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=663"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "debd44cb-89a8-4f49-92af-82aa3ceae657": {"page_content": "So this is one of the ways that we now talk about a precision cosmology, which is exciting for those of us who kind of studied this, because at the very beginning of my interest in this cosmology, well, we had an understanding of the Big Bang, but that was a bad it.\nI mean, we were talking about the grandest scales of the universe were still somewhat approaching the metaphysical.\nThat would really happen to the end of the universe, it was very difficult to gather the data needed to be able to constrain the various competing theories.\nBut now we can, now we can.\nAnd this particular event, this particular discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe is burned into my own mind anyway, because I remember it quite clearly being talked about, the buzz that arose at the university and the astronomy department at the University of New South Wales, about 1998, 1999, because prior to everyone sort of had an idea, as David just said, of what should have happened after the Big Bang, namely the slowing down of the expansion of the universe.\nAnd so what happened in 1989, well, there were two competing groups, researchers that were working on high redshift supernova, supernovas that occurred in galaxies, very, very distant from our own, our own.\nAnd why were they looking for these things at all?.\nWell, to constrain these models, to figure out what was going to happen to the universe in the far distant future.\nThe thing about these kinds of supernova, supernova, one A, and supernova one A are these very rare kind of supernova, where you have some kind of large star, maybe a red giant, in mutual orbit with a white dwarf star, which is much smaller.\nAnd the white dwarf stars have an upper limit on their mass.\nOnce you exceed that upper limit, which is called the Chandrasekal limit, the Chandrasekal limit being named after the physicist who calculated it, I think it's 1.38 times the mass of the sun.\nOnce the white dwarf star exceeds that number, 1.38 times the mass of the sun.\nAnd the repulsion forces of the electrons that are holding the star up, so in other words, you've got atoms buttressed up against other atoms.\nAnd the electrons are the only thing, the electron repulsion is the only thing preventing it from the collapsing still further.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=702"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0692f1b8-90ec-4c8b-910c-e10c8e1c2a6e": {"page_content": "Once the white dwarf star exceeds that number, 1.38 times the mass of the sun.\nAnd the repulsion forces of the electrons that are holding the star up, so in other words, you've got atoms buttressed up against other atoms.\nAnd the electrons are the only thing, the electron repulsion is the only thing preventing it from the collapsing still further.\nI suppose the quantum physicists were picking up on that and say, well, it's a poly-exclusive principle or something like that.\nBut whatever the case, you've got one force outwards trying to prevent the collapse, and gravity inwards trying to cause the collapse.\nOnce you exceed the 1.38, gravity wins.\nAnd there is a very sudden collapse of that star via complicated processes.\nWe don't need to go into that then results in a massive explosion, basically because the entire star heats up very, very quickly.\nNow this happens at precisely that 1.38 times the mass of the sun.\nIt can be calculated very precisely.\nSo as one star, the white dwarf is a creating, collecting matter from that other larger star, it passes that limit and explodes, and these things all explode at the same time.\nNow, these are very rare.\nSo within our own galaxy, we're not going to see one more than likely, okay?.\nThese are so rare that I'm not even sure that we've ever seen one within our galaxy.\nI think even the supernovae that have hitherto been seen by the unaided human eye that have occurred within a Milky Way weren't even of this sort.\nSo they're exceedingly rare.\nSo how on earth are these researchers studying these supernovae actually able to see any?.\nAnd in fact, they did see quite a number of them.\nAnd these days, you can see them daily.\nHow is that possible?.\nWell, rare as they are, galaxies are just so numerous that even if they only happen on average once every million years to a galaxy, well, there are trillions of galaxies out of well, hundreds of billions that we can actually observe.\nAnd so if you have the right technology and the right computers and you're scanning large portions of the sky, then you will pick these things up.\nAnd this is what these two competing groups of astronomers did.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=830"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4ca43de4-400e-447d-af20-fdad3a1b5ba3": {"page_content": "How is that possible?.\nWell, rare as they are, galaxies are just so numerous that even if they only happen on average once every million years to a galaxy, well, there are trillions of galaxies out of well, hundreds of billions that we can actually observe.\nAnd so if you have the right technology and the right computers and you're scanning large portions of the sky, then you will pick these things up.\nAnd this is what these two competing groups of astronomers did.\nOne of the groups was the high-z supernovae project led by Brian Schmidt, who's an Australian, well, at least we can't even as an Australian because he won the Nobel Prize for this, but actually he was born in America, naturalized to be an Australian.\nHe led one group, a very large group of astronomers actually.\nAnd they were competing against the supernova cosmology project led by Saul Perlmutter.\nAnd both of them were doing basically the same thing, making observations of these supernova, competing in a friendly way, because I think sometimes when cloud cover, obscured the view of the telescopes for one team, the other team would pick up the slack for them.\nSo they really did work well together.\nAnd they knew what to expect to some extent from the results.\nAnd what they expected was completely unlike what the results were.\nAnd so this was a classic experiment of the kind, a classic experiment of the kind.\nBecause it's an experiment that disagrees with the known theory, the best known theory.\nAnd there is no explanation for what is going on.\nSo what was the problem just in very brief what the problem was, was when they looked at these supernovae at the distances they were, at the red shifts that they were, using red shift analysis.\nIn other words, you collect the light and then you break up the light into what it's made out of.\nAnd what it's made out of is called its spectra.\nThe spectra is a consequence of the kind of elements that are in the explosion of the supernova.\nAnd so if you burn copper, you get this kind of characteristic bluey green flame.\nAnd if you burn iron, you get a red flame, if you get a carbon, you get this characteristic yellow flame.\nAll the same sort of thing happens with stellar spectra.\nAnd so you collect the light with a telescope.\nand then you put it through this thing called the spectroscope, which then goes into a computer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=940"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cc0dc820-1bd4-4724-aba2-b15bad50a4b6": {"page_content": "And so if you burn copper, you get this kind of characteristic bluey green flame.\nAnd if you burn iron, you get a red flame, if you get a carbon, you get this characteristic yellow flame.\nAll the same sort of thing happens with stellar spectra.\nAnd so you collect the light with a telescope.\nand then you put it through this thing called the spectroscope, which then goes into a computer.\nAnd it tells you what the star is made of, that's the first thing.\nAnd the second thing is that you can figure out the red shift, which tells you how far away the star is.\nThe problem is once they did that and found out how far away the star was using the stellar spectra, the luminosity, the brightness of these high red shift type 1A supernova were too dim, they were not luminous enough.\nBut the thing is, the understanding of the astrophysics of the luminosity of type 1A supernova says that it should be extremely reliable and extremely good standard candle, something that has a fixed luminosity, no matter what the distances or anything like that now.\nAny of us did question the results at first, because of things like, well, the metallicity, in other words, how much material that is heavier than in the very distant universe would have been different, because in the very distant universe, you're talking about the universe when it was much, much, much younger.\nAnd when the universe was much, much, much younger, it hadn't yet had the time to produce stars that contained within them the same kind of elements that we find in our local universe.\nIn other words, what the sun is made out of or what the other stars within the Milky Way galaxy is made out of, these have higher amounts of metal, why?.\nBecause the stars have exploded during the explosion, they release the material that's inside them, which includes the metals.\nSo the next generation of stars then collects up that material and can then burn using that material.\nAnd when you look at those stars, you can see the material, you know, contains metals.\nNow, these very, very distant type 1A supernovas are happening with stars that have appeared much, much, much earlier in the universe.\nThe light is much, much older, which means it was produced so many billions of years earlier.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=1054"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d99ab4ab-7a2c-4ada-969a-0ac913baf19e": {"page_content": "So the next generation of stars then collects up that material and can then burn using that material.\nAnd when you look at those stars, you can see the material, you know, contains metals.\nNow, these very, very distant type 1A supernovas are happening with stars that have appeared much, much, much earlier in the universe.\nThe light is much, much older, which means it was produced so many billions of years earlier.\nSo maybe just maybe the physics of what's going on there, not the physical laws, but what's happening with the kind of material out of which those supernovas are created.\nMaybe that's a little bit different to what is happening here closer to us.\nNow, that could be the case.\nIt still could be the case, who knows, and that would be called a systematic error.\nI think that we don't understand about the astrophysics of stars and in particular type 1A supernovas.\nMaybe more distant type 1A supernovas behave differently to closer supernovas, but we can rule that out now because there's a lot of other evidence also pointing out an accelerating expansion of the universe, not least of which is the cosmic microwave background radiation analysis as well, which clever astrophysics can figure out looking at the anisotropies and how large those anisotropies are and so on, to explain those in terms of an accelerating expansion of the universe as well.\nSo it's not only a type 1A supernova data that we're relying on right now.\nAnd as Saul Perlmutter himself says in an article that he wrote, those high redshift supernova are finer than we would expect, even if the universe was completely empty.\nSo the mathematical models are strongly in agreement with the idea, the hypothesis, that the universe is accelerating in its expansion.\nThe reasons that we have next to no clue about, and as David says, let's go back to the book.\nHe writes, quote, something has been counteracting its gravity, the gravity of the universe.\nWe do not know what, pending the discovery of a good explanation, the unknown course has been named dark energy.\nThere are several proposals for what it might be, including effects that merely give the appearance of acceleration, but the best working hypothesis at present is that in the equations for gravity, there is an additional term of a form first mooted by Einstein in 1915, and then dropped because he realized that his explanation for it was bad.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=1174"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5922cb5-1ae5-4df9-8d4b-2b25ab4ee0e4": {"page_content": "We do not know what, pending the discovery of a good explanation, the unknown course has been named dark energy.\nThere are several proposals for what it might be, including effects that merely give the appearance of acceleration, but the best working hypothesis at present is that in the equations for gravity, there is an additional term of a form first mooted by Einstein in 1915, and then dropped because he realized that his explanation for it was bad.\nIt was proposed again in the 1980s as a possible effect of quantum field theory, but again, there is no theory of the physical meaning of such a term that is good enough to predict, for instance, its magnitude, the problem of the nature and effects of dark energy is no minor detail, nor does anything about it suggest a perpetually unfathomable mystery.\nSo much because knowledge is being a fundamentally completed science, depending on what dark energy turns out to be, it may well be possible to harness it in the distant future to provide energy for knowledge creation to continue forever.\nBecause this energy would have to be collected over ever greater distances, the computation would have to become ever slower.\nIn a mirror image of what would happen in a mega point cosmologies, the inhabitants of the universe would notice no slowdown, because again, they would be instantiated as computer programs whose total number of steps would be unbounded, thus dark energy, which is ruled out one scenario for the unlimited growth of knowledge, would provide the literal driving force of another.\nThe new cosmological models describe universes that are infinite in their spatial dimensions, because the big bang happened to finite time ago, and because of the finiteness of the speed of light, we shall only ever see a finite portion of infinite space.\nBut that portion will continue to grow forever, thus, eventually, ever more unlikely phenomena will come into view.\nWhen the total volume that we can see is a million times larger than it is now, we shall see things that have a probability of one and a million existing spaces we see it today.\nEverything physically possible will eventually be revealed, watches that come into existence spontaneously, asteroids that happen to be good lightnesses of William Hayley, everything.\nAccording to the prevailing theory, all those things exist today, but many times too far away for light who have reached us from them yet, pausing their myreflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=1294"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3e9eeaf1-357f-415a-a238-3fe1c979419f": {"page_content": "Everything physically possible will eventually be revealed, watches that come into existence spontaneously, asteroids that happen to be good lightnesses of William Hayley, everything.\nAccording to the prevailing theory, all those things exist today, but many times too far away for light who have reached us from them yet, pausing their myreflection.\nSo this is, on the assumption that everything that physically possibly can happen, indeed will happen, which is one way of understanding, for example, the multiverse, could be one way of understanding the universe like ours.\nThis assumes, of course, this argument that David has just made there about watches popping into existence and good lightnesses of William Hayley assumes the cosmological principle, the cosmological principle being, on very large scales, the universe is homogenous and isotropic, homogenous being.\nIt's the same at every single point.\nIt looks the same at every single point.\nThis is an assumption.\nI don't know that it's something we can derive from more fundamental theories of physics.\nI think we just assume it logically needs to be the case, and so then this would follow.\nConstructed theory, of course, may have some new light to shed upon things like this, and the idea that anything that can happen, indeed, will happen.\nNow, everything might happen just by chance, that's one thing.\nBut then some things might need to be made to happen, even though they're possible we might need a constructor for it.\nAnd for more on that, you'll have to go to my series on the Physics of Can and Count, and before that, by the book, the Physics of Can and Count, by Caram, I'll let her.\nBut for now, let's go back to the cosmology here, David writes.\nLight becomes fainter as it spreads out, there are a few of photons per unit area.\nThat means that ever larger telescopes are needed to detect a given object at ever larger distances.\nSo there may be a limit to how distant and therefore how unlikely a phenomenon we shall ever be able to see.\nExcept that is, for one type of phenomenon, a beginning of infinity.\nSpecifically, any civilization that is colonising the universe in an unbounded way will eventually reach our location.\nThis is a single infinite space, could play the role of the infinitely many universes postulated by anthropic explanations of the fine-tuning coincidences.\nIn some ways, it could play that role better.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=717"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "795f86cf-193d-4e00-b302-fadffd533215": {"page_content": "Except that is, for one type of phenomenon, a beginning of infinity.\nSpecifically, any civilization that is colonising the universe in an unbounded way will eventually reach our location.\nThis is a single infinite space, could play the role of the infinitely many universes postulated by anthropic explanations of the fine-tuning coincidences.\nIn some ways, it could play that role better.\nIf the probability that such a civilization could form is not zero, there must be infinitely many such civilizations in space, and they will eventually encounter each other.\nIf they could estimate that probability from theory, they could test the anthropic explanation.\nFurthermore, anthropic arguments could not only dispense with all those parallel universes that could dispense with the variant laws of physics too, just causing that, David does have a note here that when he says, those parallel universes, he's talking about universes with different physical laws.\nThis is not the quantum multiverse, completely different, completely different.\nThe multiverse in the quantum theory explanation is, all the universes are by exactly the same laws, namely the laws of quantum theory.\nBut this is kind of megaverse idea used in anthropic arguments where we have the concept of universes with different physical laws.\nAnd as I say, I'll speak into a researcher today who does simulations of this kind of thing.\nAnd has very interesting ideas about, for example, fiddling with the knobs of the constants of nature.\nSo for example, the gravitational constant G, the fine structure constant, the cosmological constant, these things, you can fiddle with the values of these things, and then see what happens to the universe.\nAnd most fiddling of the constants result in featureless universes.\nSome he was saying don't cause the extinguishing of life very easily, but some do cosmological constant gravitational constant, for example, have huge effects on either formation of galaxies or formation of stars.\nNow, the interesting thing then, which I wasn't aware of, because I know these simulations done simulating entire universes, universes with different laws in a sense, namely the values of the constants are different, but keeping everything else the same.\nWhat the researchers cannot yet do, which I asked about, can you simulate universes with entirely different laws of physics in the sense that, well, let's not have general relativity, let's have something completely different.\nLet's not have quantum theory, let's have something completely different.\nThis is not possible at the moment, it's not feasible at all.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=1545"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c0ae05e-7046-4267-a0bd-5b03821ecd7b": {"page_content": "What the researchers cannot yet do, which I asked about, can you simulate universes with entirely different laws of physics in the sense that, well, let's not have general relativity, let's have something completely different.\nLet's not have quantum theory, let's have something completely different.\nThis is not possible at the moment, it's not feasible at all.\nHe was saying, well, if you wanted to change the law of gravity, then you would need to redo stellar physics, stellar nuclear synthesis, for example, using that new theory.\nSo that's a whole other thing that the simulation would need to be able to cope with.\nSo they're not even there, the best they can do now, clearly this is really just merely scratching the surface, of trying to figure out could life exist in universes with different physical laws.\nAll they're doing is fiddling with the constants of nature and keeping everything else exactly the same.\nIn other words, the laws of physics have exactly the same form, it's just the coupling constants are different.\nAnd so getting interesting results out of that.\nThe interesting result is almost all choices, other than the selection of constants that we do have, result in a sterile universe, that's an interesting enough result.\nBut it's certainly not putting paid to this idea that if there is a megaverse out there, there could be infinite civilizations out there, there could be.\nI don't believe this, I don't think anyone should believe this.\nNo one knows this, it's just completely conjectural right now.\nWe have no way of constraining any of these theories, really.\nWe don't have an answer to the fine-tuning problem.\nThis is why we're very much at the beginning of infinity as far as this question is concerned.\nOkay, so I'm skipping a bit that David writes here, you'll have to go to the book yourself to read that bit.\nAnd I'll skip to where he talks about the Fermi problem.\nSo he's just finished describing some aspects of the issue with fine-tuning and we've reported solutions to fine-tuning and namely the Antropic argument.\nAnd of the Antropic argument, he says, quote, Nor therefore can it solve the Fermi problem, where are they?.\nIt may turn out to be a necessary part of the explanation, but it can never explain anything by itself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=717"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9976ce47-6c40-4359-aed0-b6b5a3f5edc3": {"page_content": "And I'll skip to where he talks about the Fermi problem.\nSo he's just finished describing some aspects of the issue with fine-tuning and we've reported solutions to fine-tuning and namely the Antropic argument.\nAnd of the Antropic argument, he says, quote, Nor therefore can it solve the Fermi problem, where are they?.\nIt may turn out to be a necessary part of the explanation, but it can never explain anything by itself.\nAlso, as I have explained in chapter 8, any theory involving an Antropic argument must provide a measure for defining probabilities in an infinite set of things.\nIt is unknown how to do that in the spatially infinite universe that cosmologists currently believe we're in.\nThat issue has a wider scope.\nFor example, there is the so-called quantum suicide argument in regard to the multiverse.\nSo suppose you want to win the lottery.\nYou buy a ticket and set up a machine that will automatically kill you in your sleep if you lose, then in all the histories in which you do wake up, you are a winner.\nIf you do not have loved ones to warn you, there are other reasons to prefer that most histories not be affected by your premature death.\nYou have a range to get something for nothing with what proponents of this argument call subjective certainty.\nHowever, that way of applying probabilities does not follow directly from quantum theory as the usual one does.\nIt requires an additional assumption, namely that when making decisions, one should ignore the histories in which the decision maker is absent.\nThis is closely related to Antropic arguments.\nAgain, the theory of probability for such cases is not well understood, but my guess is the assumption is false, pausing their myreflection.\nYes, so this quantum suicide idea that if you commit suicide, you should expect as a matter of probability within the multiverse that you will wake up tomorrow.\nMy way of understanding this is, no, a version of you will wake up, but that is not you.\nWe have talked about this before, and I did recently an episode called the Nexus, which is where I think that the strength of the fabric of reality, everything that is in the beginning of your infinity, really, brought together really our best to provide the best explanation for what a person is, and that is why I called the Nexus, this mixing of the threads of the fabric of reality give us a better understanding of what a person is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=1812"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5c534869-d2ee-43a5-9056-3d0bae3b4a3b": {"page_content": "We have talked about this before, and I did recently an episode called the Nexus, which is where I think that the strength of the fabric of reality, everything that is in the beginning of your infinity, really, brought together really our best to provide the best explanation for what a person is, and that is why I called the Nexus, this mixing of the threads of the fabric of reality give us a better understanding of what a person is.\nAnd in that, I was trying to understand the nature of personhood in the context of the multiverse, knowing that we consist of infinitely many fungible instances right now.\nSo sitting here right now, continuing to speak to you, many fungible instances of myself.\nAnd right now, some portion of them, some measure of them, have gone off to get a cup of tea and do a variety of other things as well, but there remains a set of fungible instances right here.\nNow, I'm not conscious of those other versions, right?.\nThere are other versions of me that have gone.\nNow, if I arrange to have myself killed in my sleep, how does consciousness deal with that?.\nAre you extinguishing a particular consciousness forever and for good and allowing another one to wake up?.\nThere's no guarantee that it's you and this is why David says, you can't ignore the histories in which the decision maker is absent, okay?.\nSo something has been killed.\nWe know, as a matter of fact, that people die in our universal the time, we can see them dying.\nNow, some versions of them then go on to exist, all right, but we're not observing those.\nWhy should you think that you're going to be the observer of the version that survives?.\nThere is no good argument for this is why I think that something also survives.\nSomething will survive, possibly given our best understanding of quantum theory now.\nBut I'm not betting my life on it at all.\nI think the quantum immortality thing, quantum suicide thing, it doesn't run through.\nAnd I think all it says that we've got a lot that we don't understand here.\nThat's all.\nThis is another flag like dark energy for a problem.\nIt's not a solution to anything.\nThere's not an explanation there.\nSo given that, you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't go trying to play the lottery in this way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=696"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0a6e1f73-d8b3-48b6-9c39-2124ffd40d7a": {"page_content": "I think the quantum immortality thing, quantum suicide thing, it doesn't run through.\nAnd I think all it says that we've got a lot that we don't understand here.\nThat's all.\nThis is another flag like dark energy for a problem.\nIt's not a solution to anything.\nThere's not an explanation there.\nSo given that, you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't go trying to play the lottery in this way.\nOkay, let's go back to the book because we're about to talk about one of my favorite philosophers, David Wright.\nA related assumption occurs in the so-called simulation argument, his most cogent proponent is the philosopher Nick Bostrom.\nIt's premises that in the distant future, the whole universe, as we know, it is going to be simulated in computers, perhaps for scientific or historical research.\nMany times, perhaps infinitely many times, therefore virtually all instances of us are in those simulations and not in the original world.\nAnd therefore, we are almost certainly living in a simulation.\nSo the argument goes, but is it really valid to equate most instances with near certainty like that?.\nFor an inkling of why it might not be, consider a thought experiment.\nImagine that physicists discovered that space is actually many layered like puff pastry.\nThe number of layers varies from place to place.\nThe layers split in some places, and they're content split with them.\nEvery layer has identical content, though.\nHence although we do not feel it, instances of us split and merge as we move around.\nSupposed in London, space has a million layers while an Oxford only has one.\nI travel frequently between the two cities, and one day I wake up from having forgotten which one I am in.\nIt is dark.\nWhen I bet I am much more likely to be in London, just because a million times as many instances of me ever wake up in London as in Oxford, I think not.\nIn that situation, it is clear that counting the number of instances of oneself is no guide to the probability one ought to use in decision making.\nWe should be counting histories, not instances.\nIn quantum theory, the laws of physics tell us how to count histories by measure.\nIn the case of multiple simulations, I know I've no good argument for any way of counting them.\nOne question, but I do not see why repeating the same simulation of me a million times should in any sense make it more likely that I am a simulation rather than the original.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=696"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "453955f7-99bc-4d54-8046-62b0b73c3417": {"page_content": "We should be counting histories, not instances.\nIn quantum theory, the laws of physics tell us how to count histories by measure.\nIn the case of multiple simulations, I know I've no good argument for any way of counting them.\nOne question, but I do not see why repeating the same simulation of me a million times should in any sense make it more likely that I am a simulation rather than the original.\nWhat if one computer uses a million times as many electrons as another to represent each bit of information in its memory?.\nAm I more likely to be in the form of computer than in the latter?.\nA different issue raised by the simulation argument is this, will the universe as we know it really be simulated often in the future?.\nWould that not be immoral?.\nThe world as it exists today contains an enormous amount of suffering.\nAnd whoever ran such a simulation would be responsible for recreating it.\nBut would they?.\nA two identical instances of a quaille, the same thing as one, if so, then creating the simulation would not be immoral, no more than reading a book about past suffering is immoral.\nBut in that case, how different do two simulations of people have to be before they count as two people for moral purposes?.\nAgain, I know I've no good answer to these questions.\nI suspect that they will be answered only by the explanatory theory from which AI will also follow, pause there, my reflection on that.\nYes, so David has mentioned this before, all the way back in a window on infinity and the earlier chapter, the problem with trying to count infinities.\nAnd then if you have these universes with different physical laws, you have an uncountable infinity.\nAnd if you're thinking of this fractal type situation, where in the distant future, there's going to be civilizations that will have computers in which there will be simulations of people who have computers, in which there are going to be simulations and so on and so on and so on, just fractally expanding out.\nThere's no way of counting these.\nand so we don't even know what the nature of consciousness is either.\nAnd by the way, our best understanding of physical reality that we occupy right now, as we've already said, is that you are infinitely many fungible instances already, which can't be counted.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=717"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0193f14-1865-4e8e-ad32-f7425e2ea50e": {"page_content": "There's no way of counting these.\nand so we don't even know what the nature of consciousness is either.\nAnd by the way, our best understanding of physical reality that we occupy right now, as we've already said, is that you are infinitely many fungible instances already, which can't be counted.\nAnd so in what sense are those more numerous and you, what are you, like David's giving a hint here, if the simulated versions of you are not infinitely many fungible instances, but are based upon some other kind of simulations of laws of physics, which nevertheless allow for conscious experience.\nWell, we've done experiments here to show that we live in a universe that is governed by the laws of quantum theory, which mean that you, as a person, aren't a single instance.\nBut maybe those simulated, the most efficient way, the most efficient way of simulating people in those computers, is single instance people.\nMaybe that's it.\nDon't know, don't know.\nBut we know that we're not single instance people, we're uncountably infinitely many.\nSo maybe we already outnumber even that number of infinitely many people being simulated.\nI wonder why, well, he wouldn't have known, Nick Bostrom didn't take into account this idea of the multi-verse already that we live in a multi-plus, of course, not many people take the multi-verse seriously enough.\nAnd philosophers should, analytic philosophers should, okay, skipping a little, and let's go to a little bit more about Bostrom and David Wright here.\nAnd even more dubious example of anthropic type reasoning is the doomsday argument, it attempts to estimate the life expectancy of our species by assuming that the typical human is roughly half way through the sequence of all humans.\nHence we should expect the total number who will ever live to be about twice the number who have lived so far.\nOf course, this is prophecy.\nAnd for that reason alone can it possibly be a valid argument, but let me briefly pursue it in its own terms.\nFirst, it does not apply at all if the total number of humans is going to be infinite.\nFor in that case, every human who ever lives will live unusually early in the sequence.\nSo if anything, it suggests that we are at the beginning of infinity.\nAlso, how long is a human lifetime?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=717"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c8215550-5d9d-4390-9964-96aec4f0e66d": {"page_content": "Of course, this is prophecy.\nAnd for that reason alone can it possibly be a valid argument, but let me briefly pursue it in its own terms.\nFirst, it does not apply at all if the total number of humans is going to be infinite.\nFor in that case, every human who ever lives will live unusually early in the sequence.\nSo if anything, it suggests that we are at the beginning of infinity.\nAlso, how long is a human lifetime?.\nIllness and old age are going to be cured soon, certainly within the next few lifetimes, and technology will also be able to prevent deaths through homicide or accidents by creating backups of the states of brains, which could be uploaded into new blank brains in identical bodies if a person should die.\nOnce that technology exists, people will consider it considerably more foolish, not to make frequent backups of themselves than they do today in regard to their computers.\nIf nothing else, evolution alone will ensure that because those who do not back themselves up will gradually tie out.\nSo there can be only one outcome, effective immortality for the whole human population, with the present generation being one of the last that will have short lives.\nThat being so, if our species will nevertheless have a finite lifetime, then knowing the total number of humans will ever live, provides no upper bound on that lifetime, because it cannot tell us how long the potentially immortal humans of the future will live before the prophesied catastrophe strikes.\nIn 1993, the mathematician Werner Vinci wrote an influential essay entitled The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he estimated that, within about 30 years, predicting the future of technology will become impossible, an event that is now known simply as the Singularity.\nVinci associated the approaching Singularity with the achievement of AI and subsequent discussions have centered on that.\nI certainly hope that AI, for which David means AGI, is achieved by then, but they see no sign yet of the theoretic progress that I have argued must come first.\nOn the other hand, I see no reason to single out AI as a mold-breaking technology.\nWe already have billions of humans.\nMost advocates of the Singularity believe that, soon after the AGI breakthrough, super-human minds will be constructed, and that then, as Vinci put it, the human era will be over.\nBut my discussion of the universality of human minds rules out that possibility.\nAnd humans are already universal explainers and constructors.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=2393"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5f074acc-db93-4c79-a0d1-c5f6cf267dac": {"page_content": "On the other hand, I see no reason to single out AI as a mold-breaking technology.\nWe already have billions of humans.\nMost advocates of the Singularity believe that, soon after the AGI breakthrough, super-human minds will be constructed, and that then, as Vinci put it, the human era will be over.\nBut my discussion of the universality of human minds rules out that possibility.\nAnd humans are already universal explainers and constructors.\nThey can already transcend their parochial origins, so there can be no such thing as a superhuman mind as such.\nThey can only be further automation, allowing the existing kind of human thinking to be carried out faster, and with more working memory, and delegating perspiration phases to non-AI automata.\nA great deal of this has already happened with computers and other machinery, as well as with the general increase in wealth, which has multiplied the number of humans who are able to spend their time thinking.\nThis can, indeed, be expected to continue.\nFor instance, there will be evermore efficient human computer interfaces, no doubt culminating in add-ons for the brain.\nBut tasks like internet searching will never be carried out by superfast AI as scanning billions of documents creatively for meaning, because they will not want to perform such tasks.\nAny more than humans do, nor will artificial scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers ever wield concepts or arguments that humans are inherently incapable of understanding, universality implies that in every important sense humans and AI's will never be other than equal.\nSimilarly, the singularity is often assumed to be a moment of unprecedented upheaval and danger as the rate of innovation becomes too rapid for humans to cope with, but this is a parochial misconception.\nDuring the first few centuries of the Enlightenment, there has been a constant feeling that rapid and accelerating innovation is getting out of hand, but our capacitor to cope with and enjoy changes in our technology, lifestyle, and ethical norms, and so on, has been increasing too, with the weakening and extinction of some of the anti-rational memes that used to sabotage it.\nIn future, when the rate of innovation will also increase due to the sheer increasing clock rate and throughput of brain add-ons and AI computers, then our capacity to cope with that will increase at the same rate or faster.\nIf everyone was suddenly to think a million times as fast, no one would feel hurried as a result.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=717"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1e7c516d-6ea4-4aed-9760-c21e152be657": {"page_content": "In future, when the rate of innovation will also increase due to the sheer increasing clock rate and throughput of brain add-ons and AI computers, then our capacity to cope with that will increase at the same rate or faster.\nIf everyone was suddenly to think a million times as fast, no one would feel hurried as a result.\nHence, I think that the concept of the singularity as a sort of discontinuity is a mistake.\nKnowledge will continue to grow exponentially or even faster, and that is astounding enough, pausing there, ending the reading there for today because it's a wonderfully positive part to end on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=2627"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3a565d0f-e1b9-4509-a72a-f97adb607ac8": {"page_content": "This singularity, by the way, if you want some more eviscerating critique of it, I think that's as strong as you can get anywhere, but a slightly different approach to it, the computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, J-A-R-O-N-L-A-N-I-E-R. He is far too unknown, he's known amongst a certain community of people, but he deserves to be like David Deutsch, far more well-known than what he is, and the German Lanier has an additional kind of handicap in that he doesn't like social media, and so he refused to go on social media.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=2659"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c7998617-fe23-484a-abe8-01e9c39eeec3": {"page_content": "He finally has wonderful talks that he gives on YouTube, and his books are absolutely brilliant, and he similarly doesn't agree with the bostromes and the Ray Kurzweils and the Vernavinges of the World on this point about Doomsday and Singularity, and we're going to upload ourselves to the internet and all this sort of stuff.\nHe admits of the mystery of human consciousness, for example, in a slightly different way to David.\nI think we're going to hear them have a conversation, but here, this whole idea, the singularity, there's going to be this sudden take-off of technology.\nWell, haven't we already had that?.\nAnd like David says, the psychological impact of this is, well, apart from the doomsday as the naysayers, the pessimists have always been with this, you know, they've complained about the invention of the motor vehicle, the television, or the telephone, the book, okay.\nIt's a great Twitter account, pessimists archive where they reproduce very old newspaper articles of people complaining about things like books, and how books are ruining children, ruining their lives, and then of course that moved on to radio is ruining children's lives, and television is ruining children's lives, and of course today it's not just computers, but in any piece of technology is ruining children's lives.\nWe've always had the pessimists trying to tell us that technology is bad for us, but we can't handle it, and there is this zeitgeist now that people aren't handling the technology particularly well, but, you know, with every solution comes new problems, would you rather be out in the field scratching the existence out of the dirt as, you know, Neanderthal people used to do?.\nOf course not, okay.\nWe have some problems with technology today, but there are a heck of a lot better than the dealing with the problems that they solved.\nAlso mentioned there is you can't have AI being super intelligent and taking over all of our tasks, especially not the creative ones, because they'll be people, super intelligent narrow AI, you know, AI that's super intelligent in the sense that it can beat us at chess.\nNever wants to choose to do anything other than chess, and so it's not a threat to us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=1996"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a0047355-dec1-4b6b-8011-73d71e5ca1d1": {"page_content": "For more on this, see my articles at www.brethall.org about super intelligence, where I take Nick Boschtrim's view of super intelligence, whose book, super intelligence, I think it's, I was disappointed in it, more than the fact I didn't like it, since I kind of liked it because it read like a science fiction book, and I listened to the audio, and whoever reads the audio, they sound a bit like a robot, so it's a little bit scary, but they're in that uncanny valley where they're quite they're human, but just a little bit like Nick Boschtrim decides to, that's very cruel, no,.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=2824"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7be4daee-a6c1-4392-83f9-899acad21a5a": {"page_content": "Nick Boschtrim's obviously extremely intelligent, but the book for me was disappointing because I was expecting to be blown away by the precision of the philosophy, but in fact it was the philosophy in the epistemology that was the weakest part of the book, and it was upon this foundation that rested all the pessimism, so once you get the epistemology wrong, the pessimism just flows naturally from these ridiculous ideas about how Bayesianism, and this is what really turned to me off Bayesianism, I think it was, so I had to credit Nick Boschtrim for inspiring me to really research the depth of Bayesianism and realizing the poverty that the epistemology at the heart of what Bayesianism is all about, and so if you just take on Popper's conception of epistemology, you don't get these pessimistic ideas about AI and doomsday and so on and so forth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=2865"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "85c7cf27-d698-4050-a9d6-b67a1e41ba41": {"page_content": "It's no accident that the pessimists are prophets with bad epistemology, it's an awful trinity of misconceptions that go together there to all self-support one another, just take on the right epistemology, and you'll no longer be tempted to make prophecies, you'll admit of your ignorance, on the one hand, and then realize that there's hope for the future in being able to solve any problem using creativity.\nOkay, next time we'll be, sadly to some extent, the final episode on the beginning of infinity, I'll probably do that from somewhere else, a slightly nicer different location, I think, I'll have to think of ways in which I can make the final episode, something different, something great.\nOkay, but until then, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfKQTBv8Ek&t=2916"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e45ccbb1-5939-4c3f-9636-db3389bff2dd": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast.\nEpisode one of another new series.\nAt the moment on juggling essentially three series concluding the beginning of infinity chapter explorations.\nI have just commenced and just recorded the first episode of the science of canon Kant, the popular science book, in addition to being a popular science book, it's a groundbreaking revolutionary exploration of constructive theory.\nThey knew physics theory by Kiara Mileto, who's the author of the book, and David Deutsch, who is the originator of the theory.\nAnd now I am beginning for the first time and exploration of David Deutsch's first book, the fabric of reality.\nThe book that introduced me to the work of David Deutsch and really changed my mindset in ways more fundamental than I think anything else that came before.\nAnd it may seem odd that I'm doing two books in parallel, but my reason for that is twofold.\nI can't wait for either of them.\nI want to do both now that I'm finishing up with the beginning of infinity.\nI've been in my mind, I've prepared myself for doing the fabric of reality.\nAnd the fact that Kiara has just released this book, it really means that I can kind of bookend the beginning of infinity with its predecessor, which is the fabric of reality.\nAnd in some sense, some sense its intellectual success or certainly a descendant of a kind which is the science of can and can't by Kiara.\nBut this one is about the fabric of reality.\nSo let me get into the fabric of reality.\nLet me first explain why the fabric of reality is so exciting.\nAnd I've said this many times before in many different places in different forums, but the basic thing is that I have a number of popular science books here on the bookshelf behind me.\nDominant among the authors there is Paul Davies.\nAnd Paul Davies wrote some wonderful books that were summaries of our best understanding of science at any particular given point in time.\nAnd he would connect these, unlike many other authors, he would connect these to the history of ideas and to philosophy and to other areas of our intellectual endeavors, things like religion, theology, mathematics, chemistry.\nHe would explain how physics is tied into these different areas.\nBut what I would say about that is it provided a wonderful overview and exciting overview of some of the latest parts of science, especially in physics, some of the mystery, some of the open questions as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=19"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ac567ac3-8b41-4418-90e0-716c9e482b39": {"page_content": "And he would connect these, unlike many other authors, he would connect these to the history of ideas and to philosophy and to other areas of our intellectual endeavors, things like religion, theology, mathematics, chemistry.\nHe would explain how physics is tied into these different areas.\nBut what I would say about that is it provided a wonderful overview and exciting overview of some of the latest parts of science, especially in physics, some of the mystery, some of the open questions as well.\nBut it is the kind of, they were the kind of books broadly speaking that anyone who read them, anyone knowledgeable in those areas would probably think is uncontroversial.\nThis is different to David Deutsch's work.\nDavid Deutsch's fabric of reality is not merely a summary of extent knowledge, the stuff that everyone agrees on.\nIt is taking the best theories and explaining them, number one, how they are in a sense, I go here at home, hence the fabric of reality.\nAnd how there is a particular way that one should understand these things in realistic terms.\nAnd so the fabric of reality is about the four strands, so they're talked about, the four strands of the fabric of reality.\nAnd David takes a scalpel, a scalpel to trying to remove errors from our understanding of these different theories in order to clarify exactly what our best understanding is, as hard as it may be sometimes to accept.\nAnd in particular, the theory of quantum physics is explained here in a popular account for the first time, as far as I'm aware, the first time in a popular account.\nWe explain the realistic conception of quantum theory.\nPrior to this, as I was struggled through university trying to understand quantum theory, I was told the usual nonsense about if you think you understand quantum theory, then you don't.\nOkay, this is what Richard Feynman said.\nWhat David Deutsch does is he will acknowledge the existence of various other so-called interpretations.\nAnd one of the books I have up here right here is The Ghost in the Atom by Paul Davies and John Brown, Julian Brown.\nYeah.\nBy another author and Paul Davies.\nAnd they go through, well, just about every interpretation of quantum theory that existed at the time of the publication of the book.\nThis was back in the late 80s.\nOne of the people I interview is David Deutsch.\nAnd in that book, he does try to explain the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.\nWhat was called many worlds interpretation of quantum theory at that time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=137"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1433fee7-7186-4fd7-af16-9b8e46b3573e": {"page_content": "Yeah.\nBy another author and Paul Davies.\nAnd they go through, well, just about every interpretation of quantum theory that existed at the time of the publication of the book.\nThis was back in the late 80s.\nOne of the people I interview is David Deutsch.\nAnd in that book, he does try to explain the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory.\nWhat was called many worlds interpretation of quantum theory at that time.\nAnd at that time, I was still struggling to understand it.\nand I didn't really understand even that explanation.\nBut here in the fabric of reality, we get an explanation of quantum theory that is just as clear as one can hope for at the time.\nAnd even through to today, it is still my go-to explanation for how to understand quantum theory.\nAnd there's only one way to understand quantum theory that we know of.\nAnd that is the existence of quasi or semi parallel universes where there are entities existing in those other universes, which we don't have easy access to, except for interference experiments and so on.\nThat's explained in this book.\nAnd that's the thing that really hooked me for sticking with the book from beginning to end and being wowed on almost every other page.\nBut the thing that drew me in, that was the thing that sort of enticed me to continue reading, but the thing that drew me in was chapter one, chapter one where David sort of seemed to dive into my own psychology somehow, because again, this book was published in 1997.\nAnd at the time, I was doing, you know, at uni undergraduate doing physics, doing mathematics, doing philosophy and kind of having the sense that there has to be a way in which all of this comes together.\nI kind of somehow subconsciously accepted that reality was just a coherent whole out there that you could come to have a better and better understanding of, that it didn't have to make no sense.\nBut at the same time, everyone seemed to be aspiring for specialization.\nSo the more that you knew, the more that you specialize.\nSo I was interested in astronomy.\nBut astronomy wasn't enough.\nYou need to be in astrophysicist, but that wasn't enough.\nYou needed to be an astrophysicist.\nAnd then stars, but that wasn't enough.\nYou need to be an astrophysicist.\nAfter a physicist was interested in variable stars, but that wasn't enough.\nYou need to be an astrophysicist and very reliable stars called Cepheid Variables.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=337"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b375214a-678f-4291-a859-1d13f4ef7bad": {"page_content": "So I was interested in astronomy.\nBut astronomy wasn't enough.\nYou need to be in astrophysicist, but that wasn't enough.\nYou needed to be an astrophysicist.\nAnd then stars, but that wasn't enough.\nYou need to be an astrophysicist.\nAfter a physicist was interested in variable stars, but that wasn't enough.\nYou need to be an astrophysicist and very reliable stars called Cepheid Variables.\nAnd you had to use them in order to find the distance to distance galaxies and so you'd become ever more specialized as someone who gained more and more knowledge.\nThis seemed disappointing to me.\nI wanted to be more broad than that.\nI wanted to have a broad understanding of everything.\nAnd that leads me to the beginning of the book.\nAnd so I'm just going to dive in and we'll come back to what the other strands of the fabric of reality are.\nBut this is what David says in chapter 1 of the fabric of reality, titled, The Theory of Everything in David Rights.\nI remember being told when I was a small child that in ancient times it was still possible for a very learned person to know everything that was known.\nI was also told that nowadays so much is known that no one could conceivably learn more than a tiny fraction of it, even in a long lifetime.\nThe latter proposition, surprise and disappointed me.\nIn fact, I refuse to believe it.\nI did not know how to justify my disbelief, but I knew that I did not want things to be like that.\nAnd I envied the ancient scholars.\nIt was not that I wanted to memorize all the facts that were listed in the world in Cyclopedias on the contrary.\nI hated memorizing facts.\nThat is not the sense in which I expected it to be possible to know everything that was known.\nIt would not have disappointed me to be told that more publications appear every day than anyone could read in a lifetime.\nAlthough there are 600,000 known species of beetle, I'd know wish to track the fall of every sparrow, nor did I imagine that an ancient scholar who supposedly knew everything that was known would have known everything of that sort.\nI had in mind a more discriminating idea of what should count as being known.\nBy known, I meant understood.\nThe idea that one person might understand everything that is understood may still seem fantastic, but it is distinctly less fantastic than the idea that one person could memorize every known fact.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=431"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5401a6df-012a-4c4f-9ecb-cf16789a397e": {"page_content": "I had in mind a more discriminating idea of what should count as being known.\nBy known, I meant understood.\nThe idea that one person might understand everything that is understood may still seem fantastic, but it is distinctly less fantastic than the idea that one person could memorize every known fact.\nFor example, no one could possibly memorize all known observational data on even so narrower subject as the motion of the planets.\nBut many astronomers understand those motions to the full extent that they are understood.\nThis is possible because understanding does not depend on knowing a lot of facts such, but on having the right concepts, explanations and theories.\nOne comparatively simple and comprehensible theory can cover an infinity of digestible facts.\nOur best theory of planetary motions is Einstein's general theory of relativity, which early in the 20th century superseded Newton's theory of gravity and motion, it correctly predicts in principle not only all planetary motions, but all other effects of gravity through the limits of accuracy of our best measurements.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=533"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "07fe0869-877d-4040-8be1-272fc947f591": {"page_content": "For a theory to predict something in principle means that the predictions follow logically from the theory, even if in practice the amount of computation that will be needed to generate some of the predictions is too large to be technologically feasible or even too large for it to be physically possible for us to carry it out in the universe as we find it pausing their just my reflection and going back to where David talks there about this idea that knowing everything that can be known can't possibly be about, for example, knowing where all the astronomical bodies that orbit the sun or the stuff in the solar system, what orbits they're going to take at any particular moment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=590"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4372e12a-3f06-4d0e-8400-c715e39f3dde": {"page_content": "In other words, if you ask me now, where is Mars going to be in relation to the earth as it orbits the sun tonight at 9 p.m. as I look into the sky, what part of the sky would I be able to tell you?.\nI won't know that.\nIn fact, I won't know anything except a moon, I've got a good idea where the moon will be tonight.\nBut that's not the kind of knowledge we're interested in.\nWhat we're interested in is the understanding.\nCould I find out?.\nYes, or there's a number of ways I could find out, but could I understand the laws?.\nYes, I've studied those laws and anyone who wants to study those laws can study those laws of orbital motion, of being able to predict given certain quantities, given certain things like the mass of the sun, the distance between the sun and the object orbiting it.\nThese are the kind of bits of information that can go into the laws as we understand them to enable a prediction and therefore an understanding, a deeper understanding that in fact, all these bodies that go around the sun follow elliptical orbits.\nAnd if you have a sufficiently powerful computer, it will do the calculation for you.\nYou can do it with pen and paper, you can do it with pen and paper.\nIf you want high precision, then a computer is much better as David says.\nAnd that's where the understanding is, just understanding that this equation represents this particular physical entity, be it space time or in Newton's conception, the force of gravity, then given positions of objects and masses of objects, then you can figure out what's going to happen to them over time.\nThis is the understanding that gives us.\nSo far from causing the number of things to be remembered to proliferate, understanding a simpler, deeper law that underlies all those facts is far more illuminating and it requires less memory as well, doesn't it?.\nOkay, back to the book.\nAnd we're just about to get into a section where David is going to depart following Popper from so many of the rest of physicists as they understand physics.\nIt's specifically because there's this debate, this debate centers around of course quantum theory as we will come to.\nThis is why one of the motivations for why he says what he's about to say.\nAnd what he says is, quote, being able to predict things or to describe them, however accurately, is not at all the same thing as understanding them.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=637"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f0b250b7-874e-4c48-95f5-bac5821367ba": {"page_content": "It's specifically because there's this debate, this debate centers around of course quantum theory as we will come to.\nThis is why one of the motivations for why he says what he's about to say.\nAnd what he says is, quote, being able to predict things or to describe them, however accurately, is not at all the same thing as understanding them.\nPredictions and descriptions in physics are often expressed as mathematical formula.\nSuppose that I memorize the formula from which I could if I had the time and inclination, calculate any planetary position that has been recorded in the astronomical archives, what exactly have I gained compared with memorizing those archives directly?.\nThe formula is easier to remember, but then looking a number up in the archives may be even easier than calculating it from a formula.\nThe real advantage of the formula is that it can be used in an infinity of cases beyond the archive data.\nFor instance, to predict the results of future observations, it may also yield the historical positions of the planets more accurately because the archive data contain observational errors.\nYet even though the formula summarizes infinitely more facts in the archives to knowing it does not amount to understanding planetary motions, facts cannot be understood just by being summarized in a formula any more than being listed on paper or committed to memory that can be understood only by being explained.\nFortunately, our best theories embody deep exponations as well as accurate predictions.\nFor example, the general theory of relativity explains gravity in terms of a new four-dimensional geometry of curved spacetime.\nIt explains precisely how this geometry affects and is affected by matter.\nThat explanation is the entire content of the theory.\nPredictions about planetary motions are merely some of the consequences we can deduce from the explanation.\nNow, I think that there bears repeating.\nSpeaking about the general theory of relativity, David said, that explanation is the entire content of the theory.\nPredictions about planetary motions are merely some of the consequences that we can deduce from the explanation.\nOkay, so my reflection on that, here in the fabric of reality, David is holding up as brightly highlighted as anywhere the centrality of explanation to the project of science.\nAnd even more broadly.\nBut when I first read this book in 1997, I think I appreciated the negative aspect of David's argument, namely that science wasn't only about prediction.\nI think I got that.\nThat science wasn't just a list of facts.\nI think I got that.\nWhat I don't think I really took on board was what the significance of explanation really was.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=762"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cc76abe9-9a67-4652-b7c4-36b25df31ad4": {"page_content": "And even more broadly.\nBut when I first read this book in 1997, I think I appreciated the negative aspect of David's argument, namely that science wasn't only about prediction.\nI think I got that.\nThat science wasn't just a list of facts.\nI think I got that.\nWhat I don't think I really took on board was what the significance of explanation really was.\nAnd even later when I read some pop-up for the first time, I still didn't quite understand the centrality of explanation.\nIt wasn't until the beginning of an infinity.\nWhen David explained to the first time that what we're after, whether it's in science or anything else, is not an explanation of any kind, because explanations are a dime a dozen, but hard to very explanations, hard to vary explanations.\nAnd it's the hard to vary explanation that makes an explanation a good explanation.\nBut I just say that because it's an interesting personal for me, psychological phenomena, that the concept of explanation was very much here in the fabric of reality.\nBut it took me a decade or more to really understand what was being said here.\nAnd now I think I do have a much better understanding of what was going on there.\nAs much as I took from the fabric of reality, as fundamentally ground shifting in terms of the perspective change that I underwent having read this book, I still didn't pick up everything.\nAnd that's kind of a remarkable thing.\nAnd I think this is why people do go back to great books.\nAnd this is what distinguishes great books from lesser works, let's say, that you can keep returning to these books and figuring out that there's yet more to learn and that you missed so much the first time around.\nAnd like I say, the importance of explanation here that David is highlighting seemed to have escaped me.\nIt really did escape me to a large extent.\nI understood what scientific theories were not, but I don't think I really got what scientific theories were.\nAnd I'd been reading about science and studying philosophy all this time, all the way up to the beginning of infinity.\nSo I think it wasn't until actually, even just slightly prior to the beginning of infinity, it was in one of David's TED talks, a new way to explain explanation.\nI think it was then that the light bulb moment happened for me the first time I saw that.\nBut I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=920"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b108d697-75ac-4145-a246-e6351f8e8ac4": {"page_content": "And I'd been reading about science and studying philosophy all this time, all the way up to the beginning of infinity.\nSo I think it wasn't until actually, even just slightly prior to the beginning of infinity, it was in one of David's TED talks, a new way to explain explanation.\nI think it was then that the light bulb moment happened for me the first time I saw that.\nBut I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself.\nAfter all, there are professional scientists out there, greatly accomplished physicists that I do not think appreciate what a good explanation is, or the importance of explanation at all.\nWell, we know this is the case because as we're going to come to in the fabric of reality, as we've covered somewhat in the beginning of infinity series, or we've covered a lot in the beginning of infinity series, there is a certain kind of theoretical physicist.\nAnd it seems to infect theoretical physics more than anything else.\nA certain type of theoretical physicist specifically interested in, let's say, quantum theory that thinks that explanation is overrated.\nWhat we're after, of course, is prediction and merely prediction.\nThis is the error of what's called instrumentalism, that all you want out of a theory is to be able to predict the outcome of experiments.\nAnd this is a completely misconceived notion as to what science is about.\nI mean, no one would be tempted in almost any other area of science to think that this is what science is about.\nNo biologist is interested in trying to predict which species are going to evolve.\nThey're interested in understanding the explanation of the origin of extant species and even extinct species as well.\nIn chemistry, we're interested in the explanation of combustion, nor all the ways in which fires might occur in the future.\nWe're not trying to predict all the fires that are going to happen.\nIn geology, we're interested in understanding, unifying things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the drift of continents.\nAnd although we'd like to be able to predict things like earthquakes, we can't at the moment, that's not the whole point of geology.\nGeology is understanding the differences between rock, how rocks come to have the different chemistry that they have within them.\nThe age of the earth, how a planet can be dynamical or not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1061"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3aaf7d14-144e-4b6b-b0d1-2dfaed1a0573": {"page_content": "In geology, we're interested in understanding, unifying things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the drift of continents.\nAnd although we'd like to be able to predict things like earthquakes, we can't at the moment, that's not the whole point of geology.\nGeology is understanding the differences between rock, how rocks come to have the different chemistry that they have within them.\nThe age of the earth, how a planet can be dynamical or not.\nWe want to understand, which is to say, we want to explain, but it is just in certain rarefied areas of theoretical physics that, apparently, the rules need to change because some people are uncomfortable with literal explanations, or they simply lack an explanation.\nSo beware, beware that kind of physicist because it seems to be in physics alone, where explanation is pushed aside.\nBut I shouldn't say only, of course, we have a certain kind of scientism that's out there now as well.\nSo there is a lack of willingness to understand, let's say, how economic systems work, or how psychology works.\nAnd instead, we're engaged, rather too much of the time, in attempting to predict the behavior of people, the behavior of economic markets, rather than understanding what it takes in order to, let's say, create wealth in economics.\nWhat are the preconditions for creating wealth?.\nWhat has worked in the past?.\nAnd why has it worked in the past?.\nCan we rule out some economic theories?.\nInstead, some people just want to plot graphs in an attempt to predict what is going to cause the stock market to rise or not, and then fiddle with the knobs in some way or other.\nAnd this is an instrumentalist view, I would suggest, within economics.\nAnd of course, we have historicism, this idea, this false idea, this dangerously false idea, that by looking at the past, we can extrapolate through to the future, especially in the realm of politics and history and sociology.\nAnd this leads to some terrible political movement.\nSo I'm probably a little bit unfair to say that it's only the theoretical physicists that do this.\nYes, it appears in psychology and history and the humanities and the social sciences.\nIt does appear there as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1163"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "372ba98e-3e87-46c9-9285-2b15d769d59f": {"page_content": "And this leads to some terrible political movement.\nSo I'm probably a little bit unfair to say that it's only the theoretical physicists that do this.\nYes, it appears in psychology and history and the humanities and the social sciences.\nIt does appear there as well.\nThis reluctance to really grapple with and understanding of things and being a certain degree humble in the face of not having an answer, of being able to say, we don't know, we are ignorant here, but let's do the best with what we do in fact know, but not pretend that we have already everything tied up into a nice neat little bundle where we can extrapolate off into the future.\nBecause the risk, of course, with extrapolation is it is an application of the false mode of reasoning, which is induction.\nAnd there is absolutely no way that you can rule out the next observation that you make isn't going to refute your entire linear trend or whatever other trend you think that you have in hand.\nInstead, as we say here, and as David has explained here, the only way, the only way to make predictions, reliable predictions, predictions which are genuinely logical deductions and which allow you to assume that what you know now will happen into the future, is to have a good hard to vary explanation.\nOf course, good and hard to vary do not yet appear here in the fabric of reality, but the idea of a prediction is we're deducing it from an explanation.\nAnd more than that, it has to be a good explanation.\nAnd specifically, the system has to behave in such a way that you know that it has universal laws governing it, such that the extrapolation is not going to be affected by things like, for example, knowledge creation, yet.\nAnd so this is why general relativity allows us to predict the motion of planets.\nWhy?.\nBecause we can, reasonably, at this point in the history of human civilization, assume that the only thing affecting, for example, the motion of planets in our solar system around the sun is the curvature of spacetime, is gravity, explained by the general theory of relativity.\nAnd therefore, we can make a deduction from that theory, which we call a prediction, and predict where any of the bodies within the solar system are going to be for a moment to moment, using general relativity.\nNow, can we make a prediction a reliable prediction for what those planets are going to be doing a billion years from now?.\nNo.\nNo, for a whole bunch of reasons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1304"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "387cccec-9859-472d-b23d-283a6b4b9404": {"page_content": "And therefore, we can make a deduction from that theory, which we call a prediction, and predict where any of the bodies within the solar system are going to be for a moment to moment, using general relativity.\nNow, can we make a prediction a reliable prediction for what those planets are going to be doing a billion years from now?.\nNo.\nNo, for a whole bunch of reasons.\nBecause we cannot assume, in the trivial case, that some other large cosmological body isn't going to cause a collision with the objects within our solar system.\nSo that's a simple thing.\nOur ignorance about what else might happen to the solar system, into the distant future.\nA comet could come, a strange neutron star could go wandering through the solar system, who knows?.\nBut more, the more optimistic view is, as we learned from the beginning of infinity, we don't know what human civilization is going to be like, a billion years from now, a billion years, will we have the power to move planets out of there all, but will we want to do so?.\nPerhaps, perhaps we will have mind, Mars, such that it no longer exists basically, and we've converted it entirely into a super colony that travels across galaxies.\nI don't know.\nBut the point is, we can't just solely rely upon something like general relativity to predict the orbital motion of planets into the far, far distant future.\nWe can do it for the next few years, reach them with some reasonable accuracy.\nWe will presume, we'll presume.\nOkay, let's go back to the book, David Rites.\nWhat makes the general theory of relativity so important is not that it can predict planetary motions a shade more accurately than Newton's theory can.\nBut that it reveals and explains previously unsuspected aspects of reality, such as the curvature of space and time.\nThis is typical of scientific explanation.\nScientific theories explain the objects and phenomena of our experience in terms of an underlying reality, which we do not experience directly.\nBut the ability of a theory to explain what we experience is not its most valuable attribute.\nIts most valuable attribute is that it explains the fabric of reality itself.\nAs we shall see, one of the most valuable, significant and also useful attributes of human thought generally is the ability to reveal and explain the fabric of reality, posing there, just emphasizing that.\nSo here, in the fabric of reality, we already have a hint of the importance of people and the importance of human thought there.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1420"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a37da78b-49ba-4e08-b6c0-be87612943fa": {"page_content": "But the ability of a theory to explain what we experience is not its most valuable attribute.\nIts most valuable attribute is that it explains the fabric of reality itself.\nAs we shall see, one of the most valuable, significant and also useful attributes of human thought generally is the ability to reveal and explain the fabric of reality, posing there, just emphasizing that.\nSo here, in the fabric of reality, we already have a hint of the importance of people and the importance of human thought there.\nOne of the most valuable, significant and also useful attributes of human thought generally is its ability to reveal and explain.\nFantastic.\nSo there we go.\nAre we getting the nascent beginnings of the universality of the human mind?.\nI think so.\nI think so.\nI think the hint to there, the ground is being set and they're also where David writes, the underlying reality, which we do not experience directly, is the first shot across the bow of empiricism.\nThis great misconception that so many scientists and philosophers and I guess man on the streets still holds, that the way in which science works is that we go out and we observe stuff and in observing stuff, we derive knowledge from nature in some way.\nThis is a misconceived way of thinking about the project of science or knowledge generally.\nThis is not the way in which knowledge is constructed.\nIt's a creative endeavor.\nSo let's continue with the book, David writes.\nYet some philosophers and even some scientists disparage the role of explanation in science.\nTo them, the basic purpose of a scientific theory is not to explain anything, but to predict the outcome of experiments.\nIt's entire content lies in its predictive formula.\nThey consider that any consistent explanation that a theory may give for its predictions is as good as any other or as good as no explanation at all, so long as the predictions are true.\nThis view is called instrumentalism because it says that a theory is no more than an instrument for making predictions.\nTo instrumentalists, the idea that science can enable us to understand the underlying reality that accounts for our observations is a fallacy under conceit.\nThey do not see how anything a scientific theory may say beyond predicting the outcomes of experiments can be more than empty words.\nExplanations, in particular, they regard as mere psychological props, a sort of fiction which we incorporate in theories to make them more easily remembered and entertaining.\nThe Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg was in an instrumentalist mood when he made the following extraordinary comment about Einstein's explanation of gravity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1557"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b4197422-5cea-4b87-91c0-23a26204df18": {"page_content": "They do not see how anything a scientific theory may say beyond predicting the outcomes of experiments can be more than empty words.\nExplanations, in particular, they regard as mere psychological props, a sort of fiction which we incorporate in theories to make them more easily remembered and entertaining.\nThe Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg was in an instrumentalist mood when he made the following extraordinary comment about Einstein's explanation of gravity.\nQuote from Weinberg, quote, the important thing is to be able to make predictions about images on the astronomers' photographic plates, frequencies of spectral lines, and so on.\nAnd it simply doesn't matter whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effects of gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons, as in pre-ion, starting in physics, or to a curvature of space and time, gravitation, and cosmology page 147 end quote.\nWeinberg and the other instrumentalists mistake, and what we ascribe the images on astronomers' photographic plates to does matter.\nAnd it matters not only to theoretical physicists like myself, whose very motivation for formulating and studying theories is the desire to understand the world better.\nI am sure that this is Weinberg's motivation too.\nHe is not really driven by an urge to predict images and spectra.\nFor even in purely practical applications, the explanatory power of a theory is paramount and its predictive power only supplementary.\nIf this seems surprising, imagine that an extraterrestrial scientist has visited the earth and given us an ultra-high technology oracle which can predict the outcome of any possible experiment, but provides no explanations.\nAccording to instrumentalists, once we had that oracle, we should have no further use for scientific theories except as a means of entertaining ourselves.\nBut is that true?.\nHow would the oracle be used in practice?.\nIn some sense, it would contain the knowledge necessary to build, say, an interstellar spaceship.\nBut how exactly would that help us to build one, or to build another oracle of the same client, or even a better mouse trap?.\nThe oracle only predicts the outcomes of experiments.\nTherefore, in order to use it at all, we must first know what experiments to ask it about.\nIf we gave it the design of a spaceship and the details of a proposed test flight, it could tell us how the spaceship would perform on such a flight, but it could not design the spaceship for us in the first place.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1682"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f971db79-c179-4a95-b818-9faa514c9cac": {"page_content": "The oracle only predicts the outcomes of experiments.\nTherefore, in order to use it at all, we must first know what experiments to ask it about.\nIf we gave it the design of a spaceship and the details of a proposed test flight, it could tell us how the spaceship would perform on such a flight, but it could not design the spaceship for us in the first place.\nAnd even if it predicted that the spaceship we had designed would explode on takeoff, it could not tell us how to prevent such an explosion.\nThat would still be for us to work out.\nAnd before we could work it out, before we could even begin to improve the design in any way, we should have to understand among other things how the spaceship was supposed to work.\nOnly then would we have any chance at discovering what might cause an explosion on takeoff prediction.\nEven perfect universal prediction is simply no substitute for explanation.\nPause their my reflection.\nSo all of this unfortunately, unfortunately, in my view, I don't know, I can't speak for David, but it seems to all arise from the same place.\nIt came from quantum theory.\nIt came from the beginnings of quantum theory, where physicists rightly were confused, but fuddled.\nThey didn't know what was going on.\nThere's a whole swag of observations they were making that just didn't comport with what they already knew about physics.\nThere were mysteries.\nAnd some of them simply retreated from reason.\nThey said, well, the project is hopeless.\nWe're very, very good at being able to predict the outcome of experiments, so that's all we can do.\nThat's what science is about, which is, I would say, less arrogant and more ignorant about science than anything else.\nIt's as if to say, the entirety of science is theoretical physics.\nAnd more than that, the entirety of science is those problems that you are unable to find answers to solutions to explanations for.\nAnd so therefore, from this observation, from your failure, from your failure as a theoretical physicist, in trying to understand this stuff.\nAnd you should be failing all the time, the whole point of science, you're failing, you're encountering problems, and then trying to overcome them.\nBut because of this failure, this specific failure, this failure in certain, rather at that time, esoteric areas of physics, you're going to extrapolate out to the rest of the entirety of science, as if all of science is just about predicting the outcome of experiments.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1815"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f58b4ee3-d021-406a-a0eb-3ec19f0fb01c": {"page_content": "And you should be failing all the time, the whole point of science, you're failing, you're encountering problems, and then trying to overcome them.\nBut because of this failure, this specific failure, this failure in certain, rather at that time, esoteric areas of physics, you're going to extrapolate out to the rest of the entirety of science, as if all of science is just about predicting the outcome of experiments.\nIt doesn't make much sense.\nIt doesn't seem fair.\nIt lacks consideration for all the other interesting areas of science, where we really do want to understand what the heck is going on.\nPeople interested in astronomy and astrophysics.\nWe love the explanation.\nIt's a thrilling explanation about the evolution of stars, stars like the sun, and stars unlike the sun.\nAnd yes, those theories, those explanations, allow us to give very rough predictions about what might happen to the sun in the future.\nAbsent people, of course.\nAnd we presume that what's going to happen to the sun in the future is it's going to end its life as a, firstly, a red giant, and then a white dwarf star, which will just slowly cool over billions of years.\nWe know this.\nIt's a fascinating explanation, especially in light of the fact of what else could have happened to the sun if it had have been larger.\nNamely, if it had have been a much bigger star, many times more massive, let's say 10 times more massive, then it would explode at the end of its life, leaving behind either a neutron star or possibly a black hole if it's bigger still.\nThat explanation is the point of astronomy and astrophysics.\nThis is why people do those kind of subjects.\nThe fact that we can just collect light in telescopes and come to an understanding of the universe like that and understanding of the universe is phenomenal.\nThat's the exciting part about science.\nNot predicting what's going to happen to any given star.\nIt's the general explanation.\nThe big bang cosmology, cosmology still as a science is very much in its infancy.\nIt's only been over the last few decades.\nWe've been able to actually gather data, data to some extent about the behavior of the universe as a whole.\nPrior to that, cosmology was well within the remit of theology only to deal with.\nIt was metaphysical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=1938"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1ff4d287-8165-431d-8077-38d8a33c3b5d": {"page_content": "Not predicting what's going to happen to any given star.\nIt's the general explanation.\nThe big bang cosmology, cosmology still as a science is very much in its infancy.\nIt's only been over the last few decades.\nWe've been able to actually gather data, data to some extent about the behavior of the universe as a whole.\nPrior to that, cosmology was well within the remit of theology only to deal with.\nIt was metaphysical.\nHow could we, human beings, pathetic as we are, presume to try and understand something like the entire universe, the entire physical universe, and yet this is what cosmologists take on.\nAnd by gathering these scant amounts of evidence, it's not like the most crucial part of cosmology is about predicting what's going to happen to the universe in the future.\nThat's part of it.\nBut the only way in which we can make any kind of guess about what's going to happen into the future, a scientific guess, a scientific prediction, conjecture about the possibility of what will happen into the distant future is by having an explanation in the first place that relies on our understanding of what's causing the evidence that we gather.\nEvidence like the 2.3 Kelvin, or 2.7 Kelvin, temperature of the cosmic microwave background.\nThe heat left over after the big bang, which we've only recently be able to collect these photons, these very low energy photons, and wonder about the origins of them and explain, therefore, the origins of them.\nAnd so that's all the fun stuff.\nPutting together all the different, we're triangulating really with this heat that permeates through out the entire universe, along with the fact that wherever you point your telescope at very distant galaxies, you find they're moving away, not only from us, but from each other.\nAnd trying to understand why is the amount of hydrogen out there, an intergalactic space, this amount compared to the amount of helium that's in intergalactic space, compared to everything else that's out there as well.\nWhy is it this ratio, this disstrangulation of evidence that enables us to then come with the grand explanation that we call the big bang, and then inflationary theory is phenomenal.\nThat's the phenomenal part in the exciting part of the story of science, not predicting.\nAnd anyway, predicting these really distant things in cosmology, again, we're still in the infancy.\nAnd so whenever you hear science popularizes, it's kind of fun.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2069"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e7f89c9-f3d5-4894-a449-f85049ecf749": {"page_content": "Why is it this ratio, this disstrangulation of evidence that enables us to then come with the grand explanation that we call the big bang, and then inflationary theory is phenomenal.\nThat's the phenomenal part in the exciting part of the story of science, not predicting.\nAnd anyway, predicting these really distant things in cosmology, again, we're still in the infancy.\nAnd so whenever you hear science popularizes, it's kind of fun.\nI think it's about as fun as a science fiction movie at this point.\nThere are the predictions about what's going to happen to the universe on timescales of hundreds of millions, billions, even trillions of years, some of these predictions.\nPeople make them very, very confidently.\nBut the evidence is limited, that would be the first thing.\nAnd the timescales that we're talking about are just so ridiculous, that it would seem to me that it's going to be the case that we're going to find far better cosmological theories.\nSo at the moment, of course, we think that the universe is undergoing this dark energy accelerating expansion.\nAnd if we take that seriously through to the absolute limits of what we could possibly know, then we think, well, eventually all the galaxies that we can observe are going to wink out of existence, because they're going to be accelerated along with space time beyond the horizon of what we can see.\nEventually, only our galaxies will be left like a lonely island.\nAnd then it will start to expand itself as space begins to expand.\nAnd then, you know, even the solar system will expand.\nAnd then, you know, the planet will expand probably by this time, by the way, of course, the sun has long since extinguished itself.\nBut if any people are left here in the region, that is the solar system, even eventually they will start to expand as well.\nTheir bodies will start to expand apart because of this accelerating expansion of space time.\nBut this is all predicated on the fact that our theory, our present theory, the best theory that we currently currently have about the behavior of the universe, won't be overturned.\nAnd I would, if I was a betting person, I would think that that observation is going to be overturned in some way, in some significant way.\nAnd one possible way is that, you know, even thousands of years from now, even if that explanation hasn't been overturned, that people might be able to harness the energy in some way and reverse it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2180"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c0ef348c-9446-442b-8224-ac31e23bd9f8": {"page_content": "And I would, if I was a betting person, I would think that that observation is going to be overturned in some way, in some significant way.\nAnd one possible way is that, you know, even thousands of years from now, even if that explanation hasn't been overturned, that people might be able to harness the energy in some way and reverse it.\nBecause at the moment, that accelerating expansion is actually quite a weak force.\nAnd that gets us very far away from the book here, except to say, it's clearly not the case that science in any field at all is primarily about prediction.\nIt's about understanding physical reality and reality more broadly.\nAnd therefore, it's about explanations.\nSo even even an oracle that's able to make all the predictions in the world doesn't allow you to really understand the world that you're in, even if you can predict the outcome of experiments.\nAs David goes on to write, the Oracle would be very useful in many situations, but its usefulness would always depend on people's ability to solve scientific problems in just the way they have to now, namely by devising explanatory theories.\nIt would not even replace all experimentation because its ability to predict the outcome of a particular experiment would impract us to depend on how easy it was to describe the experiment accurately enough for the oracle to give a useful answer compared with doing the experiment in reality.\nAfter all, the oracle would have to have some sort of user interface.\nPerhaps a description of the experiment would have to be entered into it in some standard language.\nIn that language, some experiments would be harder to specify than others.\nIn practice for many experiments, the specification would be too complex to be entered.\nThus, the oracle would have the same general advantages and disadvantages as any other source of experimental data.\nAnd it would be useful only in cases where consulting it happened to be more convenient than using other sources.\nTo put that another way, there is already one such oracle out there.\nNamely, the physical world tells us the result of any possible experiment if we ask it in the right language.\nIf we do the experiment, though in some cases it is impractical for us to enter a description of the experiment in the required form, I to build and operate the apparatus, but it provides no explanations.\nIsn't that fantastic?.\nVery much in David Deutsch fashion.\nJust eviscerating what might be regarded as a knockdown argument against people who are saying that science is about predictions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2307"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4780909d-c589-431c-9a34-27e8ee964fca": {"page_content": "If we do the experiment, though in some cases it is impractical for us to enter a description of the experiment in the required form, I to build and operate the apparatus, but it provides no explanations.\nIsn't that fantastic?.\nVery much in David Deutsch fashion.\nJust eviscerating what might be regarded as a knockdown argument against people who are saying that science is about predictions.\nIt's almost like the super AI, not AGI, but a super AI, narrow intelligence, but it's a super intelligence.\nAnd this super intelligence can predict the outcome of any experiment that you like.\nAnd so this is what some of the early quantum physicists were about some quantum physicists today talk about being instrumentalists or the shut up and calculate type people.\nAnd if this is all that science is about, then this oracle would make, wouldn't it, science redundant?.\nBut the problem is, if you want it to predict the outcome of experiment, then you have to first specify the experiment.\nThat takes a heck of a lot of explanatory work to do.\nAfter all, why are you doing this experiment in the first place?.\nWhat is the theory that you're testing?.\nHave we thought about that yet?.\nHow do we input this in?.\nHow do we tell the oracle what the experiment is precisely?.\nWhat is the instrumentation that you're using?.\nHow did you figure out what that instrumentation was?.\nWhat is the problem that the instrumentation is trying to solve in the first place?.\nAnd as David says here, we've got this oracle, don't we?.\nWe've got this oracle.\nIt's called physical reality.\nPhysical reality is the oracle.\nIt will give you the answer to any experiment that you ask it.\nThe hard part is not asking the question, the hard part is figuring out what the question is in the first place, asking what you're testing, what exactly is this theory you're testing?.\nWhy are you doing this experiment?.\nThis is not what science is about, okay?.\nWe learn these terrible lessons in school science class.\nWhat an experiment is is, oh, well, we're doing an experiment today class.\nWe're going to take a test tube of these chemicals and a test tube of these chemicals and we're going to mix them together into a beaker and see what happens.\nThat's an experiment, isn't it?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2438"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "234503a7-fef7-47ec-b102-8d847dd34d98": {"page_content": "Why are you doing this experiment?.\nThis is not what science is about, okay?.\nWe learn these terrible lessons in school science class.\nWhat an experiment is is, oh, well, we're doing an experiment today class.\nWe're going to take a test tube of these chemicals and a test tube of these chemicals and we're going to mix them together into a beaker and see what happens.\nThat's an experiment, isn't it?.\nAnd in fact, this enters culture, this is what experiments are supposed to be.\nJust a random mixing of ideas, trying something where you've got absolutely no idea why you're doing it, why you're doing it in the first place, let alone what is going to happen.\nAnd having found something new happening, something unexpected, which of course will happen in any case.\nYou just don't know what's going to happen.\nYou take your two test tubes, you mix them together.\nIf nothing happens, that's surprising.\nYou didn't know that that's what was going to happen.\nIf you get an explosion, that's surprising, you didn't know that was going to happen.\nIf you get a color change and whatever the color is, it's going to be surprising.\nBut the point is, you had no theory to begin with.\nDid you?.\nWhat were you testing?.\nWhy were you doing this experiment?.\nThis is not what an experiment is.\nI wouldn't call that an experiment.\nThere is no sense in which that's an experiment.\nAn experiment is a test of a theory.\nAnd there are two kinds of experiments in the world.\nThere's an experiment where you literally have two good theories on offer and you don't know which one is true.\nIt's almost impossible to think of cases in science where there were three reasonable, viable explanations for a given phenomena.\nIt doesn't happen.\nIn science, just think about it yourself.\nThe usually is identically one explanation, and we call it the scientific theory of.\nFor so long, as far as the origins of the universe went, something that many people were interested in, there really were no viable explanations at all.\nThere were supernatural ones.\nGod did it, which kind of raises the question as to where did God come from and if people answer, well, God is that entity that's outside of space and time and whatever else.\nWell, why move the problem one step back?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2566"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "da8e8afb-cb70-4e8a-b714-4cba0b4b1887": {"page_content": "For so long, as far as the origins of the universe went, something that many people were interested in, there really were no viable explanations at all.\nThere were supernatural ones.\nGod did it, which kind of raises the question as to where did God come from and if people answer, well, God is that entity that's outside of space and time and whatever else.\nWell, why move the problem one step back?.\nWhy not just say, well, the origin of the universe, whatever that thing was, is outside of space and time and gave origin to the universe.\nWe don't need an intelligent creator being.\nWhatever the case, there would not really any good scientific explanations.\nAt the turn of the 1900s, the turn of the 20th century, we had this idea of an eternal universe that was just always there or infinite and all spatial directions.\nMaybe God clicked these fingers and a universe that was spatially infinite just popped into existence at some point.\nYou know, whatever the Bible said, however long, six thousand years or something.\nBut this makes no testable scientific predictions.\nIt's not experiment that we can do to test whether or not that is a better theory than something else.\nIt's not observation that we can make.\nAn experiment has to be able to compare two different competing scientific theories.\nAnd eventually we did have two, eventually we did.\nWe had the idea of the Big Bang, you know, the Big Bang sort of, well, it's an interesting part of the history of cosmology as to who came up with the Big Bang.\nYou know, was it the priest George LaMartre was at Alexander Friedman, there was an Einstein as well.\nThey all had seemingly had had something to do with coming up with the Big Bang.\nI don't know where you would actually place the credit for the Big Bang itself.\nIt was just a, this really was a case of the slow accumulation of problems and evidence in cosmology, which then all pointed to this common origin in the space and time, the universe was smaller in the past.\nBut there was, there was a time where it was quite reasonable to subscribe to Fred Hoyle's idea of a steady state universe, of the universe that just perpetually existed.\nSo there, there was a genuine split in the scientific community.\nWas it an origin in space and time, the Big Bang, or was it a universe that had always been there, the steady state.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2656"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e6e6ad5c-04d0-4499-9f11-2a2ba9074f1b": {"page_content": "But there was, there was a time where it was quite reasonable to subscribe to Fred Hoyle's idea of a steady state universe, of the universe that just perpetually existed.\nSo there, there was a genuine split in the scientific community.\nWas it an origin in space and time, the Big Bang, or was it a universe that had always been there, the steady state.\nAnd the purpose of an experiment, a cosmological experiment of a kind of being able to observe, observe things like the cosmic microwave background that constitutes an experiment setting up a big antenna that can collect microwave radiation.\nAnd to notice, it is homogenous in all directions, more or less, which means that the universe was permeated with heat.\nWhat was the origin of the heat?.\nWell, the steady state can't really account for that.\nNor can steady state of course properly account for the red shift of distant galaxies in all directions as well.\nAnd then the ratio of hydrogen to helium, okay, all of this stuff is explained by the Big Bang theory and not explained by adequately by the steady state theory.\nAnd so these things, these observations constitute experiments of a kind that rule out one particular theory in favor of another.\nNow, this is the ideal kind of experiment.\nThe ideal kind of experiment is called a crucial experiment.\nIt decides between two competing theories.\nNow, the only other kind of experiment is an experiment that makes the theory problematic.\nWell, maybe it doesn't even make the theory problematic.\nIt's just a problem.\nYou know, the measurement of the speed of neutrinos back in the day, whenever that was, when the large hydrogen clatter was switched on.\nAnd they thought that the neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light.\nThis is an experiment, I did this experiment.\nThat experiment was problematic in the true sense of the word, not the woke sense of the word.\nIn the true sense of the word, it raised a problem.\nNow, did it raise a problem for relativity?.\nWell, it might have.\nIt might have.\nAs it turned out, no, it was problematic for another reason.\nNamely, the experiment itself was faulty, flawed.\nIt suffered from something called systematic error.\nOkay, there was an error in the method, the way in which the experiment was conducted.\nA cable was loose or something or other.\nAnd so this is a legitimate experiment, in a sense.\nIt revealed something about the nature of experimentation of that kind.\nCareful with your cables.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2775"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8f84ab64-ce6c-46dc-90cc-54b8addc1d8a": {"page_content": "It might have.\nAs it turned out, no, it was problematic for another reason.\nNamely, the experiment itself was faulty, flawed.\nIt suffered from something called systematic error.\nOkay, there was an error in the method, the way in which the experiment was conducted.\nA cable was loose or something or other.\nAnd so this is a legitimate experiment, in a sense.\nIt revealed something about the nature of experimentation of that kind.\nCareful with your cables.\nBut that's the only other kind of experiment.\nWell, you already have a theory.\nYou have a theory about neutrinos and the speed with which things can move and the way in which an experimental apparatus should be set up.\nOkay.\nAnd you're testing all of this stuff.\nYou're testing this by conducting the actual experiment, collecting the data.\nBut my example of, you know, the random mixing of chemicals in a school science laboratory when you have no clue what's going on.\nWell, that's not really an experiment.\nNow, to be fair, I don't think any science teacher actually really does this.\nOkay.\nMost science teachers have some conception at least of what's going on with the underlying chemistry or science.\nAnd they do try and explain this to the children.\nAnd the children are, you know, testing things.\nThey are testing hypotheses.\nThis does indeed go on.\nBut the extent to which you're really getting a genuine understanding of what's going on is anyone's guess.\nThat's a whole other topic.\nHowever, okay.\nSo I'm going to go back to the book.\nI'm going to skip a section there, which is more detail about instrumentalism.\nThis idea that the entire purpose of science is just about making predictions.\nAnd I'll skip to the point where David writes, quote, an extreme form of instrumentalism called positivism or logical positivism holds that all statements other than those describing or predicting observations are not only superfluous, but meaningless.\nAlthough this doctrine is itself meaningless, according to its own criterion, it was nevertheless the prevailing theory of scientific knowledge during the first half of the 20th century, even today instrumentalist and positivist ideas still have currency.\nOne reason why they are superficially plausible is that although prediction is not the purpose of science, it is part of the characteristic method of science.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=2924"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dee00647-5c27-4a13-84e4-6501aac25c6c": {"page_content": "Although this doctrine is itself meaningless, according to its own criterion, it was nevertheless the prevailing theory of scientific knowledge during the first half of the 20th century, even today instrumentalist and positivist ideas still have currency.\nOne reason why they are superficially plausible is that although prediction is not the purpose of science, it is part of the characteristic method of science.\nThe scientific method involves postulating a new theory to explain some class of phenomena and then performing a crucial experimental test, an experiment for which the old theory predicts one observable outcome and the new theory another.\nOne then rejects the theory whose predictions turn out to be false, thus the outcome of a crucial experimental test to decide between two theories does depend on the theory's predictions and not directly on their explanations.\nThis is the source of the misconception that there is nothing more to a scientific theory than its predictions, but experimental testing is by no means the only process involved in the growth of scientific knowledge.\nThe overwhelming majority of theories rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests, we reject them without ever bothering to test them, pausing their my reflection.\nWow, there's just so much there.\nand I think this is again why or possible explanation for myself, possible explanation for myself is to why I didn't get it the first time around, even though I read this book, you know, over and again and I was engaged even in the late 90s in online email discussions about the book.\nI still failed to take on boards so much, you know, there's the concept of a crucial experimental test.\nThis took me all the way until, well, 2016, 2016 when David published his paper, the logic of experimental tests, particularly of ever retying quantum theory, and it was then that I think I finally appreciated what a crucial experimental test was.\nBut there's a difference between a crucial experimental test and any other kind of experiment that happens in science.\nAnd again, the crucial experimental test is the one which is able to decide between a theory and its rivals.\nAnd so it leaves one theory standing, ruling out the others, you know, in most cases, certainly in physics, at best you've got two competing theories, at best, usually only have one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=3008"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d0c68bed-b681-4223-a911-468af3807fd5": {"page_content": "But there's a difference between a crucial experimental test and any other kind of experiment that happens in science.\nAnd again, the crucial experimental test is the one which is able to decide between a theory and its rivals.\nAnd so it leaves one theory standing, ruling out the others, you know, in most cases, certainly in physics, at best you've got two competing theories, at best, usually only have one.\nAnd if you do have one and you're testing that theory by doing experiments and the experiment time to bring with the theory, then you've got this problem in preparing epistemology, sometimes known as a joupham coin thesis of how do you know what's wrong?.\nIs it the theory that's wrong when it disagrees with the experiment?.\nOr is it that you're experiment is wrong?.\nYou know, there's that saying many a beautiful theory has been slain by an ugly fact.\nWell, it's not quite true.\nYou can't slay a theory with an ugly fact.\nUnless you've got another theory to jump to, unless you have a better idea of what to do.\nIf we did 10 experiments tomorrow and they all disagreed with general relativity, there's literally nothing for it, but to rely on general relativity, because no one's got a better theory of general relativity, they're better than general relativity.\nNamely, a theory that can do everything that general relativity can do, and more, and more is the key thing.\nAnd they're at the end of this section here, we get the idea that the overall majority of theories are rejected because they can tame bad explanations.\nNow, now this part I got back in the fabric of reality, and this is one of those thrilling passages, because here we get to the grass cure for the common cold.\nThis is the first time I encountered that argument.\nAnd this idea that you need an explanation.\nIt's the explanation that you're testing, not the predictions.\nLet's just read it.\nOkay, and this is where I'll end today, because I think it's a great way to end things.\nAnd if you haven't heard this before, strap yourself in.\nOkay, the importance of explanations in testing, in experimental testing, rather than just predictions, David writes.\nFor example, consider the theory that eating a kilogram of grass is a cure for the common cold.\nThat theory makes experimentally testable predictions.\nIf people tried the grass cure and found it ineffective, the theory would be proved false.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=3123"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f604a6b2-698e-4acc-bd6e-6bd0df7104ca": {"page_content": "And if you haven't heard this before, strap yourself in.\nOkay, the importance of explanations in testing, in experimental testing, rather than just predictions, David writes.\nFor example, consider the theory that eating a kilogram of grass is a cure for the common cold.\nThat theory makes experimentally testable predictions.\nIf people tried the grass cure and found it ineffective, the theory would be proved false.\nBut it has never been tested and probably never will be, because it contains no explanation, either of how the cure would work or of anything else.\nWe rightly presume it to be false.\nThere are always infinitely many possible theories of that sort, compatible with existing observations and making new predictions, so we could never have the time or resources to test them at all.\nWhat we test our new theories that seem to show promise of explaining things better than the prevailing ones do, pausing their ending it for today.\nBut just notice there, anyone can come along and make a testable prediction, a testable claim.\nThat doesn't mean they've got a scientific explanation.\nIt doesn't mean they're doing science at all.\nDavid's other example is, you know, any person with a sandwich board standing on the street corner saying that the world is going to come to an end in fiery bombardment from the heavens next Tuesday, June the 18th or whatever, has a testable prediction.\nAnd when the day comes and goes without incident, does anyone learn anything?.\nWell, they might, or they might not.\nThey might just go back to their religious texts, reinterpret it in some way, and say, oh, I was out by a year just you wait until next year, but there is no explanation there.\nIt's testable, but without the explanation, we have no reason to assume why that prediction should be the way that it is.\nSo if if you say grass is going to cure the common cold for eating one kilo of grass is going to cure the common cold, why should we believe you?.\nWhat is the mechanism?.\nAnd so this works for any area of science, and especially any area of pseudoscience, okay?.\nAnyone who has the crazy nostrum, the claim about what alternative medical intervention is going to cure you with your disease.\nThe key thing is to ask why and how.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=3287"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4a611f20-754c-4082-b8eb-ff3645edabfb": {"page_content": "So if if you say grass is going to cure the common cold for eating one kilo of grass is going to cure the common cold, why should we believe you?.\nWhat is the mechanism?.\nAnd so this works for any area of science, and especially any area of pseudoscience, okay?.\nAnyone who has the crazy nostrum, the claim about what alternative medical intervention is going to cure you with your disease.\nThe key thing is to ask why and how.\nNow, it's absolutely the case that there are still places within medicine, where there isn't a fantastic explanation of why the particular thing works, but in traditional Western medicine, certainly at least what we have is a tradition of rules of thumb.\nIn other words, this thing has been shown to work in many cases, and we don't know why.\nWe don't know why yet, but we're working on it.\nWe're trying to figure out what the explanation is, okay?.\nAnd I can easily, and we can, you know, the community of doctors can show that the thing causes little harm and has some benefit for reasons they don't know.\nBut this is because the gradual evolution, the hard one evolution of that kind of knowledge, which you might even call in explicit medical knowledge that's been passed down.\nEven if we don't have a fully explicit scientific explanation of how some of these treatments work.\nOkay, so this is the first of what I presume will be many episodes about the fabric of reality.\nWe're barely through chapter one yet, and so next time I think I will read more, speak less, but.\nuntil then, bye-bye.\nNow, of course, many people may well notice that if you're watching this for the first time, I have another series on the beginning of infinity, and importantly, alongside this, I have a series on the science of canon cards, Chiarama letters, new book that has only been released over the last few weeks.\nThis is in 2021.\nAnd so I would encourage people to go out and get that book as well as, of course, the fabric of reality.\nAnd if you're so inclined, you can find me on Patreon.\nYou can do a Google search for top cast Patreon, T-O-K, C-A-S-T, Patreon, and you'll find me there, or Brett R. Hall at Patreon as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=3358"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15da1ba3-d754-4407-9969-5db4afaada56": {"page_content": "This is in 2021.\nAnd so I would encourage people to go out and get that book as well as, of course, the fabric of reality.\nAnd if you're so inclined, you can find me on Patreon.\nYou can do a Google search for top cast Patreon, T-O-K, C-A-S-T, Patreon, and you'll find me there, or Brett R. Hall at Patreon as well.\nOr you can just go to www.brethall.org and on the front there there's a little button that says donate, and I would appreciate any kind of assistance with my ongoing work here in understanding the worldview of David Deutsch, Car Popper, Chiarama letter, and various other people who are interested in the optimistic future and the centrality of people to understanding the universe, the cosmological significance.\nUntil next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2C21gIgzY&t=3505"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fd06c911-7691-4e3f-83b5-2a9dfff4db3f": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast, and to the second part of my series on kind of about a discussion between Sam Harrison, Max Tegmark, that was had years ago on the making sense podcast.\nIn this part of the discussion, we're mainly focused on mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics and how we come to know mathematics.\nAnd a lot of what I would say are misconceptions from the mathematicians' misconception, tend to creep in here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6eb574d3-6e02-43b7-b9fa-6bdfa1fa8241": {"page_content": "The mathematicians' misconception is that the brain or the mind rather of a human being, and especially of the mathematician, has privileged access to mathematical certainty or mathematical truth in some way, that the way in which mathematical knowledge is created, or the theorems of mathematics come to be known to mathematicians, is something other than this fallible method of conjecture and refutation, that there is some other way of gaining insight into absolutely necessary truth, or certain truth, or something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=29"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "300d269c-4c8c-4104-a9a4-d0e33ba1fc90": {"page_content": "This is the mathematicians' misconception that mathematics doesn't require a physical computation in order for us to come to understand it.\nBut that's just wrong.\nAll knowledge, mathematical, scientific, moral, political, whatever it happens to be, has to be arrived at via a human mind, which is running on a computer, which is obeying the laws of physics, and the laws of physics mandate that you will have errors now and again.\nThat's simply unavoidable.\nThat's just the way knowledge is generated via this method of error correction, identifying the errors, and then correcting them.\nAnd that's what motivates all of knowledge creation, finding some problem or error in the existing theories, or even theorems, and then improving on them.\nThere is no final knowledge.\nThere's no way of tying up with a little bow what we have discovered in any area.\nThere will always be open questions.\nWe always just at the beginning of infinity, beginning to scratch the surface of our understanding of reality.\nNow, early on in the discussion, I think you can hear a sense of confusion coming through.\nOne thing I would say is that people struggle with this idea that number, mathematics, the theorems, or whatever you want to call it, these objects of mathematics have an existence, have an independent existence.\nAnd when I say that, I just mean that, well, these things, these truths aren't made of atoms.\nMaterial stuff is made of atoms, but if you are committed to being a materialist or a physicalist, and this is the idea that you will only grant existence two things made of atoms, or stuff in the physical world that is made of physical stuff.\nYou kind of get yourself tied up into knots, and because you're talking about, let's say, the laws of physics, which you might grant exist, they're not made of material stuff.\nThey're not made of particles or anything like that.\nThey're not even made of space or energy.\nThey are the explanations of space and energy.\nThey're the things that control what's going on in a certain sense.\nSo if you're a physicalist, you're automatically believing in, or you're endorsing the existence of something that's not made of matter.\nOr are you?.\nI don't know.\nSome physicalists maybe deny that the laws of physics are real things as well.\nYou get some strange ideas among people who practice professional philosophy.\nWhat I like to say is things like numbers exist.\nThey have independent existence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=62"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9246e1dd-5289-4074-89b0-8fc5acda0d91": {"page_content": "They're the things that control what's going on in a certain sense.\nSo if you're a physicalist, you're automatically believing in, or you're endorsing the existence of something that's not made of matter.\nOr are you?.\nI don't know.\nSome physicalists maybe deny that the laws of physics are real things as well.\nYou get some strange ideas among people who practice professional philosophy.\nWhat I like to say is things like numbers exist.\nThey have independent existence.\nThey exist abstractly.\nThey're not made out of matter.\nAnd then people say, hmm, abstractly, it sounds like you're a platonist that these objects of mathematics have some sort of existence outside of the physical world.\nBut where is this other realm of this platonic realism?.\nAnd that's the wrong question.\nThat question actually doesn't make any sense.\nIt makes as much sense to me as asking what I was doing decades before my grandfather was born.\nI mean, grammatically, it's a correct sentence, but it's referring to something that didn't exist.\nAnd it doesn't exist.\nAnd it couldn't exist.\nAnd it just makes no logical sense.\nIt's illogical when you actually try and think through what's going on.\nIt's the same as what was happening before time was created.\nNow, if you have an explanation of the beginning of time, asking about what happened before time, likewise, doesn't make any sense, asking what's outside of all of space, likewise makes the sense you're asking for an explanation of the spaces outside of space.\nYou're just postulating more space.\nI would say that the same kind of thing is a mistake when we say, where is this realm of abstract reality?.\nBut it's not anywhere it just exists.\nThe physical world consists of space time and the stuff in it.\nEnergy and matter.\nSo that's what the physical world is.\nAnd there are places in the physical world.\nAnd there are times in the physical world, if you like.\nBut the abstract world, that's not made of space time.\nIt's not made of energy and matter.\nIt consists of truths, abstractions drawn from that physical world, but they're not part of the physical world.\nThey're not made of that physical world.\nWe become to understand these abstract things using our minds, which themselves are abstractions.\nSo it's perfectly okay to say something has an existence, without being able to place it in time and space.\nThat's perfectly fine.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=174"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "49c293f9-67aa-4ab6-8753-8382e50cb7e3": {"page_content": "But the abstract world, that's not made of space time.\nIt's not made of energy and matter.\nIt consists of truths, abstractions drawn from that physical world, but they're not part of the physical world.\nThey're not made of that physical world.\nWe become to understand these abstract things using our minds, which themselves are abstractions.\nSo it's perfectly okay to say something has an existence, without being able to place it in time and space.\nThat's perfectly fine.\nIn fact, you kind of get a sense that Sam is almost getting this.\nAt first, he seems to be suggesting that an idea of Platonism, the idea that this abstract reality exists in some way.\nNow, I'm not really sure exactly.\nIt depends on who you ask.\nWhen you ask different Platonists, what their version of Platonism is.\nSome of them will talk about a physical space of some kind, which as I say, I think it's a category area.\nWhen you start talking about physical spaces of abstract stuff, well, how do you marry these two things together?.\nThat doesn't really make any sense.\nAbstract spaces are different to physical spaces.\nSam almost gets there because later on in the conversation, I think we'll get there today.\nHe actually talks about an example that I invoke myself very, very often.\nAnd that is the example of, what is the next highest prime number?.\nAt the moment, we know you can look at Wikipedia and you can write out, what is the highest known prime number?.\nAnd they'll give you a number, a very, very large number.\nNow, we happen to know as a matter of proof there are infinitely many primes.\nNow, the next one, yet to be discovered, it exists.\nIt absolutely exists, and the one after that, and the one after that, an infinite number of primes exist.\nBut where?.\nWell, certainly not in the physical world, not made out of any atoms.\nThey haven't been instantiated, represented.\nAnyway, anywhere in existence, yet, but they must exist because we can come to discover them.\nWe're not inventing them, we are discovering these things.\nPeople are searching for them, literally searching, searching where, searching through abstract space, the abstract space of numbers.\nComputers are working hard, grinding away right now, to try and locate in that space, that infinite space, mind you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=284"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8553deda-e0bc-4aad-aba3-733df6f55dd2": {"page_content": "They haven't been instantiated, represented.\nAnyway, anywhere in existence, yet, but they must exist because we can come to discover them.\nWe're not inventing them, we are discovering these things.\nPeople are searching for them, literally searching, searching where, searching through abstract space, the abstract space of numbers.\nComputers are working hard, grinding away right now, to try and locate in that space, that infinite space, mind you.\nThe next prime, number, the next highest prime number that will hold the record until such times the one after that is discovered.\nThen the one after that, and so on, it goes.\nThis continual discovering of this landscape out there.\nNow, we exist in physical reality, and we are used to physical reality.\nThis is not to say that there are companies, there are other landscapes, that we can come to understand more and more.\nSam invokes one himself, the moral landscape.\nAnd I would say, that's also quite right.\nWe can imagine a moral landscape of well-being by whatever definition.\nI also like to invoke Jaron Leneier's concept of a disciplined dualist here.\nI like to think of myself as a disciplined dualist, that we can say that these abstract things exist, but not much more than that.\nWe can come to have a better and better understanding of this abstract reality, but not much more than that.\nAnd asking questions that are about the location in time and space.\nIn other words, where in physical space is the abstract stuff, is just a category error.\nNow, some people are upset about that, but again, it's making them a stake of presuming that there is only one kind of thing.\nThe stuff made out of matter that exists in space time.\nBut that's wrong, that's just wrong.\nThere are such things as emergent stuff which are beyond merely matter, beyond merely atoms.\nThere's something else going on.\nWe know they exist because they are invoked when we explain the world using our best explanations.\nAnd what do we say?.\nA thing exists insofar as it features in our best explanations.\nAnd not otherwise.\nAnd when we say it exists, we mean we know it exists.\nWhat else could we mean?.\nAnd sometimes things that we think exist turn out not to exist, like the force of gravity, and flogiston, and Elon Vital.\nThese things scientifically in the history were thought to exist.\nAnd then we found they didn't exist.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=392"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d95ac145-47aa-41be-89cd-92f64b460fc2": {"page_content": "And what do we say?.\nA thing exists insofar as it features in our best explanations.\nAnd not otherwise.\nAnd when we say it exists, we mean we know it exists.\nWhat else could we mean?.\nAnd sometimes things that we think exist turn out not to exist, like the force of gravity, and flogiston, and Elon Vital.\nThese things scientifically in the history were thought to exist.\nAnd then we found they didn't exist.\nWe had a better theory that ruled those things out.\nInstead, postulated other stuff, space time, and oxygen, and information and evolution by natural selection.\nThat kind of stuff exists now.\nWe know it exists now.\nWe know absolutely for sure that it will never be able to turn any of that stuff.\nNo,.\nbut that's not what saying something exists means.\nThis is the distinction between ontology, what ultimately, absolutely as a matter of final truth exists in some way, shape or form, to which we don't have access.\nAnd epistemology, our knowledge of physical reality.\nAnd we have access to physical reality and to abstract reality, and all the other domains in which we might consider our knowledge applicable, in which we can come to understand reality broadly, we have access to that via epistemology.\nBut always, approximately, and always in a way that leaves more and more questions for us to continue to answer and make progress.\nAnd this distinction between ontology and mathematics, what really truly exists and our knowledge of what really truly exists, this distinction here is also where the mathematicians' misconception comes in.\nAnd one of my favorite lines from the fabric of reality sums up this entire notion.\nAnd that line is necessary truth is merely the subject matter of mathematics.\nNecessary truth is not the reward we get for doing mathematics.\nSo it's the distinction between, and I've said this before on ToKCast, between whatever the fundamental constituents of matter really, really are, and our knowledge of the fundamental constituents of matter at any given time.\nNow, the history of that just shows that we continue to find smaller and smaller stuff.\nNow, it used to be thought that atoms were the smallest thing, and then we found out that there were subatomic stuff, protons, neutrons, and electrons.\nAnd then we found out, well, even the protons and neutrons are made of these things called quacks.\nAnd now people are saying, well, maybe the quacks are made out of strings.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=505"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1490a7cc-e199-4d88-8bd5-d647f5501ceb": {"page_content": "Now, the history of that just shows that we continue to find smaller and smaller stuff.\nNow, it used to be thought that atoms were the smallest thing, and then we found out that there were subatomic stuff, protons, neutrons, and electrons.\nAnd then we found out, well, even the protons and neutrons are made of these things called quacks.\nAnd now people are saying, well, maybe the quacks are made out of strings.\nAnd so our knowledge of the ultimate constituents of matter at any particular time is imperfect.\nIt leaves open questions.\nWe do not know the final ultimate constituents of matter.\nParticle physics isn't about finding the ultimate constituents of matter.\nInstead, it's about finding our best explanation of what we know the constituents of matter are at any given time.\nAt any given time, we know the constituents of matter, but not perfectly, not finally.\nThat's not what no means.\nThat's not what knowledge is.\nIt's not about a final completed science.\nIt's about explaining what we know at any given time.\nSo to with mathematics, but this is very poorly understood.\nIn particular by mathematicians, and hence the mathematicians misconception that David Deutsch talked about, it is mistaking, mistaking our knowledge of the necessary truths of mathematics with the necessary truths themselves.\nIf you could rock the necessary truths in and of themselves, that would be inherent.\nBut how would you get this in the errant knowledge?.\nHow would you escape from the fallibility of the human mind?.\nHow would you escape from the fact that whatever your mind is doing as a matter of physics is a physical process?.\nWhenever it's doing mathematics or performing a calculation or a computation, that is, the action of neurons made of atoms, obeying laws of physics, the quantum laws of physics, and the quantum laws of physics introduce error into the system uncertainty all the time.\nThat's just a law of physics and laws of physics are primary.\nThey rule over everything, including brains, including what brains do.\nThey can strain, how perfect, how knowledge of anything can be, and that includes mathematics.\nBut the mathematicians' misconception is, oh, we can escape that when we're doing mathematics, when we're doing mathematics, we can actually grasp ultimate truth.\nAnd this is simply wrong.\nAmong other things, mathematics produces theorems via a method of proof, and the method of proof must begin somewhere with the axioms.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=631"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50656e87-f4fd-4745-bbde-8d78e6987e2d": {"page_content": "They rule over everything, including brains, including what brains do.\nThey can strain, how perfect, how knowledge of anything can be, and that includes mathematics.\nBut the mathematicians' misconception is, oh, we can escape that when we're doing mathematics, when we're doing mathematics, we can actually grasp ultimate truth.\nAnd this is simply wrong.\nAmong other things, mathematics produces theorems via a method of proof, and the method of proof must begin somewhere with the axioms.\nBut you don't know the axioms are true.\nOf course, some people will say, how could they be otherwise?.\nWell, I would just implore anyone listening to this who wonders about how could it be otherwise?.\nTo go to my discussion with Naval, there at the Naval podcast, where I talk about precisely this thing, and I invoke the idea of people thinking, how could it be otherwise that two dots drawn on a piece of paper would have a unique line going through them?.\nHow could it possibly be otherwise?.\nHow could Euclidean geometry possibly be otherwise?.\nHow could we have a geometry different to this?.\nThat's the history of mathematics of common sense, of logic of people, even thinking they've found, absolutely secure foundations, absolutely unarguable.\nIt could not possibly be otherwise.\nThis is logically proved.\nWell, even those things can be overturned.\nThe history of mathematics, philosophy, logic tells us this.\nSo this is our topic for today.\nNow, as I say, mainly it's me talking.\nAlready it's been about 15 minutes of just me talking.\nBut let me bring you a little bit of what Sam has to say, and then some of what Max has to say on precisely this topic of, the relationship between mathematics and the physical world.\nAnd I'm going to pick it up where Sam is talking about that most famous of papers, Eugene Wigner's, on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and the physical sciences.\nI want to linger on this question of the primacy of mathematics and the strange utility of mathematics.\nAt one point in your book, you cite the off-sighted paper by Wigner, who I think he wrote in the sixties about, in a paper entitled, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences.\nAnd this is something that many scientists have remarked on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=737"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c72dc65-8752-43d4-8592-bb81552909a5": {"page_content": "I want to linger on this question of the primacy of mathematics and the strange utility of mathematics.\nAt one point in your book, you cite the off-sighted paper by Wigner, who I think he wrote in the sixties about, in a paper entitled, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences.\nAnd this is something that many scientists have remarked on.\nThere seems to be a kind of mysterious property of these abstract structures and chains of reasoning, where mathematics seems uniquely useful for describing the physical world and making predictions about things that you would never anticipate.\nBut for the fact that the mathematics is suggesting that something should be so.\nAnd this is lured many scientists into essentially mysticism, or the very least philosophical Platonism, and sometimes even religion, positing mathematical structure that exists, or even pure mathematical concepts like numbers that exist in some almost platonic state beyond the human mind.\nAnd I'm wondering if you share some of that mathematical idealism, and I just wanted to get your reaction to an idea that I believe I got from a cognitive scientist who lived, and he died in the forties, maybe the fifties.\nI get Kenneth Craig who published a book in 1943, where he, I think just in passing, he, this anticipates Wigner by about 20 years, but in passing, he tried to resolve this mystery about the utility of mathematics, and he's simply speculated that there must be some isomorphism between brain processes that represent the physical world and processes in the world that are represented, and that this might account for the utility of mathematical concepts.\nI think he more or less asked, you know, is it really so surprising that certain patterns of brain activity that are in fact, what mathematical concepts are at the level of the human brain, can be mapped onto the world of some kind of sameness of structure or homology there?.\nDoes that go any direction toward resolving this mystery for you?.\nOr do you think it exceeds that?.\nSo it's a few things there I want to pick up on.\nBut one is that it seems to be this, and Sam does this rather frequently, conflating brain with mind, and then saying something like, well, mathematics at the level of the brain just is a certain pattern of neural firings.\nNo, that's a wrong level of analysis.\nThe mathematics is an abstract kind of thing.\nIt is, and our knowledge of mathematics is an understanding.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=849"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2106d5ef-6a53-484f-87aa-cf88f2565236": {"page_content": "So it's a few things there I want to pick up on.\nBut one is that it seems to be this, and Sam does this rather frequently, conflating brain with mind, and then saying something like, well, mathematics at the level of the brain just is a certain pattern of neural firings.\nNo, that's a wrong level of analysis.\nThe mathematics is an abstract kind of thing.\nIt is, and our knowledge of mathematics is an understanding.\nAnd an understanding is not just a pattern of neural firings.\nFor one thing, one day, in principle, it's possible to take the mind out of the brain, so there will be no neurons whatsoever, and instead you'll be instantiated in silicon.\nA mind can be instantiated in silicon.\nAnd then what do we say, the mathematics is identical to the transistors switching on and off?.\nI would still say, no, it's the wrong level of analysis.\nIt's like saying that the events of history are nothing but the movement of atoms.\nThat's wrong.\nYes, movement of atoms were happening, but if you want to understand, understand, not merely predict, as we like to say, then you have to distinguish between these things.\nNeural firings are neural firings, and there are all sorts of neural firings.\nNeural firings happen when you move your leg.\nNeural firings happen when you digest your dinner.\nNeural firings happen when you think of artistic things, and when you think of mathematical things and when you think of scientific things.\nBut the fact that it's all neural firings doesn't mean that those things all reduced to neural firings, that would make them all identical.\nNamely, that all just be neural firings, but they're not just neural firings.\nThere's something special about particular patterns of neural firings, and it's the patterns, the abstractions, how those abstractions are represented in the neural firings.\nWhich is the really interesting thing, because you can instantiate mathematical truth, mathematical explanation, just like you can with any knowledge in different physical forms.\nYou can write it down on pieces of paper.\nAs ink, does that mean the mathematics is identical to the scribbles of ink on the paper?.\nNo.\nYou can say out loud Pythagoras' theorem.\nDoes that make Pythagoras' theorem identical to the sound waves?.\nNo.\nIt has its independent existence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=994"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c6c4110-4d3f-4692-ab61-086c135a1aab": {"page_content": "Which is the really interesting thing, because you can instantiate mathematical truth, mathematical explanation, just like you can with any knowledge in different physical forms.\nYou can write it down on pieces of paper.\nAs ink, does that mean the mathematics is identical to the scribbles of ink on the paper?.\nNo.\nYou can say out loud Pythagoras' theorem.\nDoes that make Pythagoras' theorem identical to the sound waves?.\nNo.\nIt has its independent existence.\nIt's there in the squiggles when you write it on the piece of paper.\nIt's there in these sound waves when you speak the theorem.\nIt's there when you think it in neural firings.\nIt's represented in all these different ways.\nAnd from those different ways, we abstract out the common thing, that common thing being, Pythagoras' theorem.\nWhich has this independent existence, independent of each of these things.\nIn what senses an independent, because it's not identical to any one of those things.\nWhere does it exist then?.\nWell, it exists in each of those forms, but not identical to those forms.\nBut where?.\nWhere is the actual Pythagoras' theorem?.\nThat's the wrong question.\nIt doesn't exist in space.\nIt just exists as an abstraction.\nAs an abstraction.\nAnd we only have access to that abstraction once we've come to an understanding of it.\nThe same is true of the next highest prime number.\nThe next highest prime number, we will be able to write down on paper, if we like, or presumably be many thousands of pieces of paper we could write it down on.\nSomeone could say it out loud.\nThat would be ridiculous.\nProbably take their lifetime or something.\nWe can put it as pixels on a screen.\nThat's all these different ways of representing this number.\nAnd all these different representations, they have one thing in common.\nThey all represent the one thing, the abstraction, which is that prime number.\nAnd the other thing there is this mystery about exactly why it is that mathematics should be useful in describing the physical world.\nI think this is over eggs sometimes.\nBut here's an answer.\nHere's an end to that kind of thing.\nFirstly, all the laws of physics are computable.\nThey're not even computable.\nThe functions are all computable, which is really interesting, they're these analytical functions.\nAnd so because the laws of physics as we know them, we can use them to make predictions in the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=386"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d8f3a0a-ccee-4fca-a262-02ecf4a6493a": {"page_content": "I think this is over eggs sometimes.\nBut here's an answer.\nHere's an end to that kind of thing.\nFirstly, all the laws of physics are computable.\nThey're not even computable.\nThe functions are all computable, which is really interesting, they're these analytical functions.\nAnd so because the laws of physics as we know them, we can use them to make predictions in the world.\nWell then, that gives them a mathematical structure.\nBut they are computable.\nThese are the things about farming.\nYou listen to Richard Feynman talk about this.\nAnd he thinks that it doesn't necessarily need to be the case in the future.\nLaws of physics necessarily have to have this mathematical character in the way we think of mathematics today.\nWhich is a really, there's a lecture out there on the difference between mathematics and physics.\nHe talks about this.\nIt's quite a famous lecture you can find it on YouTube.\nAnd just towards the end of that lecture, he actually makes some remarks about how he thinks the final law of physics or something like that, you know, theory of everything, whatever.\nMight not even be written in mathematics, or at least the mathematics, as we would think of it today.\nI must say that there is possible, and I've often made a hypothesis that physics ultimately will not require a mathematical statement that the machinery ultimately will be revealed, just a prejudice like one of these other prejudices.\nIt always bothers me that he in spite of all his local business.\nWhat goes on in a tiny, you know, even no matter how tiny a region of space, no matter how tiny a region of time, according to the laws as we understand in today, takes a computing machine and infinite number of logical operations to figure out.\nNow, how can all that be going on in that tiny space?.\nWhy should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky, tiny bit of space time is going to do?.\nAnd so I made a hypothesis often that the laws are going to turn out to be in the end simple, like the checkerboard, and that all the complexes are from size.\nBut that is of the same nature as the other speculations that other people make.\nIt says, I like it, you don't like it.\nIt's not good to be too prejudiced about this thing.\nIt's really curious, you know, maybe kind of like we think about constructor theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1214"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dff0012f-c9a2-4c03-b71b-3d1b316902c5": {"page_content": "And so I made a hypothesis often that the laws are going to turn out to be in the end simple, like the checkerboard, and that all the complexes are from size.\nBut that is of the same nature as the other speculations that other people make.\nIt says, I like it, you don't like it.\nIt's not good to be too prejudiced about this thing.\nIt's really curious, you know, maybe kind of like we think about constructor theory.\nNow, maybe there will be a formalism of constructor theory in terms of sophisticated mathematical apparatus, perhaps indeed there will be.\nBut if I'm in a sort of hinting act, well, you know, ultimate greater grand a deeper theory might not need to have this same kind of mathematical character.\nBut the tradition in physics, of course, is that we go toward, we tend in the direction of more sophisticated mathematics.\nAnd so now we're at string theory, where the mathematics is exceedingly complex and people struggle to understand it and to some extent many physicists are saying, you know, well, they're not seemingly making any progress by the measure of generating testable predictions.\nAnd this is why, you know, a whole bunch of them turn around and say, well, it doesn't matter.\nIt doesn't matter.\nWe're still doing science.\nWell, yeah, but testable predictions allows you to do things, not just like test the theory against rivals, but also generate stuff like technology, so actually make practical benefits for humanity, not to say that, you know, mathematics and string theory couldn't possibly have any benefits to humanity.\nOf course, it could, but problem solving requires solving physical problems.\nNow, there is this problem with unifying general theory of relativity and quantum theory.\nYeah.\nAnd so string theory is an attempt to do that, but the attempts have been going on for many decades now.\nAnd out of that, well, where's the testable prediction?.\nWe don't have one.\nWhat is the new piece of technology that a company can latch onto and to actually make profit out?.\nWell, we don't have any.\nThis is a bit of an issue.\nAnd it's one of the motivations for something like construct a theory, a new approach, something different that makes some testable predictions that might actually lead towards certain kinds of technology.\nWho knows?.\nWe're still at the beginnings here.\nOkay.\nString theory's had its few decades.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1315"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8ea1a270-cbfd-426e-a21f-8246578f3aaa": {"page_content": "What is the new piece of technology that a company can latch onto and to actually make profit out?.\nWell, we don't have any.\nThis is a bit of an issue.\nAnd it's one of the motivations for something like construct a theory, a new approach, something different that makes some testable predictions that might actually lead towards certain kinds of technology.\nWho knows?.\nWe're still at the beginnings here.\nOkay.\nString theory's had its few decades.\nLet's give construct a theory a few decades, equal time.\nSo that's one thing.\nThe other issue of why is that mathematics should be so effective in the physical science as well.\nSam kind of gets it at there.\nAnd I use the term self similarity.\nAnd David George uses in the fabric of reality, this term self similarity.\nAnd we had a great hint of this in his lectures that he's given.\nThis idea that the human mind has this capacity to generate models, models and explanations within itself that are of the rest of physical reality.\nSo you have this kind of one-to-one correspondence between explanations, claims about reality and the reality itself.\nAnd so this is the whole idea of quasars.\nYou know, David invokes quasars and the discussion of quasars.\nThat he is this object on the other side of the universe, obeying the extreme limits of the laws of physics as we understand them.\nYou know, stars being swallowed whole by these black holes, ripped apart and generating these huge jets that if they're directed in our direction, we can detect as quasars.\nNow, that physics, as David says, is someone like the physics of the human brain.\nIt's just almost unimaginable.\nAnd so go to his TED talks to hear more about that from his perspective.\nBut the magnificent thing is that our understanding of quasars comes to resemble what's really going on in quasars with increasing fidelity over time.\nThe one structure inside the mind, the model of the quasar, comes to more faithfully represent the real physical thing out there in reality over time.\nThat's the really cool thing.\nAnd that's kind of what understanding is.\nThat's what understanding is.\nSo let's hear what Max Tegmark has to say about all of this.\nThat's an interesting argument.\nThe argument that our brain adapts to the world, has a world model inside of the brain.\nOur brain is just clearly part of the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1428"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e82ac54a-da67-485b-82bb-8fb98dc1d22e": {"page_content": "That's the really cool thing.\nAnd that's kind of what understanding is.\nThat's what understanding is.\nSo let's hear what Max Tegmark has to say about all of this.\nThat's an interesting argument.\nThe argument that our brain adapts to the world, has a world model inside of the brain.\nOur brain is just clearly part of the world.\nSo their processes in the world and their processes in the world that have a, by virtue of what brains are, have a sameness of fit and of a mapping.\nSo I agree with the first part of the argument that disagree with the second part.\nI agree that it's natural that there will be things in the brain that are very similar to what's happening in the world.\nPrecisely because the brain has evolved to have a good world model.\nBut I disagree that this fully answers the whole question because the claim that he made there that you mentioned that brain processes of certain kinds is effectively what mathematics is.\nThat's something that most mathematicians I know would violently disagree with.\nThat math has something to do with brain processes at all.\nThey think of math rather as structures which have nothing to do with a brain.\nWell, let's just pull the brakes there though, because clearly your experience of doing math, your grasp of mathematical concepts or not, the moment something makes sense or you persist in your confusion, your memory of the multiplication table, your ability to do basic algebra and everything on up.\nAll of that is in every instance of it's being realized is being realized as a state of your brain or you're not disputing that.\nOf course, absolutely.\nI'm just crippling about how what mathematics is, what's your definition of mathematics?.\nSo they're both talking past each other, I would say, and they're both talking past the most parsimonious way of just sorting out this confusion.\nAnd the confusion is the distinction between the subject matter and our knowledge of the subject matter, ontology and epistemology, the real existence of mathematical structures, mathematical objects, things like numbers, and our knowledge of those things.\nNow, our knowledge of those things is going on, or the creation of the knowledge of those things is going on inside of our minds.\nAbsolutely.\nThat's where the creation is taking place.\nThat's what makes human beings, people, so unique, so special in the entire universe that we can do this process of create explanatory knowledge.\nBut it's an imperfect process.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1542"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c7d37a7c-bdb4-4ca1-8730-aed20ca1745e": {"page_content": "Now, our knowledge of those things is going on, or the creation of the knowledge of those things is going on inside of our minds.\nAbsolutely.\nThat's where the creation is taking place.\nThat's what makes human beings, people, so unique, so special in the entire universe that we can do this process of create explanatory knowledge.\nBut it's an imperfect process.\nIt's a process of conjecturing, guessing about the reality that's out there.\nAnd one of the realities that's out there is mathematical reality.\nThe reality of necessary truths of absolutely certain perfect number.\nBut we can't grasp absolute perfection.\nWe can only guess at it.\nWe guess at it.\nWe fumble our way through by error correcting.\nThis is the remarkable thing.\nNow, it's whatever the thing is that exists, by the way, that thing that exists might be matter, the material world.\nThere's an M for you.\nIt could be mathematics.\nWe come to understand the truths of mathematics better.\nBut we're guessing at that.\nWe're guessing at the material.\nWe're guessing at moral truths as well.\nSam talks about the moral landscape, and we can come to understand that moral landscape of a better.\nWell, meditation is another one.\nThis meditation, this process of meditation is a process of coming to understand the mind.\nYet another M. Coming to understand the mind of a better.\nComing to understand your own mind and your problems and your difficulties and whatever else in the action of thoughts as thoughts.\nBut imperfectly, by the way.\nJust because you are there in your first person meditating, doesn't mean that you have a privileged, best understanding of what the heck's going on now.\nCertainly it can help.\nBut sometimes you'll need to discuss with someone else, because they can have better insight into exactly what you're thinking and why.\nIt's a curious thing, right, about ourselves.\nWe tend to think we have this higher opinion of ourselves.\nWe go, well, I'm the one with my thoughts.\nI understand my thoughts really well.\nDo you?.\nDo you really?.\nYou have a lot of thoughts.\nIt's hard to keep track of everything you're thinking and why you're thinking it and which thoughts you're thinking over and over again.\nWe make mistakes all the time.\nI can tell you one thing.\nWhen I make these podcasts and I think I'm saying something really clearly.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1676"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "42385627-1d48-4e34-aafa-cc3adcd4142a": {"page_content": "We go, well, I'm the one with my thoughts.\nI understand my thoughts really well.\nDo you?.\nDo you really?.\nYou have a lot of thoughts.\nIt's hard to keep track of everything you're thinking and why you're thinking it and which thoughts you're thinking over and over again.\nWe make mistakes all the time.\nI can tell you one thing.\nWhen I make these podcasts and I think I'm saying something really clearly.\nand I think I've spoken just exactly the way I want to speak, I go back and I edit.\nAnd I've said exactly the wrong word.\nI think I've said the word, let's say, mathematics.\nAnd in fact, I've said the word, morality.\nHow ridiculous.\nAnd so I have to edit stuff and change my mind.\nBut if you had asked me immediately after having made the sentence, I would have said something like, oh, no, mathematics is a domain of necessary truths.\nAnd yet, and I would have insisted that this is what I really thought I said.\nAnd then you play back the tape and I've actually said, morality is the set of necessary truths or something like that.\nI've made a mistake.\nI can be totally wrong about the contents of my own mind just a second ago.\nAnd I think we can be systematically wrong about our own minds as well, by the way.\nWe can just continually tell ourselves we've got the right idea.\nAnd in fact, we've got the wrong idea.\nWe're just not thinking clearly.\nAnd this is one reason for talking to friends and talking to other people and talking to counselors and talking to wise older people and trying to come to a better understanding of your own ideas, what you think are your own ideas.\nOK, that's a little bit off topic.\nBut what I'm saying here is that everyone understands seemingly this distinction.\nBut when we get into the realm of mathematics, it becomes some area of confusion.\nAnd what Sam and Max would benefit from is simply recognizing this distinction that the mathematicians, again, the mathematicians' misconception, they think they've got access to this final ultimate truth and that what's going on inside of their brains is the mathematics.\nIt's like is the set of necessary truths.\nNow, you've come to an understanding of the necessary truths, but it's going to contain error in misconceptions that we can always come to a deeper understanding of these things.\nA deeper understanding.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1786"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5a168157-2062-4266-a6c8-105cc3f6b708": {"page_content": "And what Sam and Max would benefit from is simply recognizing this distinction that the mathematicians, again, the mathematicians' misconception, they think they've got access to this final ultimate truth and that what's going on inside of their brains is the mathematics.\nIt's like is the set of necessary truths.\nNow, you've come to an understanding of the necessary truths, but it's going to contain error in misconceptions that we can always come to a deeper understanding of these things.\nA deeper understanding.\nNow, when I say that we can have errors and misconceptions in our knowledge, it doesn't mean that for any particular claim, like let's say 1 plus 1 equals 2, people like to bring this thing up, you know, say, how could that possibly be wrong?.\nHow could you possibly have an error about that?.\nWell, when I say error, I just mean that you don't have the deepest possible understanding of it.\nYou think you know what 1 plus 1 equals 2 means.\nI'm not saying that I know there's something wrong about that claim.\nCan I doubt the veracity of that claim?.\nI can doubt that.\nI can doubt that you have a complete understanding of what that really entails.\nFor one thing among many, it was a surprise to me at university, learning that you could actually do this thing that proves 1 plus 1 equals 2, and it takes you about an A4 page of handwritten argumentation from the axioms using penis axioms and reaching the conclusion that 1 plus 1 equals 2.\nOkay, that's a method of proof there.\nSo that is it.\nOnce you've done that, you have a deeper understanding in a sense of what 1 plus 1 equals 2 means.\nNow, what is 1?.\nWhat is 2?.\nAnd by the way, I like David Deutsch says, you know what does equals mean?.\nBecause it can't mean exactly the same as.\nAfter all, just write down 1 plus 1 equals 2 and notice on the left hand side, you've got this symbol 1, and you've got this symbol plus, and you've got this symbol 1 again.\nThat's not exactly the same as the symbol you've got on the right hand side, which just is the numeral 2.\nSo these two things are not exactly the same.\nSo equals can't mean that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1875"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "31dd1e63-f21c-4325-ad25-cab7ac65925e": {"page_content": "Because it can't mean exactly the same as.\nAfter all, just write down 1 plus 1 equals 2 and notice on the left hand side, you've got this symbol 1, and you've got this symbol plus, and you've got this symbol 1 again.\nThat's not exactly the same as the symbol you've got on the right hand side, which just is the numeral 2.\nSo these two things are not exactly the same.\nSo equals can't mean that.\nSo there's all sorts of ways we can approach what the difference is between an absolutely necessary truth, which is the subject matter of mathematics, and our understanding of these things, which is where the confusion is, I would say, a little bit between what Sam is saying, what Max is saying, and they're not quite coming to what I think is a clear distinction.\nAnd what other mathematicians, I would say, have on this point.\nWe come to imperfectly understand mathematics.\nWe refine that understanding over time.\nAnd all of our knowledge of mathematics is generated by our brains, which is running on minds, which are obeying laws or physics, which introduce errors as a matter of physical law.\nOK, let's get going and listening to a little bit more from Max.\nAbsolutely.\nI'm just quiveling about how what mathematics is, what sort of definition of mathematics.\nAnd I think it's interesting to take a step back and ask, what do mathematicians today generally define math as?.\nBecause if you ask people on the street, like my mom, for example, they will often use math as just a bag of tricks for manipulating numbers or maybe as a sadistic form of torture invented by school teachers, ruin our self-confidence.\nWhereas mathematicians, they talk about mathematical structures and studying their properties.\nI have a colleague here at MIT, for example, who has spent 10 years of his life studying this mathematical structure called E8.\nNever mind what it is, exactly, but he has a poster of it.\nOn the wall of his office, David Volgen.\nAnd if I went and suggested to him that that thing on his wall is just something he made up, somehow that he invented, he would be very offended.\nHe feels he discovered it.\nIt was out there and he discovered that it was out there and mapped out its properties in the exactly the same way that we discovered the planet Neptune, rather than invent the planet Neptune, and then went out to study his properties.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1971"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1c03bfe4-3d94-4fcd-9a88-34260f6e6e66": {"page_content": "On the wall of his office, David Volgen.\nAnd if I went and suggested to him that that thing on his wall is just something he made up, somehow that he invented, he would be very offended.\nHe feels he discovered it.\nIt was out there and he discovered that it was out there and mapped out its properties in the exactly the same way that we discovered the planet Neptune, rather than invent the planet Neptune, and then went out to study his properties.\nSimilarly, if you look at something more familiar than E8, you just look at the counting numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.\nThe fact that 2 plus 2 is 4 and 4 plus 2 is 6.\nMost mathematicians would argue that the structure, this mathematical structure that we call the numbers, is not the structure that we invented or invented properties of, but rather that we discovered the properties of.\nIn different cultures, this has been discovered multiple times independently.\nIn each culture people invented, rather than discovered a different language for describing it.\nIn English, you say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.\nIn Swedish, the language I grew up with, you say x to what three are three are four.\nBut if you use the Swedish English dictionary and translate between the two, you see that these are two equivalent descriptions of exactly the same structure.\nAnd similarly, we invent symbols.\nWhat symbol you use to write the number two and three is actually different in the U.S. versus in India today or in the Roman Empire, right?.\nBut again, once you have your dictionaries there, you see that there's still only one structure that we discover and then we invent language.\nTo just drive this home with one better example, he was really fascinated about these very regular geometric shapes.\nI couldn't agree more.\nPerfect, exactly right.\nThat's what I would like to be able to say as well.\nJust as clearly, you know, I endorse everything there.\nI think he's got exactly right.\nWhat we would also add, he goes on to use the example of Plato.\nPlato had the platonic solids.\nHe wasn't free to just invent more platonic solids once he'd discovered the ones that existed.\nIn other words, mathematics kicks back.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=2092"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "60e55370-2162-45ad-88a0-f30c1eedb69b": {"page_content": "I couldn't agree more.\nPerfect, exactly right.\nThat's what I would like to be able to say as well.\nJust as clearly, you know, I endorse everything there.\nI think he's got exactly right.\nWhat we would also add, he goes on to use the example of Plato.\nPlato had the platonic solids.\nHe wasn't free to just invent more platonic solids once he'd discovered the ones that existed.\nIn other words, mathematics kicks back.\nIt has this independent reality that once you discover some part of it, whether it's E8 or the platonic solids or just the natural numbers, they have this autonomous set of properties that you come to understand over time by making more and more discoveries, generating more knowledge about that particular thing.\nSo that's exactly right.\nAnd we know it exists.\nWe know this stuff exists by, as David Deutsch talks about in the fabric of reality, that these things kick back.\nThat's Dr. Johnson's criterion.\nWhat does kick back mean?.\nWell, it does something kind of unpredictable that you product a little bit, and it gives you back some kind of information about itself.\nSo in the case of, you know, just a normal natural counting numbers.\nWell, it gives you back this weird, unexpected kind of thing of the prime numbers.\nThe distribution of prime numbers is kind of weird.\nWhen the next one is going to crop up, it's kind of weird.\nThe last one at any given point, and then the next highest one, these things are out there to be discovered.\nSo you start off with this simple set of assumptions, the axioms of simpler arithmetic.\nAnd you end up with the natural numbers, and you end up with the prime numbers of infinite kind of complexity in a certain way.\nAnd they exist, these things exist.\nBy the measure that, they feature in our best explanations of reality.\nOur explanations of reality include, well, the capacity to count stuff, to calculate, to compute.\nAnd so then we end up with the revealed richness of things like prime numbers, among other things.\nOkay, so we'll go on and listen to what Sam has to say about this.\nYou know, what is the highest prime number above the current one we know?.\nWell, clearly there's an answer to that question.\nYou mean the lowest prime number above all the ones we know?.\nOh, sorry, yes, the next prime number.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=2200"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "384ffb22-920b-4327-b099-4e0a5cfd0f13": {"page_content": "And so then we end up with the revealed richness of things like prime numbers, among other things.\nOkay, so we'll go on and listen to what Sam has to say about this.\nYou know, what is the highest prime number above the current one we know?.\nWell, clearly there's an answer to that question.\nYou mean the lowest prime number above all the ones we know?.\nOh, sorry, yes, the next prime number.\nThat number will be discovered rather than invented, and to invent it would be to invent it perfectly within the constraints of its being, in fact, the next prime number.\nSo it's not wrong to call that pure discovery more or less analogous, as you said, to finding Neptune when you didn't know it existed, or going to the continent of Africa.\nYou know, it's Africa's there, whether you've been there or not.\nRight.\nSo I agree with that, but it still seems true to say that every instance of these operations being performed, every instance of mathematical insight, every prime number being thought about or located, or having it.\nEvery one of those moments has been a moment of a brain doing its mathematical thing.\nRight.\nSo I'm just more computer sometimes because we have a 15 large number of proofs now done by machines, and discovery is also sometimes.\nWe're still talking about physical systems that can play this game of discovery in this mathematical space that we are talking about.\nThis fundamental mystery is that why should mathematics be so useful for describing the physical world and for making predictions about blank spaces on the map?.\nExactly.\nAgain, and I'm kind of stumbling into this conversation, because I'm not a mathematician, I'm not a mathematical philosopher.\nAnd so I'm sort of shooting from the hip here with you, but I just wanted to get a sense of whether this could remove some of the mystery.\nIf in fact, you have certain physical processes in brains and computers and other intelligent systems, wherever they are, that can mirror this landscape of potential discovery, if that does sort of remove what otherwise seems a little spooky and platonic, and represents a challenge for mapping abstract, idealized concepts onto a physical universe.\nYeah, that's a great question.\nThe answer you're going to get to that question will depend dramatically on who you ask.\nThere are very, very smart and respectable people who come down all across the very broad spectrum of views on this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=2312"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dc6dcebb-fb27-4daa-8972-540936aeee7a": {"page_content": "Yeah, that's a great question.\nThe answer you're going to get to that question will depend dramatically on who you ask.\nThere are very, very smart and respectable people who come down all across the very broad spectrum of views on this.\nI chose to not say, this is how it is, but rather to explore the whole spectrum of opinions.\nSome people will say, if you ask them about this mystery, there is no mystery.\nThere is, math is sometimes useful in nature, sometimes it's not.\nThat's it, there's nothing too mysterious about it, go away.\nAnd then if you go a little bit more towards a platonic side, you'll find a lot of people saying things like, well, it seems like a lot of things in our universe are very accurately approximated by math.\nAnd that's great, but they're still not perfectly described by math.\nAnd then you have some very, very optimistic physicists, like Einstein and a lot of string theorists, who think that there actually is some math that we haven't maybe discovered yet, but it doesn't just approximate our physical world, but describes exactly, and there's a perfect description of it.\nAnd then finally, the most extreme position on the other side, which I explore at length in the book, and that's the one that I'm personally adjusting on, is that not only is our world described by mathematics, but it is mathematics.\nIn the sense of the two are really the same, so you talked about how in the physical world, we discover new entities, and then we invent language to describe them, similarly in mathematics, we discover new entities, like, new prime numbers, the tautics, all of that, we meant names for maybe this mathematical reality, and the physical reality are actually one and the same.\nAnd the reason why, when you first hear that, and it sounds completely loony-toons, of course, you know, you look, it's equivalent to saying that the physical world doesn't just have some mathematical properties, but it has only mathematical properties, and that sounds really dumb when you, if you look at your wife, or your child, or whatever, and this doesn't look like your bunch of numbers.\nBut, to me, as a physicist, and I look at them, of course, when I met Anaka your wife for the first time, of course, he has all these properties that don't strike me as a mathematical.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=2447"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "abb606d8-aac3-4876-929c-51ee86b778ae": {"page_content": "But, to me, as a physicist, and I look at them, of course, when I met Anaka your wife for the first time, of course, he has all these properties that don't strike me as a mathematical.\nDon't tell me you were noticing my wife's mathematical properties, but at the same time as a physicist, you know, I couldn't help notice that your wife was made entirely out of quirks and electrons, and what property does an electron actually have?.\nWell, it has the property minus one, one half, one, and so on, and we've made up nerdy names for these properties.\nWe physicists, such as electric charge, spin, and electron number, but the electron doesn't care what language we invent to describe these numbers.\nThe properties are just these numbers, just mathematical properties, and...\nSo, all is number.\nThis is the Pythagorean idea.\nBut essentially, the true reality of the physical world we inhabit is actually reducible to mathematics in some way.\nBut I just think, well, this is metaphysics.\nThis is a preferred metaphysical claim.\nNow, saying there that the electron has these properties, described by numbers, minus one, one, and so on and so forth, that is saying that the object is the properties, but I just think that's wrong.\nI think that we can always come to a deeper understanding of these things.\nWhat is an electron after all?.\nWell, the physicists have refined their understanding of this thing over time.\nIt began as a particle, and they set a wave.\nNow, we think of this idea of fungible instances of the electron as particle.\nI don't think we're going to get to the ultimate final answer as to what an electron is.\nNow, as for saying that ultimately an electron reduces to nothing but the mathematics of an electron, well, again, it's a metaphysical claim, and people have preferred metaphysics, but I don't know why they, in fact, have preferred metaphysics.\nAnd why physicists want to say, well, I think it's just a cell box.\nMaybe that's what it comes down to.\nIt's like, you make a strong claim that everything's reducible to mathematics, and the cell more books, because people want to argue against you.\nNow, I don't have a strong opinion on this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=1899"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b64df20f-657c-44c7-ad57-f4784cfa8b24": {"page_content": "And why physicists want to say, well, I think it's just a cell box.\nMaybe that's what it comes down to.\nIt's like, you make a strong claim that everything's reducible to mathematics, and the cell more books, because people want to argue against you.\nNow, I don't have a strong opinion on this.\nI just think that it's one of these claims where there's little point arguing about it, because there's no way of testing at the moment, the truth of this matter.\nWell, one thing I would say is that it just doesn't comport with what I understand about the rest of physical reality, which is that we come to a deeper and deeper understanding of it over time.\nThat if, for example, string theory describes what fundamental particles are, so-called fundamental particles, they wouldn't be fundamental anymore.\nThe strings would be the fundamental things.\nThen we would have a deeper understanding of the electron.\nAnd vibration of a string, but then you would say, well, what's the string made out of?.\nUltimately, what is that?.\nAnd people of the future, physicists of the future, I would imagine, would come down in one some way, shape or form, in saying, well, actually the strings are made out of this other stuff.\nAnd so on it goes, because, like we say here, we're at the beginning of infinity, we're at the beginning of our understanding of things.\nBut Max is kind of postulating, and many physicists do this.\nWhat the ultimate end game is.\nThey think there's an end game.\nI think the end of science is coming.\nI think the end of physics is coming.\nThe theoretical physicists have this fixation on the final completed physics.\nUnify a few more things, unify the forces, and then one or two steps beyond that, you get to the final ultimate end point.\nI just don't think that's going to work.\nI think there's going to always be open questions.\nThere's always going to be a question as to why.\nAnd if you're saying that this abstract stuff, which we call mathematics, the knowledge of mathematics itself is abstract, the mathematical things themselves are abstractions.\nFor all the reasons I talked about earlier, if you're saying that's what physics ultimately is, then physical spaces in some sense, reduce to abstract spaces.\nAnd then the question about where this abstract space is, actually is a meaningful question.\nHere it is.\nHere it is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=2698"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6963bfaa-f3b1-45ac-843a-0d58fa0bd697": {"page_content": "There's always going to be a question as to why.\nAnd if you're saying that this abstract stuff, which we call mathematics, the knowledge of mathematics itself is abstract, the mathematical things themselves are abstractions.\nFor all the reasons I talked about earlier, if you're saying that's what physics ultimately is, then physical spaces in some sense, reduce to abstract spaces.\nAnd then the question about where this abstract space is, actually is a meaningful question.\nHere it is.\nHere it is.\nWe occupy an abstract, not a physical space anymore.\nBut then we just have, we're presented with the same list of questions.\nNow, you're still going to have the question about the origins of the universe.\nIt's still going to come up.\nYou're still going to have the question about dark energy.\nYou're still going to have questions about what the fate of the universe was.\nAre there other logically possible universes that we can access in some way?.\nLet me pick it up.\nJust for a few more minutes with Max and then I'll say a few more things.\nAnd we'll tidy it up for today.\nAnd if you take seriously that everything in both your life and in the world is made of these elementary particles that have only mathematical properties, then you can ask, what about the space itself, then that these particles are in?.\nYou know, what properties does space have?.\nWell, it has the property three for starters, you know, the number of dimensions, which again is just a number.\nEinstein discovered that also has some more properties.\nIt has some more properties called curvature and topology, but they're mathematical too.\nAnd if both space itself and all the stuff in space have only mathematical properties, then it starts to sound a little bit less ridiculous idea that maybe everything is completely mathematical.\nAnd we're actually part of this enormous mathematical object.\nOK, so we'll end it there for today.\nBut what I would just say about that is, I think it's the same mistake that was being made earlier.\nI think it's just confusing knowledge of something, a mathematical knowledge of physical structures, with the structures themselves.\nThat's all.\nThat our descriptions, our use of these mathematical labels for certain properties are not identical to the properties.\nI think that's just wrong.\nNow, saying that the electron and the quark differ only in these properties is just to say our way of describing differences between these things involves numbers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=2805"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "81341420-bee5-4445-8ac4-a4fff7981024": {"page_content": "I think it's just confusing knowledge of something, a mathematical knowledge of physical structures, with the structures themselves.\nThat's all.\nThat our descriptions, our use of these mathematical labels for certain properties are not identical to the properties.\nI think that's just wrong.\nNow, saying that the electron and the quark differ only in these properties is just to say our way of describing differences between these things involves numbers.\nSo, for example, you say something like, an electron has a charge of minus 1, where certain quarks have a charge of plus.\n1 third.\nBut does that explain what charge is?.\nBut charge is just literally numbers?.\nWell, I don't think so, because if you're saying that, then you're also saying, well, the mass of the electron is what it is, and the mass of the quark is what it is.\nBut that doesn't explain what mass is.\nIt doesn't explain what charge is either.\nAnd how charges behave.\nThat part of the explanation is obscured from you, if you're just going to say, well, they're nothing but these numbers.\nThen explain why there should be attraction between things or not, or repulsion between things or not.\nNow, Feynman gave this great explanation as to why, for example, electrons when brought close together tend to repel one another because they're emitting photons towards each other.\nWell, that's an explanation, but it's not reducible just to the number properties.\nYou need natural language in order to come to an understanding of this stuff, to explain what the numbers mean.\nAnd the numbers are just being invoked as part of the explanation.\nBut to say, to then go that step further and say, well, the explanation, these parts of the explanation, are not only just explaining what's going on here.\nIt is what's going on here, as a matter of final fact, that the electron is just a set of numbers.\nIt's confusing knowledge of with the thing in itself.\nThe thing in itself, you don't have a perfect understanding of.\nWe should know now that we don't have a perfect understanding of particle physics.\nFor one thing, particle physics is part of quantum theory.\nQuantum theory doesn't quite mesh with general relativity.\nSo we know we've got progress yet to make.\nProblems yet to solve.\nOkay, but that's where I think we'll leave it today.\nWe'll move on from mathematics next time to some other part of the discussion.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=2921"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "195893bf-ef89-4e49-9e26-2505ece6451d": {"page_content": "The thing in itself, you don't have a perfect understanding of.\nWe should know now that we don't have a perfect understanding of particle physics.\nFor one thing, particle physics is part of quantum theory.\nQuantum theory doesn't quite mesh with general relativity.\nSo we know we've got progress yet to make.\nProblems yet to solve.\nOkay, but that's where I think we'll leave it today.\nWe'll move on from mathematics next time to some other part of the discussion.\nI don't want to go through the entire discussion.\nI think you get a sense now of the way in which I'm approaching this.\nBut again, it is nice to see how.\nI would suggest that just picking up the books, if I break a reality in the beginning of infinity, do give you this as I like to talk about this coherent worldview.\nAnd so you're able to spot misconceptions and spot errors and kind of feel in a sense a little bit more clear in your thinking about certain things that where others tend to encounter confusions and trip-ups, you may not.\nThis is certainly not to say we have all the answers.\nAbsolutely not.\nIt's just that when you have a way of meshing together, the philosophy, epistemology, morality, mathematics, physics, computation, and all of these other things, it allows.\nyou to error correct more easily and more easily move in these subjects.\nEven if you're not necessarily a top-notch expert, but not at regard myself as a top-notch expert in physics.\nI'm a layperson, I'm not a top-notch expert in popularing epistemology, I would say.\nI'm not a top-notch expert in astronomy or anything else, but I tend to be able to spot the errors, spot the errors in thinking because this thing conflicts with that thing, which we know is the case because of our best existing explanation.\nAnd this thing conflicts with that thing, and that can't be right because again, conflicts with our best known explanation.\nSo when people start deviating from, what is known as a matter of our best explanation, our best current understanding, and when you know that the view they're espousing has already been refuted in some way by some other thinkers, then it's an interesting way to sort of look at some of these discussions.\nBut it's still fascinating, still very, very interesting, and I'm not saying it's all together wrong.\nCertainly not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=3036"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7f55ac3b-f941-40f2-9371-8b56d3386182": {"page_content": "So when people start deviating from, what is known as a matter of our best explanation, our best current understanding, and when you know that the view they're espousing has already been refuted in some way by some other thinkers, then it's an interesting way to sort of look at some of these discussions.\nBut it's still fascinating, still very, very interesting, and I'm not saying it's all together wrong.\nCertainly not.\nA lot of what Max has said here today, a lot of what Sam has said here today.\nI completely agree with.\nThis is really interesting those areas where we part ways, so to speak, because of a different deeper philosophy, and especially understanding of epistemology.\nBut until next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH6IqbMu0_A&t=3142"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6214c615-13c1-4e25-87ea-40b431ee72b0": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast.\nEpisode 1 of an entirely new series on the science of can and can't by Kyara my letter.\nNow I did say towards the end of the beginning of infinity series, which I haven't quite finished yet.\nI said that the only thing that could dissuade me really from my next project being, an exploration of the fabric of reality, David Deutsches' first book, would be if David published something brand new.\nAnd that didn't quite happen.\nWhat happened instead is that David's colleague Kyara my letter has published an absolutely astonishing book about constructive theory called The Science of Can and Can't.\nAnd it was so interesting, inspiring, original, groundbreaking that I couldn't let the opportunity pass without doing a series on this book alongside the fabric of reality.\nI think it would be really interesting to compare how some of these ideas have evolved over the last few decades because certainly the seeds of the thinking of constructive theory are there in the fabric of reality, in a certain form.\nAs I've been doing this podcast, I have had messages over the months and years now that I've been speaking about these topics.\nI've had requests for particular episodes.\nCould you do an episode on this or that?.\nPossibly one of the most frequent requests I get is could you do something on constructive theory?.\nAnd to be honest, I have really wanted to do exactly that.\nHave an episode or even an entire series on constructive theory, but it has always seemed to me to be too high a mountain to climb for myself.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9581d847-a0e9-4635-9bb7-64bc99880ca5": {"page_content": "There is a risk with any new theory like this, it's simply not doing it justice or in fact making it egregious errors, perhaps dumbing it down a little bit too much patronising the audience or perhaps going in the other direction and getting too technical and perhaps making it too boring and getting away from what I really want to do here, which is I hope makes something both as clear as possible in such a way that I think that I personally come to a deeper understanding of it, as well as at the same time being actually faithful to the truth of the actual explanations without denuding any of the ideas of their explanatory power.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=121"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e68d703-5769-4ae6-98eb-05dbe162f326": {"page_content": "So it's a fine line at times in trying to communicate any area of science, but in particular a brand new fundamental theory of physics.\nIf I was to cleave more towards the highly technical than the audience would probably become a little smaller, but the entirely broad brush strokes mean you're not going to get the accuracy and precision that I think is needed.\nAnd so taking all together, I kind of thought that constructive theory for me seemed like too big of an ask until now.\nJeremiah has managed to provide with her book here something that is made for export to different kinds of media like this one, for example.\nAnd what I love is it begins with a lot of what we already know, peppered with the spice of some cleverly new deep insights and big claims that make it really exciting.\nAnd then it begins to dive into what can only be described as revolution.\nNow I, of course, use that word advisedly.\nI'm not big on thinking that someone like Thomas Kuhn was correct that their history of science is about the history of scientific revolution, the overturning utterly of other ideas.\nIn fact, when you look and analyze the history of science, what you find is in fact, anything that is described as revolutionary turns out on closer inspection to be an incremental difference from what had existed before, but sometimes that incremental difference is highly creative.\nAnd it seems like it is a complete overturning of what went before, but usually a new theory is contained within them as a subset or at least a predicated upon ideas that preceded them.\nThis is not to deny the great person vision of science.\nI am very much as subscriber that to the idea that we need to have iconoclastic physicists working against the grain, that the history of science has been people who are what we would call geniuses.\nIt doesn't mean that none of us can learn what those people have done or even accomplish what those people have done, but what it means is some people are able to think outside the box and think of something creative, something new, and often this has been called a revolution in science when someone does think of something genuinely new.\nSo these traditional ideas about scientific revolution, whether they are the Copernican revolution, the Darwinian revolution, ideas about continental drift and geology and so on, believe it or not, that is regarded as a revolutionary and one of the more recent scientific discoveries.\nActually these things are kind of incrementally better than what went before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=161"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7d9da68c-40b0-460c-98ed-9bcad0f0ef20": {"page_content": "So these traditional ideas about scientific revolution, whether they are the Copernican revolution, the Darwinian revolution, ideas about continental drift and geology and so on, believe it or not, that is regarded as a revolutionary and one of the more recent scientific discoveries.\nActually these things are kind of incrementally better than what went before.\nIt's just that sometimes the increment might be a little bit bigger.\nNow here in caramellados, the science of Ken and Kant, we are indeed getting a theory that he is as big a jump as any of those that I mentioned.\nThe Copernican revolution, the Darwinian revolution, the Big Bang revolution, Einstein's relativity revolution, all of these things construct a theory really is on a par with those kind of things.\nBut at the same time, there's an incremental aspect to it.\nIt does come out of, it does, it's an evolution or a generalization as David Deutsch might say, of the theory of computation, the theory of quantum computation.\nIt takes this, generalize it, goes further with it, and then probes areas of science that here the two, physics hasn't had much contact with.\nFor example, biology, there is, I did in fact do myself, biophysics at university, but this is a different way of approaching that, and even more exciting.\nIt brings epistemology, epistemology, to some extent within the purview of physics.\nIt's as if we have a physics of knowledge creation, the nascent beginnings of a physics of knowledge creation here, and this is why I'm particularly excited about this theory in physics.\nIt's really it's deep, but then just a theory of physics.\nIt is a theory of science, and this is why the title of the book is the science of canon Kant rather than merely the physics of canon Kant.\nSo the fact that this new theory reaches into physics, it reaches into computation, which is already a part of physics anyway, biology, perhaps astonishingly into art, and we're going to hear about that in this episode, it is, it has something to say about literature to mythology.\nWe'll come to that.\nSo it's absolutely an amazing book.\nIt reads as if it belongs in that great lineage of books that began with the fabric of reality, and it's now presenting for the narrator in a entirely new mode, as we say, of explanation.\nA new way of conceiving how to do physics from the ground up.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=301"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3e4e9807-24db-4050-b452-d4a85e40019e": {"page_content": "We'll come to that.\nSo it's absolutely an amazing book.\nIt reads as if it belongs in that great lineage of books that began with the fabric of reality, and it's now presenting for the narrator in a entirely new mode, as we say, of explanation.\nA new way of conceiving how to do physics from the ground up.\nSo that's quite the task that Keira has set herself for a popular audience book.\nBut of course, just as with the beginning and infinity, it's really not just a popular science book.\nIt is that, but more.\nLike, for example, up here on my shelf, sit the Goldilocks enigma there by Paul Davies.\nAnd that's in fact mentioned in the science of canon Kant.\nThe Goldilocks enigma really is a popular science book, a typical popular science book.\nI don't want to denigrate it in any way at all.\nIt is a wonderful overview of the fine-tuning problem, which requires it to summarize what we hear the two know about aspects of physics, chemistry, and biology.\nAnd that's a wonderful, absolutely wonderful, I encourage people to read popular science books like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=434"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cb995e36-f91a-4af5-889b-1a534b332b6d": {"page_content": "But I'm just mentioning, in order to contrast it with a book like this, or a book like the beginning of infinity, of course, because this book, like the fabric of reality, like the beginning of infinity, in the main, is not in the main, discussing the well-established, well-known areas of science that kind of already appear in standard, high school undergraduate textbooks by putting a little spin on the top, a little bit of icing on the cake, a little bit of philosophical significance to these well-established scientific ideas.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=231"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "96ce35be-cdb1-48d0-8d10-331412c342ca": {"page_content": "Instead, this is new stuff.\nThis is a new theory, which has been published out there in referee journals, of course, but is now, for the first time, really, being brought to a general audience in book form.\nThere are lots of resources out there on the constructor theory.org website.\nLots of talks for people who are new to this, but this is the first time in one place.\nWe have a whole bunch of that very latest research synthesized into a single volume.\nAnd personally, in the book, what I have so far found is truly intriguing, and we'll get to this today in this episode.\nHow in physics the denial of the possibility of considering counterfactuals means that physics cannot possibly tell anything like a complete story of reality in its present form.\nNow I emphasize the word story, as you will come to see, and there's a clue on the cover, at least the Australian cover, the Kindle version, about this story.\nJust as I mentioned literature earlier, what on earth could literature have to do with physics?.\nWe will see explanations, really, to be explanations that allow us to understand what is happening in the world, need to consider what else could have happened in the world, aside from what will happen, or what does happen in the world.\nSo explanations to be complete explanations, fundamental explanations, need to consider counterfactuals, what could have been.\nAnd so like I say, one of the astonishing parts here is that we will see this comes to bear on literature, on things like myth and fiction, but also history for the same reasons as essentially this theory works in science.\nIn constructor theory, we can seemingly do away also entirely with the notion, therefore, of probability and physics.\nInstead, if there is a law of physics prohibiting something, then it's an impossible task.\nAnd that's that.\nBut if it's possible, this means there is no such law of physics, and there is a constructor that could cause it to occur.\nSo I really should start the book.\nThere's going to be a lot that I'm going to skip, but I will begin.\nI will begin by reading the forward of the book by David Deutsch because no, I'm not going to do that, because I want you to go and buy the book.\nI want you to go and actually get the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=531"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "caf6003f-7757-427a-964f-451bde76982b": {"page_content": "So I really should start the book.\nThere's going to be a lot that I'm going to skip, but I will begin.\nI will begin by reading the forward of the book by David Deutsch because no, I'm not going to do that, because I want you to go and buy the book.\nI want you to go and actually get the book.\nYou can get the e-book now, as of this is May the 4th, I'm recording this, which is the day the book is released.\nI presume this episode of mine will be out on the 5th of May, broadly speaking around the world, depending upon your time zone, but the actual hard cover version of the book doesn't come out until August, I don't think.\nBut I'm going to be careful, careful with the passages that are read from the book, because I don't want to think that anyone doesn't need to buy the book, that you can just listen to my podcasts and get a good understanding of it, but I don't think that's the case.\nAnd I want to leave a whole bunch of gems that are in the book, in the book, again, to encourage people.\nIt's not an expensive book, but any stretch of the imagination, if you get a Kindle, you can get it for a very reasonable price at the moment.\nBut there is a section there at the beginning, goes for a number of pages, which is a forward by David Deutsch, which is, of course, worth the price of the book alone, but you're going to get a lot more than that.\nNow, also, right at the beginning of the book, after the forward comes a note on how to read the book, I'm not going to read that either, and there is also a bit of a prelude.\nAnd I won't read most of the prelude, but it is where I'll begin, I'll just read a very small percentage of it, about 10% of that prelude, just one section of it.\nThat's where I'm going to begin.\nThe book is also interesting for the fact that it is chapters on the hard rigor of science.\nI interspersed with interesting little stories, which really bring, in many ways, the wonder of physics back, and that is another reason I'm excited about this book, being someone who was trained in physics at the undergraduate level, and to a lesser extent, the graduate level.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=666"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a491621-b318-44bf-823c-fda7f22c2097": {"page_content": "That's where I'm going to begin.\nThe book is also interesting for the fact that it is chapters on the hard rigor of science.\nI interspersed with interesting little stories, which really bring, in many ways, the wonder of physics back, and that is another reason I'm excited about this book, being someone who was trained in physics at the undergraduate level, and to a lesser extent, the graduate level.\nI went through the motions of being excited, inspired, and at times let down, or disillusioned with the project of doing physics, and I had to keep finding motivation by finding new interesting topics within physics to try and understand to try and do.\nAnd this is one of those areas.\nThis constructor theory is one of those areas, which is just so new, fresh, exciting, and seems to show a lot of promise.\nAnd that's another reason that I'm doing this.\nIt's not merely because there is this closer association between the work of Kiaramal letter in the work of David Deutsch.\nIt's not only that, but because this particular theory of physics is as exciting as any other area of physics out there, areas of physics in cosmology, about the fine-tuning problem, for example, this will have something to say about how physics might be able to find a resolution to this question about what is deeper quantum theory or general relativity.\nAnd this will have something to say about that as well.\nIt might have something to say about why string theory has so far not borne too much fruit in science, as much as it might be useful in mathematics.\nThere are just so many avenues of promise that a person who's interested in physics can find a real thrill in, not least of which, is the derivation of the laws of thermodynamics from deeper principles, bringing the laws of thermodynamics into fundamental physics as well as being emergent laws that they can be now talked about as being just as fundamental as anything else.\nThe reasons for that can be given through a construct that theoretic lens.\nSo all of this is just really exciting stuff for anyone interested in, and of course the epistemology stuff that I said, that we could have a physics of epistemology, a physics of testability, for example, we're going to get there, we're going to get there throughout the course of reading through this book, which I imagine will take some months and it will happen alongside a series on the fabric of reality as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=756"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec31f718-85d8-4b5c-8e9e-fea2707c48f9": {"page_content": "So all of this is just really exciting stuff for anyone interested in, and of course the epistemology stuff that I said, that we could have a physics of epistemology, a physics of testability, for example, we're going to get there, we're going to get there throughout the course of reading through this book, which I imagine will take some months and it will happen alongside a series on the fabric of reality as well.\nAs I finally tie up the beginning of infinity, we can go back in time to where the beginning of infinity was inspired from, the fabric of reality, and forward to where the beginning of infinity is leading to the science of can and can't.\nSo let me begin.\nI'm beginning on page XIX, because I'm not quite at page one yet, so this is still in the prelude.\nOkay, so for the first of what I presume will be many, many times, I'm going to say, and Chiara writes, the assumption that all fundamental explanations in science must be expressed only in terms of what happens with little or no reference to counterfactuals is now getting in the way of progress.\nFor counterfactuals are essential to a number of things that are currently explained only vaguely in science or not explained at all.\nActuals are central to an exact unified theory of heat, work, and information, both classical and quantum, to explain matters such as the appearance of design in living things, and to a scientific explanation of knowledge.\nAs I shall explain in this book, some of these things such as information, heat, and work already have some explanation in physics, but it is insufficient.\nIt is only approximate unlike more fundamental theories of physics such as quantum theory and general relativity.\nSome others such as knowledge creation do not even have a fully-fledged explanation yet.\nAll these entities must be understood without approximations for science to make new progress and all sorts of fields from fundamental physics, to biology, computer science, and even artificial intelligence.\nCounterfactuals are essential to understand them all, pausing their just my unpacking of that little because what are counterfactuals?.\nWe haven't yet been given an explanation of what they are, not by me, in the book, you do get one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=842"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "488e565d-0961-4356-b2fa-ea9d1ebbf749": {"page_content": "All these entities must be understood without approximations for science to make new progress and all sorts of fields from fundamental physics, to biology, computer science, and even artificial intelligence.\nCounterfactuals are essential to understand them all, pausing their just my unpacking of that little because what are counterfactuals?.\nWe haven't yet been given an explanation of what they are, not by me, in the book, you do get one.\nSo when I first heard about constructive theory and I heard that it was, and I began to understand that it was about counterfactuals, I realized that David Deutsch was following in a long line of philosophers and others who had tried to understand the nature of counterfactuals.\nCounterfactuals being about what could have been the case, what might have happened, but didn't.\nAnd in physics, in constructive theory, in David Deutsch's new theory, and Cara Milletta's new theory, what we're talking about is the physical possibility of things that could have happened, but perhaps did not happen.\nAnd we're going to sharpen that up as we go along.\nBut I first encountered the significance or the mystery behind counterfactuals when I was at University of the University of New South Wales, a lecturer of mine who's still there, a lecturer of philosophical logic, his name is Michael, and one of his great heroes was David Lewis, David Lewis, an American philosopher, and he wrote a book called Counterfactuals.\nSo it's a philosophical exploration of trying to understand the logic behind how to understand counterfactuals.\nNow I've had the science of Canon Can't for a few weeks now, I managed to get an advanced copy, and I read through it and I realized there was no contact there with David Lewis.\nAnd so I asked Cara about this, and there's good reason for that.\nThere's a very good reason for that.\nThey want to clarify counterfactuals in terms of the physics.\nI want to get bogged down in philosophical debates about who else said what, when, and where.\nInstead we're going to get a clean new approach to what counterfactuals are about from a physical perspective.\nAnd so yes, you can go out and you can find other books that are about counterfactuals.\nIn particular, I book called Counterfactuals by David Lewis, which is a wonderful book, a wonderful philosophical exploration.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1000"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "01587181-e882-470a-a06d-41b1e5d572fb": {"page_content": "I want to get bogged down in philosophical debates about who else said what, when, and where.\nInstead we're going to get a clean new approach to what counterfactuals are about from a physical perspective.\nAnd so yes, you can go out and you can find other books that are about counterfactuals.\nIn particular, I book called Counterfactuals by David Lewis, which is a wonderful book, a wonderful philosophical exploration.\nBut what we would now say, what we would have to now say, I think what we would have to conclude, is that there is a better approach to these things.\nSo reading that book, I guess would be something like learning about Newtonian physics.\nIt could be useful and interesting and illuminating, but at the same time, if you want the new stuff, if you want the quantum computation of counterfactuals, you literally want the science of canon cards.\nSo I am not going to, despite the fact I did, I grabbed my uni notes about modal logic and counterfactuals and the work of people like Saul Kripke, as well as David Lewis, on this sort of stuff, just to compare it.\nBut I quickly realized, well, the science of canon card, constructive theory, the new physics of counterfactuals, is a much cleaner, better way to go.\nBecause it's not utterly disconnected from all these other subject areas, which are sometimes what philosophy can tend to be.\nBecause after all, David Lewis, for example, who wrote that book and who consider he also talked about the reality of other possible worlds, the logically possible other worlds, and this is how he was trying to make sense of counterfactuals.\nIt didn't seem as though he was aware of avenues into reality, physical reality, namely the Everett interpretation of quantum theory, that would have allowed him to really solidify and to understand more deeply what these words essentially amounted to, given what we know about physical reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1109"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "391367db-d24d-406c-abec-398aca8480b4": {"page_content": "So, after that, additional preamble from Kiara and myself, let's begin with chapter one, which is titled, such stuff as dreams are made on, and there's a little introduction, and Kiara writes, where I explain how to look at the laws of physics in a far broader way, including counterfactuals, statements about what transformations are possible or impossible, and you become acquainted with knowledge defined objectively via counterfactuals as information that is capable of perpetuating its own existence, pausing there, and my reflection echoes there clearly of the sentiments in the beginning of infinity, one particular way of understanding what knowledge is, knowledge is this special entity in the universe that tends to cause itself to remain in existence, and we used to say that once instantiated tends to cause itself to remain so, and I guess instantiated is a bit of a complicated word, so here we're saying perpetuating its own existence meant the same thing, let's get into the meat of the matter, the beginning of chapter one, Kiara writes, quote, most things in our universe are impermanent, rocks are inexorably abraded away, the pages of books, tear and turn yellow, living things from bacteria to elephants to humans, age and die, notable exceptions are the elementary constituents of matter such as electrons, quarks and other fundamental particles, or the systems they constitute do change, those elementary constituents stay unchanged, entirely responsible for both the permanence and the impermanence are the laws of physics, they put formidable constraints on everything in our universe, on all that has occurred so far and all that will occur in the future, the laws of physics decree how planets move in their orbits, they govern the expansion of the universe, the electric currents in our brains and in our computers, they also control the inner workings of a bacterium or a virus, the clouds in the sky, the waves in the ocean, the fluid, molten rock in the glowing interior of our planet, their dominion extends even to beyond what", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1267"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "381ba444-2c01-4913-b2fc-09db8446ada1": {"page_content": "future, the laws of physics decree how planets move in their orbits, they govern the expansion of the universe, the electric currents in our brains and in our computers, they also control the inner workings of a bacterium or a virus, the clouds in the sky, the waves in the ocean, the fluid, molten rock in the glowing interior of our planet, their dominion extends even to beyond what actually happens in the universe, to encompass what can and cannot be made to happen, whatever the laws of physics forbid cannot be brought about, no matter how hard one tries to realise it, no machine can be built that would cause a particle to go faster than the speed of light for instance, nor, as I have mentioned, could one build a perpetual motion machine creating energy out of no energy, because the laws of physics say that the total energy of the universe is conserved, the laws of physics are the primary explanation for that natural tendency for things to be impermanent, the reason for impermanence is that the laws of physics are not especially suited for preserving things other than elementary components, they apply to the primitive constituents of matter without being specially crafted or designed to preserve certain special aggregates of them, electrons and protons attract each other, it is a fundamental interaction, this simple fact is the foundation of the complex chemistry of our body, but no trace of that complexity is to be found at the laws of physics, pausing their my reflection, already we have something new astonishing a different way of picturing what I have who understood the second law of thermodynamics to be about, this is already giving us an insight into where this book is going to go, a different approach to physics altogether, the second law of thermodynamics is about entropy, and in simple languages about no processes perfect, things degrade over time, nothing remains permanent, except the elementary components or physical reality, so except for electrons and quarks for example, now why, why should that be the case, well here we are getting a hint, because the laws of physics apply to the primitive constituents of matter without", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1378"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ab23d46-ada2-4979-9299-2483dfe84ff1": {"page_content": "approach to physics altogether, the second law of thermodynamics is about entropy, and in simple languages about no processes perfect, things degrade over time, nothing remains permanent, except the elementary components or physical reality, so except for electrons and quarks for example, now why, why should that be the case, well here we are getting a hint, because the laws of physics apply to the primitive constituents of matter without being specially crafted or designed to preserve certain aspects, certain special aggregates of them, so the aggregates, the thing that you get when you put these constituents, these fundamental constituents, the fundamental as far as we know, the electrons and the quarks for example, putting those things together in complicated ways creates an aggregate, cats and tables and people and stars, those things don't appear in the laws of physics, there's no tables in the laws of physics but tables exist in our universe nevertheless, the same is true for cats, same is true even for simple objects out there in space, far more numerous than any of those things that I've just mentioned, stars, they don't appear in the laws of physics, but the fundamental particles do in the standard model, they do appear in the laws of physics, so therefore the laws of physics are telling you what exists over time and so that is why those things exist over time and other things do not, now can we go deeper than that, can we get beneath these laws of physics to say why, why would it be the case that some things will just continue and some things won't, that is going to be one of the motivations for constructive theory, so and this idea, this idea that no trace of complexity is to be found in the laws of physics, even though there is complexity in the universe is just such a deep mystery, so let's continue with the book, chiarites, laws of physics such as those of our universe that are not specially designed or tailored to preserve anything in particular, aside from that elementary stuff, I shall call no design laws, under no design laws, complex aggregates of atoms such as rocks are constantly modified by the interactions with", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1480"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "039c7a40-7995-4c44-80ab-3a15cb13c7c3": {"page_content": "even though there is complexity in the universe is just such a deep mystery, so let's continue with the book, chiarites, laws of physics such as those of our universe that are not specially designed or tailored to preserve anything in particular, aside from that elementary stuff, I shall call no design laws, under no design laws, complex aggregates of atoms such as rocks are constantly modified by the interactions with their surroundings causing continuous small changes in their structure, pausing there, so let's just recap that because this is an important, given a new theory, we're going to have some important ways of sharpening up nomenclature, sharpening up the fundamentals of the theory, which allow us to then go forth and to make predictions that testable, testable about this new theory, and one such thing is this concept of no design laws, so let me just emphasize that again, chiarites, laws of physics such as those of our universe that are not specially designed or tailored to preserve anything in particular, aside from elementary stuff, I shall call no design laws,.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1596"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e05d1ef1-60b0-4eb7-a4d4-1ecb02e0d40c": {"page_content": "what a no design law, it's a law that doesn't have any special place in it for the things that emerge out of that elementary stuff, the elementary stuff might be specified within the no design law, but there's nothing in those laws that suggest a design, even though we have appearance of design, it doesn't seem as though within the laws of physics, anywhere at all, do we find life, do we find humans, do we find anything more complicated than the basic constituents of matter, there's fundamental particles, including the force carriers, which are fundamental particles as well, so this really is a new scientific theory, and in an earlier part of the book, which I did not read, in the fairly extensive preface, chiarites says we're going to meet new beasts along the way, new beasts along the way, so new things that new ways of conceiving of stuff that we haven't before, and I think this is one of the first, this concept of a no design law, so chiarites has just written, under no design laws, complex aggregates of atoms, such as rocks are constantly modified by the interactions with their surroundings, causing continuous small changes in their structure, and then she goes on, quote, from the point of view of preserving the structure, most of these interactions introduce errors, in the form of small glitches, causing any complex structure to be corrupted over time, unless something intervenes to prevent and correct those errors, the structure will eventually fade away or collapse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1672"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "773ccdae-cc71-4b75-a60e-035e089ee647": {"page_content": "The more complex and different from elementary stuff a system is, the harder it is to counteract errors and keep it in existence, just pausing there again, here we already see how construct the theory is drawing inspiration from the theory of computation, that to some extent there's this idea of degradation in the physical world and the idea of error correction in computation, so here there's already the hint of marrying these concepts together, let's continue.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1773"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a526cc29-302d-40ab-ac4b-328759a3ce8a": {"page_content": "The more complex and different from elementary stuff a system is, the harder it is to counteract errors and keep it in existence, think of the ancient practice of preserving manuscripts by hand copying them, the longer and more complex the manuscript, the higher the chance that some error may be performed while copying, and the harder it is for the scribe to counteract errors, for instance, by double checking each word after having written it, given that the laws of physics are no design, the capacity of a system to maintain itself in existence, in an otherwise changing environment, is a rare, noteworthy property of our universe, because it is so important, I shall give it a name, resilience.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1773"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4d8b5bcf-1048-40b3-980b-8a0a0fd99135": {"page_content": "That resilience is hard to come by, has long been considered a cruel fact of nature, about which many poets and writers have expressed their resigned disappointment.\nHere's a magisterial example, from a speech by Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest.\nIn Shakespeare wrote, Our revels now are ended, these are our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air, and like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud kept towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, they all which it inherits, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial, page-and-fated, leave not a rack behind, we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep, and, quote, from Tempest.\nNow those lines have such a delightful form and rhythm that, on first reading, something important may go unnoticed, they present only a narrow, one-sided view of reality which neglects fundamental facts about it.\nIf we take these other facts into consideration, we see that Prospero's pessimistic turning conclusion misplaced, but those facts are not immediately evident, in order to see them, we need to contemplate something more than what spontaneously happens in our universe, such as impermanence, occasional resilience, planets in the cloud kept towers of our cities.\nWe shall have to consider what can and cannot be made to happen, the counterfactuals, which too, as I said, are ultimately decided by the laws of physics, okay, now pausing that.\nNow I think it behooves me to go back and to actually read Shakespeare, there is a reason why people study Shakespeare as well as just enjoy it, and the reason is that it can be complicated, and so here is my imperfect attempt to translate part of this.\nSo Shakespeare wrote, our revels are now ended, we're all spirits and are melted into air into thin air, the cloud kept towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yay which we all inherit, shall dissolve.\nSo what are you talking about there, impermanence, everything there, our revels are now ended, so this thing is ending, things melt into air into thin air, so it sounds very grim, and doesn't it, even our solemn temple, the great globe itself, the entire planet.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1847"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c84cc816-efcf-4862-92e8-0fda99f2b8d6": {"page_content": "So what are you talking about there, impermanence, everything there, our revels are now ended, so this thing is ending, things melt into air into thin air, so it sounds very grim, and doesn't it, even our solemn temple, the great globe itself, the entire planet.\nSo it's interesting that he kind of got that, that everything goes the way of the second law, everything degrades, everything is subject to entropy.\nWe are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep, so rounded with a sleep, there's nothing before or at least, we begin as babies sleeping and we end as people dying, sleeping, all very depressing, and Kiara is going to cheer us up, Kiara writes, quote, the most important element that Prospero's speech neglects is that even under no design laws, resilience can be achieved.\nThere is no guarantee that it shall be achieved, since the laws are not designed for that, but it can be achieved because the laws of physics do not forbid that.\nAnd the immediate way to see this is to look around a bit more carefully than was possible in Shakespeare's time, there are indeed entities that are resilient to some degree, even more importantly, some are more resilient than others, some of them very much more.\nThese are not contrary to what proverbs and conventional wisdom might suggest are rocks and stones, but living entities, pause there, my reflection, wow, this is thrilling already.\nWe think, we look at landscapes, like I'll put a landscape up, and we think that there's stone structures like this have just been there forever.\nAustralia in particular is an extremely old continent, we're talking billions of years.\nThere are rocks there that exist in Western Australia, for example, that the geologists have found that have been there, that have got minerals in them, that were there, not that long after, the planet itself formed, they seem to be resilient.\nBut there are things that rival that kind of thing, and ultimately will far out strip any kind of mineral or rock or anything that seems to be robust.\nAnd that thing is life.\nAnd we think to ourselves, no, hold on, life degrades much more quickly than those things.\nAny individual organism dies very, very quickly on geological time scales.\nLet's see what Keira has to say about this, let's keep going.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=1945"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "caf5c530-6331-40b4-a4b6-35b4af502936": {"page_content": "But there are things that rival that kind of thing, and ultimately will far out strip any kind of mineral or rock or anything that seems to be robust.\nAnd that thing is life.\nAnd we think to ourselves, no, hold on, life degrades much more quickly than those things.\nAny individual organism dies very, very quickly on geological time scales.\nLet's see what Keira has to say about this, let's keep going.\nAnd she writes, quote, living things in general stand out as having a much greater aptitude to resilience than things like rocks.\nAn animal that is injured can often repair itself, whereas a rock cannot.\nAn individual animal will ultimately die, but its species may survive for much longer than a rock can.\nConsider bacteria, for example.\nThey have remained almost unchanged on earth for more than three billion years.\nWell also evolving.\nMore precisely, what has remained almost unchanged are some of the particular sequences of instructions that code for how to generate a bacterium out of elementary components, which are present in every bacterial cell, a recipe.\nThat recipe is embodied in a DNA molecule, which is the core part of any cell.\nIt is a string of chemicals of four different kinds, the string works exactly like a long sequence of words, composed of an alphabet of four letters, each word corresponds roughly to an instruction in the recipe.\nGroups of these elementary instructions are called genes by biologists, pausing their my reflection.\nSo this is just astonishing, interesting, new, a new way of looking at things that there are aspects of biology that are remained in existence, far longer than almost all rocks.\nIndeed, I would say all rocks.\nThere might be some minerals out there that exist for longer, and I suppose in a sense you can kind of think of DNA as like a mineral, not really, the technical differences if you speak to a chemist, but in both cases it is just an arrangement of atoms, right, that is sticking together.\nBut the thing with something like DNA is it is not just a mineral like a zircon, every DNA strand is different to another DNA strand, and it contains information, and some of that information is the same consistent across DNA strands.\nFor example, bacteria which have been around well, soon after the late heavy bombardment in astronomical terms here on Earth, DNA did appear.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2111"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d711300a-2dea-4c27-b54e-7ed2a65516b9": {"page_content": "But the thing with something like DNA is it is not just a mineral like a zircon, every DNA strand is different to another DNA strand, and it contains information, and some of that information is the same consistent across DNA strands.\nFor example, bacteria which have been around well, soon after the late heavy bombardment in astronomical terms here on Earth, DNA did appear.\nAnd some of those DNA strands have been replicated for the last three and a half billion years, something like that, through today in certain bacteria or archaea, even these thermo-philic bacteria.\nNow for the first time, I'm going to be skipping a fair bit of this chapter which talks about the significance of the fact that DNA contains this resilient information, and I'll skip to the part where car rights.\nOf course, the resilience of our civilization is constantly threatened by severe problems, which crop up as we try to move forward.\nSome of them, such as global warming and fast-spreading pandemics, are in fact a byproduct, the very progress I have described.\nThese problems present considerable challenges, and could easily wipe out several aspects of the progress we have made.\nBut the point I would like to focus on here is, it is possible to take steps to solve those issues, remember how serious they appear, and the laws of physics do not forbid still greater improvement.\nThey do not guarantee improvement or resolution, but nor do they forbid it.\nThis and further progress by addressing a problem such as the climate crisis are both possible the laws of physics expressed as counterfactuals offer a chance for improvement, pausing there.\nSo this is introducing optimism, optimism into the laws of physics as well.\nWe had this, to some extent, in the beginning of infinity.\nWe had it as a description of how reality might operate, but here we're trying to sharpen things up, and it appears as the, with constructive theory, we're getting a more rigorous way of tying these things together.\nOptimism, epistemology of certain kinds, physics, biology, and computation.\nOkay, skipping a little more, and going back to the book in Kiara Runt.\nThese reflections suggest that the recipe in certainty and A-patterns is much more resilient than stone, and that the elements of our civilization for which there exists in analogous recipe, such as medicine, science, and literature, can be more resilient still.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2236"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "418d4fa4-6125-4f16-9bd1-f832a1e4eb03": {"page_content": "Optimism, epistemology of certain kinds, physics, biology, and computation.\nOkay, skipping a little more, and going back to the book in Kiara Runt.\nThese reflections suggest that the recipe in certainty and A-patterns is much more resilient than stone, and that the elements of our civilization for which there exists in analogous recipe, such as medicine, science, and literature, can be more resilient still.\nSo under no design laws, a higher degree of resilience seems to require there to be recipes of a particular kind, what kind, and what are such recipes made of exactly?.\nThe answer has to be constructed gradually, and requires a digression about recipes.\nFirst, let's understand how recipes can be created under no design laws of physics, after all.\nAs I said, the only thing that these laws preserve for free are certain elementary particles and chemicals.\nOne, therefore, has to understand how those recipes have come about at all, out of elementary things that know nothing about recipes of such complexity.\nI shall start with the recipes coded in the pattern of living cells DNA.\nIt is now well understood how those have come about, Darwin's theory of evolution explains how living entities and their stupendous biological adaptations, such as the snout of the dog, the fins of a dolphin, or the wings of a bee, have come about in the absence of a designer, under no design and physical laws.\nNow each biological adaptation of a given animal is coded for somewhere in the recipe embodied in the DNA of that animal.\nWhat Darwin's theory tells us is how the recipes coding for complex biological adaptations can have come about without being explicitly designed.\nThis will be key to understanding what the recipes are made of, as is often the case with deep theories, grasping exactly what problem Darwin's theory addresses require some excavation.\nThe problem was stated with great clarity by their theologian, William Paley, a few decades before Darwin's breakthrough.\nLiving things are so perfectly orchestrated that they seem to have been the output of an actual design process, such as that which produces a current factory directed towards a purpose, they have the appearance of design, just like cars or smartphones or a watch.\nIf you're walking along a beach and you suddenly see a watch on the ground, you may be guessing that some designer must have assembled it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2363"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9301415b-f8e0-4718-8d30-07b2e582ee4c": {"page_content": "Living things are so perfectly orchestrated that they seem to have been the output of an actual design process, such as that which produces a current factory directed towards a purpose, they have the appearance of design, just like cars or smartphones or a watch.\nIf you're walking along a beach and you suddenly see a watch on the ground, you may be guessing that some designer must have assembled it.\nBut at the dawn of our planet's history, there was no designer, factory, or intentional design process that could create living things, only elementary components of matter, served in the form of an amorphous bubbling soup and nothing more.\nSo how can living entities and the resilient recipes coding for the biological adaptations in their structure have come about in the absence of a designer?.\nWhat Darwin discovered and what Paley could not quite see is that there is no need for any intentional design process, biological adaptations and animals can be created out of elementary components of matter such as simple chemicals via a non-purposeful process called natural selection.\nThat process needs only enough time and elementary resources such as simple chemicals and so on.\nIt is an undirected mechanism and yet it can produce purposeful complexity starting from scratch under laws of physics that are simple and no design themselves.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2485"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "99934169-4de0-4e04-8801-e0a5dced6a54": {"page_content": "Now at this point, Kiara goes into an explanation of evolution by natural selection via the neo Darwinian framework, which is best explained by Richard Dawkins in the selfish gene and so this idea of a replicator that allows for genes, genetic information, knowledge to be passed from one generation to the next is explained here and I'm skipping all that and she does make the point of course that during this process, this transcription process where the DNA can be replicated, where genes can be replicated, there is an error correction mechanism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2560"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "725b10f3-4e6f-4dfe-94f5-8a2146d1a3a0": {"page_content": "So there's error correcting there at the core of how the transcription works.\nIf there was no error correction, then there would be no replication but the error correction isn't perfect and so therefore you can have errors creeping, which leads to mutations, which leads to genes which can be more or less fit for a particular environment and this is the way in which of course you end up getting selection pressure and some things, some variants surviving being more fit given a particular environment and some being less fit given a particular environment.\nFor more on that, buy the book or of course buy the beginning of infinity or you could go back and listen to the chapters about artificial creativity and creativity that appear in the beginning of infinity that I read through in my own series.\nNow this idea of some genes being more fit when you have a mutation, you will produce a genetic variant that 999 times out of 999 times out of 1000 or more, the chance is that it's not going to be better for the organism, this particular gene, it's not going to be more fit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2603"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "728f5137-15e2-4c57-8c5f-d7deff0556fe": {"page_content": "but sometimes it will be, very rarely it will be and Chiar on this point basically says quote, what distinguishes helpful changes in the recipe, the genetic recipe, from unhelpful ones, it is a particular kind of information, information that is capable of keeping itself instantiated in physical systems, it is resilient information, I shall call this resilient information which is the ingredient in successful recipes knowledge and I shall talk about it extensively in Chapter 5, for adaptations it is knowledge of some features of the environment and so an explanation there about what biological knowledge is, knowledge which is in the genes which keeps itself instantiated in physical systems, namely in the GNA of course, the DNA of course and this knowledge of how to keep the organism or in fact more specifically the gene in existence over time, so I am going to skip past that entire section largely speaking on biology and you get the book for that to read that, I am skipping to where Chiar writes, the other kind of recipe I mentioned is those that maintain our civilization in existence by coding for how to build things like palaces, factories, cars and durobots, such recipes contain knowledge too, they consist of information that can perpetuate itself, embodied in physical support such as our brains, bits of paper, books, documentaries, historical records, scientific papers, conference proceedings with the internet and so on, however this kind of knowledge is brought about via a different process than natural selection, it is produced by thinking and it can reach further the knowledge that emerges directly by natural selection, it is primarily this kind of knowledge that humans have been able to construct their civilization that is tentatively improving and growing despite also often making bad mistakes, such knowledge consists of thoughts, it is made of the same stuff as dreams are made on, yet rather than fading away like fog in the morning sun as Prospero suggests, knowledge is the key to resilience.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2672"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2fed5d7e-9809-4500-a29e-3c403bfb557f": {"page_content": "The knowledge in his speech survives to this day, in fact knowledge is the most resilient stuff that can exist in our universe, given that knowledge has such an essential role in the survival of complex entities, it is essential to understand the process by which new knowledge is created from scratch in our mind.\nFortunately, this process was elucidated by the philosopher Carl Popper in the mid 20th century, he argued that knowledge creation always starts with a problem, which we can think of as a clash between different ideas someone has about reality.\nIncidentally, this suggests a rather positive uplifting interpretation of conflicting states of mind where contrary impulses clash and fight.\nThese conflicts are all examples of problems, but luckily problems can lead to new discoveries, for example in writing a story, the clash in the author's mind might be between the desire to use elegant, a lyrical language and the necessity of keeping the attention of the reader alive with a gripping plot.\nThe author has to find a way of meeting both these criteria, which may clash in certain situations, along passage describing an idyllic landscape might give a perfect chance to meet the former criterion, but might result in the reader dropping the book and switching on the TV, because it slows down the pace of storytelling.\nTo address problems such as this, one has to create new knowledge.\nFirst, one conjectures several tentative solutions, the analog of variations in replicators in natural selection, these could take the form of actual drafts written down on paper, or thoughts or a combination of those, those conjectures may well be full of errors and produce even worse results at first.\nSo one proceeds with the second phase, criticism.\nCriticism is the act of seeking and correcting errors in an attempt to improve on the solutions, the analog of natural selection.\nSometimes this process may be completely opaque to us, so that we may have the impression that good ideas come out of the blue, but it does in fact take place.\nThe author will usually discard most of the earlier versions of the story until some final product that meets both criteria comes about.\nThis final product, if the process has worked, may have the hallmark of all masterpieces.\nIt is hard to change further, while still meeting the criteria, because it has been obtained by tentatively removing flaws in previous versions which met the criteria to a lesser extent.\nThe masterpiece contains new knowledge.\nIt shall be remembered.\nIt shall be translated into different languages.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2800"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ff66326e-886d-4c6c-9d0f-3b00f3624322": {"page_content": "The author will usually discard most of the earlier versions of the story until some final product that meets both criteria comes about.\nThis final product, if the process has worked, may have the hallmark of all masterpieces.\nIt is hard to change further, while still meeting the criteria, because it has been obtained by tentatively removing flaws in previous versions which met the criteria to a lesser extent.\nThe masterpiece contains new knowledge.\nIt shall be remembered.\nIt shall be translated into different languages.\nIt shall live on for centuries and survive for generations, inspiring readers of all ages, as long as civilization survives, as Shakespeare's sonnet number 18 says of itself, so long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this and this gives life to thee.\nThat process is tentative.\nGiven that there is no designer, the laws of physics, there is no guarantee that one shall make progress by conjecture and criticism.\nBut one can.\nFor the same reason, a solution that looks good for one problem may be found to be an adequate at a later stage.\nFor example, in physics, Newton's theory of gravitation had been tremendously successful for nearly three centuries at explaining planetary motion and many other things.\nBut nevertheless, it was later found to be inadequate and was superseded by a better theory, Einstein's general relativity, pausing their myreflection.\nSo this is a remarkable application of the nascent physics of construct a theory to epistemology and in particular to knowledge that tends to cause itself to remain in place.\nAnd in particular, great works of literature or great works of music where the masterpieces we refer to is a masterpiece precisely because errors have been corrected.\nErrors in light of a particular criteria set of criteria beyond that the author, the composer, is striving to meet.\nIt's that thing that is set in armadias about that Mozart talking about Mozart's music.\nDisplace one note and there would be diminishment.\nIf you try and fiddle with the great works of classical music, even the great works of pop music, then they tend to sound worse.\nThe composer is striving for something objectively good.\nAnd even if they cannot explain precisely what it is, they're nonetheless meeting it.\nOkay, it might be in explicit knowledge.\nAnd when it comes to books, you know, one of my favourite all time works of literature is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.\nAnd many of us love it precisely because of exactly how Kara described this clash that occurs in the mind of the author.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=2914"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2beda3c4-8f97-4422-89bd-4c917c45c289": {"page_content": "The composer is striving for something objectively good.\nAnd even if they cannot explain precisely what it is, they're nonetheless meeting it.\nOkay, it might be in explicit knowledge.\nAnd when it comes to books, you know, one of my favourite all time works of literature is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.\nAnd many of us love it precisely because of exactly how Kara described this clash that occurs in the mind of the author.\nNo doubt.\nAnd some people, some people do find Tolkien's work slow in parts.\nAnd this is precisely why some of us absolutely love it because it is this wonderful, finely tuned blend of a fast, paced plot, interesting characters, getting up to fun stuff that's exciting.\nAnd these long poetic passages of prose describing the countryside, the scenery.\nAnd you feel like you're there if you really take it on board.\nAnd it's nice to have that kind of experience with a book.\nAnd that's why it's so long, of course, you know, it has these very long passages where you can sit back and meditate and relax and really imagine that you're there and it really does inspire one's imagination.\nYou can visualize, you know, the forests and the mountains leap into existence because of these long passages where Tolkien being just an absolute master of the English language is able to conjure these images in your mind.\nAnd then that's broken up with the excitement of some sort of plot thing going on with the characters where they're being attacked by the baddies or some other great battle goes on.\nAnd so Tolkien clearly was, did have that question his mind at times?.\nNo doubt.\nNo doubt he probably thought to him, so this is going on a bit long, where he's thinking, well, now I'm just engaged in an authoring a blockbuster fairy tale, which is what he never wanted to do.\nBut they're kind of exciting.\nThere's something fun and exciting happening on every page, but that doesn't happen in Lord of the Ring.\nSo it is a masterpiece because of this, at least some of us would say it's a masterpiece because of this.\nSo to, of course, with Shakespeare's work or with any of the great poets and playwrights, you know, it's difficult to improve, okay?.\nNot to say it's an impossible, an imprintable to improve, but very difficult, hard to vary, which is what makes it good.\nThat's the thing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=3072"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9a4f2cc5-5618-4057-8dad-e9c0ccd2279f": {"page_content": "So it is a masterpiece because of this, at least some of us would say it's a masterpiece because of this.\nSo to, of course, with Shakespeare's work or with any of the great poets and playwrights, you know, it's difficult to improve, okay?.\nNot to say it's an impossible, an imprintable to improve, but very difficult, hard to vary, which is what makes it good.\nThat's the thing.\nThat's one of the things that make it good, okay?.\nIt's hard to vary, while still achieving what you want it to achieve in the case of Lord of the Rings being an absolutely engaging, entertaining, thrilling read, an impressive read.\nOkay, let's go back to the book and Keira writes, there are no absolute sources of certain truth.\nAny good solution to a problem may also contain errors.\nThis principle is based on fallibleism, a pillar of poppers explanation of rational thinking, fallibleism makes progress feasible because it allows for further criticism to occur in the future.\nEven when it presents, we seem to be content with whatever solution we have found.\nIt leaves space for creating ever improving theories, stories, works of art and music.\nIt also tells us that errors are extremely interesting things to look for.\nWhenever we try to make progress, we should hope to find more of them as fast as possible.\nNow, I'm going to do something that I haven't done with my other series on the beginning of Infinity, but I'll do it here for this episode.\nI'm going to skip an extensive number of pages for about 20 pages or so because it's largely about physics, which is the area I'm most interested in probably alongside of epistemology and there's a lot of epistemology there as well.\nAnd so I want to devote a separate episode, my next episode, to that part of this first chapter.\nI want to end today's episode, however, with something that comes later, which really, I think, very clearly illuminates the centrality importance of this concept of counterfactuals and how physics hasn't really dealt with counterfactuals before, but construct a theory offers a new lens into understanding reality scientifically.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=3183"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1707e5a7-8c0c-4af3-845a-3e662d1f532f": {"page_content": "And so I want to devote a separate episode, my next episode, to that part of this first chapter.\nI want to end today's episode, however, with something that comes later, which really, I think, very clearly illuminates the centrality importance of this concept of counterfactuals and how physics hasn't really dealt with counterfactuals before, but construct a theory offers a new lens into understanding reality scientifically.\nAnd so I'm going to read the story that Kiara tells from ancient Greek myth, this is still in chapter one, and Kiara writes, consider, as another example, a simple story, one that could be told from generation to generation by oral tradition without having to be written down, an ancient Greek myth will do.\nThe story goes that Theseus, son of Agius, King of Athens, went to Crete to kill the Minotaur.\nTheseus made an agreement with his aged father that if he defeated the Minotaur on their return, his crew would raise white sails on the ship.\nHad he perished, his crew would raise black sails.\nSo, off went Theseus and he defeated the Minotaur, but on his way back, distracted by all sorts of things, including possibly the presence of his fiance, Ariadne, on the ship, he forgot to tell the crew about the sails.\nThe crew left the black sails on, and Agius, seeing the ship approaching from the highest tower of Athens, thought his son was dead.\nSo, he threw himself into the sea and drowned.\nThis tragic story is why the sea is now called the Agian.\nNow, suppose we asked a master storyteller to tell that story with the constraint that he could formulate statement only about what happens.\nThat is, he must report the full story without ever referring to counterfactual properties.\nIn particular, he cannot refer to properties that have to do with what could or could not be done to physical systems.\nThis task turns out to be impossible for the story to make sense and to convey its full meaning to attributes of the ship are essential.\nOne that can be used to send a signal by assuming one of two states, white sail showing or black sail showing.\nThe other that the state of having black or white sails can be copied onto another physical system such as Agius's eyes and brain.\nThe copyability property tells us that the flag contains information just as in the case of replicators.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=3284"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a196f05f-0beb-4771-85a7-666b481a1dc4": {"page_content": "This task turns out to be impossible for the story to make sense and to convey its full meaning to attributes of the ship are essential.\nOne that can be used to send a signal by assuming one of two states, white sail showing or black sail showing.\nThe other that the state of having black or white sails can be copied onto another physical system such as Agius's eyes and brain.\nThe copyability property tells us that the flag contains information just as in the case of replicators.\nThese two properties just like the property of blank paper are counterfactual, so that myth could not be told, conveying its full meaning under the constraint that one should refer only to what happens, not even by the best storyteller ever.\nPause their my reflection, ending the reading for today of the science of Canon Kant.\nWhat a wonderful way to bring myth into this whole thing and to bring storytelling into this thing, because I think that gets across the whole point of this.\nHit the two, physics has been about dynamical laws where you plug in, and I'll do an example next time, where you plug in the conditions, initial conditions, they're often called, but they can be conditions at any particular time, which will allow you to then do a prediction of what will happen, and this has always been the story of physics.\nHere we're going to predict what will happen, or in certain modes of quantum theory, what probably will happen, something like that, like an in Bayesianism of course you get this whole idea of what probably will happen.\nBut in other areas like storytelling, for example, it makes no sense at all to just talk about what will happen.\nWe want to know what could possibly have happened.\nThe only way that story makes sense, the only way we know why the king throws himself into the ocean, why the sea is now called the Aegean, is because his son was flying black sails.\nIf he had have been flying white sails, as he should have been, if he had have defeated the Minotaur, then the sea would not have been called the Aegean, because the king would never have flung himself into the sea, killing himself.\nNow, this makes sense of the story, this makes sense of the story in literature.\nHow much more so then can it make sense of what physically is going on in reality, in physical reality?.\nThis is why this new mode of explanation in physics is just so exciting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=3417"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "32d0a61b-43fd-47d7-af69-e7ce5b9f2b79": {"page_content": "Now, this makes sense of the story, this makes sense of the story in literature.\nHow much more so then can it make sense of what physically is going on in reality, in physical reality?.\nThis is why this new mode of explanation in physics is just so exciting.\nThis is at the crux of it, that hitherto we've been given this tiny little slice of reality through the lens of physics.\nPowerful as it is, useful it is, and I'll talk about all the ways in which it's so useful and powerful next time via the book.\nBut it is a tiny sliver of the possibilities that give you the much more grand picture of what reality is about.\nAnd hopefully into the future as constructive theory unfolds and we learn more about it, of our researchers working in this area, we begin to flesh out, we've been to color in the lines about what constructive theory is telling us about a physical reality.\nBut for now, at least we have the stage set that we are pivoting away from this single line idea of physics tells us what is going to happen, what has happened and what is going to happen, but constructive theory, moving beyond the dynamical laws, can now explain what possibly could happen.\nAnd that what possibly could happen indeed comes then in part to what we choose to create knowledge about, because then that allows physical possibilities to occur in the future.\nAnd we, people are instrumental in that central to that whole conception.\nSo I'm excited about this series, go and get the book.\nIt's a great book.\nThis is my only second reading of it, so I'm still learning new things about it as I go through it.\nAnd look out also for an episode about the fabric of reality released near to this one.\nProbably a short one, but near to this one.\nOkay, until next time, bye-bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrHCehE9f4M&t=3576"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2a43739b-48f7-4d89-839e-91fdeca44172": {"page_content": "Today I'm doing chapter 5, the reality of abstractions.\nHere we learn about the fact that there's not only physical material in the universe, but rather there's also some other kind of part to reality.\nNamely, there are abstractions.\nAnd these abstractions can have real causal effects on physical things like atoms.\nThe reason why something like that ends up taking the shape that it does has nothing to do with self-organization and physical forces.\nIt cannot be explained purely in terms of the motion of atoms, and it can't be reduced to laws of motion or any kind of law of physics.\nInstead, the explanation is that a great architect called Gaudi some 100 years ago decided to create something like that.\nThe idea was originally represented inside of his mind.\nThe idea was originally some kind of neural firings inside of his brain, but the copy reduced to that either.\nIt was an idea, an abstract idea.\nHe had plans, he put it down on paper, and then over many, many years it's beginning to take form or beginning to be instancigated in the rock and stone and mortar and other materials that make up an absolutely phenomenal building like this one.\nIt's only partially complete, and apparently it's going to be some decades before it finally is.\nThis is in Barcelona, Spain.\nSo with a great building, something like Gaudi's Cathedral, what we have is an idea that is somehow taken physical form.\nAnd this brings us to a kind of dualism.\nIt really is the notion that in reality, there are two ways of speaking about what exists.\nCertainly, material things exist.\nBut that's not all that exists.\nBecause the material things can be arranged into particular patterns.\nAnd in particular, what we can have is kinds of patterns.\nWe call these ideas.\nIdeas are things that can be instantiated within physical substrates.\nAnd whether that physical substrate happens to be ink on paper, or electrical signals in the brain, or indeed messages inside of a computer.\nThe point is that these ideas are something over and above the mere atoms, the particles, the physical things.\nSo there really are two kinds of things in reality.\nThere's physical things, stuff made out of atoms, and there's abstract things.\nPatterns within those atoms.\nWe can have ideas about things like mathematics, which refer to abstract entities themselves.\nSo these are abstract concepts about other abstract concepts.\nThere can be things like physical laws.\nThe explanation of physical laws is itself an abstract concept.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a520280a-6a9b-4559-bbd1-a2cdfaccaa7d": {"page_content": "So there really are two kinds of things in reality.\nThere's physical things, stuff made out of atoms, and there's abstract things.\nPatterns within those atoms.\nWe can have ideas about things like mathematics, which refer to abstract entities themselves.\nSo these are abstract concepts about other abstract concepts.\nThere can be things like physical laws.\nThe explanation of physical laws is itself an abstract concept.\nSo a realist is committed to the idea that abstract things exist.\nThat there are two kinds of existence in reality.\nPhysical things and abstract things.\nThis doesn't commit us to any kind of woo, or supernatural kind of force, or spirituality.\nAll that it says is that the way in which physical things are arranged is not haphazard.\nIt's not chaotic.\nThere's something more to it.\nAnd even more profound, the abstract things can cause things to occur in physics.\nThe abstract things can cause stuff to happen.\nThey really are the proximate and indeed ultimate cause of many kinds of events that happen in the universe, particularly when it comes to people.\nSo let's read a little from chapter 5, the beginning of infinity, called the reality of abstractions.\nAnd we'll see what David has to say about how abstract things cause stuff to happen, and how they are the explanation of things happening in physical reality.\nHe writes, The fundamental theories of modern physics explain the world in jarringly counterintuitive ways.\nFor example, most physicists consider itself evident that when you hold your arm out horizontally, you can feel the force of gravity pulling it downwards.\nBut you cannot.\nThe existence of a force of gravity is astonishingly denied by Einstein's general theory of relativity.\nOne of the two deepest theories of physics are paused there.\nThis is me speaking.\nI read a little about this on my website.\nYou can go to www.breadhold.org and there's a section there on general relativity, and it speaks about why gravity is indeed not a force.\nSo you can google that.\nGravity is not a force, I think is the name of the article.\nI'll continue, David writes.\nThis says that the only force on your arm in that situation is the one which you yourself are exerting upwards to keep it constantly accelerating away from the straightest possible path in a curved region of spacetime.\nThe reality described by our other deepest theory, quantum theory, which I shall describe in chapter 11, is even more counterintuitive.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=154"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "00f54eb4-b7a3-401b-a575-ee4148cfda20": {"page_content": "So you can google that.\nGravity is not a force, I think is the name of the article.\nI'll continue, David writes.\nThis says that the only force on your arm in that situation is the one which you yourself are exerting upwards to keep it constantly accelerating away from the straightest possible path in a curved region of spacetime.\nThe reality described by our other deepest theory, quantum theory, which I shall describe in chapter 11, is even more counterintuitive.\nTo understand explanations like those, physicists have to learn to think about everyday events in new ways.\nThe guiding principle is, as always, to reject bad explanations in favor of good ones.\nIn regard to what is or is not real, this leads to the requirement that if an entity is referred to by our best explanation in the relevant field, we must regard it as really existing.\nI'll pause there.\nThis harks back to a section right at the beginning in one of the early chapters of the fabric of reality, the criteria for existence.\nAnd the criteria of existence is said right there.\nHow do we know if something actually exists in reality?.\nWell, the way in which we know it exists is not via our senses.\nIt's not via us being able to detect it by seeing it or hearing it.\nThat's not what we mean by if something actually existing.\nBecause our senses are fallible that we can make mistakes.\nWe can see things that aren't really there.\nWe can hallucinate.\nThings can go wrong.\nThings can still go wrong with our explanations.\nBut the best way to decide whether or not something actually exists is whether or not it is referred to by our best explanations is what David says.\nSo our best explanation of how matter works requires us to believe, and I believe requires us to invoke the existence of atoms, of particles.\nAnd those particles are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons.\nSo we're committed to the idea that electrons really do exist.\nWe can't get away with explaining physical reality without referring to electrons.\nNow, when it comes to something like ghosts, well, none of our best explanations of anything require us to speak in terms of ghosts.\nPeople might think they've seen ghosts, but that is not a good explanation.\nUsually in those situations, what has happened is that people have simply made mistakes.\nSo let's continue.\nFurthermore, every day events are stupidly complex when expressed in terms of fundamental physics.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=297"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d938e10f-fee5-42bb-a753-87a00fb5c15a": {"page_content": "We can't get away with explaining physical reality without referring to electrons.\nNow, when it comes to something like ghosts, well, none of our best explanations of anything require us to speak in terms of ghosts.\nPeople might think they've seen ghosts, but that is not a good explanation.\nUsually in those situations, what has happened is that people have simply made mistakes.\nSo let's continue.\nFurthermore, every day events are stupidly complex when expressed in terms of fundamental physics.\nIf you feel a kettle with water and switch it on, all the supercomputers on earth, working for the age of the universe could not solve the equations that predict what all those water molecules will do.\nEven if we could somehow determine their initial state, and that of all the outside influences on them, which itself is an intractable task.\nSo I just had to move my camera there a little bit.\nOkay, let's continue.\nFortunately, some of that complexity resolves itself into a higher level simplicity.\nFor example, we can predict with some accuracy how long the water will take to boil.\nTo do so, we need only a few physical quantities that are quite easy to measure, such as mass, the power of the heating element and so on.\nFor greater accuracy, we may also need information about subtler properties, such as the number and type of nucleation sites for bubbles.\nBut these are still relatively high-level phenomena, composed of intractively large numbers of interacting atomic level phenomena.\nThus, there is a class of high-level phenomena, including the liquidity of the water and the relationship between containers, heating elements, boiling and bubbles that can be explained, that can be well explained in terms of each other alone, with no direct reference to anything at the atomic level or below.\nIn other words, the behavior of that whole class of high-level phenomena is quasi-autonomous, almost self-contained.\nThis resolution into applicability at a higher, quasi-autonomous level is known as emergence.\nSo we just pause there, introduces the concept of emergence, which many science popularizers and many scientists have written about over the years, often in the quite confused way, but this is exceptionally clear.\nThere's nothing particularly mysterious about emergent phenomena, except that they exist.\nThat somehow, the laws of physics are such that particles arrange themselves in ways that give rise to higher level simplicity.\nAnd that higher level simplicity obeys its own laws.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=415"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6ceced7e-3c7b-4162-8ba8-90b12cc4171e": {"page_content": "So we just pause there, introduces the concept of emergence, which many science popularizers and many scientists have written about over the years, often in the quite confused way, but this is exceptionally clear.\nThere's nothing particularly mysterious about emergent phenomena, except that they exist.\nThat somehow, the laws of physics are such that particles arrange themselves in ways that give rise to higher level simplicity.\nAnd that higher level simplicity obeys its own laws.\nIt doesn't violate, it's not possible for it to violate the laws of physics.\nSo when we say it obeys its own laws, that doesn't mean in contradiction to the laws of physics, it simply means these higher-level laws themselves emerge, and govern the behavior of those higher-level simple structures.\nSo let's continue.\nHe writes, Emergent phenomena are a tiny minority.\nWe can predict when the water will boil, and that the bubbles will form when it does, but if you wanted to predict where each bubble will go, or to be precise what the probabilities of its various possible motions are, so you chapter 11, you would be out of luck.\nStill less, it is feasible to predict the countless microscopically defined properties of the water, such as weather and odd or even number of its electrons, will be affected by the heating during any given period.\nOkay, so I'll pause there, and just refer you to this little self-indulgent, to another one of my articles, this one about free will.\nAnd I think it's important to note here that I regard free will, as I kind of emergent simplicity.\nWhen people say that free will isn't possible, because the laws of physics are already mandate what is going to happen in the universe, in other words, everything is already determined.\nIt simply ignores the fact that there is such a thing as really existing emergent phenomena.\nSo we cannot escape from the fact that the laws of physics govern all things that happen in the universe.\nBut that doesn't mean that you can't have higher order simplicity.\nThings like people making choices.\nAnd so this is my attempt to explain free will in terms of this higher level, simple structure.\nSo again, you can look up, Brett Hall emergence and free will.\nSo I'll continue.\nI'm skipping a little, and he writes, The behavior of high level physical quantities consists of nothing but the behavior of their low level constituents, with most of the details ignored.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=258"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9c4267f3-6686-4176-8471-0c814ffef8e1": {"page_content": "But that doesn't mean that you can't have higher order simplicity.\nThings like people making choices.\nAnd so this is my attempt to explain free will in terms of this higher level, simple structure.\nSo again, you can look up, Brett Hall emergence and free will.\nSo I'll continue.\nI'm skipping a little, and he writes, The behavior of high level physical quantities consists of nothing but the behavior of their low level constituents, with most of the details ignored.\nThis has given rise to a widespread misconception about emergence and explanation, known as reductionism.\nThe doctrine that science always explains and predicts things reductively, ie by analyzing them into components.\nOften it does, as we will use the fact that interatomic forces are by the law of conservation of energy to make and explain a high level prediction that the kettle cannot boil water without a power supply.\nBut reductionism requires that the relationship between different levels of exclamation always have to be like that.\nAnd often it is not.\nFor example, as I wrote in the fabric of reality, consider one particular copper atom at the tip of the nose of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill that stands in Parliament Square in London.\nNow, I'm not going to read that passage.\nI would just encourage everyone to grab the fabric of reality or grab the beginning of any and read that for themselves.\nIt's not saying my running that I'm reading passages, and I'm not going to read one of my favorite passages in both books.\nAnd it's a brilliant passage because it articulates in a very profound way the difference between reductionism as a dogma and how we go about actually explaining what happens in the universe.\nNot everything is explicable in terms of the laws of physics.\nAnd I'm not going to read the passage, but I'll give you a flavor of what the passage is.\nIt's this idea that if you want to explain where a particular copper atom is, but if it's at the nose of the statue of Winston Churchill, then trying to explain the position of that copper atom in terms of laws of motion and initial conditions stretching back to the big bang in order to try and predict that the copper atom is being bumped in sequence over and again until such time as it arrives at the tip of the nose of Winston Churchill.\nYou don't explain anything.\nHowever, if instead you talk about the copper atom as being part of a brass statue and statues are made out of brass so that they don't corrode away.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=673"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "718f9142-f496-4966-a0c8-a8507f2c57af": {"page_content": "You don't explain anything.\nHowever, if instead you talk about the copper atom as being part of a brass statue and statues are made out of brass so that they don't corrode away.\nAnd we like to make statues of important people like Winston Churchill, who prevented the Second World War from being a victory for the Nazis.\nThat is an explanation.\nWhy is the copper atom there?.\nOr the copper atom is there because it's part of brass.\nAnd brass is there because we make statues out of it.\nWe make statues out of it because we'd like to remember important historical figures.\nThat's the explanation of why the copper atom is there.\nAnd that is an actual explanation as to why.\nBut you won't get the why if you say, oh, it's the laws of physics.\nIt is just determined that the copper atom was going to be there.\nAnd then precisely the same way.\nIf you try and explain what people do, if you attempt to explain it in terms of deterministic laws, then you ignore the high level causative structure that exists in the universe, namely emergence.\nAnd one of the most parsimonious ways to explain why people choose to do one thing or the other is freewill.\nIf you try and say what they were compelled to do that in the first place, because there are these lower level laws, be they laws of neuroscience or neurobiology or even deeper the laws of physics, you're missing the difference between explanation and prediction.\nAnd although an oracle who has access to the perfect laws of physics and initial conditions would be able to predict what people do.\nIn other words, their behavior is perfectly determined in the same way that the copper atom was perfectly determined to end up where it was.\nThat predictive story is not an explanation.\nThere's a difference.\nThere's a really important difference.\nSo I'm skipping a bit and David goes through arguments against reductionism.\nAnd then arguments against its mirror image called holism.\nThis holism idea is something that you often hear from natural therapies type people.\nThis idea that we should treat diseases of the body by looking at the entire body as a whole, rather than focusing on a specific problem with the body.\nSo David criticizes all those and he writes, all those doctrines are irrational from the same reason.\nThey advocate accepting or rejecting theories on grounds other than whether they are good explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=828"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1df17c24-8e6f-470c-934d-535ad585dc54": {"page_content": "And then arguments against its mirror image called holism.\nThis holism idea is something that you often hear from natural therapies type people.\nThis idea that we should treat diseases of the body by looking at the entire body as a whole, rather than focusing on a specific problem with the body.\nSo David criticizes all those and he writes, all those doctrines are irrational from the same reason.\nThey advocate accepting or rejecting theories on grounds other than whether they are good explanations.\nWhenever a high-level explanation does follow logically from low-level ones, that also means that the high-level one implies something about the low-level ones.\nThus, additional high-level theories provided that they were all consistent would place more and more constraints on what the low-level theories could be.\nSo it could be that all the high-level explanations that exist taken together imply all the low-level ones, as well as vice versa.\nOr it could be that some low-level, some intermediate level, and some high-level explanations taken together imply all explanations.\nI guess that that is so.\nYou're right.\nOkay, so I'll pause there.\nSo this is an interesting way of speaking about explanations and laws, if you like.\nThere are these lower-level laws of physics, but in a sense, they're constrained by what we learn about the way in which high-level explanations work.\nThe high-level explanations, what we know about them, constrains what actually happens at the lower-level, or what we know about what happens at the lower-level.\nWe can't violate the laws of physics, but we also can't go violating just any old high-level explanation as well.\nThe explanations work in both directions.\nOkay, so I'll continue.\nI'm skipping again a significant chunk here.\nYou're right.\nIn any case, the emergent phenomena are essential to the applicability of the world.\nLong before humans had much explanatory knowledge, they were able to control nature by using rules of thumb.\nRules of thumb have explanations, and those explanations were about high-level regularities among emergent phenomena, such as fire and rocks.\nLong before that, it was only genes that were encoding rules of thumb.\nAnd the knowledge in them, too, was about emergent phenomena.\nThus, emergence is another beginning of an affinity.\nAll knowledge creation depends on, and physically consists of, emergent phenomena.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=352"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7c5af433-1429-484a-aac8-2effa33946d0": {"page_content": "Rules of thumb have explanations, and those explanations were about high-level regularities among emergent phenomena, such as fire and rocks.\nLong before that, it was only genes that were encoding rules of thumb.\nAnd the knowledge in them, too, was about emergent phenomena.\nThus, emergence is another beginning of an affinity.\nAll knowledge creation depends on, and physically consists of, emergent phenomena.\nEmergence is also responsible for the fact that discoveries can be made in successive steps, thus providing scope for the scientific method.\nThe partial success of each theory, in a sequence of improving theories, is tantamount to the existence of a layer of phenomena, that each theory explains successfully, though, as it then turns out, partly mistakenly.\nSuccessive scientific explanations are occasionally dissimilar in the way they explain their predictions, even in a domain where the predictions themselves are similar or identical.\nFor instance, Einstein's explanation of planetary motion does not merely correct Newtons.\nIt is radically different, denying, among other things, the very existence of central elements of the Newtons explanation, such as the gravitational force and the uniformly flowing time with respect to which Newton defined motion.\nLikewise, the astronomer Johannes Kepler's theory, which said that the planets move in ellipses, did not merely correct the celestial sphere theory.\nIt denied the sphere's existence.\nAnd Newtons did not substitute a new shape for Kepler's ellipses, but a whole new way for laws to specify motions, through infinitesimally defined quantities like instantaneous velocity and acceleration.\nThus, each of those theories of planetary motion was ignoring or denying its predecessors' basic means of explaining what was happening out there.\nThis has been used as an argument for instrumentalism, as follows.\nEach successive theory made small but accurate corrections to what its predecessor predicted, and was therefore a better theory in that sense.\nBut since each theory's explanation swept away that of the previous theory, the previous theory's explanation was never true in the first place, and so one cannot regard those successive explanations as constituting a growth of knowledge about reality.\nFrom Kepler to Newton to Einstein, we have, successfully, no force needed to explain orbit, and inverse square law needed to be responsible for every orbit, and again, no force needed.\nSo how could Newton's force of gravity, as distinct from his equations predicting its effects, ever have been in advance in human knowledge?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1059"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5afa3810-d3f0-4569-9990-bbc6371ff5c7": {"page_content": "From Kepler to Newton to Einstein, we have, successfully, no force needed to explain orbit, and inverse square law needed to be responsible for every orbit, and again, no force needed.\nSo how could Newton's force of gravity, as distinct from his equations predicting its effects, ever have been in advance in human knowledge?.\nIt could, and was, because sweeping away the entities through which a theory makes its explanation, is not the same as sweeping away the whole of the explanation.\nAlthough there is no force of gravity, it is true that something real, the curvature of space-time, caused by the sun, has a strength that varies approximately according to Newton's inverse square law, and affects the motion of objects seen and unseen.\nNewton's theory also correctly explained that laws of gravitation are the same for terrestrial and celestial objects.\nIt made a novel distinction between mass, the measure of an object's resistance to being accelerated, and weight, the force required to prevent an object from falling under gravity.\nAnd it said that the gravitational effect of an object depends on its mass and not other attributes, such as its density or composition.\nLater, Einstein's theory not only endorsed all those features, but explained in turn why they are so.\nNewton's theory too had been able to make more accurate prediction-centered predecessors, precisely because it was more right than they were about what was really happening.\nBefore that, even Kepler's explanation had included important elements of the true explanation.\nPlanetary orbits, and indeed determined by laws of nature.\nThose laws of nature are indeed the same for all planets, including Earth.\nThey do invoke the sun, they are mathematical, angiometrical, and character, and so on.\nWith the hindsight provided by each successive theory, we can see not only where the previous theory made false predictions, but also that wherever it made true predictions, this was because it had expressed some truth about reality.\nSo it's truth lives on in the new theory.\nAs Einstein remarked, there could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory, and then it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.\nI'll pause there.\nI've been engaged in some discussions recently about the existence of truth, and whether or not it can be found.\nThere's a school of philosophy called skepticism, and the skeptics seem to believe that we cannot attain truth, but we cannot know when we've attained truth.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=352"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fd1a9baf-7b09-4557-a50f-5145e96ccbde": {"page_content": "As Einstein remarked, there could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory, and then it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.\nI'll pause there.\nI've been engaged in some discussions recently about the existence of truth, and whether or not it can be found.\nThere's a school of philosophy called skepticism, and the skeptics seem to believe that we cannot attain truth, but we cannot know when we've attained truth.\nAnd this is why fallibleists don't agree insofar as we cannot get to the final truth.\nBut this doesn't mean we can't find any truth at all.\nWhat we have access to is provisional truth.\nAnd the reason we know we can have access to provisional truth is for the reasons articulated in the passage right there.\nSo let me just reread a little bit where David said, wherever it, the previous theory, made true predictions, this was because it had expressed some truth about reality.\nSo true predictions, in other words, the prediction worked, but why did the prediction work?.\nWell, the prediction worked because there must have been something about reality that the theory got correct.\nIt doesn't mean it got the whole lot correct, but the fact that it did get correct means it got something right, something true was stated.\nThese things are synonyms as far as I'm concerned.\nWe're just talking about the same thing.\nThere's a reality out there.\nAnd when we make statements about that reality, that work, we've said something true.\nWe might not know precisely which part of the theory is true until sometime later in retrospect.\nBut we are able to get some of this truth sometimes, not the final truth, not ultimate truth, provisional truth.\nTruth that works, truth that enables us to make progress.\nAnd the reason we make progress is because we are improving by objective standards our theories.\nWe're going to skip a little more and then read a little more.\nDavid writes, and this is a sort of esoteric thing that philosophers of science like to talk about, but I will mention it.\nSo he writes, by the way, it is something of a misconception that the predictions of successive theories of planetary emotions were all that similar.\nNewton's predictions are indeed excellent in the context of bridge building, and only slightly inadequate when running the global positioning system.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=352"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "046888fc-61f3-45f4-968e-795cfee32004": {"page_content": "We're going to skip a little more and then read a little more.\nDavid writes, and this is a sort of esoteric thing that philosophers of science like to talk about, but I will mention it.\nSo he writes, by the way, it is something of a misconception that the predictions of successive theories of planetary emotions were all that similar.\nNewton's predictions are indeed excellent in the context of bridge building, and only slightly inadequate when running the global positioning system.\nBut they are hopelessly wrong when explaining a pulsar or quasar, or the universe as a whole, to get all those right, one needs Einstein's radically different explanations.\nSuch large discontinuities in the meanings of successive scientific theories have no biological analogue.\nIn an evolving species, the dominant strain of each generation differs only slightly from that in the previous generation.\nNevertheless, scientific discovery is a gradual process too.\nIt is just that, in science, all the gradualness, and nearly all the criticism and rejection of bad explanations takes place inside the scientists' minds.\nAs Papa put it, we can let our theories die in our place.\nI'm skipping forward to the place where he gets to the meat of the matter, namely abstractions, and he writes.\nThat brings me to the main subject of this chapter, abstractions.\nIn Chapter 4, I remark that pieces of knowledge or abstract replicators that use, hence effect, organisms and brains to get themselves replicated.\nThat is a higher level of explanation than the emergent levels I have mentioned so far.\nIt is a claim that something abstract, something non-physical, such as knowledge in a gene or a theory, is affecting something physical.\nAgain, this is one of those profound passages where it's no good just reading it once.\nYou really have to meditate on that for a moment, so I just want to read that last sentence again.\nIt is a claim that something abstract, something non-physical, such as the knowledge in a gene or a theory, is affecting something physical.\nHe continues.\nPhysically, nothing is happening in such a situation other than that one set of emergent entities such as genes or computers, is affecting others, which is already anathema to reductionism.\nBut abstractions are essential to a fuller explanation.\nYou know that if your computer beats you at chess, it really is the program that is beaten you, not the silicon atoms or the computer is such.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1435"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6c7f6d9c-924b-41b6-b768-f68e8e610c1b": {"page_content": "He continues.\nPhysically, nothing is happening in such a situation other than that one set of emergent entities such as genes or computers, is affecting others, which is already anathema to reductionism.\nBut abstractions are essential to a fuller explanation.\nYou know that if your computer beats you at chess, it really is the program that is beaten you, not the silicon atoms or the computer is such.\nThe abstract program is instantiated physically, as a high level behaviour of vast numbers of atoms, but the explanation of why it is beaten you cannot be expressed without also referring to the program in its own right.\nThat program has also been instantiated, unchanged, in a long chain of different physical substrates, including neurons in the brains of the programmers, and radio waves when you download the program via wireless networking, and finally, as states have long and short-term memory banks in your computer.\nThe specifics of that chain of instantiations may be relevant to explaining how the program reached you, but it is irrelevant to why it beats you.\nThere, the content of the knowledge in it and in you is the whole story.\nThat story is an explanation that refers in electrically to abstractions, and therefore those abstractions exist.\nAnd really do affect physical objects in a way required by the explanation.\nThe next section is a section that summarizes part of Douglas Hofstadter's work.\nAnd I think it is a powerful, excuse the pun, knockdown argument about the reality of abstractions.\nSo I'll come back to that in a moment.\nSo let's get to Hofstadter's argument.\nDavid writes, The computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter has a nice argument that this sort of explanation is essential in understanding certain phenomena.\nIn his book, I am a strange loop, 2007, he imagines a special purpose computer built of millions of dominoes.\nThey are set up as dominoes often are for fun, standing on end close together.\nSo if one of them is knocked over, it strikes its neighbour, and so a whole stretch of dominoes falls one after another.\nBut Hofstadter's dominoes are spring-loaded in such a way that, whenever one is knocked over, it pops back up after a fixed time.\nHence, when a domino falls, a way of a signal of falling dominoes propagates along the stretching the direction in which it fell, until it reaches either a dead end, or a currently fallen domino.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1570"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "751b8aae-e16d-48fc-95cd-7d2cbe48b4d8": {"page_content": "But Hofstadter's dominoes are spring-loaded in such a way that, whenever one is knocked over, it pops back up after a fixed time.\nHence, when a domino falls, a way of a signal of falling dominoes propagates along the stretching the direction in which it fell, until it reaches either a dead end, or a currently fallen domino.\nBy arranging these dominoes in a network with looping, bifurocating, and rejoining stretchers, one can make these signals combine and interact.\nIn a sufficiently rich repertoire of ways, to make a whole, to make the whole construction into a computer.\nA signal travelling down a stretch can be interpreted as a binary one, and the lack of a signal as a binary zero.\nAnd the interactions between such signals can implement a repertoire of operations such as and, or, and not.\nOut of which arbitrary computations can be composed.\nOne domino is designated as the on switch.\nWhen it is knocked over, the domino computer begins to execute the program that is instantiated in its loops and stretchers.\nThe program in Hofstadter's thought experiment computes whether a given number is a prime or not.\nOne inputs that number by placing a stretch of exactly that many dominoes at a specified position before tripping the on switch.\nElsewhere in the network, a particular domino will deliver the output of the computation.\nIt will fall only if a divisor is found, indicating that the input was not prime.\nHofstadter sets the input to number 641, which is a prime, and trips the on switch.\nFlourries of motion begin to sweep back and forth across the network.\nAll 641 of the input dominoes soon fall as the computation reads its input and snap back up and participate in further intricate patterns.\nIt is a lengthy process because this is a rather inefficient way to perform computations, but it does the job.\nNow Hofstadter imagines that an observer who does not know the purpose of the domino network, what just the dominoes performing, and notices that one particular domino remains resolutely standing.\nNever affected by any of the waves of downs and ups sweeping by.\nHe David quotes a part of Iron Strange Loop where Hofstadter writes.\nThe observer points at that domino and asks with curiosity, how come that domino there is never falling?.\nBack to BOI, beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1694"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f802bf8d-0677-44c4-97ff-69e4c1d75065": {"page_content": "Never affected by any of the waves of downs and ups sweeping by.\nHe David quotes a part of Iron Strange Loop where Hofstadter writes.\nThe observer points at that domino and asks with curiosity, how come that domino there is never falling?.\nBack to BOI, beginning of infinity.\nWe know that that is the output domino, but the observer does not.\nHofstadter continues.\nLet me contrast two different types of answer that someone might give.\nThe first type of answer, myopic to the point of silliness would be because it is predecessor never falls, you dummy.\nAnd David writes.\nOr if it has two or more neighbours, because none of its neighbours ever fall.\nHofstadter writes.\nTo be sure, this is as correct as far as it goes, but it does not go very far.\nIt just passes the buck to a different domino.\nBack to David.\nIn fact, one could keep passing the buck from domino to domino to provide ever more detailed answers that were silly, but correct as far as they go.\nEventually, one had passed the buck billions of times, many more times than there are dominoes because the program loops.\nOne would arrive at the first domino, the on-switch.\nAt that point, the reductive to high-level physics explanation would be in summary.\nThat domino did not fall, because none of the patterns of motion initiated by knocking over the on-switch ever included.\nBut we knew that already.\nWe can reach that conclusion, as we just have, without going through that laborious process.\nAnd it is undeniably true.\nBut it is not the explanation we were looking for, because it is addressing a different question.\nPredictive rather than explanatory.\nMainly, if the first domino falls, will the output domino ever fall.\nAnd it is asking at the wrong level of emergence.\nWhat we asked was, why does it not fall?.\nTo answer that, Hofstadter then adopts a different mode of explanation at the right level of emergence, where Hofstadter writes.\nThe second type of answer would be, because 641 is prime.\nNow this answer, while just as correct, indeed in some sense it is far more on the mark, has the curious property of not talking about anything physical at all.\nNot only has the focus moved upwards to collective properties, these properties somehow transcend the physical, and have to do with pure abstractions, such as primality.\nEnd quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1814"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "62594b23-32d9-480d-8263-8297cd5b2a31": {"page_content": "The second type of answer would be, because 641 is prime.\nNow this answer, while just as correct, indeed in some sense it is far more on the mark, has the curious property of not talking about anything physical at all.\nNot only has the focus moved upwards to collective properties, these properties somehow transcend the physical, and have to do with pure abstractions, such as primality.\nEnd quote.\nDavid writes that Hofstadter concludes.\nThe point of this example is that 641's primality is the best explanation, perhaps even the only explanation, for why certain dominoes did fall, and certain others did not fall.\nJust to correct that slightly.\nDavid writes.\nThe physics-based explanation is true as well, and the physics of the dominoes is also essential to explaining why prime numbers are relevant to that particular arrangement of them.\nBut Hofstadter's argument does show that primality must be part of any full explanation of why the dominoes did or did not fall.\nHence, it is a refutation of reductionism in regards to abstractions, for the theory of prime numbers is not part of physics.\nIt refers not to physical objects, but to abstract entities, such as numbers of which there is an infinite set.\nOr pause there.\nThis is why I regard myself as a dualist.\nThere is a single reality out there.\nThis was the idea that spinodes are had.\nThere is one reality.\nHowever, there are two kinds of real existing objects within that reality.\nThere is stuff made of atoms, the physical world, and then there's stuff that's not made of atoms, the abstract world.\nThere's nothing spiritual or spooky about the abstract world.\nIt consists of things like numbers, and those numbers have properties.\nThose properties include things like whether they have multiple factors or not.\nIf they don't, and they only have themselves in one as factors, then they have the property that they are prime numbers.\nIn which case, we have this rich class of structures out there in abstract reality that have relations among themselves, but more profoundly, the abstract entities can have causal effects on the physical world.\nHow do they have causal effects on the physical world?.\nBecause the physical world is organized in patterns in such a way that the abstract entities are instantiated within that physical reality.\nAnd the relationships between the abstract entities are represented within the physical world.\nThere's nothing mysterious here.\nThere's no extra forces that are required in order to push things around.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1941"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8a0763af-4156-40e7-87d5-32269a911008": {"page_content": "How do they have causal effects on the physical world?.\nBecause the physical world is organized in patterns in such a way that the abstract entities are instantiated within that physical reality.\nAnd the relationships between the abstract entities are represented within the physical world.\nThere's nothing mysterious here.\nThere's no extra forces that are required in order to push things around.\nWe still have the same forces we do in physics.\nAnd the next part that David talks about is a little bit within the wheelhouse of Sam Harris.\nAnd a little bit within the wheelhouse of Buddhists, and sort of an interest of people who interested in this question of personhood, which I certainly am.\nSo I'm going to read that now.\nDavid writes, unfortunately, speaking about how Hofstadter has just distinguished between two kinds of really existing things, namely the physical and the abstract, David writes, unfortunately Hofstadter goes on to disown his own argument and to embrace reductionism.\nWhy?.\nHis book is primarily about one particular emergent phenomenon, the mind, or as he puts it, the eye.\nHe asks whether the mind can be consistently thought of as affecting the body, causing it to do one thing rather than another, given the all embracing nature of the laws of physics.\nThis is known as the mind-body problem.\nFor instance, we often explain our actions in terms of choosing one action rather than another, but our bodies, including our brains, are completely controlled by the laws of physics, leaving no physical variable free for an eye to affect in order to make such a choice.\nWell, Paul said, that's the determinism argument against free will.\nPeople who think that determinism is incompatible with free will.\nThese people who think determinism is incompatible with free will, tend to also think that determinism is incompatible with abstract entities.\nIf abstract entities can have causal effects in the world, then the eye, being an abstract entity, also cannot have causal effects in the world, so these people would have it.\nBut that's not possible, as we have seen, the dominoes fall down, because the abstract concept of primality is the explanation as to why a particular domino did or did not fall.\nSo I'll continue with beginning of infinity.\nFollowing the philosophy of Daniel Dannett, Hofsteder eventually concludes that the eye is an illusion.\nMinds, he concludes, can't push material stuff around, because physical law alone would not suffice to determine its behaviour, hence his reductionism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1672"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4675334d-b9d7-4a4c-812d-9f59ac42c7f5": {"page_content": "So I'll continue with beginning of infinity.\nFollowing the philosophy of Daniel Dannett, Hofsteder eventually concludes that the eye is an illusion.\nMinds, he concludes, can't push material stuff around, because physical law alone would not suffice to determine its behaviour, hence his reductionism.\nAnd now David writes something very, very important.\nHe writes, but first of all, physical laws can't push anything either.\nThey only explain and predict, and they are not our only explanations.\nThe theory that the domino stands because 641 is prime, and because the domino network instantiates a primality testing algorithm, is an exceedingly good explanation.\nWhat is wrong with it?.\nIt does not contradict the laws of physics, and explains more than any explanation purely in terms of those laws.\nAnd no known variant of it can do the same job.\nSecond, that reductionist argument would deny that an atom can push in the sense of cause to move, another atom.\nSince the initial state of the universe, together with the laws of motion, has already determined the state at every other time.\nThird, the very idea of cause is emergent and abstract.\nIt is mentioned, nowhere in the laws of motion about elementary particles, and as the philosopher David Hume pointed out, we cannot perceive causation, only a succession of events.\nAlso, the laws of motion are conservative.\nThat is to say, they do not lose information.\nThat means that, just as they determine the final state of any motion, given the initial state, they also determine the initial state, given the final state.\nAnd this state at any time, from the state at any other time.\nSo at that level of explanation, cause and effect are interchangeable.\nAnd not what we mean when we say that a program causes a computer to win at chess, or that a domino remains standing because 641 is prime.\nThere is no inconsistency in having multiple explanations of the same phenomenon, at different levels of emergence, regarding micro-physical explanations as more fundamental in emerging ones, is arbitrary and fallacious.\nThere is no escape from Hofstra to 641 argument, no reason to want one.\nThe world may or may not be as we wish it to be, and to reject good explanations on that account is to imprison oneself in parochial error.\nSo the answer, because 641 is prime, does explain the immunity of that domino.\nThe theory of prime numbers on which that answer depends as not a law of physics, nor an approximation to one.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=258"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "493146d5-81eb-4aa1-9c39-178475683088": {"page_content": "There is no escape from Hofstra to 641 argument, no reason to want one.\nThe world may or may not be as we wish it to be, and to reject good explanations on that account is to imprison oneself in parochial error.\nSo the answer, because 641 is prime, does explain the immunity of that domino.\nThe theory of prime numbers on which that answer depends as not a law of physics, nor an approximation to one.\nIt is about abstractions and infinite sets of them at that, such as the set of natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc., etc.\nThere is no mystery how we can have knowledge of infinitely large things, like the set of all natural numbers.\nThat is just a matter of reach.\nVersions of number theory that can find themselves to small natural numbers would have to be so full of arbitrary qualifiers, workarounds and unanswered questions that they will be very bad explanations, until they would generalise to the case that makes sense without such ad hoc restrictions, the infinite case.\nI shall discuss various sorts of infinity in chapter 8.\nSkipping just a short paragraph now, and David Wright's.\nOur own brains are computers, which we can use to learn about things beyond the physical world, including pure mathematical abstractions.\nThis ability to understand abstractions is an emergent property of people, which greatly puzzled the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato.\nHe noticed that the Theorems of geometry, such as Pythagoras' Theorem, are about entities that are never experienced, perfectly straight lines with no thickness, intersecting each other on a perfect plane to make a perfect triangle.\nThese are not possible objects of any observation, and yet people knew about them, and not just superficially at the time, such knowledge was the deepest knowledge of anything that human beings had ever had, where did it come from?.\nPlato concluded that it, and all human knowledge must come from the supernatural.\nHe was right that it could not have come from observation, but then it could not have, even if people had been able to observe perfect triangles, as arguably they could today using virtual reality.\nAs I explained in chapter 1, empiricism has multiple fatal flaws, but it is no mystery where our knowledge of abstractions comes from.\nIt comes from conjecture like all our knowledge, and through criticism and seeking good explanations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=2341"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ebea1d75-d8bf-47ef-8718-ca1156ff8817": {"page_content": "Plato concluded that it, and all human knowledge must come from the supernatural.\nHe was right that it could not have come from observation, but then it could not have, even if people had been able to observe perfect triangles, as arguably they could today using virtual reality.\nAs I explained in chapter 1, empiricism has multiple fatal flaws, but it is no mystery where our knowledge of abstractions comes from.\nIt comes from conjecture like all our knowledge, and through criticism and seeking good explanations.\nIt is only empiricism that made it seem plausible that knowledge outside of science is inaccessible, and it is only the justified true-belief misconception that makes such knowledge seem less justified than scientific theories.\nAs I explained in chapter 1, even in science, almost all rejected theories are rejected for being bad explanations, without ever being tested.\nExperimental testing is only one of many methods of criticism used in science, and the Enlightenment has made progress by bringing those other methods to bear in non-scientific fields as well.\nThe basic reason that such progress is possible is the good explanations about philosophical issues are as hard to find as in science, and criticism is correspondingly effective.\nI'm skipping a little here.\nand then he gets into a different class of abstract entities.\nMoral entities, so let's have a read about what he says there.\nIn the case of moral philosophy, the empiricist and justificationist misconceptions are often expressed in the maxim that you can't derive and ought from an is a paraphrase of a remark by the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.\nIt means that moral theories cannot be deduced from factual knowledge.\nThis has become conventional wisdom, and has resulted in a kind of dogmatic despair about morality.\nYou can't derive and ought from an is, therefore morality cannot be justified by reason.\nThat leaves only two options either to embrace unreason, or to try living without ever making moral judgment.\nBoth are liable to lead to morally wrong choices just as embracing unreason, and never attempting to explain the physical world, leads to factually false theories and not just ignorance.\nI'll pause there, so this has been part of the recent uptick in philosophical interest about morality in the popular online community.\nWe hear Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris talking about exactly the same issue.\nThis idea that because we can't derive and ought from an is, many people choose one of two paths.\nThe first is to head towards unreason, and I think that what we're hinting at here when we come to unreason is a kind of dogma.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=2446"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "33d3fd19-4f36-4d16-a8d4-ea3d3acfe370": {"page_content": "I'll pause there, so this has been part of the recent uptick in philosophical interest about morality in the popular online community.\nWe hear Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris talking about exactly the same issue.\nThis idea that because we can't derive and ought from an is, many people choose one of two paths.\nThe first is to head towards unreason, and I think that what we're hinting at here when we come to unreason is a kind of dogma.\nSo you give up trying to improve your theories, you settle on a particular idea, moral code, religious or otherwise, and you refuse to change it.\nIt's a form of unreason, or you move into relativism, where you simply say, I cannot make any moral judgments.\nAnd this all stems from this justificationist mistake or imperial system mistake that you can't derive and ought from an is.\nDavid Wright's on this in the next paragraph.\nCertainly, you can't derive an ought from an is, but you can't derive a factual theory from an is either.\nThat is not what science does.\nThe growth of knowledge does not consist of finding ways to justify one's beliefs.\nIt consists of finding good explanations.\nAnd although factual evidence and moral maximally independent, factual and moral explanations are not.\nThus, factual knowledge can be useful in criticizing moral explanations.\nFor example, in the 19th century of an American slave had written a bestselling book, that event would not logically have ruled out the proposition Negroes are intended by providence to be slaves.\nNo experience could because that is a philosophical theory.\nBut it might have ruined the explanations through which many people understood that proposition.\nAnd if, as a result, such people had found themselves unable to explain to their own satisfaction why it would be providential if that author would have been forced back into slavery, then they might have questioned the account that they had formally accepted of what a black person really is.\nAnd what a person in general is, and then a good person, a good society, and so on.\nConversely, advocates of highly immoral doctrines, almost invariably believe associated factual falsehoods as well.\nFor instance, ever since the attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, millions of people worldwide have believed it was carried out by the US government or the Israeli Secret Service.\nThose are purely factual misconceptions.\nYet they bear the imprint of moral wrongness, just as clearly as a fossil, made of purely an organic material, bear the imprint of ancient life.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=2572"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "25d0ffb5-f467-4842-94fd-036efb6ffa02": {"page_content": "Conversely, advocates of highly immoral doctrines, almost invariably believe associated factual falsehoods as well.\nFor instance, ever since the attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, millions of people worldwide have believed it was carried out by the US government or the Israeli Secret Service.\nThose are purely factual misconceptions.\nYet they bear the imprint of moral wrongness, just as clearly as a fossil, made of purely an organic material, bear the imprint of ancient life.\nAnd the link in both cases is explanation.\nTo correct a moral explanation for why Westerners deserve to be killed indiscriminately, one needs to explain factually that the West is not what it pretends to be.\nAnd that requires uncritical acceptance of conspiracy theories denial of history and so on.\nSo there we have this concept about derivation and people are fixated on the idea, especially morality, about trying to derive moral theories from a set of facts about the real world.\nBut you can't derive one from the other.\nderivation is very much a logical and mathematical process.\nIf you stay within the domain, within the domain of mathematics, then you can derive the conclusion from the premises, given a certain set of rules, given a certain set of rules of inference.\nThat's what mathematics is about.\nThat's what philosophical logic is about.\nBut observing stuff in the world and then deciding what to do about it isn't a straight line using derivation.\nYou need explanation.\nNext paragraph has a telling phrase, David writes, quite generally, in order to understand the moral landscape in terms of a given set of values, one needs to understand some facts being a certain way as well.\nAnd the converse is also true.\nFor example, as the philosopher Jacob Brunowski pointed out, success at making factual scientific discoveries entails a commitment to all sorts of values that are necessary for making progress.\nThe individual scientist has to value truth and good explanations and to be open to ideas and to change, the scientific community and to some extent the civilization as a whole has to value tolerance, integrity and openness of debate.\nWe should not be surprised at these connections.\nThe truth has structural unity as well as logical consistency.\nAnd I guess that no true explanation is entirely disconnected from any other.\nSince the universe is explicable, it must be that morally right values are connected in this way with true factual theories and morally wrong values with false theories.\nMoral philosophy is basically about the problem of what to do next.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=1672"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "13efd845-ea5d-437b-b0ac-76bcb81e6cdf": {"page_content": "We should not be surprised at these connections.\nThe truth has structural unity as well as logical consistency.\nAnd I guess that no true explanation is entirely disconnected from any other.\nSince the universe is explicable, it must be that morally right values are connected in this way with true factual theories and morally wrong values with false theories.\nMoral philosophy is basically about the problem of what to do next.\nAnd more generally, what sort of life to lead and what sort of world to want.\nSome philosophers can find the term moral to problems about how one should treat other people.\nBut such problems are continuous with problems of individuals.\nChoosing what sort of life to lead, which is why I adopt the more inclusive definition.\nTerminology aside, if you were suddenly the last human on earth, you would be wondering what sort of life to want.\nDeciding, I should do whatever pleased me most, would give you very little clue.\nBecause what pleases you depends on your moral judgement of what constitutes a good life and not vice versa.\nSo that's profound.\nThere's a few moral philosophies going around today, or codes of behaviour one might say, such as effective altruism.\nThese purport to be explanations of morality that are able to provide a foundation or a framework within which to decide what we should do next.\nNow, useful as they might be, for many situations, the problem is they cannot be an all-encompassing moral philosophy, because moral philosophy can't be about how to treat other people.\nThat might be a very small part of moral philosophy, but essentially, as David is saying here, if there were no other people, there'd still be a lot of moral questions.\nIf you, with the last person earth, you'd want to know what you should do next.\nIt wouldn't have anything to do with other people, because by definition there are no other people there.\nAnd moral philosophy is also about what kind of life to want.\nIf you're not sure about what to do next, then simply saying that you should do whatever your preferences are, is not much use.\nIf you don't know what you want to do, and so therefore you can't know what your preferences are.\nNow, so let's continue.\nThis also illustrates the emptiness of reductionism in philosophy, for if I ask you for advice about what objectives to pursue in life, it is no good telling me to do what the laws of physics mandate.\nI shall do that in any case.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=2827"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7916c212-a26b-4ae9-9a7d-48491b68ddeb": {"page_content": "If you don't know what you want to do, and so therefore you can't know what your preferences are.\nNow, so let's continue.\nThis also illustrates the emptiness of reductionism in philosophy, for if I ask you for advice about what objectives to pursue in life, it is no good telling me to do what the laws of physics mandate.\nI shall do that in any case.\nNor is it any good to tell me what I prefer, because I don't know what I prefer to do until I have decided what sort of life I want to lead or how I should want the world to be.\nSince our preferences are shaped in this way, at least in part by our moral explanations, it does not make sense to define right and wrong entirely in terms of the utility in meeting people's preferences.\nTrying to do so is the project of the influential moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, which played much the same role as empiricism did in the philosophy of science.\nIt acted as a liberating focus for the rebellion against traditional dogmas, while its own positive content contained very little truth.\nSo there is no avoiding what to do next problems.\nAnd since the distinction between right and wrong appears in our best explanations that address such problems, we must regard that distinction as real.\nIn other words, there is an objective difference between right and wrong.\nThose are real attributes of objectives and behaviour.\nIn chapter 14, I shall argue that the same is true in the field of aesthetics.\nThere is such a thing as objective beauty.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1rBTM9qV4&t=2938"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e7c2b889-f692-44f3-b918-e9df66b0aa26": {"page_content": "Hello and welcome to ToKCast episode 26.\nWe're still on the multiverse and I tend to be talking more than I have in previous episodes.\nThank you to the people who've been supporting the podcast by the way.\nThey're coming out more frequently precisely because of the additional support I've been receiving via PayPal and Patreon.\nSo thank you for that.\nSo we're going to be doing at least after this one one more episode.\nI was intending on this being the final episode for the multiverse but just looking at the time that it's taken for each of these to complete.\nThat's in how long each episode running for.\nI wouldn't like to make one episode go for two hours and so for that reason this one's kind of probably be about an hour and then the next one will be an about an hour as well.\nAnd then that will be the last one on the multiverse before we move on to chapter 12 of Physicist History of Philosophy.\nWhat we've been talking about so far in the readings from chapter 11 is the fictional story that David is telling in order to explain aspects of the multiverse theory which aren't often considered by people who explain the multiverse theory.\nOne important aspect of that is fungibility and today we're going to come more directly to this idea of entanglement as well so we're going to have a go at explaining that.\nSo to recap what we had in a previous episode was that a device called a transporter had a voltage surge in it in one universe but not the other.\nThis is the quantum event.\nThe quantum event happens in one universe but not the other.\nAnd quantum events are typically of this kind.\nWe've looked at half-silvered mirrors for example where a photon could go through the mirror or bounce off.\nWe've looked at interference experiments of different kinds where for example young's two-slit experiment where if you fire a single particle at the two-slits it could go through one or the other of the two-slits perhaps neither.\nPerhaps it can take different paths through both as well but there are options within the universe about where these particles could go.\nIn the case of the story that David's telling the voltage surge could have happened in the universe or might not have happened in the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=55"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9eea9ebe-2225-4099-be36-6c6d7f6adb7f": {"page_content": "Perhaps it can take different paths through both as well but there are options within the universe about where these particles could go.\nIn the case of the story that David's telling the voltage surge could have happened in the universe or might not have happened in the universe.\nAnd then the effects of that voltage surge this quantum event are amplified up to the point where the voltage surge where it happens jolts a particular person and that caused them to spill coffee and the coffee spill then leads to them talking to the person that's sitting next to them and romance ensues.\nSo we end up with this emergent kind of stream of information going on in one universe that didn't go on in the other.\nOkay let's continue with the book.\nI've skipped a substantial bit now I'm about to skip a substantial amount more as I emphasize in the last chapter this is the longest chapter in the book and I am only partially doing it just as so you really should read the entire chapter.\nMy videos are just to provide additional context and exposition I suppose.\nAll right let's continue and David writes.\nNow suppose that scientists on the Starship know about the multiverse and understand the physics of the transporter.\nThey'll note that we have not yet given them a way of discovering these things.\nThen they know that when they run the transporter an infinite number of fungible instances themselves all sharing the same history are doing so at the same time.\nThey know that a voltage surge will occur in half the universes in that history which means that it will split into two histories of equal measure.\nHence they know that if they use a voltmeter capable of detecting the surge half of the instances of themselves are going to find that it has recorded one and the other half are not pause there just my reflection.\nRemember also in the last episode we moved beyond this idea that there were only in fact two universes that in fact there's a an infinite number of universes an uncountably infinite number of universes all of which are fungible to begin with they're all the same and they're the same number of universes is maintained throughout any event which causes differentiation.\nSo the idea of the multiverse is that we have a constant number of universes it's just that they differentiate over time they become different over time and so prior to this voltage surge there's a certain amount of universes a certain measure of universes you can't count them for reasons that are explained previously in the book on infinities.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=140"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89e61377-809b-4ee2-a738-749753d87c22": {"page_content": "So the idea of the multiverse is that we have a constant number of universes it's just that they differentiate over time they become different over time and so prior to this voltage surge there's a certain amount of universes a certain measure of universes you can't count them for reasons that are explained previously in the book on infinities.\nSo instead what we have is this idea of a measure so we have this measure of universes consider it analogous to measuring the length using a ruler.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=271"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f3988fab-3f88-49ba-b5a6-78ff12020125": {"page_content": "okay that's an infinite number of points between you know the one centimeter point and the ten centimeter point even though there's only nine centimeters difference between them there's an infinite number of points and so instead of counting the points between one centimeter and ten centimeters we measure lengths to say that there's nine centimeters between the one and the ten now we could divide that nine centimeters and half to two four point five centimeter sections so we're talking about lengths rather than counting points when it comes to measuring things and so the same thing is true here of the multiverse and analogous thing is going on where prior to the voltage surge happening the measure of universes is such and then after the voltage surge happens the universe differentiates into two equal proportions now it doesn't have to be equal in the true quantum theory it can be any old proportion that you like but assuming the simplest case here we have half of the universes in which the voltage surge happens and half the universes in which the voltage surge does not happen and all of the well I say I'm about to say things in those universes but remember the universes are nothing more over and above the things that are in the universes it's not like a universe is a receptacle four things as David has said previously and so the people in that in those universes there's uncountably infinite numbers of fungible instances of those people as there are for you and as I've said before all that seems preposterous what on earth would it feel like to be many different people exactly as it does now now if you're struggling with that concept well depending upon who you are perhaps you've struggled when you first perhaps figured out that you didn't have an immortal soul and some people who believe in the immortal soul who are religious if they undergo a transformation in their mind where they realize that they don't have an immortal soul now if you're not a religious person you might very well be asked by a religious person it's preposterous to think I don't have an immortal soul I can feel that I have an immortal soul they're feeling their mind or they're feeling their consciousness something", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=303"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d7752a6a-cd39-4c9b-b7dd-ede13a5dbe73": {"page_content": "and some people who believe in the immortal soul who are religious if they undergo a transformation in their mind where they realize that they don't have an immortal soul now if you're not a religious person you might very well be asked by a religious person it's preposterous to think I don't have an immortal soul I can feel that I have an immortal soul they're feeling their mind or they're feeling their consciousness something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=413"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "89d976e1-4275-4268-ba3a-a852b18f8124": {"page_content": "so I think it's no more of a great jolt going from believing you have an immortal soul and you have a certain sense of having an immortal soul to no longer believing that you have an immortal soul this is the kind of transition that I would think it's analogous to going from thinking you're just a single instance of a person in a single universe to you are uncountably infinite numbers of instances of people in the multiverse you're a multiverse object I don't think this is a huge transition.\nokay.\nso I'll just step back a bit I'll reread some.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=441"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b89f577b-ad4e-489d-af5b-ad9423c2ac98": {"page_content": "and then I'll move forward again so David wrote hence they know that if they use a voltmeter capable of detecting the surge half of the instances of themselves are going to find that it has recorded one and the other half are not but they also know that it is meaningless to ask not merely impossible to know which event they will experience consequently they can make two closely related predictions one is that despite the perfect determinism of everything that is happening nothing can reliably predict for them whether the voltmeter will detect a surge the other prediction is simply that the voltmeter will record a surge with probability one half that's the outcomes of its such experiments are subjectively random from the perspective of any observer even though everything that is happening is completely determined objectively this is also the origin of quantum mechanical randomness and probability in real physics it is due to the measure that the theory provides for the multiverse which is in turn due to what kinds of physical processes the theory allows and forbids notice that when a random outcome in this sense is about to happen it is a situation of diversity within fungibility the diversity is in the variable what outcome they are going to see the logic of the situation is the same as in cases like that at the bank account I discussed above except that this time the fungible entities are people they are fungible yet half of them are going to see the surge and the other half are not pause their my reflection so it sounds preposterous that you are made up of all these fungible entities that there are these many different universes but the fact that it's surprising or astounding is not a meaning is not a reason for rejecting it nor a reason for getting unduly emotional except to be curious and interested and fascinating perhaps positive emotions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=231"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cb3822ae-2810-44b1-b02a-98ceab900883": {"page_content": "it's just what the science is telling us.\nbut it's remarkable to be that some people have visceral negative reactions.\nand so I'm going to have a little diversion here.\nand we're going to listen to a different podcast we're just going to listen to a few minutes of the excellent Brett Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast.\nand this is an episode in which Brett Weinstein talks to Sam Harris these two people are great intellects I love listening to Brett Weinstein.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=604"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0289e6ed-a3c2-4b11-9dd7-3a033db4f63c": {"page_content": "I think he's a fantastic thinker great biologist a person who was able to sensibly reflect upon culture at this moment and of course Sam Sam is a great rational thinker typically measured in the way he talks about things he doesn't get overly emotional and here in what we're about to listen to they're discussing the multiverse now as much as I admire these two great public intellectuals I think here they make terrible missteps in simply appreciating the physics and I think it's not only because they're stepping outside their domain of expertise I don't have a problem with people doing that after all this is what I do quite often the concern I have is they're not applying the same standards intellectual standards to this theory as they would to any other theory that a scientist might have and in particular when it comes to evolution by natural selection all of the objections that I'm sure that Brett hears from creationists or other people who reject Darwinism or neo Darwinism all of those objections are precisely the kind of objections they're on a continuum with the objections that he's about to raise about the multiverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=624"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "53fabf03-5b54-4620-8e88-8ade02a9ed3b": {"page_content": "okay so rather than going to a longer preamble than that let's just get into listening to the podcast by the way this is episode eight of Brett Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast it can be found on YouTube it can be found on iTunes his podcasts typically very long conversations which are excellent you know of the length of two and a half hours.\nor so we're only going to listen to a few minutes just a part that's about the multiverse.\nand it comes up in a discussion just by the way about free will and in terms of free will Sam and Brett seem to be in furious agreement about the non-existence of free will so let's hear what they have to say.\nright.\nyeah.\nwell so this could be a semantic difference between us but let's talk about what you think that that sintilla of freedom actually is okay so first of all it is utterly dependent on us not living in a deterministic universe if we live in a deterministic universe then I don't understand a damn thing.\nand it's game over for Brett assuming we don't.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=707"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1f4b945d-440c-471e-9a3f-530dd7c10086": {"page_content": "and I think the physics is pretty clear there's no reason to think we do there's quantum uncertainty and the fact that there is quantum uncertainty means that uncertainty can exist at higher levels through various mechanisms well or we live in a universe where if you take the many worlds picture seriously which again is hard to do but many physicists do at this point now Sam has just said there that it's hard to do it's hard to believe in this idea of the multiverse very well many things are hard to believe I suppose almost anything in science is hard to believe anything of interest is hard to believe the universe is 13.7 billion years old now the universe is as large as it is the universe contains as many stars that it that it does I mean these are we have preposterous numbers to some extent when talking about these things the number of possible organisms that could be produced using the DNA code preposterous perhaps infinite in size now just putting aside the fact that I don't think that the multiverse adds too much to this concept of free will I think that well the concept of free will that I have anyway this idea that it's an emergent feature of human minds coupled to their creativity causing them to be able to do things that are inherently unpredictable I don't think that that's really helped by the multiverse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=775"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a8b3689e-b7ed-406e-9e0b-4a1478cb7ae9": {"page_content": "but it's certainly not made anymore difficult I don't think the multiverse really has a lot to do with free will to be honest but putting that aside what is the scientific criticism of the multiverse that Sam and Brett are sort of about to get into here that's what we need to listen out for or what is the philosophical criticism the philosophy of science or the epistemological criticism because Sam so far has said it's simply hard to believe but the feeling that something is hard or difficult hard to take seriously is not a reason for rejection it could be a reason to look into things a little bit more deeply and of course I'm not going to I'm not going to get into right now the fact that Brett clearly thinks that determinism and free will cannot go together.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=871"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8dee76d6-d88a-46f9-ad41-12ebadbe0da4": {"page_content": "okay.\nI'm not the only one who thinks that they can donate to another person reasonable people can have differences upon this.\nokay.\nand often it comes down to these silly um definitional games and if we define free will in the way that people who say they're not compatible is to be defined well then I agree that sort of free will cannot possibly obtain if free will has to mean something like beyond the laws of physics a supernatural force that allows you to make choices outside of what physics permits or a an uncaused cause.\nokay if it's something like that if that's what free will is then I agree that doesn't exist free will cannot be supernatural and it cannot be an uncaused cause.\nso I'd like to preserve the concept of free will the kind of free will that people typically who believe in it.\nI think they think they have or at least to come to understand it a little better and so that's the reason I think that free will and determinism have to go together and if you don't want to call what I think free will is free will do you want to call it something else I'm okay with that.\nas well.\nokay.\nbut I typically think that when people are talking about choices and free choices it's a very simple concept to just use the term free will I've got numerous blog posts on my website about free.\nwill anyway we're not here to talk about free will let's go back to Brett's podcast we live in a world where everything that can happen does in fact happen somewhere.\nright.\nand you don't know which one of these worlds you're in.\nright.\nso it's it's a new kind of determinism in a way which is you know every every gradation of possible difference in in in this probability space which is this conversation between us is spawning yet another universe in which precisely that thing is happening you know as as deterministically is one billiard ball hitting another.\nbut the uncertainty is we don't know which one we don't know whether we're in the universe where we both start speaking Mandarin right now for reasons we can't understand or we're in the universe I'm pretty sure we're in the universe where we're going to stay stick with English but whatever surprises are here are still can still be understood understood determinally deterministically in that picture.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=926"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c12e6ee4-f56d-4c57-886c-a70bf41fe6a8": {"page_content": "so I think that's great I think that's more or less correct perhaps one of the misconceptions that people have when they reject this is that although Sam what Sam has said there is quite true we don't know if we're in a universe we're going to start speaking Mandarin all of a sudden even though neither of them can speak Mandarin that's a physically possible universe some people think that it's somehow likely or common or I don't know what they think the mere possibility that that is a possibility is a refutation of the theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1077"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c15cbd56-4664-4647-9762-39eaa0eb29f3": {"page_content": "but it's not there are possible organisms that one could create using DNA that would be absolutely astonishing but terribly unlikely no doubt there is a physically possible organism that can evolve which is highly unlikely to ever evolve in the history of our universe interestingly enough however bizarre the organism is if it's physically possible it will evolve somewhere in the multiverse.\nso these are kind of related issues to be to be honest.\nbut you know we could consider imagine a scenario an alternative history where we never had any fossils we never had any evidence of dinosaurs imagine that possibility it's possible.\nI mean dinosaurs fossils are hard to come by they only result under very very rare circumstances the dinosaur has to fall into a you know lake of mud of just the right kinding it covered up immediately in an anaerobic environment where the oxygen can't get to it and the bacteria can't get to it so that the bones are preserved.\nblah blah blah.\nthere's a lot of coincidences that have to happen to preserve dinosaurs I can imagine a world where dinosaur fossils were far far far more rare than what they are and it could have been the case that by 2020 we had never found any dinosaurs at all.\nbut we may have found evidence for evolution and evidence of the evidence of the DNA there's the thing that contains the genes which is the which is the unit of evolution now imagine if we had very similar universe the universe is basically the same as ours.\nbut it's a universe in which fossils had never been found if somebody like me had come along doing exactly a podcast like this and then said well DNA allows things like DNA would allow things almost like dragons I'm not saying these dragons can break the laws of physics I don't think they'll probably be able to breathe fire.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1104"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8dd56b8a-43ca-4ae4-9ad3-eeec147c52dd": {"page_content": "but I could imagine a flying dragon or I could imagine a dragon that is you know 50 meters long lumbering around on land I could imagine that the biologist might very well say well that's not possible you know the limbs are too big it's too heavy it wouldn't be able to get enough oxygen into its lungs there's no way these things could fly but of course we know even though people in that universe don't but the dinosaurs are eminently possible there were terradactyls big flying things that may as well have been dragons without the breathing of the fire there were bontosaurus and diplodocus you know there's really big huge dinosaurs that were that that that eight trees they were physically possible they actually existed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1241"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "736d5faa-c4b6-4062-a865-80fccd795a13": {"page_content": "but I can imagine a biologist being so incredulous and many people being so incredulous if we didn't have fossil evidence as to reject outright even the possibility given DNA that such a thing could evolve but they can and in our universe we happen to know that they can now I don't know what the repertoire of all different organisms is it's infinite.\nbut it will be an interesting I guess project to try and figure out you know could you evolve and animal with wheels I don't know could a mammal evolve such that it can exist in very sub-zero temperatures or or above a hundred degrees.\nCelsius I don't know.\nokay.\nbut these are things which are possible or not given the DNA and so there are things that are possible or not given the laws of physics.\nbut I think the same has echoed kind of what I've said in the last episode in the episode before that and the episode before that which is something that David emphasizes quite often is that the quantum multiverse is simply determinism it's a deterministic theory and it unlike unlike certain other so-called interpretations which are not deterministic they attempt to introduce randomness into the world.\nokay let's keep going we've got the next key bit by Brett.\nwell I've never regretted not speaking Mandarin more I do right now.\nbut so here's the thing.\nI I resent the many worlds interpretation so there we have it there it is he resents the many worlds interpretation it's an emotional reaction where else in science is this a legitimate form of criticism especially from an outsider it will be right.\nif at one of his public lectures on evolutionary biology to reject outright a conservative religious person who stood up and said that he resented the theory of evolution by natural selection he would be right to reject it as a legitimate criticism it's not it's not a scientific criticism it's a sign that the person is having a visceral emotional reaction because they don't understand it that's all it's no sin not to understand something.\nbut it's possibly a misstep to then get exceedingly emotional about it to the point where you're using a word like resent now perhaps I'm reading too much into resent until we hear the rest of what he has to say I'm actually not convinced that it's exactly wrong.\nbut I am convinced that at best it is a very stupidly explained way of phrasing something that nobody can seem to phrase so that it is not insane.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1286"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "63d61652-d123-48d6-a2b8-23be03b3c6f5": {"page_content": "but it's possibly a misstep to then get exceedingly emotional about it to the point where you're using a word like resent now perhaps I'm reading too much into resent until we hear the rest of what he has to say I'm actually not convinced that it's exactly wrong.\nbut I am convinced that at best it is a very stupidly explained way of phrasing something that nobody can seem to phrase so that it is not insane.\nokay so we can take the point that explanations are hard to come by and difficult to express what did Carl Papa say it is impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood so any explanation of a fundamental phenomena is going to be difficult at times for people to grok to understand but insane and stupidly explained perhaps the explanations that Brett has heard have been stupidly explained or insane to him.\nit's not the sort of language I think I've ever used about a scientific explanation there might be two kinds of people in the world when encountering a deep subtle explanation for the first time in fact I signed up by my mother and my father my father will often be somewhat like Brett Weinstein he will say that's stupid and he will reject it outright because it seems to outlandish my mother on the other hand will just say I don't understand it.\nI don't get it that's it.\nso when it comes to the the multiverse explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1450"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "02145982-22d0-4699-bea3-6b80dd08c1ad": {"page_content": "I think it's astonishing and when I first heard it I thought that's astonishing that's astounding that's surprising but as for stupid and insane they're not normally words that I tend to apply to scientific theories Brett himself would have been in the position that some physicists in with respect to explaining aspects of quantum theory Brett as a professional biologist has probably delivered public lectures where there's been conservative religious people who've come up to him after the lecture or perhaps during the questions and been unable to fully appreciate what Brett has been saying about evolution by natural selection Brett must know what it's like to deal with a person who has an emotional a visceral reaction to something new that simply signs it is not a valid criticism for a creationist to say evolution by natural selection is insane.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1552"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5bba7e87-1e37-4b77-8f58-088e4d01cfc2": {"page_content": "I mean I can use those words if they're like free speech is permitted but it's not a valid scientific criticism it's not a valid philosophical criticism all it is is throwing shade.\nit's it's insults.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1614"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d5ae39fe-cb0e-41c8-9b03-fc80122fb4b0": {"page_content": "it's not actually seriously engaging with the theory evolution by natural selection is an explanation of how the diversity of species has arisen it's an explanation of the similarity of DNA and the similarity of physiological structures it's an explanation of the fossil record and as astonishing as it might be to many people who hear it for the first time or especially religious people who believe that it runs counter to their deeply held religious views it merely running counter to deeply held religious views or deeply held perpetual errors that a person happens to carry through their life is again no criticism Brett will be right to dismiss a religious person who was criticizing okay in scare quotes because it's not a valid genuine criticism but having a go at evolution by natural selection on the grounds that it's stupid or on the grounds that it is insane so just because the explanation that some people have heard for neo Darwinism thus far seems preposterous that's no reason for thinking the theory or those who endorse the theory are either stupid or insane in fact it says far more about the person leveling those allegations against portions of the scientific community because it's not a genuine scientific criticism it's more reflection in the case of the religious person some kind of supernatural bias the magical thinking and again as I've said before I find it far more astonishing to think that all of the entities described by the equations of quantum theory including the Schrodinger wave equation all those many many entities do not actually exist as the theory says that they do but rather the act of observation causes them all to vanish or from science and from reality leaving only one that we do observe that's a strange impulse to have a psychological impulse that somehow science is about you and your personal psychology and capacity to observe things rather like thinking that the only planets that exist in the universe are the ones so far observed that would be observed the theory of planetary formation extends beyond what we can observe into regions of the galaxy and the universe that we have no hope of observing right now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1626"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9ca98c53-4747-438d-955b-78f4dfc3620d": {"page_content": "but we know planets are there no in the fallible sense not no in the traditional I'm justified in believing that such a theory is absolutely true the name of the existence of planets beyond those that we can see so far but rather an understanding that the theory of planetary formation is deeper than what our bare observations are revealing to us so to in fundamental quantum theory we may only observe photons striking the screen at one place at a time.\nbut the fact that they do strike the screen at this place rather than that place means that they've been influenced by something unobserved namely photons in other universes and we've been through that.\nanyway let's keep going with Brett and Sam.\nand so it is the it is that I think on its face the hardest thing to believe that still is seemingly believed or at least paid lip service by it might even be a majority now of physicists made it was the last poll I heard it was something like 35 percent.\nbut it's it's it's getting there.\nand it's it is the the strangest picture of reality that you could you could imagine okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1780"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fce50f30-a0ba-455a-864e-1886d413e885": {"page_content": "the strangest picture of reality that you could imagine why just simply disagree it's not it's not the strangest picture of reality that you could imagine that simply a failure of imagination on Sam's part but I don't think he actually really believes that because there are many things that are far stranger to imagine that people have taken seriously over the years great minds David Lewis wrote on the plurality of worlds I feel a softical defense of many worlds but it wasn't many physically possible worlds it was all the logically possible worlds and so he endorsed a kind of realism about this and by the way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1867"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "099ef128-607c-4df5-95d8-1cde3fae9d61": {"page_content": "David Wallace David Deutsch David Lewis.\nI don't know if you have to be a David to really make breakthroughs in many worlds.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51560357-38a7-4313-8740-93027a9b43fc": {"page_content": "but it seems like it helps anyway so David Lewis his book about on the plurality of worlds talks about how all logically possible worlds obtain some way in reality that has to be a far infinitely stranger and therefore more difficult to imagine picture of reality on Sam Harris's account than anything that David Wallace David Deutsch or Hugh Everett have ever come up with because the many worlds interpretation of physical reality represents but a tiny tiny sliver of all the possible logically possible realities that are out there all the logically possible worlds because those other logically possible worlds will obey different laws of physics the physically possible worlds of the multiverse all obey exactly the same laws of physics and so the the class of all different possible logically possible worlds that is a far far greater number and therefore a stranger picture of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1918"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e400b284-9bfb-4683-ac34-36f95d4fb511": {"page_content": "but again I just think it's kind of a failure of imagination to think that there's nothing strange than this I insist again that all physicists endorse something like the Schrodinger wave equation as a serious representation of reality to some extent those who do not endorse the many worlds interpretation say that the Schrodinger wave equation in some way represents reality prior to the act of observation and then the act of observation consciousness whatever you want to call it the observer effect it's a thing that causes the collapse of the wave function so all the realities disappear but one that we observe that to me is more difficult to imagine and it's this additional assumption that what the equation is telling us about reality is true until the act of observation when it's the act of observation that is bringing into reality what is true that's an additional assumption over and above what the many worlds interpretation is telling us the multiverse just says that reality is what quantum theory what the equations of quantum theory describe that's it we're not adding anything to it but collapse models do they add something they add this additional assumption that observation is causing reality to be the way that it is that's bizarre that's really bizarre and as for hard to believe that's far harder to believe this idea that observation is the thing that is causing little particles to do one thing rather than other.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=1974"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1fdd89db-c498-4b2b-927c-88a14d179053": {"page_content": "it's your act of observation that causes all the realities to disappear but one and therefore all of the electrons and photons that happen to be in your experiment to follow one path rather than another there's spooky action at a distant distance if ever there was some the strange woo woo force coming out of your brain and affecting subatomic particles at a distance from you that seriously is what collapse models are insinuating about reality that makes no sense that's a weird metaphysical jump I don't get it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2072"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "53e95e74-20ea-444e-8dd3-45ad1ac204be": {"page_content": "but I wouldn't say that people who endorse that are necessarily insane or stupid or that's necessarily an insane or stupid theory that's not a sign to be criticism but the criticism that you must add additional assumptions like the power of observation causes the vast majority of reality described by the equation of physics to disappear that that is a fair criticism that we shouldn't have such an assumption that no assumption is needed because to introduce such an assumption is merely to try to get the theory to comport with your biases with the biases that we're hearing expressed here that it's just too hard to imagine that it's difficult to believe it doesn't matter if it's difficult to believe evolution by natural selection is difficult for some people to believe but the difficulty in believing it has no bearing whatsoever on the actual correctness or otherwise of the theory or of the explanation as being the best explanation that we have let's get going.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2102"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "361abccf-292b-47a0-9af9-8f30f681a0fc": {"page_content": "yeah.\nI think you're being too nice.\nyeah.\nit's stupid the idea that universes are spawned to deal with the difference between the thing I dropped hitting one carpet fiber in the next day it's hilarious to me.\nI mean it Brett's having an emotional reaction Brett Weinstein's having an emotional reaction a very negative visceral emotional reaction here saying it's stupid it's insane.\nI mean I will get emotional about science at times like this when people are having ridiculous reactions I mean there's no reason to say that it's stupid because it's not it's not if you understand it and I think it's reasonably clear that he doesn't understand it or that he's been presented with a strange version but he hasn't read the books of David Deutsch let's just say.\nand I would recommend to you Brett please pick up the fabric of reality in particular the chapter called shadows and if you're not convinced after that very well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2166"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f9b35a05-af17-4ec5-8442-6a9bd9415c01": {"page_content": "but I wouldn't say that people who write such books are stupid or insane and this is not this is not reasonable philosophical discussion it sounds measured and reasonable and Brett under normal circumstances is a great mind a great intellect I love listening to him is fantastic as I say in terms of biology really original thinker in certain respects I think in terms of analyzing culture right now both Brett and Sam brilliant of that not everyone who steps outside of their domain necessarily makes such strange sweeping generalizations you know I will comment frequently about aspects of economics or history that I don't necessarily have expertise in.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2219"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "965c7e7b-616c-485a-99d5-71c16466ac2d": {"page_content": "but I don't usually regard even though with whom I have a serious disagreement as stupid or insane nor their theories necessarily.\nokay let's keep going sorry that's not how nature works it's a different view of parsimony than than I have intuitively.\nbut it's a total rejection of parsimony it is the most it is the opposite of parsimony.\nokay so there we go um he I guess misunderstands parsimony.\nand I think Sam is about to correct him on that by the way and Sam does a very very good job of correcting him on it as well I think.\nbut parsimony.\nit's just this idea that you shouldn't increase the number of assumptions beyond what is absolutely necessary in order to get your explanation across now this is in my mind it's the same as Occam's razor now I've had university lectures at some point try and tell me the difference between what parsimony is and Occam's razor and I've never got it I've never understood it apparently there's subtly different things parsimony versus Occam's razor.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2265"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "78de8e37-5d33-4081-84d0-6325d0ce913a": {"page_content": "but I use them interchangeably I'm not only going to continue to use them interchangeably here for the moment unless someone can provide me with direction on where I've gone wrong and so given that they're both about assumptions let's just go to the fabric of reality where David writes about this precise objection that the many world is somehow a rejection of parsimony or rejection of Occam's razor this in fact was the criticism that Paul Davies Professor Paul Davies had all the many world interpretation that it caused the number of universes to multiply beyond all reason in order to explain the one universe we do observe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2328"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d2d62a89-b5c1-439a-b317-59a2bd194a15": {"page_content": "but as Sam I think says in the next bit that's a concern about the bricks and mortar of the theory rather than the assumptions in the theory now I've already mentioned you know the idea of exoplanets planets that are beyond the solar system now we only found the first one I think back in 1994 something like that but our theory of planetary formation prior to 1994 predicted that there should be planets going around other stars now it would be a violation of Occam's razor not a correct use of it a violation of Occam's razor to say those planets do not exist that although the theory of planetary formation says gas giants and little rocky terrestrial planets should be orbiting perhaps a majority of stars it would be wrong to say however to take that theory seriously would cause the number of planets throughout the galaxy in the universe to proliferate beyond all reason.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2369"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aef54766-9301-4bc6-aef6-6f566d27379f": {"page_content": "no well within reason and in fact today we can see planets out to what some.\nI think thousand light years going around stars here in the Milky Way galaxy.\nbut it's not it's not very far.\nokay the other side of the galaxy is 120,000 light years away and the next nearest galaxy is 2.2 million light years away.\nand we can see galaxies off to you know many billions of light years away we have no hope at the moment with present technology of seeing planets going around stars and other galaxies.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2445"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "da11bda3-a879-4a7c-ac58-e036423e350c": {"page_content": "but we know there must be planets going around stars and other galaxies because our best theory of planetary formation says that when a star forms it will form from a cloud of gas and dust which will then have a disk of material rotating around that star some of which will come together to form planets now that's a very simple idea with very small number of assumptions leading to this proliferation of matter the bricks and mortar as Sam will come to say and so proliferating the bricks and mortar is not a violation of parsimony it's an endorsement of it it's a correct use of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2455"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "11704842-e8ff-4687-96ef-32d9c538be42": {"page_content": "so let's go to the fabric of reality.\nokay.\nso David in this is in the chapter called a conversation about justification page 160 of my paperback here and David is talking to a crypto inductor this the entire chapter is a refutation of the inductivist picture of knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2488"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d44cfe32-b8e1-4cfd-87ec-707e0352e58c": {"page_content": "and he's arguing with a person about what the correct theory of gravity is so it's in the context of what we should think out correct theory of gravity is and on the basis of what should we think our correct theory of gravity is the correct theory of gravity so we're not going to go into that but the entire argument that David is about to use here that I'm about to read applies in this situation so again just to reinforce in people's minds we have certain equations of quantum theory one of which is called the Schrodinger wave equation and the Schrodinger wave equation explains well the Schrodinger wave equation can be used to describe all of the positions for example that an electron has around the nucleus of an atom let's say.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2508"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4223297d-92d6-4222-9d89-2b34c92030ca": {"page_content": "and so this gives us the wave function and it predicts that the electron will occupy multiple positions simultaneously around the nucleus of an atom so the electron is not in one spot it is physically not in one spot according to the equation now if we take that equation seriously then we say okay.\nso the electron is not simply in one spot it's in multiple different places at the same time around the around the electron.\nbut when we go to observe it we only ever observe the electron at one place and so this is why some physicists some people who look into the theory say well it's the act of observation that causes the collapse.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2549"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2031e55f-b377-4bc3-a04c-fe6b154ae851": {"page_content": "so it's said of the wave function to one point and we see all the possibility to disappear except for the one that we do observe now that's an additional assumption the act of observation renders the equation invalid prior to the act of observation the equation is a description of reality but the act of observation causes the equation to cease to be universally valid it's not valid at the point of observation sometimes called the observation problem but if we have equations of orbital dynamics let's say and thermodynamics that explain how stars and planets form from gas clouds and those equations describe how most of the mass ends up at the center as a star and the rest of the mass ends up forming planets it would be ridiculous to say again that those equations cease to be valid except in cases where we can point a telescope at a star and see the planets orbiting the star you're active observation isn't the thing that brings reality into being the act of observation is just another part in the chain of science it doesn't affect all of reality but the collapse models which includes the Copenhagen interpretation and basically everything except the many world interpretation the multiverse all of those say there is this weird spooky action of distance where the act of observation causes all the reality disappear but.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2590"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3e2bef5e-6659-41d3-b864-a51076b6d24e": {"page_content": "what okay.\nso that's the additional assumption the additional assumption is observation causes all the realities but one to disappear okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2680"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "868b2b87-cd4c-4bcf-95b6-de34f300afb4": {"page_content": "so now I'm going to use the fabric of reality in David's words to criticize that and David writes so your additional postulate is not just superfluous it is positively bad in general perverse but unrefuted theories which one can propose off the cuff fall roughly into two categories there are theories that postulate unobservable entities such as particles that do not interact with any other matter they can be rejected for solving nothing or comes razor if you like and there are theories like yours that predict unexplained observable anomalies they can be rejected for solving nothing and spoiling existing solutions it is not I hasten to add that they conflict with existing observations it is that they remove the explanatory power from those existing theories by asserting that the predictions of those theories have exceptions but not explaining how okay I won't read the rest there but that's perfect.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2691"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b03eb07-81a2-4b22-8ff5-f546e42be25d": {"page_content": "okay end quote by the way that's exactly what anyone who rejects the many worlds interpretation the multiverse as a literal description of how reality is as best we know in favor of any other interpretation that adds a traditional assumption that again that causes them to remove the explanatory power from the existing theory so the existing theory being that all these possible realities do exist that's what the equations say and to add this additional assumption doesn't make things simpler it ruins the explanatory power of that existing theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2744"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3b305355-341c-4379-b2ff-ff2927d1e826": {"page_content": "okay so let's keep going well actually I put this to I think was Max Tegmark in a podcast I did with him.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "86fd17c2-eaab-4db1-82b3-781e19cd7b86": {"page_content": "I think it was Max and it was just a just a different view of parsimony it was not you know it was kind of privileging the the mathematical parsimony over the the bricks and mortar parsimony I think that that I mean it did that many worlds was not set was not the result of adding lots of assumptions or you know epicycles or something that was jiggering a theory it was just a brave acceptance of the consequences of what this you know they're there we should say that again you know I'm not a physicist you know we should drag your brother in here to get into more of these details but um there's no picture of quantum reality that tracks our common sense intuitions about how the world should be so you're you're you're left except in something at least at this point this seems frankly bizarre but many worlds seems as bad as bizarre as anything I could imagine again a failure of imagination live by Sam.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2796"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "86a9e395-eabe-400f-b3c0-7baf264a9a0e": {"page_content": "but I think everything else he says there's absolutely fantastic that's fantastic you're left believing something strange.\nno matter what you pick.\nokay.\nit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "06e87394-fec2-4787-ae1f-2f1fd194f801": {"page_content": "it does seem strange on first reading in the same way that those lights in the sky those little pinpricks of cold white light that we see when we go out into a bright night sky I literally sums like our own with planets going around them that's astonishing that's hard to believe when you first hear it as a child if you can remember your mind being expanded by that but as a child people are very accepting they don't have all of these irrational hang-ups about things some older educated people do okay myself included but we're hearing now of some what I would say hang-ups from people um now Sam also says there um it's just of the multiverse theory it's just a brave acceptance of the theory now that's that's telling I think that is telling um why brave why would one need to be brave in the order to expand this theory would it have anything whatever to do with being thought stupid or irrational or someone who endorses a stupid and irrational theory that when you end up hearing those kind of again scare quotes criticisms those kind of insults or dismissive gestures really um no wonder so many physicists don't endorse it or profess not to endorse it because it's a reasonable I think fear to be thought stupid and insane simply for explaining what the science is now biologists used to have to go through this not as much anymore.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2875"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "972dee13-1565-4e82-9487-acf1d51b1d94": {"page_content": "but we all know about the scopes monkey trial don't we we know that biologists historically have been attacked as insane stupid heretics of some sort.\nand so rightly probably um many didn't exactly get on the pulpit and try to explain evolution by natural selection now back then we had religious people shutting down the scientific debate now I'm not saying the Brett precisely shutting down the scientific debate.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=2983"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "88976267-38f3-46c7-a2c7-6a04700b023b": {"page_content": "but it's in that tradition that tradition of dismissing as irrational people who are suggesting something what not exactly new here I mean we're talking about a theory that was first proposed in what 1950s something um so it's been a while it's been a long time and as David Deutsch has regretted it's such a shame that physics in this area hasn't moved past concerns about taking the theory seriously for fear for fear of being thought stupid or insane and hence Sam's quite right that those who have taken up the charge by taking this theory seriously are brave.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3008"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "54cf4160-3259-4413-90ae-19c8c70b44ff": {"page_content": "um and they should be lauded for having done so in the face of people who are not willing to engage seriously in the debate but instead um throwing shade one might say which is unfortunate it's unfortunate and again I think Brett's better than this in the way he's come off here I'd be on being a bit harsh but really stupid and insane let's keep going no.\nyou're not left with accepting it and again I'm not rejecting it in a formal sense it may be an insane phrasing of something that could be phrased rationally from somebody perspective but as phrased it really is the rejection of the idea of parsimony and not for a good reason just because I mean actually Eric does have a term for the sort of thing I hope you won't resent my applying it here.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3049"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bb7ba1ee-1bc5-438f-8f9b-6eafd26aa0ee": {"page_content": "I think he would but desperation physics imagine um you know of of saying of the neo Darwinism theory of evolution by natural selection that the unit of selection being the jane that is on D&A and that code being universal for life forms imagine simply rejecting that on the basis of being desperation biology that it's stupid and insane because it is remarkable to think that whatever the organism is it has a same the same code the same DNA code and if you were to look at to DNA strand side by side one that was for bacteria and one that was for a human being the average person would barely be able to tell any difference so in fact I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to tell the difference without properly analyzing it in the laboratory somewhere that if you simply magnified up the DNA strand and looked at the two double helices you wouldn't notice much difference so that's a remarkable remarkable idea that the information genetic information can code for such two vastly different structures a microscopic organism on the one hand and a fully functioning human being on the other many things are astonishing.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3097"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "698a4592-d31c-4ad1-ab6a-2754b740ba78": {"page_content": "I'd it'd be interesting to ask Brett.\nWeinstein.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a852f1b4-3d81-40f5-b26f-1f0443b9b8a2": {"page_content": "we know that for example fossils are extremely hard to combine they are a great series of coincidences usually has to occur in order for a dinosaur to have been fossilized so far as we know a dinosaur has to die in a shallow pool of mud and be covered over rather quickly with more mud in an anaerobic environment without oxygen so the bacteria doesn't eat it away too quickly so that the bones can be ossified turn to rock over time so this series of coincidences has not happened frequently we don't have that many fossils we could be living in a world where conditions were such that we had almost no fossils at all perhaps none let's say we lived in a world where there were no fossils for whatever reason the bacteria tended to eat things more quickly than what they do so there was no chance for the bones to be ossified or we lived in a world where on planet Earth the mud just wasn't the deep enough so all of the dinosaurs that ever died rot away very quickly and nothing ever got preserved.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3184"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "45cd8ccd-bde3-412b-9b18-d1b0e8ac7414": {"page_content": "okay I can imagine a world like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4982f40b-6909-4aa1-9789-a20b8f4b11aa": {"page_content": "I'm sure Brett and Sam can imagine a world like that imagine today therefore in such a world if a biologist came along and said do you know what I think that in the past although there is no record of it I think in the past according to what I know about DNA and genetics there might have been hundreds of million years ago walking the earth dragon-like creatures that flew through the air perhaps they didn't breathe five in their mouths but their huge lumbering lizards 50 meters long or more weighing hundreds of tons now that's a possibility in fact we know that in our world that's a reality to reject that as desperation biology would be wrong it's it's a testable theory that if you came up with such a theory you might if you search long enough even in such a world find some kind of evidence of that perhaps you will find an egg preserved in amber somewhere perhaps you will find as they did in Jurassic Park the blood inside a mosquito preserved in tree sap somewhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3259"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95dc63ca-a860-4dba-a624-41124e3c7749": {"page_content": "and then you'd be able to figure out once you've done analysis of the the DNA that's in there you'd find dinosaurs.\nokay.\nbut but as it is in our world we do have fossils.\nand so we don't have to debate the reality of dinosaurs or not.\nbut we could be living in a world where we would be okay let's keep going.\nbut it's not even just forget about many worlds for a second just imagine a universe that is infinitely large you know one of the the probabilistic consequences of that scenario is that if you just go far enough in any direction again you run to the same problem anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times.\nright.\nyeah.\nI mean that's how big infinity is so that there are an infinite number of identical copies of us having infinitely similar and and slightly different conversations than this an infinite number of times simply if you make the universe big enough and that's it that just falls out of probability theory.\nright.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fe1a8724-f29e-497c-8132-c3b755229d1e": {"page_content": "I don't think the way that Sam's explained that there is correct after all one could have an infinite universe infinite in the size that is utterly featureless we may live in a kind of universe like that that beyond the horizon of what we can see in the accelerating universe that the universe just keeps getting larger and larger and larger infinite though it is and more and more sparse in the distant future if the universe does in fact last forever under this accelerating dark energy model eventually everything falls apart and we have once again an infinite universe on into an indefinite infinite future where nothing happens because the laws of physics are such that you won't have anything happening you'll have the heat death of the universe even though it's the heat death of an infinitely sized universe okay that that's possible what Sam's talking about is something slightly different where the universe has consistent density over time and just an infinite amount of matter I've heard of heard philosophers make this point before.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3391"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c3290b33-3483-42b8-8ecb-72d5603aebd9": {"page_content": "and I've never found it quite convincing they've got a particular view of infinity in their mind where all possible things happen within this infinite universe.\nbut you have to add assumptions about what the kind of infinity is there for that to work so far as I know.\nokay.\nwe'll keep going that's just a little.\naside.\nbut here's this is my point about fractals actually.\nand you know I'm speaking a little bit out of my depth here.\nbut my understanding is that there's a problem with coastlines which is that they get infinitely long the closer you measure the approach infinity in length as you get better at measuring the nuances of a coastline right that obviously doesn't make any sense the coastline isn't getting bigger because you're measuring more finally.\nwell you know it it makes sense it may be your your ruler has to get infinitely thin and small I mean you like you write the point is as you get down to the Planck scale and as you asymptote to infinity right right you discover I screwed up somewhere.\nand it isn't my ruler I screwed up just not actually well this cake it sort of comes back to xeno like this this is you've applied xenos paradox to measure in a coastline bingo.\nbut the point is there is a way to do this.\nand it took somebody stepping back and saying you know what math is going to have to be we're going to need a new toolkit just the same way Newton and Leibniz discovered a toolkit for people don't like you when I say it this way but for calculating the incalculable which is what calculus did as I see it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3484"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "37b5f19a-27ca-4b90-bd2f-217cbeef042f": {"page_content": "but anyway the point is I think the many worlds interpretation is a best answer to a problem that is phrased so incorrectly that we can't that just as if you asked the question about where these creatures came from 3,000 years ago nobody had Darwinism to offer so there wasn't even a way to begin to phrase the answer credibly you could say well then that leaves you picking between deities who might have done it and really what we're after is figuring out which one it was when in fact it wasn't any of them it was processes that were understandable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3550"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1a7b29ed-f00f-48ac-a139-9a0d0206fa62": {"page_content": "but we didn't yet have the mechanism to do so.\nso I think that's where we are in that case.\nokay so they they and I think Brett's done this a couple of times now he said he's not formally rejecting it.\nbut he's saying it's stupid and insane then he's saying it's a best answer to a question that's poorly phrased.\nbut then he said it's stupid and insane so there's a little inconsistency here if it's the best answer to the question phrase poorly or.\nnot then it can't be stupid and insane can it it's just it is the best answer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71910134-21d5-4142-b21a-bce1eec8137e": {"page_content": "it actually is the best answer it's the best explanation of what the equations say could it be wrong absolutely it could be wrong absolutely it could be wrong but and this is why I say I don't believe in scientific theories the word belief shouldn't have a place here we shouldn't believe our scientific theories but we should take them seriously that's quite a different thing that that given our best answer take our best answer seriously and when we say take it seriously take it seriously so don't get all emotional about it use it in order to make progress in particular use it in order to make quantum computers and yes in order to understand the operation of a quantum computer you have to assume that the computations are being done somewhere in reality and it's clearly not in our physical universe because it's not enough matter in our physical universe in order for the quantum computation to take place so it's being done somewhere and that somewhere is in these parallel universes but we'll come to that at another point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3622"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "310da0be-1768-40ab-ba84-c9cdd44e1589": {"page_content": "yeah it might be.\nand it's hard to see what we're not seeing here can't even dimly imagine.\nbut it it does seem like I mean it is it is a fairly straightforward claim that the infinite cases is even simpler because it's just you know it doesn't require any notion of universes splitting.\nbut it's it's hard to know where to where to bite the bullet I think I think the thing to recognize with the these counterintuitive consequences of infinity is just how counterintuitive infinity is I mean infinity is not just really really big.\nright right it is and and our intuition that that it's just really really big.\nno the rules change when you when you put that symbol of infinity on the on the paper.\nright right.\nright right there is a very big number if we can agree that in an infinitely large universe somewhere at some point in fact an infinite number of places an infinite number of times a asteroid will have hit another asteroid and Ardvark will have been formed absent in atmosphere immediately died and disintegrated into a bizarrely large patunia of an unusual color.\nright an infinite number of times I'm telling embers compatible with the laws of physics will have an infinite number of times.\nyes I don't believe that has ever happened anywhere in the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3687"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5de47fc4-cc55-420d-82f8-b7c7ba8cc584": {"page_content": "and I believe that actually what we will ultimately come to understand is that the universe has to be limited in a way that that actually won't have occurred ever well but one easy way to bound that is just say that it's we don't live in an infinite universe how big it is it's just it's not very close to being right infinite Sam Sam says here that anything physically possible that can happen will happen and bread of jacks and the idea that he's just thought of something preposterous he just came up with a preposterous thing Harry Potter universe type scenario as I explained in the last episode you know this thing where two asteroids come together and and Ardvark appears okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3776"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "27643f27-5ee5-4076-8c0f-5d3b4e52378a": {"page_content": "well.\nyeah.\nit's it's hard to believe and to say it's happened an infinite number of times is to misunderstand the point that David makes about measures of the universe.\nso I it's an exceedingly small measure of universes where that happens infinite though it might be infinite in terms of number.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3820"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "294aeb56-f4ef-4a92-8952-1ecd87eb4a96": {"page_content": "okay we don't count universes that way we have a measure of universes and it's exceedingly slim measure of universes where that happens so again this is a misunderstanding of infinity to say that just because it happens an infinite number of times and that it seems preposterous that that alone is a refutation seeming preposterous is not a refutation of a theory you need to have something more than looking at a consequence of a theory having an emotional reaction to it and rejecting the entire theory on the basis of your objection to a particular consequence it doesn't matter how preposterous it is again the theory of evolution by natural selection on religious understandings has preposterous consequences like an intelligent designer is not needed to guide the evolution of species according to a religious person that that's preposterous it's hard for them to understand so bread is in the position of being a kind of religious person here he's religious about his own common sense I suppose that because this thing violates his own sense of common sense he's rejecting it but not on any scientific grounds not on any rational philosophical epistemological grounds but emotional grounds it seems to preposterous it's insane it's stupid and.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3832"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4effe431-6054-47ea-9056-d3df037baec2": {"page_content": "so on.\nyeah.\nso we're not worried about this particular they're definitely large isn't infinite and the differences here.\nyeah.\nyeah.\nwell I agree so all right back to free.\nbut I I should just I'll tell you I think you if you want to close the door to many worlds or at least beach your intuitions into shape.\nthere I think you should probably have either David Deutsch or Sean Carroll on your podcast because they're both all in on that all in I love it when people I already want to do is bet against it because you know I'm certain to be right and it's easy money.\nso okay back to free will I couldn't agree more Brett one thing you should have a chat with David Deutsch that would be great and if you think you're certain to win your money you could have a I'll give you a $5 bet that you will be convinced it's as long as you remain open-minded about this.\nyeah.\nso I think that's where we'll end that part.\nokay.\nwe'll end we'll end the podcast there we'll end I've been talking about it for a long time now.\nbut I just thought this is this is emblematic of what you do here less frequently these days with respect to the many worlds interpretation as Sam said there might be a majority opinion I'm not sure about majority the last survey I saw and it was only a very small survey of physicists was around the 30% mark something like that.\nbut whatever the case this kind of criticism I did hear far more frequently and you do hear it from laypeople very frequently that it's oh that's ridiculous that's insane how could you believe anything like that and so on.\nwell I don't believe it as I've said before it simply is they best the best the only literal way to understand the equations of quantum theory the other the other attempts the other theories are the other theories are hedges and and additional assumptions and violations of Occam's razor.\nand so on we don't change the rules about you know the the the equations of general relativity the equations of general relativity describe a curved spacetime where space itself is literally curved and this is why we get orbits having the shape that they do this is why we can have GPS.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=3926"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4f5f8981-870a-4209-9697-fc94dc0503c2": {"page_content": "and so on we don't change the rules about you know the the the equations of general relativity the equations of general relativity describe a curved spacetime where space itself is literally curved and this is why we get orbits having the shape that they do this is why we can have GPS.\nbut could you imagine an instrumentalist coming along and saying oh those equations from general relativity useful though they are that's merely a fiction they can be used to create a predictive model of where a planet will be around a star at any given point they can be used for GPS but as for this literally describing curved spacetime and explaining gravity as it is no I reject all that the equations don't actually do that I haven't heard physicists really make this point.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4042"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8ae597fd-2a85-4a16-88c3-14d4c5a5fc43": {"page_content": "I think there are some but even though I don't think that general relativity is the final word on the nature of gravity in space and time it is the best approximation that we have so far there is nothing to rival it so too with the multiverse understanding of the equations of quantum theory like the Schrodinger wave equation it's just taking that literally now do I assume that in the future we will utterly refute utterly refute the curved spacetime model I think we're as likely to utterly utterly overturn in almost all respects the theory of curved spacetime as described by general relativity Einstein in the same way that we're likely to utterly overturn the multiverse interpretation and that is about as likely to happen as the decoupling of DNA from genetics for a biologist in the future to come along to find that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with genetics and evolution that would be astonishing to me now I do think that the current understanding of DNA and evolution and genetics will be overturned but not in all respects as I think the many worlds understanding of quantum theory will be overturned and general relativity will be overturned but not in all respects we will come to see these theories as approximations to some still deeper theory as special cases of some deeper theory if anything maybe something like David Lewis's model will end up being more correct in which case the many worlds interpretation from quantum theory is just a special case but these other logically possible worlds might exist or some portion of them might exist some universes with different laws of physics might exist okay mixed max tegmarks written these books about the many different versions of the many worlds.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4091"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f823979f-024c-4113-b6c2-eb79a9f3808b": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "45596af6-3737-4a27-aeb4-6c7a7bca53a1": {"page_content": "I don't like you know enjoy joy David Lewis's book the plurality of worlds because it is the largest possible superset of all realities like all the logically possible things that could possibly happen and the physically possible things are just a small part of that so indeed after all that we've got Brett and Sam really walking at the idea of the many worlds interpretation I think precisely because it violates their common sense it violates almost everyone's common sense the first time we hear about it but once you learn the details then it comports with common sense and other versions of trying to understand quantum theory other things that are a violation of common sense so let's go back to the beginning of infinity finally among page 279 for what that's worth and I'll begin reading there and David writes here is another situation where if we are not careful common sense makes false assumptions about the physical world and can make descriptions of situations sound paradoxical even though the situations themselves are quite straightforward Dawkins gives an example in his book Unweaving the Rainbow analyzing the claim that a television psychic was making accurate predictions and this is the quote from Unweaving the Rainbow there are about a hundred thousand five minute periods in a year the probability that any given watch say mine will stop in a designated five minute period is about one in one hundred thousand low odds but there are 10 million people watching the television psychic show if only half of them are wearing watches we could expect about 25 of those watches to stop in any given minute if only a quarter of these ring into the studio that is six calls more than enough to dumb found an naive audience especially when you add in the calls from people whose watches stop the day before people whose watches didn't stop but whose grandfather clocks did people who died of heart attacks and their bereaved relatives phoned in to say that their ticker gave out and so on and quote from Unweaving the Rainbow continuing with beginning of infinity as this example shows the fact that certain circumstances can explain other events without being in any way involved in causing them is very familiar despite being counterintuitive the naive audience's mistake is a", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4219"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "304aff87-4ca4-447d-9b7c-d882d515dabf": {"page_content": "stop but whose grandfather clocks did people who died of heart attacks and their bereaved relatives phoned in to say that their ticker gave out and so on and quote from Unweaving the Rainbow continuing with beginning of infinity as this example shows the fact that certain circumstances can explain other events without being in any way involved in causing them is very familiar despite being counterintuitive the naive audience's mistake is a form of parochialism they observe a phenomenon people phoning in because of their watches having stopped but they are failing to understand it as part of a wider phenomena most of which they did not observe though the unobserved part to that wider phenomenon have no having no way affected what we the viewers observe they are essential to its explanation similarly common sense and classical physics contain the parochial era that only one history exists this era built into our language and conceptual framework makes it sound odd to say that an event can be in one sense extremely unlikely and in another certain to happen but there is nothing odd about it in reality just pause their my reflection.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4333"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a6bc98e9-d456-4e9b-8c29-7b31cf37b4fd": {"page_content": "so this is precisely the objection that Brett articulated in his podcast with Sam where he was talking about the advark that apparently appears after a asteroid impact the concern that that however unlikely it's a possibility is just an argument from incredulity some things are unlikely to happen there is a very small measure of universes where this happens and it's not a refutation of the entire theory to say that one struggles to accept that reality.\nokay i'm skipping a bit and David's talking about the spaceship still and on this spaceship spaceship he talks about how there's a captain of the spaceship and there's a navigator of the spaceship and if we could see from a god's i view the entire multiverse that how the spaceship is represented the multiverse we would see a flurry of different instances of the captain and the navigator.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4401"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "85e39140-75e2-4ad5-8d19-b773187b05b2": {"page_content": "but we would notice that only one instance of the captain ever in interacts with an instance of one instance of the captain ever interacts with an instance of the navigator so there must be information within the instances to tell the captain and the navigator which of them should interact with which on that point David says the upshot is that our laws of it quote the upshot is that our laws of physics must also say that every object carries within an information about which instances of it could interact with which instances of other objects except when the instances are fungible when there is no such thing as which quantum theory describes such information it is known as entanglement information so far in the story we have set up a vast complex world which looks very unfamiliar in our minds eye but to the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants look almost exactly like the single universe of our everyday experience end of classical physics plus them apparently random jiggling whenever the transporter operates a tiny minority of the histories have been significantly affected by very unlikely events but even in those the information flow what affects what is still very tame and familiar for instance a version of the starships log that contains records of bizarre coincidences will be perceptible to people who remember those coincidences but not to other instances of those people thus the information in the fictional multiverse flows along a branching tree whose branches histories have different thicknesses measures and never a join once they have separated each behaves exactly as if the others did not exist if that were the whole story that multiverse's imaginary laws of physics would still be fatally flawed as explanations in the same way that they have been all along there would be no difference between their predictions and those of much more straightforward laws say saying that there is only one universe one history in which the transporter randomly introduces a change in the objects that it teleports under those laws instead of branching into two autonomous histories on such occasions the single universe randomly does or does not undergo such a change thus the entire stupendously complicated multiverse that we have imagined with its multiplicity of entities including people walking through each other and its bizarre occurrences and its", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4456"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d83cc0f2-7ea7-4b0c-aa8a-cbd12ad6be53": {"page_content": "that there is only one universe one history in which the transporter randomly introduces a change in the objects that it teleports under those laws instead of branching into two autonomous histories on such occasions the single universe randomly does or does not undergo such a change thus the entire stupendously complicated multiverse that we have imagined with its multiplicity of entities including people walking through each other and its bizarre occurrences and its entanglement information would collapse into nothing like the galaxy in chapter two that became an emulsion floor the multiverse explanation of the same events would be a bad explanation and so the world would be inexplicable to its inhabitants if it were true skipping a small part and David writes in quantum physics information flowing the multiverse is not as tame as in that branching tree of histories I have described this is because of one further quantum phenomena under certain circumstances the laws of motion allow histories to rejoin become fungible again this is the time reversal of the splitting differentiation of history into two or more histories that I have already described so a natural way to implement it in our fictional multiverse is for the transporter to be capable of undoing its own history splitting.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4566"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "64a4df95-3d69-4e98-b228-f15b2ff484c6": {"page_content": "okay.\nso now I'm I'm pausing the reading there.\nand I'm going to explain what David has written rather than just read it verbatim.\nso this is almost reading but more of a summary of what's being said here.\nokay.\nso here's a diagram that represents the splitting of the universe from one state that it's in x into two states x and y and x represents the normal voltage and y is the anomalous one but the transporter causes and this diagram represents what interference is again we have the x and y the two different voltages they can join together again and this is what interference is interference phenomenon David defines there as where differentiated histories rejoin okay now read a little bit.\nand he writes interference is the phenomenon that can provide the inhabitants of the multiverse with evidence of the existence of multiple histories in their world without allowing the histories to communicate for example suppose that they run the transporter twice in quick succession I shall explain in a moment what quick means and here we have a diagram showing x splitting into x and y and then rejoining again into x.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4657"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3aa62212-e2e1-4427-b85a-025c9251dd04": {"page_content": "so we've got differentiation and then interference if they did this repeatedly would say different copies of the transporter on each occasion they could soon infer that the intermediate result could not be just randomly x or y because if it were then the final result then the final outcome would sometimes be y because x could split into x and y while in fact it is always x thus the inhabitants would no longer be able to explain away what they see by assuming that only one randomly chosen value of their voltage is real at the intermediate stage.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4714"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7893ce80-a2f6-4d30-bad0-c35193c0f9f3": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9028020b-8a11-4772-8357-ca8280bec84e": {"page_content": "and then David goes on to speak more about entanglement and the rejoining of histories and I'm skipping a little bit there and David writes in our story just as we did not allow splitting to happen in a way that would allow communication faster than light so we must ensure the same for interference the simplest ways to require that the rejoining take place only if no wave of differentiation has happened that is to say the transporter can under the voltage surge only if this has not yet caused any differential effects on anything else when a wave of differentiation set off by two different values x and y of some variable has left an object the object is entangled with all the differentially affected objects and here we have a lovely little diagram explaining what not entangled is about when you've got two objects x and y those are not entangled with the rest of the world if x and y if the rest of the world is not differentially affected by x and y on the other hand entangled means that the rest of the world can be affected by x while y will be will affect the rest of the world differently compared to x.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4744"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1b92d29c-af8f-49f1-811a-d5cfe2b1bf37": {"page_content": "and that's what entangled is about entanglement is and David writes beneath that diagram so our rule in short is that interference can happen only in objects that are untangled with the rest of the world this is why in the interference experiment the two applications of the transporter have to be in quick succession although alternatively the object in question has to be sufficiently well isolated for its voltages not to affect its surroundings so we can represent a generic interference experiment symbolically as shown.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4817"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "655543ee-5395-469e-b3e6-2037afc5cdc8": {"page_content": "okay.\nand here's the diagram of that we've got x and the rest of the world.\nso x is in the world somewhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b276ac9-1e8e-4867-88e6-3db6c08c42ea": {"page_content": "but it splits then it differentiates into x and y but the rest of the world is not being affected by x and y differentially affected as he says there and interference is where x and y can merge together again to become fungible once more and the rest of the world is still not differentially affected by x and y opposed they just my reflection this is the difficult part for engineers trying to build quantum computers because we need the objects to not be entangled with the rest of the world this is the concept of decoherence when the objects that are performing the computations within the quantum computer become entangled with the rest of the world and therefore the information about the computation is lost I might just go to the emergent multiverse on this for a moment this is David Wallace's book and Wallace in the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4855"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a9337450-3017-4d7d-bf90-18b29b719c65": {"page_content": "right say a bit about entanglement.\nbut I just want to mention here what David said about a little bit earlier about how interference experiments provide that a well would be evidence and he's about to come to the fact that he's going to say that interference experiments provide the main source of evidence for the many worlds interpretation for the multiverse now there is another kind of evidence as well we don't fully have it.\nyet this evidence.\nbut we will when quantum computers are built and this is what David Wallace writes about David Deutsch talking about the evidence that would come from quantum computation which of course is a form of interference experiment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4914"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8011eaa3-03d7-47fc-8e13-ed943ca3992f": {"page_content": "but anyway and Wallace is just explaining about a neutron interferometry which is a form of interference experiment but using neutrons and Wallace writes David Wallace writes in his book in a sense of course this discussion of quantum computation tells us nothing philosophical that we didn't already know from neutron interferometry the really crucial step is from one layer of reality to no more than one and the further considerations here are just quantitative changes nonetheless there is something rather striking about the idea of empirical proof that such a huge number of different realities must exist Deutsch puts it this way quoting David Deutsch now When Shaw's algorithm has factorized the number say 10 to the power of 500 also times the computational resources that can be seen to be present where was the number factorized there are only about 10 to the power of 80 atoms in the entire visible universe an utterly miniscule number compared with 10 to the power of 500 so if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number who did factorize it then how and where was the computation performed Deutsch 1997 page 217 so that is from the fabric of reality I'm going to continue reading Wallace's reflection on what Deutsch has just said there Wallace says now if by this Deutsch means that the very fact of the calculation entails multiple universes he has overstated the case it is unproven that there are no classical algorithms for efficient factorization and it is not logically impossible that the calculations that the calculation just happens by magic as if as it were without any detailed account at all there is no logical contradiction although it goes against everything we have learned in science in the supposition that the laws of physics must contain primitive factorization implementing processes so to pause their my reflection on Wallace's reflection on Deutsch.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=4964"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2299d6af-e9d2-4a96-9a9f-daf311c3e298": {"page_content": "yeah.\nokay.\nthe magic is not logically impossible but we don't live in a world of magic.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f0ae5ac-eb2e-48a6-8a9b-f81c27dfcc4b": {"page_content": "so I think it's a fair criticism to say that although something might be logically possible if it entails the supernatural or magic that's and that's something unexplained a science consists of good explanations so you can always put a god of the gaps in a and then magic happens and then a wizard did it as David likes to say but this is not a good explanation but Wallace comes back to rightly give Deutsch credit here and Wallace writes but to object thus is to miss the point which is not that there could be no other explanation for the factorization but that we actually have a good in principle thoroughly testable explanation namely it involves simple well understood algorithms operating in a massively parallel way within a single computer it presumes that each computation happens independently the empirical prediction is that everything will happen as if the computer as if each computation is occurring independently and there is no way of explaining the actual computational process taking place which does not assume that the computations are happening independently by Deutsch's criterion then there is no way of so explaining the algorithm which does not accept the reality of all the independent computations at least within the quantum computer there would be many worlds and quote from Wallace there and that's exactly right it will be and I think this is why physicists are coming around to the many worlds interpretation because they can see all the progress and all of the energy being devoted to quantum computation and they understand that argument putting aside other kinds of interference experiments which should always already be convincing but if we are on the verge I don't know how close we are no notice how close we are to having fully functional quantum computers then it will be very difficult to deny what Wallace has said there where are and Deutsch's said where are these computations being taking place if a quantum computer is computing things that would require more than all the matter in the visible universe operating at switching speed to the speed of light and so on if it can't physically be done in this universe it's being done somewhere else it's being done by harnessing the resources of quantum computers", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5107"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e6355346-b6f7-4be6-8428-0f6cb837d3af": {"page_content": "be very difficult to deny what Wallace has said there where are and Deutsch's said where are these computations being taking place if a quantum computer is computing things that would require more than all the matter in the visible universe operating at switching speed to the speed of light and so on if it can't physically be done in this universe it's being done somewhere else it's being done by harnessing the resources of quantum computers and other realities but in other physical realities by the way this book is absolutely brilliant if you're really interested in this topic then this is the book for you once you've read fabric of reality in the beginning of infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5220"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b28d79d-add3-46ec-b435-f17be5671055": {"page_content": "but it is highly technical I might just mention as well I've been a what Wallace would regard as a wave function realist.\nbut if you get into the if you get down into the weeds about this he says that we shouldn't be wave function realist so wave function realist is just someone who says well take the wave function literally.\nokay.\nand the wave function if you draw a graph of it I won't bother to do that now maybe next time but let's say you're trying to describe the position of an electron around a nucleus then the wave function kind of looks like a a Gaussian curve the bell curve normal distribution.\nokay it can look something like that.\nso it's highly probable to be in the center wherever the center happens to represent and less probable to be elsewhere.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5268"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e5e4f63c-0a63-45dd-84fa-b80487260643": {"page_content": "but the point is with respect to the multiverse that it isn't in one single place the wave function maps all the different places that it could be you square the wave function and you get the probability function so you find it and the amplitude tells you the probability that the how high the bell curve happens to be at any particular point tells you the probability of finding the electron of that place we would say however it gives you the measure of universes where that electron is going to be around the nucleus.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5314"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "084b76ea-e745-4fd9-9d9b-45a3fdc6aea6": {"page_content": "anyway I digress a little bit I just want to mention what Wallace says about that.\nand he writes this on page 316 of the emergent multiverse if we take non-relativistic quantum particle mechanics as our paradigm quantum theory there is one fairly obvious possible way to make sense of the quantum state it is typically represented as a wave function on configuration space.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5349"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90d52baa-619b-4868-bf4d-a104c5dfeb36": {"page_content": "so just take that literally on this reading which is called wave function realism according to him quantum mechanics is not a theory of events in three plus one dimensional space time at all it is a theory of a complex field evolving in a very high dimensional space if we could treat the whole observable universe non-relativistically for example the space would have 10 to the power of 80 dimensions wave function realism was first explicitly proposed and discussed by Albert it has been criticized on the grounds that it fails to provide the kind of ontology that can rewrite records at facts about three dimensional objects in the behavior from this book's point of view though such concerns missed the point all that is needed is that we recover high level ontology at a structural level.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5369"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "41247b50-2b7b-4b53-8c9e-a646689c8a69": {"page_content": "and I'm skipping a little bit.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4347c3f4-9c8c-47b9-a6c0-52712c65f885": {"page_content": "and he writes that the the problems with wave function realism his he says wave function realism misrepresents the structure of quantum mechanics by singling out the position basis for a special treatment secondly it is difficult at best to extend it to quantum field theory where no single basis seems to have the preferred status which the position basis might arguably said to have in non-relativistic quantum mechanics and this position basis means we're privileging position rather than some other physical aspect of a given particle.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5419"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f86a3a0d-391a-414a-be45-a344339872ed": {"page_content": "and so Wallace goes on to say some more here there.\nbut he says I see wave function realism as in general an unhelpful way to think about the ontology of quantum mechanics that just an extra end quote there this is just an extremely technical point because I have heard people recently as I have been as well talking about taking the wave function purely literally as I have indeed in this video.\nespecially so it's a minor technical point.\nbut this is this goes no way to denying the fact that after all this book is precisely about the multiverse that these multiple histories this multiple physical realities really do exist okay.\nso I'll continue reading from the beginning of infinity David writes quote once the object is entangled with the rest of the world in regard to the values x and y no operation on the object alone can create interference between those values instead the histories are merely split further in the usual way and here's a diagram on page 284.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5453"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4581dfcd-701c-4881-8aac-6b8862e8d282": {"page_content": "so in this picture here we have an object x and the rest of the world is unaffected by the object that object x is then split into two different copies at different shapes into x and y and the rest of the world is not affected by either x or y entanglement then means that object x big has an effect on the rest of the world while object y has a different effect on the rest of the world and then the splitting can continue and as David writes in a blurb underneath that in entangled objects further splitting happens instead of interference and it continues to write when two or more values of a physical variable have differently affected something in the rest of the world not going to fix typically continuing definitely as I have described with a wave of differentiation in tangling more and more objects if the differential effects can all be undone then interference between those original values becomes possible again but the laws of quantum mechanics dictate that undoing them requires fine control of all the affected objects and that rapidly becomes infeasible the process of it becoming infeasible is known as decoherence in most situations decoherence is very rapid which is why splitting typically predominates over interference and why interference though ubiquitous on microscopic scales is quite hard to demonstrate unambiguously in the laboratory nevertheless it can be done and quantum interference phenomena constitute our main evidence of the existence of the multiverse and of what its laws are a real life analogily above experiment is standard in quantum optics laboratories instead of experimenting on volt meters whose many interactions with their environment quickly cause decoherence one uses individual photons and the variable being acted upon is not voltage but which of two possible paths the photon is on instead of the transporter one uses a simple device called a semi-sealwood mirror represented by the gray sloping bars in the diagrams below and there we have the mark the beginnings of the marks and the interferometer which David Deutsch goes ahead and explains in the next few pages.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5515"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6fa7026f-1c06-4342-8c7c-52ba82fa14e5": {"page_content": "so this is where I will end this particular episode because we've explained that in a previous episode you go back I think two episodes or so and three episodes perhaps now and another reason to read the book if you're still struggling to understand any of this just a whole point of these this series is to help us all understand the book a little better.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5638"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "74c80221-6e0a-435c-b1b8-8024b0506065": {"page_content": "and I explain things slightly differently to the way David has explained things but encountering the explanation in two different ways about the marks ender interferometer is very important and you can find in fact the author of this book David Wallace on YouTube explaining the marks ender interferometer experiment as well so this this idea of entanglement where we have these particles unentangled with the rest of the world this is what goes on inside a quantum computer so we have these particles interacting inside of the quantum computer not entangled with the rest of the world if they get entangled with the rest of the world then it's like the information is kind of I don't know if David would like it to be put this way but the information kind of leaks out into the rest of the world it becomes entangled with the rest of the world.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5662"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3bbdd2c0-b71c-44b5-a7f2-0d8750edd5df": {"page_content": "and then you lose you lose the quantum computation and at the moment the engineering seems to be concentrating on how to ensure that the particles remain coherent together they don't deco here and the common way of attempting to do this appears to be keeping the particles at low temperature I happen to be wearing a shirt I've been wearing for this episode I'm not sure if you can see that that's um from the University of New South Wales here in Australia and they have a center for quantum computation and I visited there a few times and I have this remarkable way of trying to do a quantum computation so if I had to say the temperatures need to be exceedingly low because as soon as temperatures can get high the particles start to vibrate too much and the information that then the particles then become entangled with the rest of you know reality now to get the temperature down really low.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5706"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f1e811f9-93ee-47f0-8b76-8f75e930baed": {"page_content": "um well they use liquid helium as one would expect but an interesting part about this story is that liquid helium itself isn't cold enough for what they need to do.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0bfaa20e-d304-4142-95ea-c4205e349a04": {"page_content": "and so then it is special isotope so they first the first stage of cooling is to use normal liquid helium which is expensive enough but for the second stage of cooling they use an isotope helium three I believe and the helium three isotope then boils away from the rest of the helium that they have and that lowers the temperature even further it's like a refrigeration effect and evaporative cooling effect using liquid helium where a nice type of liquid helium boils away taking additional heat with it now where do they get the the helium three from well one of the sponsors one of the sponsors of the University of New South Wales quantum computation project so they told me was the American army and the American army not only invested in their project military likes to invest in computational projects but they also supply them with helium three where would they get helium three from apparently decommission nuclear bombs nuclear weapons give off this isotope of helium.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5773"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d04b2fa6-0528-4fb7-9911-f545e853ef54": {"page_content": "three and so they collect it and again if I remember correctly and I'm sure someone will let me know if I get this wrong they said that a balloon full of the gas not full of the liquid but a balloon full of the gas is something like ten thousand dollars worth that's how much it costs for this isotope of helium three that's how rare it is and so they use this out at the University of New South Wales in order to do quantum computation because they need to keep things cool so that they don't deco here.\nokay that's where we'll end it today we'll have one more episode on the multiverse and then we'll be moving on to the next chapter so again hope you're enjoying this if you do feel the urge to contribute to my patreon account you can find me on patreon or paypal as well and I have a donate button on my website thank you very much for any and all support and thank you for your comments on youtube thank you for your feedback on twitter it's all very valuable see you next time.\nbye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJdhiMqIrU&t=5840"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "299645dd-ba2d-49c7-ab0f-3af13d035da8": {"page_content": "Hello, so we're up to chapter 4 today.\nBefore I begin, someone asked if I'd be doing video similar to these but for people who haven't read the book and the answer I suppose is no because that's the purpose of the book.\nIf you haven't bought the book, if you haven't read the book then I think that people should buy the book and maybe this can help you to understand some of the parts.\nI often find it far better to have someone to discuss ideas with.\nI know there's people out there that maybe aren't surrounded by others who are interested in philosophical discussions and so maybe this can serve as a sort of support for that.\nSo this is to help people to understand the book.\nIt's an extremely dense book, it's probably one of the most fascinating broad-ranging deep books that have ever been written and so it is helpful to have someone else I think to bounce ideas off and so if you hear someone else reading it and commenting on it, that can help but as for people who haven't read the book at all and just wanted to spread the ideas out there.\nCertainly that's great if people do that.\nbut I'm not going to provide a summary I guess of the book if you want.\nPeople can buy the book to get the summary at the end of every chapter is indeed a summary of that chapter.\nSo that's all you wanted to do.\nThat would be a great way of at least getting an overview of the Deutcheon worldview for a wonderful better word.\nSo up to chapter four today, chapter four is called Creation.\nI find that it's essentially in two parts.\nThe first part is very much about biological knowledge and how it comes into being and it's impact upon what is neodilinism or just evolution by natural selection as another way of putting that.\nAnd the second part is really about fine tuning which is something I'm very interested in.\nI'm fascinated by this concept of the fine tuning of the physical constants of nature.\nThere's been a number of books written specifically on that topic over the years and David has a section here in chapter four and he makes a good contribution to the corpus of knowledge that's been written there.\nSo an interesting philosophical ideas.\nSo in chapter four we do find that there are many misconceptions about how stuff in general is created that people have become subject to over the years of trying to understand the appearance of design in nature.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=8"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "615748d2-99cf-4118-a917-1a1c4e49baf2": {"page_content": "There's been a number of books written specifically on that topic over the years and David has a section here in chapter four and he makes a good contribution to the corpus of knowledge that's been written there.\nSo an interesting philosophical ideas.\nSo in chapter four we do find that there are many misconceptions about how stuff in general is created that people have become subject to over the years of trying to understand the appearance of design in nature.\nThese misconceptions pervade not only biological evolution but other kinds of creation like knowledge creation for example which has a bearing on the psychology of learning how it is our minds learn.\nSo in chapter four David does go through the usual Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens, the atheist objections to creationism but he does something a little bit deeper.\nHe goes more fundamental than just the biological.\nSo in all cases he's trying to understand how the knowledge has become instanciated where it is.\nIn all cases he's trying to understand how the knowledge has been created there.\nFrom my perspective it's only possible for knowledge to be created in one broad way and I'm going to be a little bit lazy with the synonyms here but essentially the idea is that you have a conjecture which is a mutation of some existing idea or some existing trial in the case of biological organisms, possibly an adaptation or a change, a mutation of a gene in particular.\nSo this conjecture or this mutation is iterated with criticism or selection.\nSo this has a bearing on also bucket theories of mind which are still operative everywhere and it shows how alternative epistemology is a false.\nThe spontaneous generation of anything that is sufficiently complicated is false and that's usually the error that's at heart of any of these attempts to understand how it is that knowledge has come to be instanciated where it is.\nSo in the case of biological evolution and biological knowledge the issue there is that we cannot have spontaneous generation of life as we will see because that would presume that the knowledge somehow has come from nowhere.\nCreationists will say it's come from God.\nbut then we merely have to ask the question how did God get the knowledge and if he always had the knowledge then that doesn't solve any problems.\nWe may as well say that nature already had the knowledge there.\nSimilarly bucket theories of mind are spontaneous generation theories of how we learn.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=121"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "27637b8f-09dc-4207-af75-de7e2e9d33ed": {"page_content": "Creationists will say it's come from God.\nbut then we merely have to ask the question how did God get the knowledge and if he always had the knowledge then that doesn't solve any problems.\nWe may as well say that nature already had the knowledge there.\nSimilarly bucket theories of mind are spontaneous generation theories of how we learn.\nSo someone who sits in a classroom and passively is supposed to be the recipient of the knowledge passed on by the teacher or through reading a book is a spontaneous generation concept that merely by virtue of the empty vessel remaining in a room and someone pouring knowledge into the empty vessel that a person can learn.\nThey won't because they need to conjecture the knowledge themselves first and just as a related point this will only happen if they're interested in what they're hearing or if they have some other kind of motivation but really they need interest.\nAny other kind of motivation that you try and give them is probably going to be immoral, for example if you say we punished if you don't gain this knowledge and this is why I continue to argue that Iq was really an interest quotient.\nIt just tells people how interested an individual happens to be in doing the kind of tasks associated with intelligence tests, so-called intelligence tests.\nReally what we have is a class of tasks, questions, kinds of knowledge that people value and that yes sure might help you to be successful out there in the world but some people aren't interested in that kind of thing.\nIt doesn't mean that their brains are any less capable of doing certain tasks.\nIt means they're not interested in doing certain tasks but this is taking us far afield or it's taking us a little afield from the central points in chapter 4.\nSo let me get into the reading and to also at this point I think people for the email sort of been coming in I've been enjoying responding to those.\nThey're great.\nSo chapter 4 creation.\nI'll start from the beginning and read until I think it's time to comment.\nYou're right.\nThe knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptations are both created by evolution in the broad sense.\nThe variation of existing information alternating with selection.\nIn the case of human knowledge the variation is by conjecture and the selection is by criticism and experiment.\nIn the biosphere the variation consists of mutations, random changes, in genes and natural selection favors the variance that most improve the ability of their organisms to reproduce.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=288"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "810d5f8f-860f-4562-93a4-41ffbc1d5c04": {"page_content": "You're right.\nThe knowledge in human brains and the knowledge in biological adaptations are both created by evolution in the broad sense.\nThe variation of existing information alternating with selection.\nIn the case of human knowledge the variation is by conjecture and the selection is by criticism and experiment.\nIn the biosphere the variation consists of mutations, random changes, in genes and natural selection favors the variance that most improve the ability of their organisms to reproduce.\nThus causing those variant genes to spread through the population and natural selection favors the variance that most improve the ability of their organisms to reproduce.\nThus causing those variant genes to spread through the population.\nThat a gene is adapted to a given function means that few if any small changes would improve its ability to perform that function.\nSome changes might make no practical difference to that ability but most of those that did would make it worse.\nIn other words good adaptations like good explanations are distinguished by being hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions.\nThis is me speaking now.\nThe concept of hard to vary discovered by David Deutsch, the improvement beyond Popper, applies equally here to biological evolution as it does to a epistemology.\nBack to the book.\nHuman brains and DNA molecules each have many functions but among other things they are general purpose information storage media.\nThey are in principle capable of storing any kind of information.\nMoreover the two types of information they respectively evolve to store have a property of cosmic significance in common.\nOnce they are physically embodied in a suitable environment they tend to cause themselves to remain so.\nSuch information, which I call knowledge, is very unlikely to come into existence other than through the error correcting process of evolution or thought.\nMy commentary here now.\nThat is so crucial to understand there's a lot being packed into there as always.\nWhat we learn there is a new way of viewing knowledge, knowledge being this kind of entity that once it has appeared in a particular environment it will tend to cause itself to remain in that environment.\nIt will copy itself.\nWe will replicate itself.\nIt has this kind of robust capacity to avoid the usual vagaries of physical forces.\nA rock, once it comes out of a volcano or whatever process that produces the rock, isn't able to cause itself to remain in existence.\nIt's subject to erosion or disappear eventually.\nTypical species of organisms will tend to go extinct over time as the environment changes.\nVery little has the property in physical reality of tending to cause itself to remain in existence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=406"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "28c5bff6-036a-4279-a705-251ed5480bc3": {"page_content": "It will copy itself.\nWe will replicate itself.\nIt has this kind of robust capacity to avoid the usual vagaries of physical forces.\nA rock, once it comes out of a volcano or whatever process that produces the rock, isn't able to cause itself to remain in existence.\nIt's subject to erosion or disappear eventually.\nTypical species of organisms will tend to go extinct over time as the environment changes.\nVery little has the property in physical reality of tending to cause itself to remain in existence.\nOne struggles to think of something else that tends to cause itself to remain physically embodied in the environment.\nSo we have this concept of tending to cause itself to remain in the environment over time.\nOnce embodied there in a suitable environment they tend to encore themselves to remain so.\nAnd the other thing is that knowledge cannot come into existence other than through this process of evolution or thought.\nSo the two kinds of knowledge there.\nThis biological type knowledge that arrives on the scene due to evolution by natural selection.\nThe process of variation and selection or through thought the products of minds that people have.\nAnd that process is conjecture and criticism or conjecture and refutation as pop would say.\nMy commentary over let's continue reading.\nThere are also important differences between those two kinds of knowledge.\nOne is that biological knowledge is non-explanatory and therefore has limited reach.\nExplanatory human knowledge can have broad or even unlimited reach.\nAnother difference is that mutations are random while conjectures can be constructed intentionally for a purpose.\nNevertheless the two kinds of knowledge share enough of their underlying logic for the theory of evolution to be highly relevant to human knowledge.\nIn particular some historic misconceptions about biological evolution have counterparts in misconceptions about human knowledge.\nSo in this chapter I shall describe some of those misconceptions in addition to the actual explanation of biological adaptations namely modern Darwinian evolutionary theory sometimes known as neo Darwinism.\nNow there's a subtitle and it says creationism.\nCreationism is the idea that some supernatural being or beings designed and created all biological adaptations.\nIn other words the gods did it.\nAs explained in chapter one theories of that form are bad explanations.\nUnless supplemented by hard to very specifics they do not even address the problem.\nJust as the laws of physics did it will never win you a Nobel Prize and the chondra did it does not solve the mystery of the conjuring trick.\nBefore a conjuring trick is ever performed its explanation must be known to the person who invented it.\nThe origin of that knowledge is the origin of the trick.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=547"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "95b62a33-c527-4d79-8ce1-0c3bd0c4c76c": {"page_content": "As explained in chapter one theories of that form are bad explanations.\nUnless supplemented by hard to very specifics they do not even address the problem.\nJust as the laws of physics did it will never win you a Nobel Prize and the chondra did it does not solve the mystery of the conjuring trick.\nBefore a conjuring trick is ever performed its explanation must be known to the person who invented it.\nThe origin of that knowledge is the origin of the trick.\nSimilarly the problem of explaining the biosphere is that of explaining how the knowledge embodied in its adaptations because possibly have been created.\nIn particular a putative designer of any organism must also have created the knowledge of how that organism works.\nCreationism thus faces an inherent dilemma is the designer a purely supernatural being one who is just there complete with all that knowledge or not.\nA being who is just there would serve no explanatory purpose in regard to the biosphere.\nSince then one could more economically say that the biosphere itself just happened complete with that same knowledge embodied in organisms.\nOn the other hand to whatever extent a creationist theory provides explanations about how supernatural beings design and create the biosphere they are no longer supernatural beings but merely unseen ones.\nThey might for instance be an extraterrestrial civilization but then the theory is not really creationism unless it proposes that the extraterrestrial designers themselves had supernatural designers.\nNow there's a section about the idea that surely if there was a supernatural designer they would have made things as good as possible.\nEspecially if it's a benevolent designer and an omniscient designer and David uses the famous example of.\nIn mammalian eyes for example in human eyes what you've got is an eyes where the light sensitive part has its blood supply and the wiring the nerves in front of the light sensitive cells so they're blocking some of the light.\nIt didn't have to be this way in other animals it's not and because the wiring the blood supply is in the front of the retina you then have to have a system where all those wires and those and all those blood vessels have to get back to the brain.\nSo what they have to do is to dive in through the retina through what is the optical blind spot back to the brain to buy the optic nerve back to the visual cortex.\nThis is a terrible design.\nOkay no engineer would come up with this no intelligent designer would come up with this.\nI believe the octopus has an eye where all of the wiring is at the back and so there's no degradation of the light coming in to their retinas.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=709"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8b9a9780-26a0-4091-b5d3-7d220bbe9b4c": {"page_content": "So what they have to do is to dive in through the retina through what is the optical blind spot back to the brain to buy the optic nerve back to the visual cortex.\nThis is a terrible design.\nOkay no engineer would come up with this no intelligent designer would come up with this.\nI believe the octopus has an eye where all of the wiring is at the back and so there's no degradation of the light coming in to their retinas.\nso evolution was able to get it right in one sense but not right in the other self it was an intelligent designer I don't know why he preferred octopuses to mammals David actually says squids yes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=813"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5fac4a50-85ad-4a40-8373-a8456c448f8c": {"page_content": "There's also sections here about vestigial features things like the appendix male may not have a function in human beings it seems to be a degraded sequence as far as I remember David talks about the fact that we need vitamin C and yet many other animals have genes for vitamin C that work but our gene for vitamin C doesn't work so we have to go out and get our vitamin C from plant material so that seems to be a bad design and it seems to be not a very benevolent thing for an all-powerful god to do to give us features that generally cause us harm yet again the appendix or the tonsils are a pretty good example these are things that often have to be operated on in human beings and removed without too much harm.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=848"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fdcd5dfa-de4f-400f-a5c0-0c4e6e0137ec": {"page_content": "so why they're still there will their vestigial they're left over from our evolutionary ancestors that's the end of my commentary let some persevere with the book the central floor of creationism that it's a count of how the knowledge and adaptations could possibly be created is either missing supernatural or illogical is also the central floor of pre-enlightenment authoritative conceptions of human knowledge in some versions it is literally the same theory certain types of knowledge such as cosmology or moral knowledge and other rules of behavior being spoken to all the humans by supernatural beings in others perochial features of society such as the existence of monarchs and government or indeed the existence of god in the universe are protected by taboos or taken so uncorrectly for granted that they are not even recognises ideas.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=892"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "56d11d29-8fee-4196-a7aa-2f2c5cab4281": {"page_content": "and I shall discuss the evolution of such ideas and institutions in chapter 15 so I'm skipping quite a bit now there's a long section on spontaneous generation which was the attempt early on by people to try and explain how it is that biological organisms arose out of non-living material should say we don't have a full explanation yet or even any explanation as to how inorganic material becomes self replicating there must be a natural process that allows it.\nbut it's an open question it can't in any case be spontaneous generation which is the idea that you can leave alone a bunch of non-living stuff.\nand eventually it will simply become a complicated organism for what it's worth there trying to replicate the early conditions of the earth in milliurae type experiments the milliurae experiment was this attempt to take a whole bunch of inorganic material carbon dioxide methane oxygen nitrogen etc put in a flask with some water heated up shoot electricity through it leave it for a little while and see what happens at the end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=941"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7ca494c9-4238-4b96-9b91-f2efa178d3d9": {"page_content": "and I think initially in the first few iterations of the experiment anyway people were extremely excited about the fact that they ended up producing amino acids of course amino acids aren't life amino acids aren't life anymore than a pile of bricks is the Sydney Opera House if someone said to you I'm doing some important work I'm building the Sydney Opera House and you say to them show me your progress and they say sure no worries and they show you a brick this is hardly evidence that they're well on their way to building the Sydney Opera House in a similar way milliurae type experiments at least the early ones I haven't kept up with it but the early ones were able to produce some very simple organic molecules things like amino acids maybe they produce simple proteins I don't know they certainly didn't produce nucleic acids and they didn't haven't yet produced anything that is self replicating.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1015"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e435846f-5d90-46d6-8c51-145986e425ca": {"page_content": "so it's an interesting open question as to how easy it is for inorganic material given our laws of physics to organize itself into self replicating molecules how that happens and how easy it is we don't know the milliurae experiment seems to suggest it might be difficult there are other kinds of ways of approaching the problem for example looking at the geology of the early earth if you look at the geology of the early earth what you find is that life arose here on planet earth as soon as the conditions were even marginally okay for life to arise you know it was very soon after the earth solidified on its surface.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1070"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ad1f012e-5b49-4325-83f4-f2baff87fc9b": {"page_content": "so it was very very hot completely in hostile you know some thousands of degrees selfies on the earth very early on but as soon as it cooled down the life appeared and you can find this in geology the question then from geology is well it seems like it rose as quickly as it possibly could here on earth which would suggest that it's rather easy for life to arise we don't know it's it's it's a simple example maybe it's very very hard but the fact that it rose quickly on earth is interesting in light of the fact that the smartest biologist working for a long time now I haven't been able to replicate the process in the lab.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1107"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6a027c0a-57b7-4260-94ae-8c9e7e421af0": {"page_content": "okay.\nI'm going to read the section now which is on page 83.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0f430d06-19b1-44c1-856f-12b96fa0ae9c": {"page_content": "and it's titled the argument from design the argument from design has been used for millennia as one of the classic proofs of the existence of God as follows some aspects of the world appear to have been designed but they were not designed by humans since design requires a designer they must therefore be of God as I said that is a bad explanation because it does not address how the knowledge of how to create such designs could possibly have been created who designed the designer and so on but the argument from design can be used in valid ways too.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1153"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6923800a-1544-43e5-b335-62676de152d7": {"page_content": "and indeed it's earliest known use by the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates was valid the issue was given that the gods have created the world do they care what happens in it Socrates pupil Aristodemus had argued that they do not another pupil the historian Xenophon records Socrates reply Socrates because our eyes are delicate they have been shuttered with eyelids that open when we have occasion to use them and our foreheads have been fringe with eyebrows to prevent damage from the sweat of the head and the mouth set close to the eyes and nostrils as a portal of ingress for all our supplies whereas since matter passing out of the body is unpleasant the outlet to directed hindwoods as far away from the senses as possible I ask you when you see all these things constructed with such show of foresight can you doubt whether they are products of chance or design Aristodemus certainly not viewed in this light they seem very much like the contrivances of some wise craftsmen full of love for all living things Socrates and what of the implanting of the instinct to procreate and in the mother the instinct to rear her young and in the young the intense desire to live and the fear of death Aristodemus these provisions too seem like the contrivances of someone who has determined that their shall be living creatures that might commentary on that before I go back to the book this is where I suppose our Richard Dawkins or any other evolutionary biologist would jump in rightly and say that this is a forced dichotomy where Socrates says can you doubt whether our products have chance or design and so he's meaning there the exclusive or it has to be one or the other and of course we know that it is neither of those things now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1189"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f865bccc-01b4-4105-97d6-4b2de438ab9f": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bd95d342-e5a5-476d-87a9-7ff4131c56bd": {"page_content": "so this is a trap that many people fall into they can only see two options and so therefore they conclude there are only two options but your lack of imagination is not a refutation of the possibility that you're wrong so let's go back to the let's go back to the text Socrates was right to point out that the appearance of design and living things is something that needs to be explained it cannot be the product chance and that is specifically because it signals the presence of knowledge how was that knowledge created however Socrates never stated what constitutes an appearance of design and why do crystals and rainbows have it there's the sun or summer how are they different from biological adaptation such as eyebrows the issue of what exactly needs to be explained in an appearance of design was first addressed by the clergyman William Pailey the finest exponent of the argument from design in 1802 before Darwin was born he published the following thought experiment in his book Natural Theology he imagined walking across a heath and finding a stone or alternatively a watch in either case he imagined wondering how the object came to exist and he explained why the watch would require a holy different kind of explanation from that of the stone for all he knew he said the stone might have laying there forever today we know more about the history of the earth so we should refer instead to supernova transmutation and the earth's cooling crust but that would make no difference to Pailey's argument his point was that sort of account can explain how the stone came to exist or the raw materials for the watch but it could never explain the watch itself a watch could not have been lying there forever nor could it have formed during the solidification of earth unlike the stone or rainbow or a crystal it could not have assembled itself by spontaneous generation of from its raw materials nor could it be a raw material but why not exactly asked Pailey why should not this answer serve for the watch as well for the stone why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1302"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0415d488-f7dd-49ac-825c-cbd56da09c32": {"page_content": "and he knew why because the watch not only serves a purpose it is adapted to that purpose Pailey wrote quote for this reason and for no other views that when we come to inspect the watch we perceive what we could not discover in the stone that it's several parts of framed and put together for a purpose for example they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day end quote back to the book one cannot explain why the watch is as it is without referring to its purpose of keeping accurate time like the telescopes I discussed in chapter two it is a rare configuration of matter skipping a little so people must have designed that watch Pailey was of course implying that all of this is even more true of a living organism say a mouse it's several parts are all constructed and appear to be designed for a purpose for instance the lenses in its eyes have a purpose similar to that of a telescope the focusing light to form an image on its retina which in turn has the purpose of recognizing food danger and so on actually Pailey did not know the overall purpose of the mouse that we do now see near Darwinism which we're about to come to but even a single eye would suffice to make Pailey's triumphant point namely that the evidence of a parent design for a purpose is not only that the parts all serve a purpose but they were but if they were slightly altered they would serve it less well or not at all a good design is hard to vary quote if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are of a different size from what they are or placed after any other manner or in any other order then that which they are placed either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1427"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ae41fbcf-bafd-4dbb-9358-98f3ff4bbbe5": {"page_content": "quote so David says here this is so my commentary David says here that the knowledge there has come to be embedded in the watch it's also embedded in the mouse as well and so now I'll go back to the book and you're right.\nso how did all that knowledge come to be embodied in those things as I said Pailey can conceive of only one explanation that was his first mistake.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1549"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "974e533a-28cd-4a5f-b796-7d8b6563eedf": {"page_content": "quote the inference we think is inevitable that the watch must have had a makeup they cannot be designed without a designer contrivance without a contriver order without choice arrangement without anything capable of arranging subservancy and relation to a purpose without which without that which could intend a purpose mean suitable to an end without the end having ever been contemplated or the means accommodated to it arrangement disposition of parts subservancy of means to an end relation of instruments to a use imply the presence of intelligence and mind we now end quote back to the book we now know that they can be designed without a designer knowledge without a person who created it some types of knowledge can be created by evolution I shall come to that shortly but it is no criticism of Pailey that he was unaware of a discovery that had yet to be made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science so David then goes on to speak about how Pailey understood the problem even if he didn't realize the solution and the solution contained the problem because his solution was of course there's an ultimate designer.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1575"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f8cf0cc5-6db0-467e-b198-84d9a7058c07": {"page_content": "so if you find a watch then you're right to conclude that there must have been a designer and Pailey arguable therefore if you find a mouse then the mouse must have had a designer because the mouse is even more complicated than what the watch is so therefore got exists but it doesn't actually solve the problem because this ultimate designer itself must have had a maker this is an objection that's been raised many many times by many many different people and David admits that this isn't a proof of the non-existence of God it just shows that that particular argument for God is a bad one and then we move on to Lamar Kism again I'm not going to read the entire section here interesting though it is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1645"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4c49142e-6ee6-4b70-9918-4cd93f901f80": {"page_content": "so I'm just going to skip to the main points and so now we're getting it to Lamar Kism I'm going to skip over a lot of it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "982248bb-db5b-4651-a46f-db2a4c27d576": {"page_content": "David's writing about the first attempts to try and understand how it is that biological organisms seem well suited to the environments in which they're found David writes during the early years of the 19th century the naturalist John Baptiste Lamarck proposed an answer that is now known as Lamar Kism it's key idea is that improvements acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be inherited by its offspring Lamarck was thinking mainly of improvements in the organisms organs limbs and so on such as for instance the enlargement and strengthening of muscles that an individual uses heavily and the weakening of those that it seldom does skipping a little the Lamarckian explanation of giraffes is that when eating leaves from trees whose lower lying leaves were already eaten stretch their necks to get at the higher ones this supposedly lengthened their neck slightly and then they're offspring inherited that trait of having slightly longer necks thus over many generations long neck giraffes evolved from ancestors with unremarkable necks in addition Lamarck proposed an improvements were driven by a tendency built into the laws of nature towards ever greater complexity the latter is a fudge for not just any complexity could account for the evolution of adaptations it has to be knowledge and so that part of the theory is just invoking spontaneous generation unexplained knowledge Lamarck might not have minded that because like many think it's a these day he took the existence of spontaneous generation for granted.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1690"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c66737ac-3f85-4a4a-927f-6c3bac892b63": {"page_content": "so I'll pause there there are all sorts of problems with the markers and this makes me think of another misconception people have about evolution that is directed towards ever greater complexity what kind of complexity we're never really told but people have this notion that perhaps it's moving towards greater complexity in forms of more intelligence or bigger brains something like that and so people often think that evolution is directed towards creating more intelligent species and so in our evolutionary history when we look back there was some other kind of hominid that had a slightly smaller brain and before that as a shorter smaller brain hominid and so on stretching back to some kind of ape thing and then perhaps to some kind of monkey thing and then to some other kind of simple mammal and then some other kind of amphibian thing and some other kind of fish thing the brains get smaller and smaller smaller so it appears as though from our perspective looking back that evolution has led to us so why shouldn't we find aliens out there that have big brains surely if it's happened here on earth it'll happen somewhere else out there as well now there are many many problems with this argument.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1775"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "50d2dcad-bdd2-4ab8-a8fc-a3342a3142f4": {"page_content": "but I just want to consider the giraffe for a moment if you've got an anthropomorphic giraffe and the anthropomorphic giraffe is able to contemplate its own existence in evolutionary history it might look back at its ancestors and notice that all of those have had slightly shorter necks that became longer and longer and longer at culminating in a really long neck so then the question becomes for a giraffe that's interested in astrobiology should we expect out there in the universe to find other things with really long necks after all if it happened here on earth it'll happen elsewhere out there but when you look around here on the earth at all the species that are alive today you don't find many with long necks maybe you can consider certain kinds of dinosaurs.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1850"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a4f237a1-b5e7-4a98-adef-ba66b8aad0a3": {"page_content": "so maybe it's a possibility but it's not like it's a convergent feature of evolution typically not many species have long necks with humans it's even worse it's even worse it doesn't seem like any other species perhaps had the intelligence that we did perhaps there were there might have been Neanderthals or chromagnan man or something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1897"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6072acc6-d387-4688-896b-aeebc792e2cc": {"page_content": "but I would guess that all of these kind of hominids actually had an intelligent common ancestor and so that intelligent common ancestor that's the thing that I'm interested in finding out whether or not there might have been independent big brain general purpose explainers out there this argument by the way is due to Charles Lineweaver Charlie Lineweaver who's an astrophysicist astrobiologist of the Australian National University and he calls it the planet of the apes hypothesis and he actually uses the example of an elephant and the length of trunks and he does a good statistical analysis of long trunked things over time and if you look at the length of trunks leading to elephants you might very well conclude that this is what evolution is about it's about making ever longer trunks but that is simply confirmation bias from the perspective of an elephant.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1926"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "786912ec-e118-4cb2-9846-9be4573057a5": {"page_content": "and so perhaps we have a similar kind of confirmation bias when it comes to human beings with the only species we know of that is intelligent that's alive today so if we go looking out there into outer space for intelligent aliens we might be sorely disappointed they might not be any out there even if the entire cosmos is filled with with bacteria covered planets none of them might evolve intelligence there's more to say on that I'll leave it for another time back to the text I'm skipping a lot more now David writes the fundamental error being made my landmark has the same logic as inductivism both assume that new knowledge adaptations and scientific theories respectively is somehow already present in experience or can be derived mechanically from experience but the truth is always that knowledge must first be conjectured and then tested that is what Darwin's theory says first random mutations happen they did not take account of what problem is being solved then natural selection the scars the variant genes that are less good at causing themselves to be present again in future generations.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=1978"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cc73f256-8010-4e14-af2d-ee3916ae7113": {"page_content": "okay.\nso now we get to the section subtitled neo Darwinism.\nand I'm going to read a fairly lengthy bit here because I think it's very instructive to get the David Deutsch perspective on neo Darwinism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c68d9f3c-eac2-44cb-bd30-fcbf69351cea": {"page_content": "okay so David writes the central idea of neo Darwinism is that evolution favors the genes that spread best through the population there is much more to this idea than meets the eye as I shall explain a common misconception about Darwinian evolution is that it maximizes the good of the species that provides a plausible but false explanation of apparently altruistic behavior in nature such as parents risking their lives to protect their young or the strongest animals going to the perimeter of a herd under attack thereby decreasing their own chances of having a long and pleasant life or further offspring thus it is said evolution optimizes the good of the species not the individual but in reality evolution optimizes neither to see why consider this thought experiment you imagine an island on which the total number of birds of a particular species will be maximized if they nested at say the beginning of April the explanation for why a particular data is optimal we refer to various trade-offs involving factors such as temperature the prevalence of predators the availability of food and nesting materials and so on suppose that initially the whole population has genes that caused them to nest at that optimum time that would mean those genes were well adapted to maximizing the max that would mean that those genes were well adapted to maximizing the number of birds in the population which one might call maximizing the good of the species now suppose that this equilibrium is disturbed by the advent of a mutant gene in a single bird which causes it to nest slightly earlier say at the end of March assume that when a bird has built a nest the species other behavioral genes are such that it automatically gets whatever cooperation it needs from a mate that pair of birds would then be guaranteed the best nesting site on the island an advantage which in terms of the survival of their offspring might well outweigh all the slightest advantages of nesting earlier in that case in the following generation there will be more March nesting birds and again all of them will find excellent nesting sites that means that a smaller population than usual of the April nesting variety will find good sites the best sites will", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2051"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c405e1ca-4a12-486a-b6cc-4346a4761eba": {"page_content": "birds would then be guaranteed the best nesting site on the island an advantage which in terms of the survival of their offspring might well outweigh all the slightest advantages of nesting earlier in that case in the following generation there will be more March nesting birds and again all of them will find excellent nesting sites that means that a smaller population than usual of the April nesting variety will find good sites the best sites will have been taken by the time they start looking in subsequent generations the balance of the population will keep shifting towards the March nesting variants if the relative advantage of having the best nesting sites is large enough the April nesting variant could even become extinct if it arises again as a mutation it's hold will have no offspring because all sites will have been taken by the time it tries to nest thus the original situation that we imagined with genes that were optimally adapted to maximizing the population benefiting the species is unstable there will be evolutionary pressure to make the genes become less well adapted to that function this changes harm the species in the sense of reducing its total population because the birds are no longer nesting at the optimum time it might thereby also have harmed it by increasing the risk of extinction making it less likely to spread to other habitats and so on so an optimally adapted species may in this way evolve into one that is less well off by any measure.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2160"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5571d359-b51c-4792-9817-244e91c01cbe": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b2489a3b-065a-4a5e-9c75-ac0f8ad33fd3": {"page_content": "so I'll just pause there this is a powerful way of explaining the selfish gene idea that Richard Dawkins popularized so this idea of the selfish gene stands in stark contrast to other people who argue for group selection or even species selection I think Stephen J Gould was one of the most famous proponents that argued against Dawkins when it came to this concept of the selfish gene here David is using this thought experiment about a bird that is that for the best of the species the bird should be nesting sometime in April you know it's good weather and you know there's lots of food and so on but if there was a mutation in the gene that controls when a bird nests such that the bird didn't nest in April which is optimum for the bird but instead started nesting in March then the birds would find there are more nesting sites especially if there's a limited number of nesting sites and so if the mutant gene causes the bird an individual bird to start nesting earlier then that bird might have offspring which is more likely to survive because there's less competitors at that time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2252"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e450e231-b53d-432d-aab9-da2620696c0e": {"page_content": "so.\nthe I've got birds outside right now making noise so what can happen then is that those particular birds have an advantage over the ones that are nesting in April which are competing for food and so on and so the ones in March are able to have more offspring and so if these birds start nesting earlier namely in March sometime then by the time the April birds come around decide to nest perhaps so this.\nthis bird.\nokay let's say it's able to find a mate pretty quickly which has a random mutation in the gene that causes it to nest such that it nests in March instead of April will have offspring that will also have that variant of the gene and because in March if they're nesting in March and they're not competing with other birds then the offspring are likely to survive more easily because the parents aren't competing for nests with other birds so they have offspring which themselves have the variant.\nand so it goes on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2331"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "51b28b7b-7ea0-44ea-8524-de2cfb0fb6e7": {"page_content": "and so you end up with this situation where the birds are nesting during March which is not optimal for the species and indeed when the April nesting bird decide to nest in April all the nests are taken by the birds sort of nested in March and this isn't good for the species because the optimal time by the terms of the thought experiment is April that's where all the food is that's where just the ideal conditions are March is not ideal but the gene itself the gene has been successful and it's pushed away the gene that was useful for the species in favor of the selfishness of the gene itself the gene itself is the thing that has persisted and it could cause the species of April nesting birds to go extinct and then you'd essentially have kind of a new species you'd have March nesting species which in the long run the March nesting species probably wouldn't be wouldn't thrive as well and they wouldn't thrive as well because that's not the optimum time for these particular bird species to nest I'll keep reading so back to the book if a further mutant gene then appears causing nesting still earlier in March the same process may be repeated with the earlier nesting genes taking over and the total population falling again evolution will thus drive the nesting time ever earlier and the population lower a new equilibrium would be reached only when the advantage to an individual bird's offspring of getting the very best nesting site was finally outweighed but the disadvantages are slightly earlier nesting that equilibrium might be very far from what was optimal for the species a related misconception is that evolution is always adaptive that it always constitutes progress or at least some sort of improvement in useful functionality which it then acts to optimize this is often summed up in a phrase due to the philosopher Herbert Spencer and unfortunately taken up by Darwin himself the survival of the fittest but as the above thought experiment illustrates that is not the case either not only has the species been harmed by this evolutionary change every individual bird has been harmed as well the birds using any particular site now have a harsh head life then before because they are using it earlier in", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2397"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "990fc99c-8a30-4771-bce6-624b37d2288d": {"page_content": "often summed up in a phrase due to the philosopher Herbert Spencer and unfortunately taken up by Darwin himself the survival of the fittest but as the above thought experiment illustrates that is not the case either not only has the species been harmed by this evolutionary change every individual bird has been harmed as well the birds using any particular site now have a harsh head life then before because they are using it earlier in the year skipping a little what exactly has the evolution of those birds achieved during that period it is optimized not the function of adaptation of ovarian genes with environment the attribute that would have impressed pale but the relative ability of the surviving variant to spread through the population an April nesting gene is no longer able to propagate itself to the next generation even though it is functionally the best variant the early nesting gene that replaced it may still be tolerably functional but it is fittest for nothing except preventing variants of itself from procreating from the point of view of both the species and all its members the change brought about by this period of evolution has been a disaster but evolution does not care about that it favors only the genes that spread through the population so again my commentary here now wonderfully succinct very well explains what the process of evolution by natural selection is in terms of genetic selection it's not about which species will survive it's not about group selection it never is it's about genes surviving okay skipping a little end back to the text David writes is it she luck then that most genes do usually confer some albeit less than optimal functional benefits on their species and on their individual holders no organisms are the slaves or tools the genes used to achieve their purpose of spreading themselves through the population that is the purpose that paleon even Darwin never guessed genes gain advantages over each other and part by keeping their slaves alive and healthy just as human slave owners did slave owners were not working for the benefit of their workers of their workforces nor for the benefit of individual slaves it was solely to achieve their own objectives that they fed and house their slaves and indeed forced them to reproduce genes do much the same thing in addition there is the", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2516"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5f0c72d9-62ca-4179-9b8d-4dc4bb7b180b": {"page_content": "purpose that paleon even Darwin never guessed genes gain advantages over each other and part by keeping their slaves alive and healthy just as human slave owners did slave owners were not working for the benefit of their workers of their workforces nor for the benefit of individual slaves it was solely to achieve their own objectives that they fed and house their slaves and indeed forced them to reproduce genes do much the same thing in addition there is the phenomena of reach when the knowledge in a gene happens to have reach it will help the individual to help itself in a wide range of circumstances and by more than the spreading of the gene strictly requires that is why mules stay alive even though they are sterile so it is not surprising that genes usually confer some benefits on their species and its members and do often succeed in increasing their own absolute numbers nor should it be surprising that they sometimes do the opposite but what genes are adapted to what they do better than almost any variant of themselves has nothing to do with the species or the individuals or even their own survival in the long run it is getting themselves replicated more than rival genes now we move directly to the next section which is an especially David Deutsch take on neodarwinism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2640"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b379306e-0221-475c-886d-13dd04e85f43": {"page_content": "so he's taking the work of Richard Dawkins step further David writes he's called the section neodarwinism and knowledge and writes neodarwinism does not refer at its fundamental level to anything biological it is based on the idea of a replicator anything that contributes causally to its own copying for instance a gene conferring the ability to digest a certain type of food causes the organism to remain healthy in some situations where it would otherwise we cannot die hence it increases the organisms chances of having offspring in the future and those offspring would inherit and spread copies of the gene ideas can be replicators too for example a good joke is a replicator when lodged in a person's mind it has a tendency to cause that person to tell it to other people thus copying it into their minds Dawkins coined the term memes runs with dreams dreams for ideas that are replicators most ideas are not replicators they do not cause us to convey them to other people nearly all long lasting ideas however such as languages scientific theories and religious beliefs and the ineffable states of mind that constitute cultures such as being British or the skill of performing classical music and memes or memeplexes collections of interacting memes i shall say more about this in chapter 15 the most general way of stating the central assertion of the neodarwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation for instance by imperfect copying will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals causing themselves to be replicated this is a surprisingly deep truth which is commonly criticized either of being too obvious to be worth stating or for being false the reason i think is that although it is self-evidently true it is not self-evidently the explanation of specific adaptations our intuition prefers explanations in terms of functional purpose what does a gene do for its holder or for its species but we have just seen that genes generally do not optimize such functionality so the knowledge embodied in genes is knowledge of how to get themselves replicated at the expense of their rivals genes often do this by imparting useful", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2714"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cfda93b6-7383-46c9-af83-99fee64325ab": {"page_content": "true it is not self-evidently the explanation of specific adaptations our intuition prefers explanations in terms of functional purpose what does a gene do for its holder or for its species but we have just seen that genes generally do not optimize such functionality so the knowledge embodied in genes is knowledge of how to get themselves replicated at the expense of their rivals genes often do this by imparting useful functionality to their organism and in those cases their knowledge incidentally includes knowledge about that functionality functionality in turn is achieved by encoding into genes regularities in the environment and sometimes even rule of thumb approximations to laws of knowledge in which case the genes are incidentally encoding that knowledge too but the core of the explanation for the presence of a gene is always that it got itself replicated more than its rival genes non-explanatory human knowledge can also evolve in an analogous way rules of thumb are not passed on perfectly to the next generation of users and the ones that survive in the long run are not necessarily the ones that optimize the ostensible function for instance a rule that is expressed in an elegant rhyme may be remembered and repeated better than one that is more accurate but expressed in ungainly prose also no human knowledge is entirely non-explanatory there is always at least a background of assumptions about reality against which the meaning of a rule of thumb is understood and that background can make some false rules of thumb seem plausible explanatory theories evolve through a more complicated mechanism accidental errors in transmission and memory still play a role but a much smaller one that is because good explanations are hard to vary even without being tested and hence random errors in the transmission of a good explanation are easier for the receiver to detect and correct the most important source of variation in exponatory theories is creativity for instance when people are trying to understand an idea that they hear from others they typically understand it to mean what makes most sense to them or what they are most expected to hear or what they fear to hear and so on those meanings are conjectured by the listener or reader and may differ", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2823"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d88ddc73-071b-4657-8b83-f20c10bdad43": {"page_content": "are easier for the receiver to detect and correct the most important source of variation in exponatory theories is creativity for instance when people are trying to understand an idea that they hear from others they typically understand it to mean what makes most sense to them or what they are most expected to hear or what they fear to hear and so on those meanings are conjectured by the listener or reader and may differ from what the speaker or writer intended in addition people often try to improve explanations even when they have received them accurately they make creative amendments spurred on by their own criticism if they then pass the explanation onto others they usually try to pass on what they consider to be the improved version so this is one of those sections where I really need to pause embedded amongst the text the text which is great is this real gem I don't know the pop has spent much time trying to explain the psychology of learning but here David really has gone to the heart of the matter he's brought to bear popularian epistemology to the process of learning people are not taking this seriously that are interested in the question about how people learn or trying to maximize learning let's say so I'm never going to make a habit of rereading things after all people can just rewind the video but this is so important I think I need to emphasize it again so David's talking about understanding we may as well say learning here so let me just read let me just read those very few sentences again because they're very dense they have this amazing idea he writes when people are trying to understand an idea that they hear from others.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=2935"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c7dd55eb-434d-4e47-aa50-b85f383c66ac": {"page_content": "so for example from a lecturer or from a teacher or from a parent or from a friend you're just trying to understand something how is it that you learn well what he says here is that people typically understand that the listener typically understand it the thing that they're trying to learn they typically understand it to me what makes most sense to them or what they are most expecting to hear or what they fear to hear and.\nso on.\nokay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3029"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c257a907-1a0a-4d7c-9448-60c77f64adfe": {"page_content": "so it could be any number of things you have these expectations about what you're about to hear and that's what you understand you can't just gain understanding from the message that's coming to you you have to bring your understanding to the message those meanings are conjectured by the listener or reader and may differ from what the speaker or writer intended so you're trying to teach someone something you're trying to help someone learn in some way it's not a matter of you speaking ever more clearly or ever more loudly or it's not a matter of your intentions of what you're expecting the person to learn it's a matter of what they're expecting to hear which is a profound idea people often try to improve explanations even when they have received them accurately they make creative amendments spurred by their own criticism I've personally experienced this a lot that I can explain something and the listener does a far better job than I could ever have done in explaining that particular concept because they've understood it in a way that is very different to what I understand it and their way is more parsimonious their way is free of the kind of errors that I was bringing to my explanation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3062"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f41541aa-c316-44af-a550-5c87b080ab2f": {"page_content": "so it's absolutely true it's the expectations of the person that's doing the learning that shapes what it is they understand a particular concept to be you can't pass on the concept you can only really pass on the message you can attempt to transmit.\nbut the receiver is the thing that's doing the error correction I'm gonna continue reading.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3150"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f2ae301e-ac5c-4743-9f70-0782c7aba92c": {"page_content": "but he's about to speak to write a little bit more about a little bit more about understanding but just to link that last paragraph with the next one it does really seem to me to be the case that when people try and understand each other what each other is saying that if I use certain words in perfect English and you are a perfectly fluent English speaker as well that what you hear might be a certain set of words which go into your ears converted into electrical signals passed into your brain then into your mind what your mind then does is an absolute mystery for the most part but your way of viewing the world even though we're using exactly the same language could be vastly different that what you understand certain words to actually mean could be quite different to what I understand them to me and so an act of translation goes on that when I use a word which labels a particular concept although you understand the word it could label it and ever so slightly different or perhaps a completely different concept in your mind and so then when you respond to me you're responding to the concept you understand the word to label and so when I hear your response I'm assuming that the words that you're using now which could be exactly the same word that I've just used in conveying something to you is actually labeling a different concept than the one that I thought it was labeling so as proper would say you cannot speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood everyone could be speaking precisely the same language perfectly accurately perfectly fluently but still talking about different things even though you're using the same words I don't know how common this is but I do think it's an important problem that we have in attempting to understand each other human beings are mysterious as Jared Lanier would say we infinite wells of mystery can just keep on discovering more and more and more about people and we don't seem to get to the end I think problems are soluble but I do think he has a point here that because of creativity and creativity is kind of this infinite thing with infinite reach that perhaps understanding someone else and just like perfectly understanding anything it's impossible but in particular understanding something with arguably infinite complexity like a human mind is even more challenging but exciting as well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3172"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d5640ed2-b77f-4cfc-be03-ec43979427de": {"page_content": "okay continue unlike genes many memes take different physical forms every time they are replicated people really express ideas in exactly the same words in which they heard them they also translate from one language to another and between spoken and written language and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3326"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0d336fad-fca0-4edc-b63f-b07f54e23cb2": {"page_content": "yet we rightly call what is transmitted the same idea the same meme throughout thus in the case of most memes the real replicator is abstract it is the knowledge itself this is in principle true of genes as well biotechnology routinely transcribes genes into the memories of computers where they are stored in a different physical form those records could be translated back into DNA strands and implanted in different animals the only reason this is not yet a common practice is it is easier to copy the original gene but one day the genes of a rare species could survive its extinction by causing themselves to be stored on a computer then implanted into a cell of a different species I say causing themselves to be stored because the biotechnologist would not be recording information indiscriminately but only information that met a certain criterion such as gene of endangered species the ability to interest biotechnologists in this way would then be part of the reach of the knowledge in those genes so both human knowledge and biological adaptations are abstract replicators forms of information which once they are embodied in a suitable physical system tend to remain so while most variants of them do not the fact that the principles of neodarwinist theory are from a certain perspective self-evident has itself been used as a criticism of a theory for instance if the theory must be true how can it be testable one reply often attributed to helldane is that the whole theory would be refuted by the discovery of a single fossilized rabbit in a stratum of Cambrian rock however that is misleading the import of such an observation would depend on what explanations were available under the given circumstances for instance miss identifications of fossils and of strata have sometimes been made and would have to be ruled out by good explanations before one could call the discovery a fossilized rabbit in Cambrian rock even given such explanations what would have been ruled out by the rabbit would not be the theory of evolution itself but only the prevailing theory of the history of life and geological processes on earth suppose for instance that there was a prehistoric continent isolated from the others on which", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3346"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4921f217-8b92-468e-a2fe-732456716adb": {"page_content": "made and would have to be ruled out by good explanations before one could call the discovery a fossilized rabbit in Cambrian rock even given such explanations what would have been ruled out by the rabbit would not be the theory of evolution itself but only the prevailing theory of the history of life and geological processes on earth suppose for instance that there was a prehistoric continent isolated from the others on which evolution happened several times as fast as elsewhere and that by convergent evolution a rabbit-like creature of all there during the Cambrian era and suppose the continents were later connected by catastrophe that obliterated most of the life forms on that continent and submerged their fossils the rabbit-like creature was a rare survivor which became extinct soon afterwards given the supposed evidence that is still an infinitely better explanation than for instance creationism or Lamarchism neither of which gives any account of the origin of the apparent knowledge in the rabbit so what would refute the Darwinian theory of evolution evidence which in the light of the best available explanation implies knowledge came into existence in a different way for instance if an organism was observed to undergo only or mainly favorable mutations as predicted by Lamarchism or spontaneous generation then Darwinism's random variation postulate would be refuted if organisms were observed to be born with new complex adaptations for anything of which there were no precursors in their parents then the gradual change prediction would be refuted and so would Darwinism's mechanism of knowledge creation if an organism was born with a complex adaptation that is survival value today yet was not favored by selection pressure in its ancestry say an ability to detect and use internet where the forecast to decide when to hibernate then Darwinism would again be refuted a fundamentally new explanation would be needed facing more or less the same unsolved problem that paleon Darwin faced we should have to set about finding an explanation that worked.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3452"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0ab764fb-9b0c-42fe-a920-03774cf28ff1": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b8c6f26c-f10f-40a6-8cff-06fcc63a5117": {"page_content": "so this is this some might think it's a controversial point I don't know I don't know that matters I make a big deal as many people interested in the philosophy of science do about the line of demarcation between science and non-science when it comes to this question about neo Darwinism Darwinism broadly speaking and whether or not it's falsifiable given that David has just said well rabbits in the pre-cambrian would not falsify the theory and then asked the question well what would well evidence that would suggest that you only ever had favorable adaptations so that's possible but some people still argue that well perhaps it's just this thing called a research framework so you know some people argue about whether or not the theory of evolution by natural selection Darwinism neo Darwinism whether it's a scientific theory or actually something deeper than a scientific theory sometimes called a research program now I don't think it really matters ultimately whether it's the framework within which we do biology or whether it is a scientific explanation subject to the usual test the usual experimental test that we can perform on any scientific theory just so happens coincidentally I'm reading a book by the philosopher and or biology philosopher Michaelis Michael Professor of Michaelis Michael at University of New South Wales here in Australia he's written a book just recently called evolution by natural selection confidence evidence and the gap now Michaelis has a few problems with pop-up and with falsificationism and indeed to some extent is a proponent of Stephen J Gould's view good to read people who you disagree with.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3569"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "80d8c81b-fa63-4fa3-a41b-450056186573": {"page_content": "but I just wanted to take a moment just to read his section here of his book it's subtitled is evolutionary theory falsifiable so let me just read what Michaelis has written he writes the question we started with is is evolutionary theory science takes on a period guys as is evolutionary theory falsifiable.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3679"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c2dcca2e-519c-4ad1-954d-99ae1a9c4ce3": {"page_content": "but this is too coarse grain to be answered there are many different evolutionary theories we can can consider and we can ask of each of them whether it is falsifiable so Michaelis's claim is that the different evolutionary theories might be considered to be is the theory that evolution has taken place firstifiable is the theory that the human chin evolved falsifiable is the theory that evolution has involved natural selection falsifiable is the theory that the human chin evolved through natural selection falsifiable the theory that evolution has taken place is a historical theory it says that the biological world has evolved it says that the biological world has changed at the time is it falsifiable?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3698"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf48a5ca-2d47-42e3-9491-f0a405ebf4af": {"page_content": "To be falsifiable is to be able to specify an observation that would refute the theory.\nIt might be thought that this would not be falsifiable.\nHowever, a moment's reflection should convince you that you can imagine possible evidence that would refute the theory that evolution has taken place.\nIn this case, it is easy to find such a piece of possible evidence.\nWhat if the fossil record never revealed any changes?.\nWere the fossil record to be just like the present organisms, then the theory that there has been biological evolution would be falsified?.\nIn fact, the fossil record does show that at different times the biological world has been exemplified by different organisms.\nTherefore, this theory is in fact falsifiable.\nWe can specify a feuding observations that would have led to the theory being rejected.\nThe observations did not take place, but that does not mean the theory is not falsifiable, but only that it is not yet falsified.\nWhat about the theory that the human chin evolved is falsifiable?.\nThis theory is also a historical theory.\nIt says that at one time, organisms existed with no chins and that later descendants had chins.\nThere are issues with deciding which types of organisms are ancestral to which, but one thing we could predict, so have seen in the fossil record that would lead to this theory being rejected, is if all species in the lineage allied with the hominin lineage had chins.\nIndeed, we could have falsifying evidence were chins to be found in the hominin lineage regardless of whether they are directly ancestral to our species.\nJust as we might say they have been changes to the heart in humans where we define that humans evolve features or structures novel to their hearts, we do not say that the heart evolved in humans when all vertebrates have hearts.\nSo the theory that the chin evolved in humans is falsifiable.\nAgain, there are observations we could have observed that would have told against that theory.\nIt is important to note that saying that a theory is falsifiable does not mean that if it were false, then there would in fact be some observable evidence that tells you the theory is false.\nThere may be many circumstances in which you cannot tell whether a particular theory is false and only a few in which you can tell the theory is false.\nSuch a theory is nevertheless still falsifiable.\nWhat about the theory that natural selection has been involved in evolution?.\nThis is a historical theory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3749"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "278be29d-a8e5-46c6-b951-a1387f7d1556": {"page_content": "It is important to note that saying that a theory is falsifiable does not mean that if it were false, then there would in fact be some observable evidence that tells you the theory is false.\nThere may be many circumstances in which you cannot tell whether a particular theory is false and only a few in which you can tell the theory is false.\nSuch a theory is nevertheless still falsifiable.\nWhat about the theory that natural selection has been involved in evolution?.\nThis is a historical theory.\nOnce again, it is about what happened in the past, but it is not just about what happened.\nIt is about why what happened happened.\nSaying that something evolved by natural selection involves identifying the mechanism that drove that change.\nIs that visible?.\nIs it important to see that it is not visible?.\nIn fact, there is a general issue with causation.\nWhat we aspire to in science is more than just a catalog of what happened when.\nAlthough finding out what happened when is often hard enough.\nIn scientific endeavors, we do try to discern why things happened.\nThe causal explanations.\nSince Hume, we have known that this is very difficult.\nWe see constant conjunctions easily, but finding causation is much more difficult.\nOr rather, getting clear what we need to establish to have established the causal link is the difficult question.\nOne idea coming from Hume himself is about what happens when we manipulate the system.\nHume famously gives two versions of the nature of causation.\nThe first is entirely empirical.\nIt is just that A causes B when A type of ends are constantly conjoined with B type of ends.\nAnd A and B are spatiotemporally contiguous.\nAnd we come to expect B when we perceive A.\nThe second account involves counterfactuals since just that A causes B if our spatiotemporally contiguous and manipulating A manipulates B. Therefore, well, A not to occur then B would not either.\nExploring the science, metaphysics and epistemology of causation is not a small topic.\nIt may be enough to say that finding the constant conjunctions is hard enough in science, finding causal relations is hard to steal.\nHowever, here a strange fact needs to be highlighted.\nThis theory that we have, this theory that we have decided is not falsifiable, is in fact that conclusion of Darwin's key argument for natural selection.\nDarwin argued for this conclusion from two premises that we saw were empirical and falsifiable.\nThe first that there is an excess of young relative to breeding individuals.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3850"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "31477285-7a79-4583-af23-e88451d5f868": {"page_content": "It may be enough to say that finding the constant conjunctions is hard enough in science, finding causal relations is hard to steal.\nHowever, here a strange fact needs to be highlighted.\nThis theory that we have, this theory that we have decided is not falsifiable, is in fact that conclusion of Darwin's key argument for natural selection.\nDarwin argued for this conclusion from two premises that we saw were empirical and falsifiable.\nThe first that there is an excess of young relative to breeding individuals.\nThe second is that there is variation and that the variations are heritable.\nEach of these was empirically testable even in Darwin's day and his evidence for both was copious.\nDarwin also used another premise that amounted to an analytic claim.\nIf any variations help their barriers in the struggle for existence, then these will be fitter and have a higher tendency to survive.\nFrom these three, together with a law of large numbers type hidden premise, he derived the conclusion that natural selection would have taken place.\nOkay, so that's what Michaela's Michael from Sydney happens to say about evolution by natural selection and whether it's falsifiable.\nOf course, I would have some issues with the way he's presented what causation is there.\nIt sounds inductivist to me.\nNevertheless, as he admits, there's really a problem there with trying to understand this concept of causation.\nHe does admit that science is very much about explanation.\nI don't know if he's aware of what hard to vary is about.\nThe book is an interesting one.\nThere's a lot there about falsification and science.\nAs I say, I don't necessarily agree with it all.\nNevertheless, it's very interesting.\nIf you can get hold of the book, it's not a very long book.\nIt's 140 something pages, but going back to the beginning of infinity now.\nThe next section is about fine tuning and I'll leave that until next time.\nBut what was really interesting here in this part is the symmetry between the way in which human knowledge is constructed, especially explanatory knowledge via this process of conjecture and refutation or guessing in criticism or creation and creativity in criticism and biological evolution, where you have random mutations and then selection of those or variation and selection.\nThey mirror one another, not exactly the same, in particular.\nThe kind of mechanisms that allow us to create explanatory knowledge are intelligently designed.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=3966"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ddac77f0-d9a0-4df8-aef7-f05f2ad77a6f": {"page_content": "But what was really interesting here in this part is the symmetry between the way in which human knowledge is constructed, especially explanatory knowledge via this process of conjecture and refutation or guessing in criticism or creation and creativity in criticism and biological evolution, where you have random mutations and then selection of those or variation and selection.\nThey mirror one another, not exactly the same, in particular.\nThe kind of mechanisms that allow us to create explanatory knowledge are intelligently designed.\nPeople have minds, they have intentions, they have free will, and so they're able to choose amongst different ways in which they might improve knowledge.\nThis idea of creativity, of the ability to create explanatory knowledge has, I think, a deep connection to the concept of free will, and whether or not we have free will, even given determinism.\nBecause the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable, and we don't know what problems are going to come next.\nSo we don't know where we're going to direct our minds.\nI think that's where we'll live for today.\nI'll look forward to the next part at some about fine tuning, as I've already said, and perhaps in a few days, possibly a week, I'll be able to get to that.\nSee you later.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHhHsxuAP8&t=4068"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1ac98707-3070-4049-ae3e-cc80403fc5f0": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast for a special episode, an omnibus type episode, so to speak.\n99 minutes for my 99th episode devoted to the beginning of infinity, the book that started my podcast.\nThis is going to be not a typical episode in the sense that often what I do is read part of the book and then reflect upon that book.\nInstead, what I'll be doing is simply giving nothing but my reflections without ever referring directly to the book.\nThere will be very few quotes that might be one or two here, but I'm not going to have the book in front of me and reading passages out of it.\nFor that, of course, you can go to the rest of my podcast series on the beginning of infinity, where I do extensive readings and longer reflections.\nThis is going to be very much a personal set of reflections on what I got from each and every chapter from the beginning of infinity.\nIt'll be very much in my words and shouldn't be taken as representative of what really is in the chapter.\nDavid provides summaries at the end of every single chapter and I guess they would be his main points, but this will be my main takeaways from the book.\nAt the end of each chapter that I discuss, I'm going to give the two or three sentence summary of what I think that chapter was about.\nAgain, nothing official in this.\nThis is just my takeaways and many people out there might quite disagree with what I'm taking away as the central message of that chapter.\nThe beginning of infinity is special in many ways.\nFirstly, as Naval Ravakhand has said, there seems to be many people who purchase the work.\nSomewhat fewer readers of the work and fewer still people who actually have a good understanding of what's being said there.\nThis is somewhat perplexing to me in a sense because I don't know why people wouldn't persevere with the book.\nI get why you wouldn't start the book to begin with.\nIt's a fairly large tone.\nand maybe you just want it to look good on your shelf there.\nBut if you begin reading it, surely you find it captivating.\nIt's amazing.\nI mean, it's providing you with a different world view, a different way of saying not only science and progress, but just about every area of human interest.\nIt's in some way or other captured there within the beginning of infinity.\nAnd it provides an optimistic alternative to all of those other misconceptions and worldviews that are out there at the moment.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=0"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6f277f61-eeb9-4f74-b8d1-4817d42b07da": {"page_content": "But if you begin reading it, surely you find it captivating.\nIt's amazing.\nI mean, it's providing you with a different world view, a different way of saying not only science and progress, but just about every area of human interest.\nIt's in some way or other captured there within the beginning of infinity.\nAnd it provides an optimistic alternative to all of those other misconceptions and worldviews that are out there at the moment.\nI'm somewhat reminded of what Popper said when it came to problems in one's life.\nHe said that, you know, essentially the purpose of life to some extent is to meet a problem, to see its beauty and to fall in love with it, to get married to it, and to live with it happily, till death do ye part, unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem.\".\nEnd quote from Popper.\nWell, much the same could be said of a good book or even a sublime book like this one, to meet it, to see its beauty and to fall in love with it and basically to spend days and weeks pouring over it.\nI'm sure some books are possibly pumped out rather quickly like so many blog posts are.\nI know the feeling of having a particular thought tossing it over in my mind for a while and then feeling the urgent need to commit it to the page in the form of a longer or shorter blog post.\nI tend to think it over sometimes for only a matter of hours before committing it to the page, but I also know the feeling of having an idea, committing it to the page in draft form, and then tossing it over for days and weeks until it refined to the point where I think, yeah, that's worth publishing.\nI think that many other books, like popular science books and things, they tend to read a little bit like blog posts of the first kind.\nThere's something the authors have just had to say and had to publish very quickly, or perhaps they've tossed it over in their minds for weeks and months, perhaps a year or two and some special cases.\nBut I know the beginning of infinity took something like a decade to write and it really does show.\nThe beginning of infinity stands apart because each page really does have a new insight.\nIt's often something that counters prevailing misconceptions and it's clear, exceedingly clear, and not merely clear, but eloquent and this sets it apart.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=136"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "625f7aa4-28e3-476e-a2f2-f99dbdefcadd": {"page_content": "But I know the beginning of infinity took something like a decade to write and it really does show.\nThe beginning of infinity stands apart because each page really does have a new insight.\nIt's often something that counters prevailing misconceptions and it's clear, exceedingly clear, and not merely clear, but eloquent and this sets it apart.\nBut the fact that it is so insightful, I think, is one reason that people might not at times persevere or even see the subtle importance of what's being said.\nIf you're being hit, rapid fire on every page with new ways of thinking about things, one might dare say everything's, it can be disorienting.\nAnd of course, this is the reason for my channel here, and the podcast that I produce and the blog posts and so on, because as so many others have said, some sentences in the beginning of infinity could be entire paragraphs.\nSome paragraphs could be entire chapters and some chapters could be entire books in themselves.\nSo some unpacking and discussion is not necessarily needed, but it is warranted.\nIt's fun to engage with this stuff and see where the new ideas could potentially lead and how they might inform science, philosophy, decision-making, and thinking and progress broadly.\nSo this episode is an unusual one.\nThe plan is this.\nI'm going to take about four to five minutes per chapter and just highlight what I think is important.\nWhat was key for me out of that chapter.\nAs I say, this time, no quotes, no reading, nothing direct, maybe except some incidental quotes here and there that I might remember off by heart or I feel I need to just pull out of the book.\nBut in the main, it's going to be my interpretation of the chapters.\nSo it's more like a translation of a kind.\nSo it's more like the beginning of infinity filtered through me in a sense, so expect to lose something.\nExpect to lose a lot in that process.\nAs I always say, none of this is a substitute for the book itself at 18 chapters and four to five minutes per chapter.\nThat gives me a few minutes here at the beginning to do this introduction and maybe some minutes at the end to do a little bit of a conclusion.\nAnd what I'll do with these four to five minute breakdowns of each chapter is probably just published them separately on Twitter as well as putting them together.\nHere and now for you as a complete podcast.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=268"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "72543ba2-c0ca-49ee-a553-d5925af10db1": {"page_content": "As I always say, none of this is a substitute for the book itself at 18 chapters and four to five minutes per chapter.\nThat gives me a few minutes here at the beginning to do this introduction and maybe some minutes at the end to do a little bit of a conclusion.\nAnd what I'll do with these four to five minute breakdowns of each chapter is probably just published them separately on Twitter as well as putting them together.\nHere and now for you as a complete podcast.\nAnd the reason for that is once again, I hope it really does entice people to pick up the book and delve more deeply into it.\nI know I've already done the 45 episodes on the beginning of infinity and that is, in fact, close to two complete days worth of continuous beginning of infinity content, not counting the questions with David and the other things that I've published as well.\nBut this is an interesting challenge.\nI think it's important to accept the reality sometimes that some people simply won't ever read the book.\nBut the ideas in this book are just so important, especially right now, and will continue to be that we need to repackage them over and over again, informats more accessible to some people.\nThe Naval podcast is doing that.\nI think very successfully if the feedback is anything to go by.\nNaval has great reach of course and extremely, hopefully a deep understanding and appreciation of these ideas and one hopes that anyone inspired by Naval when it comes to the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality will turn to those books.\nAnd so that's what I hope to do here as well.\nTurn to the book for more details, of course.\nThere's so much proper and Deutsch content out there now.\nAll of David's interviews in various places and the various other podcasts that are out there now as well, the Duix Blaine podcast, the fallible animals podcast, the theory of anything podcast, the lunar society podcast to name just a few.\nDavid has really inspired an entire ecosystem of online podcasts and YouTube channels and blogs.\nSo it's really getting difficult for someone who's a big fan like me to even keep up with everything that's out there now.\nAnd so I guess personally, I'm not really helping things right now by producing yet more beginning of infinity content.\nIt's an embarrassment of riches to some extent.\nAnd I don't just mean the proper and Deutsch-related material.\nI also mean the broad intellectual science philosophy broadcasting space.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=371"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "478645dc-6f85-41f3-9dd7-ae57a0fe1d97": {"page_content": "So it's really getting difficult for someone who's a big fan like me to even keep up with everything that's out there now.\nAnd so I guess personally, I'm not really helping things right now by producing yet more beginning of infinity content.\nIt's an embarrassment of riches to some extent.\nAnd I don't just mean the proper and Deutsch-related material.\nI also mean the broad intellectual science philosophy broadcasting space.\nAll that said, I think our corner, the David Deutsch corner of the internet really is still David against Goliath, David Bing, David Deutsch and the rest of us on his side of the ledger and Goliath Bing, well, mainstream misconceptions, mainstream academia and intellectual culture and all those other kinds of so-called rationality that are out there.\nSome better than others, but none quite getting to the heart of the matter about why it is we need to be optimistic.\nWhy it is that we continue to make progress and what it is about science and philosophy and reason that really sets humanity apart at this particular epoch and time and the people in the Enlightenment tradition as compared to everything that has gone before, as I say.\nAt the end of each chapter that I'm about to go through, I'm going to give you my personal key learning from the chapter.\nEmphasis on my others might very well take something else, more important away and maybe David's intention was something completely different to what I say is the central message that I've got.\nOf course, the worst thing about even attempting this, of course, is that I've already said that each chapter could be an entire book in and of itself.\nSo why would I go in the opposite direction and try and reduce the chapter to a few sentences?.\nI just thought it would be a cool, curious little challenge that I'd set for myself.\nSo without further ado, let's get to my brief reflections upon each chapter in the beginning of infinity, the most ground-breaking work so far of the 21st century.\nChapter one, the reach of explanations.\nIn this chapter, David Deutsch makes some genuine progress in epistemology.\nPrior to Popper, we had this notion of empiricism, that the way in which knowledge was generated was you went out into the world and you observed the world and from your observations, you managed to drive knowledge from those observations in some way, shape or form that was never really specified.\nEmpiricism at least put observation at the center of knowledge creation.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=511"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "16496c22-c5df-4171-a4a6-7bc44cc5692a": {"page_content": "Chapter one, the reach of explanations.\nIn this chapter, David Deutsch makes some genuine progress in epistemology.\nPrior to Popper, we had this notion of empiricism, that the way in which knowledge was generated was you went out into the world and you observed the world and from your observations, you managed to drive knowledge from those observations in some way, shape or form that was never really specified.\nEmpiricism at least put observation at the center of knowledge creation.\nIt was a relief to be relieved from superstitious notions of how knowledge might be generated or the idea that certain authorities possessed the knowledge, the final truth to a certain extent or the best version of a truth and everyone else should agree with what the authority said was known or said was true.\nWe know that empiricism can't be true because we know that, well, seeing is not believing.\nOur go-to example in the beginning of infinity in various other places and the one which I always turn to is this idea of observing stars at night and seeing small dim points of light.\nBut is that what a star is?.\nA small dim point of light?.\nNo, and no amount of repeatedly making those same observations over and over again can get you one jot closer to the nature of what a star really is.\nWhat we now know is that stars are not cold but hot, not dim but bright.\nThey are extremely distant, hot furnaces, fusing hydrogen nuclei protons into helium and other more complicated processes as well.\nAnd we only get to that notion, not because we can actually observe the core of stars where these reactions are taking place.\nIn fact, it's very rare for us to be able to observe directly a star.\nWhenever you take even a powerful telescope, the star still appears as simply a point of light.\nThere are a few exceptions.\nSo we're not observing stars directly at all, let alone the reactions that are going on inside them.\nSo how did we get this knowledge?.\nWe had to conjure it, we had to guess it.\nAnd then the function of our observations using telescopes in various other things was to criticize those theories.\nAnd as far as those theories were criticized and survived the criticism, then we accepted that we had learned something new via this method of conjecture as Papa told us about what the nature of stars are.\nEventually, our theory of stars became a good explanation.\nAnd what we mean by good explanation is something that is hard to vary.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=616"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e722492-260d-4603-9b03-47986b5bff4e": {"page_content": "We had to conjure it, we had to guess it.\nAnd then the function of our observations using telescopes in various other things was to criticize those theories.\nAnd as far as those theories were criticized and survived the criticism, then we accepted that we had learned something new via this method of conjecture as Papa told us about what the nature of stars are.\nEventually, our theory of stars became a good explanation.\nAnd what we mean by good explanation is something that is hard to vary.\nAnd this is the insight that David Deutsch provides us in chapter one.\nIt is a genuine epistemological discovery prior to David Deutsch, Papa rightly demarcated science from non-science via this criterion of falsification.\nHowever, as David points out, falsifiable theories are a dime a dozen.\nAfter all, any crank wearing a sandwich board on the corner of the street saying the world is going to end next Tuesday has a falsifiable theory.\nAnd it will be falsified, but simply because it's a falsifiable theory doesn't make it scientific just because it's testable doesn't make it scientific.\nSomeone can say, eat a kilogram of grass, it'll cure your common cold.\nIt's a falsifiable theory, but that does not make it scientific.\nSo what is David Deutsch's great insight?.\nWhat we're after, not only in science, but everywhere are good explanations.\nAnd a good explanation is something that counts for what is really going on in the world and which also is hard to vary, which means every single part of the explanation serves a purpose.\nAnd in this view, therefore, experiments and observations serve the purpose of choosing between these theories that we've already guessed.\nIt's very rare for us to have more than one explanation for any given phenomena, but where we do, for example, in the case of gravity, we had Newtonian gravity and we had Einstein general relativity.\nWe needed to craft an experiment, a way of distinguishing between the predictions that these two theories made.\nAnd if one of them was inconsistent with that theory, we would say that the observation has refuted that theory while the other, which is consistent with the observation, the theory which is consistent with the observation, we say has so far gone unrefuted and now remains our best explanation of that given phenomena.\nAnd those explanations that we generate have reach, they solve the problem they were created for in the first place.\nAnd then go on to do even more.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=743"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0189d6f5-63c3-4a69-bee8-caba2a65e8da": {"page_content": "And if one of them was inconsistent with that theory, we would say that the observation has refuted that theory while the other, which is consistent with the observation, the theory which is consistent with the observation, we say has so far gone unrefuted and now remains our best explanation of that given phenomena.\nAnd those explanations that we generate have reach, they solve the problem they were created for in the first place.\nAnd then go on to do even more.\nGeneral relativity fixes issues that Newtonian gravity could not solve, but then it reaches into things like the expanding universe and the black holes and neutron stars and the GPS system, things that no one imagined two centuries ago under the Newtonian gravity framework.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that knowledge creation is a process of guessing what is true and then criticizing those guesses, leading gradually and ideally to the production of good by which we mean hard to vary explanations, which cannot be derived from our observations.\nChapter two, closer to reality.\nKnowledge brings us closer to understanding reality.\nThis idea of realism is the claim that reality is out there and exists independent of what we happen to think about it.\nBut our knowledge, what we come to understand of that reality, which is beyond our minds, as well as our minds being a part of that reality, our knowledge of all of this can be objective and should be objective.\nAnd that is, objective in the sense that no subjective Noah needs to be involved in order for the knowledge to actually be knowledge.\nKnowledge can be recorded in books or stored in computers.\nIt can even appear in objects.\nThe computer on which you are watching this is going to instantiate relationships between the circuits, the knowledge of how to process information, and should all of humanity be wiped out tomorrow, but our artifacts, including our computers left behind, and an alien race found them, then they could reverse engineer what is going on in the computer, and therefore uncover the knowledge that's in the computer by decoding it, and then they would know what we know, what has been stored in the computers.\nBut how is it that knowledge brings us closer to reality?.\nIt's interesting because sometimes, in order to come closer to the reality, we need to put multiple objects between us and that reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=856"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c0d1524c-dba0-4c7b-a3d2-4ab3bf075d09": {"page_content": "But how is it that knowledge brings us closer to reality?.\nIt's interesting because sometimes, in order to come closer to the reality, we need to put multiple objects between us and that reality.\nFor example, returning to trying to understand the nature of stars, in order to better understand what a star is, looking directly at it with an eye that's unaided by any technology, is not going to bring you closer to the reality of what that star is.\nInstead, putting between your eye, a telescope, and a computer will certainly help in the process of bringing you closer to understanding the reality of stars, putting objects between you and that star, and not only the objects, but also existing explanations can bring you closer to understanding reality as well.\nYou can't see things directly because observation is theory laden.\nSo when an astronomer puts a telescope between themselves and a star, they have to have an explanation first of how the telescope works.\nThey have to understand whether, in to what extent, the telescope might be subtly changing the color of the star, whether there might be artifacts on the lens and so forth.\nBecause, after all, once you produce a picture of whatever the telescope is taking using the computer, you might very well end up with something that's only printed page that is not actually out there and out of space, but it could just be an error introduced by the telescope or the computer processing of the image.\nThis is the sense in which observation is theory laden.\nEven something as simple as straightforward looking relies upon a complex process of how light gets through the corner of our eyes back to the retina, converted from chemical energy into electrical energy, and then finally, somehow or other, translated by our minds into information of a sort, this process of seeing is extremely complicated, but so long as we're correcting errors, then we do come closer to the truth because this is what knowledge growth really is.\nIt consists of correcting errors and solving problems, errors in our existing theories.\nIt's people who are the creative entities that do the science and grow explanatory knowledge.\nPeople like Thomas Edison and others have said over the years that innovation is very much 99% perspiration of 1% innovation, but in fact, that's not true.\nThe perspiration phases of creativity can very much be automated and increasingly are what's so important now is imagination.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1001"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b5d279df-8288-4dfb-ae69-f3e37d521ff4": {"page_content": "It consists of correcting errors and solving problems, errors in our existing theories.\nIt's people who are the creative entities that do the science and grow explanatory knowledge.\nPeople like Thomas Edison and others have said over the years that innovation is very much 99% perspiration of 1% innovation, but in fact, that's not true.\nThe perspiration phases of creativity can very much be automated and increasingly are what's so important now is imagination.\nThe inspiration part, that's all of what science is about, trying to find a problem and fall in love with it, as Popper says, and then attempting to find a solution.\nUnless of course you find a better problem along the way, so the truth is that in science, it's almost all or ideally it should be, mainly creativity, imagination.\nMy key takeaway for this chapter is that knowledge growth is about the identification of errors in our existing explanations and correcting them, and sometimes we need to put lots of things like technology such as telescopes and computers as well as other explanations between us and those parts of reality were trying to understand in order to come closer to explaining what's really going on.\nChapter 3, The Spark.\nIt is common these days for intellectuals to embrace the so-called principle of mediocrity.\nThat is the claim that people are nothing special.\nAs recently as 2021, the year in which I am recording this, the biggest paid podcast on earth was called Absolutely Mental, and it featured Sam Harris in conversation with the comedian Ricky Gervais.\nThere have been two series so far.\nNow, certainly of course it was mainly for entertainment and comedy purposes, but the subtext was, whenever they got into science and philosophy in a serious sense, it really was all about the principle of mediocrity.\nOver and again, Gervais made the claim and Harris, if not explicitly, at least tacitly, endorsed the notion that we are nothing special, we humans.\nThere is a continuum between bacteria through to lower mammals and then to us.\nWe are just an incremental increase on what went before.\nOur dolphins and great apes so smart.\nLook at us.\nWe're just so stupid for polluting, getting in wars and being cruel to other creatures.\nBut this is not merely black comedy.\nIt informs academia as well.\nSadly, on this view to some extent, you're an intellectual, if you do, denigrate people.\nOnly silly religious people think humans are anything special.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1120"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aa68a751-847c-4162-b320-e6a9e1e612dd": {"page_content": "We are just an incremental increase on what went before.\nOur dolphins and great apes so smart.\nLook at us.\nWe're just so stupid for polluting, getting in wars and being cruel to other creatures.\nBut this is not merely black comedy.\nIt informs academia as well.\nSadly, on this view to some extent, you're an intellectual, if you do, denigrate people.\nOnly silly religious people think humans are anything special.\nSo this principle says we are nothing special, and also the cosmological principle says that the earth, planet earth, is nothing particularly special.\nIt's just a regular planet orbiting a regular star in a rather typical galaxy, one among hundreds of billions of them.\nBut set against all of this is, in the minds of many, a version of what is called spaceship earth.\nWell, these days, many people say there is no planet B. Even when there are literally many, many planet bees that have been discovered, Kepler 452B, Kepler 10B, Kepler 442B, take your pick.\nThere are even seas and dees and so on.\nAnyways, no planet B or spaceship earth says, in fact, the earth is a special place and nowhere else is.\nBut all of this is wrong.\nWe humans are special and earth is only special because we are here.\nWe can make anywhere hospitable.\nThe environment doesn't support us.\nIt is barely suitable for us, as David says.\nMost places are inhospitable.\nEven on the earth, we make the place hospitable, and soon we will make space hospitable.\nWe've already begun.\nOnly creative innovation allows for us to support ourselves here because the cosmos is dangerous and so is earth.\nEnlightenment knowledge is the spark that allows for unbounded progress off into an infinite future.\nThis is explanatory knowledge that allows for the solving of human problems.\nThe only other known type of knowledge in the universe is biological, slow, incremental guessing and checking of blind mutations to see if there are any useful adaptations.\nSo the spark is very much us.\nWe people are the catalyst that takes inert useless material and comes to understand what it is made of.\nWe create knowledge of it.\nFind out what it is and only then it becomes useful and actual resource.\nWith this resource, we can begin the process of transforming our environment into something hospitable.\nAnd our environment is the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1264"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "09a05988-4e19-48b9-ad68-f2bc87e595fb": {"page_content": "So the spark is very much us.\nWe people are the catalyst that takes inert useless material and comes to understand what it is made of.\nWe create knowledge of it.\nFind out what it is and only then it becomes useful and actual resource.\nWith this resource, we can begin the process of transforming our environment into something hospitable.\nAnd our environment is the universe.\nEventually, this ratcheting up of knowledge creation, allowing us to transform physical reality around us, will stretch out beyond the earth, sparking knowledge creation throughout the solar system and then the galaxy.\nAnd from there, who knows where?.\nThe Enlightenment has only just begun to glow in an otherwise implacably dark and hostile universe.\nEventually, we can bring the rest of the universe to life by making it hospitable.\nJust as we have done here on a far smaller scale, this is merely the beginning, the kindling of infinite progress.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that the earth is a unique place so far as we know in the universe, where an open ended stream of knowledge creation is occurring.\nHowever, it will not remain this way as our Enlightenment traditions will spread to other planets and stars and one day, the rest of the universe, chapter four, creation.\nKnowledge has to be created.\nKnowledge being useful information or information that solves a problem.\nThere are two kinds known.\nThe information in the DNA of an organism is useful, so it counts as knowledge.\nIt solves the problem of survival for an organism, ideally, but more precisely, how the gene can spread through a gene pool.\nAnd the problem of how to be copied, another feature which makes it knowledge.\nIt appears via the process of evolution by natural selection as explained originally by Darwin, and which we now know in a so called Neo Darwinian framework as being about the selection of units on the DNA, double helix called genes.\nGenes or groups of genes code for structures in the physical structure of an organism.\nMutations of the DNA are, in essence, like guesses about what might work in a given environment.\nMost of bad guesses and only damage the organism, rarely some are mutations which are advantageous and survive into the next generation, as they cause that organism to be more fit in the given environment.\nThey go on to be copied generation after generation.\nThis all looks a little like the growth of explanatory knowledge, where existing ideas can be changed somewhat, but most changes are not good.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1392"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e061cb1a-40dd-46b8-8dd8-ac5c53c7f1b9": {"page_content": "Mutations of the DNA are, in essence, like guesses about what might work in a given environment.\nMost of bad guesses and only damage the organism, rarely some are mutations which are advantageous and survive into the next generation, as they cause that organism to be more fit in the given environment.\nThey go on to be copied generation after generation.\nThis all looks a little like the growth of explanatory knowledge, where existing ideas can be changed somewhat, but most changes are not good.\nKnowledge in the DNA, ending human minds of the explanatory sort, is hard to vary.\nSmall changes will ruin and not improve the knowledge, broadly speaking.\nThat both ideas and genes can be copied and are copied means they are replicators.\nBut they do exist differences, explanations can be deliberately changed, intelligently designed if you like, by the free and conscious choices of people who can see a problem and deliberate over it, and consider the best knowledge available and imagine into existence new ideas.\nThere is a genuine act of creation on their part, but there is no mind behind the generation of biological knowledge.\nThat is a blind process.\nAnd biological knowledge of that sort never does much more than ensuring the survival or not of a particular organism or species.\nWhile explanatory knowledge has reach, it solves the local problem a scientist, for example, is interested in, only for it then to go on to solve problems elsewhere at different times.\nThe problem of what the structure of the atom is eventually leads to uncovering the cause of radioactivity, and eventually leads to the possibility of generating electricity for hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of people using nuclear fission reactions.\nExplanatory knowledge reaches into areas creators of it can never quite imagine initially.\nEvolution by natural selection replaced Lamarchism.\nThe idea that biological knowledge can be acquired by some sort of process of extrapolation, where drafts necks got longer because they try to make their necks longer.\nSimilarly, inductivism assumes that explanatory knowledge is a process of extrapolating from observations, somehow the knowledge in both cases spontaneously appears out of trends, both Lamarchism and induction are thus wrong.\nEvolution by natural selection solved an important problem, that of the problem of the appearance of design.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1497"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "965a83b1-212f-4333-9211-8b304c63f371": {"page_content": "The idea that biological knowledge can be acquired by some sort of process of extrapolation, where drafts necks got longer because they try to make their necks longer.\nSimilarly, inductivism assumes that explanatory knowledge is a process of extrapolating from observations, somehow the knowledge in both cases spontaneously appears out of trends, both Lamarchism and induction are thus wrong.\nEvolution by natural selection solved an important problem, that of the problem of the appearance of design.\nBut taking a look at the universe as a whole, the physical laws and the constants there, also have the appearance of design, it seems as though the laws have just the right form and especially the right parameters, those parts of a theory that needs to be measured, the constants of nature like the gravitational constant or the charge on an electron, for the universe to be bio-friendly.\nBut the claim that cosmologically, fine-tuning is solved by a designer suffers from the same floor as it does in biology.\nWe don't yet have an explanation for the appearance of fine-tuning, but this is only because we do not yet know enough.\nWhatever the case, we shouldn't be leaping to, it looks like design, therefore it is design, so there must be a designer that is exactly the same as the area in biological creationism before evolution by natural selection was known.\nWe cannot say why there is an appearance of design in the physical laws, but postulating a cosmological multiverse or a megaverse, a multiverse of multiverses where the other universes have different laws doesn't solve the problem either.\nIn truth, this notion is rather too easy to vary as it could account for any set of laws, including the ones we know to exist in our universe.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that both biological organisms and the physical constants in the universe that permit life have the appearance of design, but appearances can be deceiving.\nAlthough Darwin solved the problem of why life appears to be designed, the question of why the constants of nature seem to be designed seem to be fine-tuned remains unsolved.\nChapter 5.\nThe reality of abstractions, what happens from one moment to the next in the physical universe is determined by laws of physics acting on fundamental particles.\nThis description of reality happens to explain very little.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1617"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8346f5a1-30f3-48cf-94ee-fee0cd207197": {"page_content": "Although Darwin solved the problem of why life appears to be designed, the question of why the constants of nature seem to be designed seem to be fine-tuned remains unsolved.\nChapter 5.\nThe reality of abstractions, what happens from one moment to the next in the physical universe is determined by laws of physics acting on fundamental particles.\nThis description of reality happens to explain very little.\nIt is at best predictive, but even then in practice the prediction for large ensembles of particles is intractable and in principle there can be no computer so powerful in our universe that it could actually predict what happens moment to moment, precisely because to know what happens next with high precision requires knowing now with high precision where all the particles are and how fast they are moving.\nBut there is no single now because of the relativity of simmultanarity.\nWhat has this to do with anything at all?.\nThis determinism is a form of reductionism where it is assumed, wrongly, that explanations at the lower level are necessarily superior to explanations at the emergent level.\nBut sometimes the emergent explanation, indeed mostly it is the emergent explanation in day-to-day life, is the only known proper explanation.\nNow go to example here is the parable of the copper atom as I have come to call it.\nIt first appear in the fabric of reality and I have done a number of podcasts on it, including one devoted exclusively to it, but in short it goes like this.\nIn Parliament Square in London there stands a statue of Winston Churchill.\nIt is made of bronze and at the tip of the nose of the statue is a copper atom.\nWhy is that copper atom there?.\nThe deterministic predictive explanation goes like this.\nMatter was produced at the Big Bang and some of that matter eventually coalesce into stars and at the core of those stars eventually copper was fused during a supernova explosion.\nSome of that copper ended up forming the minerals on the earth which were mined and under the action of the forces of the laws of physics, the copper atom eventually ended up at the tip of the nose of Winston Churchill.\nNow that explanation works for anything anywhere anytime.\nIt doesn't matter what the object is, it doesn't matter what the particle is that you're talking about, beginning at the Big Bang, following the trajectories which are determined by the laws of physics, you will end up with the particles being where they are right now.\nThat's predictive.\nIt's not explanatory.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1731"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d1e1dc8e-1b65-4543-83bb-96ce94190290": {"page_content": "Now that explanation works for anything anywhere anytime.\nIt doesn't matter what the object is, it doesn't matter what the particle is that you're talking about, beginning at the Big Bang, following the trajectories which are determined by the laws of physics, you will end up with the particles being where they are right now.\nThat's predictive.\nIt's not explanatory.\nA genuine explanation of what's going on is the reason that there's a copper atom at the tip of the nose of Winston Churchill's statue is because we make statues out of things like bronze and brass which contain copper that helps them not corrode away quite so quickly.\nAnd the reason the statue is there at all in the first place is because Winston Churchill helped to fanned the west, the enlightenment, against fascism.\nAnd we like to build statues honouring great leaders like that.\nAnd so that's why there is a copper atom at the tip of the statue in Parliament Square.\nNow this explanation involves things in its full context of culture and choices and war and things that do not reduce to physical forces and fundamental particles.\nThings like culture and the choice to go to war involve abstractions, the reality of abstractions.\nNumbers and not the numerals that represent them, but numbers are abstractions as well.\nAnyone can go online and look up now on Wikipedia what the highest presently known prime number is.\nWe happen to know there is an infinite number of prime numbers, but at any given time we only know of a particular highest prime number.\nNow what is the next highest prime number?.\nWe know it exists, but we haven't found it yet.\nNow in what sense does it exist?.\nWell it doesn't exist in physical reality right now.\nNo one's found it.\nIt hasn't actually been transcribed into a computer anywhere.\nIt hasn't been printed on sheets of paper.\nIt doesn't exist in our physical universe, but it exists.\nIt's an abstraction and it can cause things to actually happen.\nThat prime number actually causes people, human beings, to go out and search for it.\nSo abstractions absolutely exist and can have causal effects on what goes on in physical reality.\nAnd it does not reduceable just to the action of particles and physical forces.\nPerhaps the most controversial of all abstractions is this idea of free will.\nI regard free will as an abstraction.\nIt is just the capacity to choose and sometimes to create knowledge, to freely choose to create knowledge, which wasn't there before.\nBut our minds also are abstractions.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1863"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "15a11024-4acd-4256-a6f7-1a0d307e452e": {"page_content": "So abstractions absolutely exist and can have causal effects on what goes on in physical reality.\nAnd it does not reduceable just to the action of particles and physical forces.\nPerhaps the most controversial of all abstractions is this idea of free will.\nI regard free will as an abstraction.\nIt is just the capacity to choose and sometimes to create knowledge, to freely choose to create knowledge, which wasn't there before.\nBut our minds also are abstractions.\nThey are instantiated presently in the neurons within our brains, but there is no reason in principle that whatever is going on in that brain could not be emulated, simulated in the silicon workings of a computer, which means whatever it is, is not identical to the firings of the neurons in the brain.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that non-physical stuff, or rather stuff that is independent of its physical instantiation.\nIn other words, abstractions can affect physical stuff.\nIt is rarely the case that a description of events in terms of physical interactions is a complete explanation.\nWe often need to invoke really existing abstractions among the most important of which our ideas, chapter 6, the jump to universality.\nIt is a jump to universality that really makes the difference between people by which we mean humans and the possibility of alien intelligence, and perhaps in the future the possibility of artificial general intelligence.\nIt's a jump to universality that makes difference between these kinds of people and all the other living entities that are out there, those entities that cannot generate explanatory knowledge.\nWe have a kind of universality that is explanatory universality.\nBut what is this thing about a jump to universality?.\nWell, firstly, the first kind of universality to have a reason that we know of seems to have been the DNA code.\nIt is a code which cannot just make some limited number of organisms, but rather can explore the space of all possible carbon-based life.\nIt's a strange kind of thing DNA.\nIt can code for bacteria and single-celled amoeba and simple life, but also fission birds, aquatic and air and land of course, mammals and so on, and some things in between like amphibians and reptiles.\nIt can do insects and dinosaurs and everything in between those.\nBasically, if it can be alive and built from amino acids joining together to form proteins, allowing cells to hold water in which are dissolved the chemicals of life, then DNA seems to be able to build it.\nIt's a universal code for life.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=1976"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e420fa9c-d79a-497e-8324-30f26c3c0672": {"page_content": "It can do insects and dinosaurs and everything in between those.\nBasically, if it can be alive and built from amino acids joining together to form proteins, allowing cells to hold water in which are dissolved the chemicals of life, then DNA seems to be able to build it.\nIt's a universal code for life.\nHuman beings have created forms of universality as well.\nTake ways of communicating.\nAt first, pictograms were used, pictures representing words.\nThis system is not universal because if a new word was invented, then a whole new picture was needed.\nSo the existing system could never represent whatever word or concept was needed when a discovery was made, but our present various systems of alphabets, for example, the English alphabet, is universal.\nWords might get longer, or in some cases shorter, but it's not like we're going to run out of letters or words, and number systems like Roman numerals are cumbersome and not so easy to use to represent large numbers or to complex arithmetic efficiently.\nBut the modern Indian Arabic system of 0 to 9 is universal.\nIt's easy to represent whatever number you like and perform with relative e's calculations in that system.\nThe number 0 through to 9, represent any number simply by changing the position of the number 9 units, 9 tens, 9 trillions, and so on, or with a single digit, and then add a few zeros.\nIt's universal.\nThe most important example in technology of universality is the computer, the Turing machine, a device able to do the work of any other device that computed stuff was his invention, including the human mind, by the way, could do the work of that, too.\nSo in principle, the universal computer, the universal Turing machine, could be programmed with intelligence.\nAnd then David Deutsch made a further jump to universality with the notion of a quantum computer, a computer that took advantage of the actual known laws of physics, the quantum laws of physics, to allow for quantum computation.\nA far more efficient way of calculating certain things.\nImportantly, things like quantum systems, which meant that all physical systems could be efficiently simulated by this computer.\nProvably, that includes human brains.\nIt's not a metaphor that the human brain is a computer.\nIt is the literal truth of the matter given the known laws of physics.\nAll of these computers, quantum or classical, rely on error correction, making them digital devices.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=2119"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e01390f1-da6b-4636-8992-f3070a1ac590": {"page_content": "A far more efficient way of calculating certain things.\nImportantly, things like quantum systems, which meant that all physical systems could be efficiently simulated by this computer.\nProvably, that includes human brains.\nIt's not a metaphor that the human brain is a computer.\nIt is the literal truth of the matter given the known laws of physics.\nAll of these computers, quantum or classical, rely on error correction, making them digital devices.\nThe common feature of all these kinds of universality is that they exist in digital systems, but the most important jump to universality in the universe is us, the jump to explanatory universality.\nEven if are the animals can think, and I'm not sure that they can, but if they can, it is about a fixed range of things, whatever is encoded in their genes, but.\nhumans, being people, are universal in their capacity to explain the world.\nThis gives us a special relationship with the laws of physics, because what it is in here going on in our minds comes to resemble what is out there over time with increasing fidelity.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that many systems gradually improve over time, but sometimes, some systems reach a point where there is a sudden increase in capacity, such that the system is now able to do everything in some class of tasks.\nFor example, although pre-humans might have been able to explain something about reality, people today can explain everything that is explicable.\nChapter 7 Artificial Creativity.\nWhat is called artificial intelligence is really just an incremental improvement on the kinds of tasks computers have always done, calculating, extrapolating and doing very little that is surprising.\nA program that is created to learn to play computer games does exactly that.\nIt does not tend to stop and decide to write a poem on a word processor.\nComputers presently do precisely as they are programmed to do.\nThey do not disobey, but people disobey.\nCreativity requires disobedience to go against what was known or acceptable before.\nWhat this tells us is that the programs running on these computers do not create anything new.\nOnly the programmers do.\nA computer that beats a chess grandmaster is impressive, but it is impressive because of raw power and clever programming.\nIt is not creating new knowledge.\nIt is literally calculating among known possibilities.\nIt is not having fun and it is not ever able to do anything else other than that one thing.\nEven a computer programmed with a wide repertoire of abilities is not approaching universality of the explanatory kind.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=2262"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0720f643-344e-43c8-92c6-73ccf4063061": {"page_content": "Only the programmers do.\nA computer that beats a chess grandmaster is impressive, but it is impressive because of raw power and clever programming.\nIt is not creating new knowledge.\nIt is literally calculating among known possibilities.\nIt is not having fun and it is not ever able to do anything else other than that one thing.\nEven a computer programmed with a wide repertoire of abilities is not approaching universality of the explanatory kind.\nUniversality of that kind, actual creativity, actual artificial general intelligence, intelligence like ours has no fixed repertoire.\nWe can invent new tasks unlike a computer.\nWe have problem situations.\nLikewise, evolutionary algorithms are not examples of actual evolution being simulated either.\nA PhD student who designs a robot with legs, or even just simulates one, which then goes on to learn to walk through trial and error, has been given a fixed task, learn to walk.\nAnd it has a criteria for learning to walk, so it is unsurprising that it manages to achieve this modest task eventually.\nBut if it then begins to dance a wall without ever being programmed, that would be a truly impressive display of evolution.\nAnd if it ever then went on to invent beautiful new dances no one had ever seen before, then we should all think we are in the presence of an actual artificial intelligence, an AGI, a person.\nUntil then, all we have are dumb computers.\nImpressive, a Tesla car is impressive, but it is not intelligent.\nWhen a programmer writes a so-called evolutionary algorithm, the thing is they are putting their explanatory knowledge into the code and some of that knowledge has reached.\nWhat this means is that the knowledge itself ends up being able to solve problems, the programmer might not have thought of.\nBut this does not mean the code or the knowledge on certainly not the robot is actually thinking of those problems.\nIt just means that the problem is encountered, and the code was already a solution for that problem.\nThere's a thought experiment in this chapter, which basically goes, a true evolutionary algorithm, if it is to replicate evolution by natural selection, which recall is an iterative process of random mutations, the random being important here.\nAnyways, an actual evolutionary algorithm would not begin with the knowledge of the programmer.\nIt would begin with almost no knowledge.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=2375"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "ec74c4e9-00c6-46fc-bfa4-18d3cf7c2b71": {"page_content": "It just means that the problem is encountered, and the code was already a solution for that problem.\nThere's a thought experiment in this chapter, which basically goes, a true evolutionary algorithm, if it is to replicate evolution by natural selection, which recall is an iterative process of random mutations, the random being important here.\nAnyways, an actual evolutionary algorithm would not begin with the knowledge of the programmer.\nIt would begin with almost no knowledge.\nSo if we took say a robot that could walk, replace its program by a sequence of random numbers and then have a random number generator introduce more random numbers each time the programmer is run, and you keep the same criteria in the program for succeeding as in any usual evolutionary algorithm.\nIf, after some years of doing this, the robot ends up walking at all, then we've refuted the idea that in those other programs, it was all just the programmer's knowledge achieving the task after all and not evolution.\nEvolution is, after all, blind and the mutations are random.\nThis thought experiment also points to the fact.\nWe do not understand how actual evolution by natural selection works in very fine detail either.\nWe know there has been a ramping up of complexity in some species at a time.\nWe cannot say precisely why, because our existing understanding of the theory says that evolution is blind, and as always, the maximum, if you can't program it, you haven't understood it holds.\nIn both cases, evolutionary creativity and explanatory creativity, we do not understand how to program a computer to simulate either of them, which would be to actually create a version of either.\nAnd at least in part, this is because we do not understand how universality in either of these cases is operating and represented in the DNA or the human mind respectively.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is, if you can't program it, you haven't understood it.\nAnd we can program neither the ability to simulate the creation of biological knowledge, nor of explanatory knowledge using our computers.\nIndeed, first we're going to need algorithms for both to be constructed before we can begin to think about actually writing some code, chapter 8, a window on infinity.\nMathematical infinities can produce some seeming paradoxes.\nDavid Hilbert imagined an infinity hotel to push our intuitions about infinity around.\nIf you consider a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and all of them are full, then you might think that, well, if they're all full, there's no room for more patrons.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=2507"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d39cd60d-acde-41a5-8839-7a272e56e2aa": {"page_content": "Mathematical infinities can produce some seeming paradoxes.\nDavid Hilbert imagined an infinity hotel to push our intuitions about infinity around.\nIf you consider a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and all of them are full, then you might think that, well, if they're all full, there's no room for more patrons.\nBut let's think a little more carefully.\nUnlike with a regular finite hotel, if infinity hotel is full, it doesn't actually mean there's no more room.\nFor example, if another guest does arrive, all the management need to do is to announce via the PA system that everyone should move to the next highest number room.\nSo the person in room 1, moves to room 2, the person in room 2, moves to room 3, and so on.\nThat would leave room number 1 unoccupied.\nThere is no last room, so it's not a problem what actually goes on there.\nHowever, infinity hotel can be overwhelmed.\nThis is because room numbering in infinity hotel consists of countable room numbers.\nYou can literally count them, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.\nBut some infinities are uncountable.\nIt was georganto who proved using a diagonal argument.\nHow some infinities are larger than others?.\nThe way a diagonal argument works is this.\nImagine the rooms in infinity hotel were assigned.\nOne of the decimal numbers between 0 and 1, there are clearly an infinite number of those.\nWould we be able to assign one decimal number identically to one of the hotel rooms?.\nImagine we did this at random, so room 1 got assigned to the number 0.5567 and that goes on forever.\nThat ellips there, the three dots means the number continues without end.\nImagine room 2 is 0.542.\nImagine room 3 is 0.971, 4 is 0.509, and you keep on doing this for all the rooms in the hotel.\nWould any decimals be left over?.\nWould some ever go unassigned?.\nWhat about this number?.\nLet's construct it by differing from the number assigned to room number 1 by the first digit.\nSo instead of it being 0.5, let's take the 5 and we'll change it to a 6, but you could pick any number that you like.\nSo far we've got 0.6.\nAnd let's say it differs from the second number by the second digit in some way.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=2638"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "faf66b9a-5cd9-454b-9674-d37fce2b15ae": {"page_content": "Would some ever go unassigned?.\nWhat about this number?.\nLet's construct it by differing from the number assigned to room number 1 by the first digit.\nSo instead of it being 0.5, let's take the 5 and we'll change it to a 6, but you could pick any number that you like.\nSo far we've got 0.6.\nAnd let's say it differs from the second number by the second digit in some way.\nSo instead of 0.54, so instead of the 4 in that second place, we will take that and change it into a 2 arbitrarily.\nAnd in the third number we take the third digit and we change that and so on for all of the numbers assigned to the rooms of the hotel.\nBy the end of this process you will have constructed a number different from any of the numbers assigned to any of the rooms in the hotel.\nAnd so there would be a decimal number that appears between 0 and 1 that is unassigned to any room in the hotel by definition.\nThis is a diagonal argument and you've produced there a proof of an uncountable infinity.\nA kind of infinity that includes numbers not in the infinite sequence that you might otherwise think contains all the possible numbers.\nAnd the curious thing is about counting integers is that no matter where you start you're always unusually close to the beginning because you're always infinitely far from the end.\nThere is no end after all you're infinitely far from infinity.\nAnd in physical reality we like to say we're here at the beginning of infinity and we'll always be at the beginning of infinity and unusually close to it.\nThat's what infinity just happens to be like.\nWe live in a multiverse where we actually can't count the universes.\nThere might be uncountably infinite numbers of universes and therefore copies of each of us that differentiate into infinitely many copies over time.\nAnd we, as the knowledge creators in physical reality, only know something of whether a thing is true or false because the laws of physics allow us to do the knowing, the proving or the calculating or explaining that is possible to do given the physical brains that we have.\nIt is therefore physics that underpins what it is possible for us to claim to know, including claim to prove in mathematics.\nThat some mathematical theorem is true or false may be independent of physics but our fallible human knowledge of that theorem is not independent of physics but bound by it.\nAfter all our brains are physical objects, proof and explanation are physical processes.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=2789"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e297983-1da1-4c54-9244-5775d9bac8c6": {"page_content": "It is therefore physics that underpins what it is possible for us to claim to know, including claim to prove in mathematics.\nThat some mathematical theorem is true or false may be independent of physics but our fallible human knowledge of that theorem is not independent of physics but bound by it.\nAfter all our brains are physical objects, proof and explanation are physical processes.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that we are always at the beginning of infinity so we are still unusually primitive compared to people of the distant future.\nWe are thus lucky compared to our ancestors but terribly unlucky compared to our descendants, chapter 9, optimism.\nAll evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.\nThis is what David Deutsch has called the principle of optimism.\nTo some extent it is a special case of problems are soluble.\nUnless there is a physical law preventing us from solving the problem then the problem can be solved by creating the knowledge needed to solve that problem.\nAmong all the categories of different problems that exist, evil is one kind.\nNot all problems cause suffering or evil only some do.\nSome problems are fun and lead to no harm at all.\nThe problem of how to improve the CGI in a movie is not an evil but it is a soluble problem and fun for some to try and figure out a solution to but problems which do cause suffering.\nEvils are due to our not knowing how to fix that problem.\nYes, serial killers are an evil but so are earthquakes and cyclones.\nIf we knew how to prevent all murder we would do so.\nbut we don't know how.\nAnd the same is true of any other natural disaster and people do evil things because they don't know better.\nMorally they do not know what the right thing is.\nEven if they claim they do know what the right thing is and choose to do otherwise.\nThis is still an example of a lack of knowledge, a lack of actual moral knowledge which would have directed their behavior towards something better.\nSomething they should have done in morality as in physics or mathematics.\nIt is possible to make objective progress.\nWith morality, consider it as that domain concerned with what to do or what to do next or what you should do.\nThere is something objectively better and something objectively worse in the choices before you.\nAnd in the limit there must be something like an optimal choice to make given the values of any particular person.\nAnd those values are themselves claims about what is right.\nAnd they could possibly be wrong and so they can be improved.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=2901"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8df7e51b-e29d-4074-accd-a01806dc10e8": {"page_content": "It is possible to make objective progress.\nWith morality, consider it as that domain concerned with what to do or what to do next or what you should do.\nThere is something objectively better and something objectively worse in the choices before you.\nAnd in the limit there must be something like an optimal choice to make given the values of any particular person.\nAnd those values are themselves claims about what is right.\nAnd they could possibly be wrong and so they can be improved.\nAll of this means that in morality as in physics it is possible to be wrong.\nAnd because there is something to be objectively wrong about, there are true and false claims we can make in these areas.\nWhat we need to do everywhere is to seek out good explanations as they will never come a time where in any domain our knowledge is anything like complete.\nThere can be no end of science and no end of progress.\nFailablism is the claim that we might be wrong about something.\nAnd this is an optimistic way of viewing the world because the capacity to be wrong means the capacity to error correct and hence the possibility of making objective progress.\nAnd that is always our circumstance.\nAt the level of society we want an open and dynamic society, one that has a tradition of criticism.\nA tradition of criticism means we take nothing for granted and attempt to objectively improve our best explanations over time by incremental means.\nThe key thing here is error correction.\nIdentifying areas where we can find them and conjicturing ways to correct those areas.\nWhat is important for our civilization is to continue to preserve the means of error correction.\nOur society, the civilization that continues the Enlightenment tradition has been especially long lived and uniquely long lived in fact preserving error correction means preserving our civilization because that means preserving progress and problem solving.\nFor almost all of geological history on this planet whenever an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth it struck this planet.\nFor the first time ever our planet is in the unique position in the universe so far as we know where asteroids will be repelled by a planet.\nOur planet in the form of our technology created through our knowledgeable use of resources.\nSo whenever anyone says that the chance of civilization being destroyed by an asteroid is 1 in 10,000 in the next 100 years what they mean is completely absent human knowledge and choices.\nWe cannot prophesy the future with any reliability because we cannot predict what people will choose to do in the future and especially we cannot predict what knowledge they will have created.\nThis is as true for climate change and viruses as it is for asteroids.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3064"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3860e501-5022-40ba-9d55-c1d4306a8263": {"page_content": "So whenever anyone says that the chance of civilization being destroyed by an asteroid is 1 in 10,000 in the next 100 years what they mean is completely absent human knowledge and choices.\nWe cannot prophesy the future with any reliability because we cannot predict what people will choose to do in the future and especially we cannot predict what knowledge they will have created.\nThis is as true for climate change and viruses as it is for asteroids.\nIt is never a matter of probability but knowledge.\nProblems are soluble.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge.\nIf we continue to create the wealth needed to fund the solutions to solve our problems we will be in the best position to prepare for the unknown problems of tomorrow, chapter 10.\nA dream of Socrates.\nIn this chapter David explains a epistemology.\nWhat knowledge is and how we create it through a dialogue largely between the god Hermes and Socrates.\nIn this chapter we find that all knowledge is conjectural it is guessed.\nBut that doesn't stop it from being objective, it tracks reality and is independent of what anyone believes to be true about that knowledge.\nAnd so knowledge is not what the ancient say a form of justified true belief.\nAfter all the standard of justifying as true is impossibly higher to begin with and as for believing knowledge, well there are many instances where not only would this not be desired, it would be absurd.\nIt would be wrong to believe as true a flat earth, but constructing the concrete base of your home on the assumption that the ground there is ideally flat is a reasonable one.\nBut you don't need to believe that.\nI also don't need to believe Newton's law of gravity.\nI know it, it's part of my knowledge, but there's no possible way I can justify it to be true.\nIndeed, I know it to be false, yet it is knowledge.\nIt solves a problem.\nWe cannot see what is before our eyes.\nThat we can, although we should endorse the claim that seeing is believing, ignores most of what is interesting in science and elsewhere.\nI cannot see the atoms before my eyes.\nI cannot see the oxygen in the air that I breathe.\nYet I know about atoms and I know about oxygen.\nKnowledge is not primarily about the information our senses provide us with.\nIn fact, it is more about correcting the errors in the misconceptions our senses naively lead us into.\nOur senses lead us astray all the time.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3169"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "99505bb8-e63a-4bc2-bac6-cc3df0951506": {"page_content": "I cannot see the atoms before my eyes.\nI cannot see the oxygen in the air that I breathe.\nYet I know about atoms and I know about oxygen.\nKnowledge is not primarily about the information our senses provide us with.\nIn fact, it is more about correcting the errors in the misconceptions our senses naively lead us into.\nOur senses lead us astray all the time.\nIndeed, our thinking can and anything, therefore, can be doubted.\nJust because we cannot think of a misconception right now about a piece of knowledge that we have does not mean that piece of knowledge is once and for all finally true.\nIt may just mean we have a lack of imagination considered the claim that through any two points of unique straight line can be drawn.\nThis is not actually true.\nLook into that a little, perhaps here, whatever the case.\nIt might be that there is just one central moral maxim.\nThat is, the moral maxim that brings morality to some extent within the sphere of epistemology.\nThe one thing we should never destroy the means of error correction.\nThis idea of should, that's a moral claim.\nThis idea of error correction, that's epistemology.\nAnd further, our latest understanding coming from construct a theory is we might also say that what is possible to error correct and ultimately how physically to correct an error is a matter of physics.\nAnd this is pure speculation on my part, but in a distant future, might there be a physics of morality?.\nWhat I am not trying to say is that we will ever be able to determine by some calculation what to do morally, but what I do mean is that perhaps physics itself will place limits upon us morally, even if it cannot tell us what to do.\nIt will say perhaps what is impossible amongst all of our shoulds, but this is beyond the scope of this chapter, so I'm cheating a little bit.\nThe chapter here also contains our perspective on the so-called so-cratic problem.\nThe problem of what Socrates, the philosopher, really said or thought, what we know of Socrates comes to us filtered through the writings of Plato, and while Socrates seems in some moods to be a fallobilist, Plato wasn't.\nPlato was a genius of course, but also all sorts of wrong on epistemology and political philosophy and morality and mathematics and so on.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3326"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c9910644-c438-41e5-af7b-296815b5b92e": {"page_content": "The chapter here also contains our perspective on the so-called so-cratic problem.\nThe problem of what Socrates, the philosopher, really said or thought, what we know of Socrates comes to us filtered through the writings of Plato, and while Socrates seems in some moods to be a fallobilist, Plato wasn't.\nPlato was a genius of course, but also all sorts of wrong on epistemology and political philosophy and morality and mathematics and so on.\nSo it may be that he simply misunderstood Socrates' teacher, misunderstanding is the natural state of affairs, of course, as proper admonished, it is impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood.\nIn this chapter, David also makes some remarks about the nature of philosophy compared to other academic disciplines.\nIn philosophy, as it appears in universities, there's rather a lot of attention paid to the history of philosophy.\nWhat this or that, ancient or classical philosopher actually said or meant.\nIt should perhaps be more like physics or chemistry or science broadly, where we almost never consult the original source of some idea or theory.\nInstead, we just take the idea itself for granted, and then, make some progress.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that knowledge is not derived from the senses.\nIt is we, people who create it in our minds by a process of guesswork.\nWe guess what is true and criticize those guesses in the light of our observations and other kinds of refutation.\nThe purpose of observation is to decide between theories already guessed.\nChapter 11.\nThe Multiverse.\nThe experiments in quantum theory can only be properly explained by recourse to a physical reality that is tremendously larger than the one we observe.\nThis continues that tradition in science that the size of the reality we inhabit seems to only ever be going in one direction, getting bigger and bigger to include more and more stuff that we don't ever hope to directly observe.\nTo explain the motion of particles we do see in our universe.\nWe need to invoke the existence of entities we do not see.\nThese other entities are behaving like fundamental particles, which means they are fundamental particles, because they affect the fundamental particles we can see.\nThis tremendously larger ensemble of entities, beyond what we can see, we call the multiverse.\nThere are many experiments that are used to illustrate this reality.\nOne is known as the Mark Zender Interferometer.\nHere, two half-silvered mirrors are placed with two regular mirrors.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3408"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d9db2345-8be2-46ca-9d7a-0d6d372de799": {"page_content": "We need to invoke the existence of entities we do not see.\nThese other entities are behaving like fundamental particles, which means they are fundamental particles, because they affect the fundamental particles we can see.\nThis tremendously larger ensemble of entities, beyond what we can see, we call the multiverse.\nThere are many experiments that are used to illustrate this reality.\nOne is known as the Mark Zender Interferometer.\nHere, two half-silvered mirrors are placed with two regular mirrors.\nThe half-silvered mirrors allow photons particles of light to either go through, be transmitted, or bounce off, be reflected.\nAt the first mirror we cannot predict in our universe whether a given photon will be transmitted or reflected.\nWe can only say that it's got a 50% chance of either.\nAt the second half-silvered mirror at the end of the experiment what happens is that the photon is always detected at the arrow that says photon out and never at the nothing out arrow.\nBut why?.\nWhy isn't it 50-50 here as well as it was in the first mirror?.\nThe reason is that in truth at the first mirror what happens is that the photon that interacts with that mirror is a multiverse object.\nThat means it occupies many universes.\nWe are in one universal one group of universes so can only detect it either going along x or y even though in truth it does go along both.\nWe know this is true because only if that photon takes both paths, the one we see and the one we do not see, can we explain how the two photons interfere at the second mirror and recombine there causing it to always go in only one of those directions rather than both.\nThis is the only explanation.\nSomething is interfering with the photon at the second mirror and that something is its counterpart in the other universe if we did not live in a multiverse.\nIf our universe did not consist of many things that we do not observe we should expect a 50-50 split has at the first mirror.\nWhat is happening at that first mirror is that the photon differentiates into two groups and thus so do the universes and the observers in those universes.\nThis is going on all the time.\nAll objects we can see are multi-versal objects.\nThey exist in the universe we observe and many others we do not sometimes would slight or even very great variations.\nAnd the truth is deeper still.\nWhat we observe is a universe but it is a universe of objects that have fungible instances.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3531"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "db07e2fb-037e-4989-98db-d6989d11a661": {"page_content": "What is happening at that first mirror is that the photon differentiates into two groups and thus so do the universes and the observers in those universes.\nThis is going on all the time.\nAll objects we can see are multi-versal objects.\nThey exist in the universe we observe and many others we do not sometimes would slight or even very great variations.\nAnd the truth is deeper still.\nWhat we observe is a universe but it is a universe of objects that have fungible instances.\nPerfectly identical instances in the same place at the same time that occupy different universes.\nSo they are different in that sense because they could potentially partition themselves into universes which cease to be fungible.\nThe theory of quantum computation requires that a multiverse exists because it is otherwise impossible to explain what quantum computers are in principle and one day will be in practice capable of doing.\nNamely a quantum computer would be able to perform calculations that a computer even the size of our entire universe could not possibly do and it can only do this because it the quantum computer can take advantage of computing power in other universes using interference.\nWe cannot explain how a quantum computer does what it does in retrospect by appealing to a single classical history.\nWe have to invoke once more the existence of histories we observers did not occupy.\nThis again is testament to physical reality being more than just a single classical universe and as unpalatable as it might be to some people this means we're in a multiverse.\nMany semi-parallel at times barely interacting and sometimes not interacting universes.\nA person on this view in the multiverse is a channel of information flow along which knowledge grows.\nThis is unique in the universe and this knowledge may turn out to be among some of the longest persisting structures in the multiverse.\nFor more on all of this see my now seven part and indeed more than seven hours series on the multiverse right here and see also this the nexus video for more on what the philosophy of people and the philosophy of self might be in the multiverse.\nMy key takeaway here is that the physical universe is tremendously larger than what we can ever hope to observe.\nWe call the approximately autonomous regions closed off from us other universes and together with our own universe we call the entire ensemble the multiverse chapter 12.\nA physicist's history of bad philosophy.\nA reason why the Everett or quantum multiverse is not more widely known taught or even taken seriously by actual practicing quantum physicists is bad philosophy.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3697"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "747532eb-2948-4075-a668-03d8646f93fc": {"page_content": "My key takeaway here is that the physical universe is tremendously larger than what we can ever hope to observe.\nWe call the approximately autonomous regions closed off from us other universes and together with our own universe we call the entire ensemble the multiverse chapter 12.\nA physicist's history of bad philosophy.\nA reason why the Everett or quantum multiverse is not more widely known taught or even taken seriously by actual practicing quantum physicists is bad philosophy.\nThere was a retreat into some sort of relativism and instrumentalism by physicists in the early 20th century.\nInstrumentalism is a fancy word for this idea of shut up and calculate.\nIt is the idea that science probably considered it is simply about being able to predict the outcome of experiments rather than actually understand and hence be able to explain what is really going on in reality.\nAnyways this chapter is about how the equations of quantum theory describe particles as seeming to be in multiple places simultaneously and having multiple velocities simultaneously.\nSo to take the theory and the formalism literally as a description of reality particles do have those properties however when you go to observe any single particle we find it in a single place.\nSo how do we square this?.\nThe theory is saying one thing the particle has multiple positions at the same time and our observation the particle only has one position at a time.\nWell if you're a physicist struggling to understand all this in the early 20th century you might well throw your hands up in the air and say all the possibilities except for the one we observe collapse or disappear upon the act of observation.\nThis seems to put the observer the act of observation right in the center of fundamental physics.\nObservation is doing something fundamental to the physical theory and that has led to all sorts of nonsense claims ever since being made about quantum theory bringing in consciousness and mind to the quantum realm.\nThis idea that observation destroys all the positions a particle was occupying except for one is known as the measurement problem.\nHow it actually happens no one could say and people gave up for a time trying to really find out they just accepted it.\nAll of this was at least in large part motivated by bad philosophy.\nThis is philosophy that's not merely false but it actively prevents the growth of knowledge.\nThe idea that science should only be about predicting the outcome of experiments acts to prevent us from improving actual explanations of reality.\nAfter all it rules out explanation is even being a part of science in the first place but bad philosophy is not only affected physics.\nit's also infected some other sciences or what should be sciences like psychology.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3793"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "07cad76c-1a0f-4f0b-90a5-f7e5e453f233": {"page_content": "All of this was at least in large part motivated by bad philosophy.\nThis is philosophy that's not merely false but it actively prevents the growth of knowledge.\nThe idea that science should only be about predicting the outcome of experiments acts to prevent us from improving actual explanations of reality.\nAfter all it rules out explanation is even being a part of science in the first place but bad philosophy is not only affected physics.\nit's also infected some other sciences or what should be sciences like psychology.\nBehaviorism in psychology is instrumentalism as applied to that subject and says that because we cannot directly observe minds we can only observe human behavior and trends in human behavior then this serves as a proxy for understanding why people do what they do.\nThis denies of a having good explanations of the human mind consider that an antidepressant may make a person objectively happier or it may simply lower their standards for what they think of as happiness.\nPresently there is no good explanation and no experiment that can distinguish these two possibilities.\nHappiness could be a state of continually solving your problems and when you are constantly thwarted in solving your problems then your happiness turns to unhappiness.\nBut behaviorism looks at behaviors including people self-reporting that's a behavior talking that indicate more or less happiness without ever wondering what the causal link between what it's actually going on in the mind in terms of thoughts and ideas and what causes behaviors.\nWe call this explanation less science.\nIt might all look like real science is going on, experiments might be done, papers written, graphs with trend lines produced but if we cannot ever say why something or other constitutes happiness in the first place if we do not have an explanation of what a particular mental state is at the level of ideas in the mind then we cannot hope to maximize it let alone treat deficiencies of it.\nBad philosophy continues through to today.\nRelivism is a form of bad philosophy that denies the possibility of objective knowledge and objective truth.\nIt really took off.\nSoon after Wittgenstein published his major works, Wittgenstein thought most of philosophy reduced to puzzles and it was all just about language that people were using rather than actual philosophical problems.\nWittgenstein is still extremely popular today.\nMany people think that philosophy is just about argumentation rather than solving particular philosophical problems.\nReducing every single problem to nothing but a puzzle in language is quite a dangerous route to go down and it breeds a form of relativism which we inherit today in certain kinds of workism.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=3947"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "47193a2b-ac7f-425c-9cb3-3a4f64c25464": {"page_content": "Wittgenstein is still extremely popular today.\nMany people think that philosophy is just about argumentation rather than solving particular philosophical problems.\nReducing every single problem to nothing but a puzzle in language is quite a dangerous route to go down and it breeds a form of relativism which we inherit today in certain kinds of workism.\nMy key idea from this chapter is that instrumentalism is the idea that the purpose of science is to predict the outcome of experiments.\nThis constitutes a kind of bad philosophy which we define as philosophy which actively prevents the growth of knowledge by denying reality or truth or the possibility of finding good explanations.\nChapter 13 Choices When people have a choice before them, it is often not a case that pure logic and therefore any mathematical process of objectively weighing options is going to lead them to the best choice.\nInstead what people actually do, both individually and even when acting as part of a group, is to creatively conjecture new options no one had on the table before.\nSo it cannot be a process of weighing existing options because the existing options can always be changed.\nSocial choice theory is an attempt to turn decision-making by people into a purely logical exercise to make it perfectly rational.\nThe motivation I suppose was a noble one. Take out the messy emotions and subjective feelings from the issue and look simply at the facts and apply some rigorous rational mathematical framework to the situation and see which choices actually calculated to be best.\nThe problem with this is that all such schemes for trying to turn decision-making into a branch of mathematics encounters what are known as no-go theorems, paradoxes and things that are simply illogical.\nOne of the most famous of these discussed in the book is known as arrows theorem.\nThis theorem is about how a group might come to a consensus.\nArrow begins with a set of axioms that any such group would want to adhere to if they're going to make a rational choice.\nThese uncontroversial axioms, the starting points, will be things like, well if a group is going to be unanimous on a particular decision, then that decision should be whatever the unanimous vote happens to be.\nLogical.\nAnother axiom is called the no-dictator axiom.\nOne person cannot be said to represent the whole group unless everyone already agrees and consult the book for the others or look up arrows theorem.\nThese axioms are completely uncontroversial.\nYou'd want to be able to agree with them.\nHere's the problem.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4082"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "812ff5df-a3a9-4b2a-80c0-cb0eab4678ce": {"page_content": "Logical.\nAnother axiom is called the no-dictator axiom.\nOne person cannot be said to represent the whole group unless everyone already agrees and consult the book for the others or look up arrows theorem.\nThese axioms are completely uncontroversial.\nYou'd want to be able to agree with them.\nHere's the problem.\nWhat arrows showed is that the uncontroversial axioms, despite being perfectly reasonable, are also inconsistent logically with one another.\nIn other words, they cannot all be satisfied simultaneously.\nThis is a deep problem, a fatal blow to the idea that decision-making can always be a perfectly logical exercise.\nSo what do we do?.\nDo we just give up on logic?.\nNo.\nWhat we do in these cases, whether individually or as a group, is to create new options and have a good explanation either for some existing option or the new one.\nWe then choose among our options by choosing among the explanations and criticizing and hence refuting the other options.\nThis is actually how decision-making works.\nIt's not a process of weighing, but criticizing.\nTruly objective decision-making, more resembles objective science.\nWe have some theories or policies at the level of society, and we seek to refute all of them except for one ideally.\nAnd that one that goes unrefuted, that survives the critical process, that's the one we accept as our best explanation or as our best policy.\nOr if none of them happen to be satisfactory, what do we do?.\nWe use our creativity as people to invent a better theory or policy.\nDemocracies, are systems of government for making decisions.\nBut the quality of a democracy is to be judged not by whether the best ruler is installed and to what extent this is isomorphic with the era that science is about finding the once and for all true theory.\nInstead, what democracy is, is a system for removing rulers and policies easily without violence.\nThat is the standard by which we judge democracy and its institutions broadly.\nThis also means that the plurality voting system is the best system of voting.\nBecause it means a ruler can be more easily removed if they're a bad ruler.\nThis is unlike in any preferential voting system, where that bad ruler can form a coalition and get preferences to keep themselves in power.\nThe more parties there are, the more coalitions can form, and this means deals are done to keep themselves in power, even when the voters no longer want those elected officials in office.\nPoliticians like preferential voting systems for this reason.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4231"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "cd25daa9-82b6-4068-b1f6-f1566038acb9": {"page_content": "Because it means a ruler can be more easily removed if they're a bad ruler.\nThis is unlike in any preferential voting system, where that bad ruler can form a coalition and get preferences to keep themselves in power.\nThe more parties there are, the more coalitions can form, and this means deals are done to keep themselves in power, even when the voters no longer want those elected officials in office.\nPoliticians like preferential voting systems for this reason.\nAnd on this point, compromise has an undeservedly good reputation.\nWhat a compromise is, is a theory or a policy that wasn't anyone's first choice in the first place.\nSo when it fails, as inevitably it often will, everyone involved in the compromise can turn around and say, well that's not what I ever wanted anyway, and therefore no one actually learns anything when the compromise fails.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that making a choice is about choosing the best explanation.\nWhen there are options before you, the only rational thing to do is to criticize them in the hope that all but one of them are refuted.\nIf none are satisfactory, then we use our creativity to come up with a better option.\nAnd unless there's a threat of violence, don't compromise, chapter 14.\nWhy are flowers beautiful?.\nAesthetics, art, music, and beauty are all domains of objective knowledge.\nYes, people have subjective preferences.\nNo one denies this, but this is not to say that there is no such thing as one particular thing in truth, in reality, actually being more beautiful than another.\nThere are objective differences, not merely between noise and music, but between music of different epochs, the proverbial cave people banging on drums and modern music today, or cave art and modern 3D computer generated art.\nCave people would have liked to know how to paint better, and there really is a better.\nThey would like to have made objective progress in their art and storytelling.\nThe waste paper basket as we like to say of the musician and the composer fills up over time because they are trying to reach an objective standard, trying to make something sound better, and not merely to them, but to everyone and in actual truth.\nSome sounds simply are more harmonious, more beautiful than other combinations of sounds.\nThe fact that today we cannot rank order all musicians that have ever existed from worst to best in a way that everyone would agree with does not mean there are no objective standards.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4350"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3a5056a4-31e9-4b17-b707-8b0583797585": {"page_content": "Some sounds simply are more harmonious, more beautiful than other combinations of sounds.\nThe fact that today we cannot rank order all musicians that have ever existed from worst to best in a way that everyone would agree with does not mean there are no objective standards.\nIt just means that we don't know much about those objective standards yet, and those standards are sometimes swamped by, yes, the subjective taste of people, but the existence of subjective taste does not rule out the existence of real objective standards in music and elsewhere in art and aesthetics.\nBeauty, if we think of it as attractiveness, is something humans have tried to produce and surround themselves with since time immemorial, and art pieces objectively beautiful because people are attracted to it by the measure that people return to it over and over again in the gallery.\nNot all of what is called art does this.\nSome art rejects the notion of beauty altogether and exists rather to provoke or make a political point, but again this rejection of beauty is likewise no proof that objective beauty and the capacity for something to be more or less attractive does not exist.\nThe existence of creationism doesn't show that there's a problem with evolution by natural selection, likewise the museum of modern art with its do-shamp urinals doesn't prove that the classical art gallery does not contain objectively better art.\nFlowers are attractive.\nInsects are attracted to flowers, but so are people.\nWhatever it is that flowers are doing and creating beauty in nature, it acts to attract both insects and people.\nSomething needs to be explained here.\nThere must be some objective standard of beauty operating even if we cannot in fine detail say exactly what it is, but it seems to be the case.\nThat flowers are beautiful because they needed a way to signal across diverse species.\nInsects co-evolved with flowers and so the flowers evolved to be beautiful and we humans seek out objective beauty also, so we find flowers beautiful because they are actually in reality beautiful.\nIt's not just our opinion.\nEvolution design them that way to attract insects.\nPeople enjoy objective beauty because we are trying to signal across the wide gap between us and other humans.\nBetween one human person and another, there is a vast gap in preferences and knowledge and more besides the differences between one person and another, alike the differences between species.\nSo if we are to signal to one another, what we like, we will learn to appreciate objective beauty too and so we will create things more and more beautiful.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4485"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c574ffc7-8707-478a-8792-1fc83d52723e": {"page_content": "Evolution design them that way to attract insects.\nPeople enjoy objective beauty because we are trying to signal across the wide gap between us and other humans.\nBetween one human person and another, there is a vast gap in preferences and knowledge and more besides the differences between one person and another, alike the differences between species.\nSo if we are to signal to one another, what we like, we will learn to appreciate objective beauty too and so we will create things more and more beautiful.\nThis signaling to one another and attracting one another to our creative output is what we're all about.\nThe best way to do this is by finding those objective standards of beauty, just as flowers did.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter, there is a parochial kind of beauty.\nWe've all got our own tastes and preferences, yes, but there are also objective standards for beauty, some of which have evolved in flowers and many of which we have only just begun to discover through our creative and artistic endeavors, Chapter 15.\nThe evolution of culture.\nThis chapter contains some really new and deep insights about memes.\nThe concept of a meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and is the abstract analog of a gene.\nIn other words, it's a replicator of a kind.\nIt contains knowledge, certainly information, and can be combined in complex ways to direct a behaviour.\nMoreover, memes evolve.\nIn short, memes are a kind of idea, a kind of idea that persists, but may also change gradually over time.\nCultures consist of many memes.\nAnd Deutsch's deep insight in this chapter is that there are important differences between cultures in terms of their memes.\nDeutsch refines this notion to be about dynamic and static societies.\nWhy is it that so many societies have gone extinct, especially given that the brains of people in the past were anatomically almost indistinguishable from the ones we have today?.\nThey, those primitive people, had the capacity to be creative.\nSo why weren't they?.\nWell, because they used their creativity to keep things the same, something that I'll return to in the next chapter.\nIdeas that people have, which tend to keep a society the same, or in other words, actively prevent the growth of knowledge, are called anti-rational memes.\nThese are not merely irrational ideas, which might be thought of as bad ideas.\nBut rather, anti-rational memes are the ones which say, you may not criticise this thing.\nThey disable the person's critical faculties.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4623"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "93ca7310-d8d2-4153-b55a-28028c400a5a": {"page_content": "Ideas that people have, which tend to keep a society the same, or in other words, actively prevent the growth of knowledge, are called anti-rational memes.\nThese are not merely irrational ideas, which might be thought of as bad ideas.\nBut rather, anti-rational memes are the ones which say, you may not criticise this thing.\nThey disable the person's critical faculties.\nSo you can imagine all sorts of evil notions, like those that say, if you do raise an objection to anything in this holy book, you can be put to death.\nThis acts to prevent anyone from criticizing the holy book, and in time it stops them even being able to think of criticisms.\nIt is an anti-rational meme, and it can get replicated as parents teach their children that and their children teach their children and so on.\nBut a rational meme is one ritual lies on a person's critical faculties to get itself replicated in the first place.\nA person tries to criticise the idea, but fails to find any valid criticism.\nAnd so they pass it on because they think, that's a good idea.\nImplicitly, they think, I couldn't refute it.\nSo I'm going to regard this as part of my knowledge, and I'm going to spread it out into the world.\nTheories in science are like this, so are musical tunes and jokes.\nThe underlying idea gets passed on, even if it's not verbatim.\nA culture is a set of ideas or memes that cause the people in that culture to behave in more or less similar ways, but there is an important way to distinguish between two extreme kinds of society.\nThe two extremes are a static society.\nThis is the one that is ruled by anti-rational memes for the most part.\nIn such a society, centuries and millennia can pass, and almost nothing changes.\nBut a dynamic society, a society like ours, is ruled by rational memes, where the anti-rational memes have not quite been eliminated, but minimized to a large extent.\nIt is one where the thing that stays the same is change.\nThe enlightenment is the longest surviving example of a society where it is dynamic, because there exists this overarching anti-rational meme, a rational meme in other words, but a special kind of rational meme that guards against the anti-rational kind.\nAnd that meme is the traditions of criticism or the tradition of criticism, if you like.\nThe underlying idea of which is this, it's all up for grabs, and you can criticize anything.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4746"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c0cf9b59-14b9-486b-8425-d4e9a1b97fde": {"page_content": "It is one where the thing that stays the same is change.\nThe enlightenment is the longest surviving example of a society where it is dynamic, because there exists this overarching anti-rational meme, a rational meme in other words, but a special kind of rational meme that guards against the anti-rational kind.\nAnd that meme is the traditions of criticism or the tradition of criticism, if you like.\nThe underlying idea of which is this, it's all up for grabs, and you can criticize anything.\nFree speech and institutions protecting free speech and more besides to protect the means of progress.\nNow, there is no perfect example of either a static society, something that really doesn't change at all over time, even the near static societies do change, but very, very gradually.\nAnd even our culture, it's not a perfect example of a dynamic society.\nThere are threats, even now, that slow down progress.\nThe creeping workism and so on, and kinds of political correctness that cause people to not criticize ideas for fear of offending someone or suffering legal action.\nBut in the main, our society is a very robust and good example of a dynamic society.\nWe are the best society to have ever existed.\nPrimitive societies were unimaginably bad.\nWe are always at the beginning of infinity, so even our society is transitioning and because of creativity, which is error prone, we will always be transitioning to something even more dynamic, like he take away from this chapter.\nDynamic societies like ours value criticism, and protect our ability to correct errors in our ideas through the propagation of rational memes.\nThis stands in stark contrast to static societies where anti-rational memes have taken hold, disabled the holders' critical faculties and make people reluctant to criticize, and therefore improve existing ideas in the culture.\nChapter 16.\nThe evolution of creativity.\nHumans are creative entities.\nOur defining feature is that we can create explanatory knowledge.\nAny other people in the universe, be they aliens or artificial general intelligence, will be able to explain their environment.\nSo why is it then that for most of human history, most humans, living in primitive societies, fail to do much good explaining.\nHence, why did they fail to make much progress?.\nThe enlightenment began around 1700 or maybe a little bit before, and the Industrial Revolution began to happen just a little bit later than that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4860"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5cbf30cf-0646-4a71-8ce9-97c3b8afb472": {"page_content": "Any other people in the universe, be they aliens or artificial general intelligence, will be able to explain their environment.\nSo why is it then that for most of human history, most humans, living in primitive societies, fail to do much good explaining.\nHence, why did they fail to make much progress?.\nThe enlightenment began around 1700 or maybe a little bit before, and the Industrial Revolution began to happen just a little bit later than that.\nBut why did neither of these things happen a thousand, or even 10,000 years earlier, if people had the same capacity for thinking and creativity as the people then did, and the people today have?.\nThe answer is that the creativity they did have was being used to keep things static the same and unchanging.\nIn a static society, the way to stand out as a good person and get a mate or get respect or gain authority and so on would be to enact the memes of that society, the culture ever more strictly, to be especially static in your outlook, to be especially obedient and uncreative, the replication of a meme takes creativity.\nIt cannot be copied directly because we do not have direct access to each other's minds, and what we do when we copy a meme, or rather replicate it, is to replicate it's meaning.\nThat's the whole content of a meme, it's meaning.\nSome thinkers on the topic, for example, the wonderful Susan Blackmore who has popularised the field of memetics as much as anyone, has suggested meme replication occurs by imitation.\nBut David Deutsch explains that this is not possible because we do not have direct access to the memes, the ideas in people's minds or brains in order to do this.\nInstead, what actually happens is we observe behaviour, and we don't directly copy that either.\nIt certainly looks as if we are copying, but it can't be that.\nAfter all, let's imagine a simple example, a child learning to wave back at someone.\nIf it was all about copying that behaviour, would that mean going to stand where the other person is and wave from that exact location back towards where the child was previously standing?.\nWould it mean the child getting a stool and standing on it so their hand is the same height as the person waving at them?.\nWould it mean putting a little bit of artificial hair on their arm so their arm was being copied somewhat more faithfully from the adult?.\nWhat exactly is being copied or imitated in this situation?.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=4980"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8e1c5545-550c-4bd6-9ca4-8239ab2594a0": {"page_content": "Would it mean the child getting a stool and standing on it so their hand is the same height as the person waving at them?.\nWould it mean putting a little bit of artificial hair on their arm so their arm was being copied somewhat more faithfully from the adult?.\nWhat exactly is being copied or imitated in this situation?.\nWell, David relates the story of how Popper would begin his lectures on the philosophy of science with one word.\nHe'd say to the students, observe, and then just wait.\nEventually, one of them would ask what they were supposed to be observing.\nWell, exactly.\nYou need a theory first of what to observe and how before you can begin observing.\nThis was perhaps one of Popper's deepest insights.\nObservation is theory laden, and so when we are trying to replicate a meme, we have to come at that situation with a theory to begin with.\nDavid imports this whole notion into the field of memetics.\nIt cannot be straightforward imitation of behaviour or copying.\nNo, rather the child or anyone else seeking to uncover what someone else is thinking to replicate their meme, so to speak, has to guess what is true.\nAnd wait for feedback from the world.\nA child might, very well, upon being waved at, run over towards a person and need to be corrected at some point by a parent who helps them learn.\nNow, you don't need to run over there when someone waves at you.\nYou can just stand here and move your hand or something like that.\nAnyway, the child guesses what is correct and eventually they get it.\nApes and parrots can ape and parrots, but they cannot construct knowledge like humans can.\nAlthough they've got memes, the repertoire of their memes is fixed by their genes, but their brains are sufficiently evolved so that they can change the sequence of the memes that are fixed in many different ways.\nIt's rather like they've got 100 pieces of a puzzle which can be arranged in perhaps thousands of different ways to do different things.\nSo from the outside, it kind of looks a little like they're creating knowledge.\nHowever, the repertoire is fixed.\nThe number of possible combinations is fixed.\nThis explanation for how lower animals, like apes, imitate behaviors, like sounds and even signed languages, called behavior passing and so it kind of looks like what we're doing, our thinking, our creativity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=5111"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2dbf330b-c3b3-458f-88d7-e68d0bfce0bd": {"page_content": "It's rather like they've got 100 pieces of a puzzle which can be arranged in perhaps thousands of different ways to do different things.\nSo from the outside, it kind of looks a little like they're creating knowledge.\nHowever, the repertoire is fixed.\nThe number of possible combinations is fixed.\nThis explanation for how lower animals, like apes, imitate behaviors, like sounds and even signed languages, called behavior passing and so it kind of looks like what we're doing, our thinking, our creativity.\nIt was discovered by the animal behavior theorists Richard Byrne and it requires no actual creativity on the part of the ape or the parrot of the explanatory type, but humans are different.\nWe invent new puzzle pieces all the time and so our repertoire of possible behaviors is unbounded.\nIt is not fixed by genetics.\nWe flew that coupe long ago.\nNow, most evolution goes on outside the genes.\nGenetic evolution was just a prelude.\nMost of the rest of the history of evolution in our universe will be about the evolution of names.\nMy key takeaway from this chapter is that for most of human history, people were using their creativity in order to simply keep things the same.\nAnd they were doing this because the way to be more accepted in a static society is to be more conformist, to be more obedient.\nBut in a dynamic society, the way to stand out is to innovate and to be creative.\nChapter 17, Unsustainable.\nStatic societies reveal an important truth.\nIf criticism is not valued by a society, it will go extinct.\nThe parable of the Easter Islanders is salient here.\nThey built great monuments for no more purpose than appeasing their superstitions.\nAs whatever tragedy, disease or famine or some other natural disaster fulfill them, the rate of their monument building increased.\nThey failed to try something new to criticise the way things were done.\nSo they went extinct.\nOver and over again, lost civilizations are testament to not solving their problems in time.\nWe are unique because we value criticism, but it is a tradition of criticism.\nAnd so we have to be careful that the institutions that preserve that tradition likewise are protected.\nSo we are making progress fast and slow in fits and starts, and it has been unrelenting for a time, but it's not inevitable.\nWe need resources to build it, energy to fuel it, David Attenborough and other naturalists have gifted the world with a deep misconception over many decades now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=5231"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e894e642-75fb-44a1-9ede-d1457abc7f83": {"page_content": "We are unique because we value criticism, but it is a tradition of criticism.\nAnd so we have to be careful that the institutions that preserve that tradition likewise are protected.\nSo we are making progress fast and slow in fits and starts, and it has been unrelenting for a time, but it's not inevitable.\nWe need resources to build it, energy to fuel it, David Attenborough and other naturalists have gifted the world with a deep misconception over many decades now.\nAnd that misconception is that something like the tragedy of Easter Island is an example of there having consumed the resources there in an unsustainable way.\nBut this is false.\nIt is false because the island could never sustain them in the first place.\nThe island was always a death trap.\nIt had not enough trees that grew not fast enough.\nIt had insufficient arable land, two little drinking water, storms hit them, drought hit them, what they had of crops routinely destroyed by weather or pests.\nBacteria and worse got into their water supply when it did rain.\nIt was a hellhole.\nAnd if they knew how to sail elsewhere to somewhere with more resources, more pleasant, they would have done so.\nOr if they knew how to use the resource already there, perhaps more importantly, they would have survived.\nNothing is a resource, after all, until the knowledge of how to use it as such is discovered.\nResources are plentiful.\nThe earth cannot sustain us into the indefinite future.\nThe lesson of Easter Island is that we need to make progress faster.\nWe need more energy and cheap energy, not less.\nWe should be optimistic that problems are soluble.\nThere are many, many problems ahead of us.\nClimate change is one of them.\nIf we want to survive it or whatever we eventually will discover is why worse than climate change, we must have more wealth.\nWealth we define as the repertoire of physical transformations, we are capable of making.\nTo have more wealth, we should be seeking out more and cheaper resources and exploiting them.\nIf we have insufficient wealth, when the proverbial asteroid or even worse virus eventually does arrive, we will not be sustained by anything else but our wealth.\nAll we've got is our knowledge.\nThat unique capacity that the laws of physics allows in us to understand anything out there in the universe and thus solve any problem we try to.\nThroughout the decades, people have drawn incorrect guesses about the future, which we call prophecies that suggest doom is coming.\nThey say the world is entering a new ice age.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=5341"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0aa38239-9772-454e-8652-c9a9896323b9": {"page_content": "All we've got is our knowledge.\nThat unique capacity that the laws of physics allows in us to understand anything out there in the universe and thus solve any problem we try to.\nThroughout the decades, people have drawn incorrect guesses about the future, which we call prophecies that suggest doom is coming.\nThey say the world is entering a new ice age.\nPresently we are told we're entering a period of warming.\nWhile we should take seriously the explanations of the experts on these matters when they are brought to us, we should also keep in mind that slowing progress and reducing wealth by concentrating it in the hands of authorities is not a solution.\nIt does not create rapid knowledge growth and progress.\nTo solve a problem, we need knowledge and that knowledge could come from anywhere.\nIt could come from a child presently struggling to learn to read in an impoverished country somewhere if only they had very cheap electricity and semiconductors.\nThat child could be interacting on the web with people learning to read far more rapidly and eventually learning the physics needed for him or her to solve the problem of climate change quickly and efficiently.\nPerhaps by uncovering what it takes to make electricity from fusion reactors more cheaply.\nWe cannot know that this is not the case.\nWho knows what resources I yet to be discovered and which will make many of our present political discussions moot in light of a new fuel source or way to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.\nIt was once said that the only way for a colour television to work was with phosphores and the red phosphorequired European.\nSupplies were fine not on earth and so it was a mathematical certainty that colour television would eventually be a thing of the past once the European was consumed.\nBut no one now uses European for the production of red pixels on screens.\nWe use LCD technology.\nThe lesson here should not be lost on anyone.\nThe growth of knowledge is unpredictable and so we should have a start of optimism with regards to what people can actually achieve when left to their own creative capacity to learn and discover.\nA key takeaway from this chapter is that nothing is a resource until the knowledge of why it is has been discovered.\nIt is only knowledge that changes rocks into pure metals or uranium ore into electricity.\nChapter 18.\nThe beginning.\nIt is sometimes claimed we are near the end of discovering everything that is to be discovered.\nBut not merely as the human mind finite in scope, but the very laws of physics themselves have almost all been discovered.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=5480"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2dea8152-2c57-49d5-bf74-eeefb284fb78": {"page_content": "A key takeaway from this chapter is that nothing is a resource until the knowledge of why it is has been discovered.\nIt is only knowledge that changes rocks into pure metals or uranium ore into electricity.\nChapter 18.\nThe beginning.\nIt is sometimes claimed we are near the end of discovering everything that is to be discovered.\nBut not merely as the human mind finite in scope, but the very laws of physics themselves have almost all been discovered.\nThis was even the prevailing view under Newtonian physics at the end of the 19th century.\nIt was thought Newton was lucky to have uncovered the laws of physics.\nEinstein and his relativity and Einstein and his quantum theory and the quantum theory of lots of other people showed that impulse wrong.\nBut it is not gone away.\nJohn Horgen wrote a book called The End of Science which captures the mood of many scientists and even physicists.\nThere isn't much more to know on this view.\nPeople talk about a final theory of everything, where the four known forces are unified.\nAnd then we will have an equation for printing on a T-shirt that will be able to predict everything that happens anywhere forever, in principle.\nOr once we have a complete understanding of neuroscience, then we will have a complete understanding of the human mind.\nOnce we have a complete understanding of genetics, then biology will almost be done.\nBut all of this is terribly pessimistic.\nIt says that progress must come to an end in this place or that place and perhaps altogether.\nIt also says we aren't aeroprome.\nBut our fallibility means that we will never have perfect knowledge.\nEra is simply a part of us and our knowledge.\nAnd this is wonderful.\nIt means error correction must go on forever.\nIt means there can be no final theory and so progress has no war before it, beyond which no further discovery is possible.\nWe are instead just scratching the surface and always will be.\nShould we find a way to unify gravity with the three fundamental forces?.\nWe can ask why is G the value it is?.\nWhy does it have that strength?.\nWhy is that law the one that operates in our universe and not something else?.\nWhat is the theory that explains the physics we have discovered?.\nWe will want to go deeper, other actually other universes with other physical laws.\nIn what sense were other laws even possible?.\nIf they are possible, where are they?.\nIf not possible, why not?.\nOur future understandings of deeper reality are still before us.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=5587"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "299bf235-3d2f-4de1-9354-ed929af5c7e9": {"page_content": "Why does it have that strength?.\nWhy is that law the one that operates in our universe and not something else?.\nWhat is the theory that explains the physics we have discovered?.\nWe will want to go deeper, other actually other universes with other physical laws.\nIn what sense were other laws even possible?.\nIf they are possible, where are they?.\nIf not possible, why not?.\nOur future understandings of deeper reality are still before us.\nBut we can rule out some bad ideas now.\nFor example, quantum theory is not fully understood, whatever that can mean, fully.\nThere can be no fully.\nNevertheless, some people have postulated that because we live in a multiverse, we might be a mortal.\nThis is on the theory that should you die in this universe that you occupy, you persist in the others.\nAnd the problem with this is, well, we don't understand the place of consciousness in the multiverse exactly for a start and besides, if you are a person who did not did not just commit quantum suicide or just plain old suicide.\nWhy should you then suddenly become the person that did?.\nA person that survives quantum suicide presumably does so because they never actually did commit suicide.\nThat person who actually did commit suicide, they're no longer part of this strange thought experiment.\nWe don't know enough.\nWe can also rule out living in a matrix or Plato's cave or being deceived by Descartes demon or that we are simply dreaming reality into existence.\nThe most recent famous example that's logical to the equivalent to all of these is of course, bostrom simulation argument, which says that in the future, people will build super computers on which whole universes or even whole multiverses will be simulator.\nAnd those will that number the number of base realities, presumably, that's just one of those.\nSo we should presume to be in a simulation.\nWe can become superhuman.\nWe already are compared to the ancients and those people drawing in caves.\nWe can go and extending our lives and extending our reach.\nMy key takeaway for this chapter is a special one.\nIt's simply quoting the last three sentences of the book.\nQuote, there is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress or of surviving in the long run.\nAnd that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism.\nWhat lies ahead of us in any case is infinity.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=5740"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "1d0ea6d4-abab-408e-8507-17a450698582": {"page_content": "We already are compared to the ancients and those people drawing in caves.\nWe can go and extending our lives and extending our reach.\nMy key takeaway for this chapter is a special one.\nIt's simply quoting the last three sentences of the book.\nQuote, there is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress or of surviving in the long run.\nAnd that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism.\nWhat lies ahead of us in any case is infinity.\nAll we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or of knowledge, right or wrong, death or life.\nEnd quote.\nWell, there we go.\nThat is my omnibus episode going through all 18 chapters of the beginning of infinity and 99 minutes.\nAnd all because I still continue to regard this book as the most groundbreaking book of the 21st century, I can't claim to have read all the books from the 20th century.\nI think the fabric of reality might be there at the top of that particular century.\nAnd we don't know what's coming next either.\nMaybe David's next book throughout my podcast series.\nI still plan on referring more to the beginning of infinity.\nAnd next episode we will have the complete interview.\nEpisode 100 between myself and David Deutsch.\nAnd then episodes 101 and 101 to ask me anything episodes as well.\nSo there's a lot to come on the theme of the work of David Deutsch, the beginning of infinity and associate ideas.\nBut until next time, bye bye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKhZvfqJPjA&t=5870"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e868b64b-ac60-4400-9359-dfe7bd89fafc": {"page_content": "Welcome to ToKCast and to the next episode in my readings from and reflections upon the fabric of reality.\nAnd today it's chapter five, virtual reality.\nAnd really this chapter is like a mini exploration of the entire book itself.\nIt's very synecticky if you know the term.\nThe idea that part of the whole can represent the whole.\nAnd what I continue to marvel at in this book is it's prescience in a sense which is kind of silly.\nIt's a silly thing to say because David of course is the author.\nBut it seems prescient in retrospect because it seems to predict so much of the content of the beginning of infinity that absolutely has a standard everyone that has read it ever since.\nBut all that means really is that I just continue to be amazed how much I missed the first time around with the fabric of reality.\nBut again, I forgive myself.\nI was only twenty years old at its publication and extremely busy at that time.\nAnd so it was a lot to absorb.\nAnd today we're going to cover in this one chapter, computation and universality.\nThe nature of personhood to some extent and the centrality of explanations.\nThe nature of mathematics and the limits upon it imposed by physics and lots, lots more.\nAll of those huge themes that come up here on ToKCast because they feature so heavily in the work of David Deutschmore broadly.\nSo no long introduction today.\nLet's just get into some reading chapter five, virtual reality and David writes.\nThe theory of computation has traditionally been studied almost entirely in the abstract as a topic in pure mathematics.\nThis is to miss the point of it.\nComputers are physical objects and computations are physical processes.\nWhat computers cannot compute is determined by the laws of physics alone and not by pure mathematics.\nOne of the most important concepts of the theory of computation is universality.\nA universal computer is usually defined as an abstract machine that can mimic the computations of any under abstract machine in a certain well-defined class.\nHowever, the significance of universality lies in the fact that universal computers are at least good approximations to them can actually be built and can be used to compute not just each other's behaviour, but the behaviour of interesting physical and abstract entities.\nThe fact that this is possible is part of the self-similarity of physical reality that I mentioned in the previous chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=32"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6101605c-b13d-4a4c-a632-e7b7444b99b2": {"page_content": "However, the significance of universality lies in the fact that universal computers are at least good approximations to them can actually be built and can be used to compute not just each other's behaviour, but the behaviour of interesting physical and abstract entities.\nThe fact that this is possible is part of the self-similarity of physical reality that I mentioned in the previous chapter.\nThe best known physical manifestation of universality is an area of technology that has been muted for decades but is only now beginning to take off, namely virtual reality.\nJust pausing their more reflection and of course I'm going to come back to this throughout the chapter.\nBut not to harp on about it but remember that this book was written in 1997.\nSo now 25 years later not only has virtual reality begun to take off it is routine to find it in all sorts of places into society, not least people's homes as an entertainment device.\nI know I've got one, a PS4 VR machine and the PS4 VR machine is one of the lower cost ones.\nbut it's still fantastic for a whole bunch of things.\nand I will come back to process of that.\nLet's go back to the book and David Wright's quote.\nThe term refers virtual reality to any situation in which a person is artificially given the experience of being in a specified environment.\nFor example a flight simulator, a machine that gives pilots the experience of flying aircraft without having to leave the ground is a type of virtual reality generator.\nSuch a machine or more precisely the computer that controls it can be programmed with the characteristics of a real or imaginary aircraft.\nThe aircraft's environment such as the weather and the layout of airports can also be specified in the program and quote and just my reflection on that because from here David goes on for a few paragraphs talking about the operation of a flight simulator which I won't like I say 25 years after he wrote this because this chapter is referring to some specific technologies which at the time we're extremely new but now people I think are far more familiar with them we don't need the detailed description.\nLike I say personally I love my PS4 VR machine.\nit's great there's a number of first-person shooter games you can get with these virtual reality things.\nI've got this game called Farpoint it's the name of this game where you're on an alien planet just filled with spiders and the spiders can jump and a lot of them are massive.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=121"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a758081e-4dcf-46f1-be30-1ea946a37653": {"page_content": "Like I say personally I love my PS4 VR machine.\nit's great there's a number of first-person shooter games you can get with these virtual reality things.\nI've got this game called Farpoint it's the name of this game where you're on an alien planet just filled with spiders and the spiders can jump and a lot of them are massive.\nI wouldn't say it's realistic but it's realistic enough it's very cool very scary and so you are you are totally immersed because visually you're totally immersed and you've got their headphones in and.\nso of course auditory you're totally immersed but your other senses are not.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=253"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7e28ee02-999e-47f6-87a3-ce94feda3d67": {"page_content": "but it's enough it's enough to have just your hearing in your side of course completely consumed by the VR machine to make you feel like you're really there on this alien planet somewhere other shooting at spiders that are jumping at you and attacking you and the VR of course is not only taking off it just continues to get better and better and the only annoying thing at the moment is the weight of the headset the how cumbersome these things are in any place even the wireless ones are still rather cumbersome and focusing at the goggles for me has always been a bit of a pain but otherwise like I say it's fully immersive as far as sight and hearing goes so I'm skipping all of this section where David is giving us an overview of the functioning of flight simulators especially for people who at the time wouldn't have been familiar with these things hardly at all so I'm going to pick it up where David is introducing a piece of nomenclature for the purpose of this chapter.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=278"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a007a5bc-f8f2-4be5-9e82-8b26549798e5": {"page_content": "and he says quite I shall use the term image generator for any device such as a planetarium a high-fi system or a spice rack which can generate specifiable sensory input for the user specified pictures sounds odors and so on all count as images for example to generate the olfactory image i.e. the smell of vanilla one opens the vanilla bottle from the spice rack to generate the auditory image i.e. the sound of Mozart's 20th piano concerto one plays the corresponding compact disc on the high-fi system any image generator is a rudimentary sort of virtual reality generator but the term virtual reality is usually reserved for cases where there is both a wide coverage of the user sensory range and a substantial element of interaction kicking back between the user and the simulated entities end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=326"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fbe12252-f068-447e-981e-646d9f372505": {"page_content": "quote okay.\nso like I say that's just a bit of nomenclature to be used in this chapter this image generator idea.\nand we'll need it in what to come okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=374"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "efe31661-1dfe-43e9-aa0f-6578276f3e27": {"page_content": "so I'm skipping again a vast sway though the beginning of this chapter I'm going to pick it up where David writes quote if Bishop Barkley or the inquisition had known of virtual reality they would probably have seized upon it as the perfect illustration of the deceitfulness of the senses backing up their arguments against scientific reasoning what would happen if the pilot of the flight simulator tried to use Dr Johnson's test for reality although the simulated aircraft and its surroundings do not really exist they do kick back at the pilot just as if they would if they did exist the pilot can open the throttle and hear the engines roar in response and feel their thrust through the seat and see them through the window vibrating and blasting out hot gas in spite of the fact that there are no engines there at all the pilots make experience the aircraft through a storm and hear the thunder and see the rain driving against the windscreen though none of those things is there in reality what is outside the cockpit in reality is just a computer some hydraulic jacks television screens and loud speakers and a perfectly dry and stationary room does this invalidate Dr Johnson's refutation of solipsism no his conversation with Boswell could just as well have taken place inside a flight simulator or if you did thus he might have said opening a throttle and feeling simulated engine kick there is no engine there what kicks back is ultimately a computer running a program that calculates what an engine would do if it were kicked but those calculations which are external to Dr Johnson's mind respond to the throttle in the same complex and autonomous way as the engine would therefore they pass the test for reality and rightly so for in fact these calculations are physical processes within the computer and the computer is an ordinary physical object no less than an engine and perfectly real the fact that it is not a real engine is irrelevant to the argument against solipsism after all not everything that is real has to be easy to identify end quote just to explain that a little bit more hear the idea is that the external reality is real even if it's a virtual reality that that virtual reality is not part of the person it's autonomous and outside of the person have any experience remember the", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=385"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "26a33382-16f1-49d8-8b92-5d3e6a130051": {"page_content": "ordinary physical object no less than an engine and perfectly real the fact that it is not a real engine is irrelevant to the argument against solipsism after all not everything that is real has to be easy to identify end quote just to explain that a little bit more hear the idea is that the external reality is real even if it's a virtual reality that that virtual reality is not part of the person it's autonomous and outside of the person have any experience remember the whole idea here if we go back to previous chapters where David was talking about idealism the bishop Barkley referenced there these philosophers thought that well you could have this situation where your dreaming reality into existence it's all ideas and it's all coming from within you this ancient idea.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=487"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3cbc6218-e332-4c45-b382-f34a163be2fa": {"page_content": "really so solipsism is the claim that only you exist in the universe and that you are dreaming everything into reality now what is our philosophical refutation against that it's that most of reality is acting in an autonomous way a way that you cannot possibly predict or explain without going out and investigating your own mind what is supposedly your own mind which it turns out has all of the richness of objective reality an external reality beyond your mind so you're just adding realism the claim that there is an external objective physical reality beyond your mind you're adding to that that simple statement of realism the additional assumption.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=531"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "07bbab5c-36bf-4584-a089-c09559ca2e79": {"page_content": "but you're dreaming at all.\nokay.\nand so here what David is saying is even if even if you were going to be given all of this.\nyou know you're sort of born into a virtual reality machine or something like that.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9c8ee67e-4cf7-4fa5-b976-709e0091957d": {"page_content": "well it would still not show that solipsism is real it would still show that something was external to you namely the computer running all of this I would say it's like the difference between the person having the experience and what is generating the experience during a dream it is the case that the contents of the dream are produced by the person having the experience and there might be subjective unpredictability there but what won't happen is a rich experience of something you've never experienced before a rich experience you will not dream of having the actual experience of walking down let's say a the main street of Melbourne Australia if you have never done that before or seen it and so on sure you may dream and experience of that but not the actual experience which will contain specifics accurate specifics you can't just dream up what particular buildings are actually there what shops and signs and side streets you will pass and so on what actually is the case in Melbourne in the main street of Melbourne is actually the case and you can't just dream that into existence unless you've already had it you might have a dream of an experience but it won't be an accurate representation of the real reality of what's going on in the main street of Melbourne on the other hand of course if you have had that experience and in particular if it's an experience you have daily because of your commute to work every single day going up and down the main street of Melbourne then it might be the case your dreams will contain accurate specifics a virtual reality generator could give you such an experience even though you've never had it performed reality because it is part of external reality the reality external to you.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=587"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "34371e0d-0878-4471-b59c-6da16ccb51af": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "892f5d82-32ad-489e-a528-220d9286c465": {"page_content": "so once again I'm skipping a couple of pages and I shall pick it up where David writes quote Virtual reality rendering might seem to fall into the same philosophical category as illusions false trails and coincidences for these two are phenomena which seem to show us something real but actually mislead us we have seen that the scientific worldview can accommodate indeed expects the existence of highly misleading phenomena it is par excellence the worldview that can accommodate both human fallibility and external sources of error nevertheless misleading phenomena are basically unwelcome end quote someone once described David Deutsch's writing as extremely knowledge dense you're getting a lot of information packed into a small amount of words.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=679"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "aab64206-9f3a-4fcb-bebc-6cca240a2ebb": {"page_content": "okay.\nhe's very efficient on the words in order to convey such a deep ideas and here's here's an example of that we've got their refutations of empiricism claims about human fallibility the the idea of errors and correcting errors and not being able to of course experience things as they are so let's just unpack this a little bit what does it mean that we have seen that the scientific worldview can accommodate indeed expects the existence of highly misleading phenomena.\nwell I would say this is a kind of refutation of empiricism empiricism remember is this philosophical position that some scientists especially claimed hold that we get information about reality via our senses seeing is believing in other words this is what empiricism amounts to.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=702"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2dcb7b88-11ef-4e19-9e35-8bee534764b3": {"page_content": "but as we've been at pains to explain here most of what we see out there experience with our senses is highly misleading and our trope example that we go to all the time is looking up into the sky at night and seeing what stars apparently are that's highly misleading it's misleading to think that what the information you're getting from your senses there just your bare senses is it all going to actually tell you what the true nature of a star is after all it appears to us it seems to any human being that what the star is is a tiny dim prick of white light cold and perhaps closer than they are you don't get a sense of just how far away stars are most of the ones you can see in the night sky are going to be some tens or hundreds and perhaps at absolute most thousands in the case of the very brightest ones light years away you don't get a sense of what a light you're is by looking at any bright point of light in the sky at night after all some of them are nowhere near as far away as that they're the planets and not even stars at all and as for most of the stars being cold and dim no the exact.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=775"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "23fe045d-4dfe-42d6-9d8f-b377953f2bf7": {"page_content": "opposite.\nokay so we're getting very misleading information from our senses when you take your finger.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "bf0cb7be-ff68-4584-aa84-bb58fbdb66df": {"page_content": "and you rub it across a smooth surface the desk in front of you the window plane beside you something like that you feel continuity you feel matter as if it is not made up of particles your your senses your physical sensation of touch is unable to discriminate any level between the atoms out of which that matter is truly made so we are misled rather often by our senses but what decides to science error corrects that despite the fact we are fallible as David mentions there are human fallibility and not only are we fallible there's external sources of error as well there's you know measuring devices can go wrong despite that the scientific world view accommodates all of this it expects it and it accommodates all of this how by correcting errors in all of that sense data we have we conjecture explanations and then what's the purpose what do we use the evidence that the sense data that we're gathering we use that in order to discriminate to decide between theories we've already guessed I'm skipping a little and David goes on to say quote we shall see that the existence of virtual reality does not indicate that the human capacity to understand the world is inherently limited but on the contrary that it is inherently unlimited end quote pausing there and I think you can guess what I'm going to say.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=851"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "38c33699-77ae-4c5e-bc61-3761220db5ef": {"page_content": "wow it's one of those things that it's one of those quotes there where you just have to say well.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4ce613e9-6251-4fae-9fea-348d549088e0": {"page_content": "well well there's the beginning of infinity here in chapter five of the fabric of reality let's read it again because it's just it's a perfect encapsulation of the one of the deepest themes of the beginning of infinity even though it's not in the beginning of infinity we might as well say nothing indicates quote that the human capacity to understand the world is inherently limited but on the contrary that it is inherently unlimited end quote true we human beings are people and people are defined by their capacity to create explanatory knowledge and that capacity to create explanatory knowledge is universal it can be turned in any direction onto any problem about any phenomena there is nothing that there is no phenomena for which we cannot generate an explanation we are universally in our capacity to generate explanations because if someone puts forward something that we say it is claimed not to be explicable then they would have to have an explanation as to why that thing is not explicable but that would be a problem that would be soluble but more importantly than that as David likes to say any claim that a particular phenomena is inexplicable to human beings is nothing but an appeal to the supernatural it's just going back to standard theistic supernatural mystical magical explanation sort of been with us since the beginning of time you can't possibly understand the mind of God you are a pathetic human you are like a cockroach compared to the alien intelligence out there the artificial general super intelligence that is yet to come or god of monotheism in all these cases you can't understand the ultimate nature of reality so anyone even with their scientific rationalist mindset who comes to you to say there is something there that cannot be understood by human beings is doing the same thing as the priest the rabbi the monk and so on and so forth it was saying some things are just beyond the can of people to ever fully appreciate and understand.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=921"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f430ee41-87aa-4d6a-a372-44f1e93e8d84": {"page_content": "and I think that's fine allow them to believe that so long as they're not getting in the way of everyone else who's actually trying to come to a rational realistic understanding of reality okay we have optimism here now optimism says problems are soluble and the hard stuff we have to deal with is human beings the things that cause suffering the evils in the world can be overcome because they're just a matter of a lack of knowledge so please step aside people who think that certain problems are not soluble who think that our capacity for understanding the world is inherently limited those people can step aside and allow the rest of us go forward into understanding reality because we think it's inherently unlimited and so there's no barriers before us let's keep going and David writes quote it's no anomaly brought about by the accidental properties of human sense organs but is a fundamental property of the multiverse at large and the fact that the multiverse has this property what property this property that the universe is comprehensible that we are in it and we can comprehend the universe far from being a minor embarrassment for realism and science is essential for both it is the very property that makes science possible it is not something that we would rather do without it is something that we literally could not do without these may seem rather lofty claims to make on behalf of flight simulators and video games but it is the phenomenon of virtual reality in general that occupies a central place in the scheme of things not any particular virtual reality generator so I want to consider virtual reality in as general away as possible what if any are its ultimate limits what sort of environment can in principle be artificially rendered and with what accuracy by in principle I mean ignoring transient limitations of technology but taking into account all limitations that may be imposed by the principles of logic and physics the way I have defined it a virtual reality generator is a machine that gives the user experiences of some real or imagined environment such as an aircraft which is or seems to be outside the user's mind let me call those external experiences external experiences are to be contrasted with internal experiences such as one's nervousness when making one's first solo landing or one surprise at the sudden", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1059"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "a936c44b-1d3d-41e9-9c04-c17560e7f6d4": {"page_content": "the principles of logic and physics the way I have defined it a virtual reality generator is a machine that gives the user experiences of some real or imagined environment such as an aircraft which is or seems to be outside the user's mind let me call those external experiences external experiences are to be contrasted with internal experiences such as one's nervousness when making one's first solo landing or one surprise at the sudden appearance of a thunderstorm out of a clear blue sky a virtual reality generator indirectly causes the user to have internal experiences as well as external ones but it cannot be programmed to render a specific internal experience for example a pilot who makes roughly the same flight twice in the simulator will have roughly the same external experiences on both occasions but on the second occasion will probably be less surprised when the thunderstorm appears of course on the second occasion the pilot would probably also react differently to the appearance of the thunderstorm and that would make the subsequent external experiences quite different too but the point is that although one can program the machine to make a thunderstorm appear in the pilots field of view whenever one likes one cannot program it to make the pilot think whatever one likes in response.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1169"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "638c74b9-a4dd-41b2-8a0c-a6fdfb50682e": {"page_content": "end quote and here David goes on to consider virtual reality that intervenes in the mind directly you know drugs are one such thing but they're sort of low resolution approximations to what we would imagine could be done in the future with individual electrodes going into individual neurons or perhaps getting right into the synapse and fiddling with the neurotransmit is directly if you can do that with some level of precision without limit you know presumably an interface of the future would be able to replicate simulate interfere with whatever you want to do with the individual neurotransmiters with the chemicals themselves therefore you'd be able to simulate literally any experience that a brain could possibly conjure for the mind of a person when nowhere near there yet a glass of wine is obviously going to alter your experience of reality.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1244"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "790e781d-ca69-48bd-81df-7fae8b6b3fda": {"page_content": "but it is a very crude method in which to alter one's mood or change one's experience of the sensations and the data that's coming into their brain and then interpreted by their mind.\nokay.\nso I'm skipping a bit and picking it up where David writes another type of experience which certainly cannot be artificially rendered as a logically impossible one I have said that a flight simulator can create the experience of a physically impossible flight through a mountain but nothing can create the experience of factorizing the number 181 because that is logically impossible 181.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1294"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "196e844a-bb22-40d0-8838-f8a4b1637c16": {"page_content": "it's a prime number believing that one has factorized 181 it is a logically possible experience but an internal one and so also outside the scope of virtual reality another logically impossible experiences unconsciousness for when one is unconscious one is by definition not experiencing anything not experiencing anything is quite different from experiencing a total lack of sensations sensory isolation which is of course a physically possible environment having excluded logically impossible experiences and internal experiences we are left with the vast class of logically possible external experiences experiences of environments which are logically possible but may or may not be physically possible something is physically possible if it is not forbidden by the laws of physics in this book I shall assume that the laws of physics include an as yet unknown rule determining the initial state or other supplementary data necessary to give in principle a complete description of the multiverse otherwise these data would be a set of intrinsically inexplicable facts in that case an environment is physically possible if and only if it actually exists somewhere in the multiverse i.e. in some universe or universes something is physically impossible if it does not happen anywhere in the multiverse pausing their my reflection and importantly my ruminations on this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1337"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6aeebf15-c0a0-43bf-8d51-ce8ed8558744": {"page_content": "so following the science of cannon count following constructive theory and following what we know about quantum theory given the everretian so-called interpretation unitary quantum theory it's true that anything that can possibly happen is going to happen somewhere in the multiverse but that does not mean that all things that happen unnecessarily caused or represented in equal measure throughout the multiverse as a silly example every single time the lottery a new country is run and you buy a ticket there is a possible sequence of universes where you are the winner week upon week upon week upon week because it's physically possible it's not ruled out by the laws of quantum theory and so therefore it's going to happen somewhere but each time you win the lottery the measure of universes where you subsequently continue to win get ever thinner and thinner there is a smaller and smaller measure of universes where that happens you shouldn't expect it to happen it may very well happens somewhere in physical reality in the multiverse but these long chains of coincidences they are not expected to continue and some of those chains of coincidences can't be said to be causal you go to my multiverse series on that but what we're basically saying here is the classic Harry Potter universe where a bespectled boy somewhere in the multiverse every time he holds a loft a stick is wand and says the magic words abracadabra or whatever they say in Harry Potter a lightning bolt a spark of electricity shoots out from the wand now that's not because he says the magic words and it may have nothing whatever to do with either the bespectled boy or with the wooden stick that he's holding these are just chains of coincidences it's not causal it's not that the boy is causing the magic wand to be magic and to release lightning from the tip of the wand these are just coincidental things yet it appears causal to everyone in that universe and so people in that universe might believe come to think that the bespectled boy is in fact magical but also in every single one of these universes it should be expected that the very next time he says the", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1416"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "dcd762d7-5193-4506-888f-90980c19e915": {"page_content": "it's not causal it's not that the boy is causing the magic wand to be magic and to release lightning from the tip of the wand these are just coincidental things yet it appears causal to everyone in that universe and so people in that universe might believe come to think that the bespectled boy is in fact magical but also in every single one of these universes it should be expected that the very next time he says the magic words that no spark does happen in the overall majority of universes where he does try it fails but there is a sliver of universes where it continues to happen.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1524"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "91660ccb-02da-4907-a988-9841677c2bbb": {"page_content": "okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5fa22721-f445-483d-8c7f-1d233f24e8c8": {"page_content": "all of that is fine the put the thing here is that there's a difference between something being physically possible in the universe actually happening and something occurring in our world our part of the multiverse if you like where it actually forms a causal explanation of what's going on and that usually comes down to the creation of knowledge somewhere in the multiverse human beings have figured out how to be effectively immortal you know not die of sickness maybe they still die of accidents but they've cured all illnesses now that part of the multiverse is going to continue to grow presumably the proportion of universes will continue to increase because it's physically possible and it's in very important knowledge useful information which will grow over time because knowledge by its very nature is useful information that's very useful people want to solve the problem of why human beings keep on getting ill sick and dying and if we can figure out how to solve this then so will our counterparts and other universes and if they already have we will too eventually if there's no physical law standing in the way of effective immortality then this is a possible thing that will grow in terms of how much of the multiverse it begins to occupy as David has written these papers the structure of the multiverse is determined by information flow and so essentially what happens into the distant future is a result of the knowledge creation that people undertake in our universe and in universes right beside ours so to speak and so in our part of the universe where we're creating knowledge that knowledge is of course possible and in the case of immortality or any other important issue that we would like to find the solution for we'd like to find immortality would like to find fusion power how to do it here safely on earth perhaps even something more efficient than fusion power who knows what if it's possible then we will find it and that will propagate throughout the multiverse and become an increasingly more important causal reason why other things happen in the multiverse as compared to that other sequence of possible things the Harry Potter universe is where I just mentioned where it will become an increasingly smaller proportion of the multiverse over time when magic appears to have worked but never actually did work okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1558"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c1e96095-6e2e-4b3b-9428-9f7607c94bd0": {"page_content": "but knowledge creation actual knowledge creation is a cause of the way in which the multiverse evolves over time because that's useful information that continues to remain instantiated in the universe continues to get itself copied because it's solving a particular problem so that's how that comes to bear all on this.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1694"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "8c9ad3d7-49a7-4557-863d-4d5ee3c8ca0e": {"page_content": "let's continue David Ryan I define the repertoire of a virtual reality generator as the set of real or imaginary environments that the generator can be programmed to give the user the experience of my question about the ultimate limits of virtual reality can be stated like this what constraints if any to the laws of physics impose on the repertoire of virtual reality generators and in this section David goes on to consider the resolution the the the limit of precision of senses now these days as he mentions and I'm looking to read this part audio equipment speakers high-fidelity speakers and stuff it routinely replicate precisely the sounds of reality you know I've got cats I play my cats because they are entertained by it these sounds and images of birds on a screen now the sounds even to me are completely indistinguishable from the real sounds that birds make so they are perfectly replicating reality to me if I'm immersed in the sound escape of artificial bird sounds it may as well be real bird sounds repeat for just about anything else I mean my is unable to distinguish at this point between reality and the audible reproduction now there is a difference I would say with music sometimes just because who knows what I I'm not a musician I can't explain this in technical terms but certainly if you're at a concert there is a different experience and the sound there is different to what I recorded concert is.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1710"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "efddbc9e-4352-4a61-926f-ac36cdf4e87c": {"page_content": "and I think they've got that quite right here for reasons maybe listeners can tell me with screens with the visual stuff we're just about there aren't we it's just about the case that a 4k or 8k 16k I think we're getting to high resolution screen as of 2022 that's going to date as someone's going to be listening to this in 2024 2026 and say we've got much better screens now anyway those screens are going to be as high resolution as a window you're going to be able to look at the screen to be unable to tell the difference between the screen and actual reality so with airwood sound with airwood vision what about other stuff one of the really interesting ones neither sight nor sound is smell and one of the pioneers of perhaps the pioneer of virtual reality as we experience it now in games and so forth connected up to our computers he's Jerome Lenny here who I've mentioned before in the podcast great iconoclastic thinker another person by the way who apparently didn't complete high school I don't think and not much university either but has contributed to many different fields to mathematics to physics of course to technology now he wrote a book which I recommend to everyone you are not a gadget wonderful book again about the deep mystery of what it is to be a human being I've often said that Jerome Lenny here is my favorite optimistic pessimist he's a bit of a pessimist about various matters but somehow comes around to this positive wonderfully positive vision of human beings and even a positive vision of economics which is rare today most of the people are tending the collectivist direction he tends more into the free trade-free markets direction but there's still this sort of pessimism about technology now maybe he's right to a certain extent about that he's not a great fan of social media that's taking me far feel of what I wanted to say back in his first book you are not a gadget he writes about this question about how to have smell in virtual reality can we have smell in the same way that we have virtual reality sound and virtual reality vision what would goggles with that stimulate the old factory system be like let me just read a section from you are not a gadget page 184 if you happen to have the book and", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1800"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0e44f083-d7eb-40f6-bf70-0d761501825d": {"page_content": "that's taking me far feel of what I wanted to say back in his first book you are not a gadget he writes about this question about how to have smell in virtual reality can we have smell in the same way that we have virtual reality sound and virtual reality vision what would goggles with that stimulate the old factory system be like let me just read a section from you are not a gadget page 184 if you happen to have the book and he writes so Jerome writes quote for 20 years or so I gave a lecture introducing the fundamentals of virtual reality I'd review the basics of vision and hearing as well as of touch and taste at the end the questions would begin in one of the first ones was usually about smell will we have smells in virtual reality anytime soon maybe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1914"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "f5ccf2ce-5c53-44c6-bde4-2eb3c8a10977": {"page_content": "but probably just a few odors are fundamentally different from images or sounds the latter can be broken down into primary components that are relatively straightforward for computers and the brain to process the visible colors are merely words for different wavelengths of light every sound wave is actually composed of numerous sine waves each of which can be easily described mathematically each one is like a particular size of bump in the corduroy roads of my childhood in other words both colors and sounds can be described with just a few numbers a wide spectrum of colors and turns is described by the interpolations between those numbers the human retina need be sensitive to only a few wavelength or colors in order for our brains to process all the intermediate ones computer graphics work similarly a screen of pixels each capable of reproducing red green or blue can produce approximately all the colors that the human eye can see a music synthesizer can be thought of as generating a lot of sine waves then layering them to create an array of sounds odors are completely different as is the brain's method of sensing them deep in the nasal passage shrouded by a mucus membrane sits a patch of tissue the olfactory epithelium studded with neurons that detect chemicals each of these neurons has cup shaped proteins called olfactory receptors when a particular molecule happens to fall into a matching receptor a neural signal is triggered that is transmitted to the brain as an odor a molecule too large to fit into one of the receptors has no odor the number of distinct odors is limited only by the number of olfactory receptors capable of interacting with them Linda Bach of the Fred Hutchinson cancer research center and Richard Axel of Columbia University winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine have found that the human nose contains about 1000 different types of olfactory neurons each type able to detect a particular set of chemicals this adds up to a profound difference in the underlying structure of the senses a difference that gives rise to compelling questions about the way we think and perhaps even about the origins of language there is no way", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=1958"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c801770d-febb-44c7-a9cd-64362d03cffa": {"page_content": "Columbia University winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine have found that the human nose contains about 1000 different types of olfactory neurons each type able to detect a particular set of chemicals this adds up to a profound difference in the underlying structure of the senses a difference that gives rise to compelling questions about the way we think and perhaps even about the origins of language there is no way to interpolate between two smell molecules true odors can be mixed together to form millions of sense but the world smells can't be broken down into just a few numbers on a gradient there is no smell pixel think of it this way colors and sounds can be measured with rulers but odors must be looked up in a dictionary that's a shame from the point of view of a virtual reality technologist there are thousands of fundamental odors far more than the handful of primary colors perhaps someday we will be able to wire up a person's brain in order to create the illusion of smell.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2068"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c6ba3a64-ad8f-40bd-a26a-2ffdc333b004": {"page_content": "but it would take a lot of wires to address all those entries in the mental smell dictionary then again the brain must have some way of organizing all those odors maybe at some level smells do fit into a pattern maybe there's a smell pixel after all.\nokay end.\nquote and then Jaron goes on writing in this vein talking more about smell.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2125"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "5d6a2545-93c3-4839-85e5-964e00cec56e": {"page_content": "but that's very interesting isn't it so fundamentally of a different kind so while you have wavelengths effectively for light and for sound no such wavelength exists for smell instead as he says there it's a dictionary that you have to look up particular things but David's not so much talking about that kind of limitation as Jaron admits there and as David agrees if you could just get into the individual neurons problem solved say problem solved of course in principle it's physically possible in practice at the moment we don't have much of a clue about how to do this at all and David actually writes in the very next section on this I'll just read the section that David writes about this after he explains how virtual reality with vision and hearing would work he says but what about the other senses quote is it obvious that it is physically possible to build a general purpose chemical factory that can produce any specified combination of millions of different odouriferous chemicals and a moment's notice or machine which inserted into a gormon's mouth can assume the taste and texture of any possible dish to say nothing of creating a hunger and thirst that proceed the meal and the physical satisfaction that follows it end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2145"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4b0d5038-9e14-4b5d-ba78-f70c238526be": {"page_content": "quote so yes we've got difficulties here with these other kinds of senses now again those practical difficulties pose no barrier to what is physically possible and if you're watching this on YouTube I'm putting up the slide of the image that appears in the book.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2211"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "227b5dad-a823-4eeb-9e25-c0dc75ce31c3": {"page_content": "and it's a table of tag table 5.1 a classification of experiences with examples of each virtual reality is concerned with the generation of logically possible external experiences which are only in the top left region of the table so for people listening we've got this table here of both external and internal experiences and the logically possible experiences and logically impossible experiences so the ones that are ruled out that no virtual reality generator can possibly generate to produce would be the experience of factorizing a prime number that's an external experience which is logically impossible and unconsciousness would be an internal experience which is logically impossible so it's logically possible to be proud of one's piloting abilities.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2231"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "77e20ee3-0a04-4d22-885d-7041ca051fad": {"page_content": "but that's not something that a virtual reality generator could do because the virtual reality generator we're talking about isn't actually going directly into your mind to fiddle with your capacity to have a particular thought or a particular idea so all of it of what a virtual reality generator is limited to things that are external and physically possible and physically impossible as well so for example piloting an aircraft is physically possible to an external experience but also piloting an aircraft such that it flies faster than a bit of light as also something a virtual reality generator could do physically impossible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2275"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "10f53cd4-ae72-44bd-b484-8da529b11a29": {"page_content": "but it could give you that experience or at least represent that experience David's about to explain a little bit more on that point now the before we get there the next part is about some of the practical difficulties not merely difficulties perhaps impossibilities of generating certain experiences or sensations one of which is to do with gravity now now weightlessness is one such they can fiddle with someone's experience of gravity in certain ways I know I had this back when I was a child.\nand I went to Disneyland for I think the only the second time they had a star wars ride.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2312"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "90a1e7f2-299a-48c9-8c32-af99cf7cd71e": {"page_content": "and you went on this ride and of course it was a virtual one of the early forms of virtual reality and you and the other people in the ride all you were doing was staring at a screen and on the screen in front of you and you were also listening to the sounds on the screen in front of you was was where you were going on the ride now if it wanted to give you the experience of accelerating then of course the simulator thing just like a flight simulator used hydraulics to pitch the entire thing upwards and if it wanted to give you the experience of quickly decelerating then it pitch the thing downwards towards the ground and this takes advantage of something called the equivalence principle now the equivalence principle comes from general relativity it's an important idea where if you're listening to this on planet earth and you're sitting down then the force of gravity upon you I shouldn't say force the strength of the gravity and we can measure strength the strength of gravity in various different ways one ways to talk about the acceleration due to gravity the number that's normally used is 9.8 ish now the units can be Newton's per kilogram but equivalently we can talk about 9.8 meters per second squared.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2347"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9e31aa0a-dec5-403b-8c6a-a25b727f2369": {"page_content": "okay that's the number that's the value of gravity if there was such a thing as the surface of Jupiter the value would be higher you would feel heavier and if you went to the moon the value is about one fifth of what it is here on earth and so therefore you feel lighter now the equivalence principle basically says this that if the value here on the surface of earth is 9.8 meters per second squared when you're just sitting there in a chair on the surface of the earth then if you go into deep space somewhere although where you are weightless so to speak far from any gravitational body then if you wanted to replicate what it was like on earth all you would need to do would be to accelerate at the rate of 9.8 meters per second squared so you could stick yourself in a box and if you are unable to see outside if it was a solid metal box then there would be no experiment that you could do inside the box to tell the difference between whether you're in a box in deep space accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared or on the surface of the earth completely stationary but subject to the gravitational field of the earth of 9.8 meters per second squared that's the equivalence principle in other words accelerations and gravitational fields are equivalent in that way even though we can tell by looking at them that the cause of the two different things is somewhat different now what's that got to do with anything at all well if you want to simulate literal weightlessness here on earth with a virtual reality machine you've got some problems to overcome and perhaps those problems are impossibly high in terms of even in principle being able to overcome on earth if an astronaut wants to train in weightlessness then what they have to do is to get into an aeroplane and the aeroplane follows a parabolic path David explains this and the descent of the parabolic path can be such that you can experience literal weightlessness there's no longer a gravitational field acting upon your body and so you feel weightless you are weightless you will not register upon a scale we also call that freefall in other words the best that a flight simulator on earth could do if it wants to give you that sensation would be", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2411"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "073468a5-8a8d-4744-8590-31b2ee51ced3": {"page_content": "and the aeroplane follows a parabolic path David explains this and the descent of the parabolic path can be such that you can experience literal weightlessness there's no longer a gravitational field acting upon your body and so you feel weightless you are weightless you will not register upon a scale we also call that freefall in other words the best that a flight simulator on earth could do if it wants to give you that sensation would be aside from getting directly into your brain of course if it was able to somehow get directly into your brain would be on virtual reality then how then it could give you the sensation of weightlessness however the only other way would be to put the flight simulator itself into freefall which obviously means you'd want the flight simulator at high altitude.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2514"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7be07a50-2587-426c-a7c3-c0bb6d889a1d": {"page_content": "and then you're not simulating weightlessness you are weightless but how to simulate freefall on the ground David asks and let me just read this section he says how to simulate it well quote not easily for the laws of physics getting the way known physics provides no way other than freefall even in principle of removing an object's weight the only way of putting a flight simulator into freefall while it remained stationary on the surface of the earth would be somehow to suspend a massive body such as another planet of similar mass or a black hole above it even if this were possible remember we are concerned here not with immediate practicality but with what the laws of physics do or do not permit a real aircraft could also produce frequent complex changes in the magnitude and direction of the occupants white by maneuvering or switching its engines on and off to simulate these changes the massive body would have to be moved around just as frequently.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2559"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fb2dcd1c-9166-445c-bef1-dff5d072d181": {"page_content": "and it seems likely that the speed of light if nothing else would impose an absolute limit on how fast this could be done and then David goes on to explain the approximations that we use you know going underwater for example gives you an approximation.\nbut it's a crude approximation to weightlessness so we can ignore those.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2610"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "00b51c3b-4689-4b76-8bca-ee62af6a794f": {"page_content": "and he ends up concluding by saying or asking quote but could one ever render the experience perfectly in a flight simulator that remained firmly on the ground if not then there would be an absolute limit on the fidelity with which flying experiences can ever be rendered artificially to distinguish between a real aircraft and a simulation a pilot would only have to fly it in freefall trajectory and not see where the weightlessness occurred or not then skipping a little David goes on to say weightlessness and all other sensations can in principle be rendered artificially eventually it will become possible to bypass the sense organs altogether and directly stimulate the nerves that lead from them to the brain so we do not need general purpose chemical factories or impossible artificial gravity machines when we have understood the old factory organs well enough to crack the code in which they send signals to the brain when they detect sense a computer with suitable connections to the relevant nerves could send the brain the same signals then the brain could experience the sense without the corresponding chemicals ever having existed similarly the brain could experience the authentic sensation of weightlessness even under normal gravity and of course no televisions or headphones would be needed or either thus David goes on to say the laws of physics impose no limit on the range and accuracy of image generators there is no possible sensational sequence of sensations the human beings are capable of experiencing that could not in principle be rendered artificially thus the laws of physics impose no limits on the range and accuracy of image generators one day as a generalization of movies there will be what Aldous Huxley and Brave New World called Feelies movies for all the senses one will be able to feel the rocking of a boat beneath one's feet hear the waves and smell the sea see the changing colors of the sunset on the horizon and feel the wind in one's hair whether or not one has any hair or without leaving dry land or venturing out of doors not only that feelies will just as easily be able to depict scenes that have never existed and never could exist or they could play the equivalent of music beautiful abstract combinations of sensations", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2632"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "33849f94-2321-4457-9836-96bd9339bcf9": {"page_content": "boat beneath one's feet hear the waves and smell the sea see the changing colors of the sunset on the horizon and feel the wind in one's hair whether or not one has any hair or without leaving dry land or venturing out of doors not only that feelies will just as easily be able to depict scenes that have never existed and never could exist or they could play the equivalent of music beautiful abstract combinations of sensations composed to delight the senses that every possible sensation can be artificially rendered as one thing that it will one day be possible once and for all to build a single machine that can render any possible sensation calls for something extra universality a feeling machine with that capability would be a universal image generator.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2732"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "e9036b67-27bf-4136-8baf-bc65da3338b5": {"page_content": "okay then David goes on talk about the possibility of creating these universal image generators and so I'm skipping a bit there again we go into the limits of technology the the the the the parochial limits of technology at any given time how good our audio reproduction happens to be so skipping that picking it up where David writes quite if an image generator is playing a recording taken from life.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2775"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fe530c43-4479-4da0-9f07-810b18f7226c": {"page_content": "it's accuracy maybe defined as the closeness of the rendered images to the ones that a person in the original situation would have perceived more generally if the generator is rendering artificially designed images such as a cartoon or music played from a written composition the accuracy is the closeness of the rendered images to the intended ones by closeness remain closeness as perceived by the user if the rendering is so close has to be indistinguishable by the user from what is intended then we call it perfectly accurate so a rendering that is perfectly accurate for one user may contain inaccuracies that are perceptible to a user with sharper sensors or with additional sensors pause their mind reflection and one might also add and more knowledge as well I'd can certainly imagine listening to a piece of music that I think he's a perfect representation a perfect rendering of a previous piece but not knowing that much about music I imagine someone else who has better knowledge of music even if they don't have sharper sensors than they would be able to tell the difference kind of skipping a bit David goes into what a universal image generator amounts to you know this is the same as a computer all all actual computers we call them universal computers.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2799"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d38fbd91-b0d7-4cd4-99f7-b17aa48506ba": {"page_content": "but of course all actual computers to to approximations to universal computers to be a truly universal computer you need an infinite amount of memory in order to you know literally any possible computation that is possible well that includes computations that might last for the.\nyou know the length of the universe.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2871"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "c198251e-e6f8-4cb4-814d-acd8778adbe7": {"page_content": "so therefore you need a lot of you know memory in order to do that the same is true for this universal image generator would need something so an amount of memory that allows it to play a recording of unlimited duration as David says and so would need to be able to maintain itself as it goes along as well so I'm skipping bits here and I'll pick it up where David writes quote the human mind affects the body and the outside world by emitting nerve impulses therefore a virtual reality generator can in principle obtain all the information it needs about what the user is doing by intercepting the nerve signals coming from the user's brain those signals which would have gone to the user's body can instead be transmitted to a computer and coded to determine exactly how the user's body would have moved the signals sent back to the brain by the computer can be the same as those that would have been sent by the body if it were in the specified environment if the specification called for it the simulated body could also react differently from the real one for example to enable it to survive in simulations of environments that would kill a real human body or to simulate mouth functions of the body I had better admit here that it is probably too great an idealization to save the human mind interacts with the outside world only by emitting and receiving nerve impulses there are chemical messages passing in both directions as well I am assuming that in principle those messages could also be intercepted and replaced at some point between the brain and the rest of the body thus the user would lie motionless connected to the computer by having the experience of interacting fully with the simulated world in effect living there okay.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2890"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "d37f84c8-056c-4315-ad93-2c87e65c590f": {"page_content": "pausing their my reflection this is as David goes on to say basically talked about in daycarts meditations with the team and the demon is intercepting your senses your brain whatever and perhaps make deceiving you about the real nature of the world this exactly the same thing is true in the matrix the movie by the Wachowski brothers that the matrix movie the series of movies where human beings might be laying in pods and their their their nervous system has a cable attached to it which intercepts these signals going to and from the brain to make you think that you're experiencing a full 3d reality world but in fact you are laying in a pod somewhere as the fuel source or the energy source for a great nefarious computer same idea so skipping lots more and I'm just picking it up where David says quote I do not want to understate the practical problems involved in intercepting all the nerve signals passing into and out of the human brain and in cracking the various codes involved but this is a finite set of problems that we shall have to solve once only after that the focus of virtual reality technology will shift once and for all to the computer to the problem of programming it to render various environments what environments we shall be able to render will no longer depend on what sensors and image generators we can build but only on what environments we can specify specifying an environment will mean supplying a program for the computer which is the heart of the virtual reality generator.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=2984"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "be410456-bcc8-4771-8d49-1a390936d256": {"page_content": "end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9053ac32-3e02-444e-a242-79103a50ae18": {"page_content": "quote then David goes on to say how a virtual reality generator unlike an image generator virtual reality generator responds to the users movements and so on inside that environment what the user chooses to do and by way of further exploring this idea David talks about playing tennis and so he says quote the number of possible tennis games that can be played in a single environment that is rendered by a single program is very large consider a rendering of the center court had Wimbledon from the point of view of a player suppose very conservatively that in each second of the game the player can move in one of two perceptibly different ways perceptibly that is to the player then after two seconds there are four possible games after three seconds eight possible games and so on after about four minutes the number of possible games that are perceptibly different from one another exceeds the number of atoms in the universe and it continues to rise exponentially for a program to render that one environment accurately it must be capable of responding in any one of those myriad perceptibly different ways depending upon how the player chooses to behave if two programs respond in the same way to every possible action by the user then they render the same environment if they would respond perceptibly different to even one possible action they render different environments that remains so even if the user never happens to perform the action that shows up the difference the environment of program renders for a given type of user with a given connecting cable is a logical property of the program independent of whether the program is ever executed a rendered environment is accurate insofar as it would respond in the intended way to every possible action of the user thus its accuracy depends not only on experiences which users of it actually have but also on experiences they do not have but would have had if they had chosen to behave differently during the rendering this may sound paradoxical but as I have said it is a straightforward consequence of the fact that virtual reality is like reality itself interactive this gives rise to an important difference between image generation and virtual reality generation the accuracy of an image generator's rendering can in principle be experienced measured and certified by the user but the accuracy of a virtual reality rendering never can be for example if you", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3073"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "362425ef-ebd2-4498-8e49-8e1e39befa9f": {"page_content": "behave differently during the rendering this may sound paradoxical but as I have said it is a straightforward consequence of the fact that virtual reality is like reality itself interactive this gives rise to an important difference between image generation and virtual reality generation the accuracy of an image generator's rendering can in principle be experienced measured and certified by the user but the accuracy of a virtual reality rendering never can be for example if you are a music lover and you know a particular piece well enough you can listen to a performance of it and confirm that it is a perfectly accurate rendering in principle down to the last note phrasing dynamics and all but if you are a tennis fan who knows Wimbledon center court perfectly you can never confirm that a purported rendering of it is accurate even if you are free to explore the rendered center court for however long you like and to kick it in whatever way you like and even if you have equal access to the real center court for comparison you cannot ever certify that the program does indeed render the real location for you can never know what would have happened if only who had explored a little more or looked over your shoulder at the right moment perhaps if you had sat on the rendered umpire's chair and shouted fault a nuclear submarine would have surfaced through the grass and torpedoed the scoreboard end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3191"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "23c09b23-0816-4b51-91f8-16b59861b19b": {"page_content": "quote.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "3010e4ac-a7fb-4dee-85c9-d98db34e1f29": {"page_content": "so what's David saying there well obviously that wouldn't happen on the real center court so if it happened in the rendered centered court then center court at Wimbledon you know if you yell fault in the umpire's chair and the nuclear submarine rises then clearly it's not an accurate rendering of the actual center court where that thing would not have happened okay let's get going quote on the other hand if you find even one difference between the rendering and the intended environment you get immediately certify that the rendering is inaccurate unless that is the rendered environment has some intentionally unpredictable features for example a roulette wheel is designed to be unpredictable if we make a film of roulette being played in a casino that film may be said to be accurate if the numbers that are shown coming up in the film are the same numbers that actually come up when the film was made the film will show the same numbers every time it is played it is totally predictable so an accurate image of an unpredictable environment must be predictable but what does it mean for a virtual reality rendering of a roulette wheel to be accurate as before it means that a user should not find it perceptibly different from the original but this implies that the rendering must not behave identically to the original if it did either it or the original could be used to predict the others behavior and then neither would be unpredictable nor must it behave the same way every time it is run a perfectly rendered roulette wheel must be just as usable for gambling as a real one therefore it must be just as unpredictable also it must be just as fair that is all the numbers must come up purely randomly with equal probabilities how do we recognize unpredictable environments and how do we confirm purportedly random numbers are distributed fairly well we check whether a rendering of a roulette wheel meets its specifications in the same way that we check whether the real thing does by kicking spinning it and seeing whether it responds as advertised we make a large number of similar observations and perform statistical tests on these outcomes again however many tests we carry out we cannot certify that the rendering is accurate or even that it is probably", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3271"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2497846b-d998-48c2-a047-73de89a7b259": {"page_content": "random numbers are distributed fairly well we check whether a rendering of a roulette wheel meets its specifications in the same way that we check whether the real thing does by kicking spinning it and seeing whether it responds as advertised we make a large number of similar observations and perform statistical tests on these outcomes again however many tests we carry out we cannot certify that the rendering is accurate or even that it is probably accurate for however randomly the numbers seem to come up they may nevertheless fall into a secret pattern that would allow a user in the know to predict them or perhaps if we had asked out loud the date of the Battle of Waterloo the next two numbers that came up would invariably show that date 18 15 on the other hand if the sequence that comes up looks unfair we cannot know for sure there it is but we might be able to say that the rendering is probably inaccurate for example if zero came up on our rendered roulette wheel on 10 consecutive spins we should conclude that we probably do not have an accurate rendering of a fair roulette wheel pause there my reflection you have to read all of these in concert with perhaps my recent episodes on probability including the chapter on probability from Stephen Pinker's book Rationality and more importantly perhaps the one before that where I go through David's talk on probability all of this that same meaning is conveyed what David says he conveys precisely the same meaning as I think he would otherwise phrase things now.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3378"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "501ec346-d546-48eb-9ffc-8748ec3e72b2": {"page_content": "because.\nyeah.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4250385c-2d0b-4753-8d87-72253d13ac4c": {"page_content": "his take is that probability is not a genuine thing it's a scam but it's a better way to talk about these things in the same way so the roulette wheel a fair roulette wheel is subjectively unpredictable we can't predict where it's going to go next because of the quantum world the quantum laws or physics are the things that mean that from our vantage point we just don't know what number is going to come up next but that's not to say it is literally random literally random and he probably wouldn't say the word.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3466"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "9b6fd50d-5acc-4ad1-9ce1-6be9582e798b": {"page_content": "probably so often I don't know what we would say here is where he says let me just read it again for example he says quote for example if zero came up on our rendered roulette wheel on 10 consecutive spins we should conclude that we probably do not have an accurate rendering of a fair roulette wheel and quote I would say that one phrasing that we could use instead of using word probably there is if you have 10 consecutive zeros coming up on a roulette wheel a bad explanation is that that was just due to chance one should instead hedge for have the conjecture that there's been a stitch up that it's a put up job that someone is cheating and so on and so forth whatever way you want to say this what isn't the cases that it's the best explanation is that's not a fair roulette wheel we don't have to have any probably about it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3431"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "36f88b48-3a5c-49c5-8b13-5641a8f8ef8d": {"page_content": "it's not a fair roulette wheel would be our working hypothesis until such time as someone can show us then in fact it is a fair roulette wheel however they go about doing that let's get going David writes quote when discussing image generators I said that the accuracy of a rendered image depends upon the sharpness and other attributes of the user's senses with virtual reality that is the least of our problems certainly a virtual reality generator that renders a given environment perfectly for humans will not do so for dolphins or extraterrestrials to render a given environment for a user with given types of sense organs they virtual reality generator must be physically adapted to such sense organs and its computer must be programmed with their characteristics end.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3545"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "4f20b2a1-4bb5-4d58-a605-42ed7bb6844b": {"page_content": "quote.\nyes so that's interesting so we have particular range of senses.\nand then other organisms will have subtly different range of senses.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "0c37aa83-389d-4219-ac36-03592bbabae9": {"page_content": "so it's no good having a virtual reality generator that is sending us the sensation of seeing ultraviolet or infrared radiation we can't see those things so the whole concept of accuracy here is a virtual reality rendering is accurate for a particular user and if the particular user can't tell the difference between that thing and the real thing then it's accurate as David goes on to say quote this discussion of accuracy in virtual reality mirrors the relationship between theory and experiment in science thereto it is possible to confirm experimentally that a general theory is false but never that it is true and thereto a short-sighted view of science is that it is all about predicting our sense impressions the correct view is that while sense impressions always play a role what science is about is understanding the whole of reality of which only an infinitesimal proportion is ever experienced pause their my reflection there we go again there we have the beginning of an infinity prefaced in or a deep theme of the beginning of a new prefaced in here the fabric of reality again he says what science is about is understanding the whole of reality understanding so there we get explanations an explanation allows you to understand reality and we only ever experience an infinitesimal proportion of it so this small amount of data that we are able together that's the stuff that gives us our problems or allows us to distinguish between the theories we already guess and those theories can be about all of reality wonderful David goes on to say the program and virtual reality generator embodies a general predictive theory of the behavior of the rendered environment the other component deal with keeping track of what the user is doing and with the encoding and decoding of sensory data these as I have said are relatively trivial functions thus if the environment is physically possible rendering it is essentially equivalent to finding rules for predicting the outcome of every experiment that could be performed in that environment because of the way in which scientific knowledge is created ever more accurate predictive rules can be discovered only through ever better explanatory theories so accurately rendering a physically possible environment depends on understanding its physics the converse is also true", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3598"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "54cd49ec-8b5a-454f-8fae-76e9f10822d8": {"page_content": "functions thus if the environment is physically possible rendering it is essentially equivalent to finding rules for predicting the outcome of every experiment that could be performed in that environment because of the way in which scientific knowledge is created ever more accurate predictive rules can be discovered only through ever better explanatory theories so accurately rendering a physically possible environment depends on understanding its physics the converse is also true discovering the physics of an environment depends upon creating a virtual reality rendering of it normally one would say that scientific theories only describe and explain physical objects and processes but do not render them for example an explanation of eclipses of the Sun can be printed in a book a computer can be programmed with astronomical data and physical laws to predict and eclipse and to print out a description of it but rendering the eclipse in virtual reality would require both further programming and further hardware however those are already present in our brains the words numbers printed by the computer amount to descriptions of an eclipse only because someone knows the meanings of those symbols that is the symbols evoke in the reader's mind some sort of likeness of some predicted effect of the eclipse against which the real appearance of that effect will be tested moreover the likeness that is a vote is interactive one can observe an eclipse in many ways with the naked eye or by photography or using various scientific instruments from some positions on earth one will see a total eclipse of the Sun from other positions a partial eclipse and from anywhere else no eclipse at all in each case an observer will experience different images any of which can be predicted by the theory what the computer's description of folks in the readers mind is not just a single image or a sequence of images but a general method of creating many different images corresponding to the many ways in which the reader may contemplate making observations in other words it is a virtual reality rendering thus in a broad enough sense taking into account the processes that must take place inside the scientist mind science and the virtual reality rendering of physically possible environments are two terms to noting the same activity pausing their my reflection there's a depth to that that we can't", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3716"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2fe9198b-73e7-421d-89ff-2158d15c4eb3": {"page_content": "images but a general method of creating many different images corresponding to the many ways in which the reader may contemplate making observations in other words it is a virtual reality rendering thus in a broad enough sense taking into account the processes that must take place inside the scientist mind science and the virtual reality rendering of physically possible environments are two terms to noting the same activity pausing their my reflection there's a depth to that that we can't just brush aside that science and the virtual reality rendering of physical reality physically possible environments are two terms to noting the same activity science this capacity to explain the universe is a virtual reality rendering inside of our minds of what's going on in physical reality that's what a human's mind is doing what a scientist mind is doing when they explain the world they are rendering physical reality a version of physical reality to some degree of fertility to some degree of accuracy inside of their own minds and this gets to the heart of this idea of humans as universal explainers yet of course I think to be discovered by David yet there doesn't come until between here and the beginning of infinity but we're getting hints of it there aren't we we're really getting hints of it there David goes on to talk about virtual reality machines that render physically impossible environments one of which is of course you know flying an airplane faster than the speed of light that is something that a virtual reality generator can do it can render that environment now who cares about that well let's read what David has to say about these reflections on this idea of physically impossible environments being rendered in virtual reality consider a virtual reality generator in the act of rendering a physically impossible environment it might be a flight simulator running a program that calculates the view from the cockpit of an aircraft that can fly faster than light the flight simulator is rendering that environment but in addition the flight simulator is itself the environment that the user is experiencing in the sense that it is a physical object surrounding the user let us consider this environment clearly it is a physically possible environment is it a renderable environment of course in fact it is exceptionally easy to render one simply uses a second flight simulator of the same design running the identical program under those circumstances", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3822"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "fd697c12-abb1-462d-b87c-ae25ff136684": {"page_content": "the flight simulator is rendering that environment but in addition the flight simulator is itself the environment that the user is experiencing in the sense that it is a physical object surrounding the user let us consider this environment clearly it is a physically possible environment is it a renderable environment of course in fact it is exceptionally easy to render one simply uses a second flight simulator of the same design running the identical program under those circumstances the second flight simulator can be thought of as rendering either the physically impossible aircraft or a physically possible environment namely the first flight simulator similarly the first flight simulator could be regarded as rendering a physically possible environment namely the second flight simulator if we assume that any virtual reality generator that can in principle be built can in principle be built again then it follows that every virtual reality generator running any program in its repertoire is rendering some physically possible environment it may be rendering other things as well including physically impossible environments but in particular there is always some physically possible environment that it is rendering so which physically impossible environments can be rendered in virtual reality precisely those that are not perceptibly different from physically possible environments therefore the connection between the physical world and the worlds that are renderable in virtual reality is far closer than it looks we think of some virtual reality renderings as depicting fact and others as depicting fiction but the fiction is always an interpretation in the mind of the beholder there is no such thing as a virtual reality environment that the user would be compelled to interpret as physically impossible.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=3943"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "6095d893-c449-4f3b-a7b4-b3de02ab1fdc": {"page_content": "okay then David goes on to talk about how virtual reality could be used to render environments where the laws of physics are different so in theory sort of physically impossible environment however the mere fact that some virtual reality machine can render that environment makes it a physically possible environment because look the virtual reality machine is rendering that environment so therefore it's physically possible to render the environment so you're having an experience which is physically possible not physically impossible in a sense and David talks about how imagination is a straightforward form of virtual reality and goes on to say quite I'll pick it up where he starts to say quote we realist take the view that reality is out there objective physical and independent of what we believe about it.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=4037"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "892ffce0-0019-4048-b3b7-ca3f308a26bb": {"page_content": "but we never experienced that reality directly every last scrap of our external experiences of virtual reality and every last scrap of our knowledge including our knowledge of the non-physical worlds of logic mathematics and philosophy and of imagination fiction art and fantasy is encoded in the form of programs of the rendering of those worlds on our brain's own virtual reality generator.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=4082"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "93541be3-cf3a-454f-9aaf-d0ed1a29b0f3": {"page_content": "so it is not just science reasoning about the physical world that involves virtual reality all reasoning all thinking and all external experience are forms of virtual reality these things are physical processes which so far have been observed in only one place in the universe namely the vicinity of the planet earth we shall see and chapter eight that all living processes involve virtual reality too but human beings in particular have a special relationship with it biologically speaking the virtual reality rendering of their environment is the characteristic means by which human beings survive in other words it is the reason why human beings exist the ecological niche that human beings occupy depends on virtual reality as directly and as absolutely as the ecological niche that koala bears occupy depends on eucalyptus leaves end quote end of the chapter and there once again we have a hint.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=4104"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "2d214a4b-6358-494c-a2e6-1ce8e0f4c777": {"page_content": "I I.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=None"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "b47fc62e-e7cd-4c16-8a63-b920188a672b": {"page_content": "I window into the beginning of infinity because there the characteristic means by which human beings survive what is it a virtual reality rendering of their environment and what is that and understanding of the physics of the environment of all of everything not just the physics but of what the virtual reality rendering of their environment is the explanations of their environment the explanations of the physical world and not just the physical world but the other parts the other aspects of the world the social world in which you occupy that you occupy the philosophical world that you occupy the traditions and the culture that you occupy if that is being rendered inside of your mind the understanding that you have inside of your mind the set of explanations that forms your worldview is essentially a virtual reality rendering of your environment which is connecting this book the fabric of reality to the beginning of infinity David says there again koala bears I think it's not the first time that he said koala bears in this book and every Australian every Australian of course bogs at koala bears.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=4155"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "7cbd80b2-ea36-4fc5-9286-cf448ce07f90": {"page_content": "but I'm not going to get into it people can't even agree at the moment on what boys and girls means so whether or not koalas are bears or not I think can be passed over in silence.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=4221"}, "lookup_index": 0}, "71370e06-2ab6-44ff-ba16-4c1dda12afe4": {"page_content": "but that is the end of the chapter let me read the summary at the end of the chapter here David writes virtual reality is not just a technology in which computers stimulate the behavior of physical environments the fact that virtual reality is possible is an important fact about the fabric of reality it is the basis not only of computation but of human imagination an external experience science mathematics art in fiction what are the ultimate limits the full scope of virtual reality and hence of computation science and imagination the rest in the next chapter we shall see that in one respect the scope of virtual reality is limited while in another it is drastically circumscribed goodbye.", "lookup_str": "", "metadata": {"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cUTvI-aE&t=4231"}, "lookup_index": 0}}
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