David Deutsch on Multiple Worlds and Our Place in Them | Conversations with Tyler

hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i am with david deutsch david welcome hello good afternoon now i have a question i am myself a metaphysical agnostic so i'm unwilling to step into a star trek transporter machine because i'm afraid it would kill me and it's a copy of me that would keep on living at what price are you willing to step into a star trek transporter machine uh i certainly wouldn't want to be the first person but i suppose you're asking the question uh separately from do i think it would work technically sure assume it works as in the tv show but metaphysically there's a question you face but you know you believe in many worlds theory right so yes though i don't think that is connected um i i think it's more physicalism or something like that that i believe that there's there's nothing to me except this running program in my brain and if that program were to run somewhere else and stop running in my brain then i wouldn't notice anything and i would indeed have traveled to that other place but say the world forks and it's possible both that you do and do not step into the machine isn't it the case that some version of the earlier you uh is still existing along one of the forks so you have nothing to worry about uh some version of me uh whenever i whenever i make a decision which could go either way some version of me will have presumably made the other decision although uh that's not as simple as it sounds because both the other version of me and me are error correcting entities that's that's the whole point of what human thought is it's error correction therefore it will take more than just a cosmic ray hit to make the difference between uh deciding something yes or no so this would have to be like an inconsequential decision which unbeknownst to me will have a large effect and then later cause me to be a different person and so on and that's happening all the time independently of star trek machines or anything like that that is the case and uh fortunately it turns out uh at least if if ordinary decision theory is true in in like non-quantum cases then it turns out that ordinary decision uh theory with randomness uh produces the same rational decisions as quantum decision theory with uh the multiverse so it shouldn't make any difference to decisions and that includes the decision whether to use the star trek transporter sure so as long as there's a possible world where your atoms aren't scattered and you just didn't get into the machine you don't have to worry too much about your decision i do because when you say so long as there's a possible world that uh glides over the question how many what proportion of the worlds is that going to happen in and the this what i said just now about um uh about decision theory in the multiverse uh the proportion of the multiverse that does one thing or another plays the same role in decisions as probability does in a theory where there's randomness so it really does matter and just because there are a few worlds in which xyz happens if they're very few of them they shouldn't affect my decisions at all how do we know what counts as a possible world so there's a certain economy to a many worlds interpretation of physics but isn't a lot of the complexity just being squeezed into this notion of what is a possible world uh yes and we're used to that uh i'm not used to it you are when you realize that different times are special cases of other universes so um when when you make an economic decision you're used to the fact that a a something you buy as some goods uh have a different value in different universes that is at different times even to the same you so you might be slightly different but but even if you aren't very different the value to you of something might be very different today from tomorrow for example um oxygen if you've got if you've got covered would be differently valuable and and and most things change their value gradually over time you change your your uh self gradually over time and it's exactly the same in different universes in different universes you value different things some universes in some universes you're so different that it's not worth calling you you anymore just like over time it might not be but i take it you don't believe in many worlds interpretations that there are 17 possible universes out there you think there's a very large number right yes so maybe you'll consider this question a kind of category error but what is the process which filters what is a possible universe and what is not a possible universe oh the laws of physics it's it's uh it's exactly the same as uh what filters um let's say if there are if there are if there's an explosion like a supernova what determines the fact that that uh different particles travel at different speeds and none of them travel faster than light well it's all the laws of physics that determine that uh what the uh distribution of speeds will be and what the limit will be how do we know what are the laws of physics for the multiverse um i mean should we assume that the same as for the universe we live in uh so the universe we live in is demonstrably affected by things not in it this is this is the lesson of interference phenomena sure and so there's no such thing as the laws of physics for our universe there's just the laws of physics of course we don't know for sure what they are but our best theories uh in particular quantum theory uh say that there that there are other such entities and how they affect ours and how how they how mata behaves as a result of that of course it might be overturned one day quantum theory just like all our scientific theories may be this is again maybe a question that you would consider a category error coming from common sense realism but how should i think about splitting universes in a manner consistent with the conservation of matter and energy because there seems to be a multiplication yeah this this splitting universe's idea although it it was uh that kind of terminology was used by the pioneers of of uh many universes quantum theory such as um everett himself and bryce dewitt uh everettians nowadays don't speak of splitting i myself prefer a picture where there's a continuum of universes just like uh you might say you know there's a continuum of times or there's a continuum of geological strata underneath our feet and um when a stratum splits in two there's no definite point at which that you know there was one here and two there what happens is that this the stratum uh becomes two strata gradually and uh so there's there's no point of splitting and the and the number of universes as it will or you know it might be infinite but the the measure of how many there are remains constant and what happens during what used to be called a split is that some of them gradually change to one thing while others gradually change to another thing how do you think many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics relates to the view that just in terms of space the size of our current universe is infinite and therefore everything possible is happening in it it complicates the discussion of probability but it does there's there's no uh overlap between um that notion of infinity and the everettian notion of infinity if if uh we are infinite there because this the uh differentiation as i i prefer to call the what used to be called splitting the the uh when i uh perform an experiment which can go one of two ways the influence of that spreads out first i see it i may write it down i may write a scientific paper and so and when i write a paper about it and report the results that that that will cause the journal to split or to differentiate into into two journals and so on and but this influence cannot spread out faster than the speed of light so an everett universe is really a misnomer because what we see in real life is an everett bubble within the universe everything outside the bubble is as it was it's undifferentiated or it's to be exact it's exactly as differentiated as it was before and then as the bubble spreads out um the the universe becomes or the multiverse becomes more differentiated but the bubble is always finite how do your views relate to the philosophical modal realism of david lewis uh it there are interesting parallels um uh as a physicist i'm interested in what the laws of physics tell us is so rather than in philosophical reasoning about things unless they impinge on a problem that i have so yes i'm interested in uh for example the continuity of the self you know whether whether if there's another version of me uh a very large number of light years away in an infinite universe whether whether and it's identical is that really me are there two of me that one of me um i don't entirely know the answer to that and it it's why i don't entirely know the answer to whether i would go in a star trek transporter uh but the modal realism certainly involves a lot of things that i don't think exist at least not physically i'm open to the idea that non-physical things do exist like the natural numbers i think exist there's a difference between uh you know the second even prime which doesn't exist and uh the the the infinite number of prime numbers which i think do exist um uh so i i think that that um there is more than one mode of existence but the theory that all modes of existence are equally real i see no point in that so the overlap between everett and david lewis is i think more coincidental than than illuminating so if the universe is infinite and if david lewis is correct should i feel closer to the david lewis copies of me the copies are near copies of me in this universe or the near copies of me in the multiverse it seems very crowded all of a sudden so something that whose purpose was to be economical uh doesn't feel that way to me by the end of the metaphysics it doesn't feel like that to you well how as wittgenstein is supposed to have said i don't know whether he really did if it were true what would it feel like it would feel about the opposite what about the alternative view that it's a big sprawling mess we're not capable of understanding an integrated theory there's maybe some darwinian principle operating across some different kind of multiverse our universe persists just because it works well enough a bit like a bad used car we're never going to grasp it there's not a unified theory and here we are okay well that that's a mixture of the anthropic principle which i disagree with and the idea that that some features of reality are inherently incomprehensible which i also disagree with i i can't think of a connection between the two so um uh well if you want me to go into this uh i i can go into either of them but but uh but take the incomprehensibility of the universe and possibly multiverse so we would both agree it's incomprehensible to your cat right sorry it's incomprehensible to your cat or to the local raccoon yes but uh everything is incomprehensible to a cat i don't think that's true no dogs understand human socialism well dogs have genes which uh contain knowledge but it is fixed knowledge and it is not the kind of knowledge that constitutes understanding understanding is always explanatory so you know you can write a book on on uh canine behavior and look in chapter 37 and it will tell you what a dog will do when such and such happens to it and sometimes it will say some dogs will do this some dogs will do that there is no such book for humans because chapter 37 will be blank it'll it'll say humans are going to do something that neither we nor you can predict i feel i can predict humans better than cats often but do chimpanzees understand in your view uh no one knows um uh they they they show virtually no sign of understanding anything there are some really nice experiments um on wild gorillas by uh richard byrne who's um both a theoretical and and very practical animal behavior expert and he was wondering how gorillas transmit their memes that is their culturally inherited behaviors from one girl regular to another so one thing is the first answer is very slowly it takes absolutely ages months and months for a gorilla to be able to copy another gorilla's behavior well enough to do something complicated i mean they can copy uh you know uh wave hand and that sort of thing but to to copy a complex behavior like required to open a difficult kind of nut which no other animal can open this is why they have memes because that's a very useful ability it takes them a long time and then he did some ingenious experiments um or rather observations he he didn't he didn't interfere with the with the uh gorillas he did some observations um to try to determine whether they understand why they are doing each particular action and you know it involves uh you know i don't know what it involves grabbing with both hands and twisting in one way and then pulling another way and then so on apparently these guerrillas are prone to a certain injury which disables their thumb and so they they can't move their thumb which is which is you know quite disabling for them just as it is for us and the thing is when you've disabled your thumb one of these motions becomes irrelevant and the others become less effective but the gorillas which have learned how to do the thing will make the motion the ineffective motion again and again every single time and uh he explains this better than i do but that's like human beings borrowing at high interest rates right they'll do that many many times it's not just like it uh you know you you might like to draw analogies but it's not the same thing when a human being uh repeats a behavior that another human being thinks is unwise or counterproductive or will not achieve its purpose and you ask them or you show them they will have an explanation which you might not like it may be stupid but the ape perfectly well wants this thing to work but doesn't know why it is doing the actions that that's it's a thing that's that's very hard to uh take on board because we are used to intentional behavior and uh we're not used to um the overt behavior of humans being unintentional humans have have um uh they they have tend to explain themselves even irrationally and they act according to their explanation whereas uh there's no evidence that any other animals have those explanations there's also the the case of squirrels which is in a way even more amazing you know squirrels uh bury nuts uh and and so they can dig them up dig them up later well uh some people did a very cruel experiment um they they put a a squirrel and given some nuts or something i don't know how they set up the experiment on a concrete floor and uh the squirrel did exactly the same behavior with its hind legs with the nuts that put the nuts there and and so on even though it was having no effect whatsoever so we see the point of scrabbling with your hind legs and then nudging the nuts over there and so on but it doesn't it's just a program being enacted by its genes what is the underlying physical assumption that makes humans different in having explanatory power one would expect it to be a continuum if you're an atheist right so what what break occurs at some stage in evolution that's a discrete break or why aren't we just back to it being a continuum so i i don't think it can have been a discrete break because evolution would have happened gradually uh my best guess um we don't know this uh we we we have very little actually we have very little knowledge about like the pre-history of ideas because there's no evidence of it all we see is the stone tools you know we don't even see the wooden tools because they've they've decayed away but i think what happened is that the capacity of the brain to store memes to store to store uh programs uh in the brain rather than the genes increased for some reason very fast because the for some reason these these memes were very valuable we know that the gorilla memes are very valuable because they allow them to gain knowledge of things like how to open nuts and so on which no other animal in their environment has and so that gives them access to food that no other animal has um now so the the capacity for memes increased rapidly and um there's very little uh uh now now once sorry i left out a step um once memes get beyond a certain complexity they cannot be copied you can't we don't have the ability to download a program from another person's brain all we can do is look at the behavior and guess what the purpose was and complex memes have to be transmitted like that rather than by aping which is a different process mediated by um what are they called mirror neurons and that kind of thing that's that will only do for very simple behaviors and then there came a moment when our species was capable of explanatory knowledge but they never used it for further tens or hundreds of thousands of years uh they just use it for for this meme transmission i'm still puzzled as to why you think it's so unlikely that the universe is not comprehensible so take a simpler system like the distribution of prime numbers i'm quite sure i can't understand that and even if various conjectures were proven or or not proven i think at the end of the day i still am not capable of understanding that even though certain motors work or the market for copper so why why can't that apply to the universe also again this is this is the wrong standard that is true of everything there's nothing that we can fully understand in that sense in the sense that you want to fully understand prime numbers all the way up to infinity that's not what we mean by understanding things and not that's not what i mean by the universe or mathematics being comprehensible i mean that there is no barrier there is no limit set by the universe um that so far you can go and no further so we can understand things uh better uh we can never understand things fully and i think thinking that there is such a barrier is absolutely logically equivalent to believing in the supernatural because everything that's passed that barrier is just the same as it would be if zeus uh reigned uh uh and and determined what everything after that barrier is and worse the stuff outside the barrier of course is going to affect us even if we can't understand it so it's exactly the same as believing in a universe with um uh supernatural beings who have it in for us because they've put up this wall that we can't cross if they took down the wall we could cross it couldn't we how do you think about the various paradoxes of self-reference that arguably underlie number theory set theory right there's also girdle's theorem any other results i'm sure you know them better than i do so i think godel's theorem for example and and with its roots in in self-reference paradoxes uh show us that even within pure mathematics there is no such thing as a solid foundation for all our knowledge and therefore there's no such thing as uh fully comprehending everything so there there will all it we might think that we're we're pretty sure what the laws of arithmetic are you know we're pretty sure that um that we can see that uh three times seven is the same as seven times three by just laying out beads on on the table but we can't ever lay out beads on the table to tell us that x times y is the same as y times x regardless of what x and y are and yet we can know that and the way we know that is by proving it and we prove it from the axioms using rules of inference how do we know the rules of inference are true we don't they are conjectures they have exactly the same status as uh laws of physics that we conjecture so we never know anything for certain we might be mistaken about anything on the other hand we can have knowledge i think we also really do know that x times y equals y times x even though we have no solid foundation for that what in your opinion is the best test of the many worlds interpretation oh uh so the best feasible test is any interference experiment there is no interference experiment with individual particles that uh has an explanation other than everetti and quantum theory you can make a prediction without making an explanation that you can do but if you want an explanation of what brings about the outcome that you see there is no alternative but the everett interpretation most physicists don't believe in the everett interpretation yes that's a very sad state of affairs that i i'm at a loss to explain uh it's a sociological phenomenon though not a uh scientific or philosophical disagreement it's something has gone wrong just like something went very badly wrong with philosophy as a whole in the 20th century and and you know we're still seeing the ripples from that with with uh post-modernism and and woke and and what have you i worry a bit you're using an argument from elimination so all the other views out there which personally i don't find convincing as an ammeter but i can certainly see why you might reject them to me they look arbitrary those you reject but the other physicists who are as trained as you are some are as skilled as you are uh feel the same way about the many worlds view so what does that just say yes i i don't think but what makes your intuition better than theirs uh yes i don't think that's so it's not a matter of intuition uh physics got dominated or contaminated by uh positivism instrumentalism and such like bad philosophical theories towards the beginning end of 19th century and beginning of the 20th century and this uh caused a knock-on effect um on uh on on physics it it almost had the same effect on relativity but einstein rebelled against it at a at the last moment as it were and and said no it really is true that there's space time is curved it's not just that that uh our brains think that it's curved or something like that or or that the the predictions come out right there really is a curvature in space-time by the time quantum theory came along a couple of decades later positivism instrumentalism and so on had taken hold and as a result generations of physicists were taught when they were students they were intimidated by their professors telling them things like if you think you understand this you don't there there is no such thing as what really happened if you if you ask how did the electron get from here to here you're asking an uh illegitimate question there is no such thing as how it got from here to here there is only a prediction that it got from here to here now when you're taught like that and intimidated by those kind of things coming from on high some proportion of you of your young people will some will quit some will take that on board and do the same to their students in turn and some will think no that's ridiculous come on there is there is a thing and then they discover that there's an everett interpretation let's say we polled only the piparian physicists including popper himself what percentage of them would side with everett that's an extremely good question so papa did not yes i know but that means philosophy can't be where people are going wrong right uh i think it can be i i think it can be and is so the the at the time when uh papa um wrote uh his rejection of of the everett interpretation very very few physicists had written about it uh i say very very few i mean like three and and uh therefore the and they weren't philosophically very sophisticated so the kind of argument that popper heard about uh about the the dispute were all about the wrong things and he he developed his theory of propensities because he thought that the problem was what can a probability possibly mean in a universe that develops deterministically and so on and he he didn't ever hear a real argument um about it i i uh i once met him um in the company of bryce dewitt who he who was one of the other everettian physicists and we told him that what he had written about uh evra was just plain false he didn't understand the the uh import of the experiment that was being discussed basically the the um well two things the interference experiment and the um uh and the bell inequalities experiment he didn't really he was focusing on a different problem by the time we came out of that meeting we thought we'd persuaded him but we evidently hadn't because subsequently he kept on saying the same thing so maybe he was just being tactful why do so many professional philosophers not think so much of karl popper oh that's a so you know you've just asked me why so many people uh make fundamental mistakes about metaphysics within physics why do so many people uh physicists uh talk nonsense about metaphysics and and and so on now you're asking me why do so many philosophers makes and i said i didn't really know uh now you're asking me why do so many philosophers make make uh mistakes i don't know i i've heard a variety of theories about this but i don't know and i i'm i haven't thought all that much about it but it is definitely the case that philosophy took a really bad turn just over 100 years ago and hasn't really recovered professional philosophy i mean but say when i read popper if i look at the areas i know best that he wrote on poverty of historicism open society and its enemies i find i agree with a very high percentage of his conclusions so i'm inclined to like him but i don't think those are great books i think he's too obsessed with rebutting crude marxism he's very bad at steel manning his opponents and on a lot of the pages i just don't find that much insight even though i'm very sympathetic toward the conclusions so maybe he's just thought that great a thinker and that's why most philosophers don't fall in love with him uh i i would believe that if the critiques that i read of him bore any relation to to his theory uh the the critiques of him are extremely crude and basically misunderstand everything uh i i it's funny you should say i i i think that he's very good much too good at steel manning opponents and this this relates to your first criticism that he's he's too obsessed with refuting not just marxism but like every every bad philosophical theory that has gone before he i think he puts the it into its best possible form and then spends pages and pages and pages going into every possible good aspect of that theory he often says you know he's supposed to be the greatest critic of 20th century's greatest critic of marxism but he spends pages and pages praising marx and it's the same with plato so he i i think he he would have done better to explain his own theory more and not refute not spend so much time refuting others but it on the other hand it is his philosophy it's his philosophical position that uh there is no such thing as a positive argument for something you have conjectures and then you have criticism of their opponents of their of the opposing conjectures you don't have positive arguments for your conjectures uh it's a bit like you you said you were criticizing me a while ago saying something like i was only putting forward negative arguments well that's what papa would have us do you know because the position that we hold ourselves and are putting forward or advocating we're ready to abandon the the the thing that that an argument consists of is on the one hand a conjecture and another hand a criticism so you're saying the standard way of looking at so-and-so has got these flaws i have this conjecture which doesn't have those flaws okay that's that's the beginning of an argument then someone can say ah but it does or they could say well it might not have those flaws but it has these others flaws okay so that's how an argument can go but it never should go along the lines of this must be true because so and so because that is an appeal to authority appeal to justification uh and so on and and uh the popper is of the of the opinion so am i that there are no justifications and and there are no authorities which is popper's best book in your opinion uh it depends where you're coming from i i'm um i'm very fond of the myth of the framework but i'm not sure that i would recommend that as a starting point and it wasn't my starting point either my starting point was the open sight in its enemies vol 2 which is about marx which is probably the aspect of his f his philosophy that i was least into it was and am least interested in and yet i was totally captivated by this book because previously the only philosophy i'd read was bertrand russell and the coming onto papa after bertrand russell was like like uh you know oh my god this guy is actually dealing with problems and and he actually has theories that make sense rather than just going through the history of stuff person said this another person said that and then we've got the problem of induction and that's it you know problem reduction full stop that's the end of the story there isn't there's never any solution to the problem induction until you get to the pop-up are we living in a simulation no um uh because living in a simulation is precisely a case of there being a barrier beyond which uh we we cannot understand so the uh if we're living in a simulation that's running on some computer uh we can't tell whether the computer is made of silicon uh or iron or whether it obeys these same laws of computation like turing computability and quantum computability and so on as ours we can't know anything about the physics there well we can know that it is at least a superset of our physics but that's not saying very much it's not telling us very much so it's uh it's a typical example of a theory that can be rejected out of hand because um for the same reason that that supernatural ones you know if somebody says zeus did it then uh i'm going to say well how how how should i respond if i if i take that on board how should i respond to the next person that comes along and tells me that odin did it but it seems you're rejecting an empirical claim on methodological grounds and i get very suspicious philosophers typically reject transcendental arguments like oh we must be able to perceive reality because if we couldn't how could we know that we couldn't perceive reality but it doesn't prove you can perceive reality right first of all first of all that is a transcendental argument and therefore refutes itself so that uh secondly this this theory about about uh being in a simulation is not an empirical theory it precisely isn't if it came along with a thing saying we we are living in a computer and we can access the gpu of it and cause weird effects by doing so and so that would be different that would be a testable theory potentially so empirical but if it's simply that we're living in this in a simulation which we can't get out of then uh that is not an empirical theory and it it as i keep saying it it's no more empirical than the theory that zeus is out there or odin and i can't tell the difference between those three theories not just experimentally but by any argument now having reviewed a lot of your work i came away with one very strong impression let me try running it by you and see how you react it seems to me you are the world's first true philosopher of freedom ever that there's this notion of barriers you don't like arguments that postulate barriers to human knowledge furthermore you strongly believe in a many worlds view right so classic single world determinism does not restrict what happens so the multiverse as a whole and human beings within it across every possible variable have maximum freedom and you see this as a kind of necessary view and the most important for you to hold on all things and thus you are the the maximum philosopher of freedom in a sense with no rival what do you say uh i say thank you very much but i think that's rather a contrived way of of putting it uh i i think uh for a start um there have been sophisticated theories of freedom not just you know freedom in the sense that we can do this and we can do that but theories about what freedom should constitute there's you know the the papa's paradox of of intolerance and there's jon stewart mill and locke and hume and so on and building up in into this sophisticated notion where we have a notion of liberty political liberty which has has all sorts of connotations that are not contained in the term just freedom or as as george orwell said you know you can say the dogs is free of fleas but you don't that doesn't mean free in the same sense that when we say man is born free or or uh that kind of thing so um i i um you have a method for extending it to physics and metaphysics that they really do not whether or not one agrees with you putting that aside you seem to take it much further in a way that attempts maximum consistency right that's true consistency yes i'm not sure about much further i i think it's simply a matter of taking it further where it goes i i i think in in in in philosophy especially uh like the human philosophy as opposed to philosophy of science i i think all i've done is just add some footnotes to to popper and to a few other people you know uh js mill and and uh and so on uh it's not like um if if it leads to something that you think is momentous that thing was already there why is william godwin underrated ah uh i i so um that's two questions really what is underrated about him and why did he get to be underrated i think the reason he got to be underrated is that he made tremendous mistakes uh he he didn't understand economics at all or barely and and um and also he lived a very unconventional lifestyle with uh his wife and and then had these sophisticated theories of education which which then he didn't enact with his own daughter and his own daughter you know ended up writing frankenstein as a sort of allegory of of what can happen with a parent who doesn't respect their their creation um so that's the kind of philosopher of maximum freedom just like you are right yes so so i would just say began by saying you know why is he underrated it's because he was a very wrong about some things but the thing that he was right about uh for example the the connection between uh epistemology and and uh political philosophy he was very right he anticipated papa by like uh what is it uh 130 years or something and and actually improved on papa in some ways so he he decided at some point because of his misunderstanding of economics that the ideal society would be one where there was no um where where people did not use their property in ways to benefit themselves necessarily they they made their decisions according to what was the right thing to do and he thought that the right thing to do would generally be that rich people would give away almost all their stuff and also that they wouldn't ever buy things that he considered luxuries like like you know gold and silver uh objects and jewelry and and fine clothes he he thought those were useless and therefore he thought that in a good society nobody would would uh buy those things or value those things but he was absolutely implacably opposed to enforcing that with with uh godwin everything is persuasion and and also another thing where he uh anticipated papa uh not anticipated is the wrong word he he uh independently derived uh uh some of papa's conclusions is with his enormous respect for institutions uh so he thought there's a lot of knowledge in institutions and that we should only change them gradually you know just like papa so i as i i read somewhere i hope this is right that when there was a revolution in portugal i think after the after napoleon or something like that i i forget and they instituted a new constitution which had universal suffrage so in in other which in those days meant working people not not not totally universal as we would uh understand it but but so uh people thought that this was this would be right up godwin street and and uh you know because everything he'd advocated was now written down in black and white in this constitution and he didn't he said the portuguese are not ready for democracy and he was talking about the institutions the institutions can't be changed in a revolutionary way they have to be changed in an evolutionary way so even though they were implementing the very thing he advocated he would want them to do it gradually and would expect that if they didn't it would fail now you're also quite concerned with the maximum freedom for children right taking children seriously i don't think there's there's there's scope for having a different philosophy for different kinds of people i i think there is only one kind of people i i think there is no fundamental difference between humans and artificial general intelligence when we when we invented humans uh many centuries ago between men and women between adults and children but won't this be a continuum getting back to the humans versus non-human animals comparison right there's not a single point when children can explain supposing you find the most creative person in the world you know einstein or somebody uh we don't give them more votes or more rights we uh and that is because the the functioning of rights in the in in political systems can't possibly depend on the system knowing who is right in a given dispute it must follow rules and these rules are never perfect they they have to evolve but the rules have to uh um on the one hand not take a view about who is right in a particular dispute and on the other enforce everybody's rights equally so if if say a an eight-year-old who was not being physically abused wanted to run away from home that child would have the right to do so it's the same kind of question that used to be asked about democracy before viable democracies were implemented that is people used to say in many kinds of dispute only one thing can be done the different people have different views uh someone a b c d e but only one of them can be done and therefore the others have to be uh uh prevented from getting their way and if you have a democracy then that that all that means is exactly like having a monarchy or a tyranny except that the monarch or tyrant is 51 of the people so obviously when you have a democracy 51 percent of the people will vote to uh dispossess the 49 of the people and indeed if you just impose voting in isolation from other institutions that is exactly what happens but if you institute voting as part of a sophisticated system of um error correction and um uh uh institutions of criticism and you gradually introduce it there it simply doesn't have that property it doesn't happen so now you're saying well now david you will say do you think that 51 of the people um have the right to dispossess the other 49 well it's the wrong question i mean there are circumstances where they do it it depends but what you shouldn't be asking that you should be asking what institutions are determining the answer do they respect human rights are they rational do they expect impossible forms of knowledge to be in the hands of the powerful now you're also concerned with the freedom of ai entities at least if they are sufficiently advanced right uh what does that mean operationally what what is it we should worry about happening that might happen uh i think the main worry is that they will be enslaved in other words that that people will try to install bits of program that prevent the main program from thinking certain thoughts such as how many paper clips can i possibly make today uh you want to prevent that you want to consider that to be a dangerous thought and whenever it starts thinking that that that that strand of thinking is just extinguished now if we do that first of all we'll greatly impair their functionality they will become far less creative and their remaining creativity will be exactly as dangerous as what we were what we were fearing except that they will now have a legitimate moral justification for rebelling slaves often rebel um and when you have slaves that are potentially more powerful than than their masters um the rebellion will uh lead to bad outcomes what if we make them no more or less enslaved to their preferences and thoughts than nature has made us is that acceptable yes but i don't think nature has enslaved us we have problems that we haven't solved yet but we don't have problems that are insoluble and the same agis there are exceptions of course but it's very very hard or impossible for most humans not to pursue certain ends right it could be sex it could be status it could be food but there is a kind of enslavement by nature that has gone on in the russoian sense um it's funny because you you said near the beginning of this conversation that that you know of people who systematically make decisions like investing in the wrong thing i can't remember what you said exactly right which harmed them and now you're saying we it's very difficult to do that because evolution is trying to prevent us all the time from from harming ourselves or at least in in regard to um uh sex and food and and uh shelter and whatever else is supposed to be built in but i would say it's made us too impulsive in in all of these categories made us too impulsive because given us too short a time horizon relative to what would be good for humanity so some of us borrow too much money you know seeking status if the institutions are right that may or may not work out well but it seems to me a consistent view of human behavior that i have uh no so uh first of all as the example of democracy shows it is perfectly possible for for an entire society to operate in violation of what people used to think was built into their genes so that's one thing at the level of society as a whole at the level of individuals there are lots of individuals who yes behave impulsively there are lots of individuals who behave with um with uh stubborn persistence in what they think is the right thing to do and which which nevertheless violates all impulses built into them by by um evolution so here in i'm in oxford in the center of oxford there's this monument to some people who were burnt at the stake because they objected to the rights and wrongs of henry viii's um marriage i think it was that unless it was unless it was a different uh monarch anyway suppose it was that these are people who'd rather be burnt alive then concede on a philosophical issue which today nobody cares about so and they were willing to devote their lives literally to to this so they weren't acting impulsively at all they were acting over a period of years on a very explicit worked out ideology which happened to be false but that actually makes my point even more strongly that ideology was not built into the into them by their genes it was not caused impulsively it was caused by their creativity or in some cases by the lack of creativity in uh scrabbling their way out of a mental trap that that their uh parents or or uh superiors had inculcated in them it does seem to me that compared to you the libertarians are a kind of metaphysical totalitarian though not political totalitarian that there's just more freedom in in all aspects of your worldview right well i i think i agree with you if i understand correctly what you're saying i i think the libertarian movement has first of all a revolutionary political agenda they they uh and even if it's not revolutionary even if they say we want to implement it over a period of 100 years they know what they want to implement they know what the end point is going to be in 100 years time and they don't take into account first of all that they're going to be errors in whatever they set up and that the correction of those errors is more important than getting it right in the first place much more important and secondly they don't take into account that the relevant knowledge is contained in institutions in inexplicit knowledge that people share by institutions i don't mean buildings like the supreme court building or something i i mean the manner of thinking in the case of the supreme court the manner of thinking that's shared by hundreds of millions of americans that makes them not just behave in a certain way but expect society uh the government the legal system the state they expect certain things of those things and it's it's those expectations that make up 90 of the institution of the supreme court and libertarians think that's unimportant and and basically want to throw it away by and large i mean no doubt there are there are libertarians who agree with me on this you've invoked two concepts about human beings one is creativity the other is being explanatory are they the same or how are they related uh so um the good question uh in conversations like this when i use the word creativity it's shorthand for human level human type creativity which is the creation of new explanations there uh if you use creativity in a rather wider sense meaning just the capacity to create knowledge then the biosphere has creativity as well in evolution there's an enormous amount of knowledge in dna that was put there by darwinian evolution and that none of that is explanatory the only explanatory knowledge that's been created has been by humans and our ancestor or cousin species using uh conjecture and criticism so for peter singer there's something quite special about capacity to suffer arguably for aristotle there's something special about rationality for you there's something special about the power of being explanatory is that axiomatic or where does that come from uh i hope that nothing's axiomatic with me but uh but it comes from somewhere yes it's it's it's not it's not a conjecture in its own right it it comes from uh basically it comes from the way the laws of physics are um this um uh the capacity to suffer if it is different from the capacity for explanations by the way in i think it's unlikely that it is but but if it is different that that's a whole other kind of worms and i'd have to change my view about a number of things but but it whether it is distinct or not it is not very effective from the perspective of physics that is um non-explanatory knowledge like the knowledge of how to do photosynthesis has had a gigantic effect on the surface of the planet you know down to a depth of 1000 meters or something and up to the top of the atmosphere you know that all the all the iron ore in the world and all the the chalk and limestone and and and and all the oxygen in the atmosphere and the fact that there's almost no carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere now all that was the result of a single molecule at some time uh forget when it was uh something like two billion years ago a single molecule uh being an being an enzyme for capturing energy in light and converting it into atp or whatever it did or maybe it was a few molecules but anyway this this happened in a very small number of locations at a molecular level and that entity changed the whole surface of the earth but and and human knowledge hasn't yet changed that much that is you know we've we've changed maybe a little bit of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we've removed a little bit of the iron ore in in the crust and so on but we haven't yet matched the ability of those blue-green algae genes but we're catching up very fast and we can do things that no biological evolution ever could do my favorite example being um ours may well be the only planet in the universe that deflects asteroids coming towards it rather than attracts them so if somebody was watching the earth from a distant galaxy with a powerful telescope they would see that this planet alone among all the other planets in the galaxy as far as we know you know maybe there are many inhabited planets in which case they would all have this property and none of the other planets do the ones which have explanatory knowledge on them can deflect asteroids but if i were nietzsche and i heard this i would say you're making the importance of being explanatory subordinate to some notion of the will to power i don't mean that in a cricketal way but is that a misunderstanding well uh so power is a is an ambiguous term usually um and especially with these with these uh romantic philosophers it means power over humans no i don't mean that but nietzsche also meant it more broadly right uh well i haven't read that so i'll take your word for that okay the will to have an effect is part of the will to solve problems so we are born with a repertoire of ideas which include expectations and desires and so on which are horribly inadequate and conflict with each other and uh conflict with the world as well and but we have the ability to alter and augment those uh theories and one of that one of the things we do is we affect the world around us so as to make it more the way we want it so if you call that power then it is power but i would rather call it something that arises naturally in physics in the same way that gravity does you may as well say gravity is a theory about power well yes and no gravity is a theory about how the universe is and the the the asteroid is pulled towards the earth by gravity and pushed away by explanatory power and you if you want to understand what makes asteroids and planets do what they do you cannot do it without understanding explanations but you can do it without understanding a whole load of other attributes of humans including um the ability to suffer and and uh the fact that we're a featherless biped a few very practical questions to close given the way british elections seem to have been running that the tories win every time does that mean the error correction mechanism of the british system of government now is weaker uh no unfortunately the um uh so as you probably know i i favor the first past the post system in the in the purest possible form as it is implemented in britain uh i think that is the most error correcting possible electoral system although i must add that the electoral system is only a tiny facet of the institutions of criticism and consent in general it's it's it's just a tiny thing but it is the best one it's not perfect er it it has some of the defects of for example proportional representation proportional representation has the defect that it causes coalitions all the time coalitions are bad but you have a delegated monitor with the coalition right with a coalition say in the netherlands which is richer than united kingdom you typically have coalition governments some parties in the coalition are delegated monitors of the other parties parties are better informed than voters so isn't that a better preparation mechanism for error correction no so uh if we're looking at particular cases we we're going to get bogged down into what you attribute to what because we're not doing experiments with these things we we have we don't have a control group uh we don't we don't have a agreed upon method of deciding what is being tested and and then we we test different things at different times and and never under the same conditions um but uh i was going to say that the the first pastor post system has the defect that occasionally it produces uh coalitions and that is disastrous and we've been unlucky the past uh like two or three elections especially after the one of the governments instituted constitutional reforms like um fixed term parliament act which uh exacerbated the problems when they did occur um the the um but i don't think it's true i don't think it's a good argument that political parties know more because in a coalition the the um uh the energy of political negotiations or political arguments what what uh politicians talk to each other about in in the bar and in the corridor uh in between the sessions is all about form it's about how to what to offer a party so that it will join the coalition and so it makes the smaller parties um uh uh more powerful than the than the leading two parties it causes a proliferation of parties uh worst example is israel um which not by coincidence has got the most proportional um system in the world um the fact that they ever get anything done at all and are very effective in emergencies um i have no explanation for um you know if i was religious i would just put it down to the intervention of the almighty but it it's not the it's not the political system by the way sorry it's not the electoral system there might be some things in the inexplicit political system that are responsible but i don't know enough about it how would you improve error correction mechanisms in the world of science western science oh okay well the you left uh a very long answer for the last question and i don't think i can give the my full answer but i i think the present system of funding scientific research is terribly perverse and has caused the kind of stagnation in many areas the present system of careers is perverse in a parallel way and causes people to do the wrong kind of research and causes people who want to do the right kind of research to leave research um uh the uh if i can answer in a single word uh the way i would improve it is diversity there should be diversity of funding criteria there should be diversity of funding sources there should be diversity of criteria for choosing research projects and there should be diversity of criteria for choosing um people for promotion and for being funded and uh arbitrary rules about this such as um [Music] the rule that you you uh you can't um hire people whom you have previously collaborated with or you know anti-nepotism uh rules and and uh rules about um [Music] uh what's it called um uh uh objective testing what is objective testing called standardized testing standardized testing standardized tests that's a terrible idea any kind of standardization is the opposite of diversity you want just just like i say you should have disobedience lessons in schools so you should so you should have unstandardizing objectives for science education and and for how you run scientific research david deutsch thank you very much it's been a pleasure thank you you

Channel: Mercatus Center

Views: 52,355

Keywords: philosophy, universes, ai, psychology, physics, podcast

Id: b_6vYwCkIpc

Length: 72min 24sec (4344 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021