Fear not! ToKCast is not becoming a pure Q&A "show". This is literally a kind of "break" for me that I find easy and I note the listeners find fun. Today's a little shorter and - here's some of the topics covered!
00:00: David Deutsch mentioned on Lex Fridman
04:15: Dennis Noble debates Richard Dawkins on the selfish gene
16:47: The goal driven life and AI
27:51 Self similarity - minds and universes
34:39: The hard problem of consciousness and Popperian epistemology
41:30: Wave particle duality
53:53 The fun criterion - and some reflections on responsibility and “toil”.
1:05:44 - Communication and the difficulty thereof between people
1:07:13 - Roger Penrose and the universality of (quantum) computation (or Taking Theories Seriously…)
1:13:35 Book recommendations.
I thought I'd start by acknowledging the fact that David Deutsch was mentioned on the Lex Friedman podcast, the most recent one. Thank you to my friend Sean from Twitter, who let me know about this. And it was, he was, I should say it was, David Deutsch was mentioned in the context of Lex interviewing Aravind Shrinivas, who I've heard of before, because he's involved in general creating chatbots, programming, AI, that whole thing. But he's not a doomer. And he seems to have been influenced by the work of David Deutsch. He has read at the beginning of infinity the mentions that he makes of David's work in this interview, so far as I can tell, and I've only listened to the first, you know, 20 minutes, seem to me to be sound. He's talking about how knowledge is an open-ended quest and there will always be an infinite amount of knowledge left yet to be discovered. So that seems to me to be all quite right and hey, great. More people are coming on board. I mean Elon Musk is now following David Deutsch on X. So I think this is down very much to the work of Naval. Naval Ravakan has spread throughout the tech community an optimistic vision of the work that they do and they don't have to be worried that what they're working on somehow has to be regulated and controlled for fear that it's going to take over the world, that kind of thing. And the reasons for that come not from just blind hope or naive optimism but rather a deep understanding of computation, physics and epistemology and where can you find out more about that, the beginning of infinity among other things. So yes, David Deutsch mentioned yet again on the Lex Friedman podcast from a different person once more, this guy happens to be the CEO of perplexity which is kind of like chat GPT as far as I can tell, similar sort of an idea. So more power to people appearing on podcasts and spreading the word of whether you want to call it rational optimism, optimism in David Deutsch's sense, a way of countering the doomers and the prophets and the naysayers and the regulators and the authoritarians and the anti-enlightenment impulses that appear to be out there, there will always be out there because people are fallible, I say always, is that pessimistic? Not really because it just is an admission that people make mistakes and we can't expect everyone to always be committed to open-ended rapid progress. People will be born, learn certain things and conjecture ideas which are sometimes going to be very much against the idea of progress, that's just baked into what it means to be a person. I forgive my drinking of tea, it's just past morning tea time here in Australia because I follow very much in the British tradition of these things. For us and loose ends, I wanted to tidy up from yesterday's very fun, ask me anything live stream and so before I get to any new questions that happened to arise today and if you happen to be joining, please feel free in the chat just to ask me absolutely anything and I'll try and get to it, was that Randy asked me yesterday via Twitter about a fellow called Dennis Noble, a name I'd heard but I could not place the name. I heard I heard this name before but the way in which Dennis phrased the question was about how maybe I should just go to the question itself rather than me trying to go off my failing memory of what the question actually was, so let me find your question, Randy. Randy asked me yesterday another question about constructive theory and said can you comment on how Dennis Noble's ideas about purposeful or goal-driven action of biological systems, examples, cells and organisms in the concept of constructive theory, can goals be objectively assigned to processes change in the state of the constructor, substrate for an enzyme if goals can be objectively defined, can this be a path to a better understanding of qualia and problem solving? I barely answered this question at all and one reason is that I wasn't aware of Dennis Noble or at least although I'd heard the name I couldn't place it in the intellectual context so to speak but I went away, did my homework so to speak because I thought the way in which the question was phrased, there's goal-driven action of biological systems, it seemed to me to be standing in stark contrast to the selfish gene idea where it's not goal driven. Evolution by natural selection is a blind process of random mutations being selected and those random mutations occur for any number of reasons whether it be just poor copying that's going on or a far-flung cosmic ray strikes the DNA in just the right place at just the right time causing an electron to ionize an atom which then goes on to end up being a mutation and so I went and did my homework and I was very impressed to find that Richard Dawkins had debated this Dennis Noble guy but I also thought to myself because I don't know Richard Dawkins personally but I followed his work very closely for decades now and he always had a policy he used to say out loud quite proudly I will not debate creationists and I will not debate creationists because although it's going to look wonderful on their resume it does absolutely nothing for me and no one learns anything. Now of course Dennis Noble is not a creationist but the rejection of the selfish gene idea and a whole bunch of other things I went reading about okay what does Dennis Noble actually think he was on the stage and he's on the stage with the Institute of Art and now where is it? There is a debate between Richard Dawkins it happened only last year and Dennis Noble on the IAI site so you can find that the one that I watched was titled you can find us on YouTube Dawkins re-examined Dawkins legacy and Dennis Noble versus if you like Richard Dawkins and they're talking about the selfish gene idea and evolution by natural selection in general and it was a wonderful discussion but I thought to myself now why would Richard bother because there are many people Richard doesn't even bother to engage with after all and David Deutsch has a similar perspective why keep re-hashing the same old tyre ground the old debates that we know have been long since resolved we know certain things it's like you can't keep arguing with people about the fact that the multiverse is the way in which we understand quantum theory you can't keep arguing about realism you can't keep arguing against solipsism or for the existence of infinities and for the existence of democracy now we do these things but at the high intellectual level it's like well the argument has been had the argument has been won and the alternatives have been left aside as bad explanation so my thought was why would Richard subject himself to this well as it turns out Richard has deep admiration and respect for Dennis Noble and why Dennis Noble was his thesis examiner so when Richard got his first PhD it was Dennis who was listening and deciding whether or not he qualified for his graduate level degree so this is one reason why and Dennis Noble isn't any old critic he is sophisticated and seems to have some understanding of the selfish gene ideal though by his own admission he says he doesn't fully understand it and that does come across in the debate that I watched it goes for about 50 minutes and it's there on YouTube and it's like two Jedi masters going out one another but one of them Richard Dawkins clearly has a handle on things more than the other but it's a very respectful tone very humorous you know Richard says things like I absolutely loved Dennis's most recent book it is so beautifully written it's cogent and clear it's just that it's completely wrong and so he was picking out a particular sentence from the book and unpacking it and saying why it's wrong the fundamental disagreement between them comes down to Richard says that it is the gene that is a unit of selection and it uses the environment including the body in which it finds itself and the cell and all that kind of stuff in order to get replicated it is a replicator then as denies that it even is a replicator to begin with and then goes a step further to say that it is the organism or the body that is using the genes looking them up if you will as and when required to build the proteins in order that it survives so it's cut before the horse in other words I don't know what his motivation is because I haven't read a sufficient amount of his work I've just listened to him talk but we can judge people when they're set one against the other by the clarity of the explanations and the clarity of Dennis's explanation left a lot to be desired I was left with too many questions now this could be my fault because maybe I'm not sufficiently aware of his work and of what his theory is but Richard was explaining the theory very well that he holds to and that he discovered for example without using the term he talked about substrate independence substrate independence he said we could take your gene on Dennis and in principle we could write it down on a piece of paper preserved but under glass for 10,000 years and in 10,000 years from now we could recreate you your twin and Dennis's retort to that was no you couldn't you would also need a cell to which Richard and I guess everyone in the audience went well of course of course that goes without saying but that made me think that Dennis was just looking for a nitpicking way to disagree not with the substantive point which Richard was making which was that the genome actually encodes information about how to build an organism but rather wanted to pick him up on something he did not say but when unsaid because to me it was implicit in his thought experiment that 10,000 years from now we can build you given your genome your genome contains all the information in order to recapitulate that organism and it is the genes that other things that are trying to it is about survival of the genes the genes that are most frequent other ones that are most successful in a given gene pool and so on so I was none the wiser at the end of watching Dennis Noble explain or attempt to explain his alternative he just seemed to be saying at times well there are unsolved questions here unsolved problems here to which Richard of course concedes and everyone does that we don't know everything there is to know about evolution by natural selection but to deny that evolution by natural selection in the form of the selfish gene is the way in which we explain the diversity of species seems to be badly misguided reading further you know my understanding is that Dennis Noble says things like mutation for example is not random it is not a random process no I don't know how he comes to that but he says this so all of these things that do cause mutations radiation chemistry poor copying I don't know how he gets around that this idea that they're not random or pseudo random nothing we genuinely random in the universe but of course being if your germline DNA is struck by a cosmic ray that's as random a thing that can possibly happen in physical reality as can be imagined Dennis Noble makes a big idea of the notion that acquired characteristics can be inherited which is no one these days really disagrees with that it's just that that's part of a wider understanding sometimes it goes under the terminology of epigenetics that certain things can happen to your grandparents and that can affect your DNA but it doesn't change the fact that the information is being transmitted via the DNA via the genome there's no other mechanism except that information is being carried by an information medium and then replicated but he does reject Dennis Noble does reject the gene centered view of evolution and he also rejects the idea that evolution is is a gradual incremental process so therefore he's on the side of Stephen Jay Gould and those debates were well hashed out decades ago as well but between Richard and Stephen Jay Gould so there's much to disagree with and I think I understand that perspective I don't understand Dennis Noble in particular but there are people like that in biology he's a biologist he's a physiologist he's a well renowned physiologist I've come to understand he had a he's one of the first to produce a working mathematical model of the way in which the heart pumps blood so he knows his stuff at that level but in terms of evolution he seems to be getting things wrong fundamentally getting things wrong he thinks that the failure of biology to achieve certain things is an indication that the selfish gene view of evolution is itself flawed so for example because scientists so far have not been able to create life in the laboratory that therefore this view of having a gene centered view of biology must itself be flawed and I don't see that that follows at all there are many things we don't know in biology we don't know how to make people live forever that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the gene centered view of biology so that's Dennis Noble so hopefully I'm that satisfies Randy on that point I want to mention I was on air chat join air chat if you've not yet joined air chat talk to me there it's a great way to interact with like minded people about any number of topics oh Randy's on YouTube yes okay so this thing about goals now I've talked about goals performed in fact I've talked about goals here on a live chat before and so I'm going to broaden things out now because Randy said at the end of that question on Twitter can goals be objectively assigned to processes change in the state of the constructor substrate for an enzyme if goals can be objectively defined can this path be a better understanding of quality and problem solving we can certainly define a goal and this is what we want AI to do to do what we want it to and you could say that's the goal I've got a pocket calculator the goal might be for me to add up to numbers and when it produces the sum the pocket calculator has helped me achieve that goal I might not know what the capital city of the United Kingdom is I've forgotten for whatever reason and so I got a chat chip attend type it in and it gives me the answer my goal was to know what the capital city was and at the end of the process of using the AI I have found my answer we can program AIs to achieve goals to perform tasks you hear a lot of people in the self-help community talk about human beings and people in terms of goals and tasks as well you should have a goal send it live people who aren't driven by their goals are not going to achieve anything and this kind of thing and I think that is terribly misguided it treats a person like a mechanism because if you set yourself a goal and do not achieve that goal that's regarded as a failure rather than which is often the case you becoming more interested in a better goal better yet don't call it a goal at all becoming more interested in something else something more important something more fun we should regard our circumstances being one of problems many of which hopefully are fun and animate our lives with the search for good explanations in our own lives so that we can be more creative in finding ways to enrich our lives physically mentally spiritually whatever you want to say and the pursuit of finding those solutions is open-ended whereas a goal is a closed thing once you've achieved your goal cap on top of that and this is why one of the examples that people come back to is the Olympic athletes who we can all admire but imagine if as a child you see the person on the podium who is the fastest sprinter in the world and you think that's what I want to do I want the gold medal at the Olympics you know 12 years from now and I want to be standing on that podium holding the gold medal for the fastest person in the world over 100 meters now whether you achieve that goal or not it can be a recipe for unhappiness after all if you don't achieve it you feel a failure but if you do achieve it we know we know so many people in this situation as sports stars are renowned for falling into deep depression because they haven't achieved the goal or when they do achieve the goal there's nothing left for them to do they go what now because they've devoted their life to this one thing rather than having problems and solving them and having fun along the way scientists can suffer the same thing scientists can make a difference can make what they think is the discovery the discovery doesn't get taken up by the community of scientists and they can fall into a terrible depression that they feel as if they're going unacknowledged when they deserve greater acknowledgement and this runs a risk of turning some people into cranks a crank being as I often say a technical term for someone who pretends to have knowledge which they did not possess that's not a waste okay sometimes great scientists whose work is not appreciated until after their death become very depressed because they think it should have been appreciated sooner and they're right but in any case they shouldn't have the frame of mind where their goal is for their pet theory good though it might be to make them famous to make a deep impact on the world immediately a number of these things what they should be doing is trying to have fun and if they're not having fun they should be doing something else we should be trying to find the farm in whatever situation we're in and that means having a goal driven life is often not that having a goal driven life works in opposition to this kind of thing and is different to problem solving and so Randy has asked if goals can be objectively defined can this be a path to better understanding quality and problem solving well I'm not sure I don't I don't know what a path to understanding qualia could be it's the same as the idea of consciousness I don't know where to begin with that yet my own conjecture which doesn't get us far at all is simply to say what we know subjectively is that we are conscious and objectively what we say in other people is the best explanation is they are conscious too and what separates people human beings from the rest of the species on the planet is that we generate explanatory knowledge so therefore are these two features or more features consciousness creativity the capacity to have qualia linked in some way throwing free will are all of these just different angles on the same mystery of what it is to be a person and will it all be resolved once we figure out a GI perhaps I don't know but problem solving and achieving goals are I would say not necessarily the same thing that can be regarded as opposites of the time because you may very well have the goal I want to be standing on the podium holding the gold medal or the hundred meter sprint at the Olympics in 12 years time that might be your goal and you do that to the exclusion of everything else causing your future self after you've held a lot for that gold medal and for the the warm glow of the following two weeks or perhaps two years however long lasts yourself after that you're condemning them to a kind of depression because you haven't thought beyond what problems will you solve then what will animate you who did you step on or what problems did you ignore the entire time you were training for this one thing now no doubt there are sprinters and great sports stars who can avoid this trap or falling in the depression whether they fail or succeed perhaps for some people having a goal for some time can be better than being completely inert there are degrees of mistakes we can make in the way in which we organize our lives one is to literally be inert is to have no motivation whatsoever be it a goal or a problem and distinguishing between those two things a goal is a thing that you think I would like to achieve that thing because once I achieve that thing I will be happy that's my goal I'll be happy satisfied or a better person something like that whereas a problem is this is the thing I'm interested in trying to find the solution to now this seems like fun or important maybe both ideally both and I'm going to keep doing this unless as Papa says something else comes along that's more interesting still a better problem than in either case if I got this goal fit am I fixed on this am I going to be not distracted because that's supposed to be the virtue right you go and I go to a gym and the way in which the trainers talk and the inspirational posters are up there I was like you must remain focused you must remain committed on this one thing and that all the self-help people talk in these terms have a goal stick to it be fixated jocko willing looks like this you know but jocko is an interesting person but those kind of people are very motivating when you hear hear them but really when you listen to jocko he's having fun he's a very different kind of character he talks about discipline and you know knowing what you want and that kind of thing but he is also mercurial by which I mean he changes his mind and he talks about that in his books so you know you might may well have this aim this thing even at the military does you know this is the target that we want to get and whatever but they don't doggedly just go after that without regard for other possibilities is forever considering what might be a better option which the goal driven life doesn't account for the goal driven life the goal driven perspective is here is this one thing that I am committed to not being distracted from regardless of what else tried to intrude and those things that are trying to intrude are giving you information about the world especially if you think I think I'd rather be doing something else right now that's an important piece of information and maybe something you ignore if you're trying to get fit if your problem is that you're concerned that your heart isn't as healthy as it should be because that's what your cardiologist has told you or that your blood sugar is too high because that's what the the blood work from the pathology lab has told you and been returned to the doctor or any number of things that could be causing you ill health and therefore you have to to some extent do some things if you want to keep surviving that you otherwise hadn't included in your plan for your near-term life then you're going to have to do things which you can call them goals if you like but I would prefer to just call them problems to solve and you can find fun ways of dealing with the unexpected things are going to intrude sometimes and so again this is why I say admitting our circumstance is one of problem solving and not of goal achieving separates us from the machines the machines are the things that achieve the goals that we set for them and they will do it so long as they're not malfunctioning as well as we've programmed them too and they won't disobey but yeah let me talk about our air chat briefly so come to air chat if you ever want to talk to me about anything a voice to voice novile rubber counts there are a whole bunch of people are there talking as they would kind of do on Twitter or Facebook posts or whatever but it's it's voice and I was talking recently about how people in being unique uh simulate crumbs of the universe as a whole we each have our model of what's going on in the rest of physical reality which kind of makes us like a universe we have this internal universe inside of us running a virtual reality rendering on this thing called our minds of the rest of physical reality but each of us have a subtly different one and so I pushed the analogy perhaps a little too far but thought I might share it now and the analogy if you like is if we're going to talk about each other as being a universe an individual universe because as I say we're modeling the universe so there's this one-to-one correspondence between the contents of our minds in terms of our explanations of physical reality and the physical reality itself and that one-to-one correspondence means if there's a universe out there then there's a model of the universe inside of us so each of us has a subtly different model a different perspective on the universe so what kind of universe are you modeling inside of your mind is it open closed flat or something else these are the cosmological terms if it's a closed universe then this means in cosmological terms and what used to be thought was that the amount of mass and energy in the universe would be sufficient because it has gravity to eventually stop the expansion after the big bang there's a big bang there's an expansion of space and then the expansion of space would eventually come to a halt and then collapse in on itself that's closed the analogy therefore to a person is are you the kind of person who makes lots of rapid progress such as all children do early on and then eventually one day you just kind of give up and stop and then you collapse and retreating on yourself and go backwards and decline become decrepit and stop trying to achieve more you're a closed person in the same way our closed universe eventually ends up in a big crunch you're going to end up in a sudden death or something like that horrible thing to think about but we hope that we don't end up in that position that's the the closed universe now the flat universe or the critical density universe might be a better way of putting that because other universes can be flat oh forget about that the critical density universe is where on a knife's edge the expansion of the universe is perfectly balanced by the amount of matter and energy in the universe gravity so that it comes to a stop it doesn't collapse in on itself but at the same time it doesn't expand any further and that causes a flat geometry and it seems like a universe is extremely flat for a long time that was a big mystery it's not wise the universe so flat so close to the critical density and the analogy there would be to a person who continues to make progress throughout the course of their life and then dies having continued to make progress which is a preferable state to the first one where they kind of went into a kind of regression and the third kind is the open universe which is the one where we'd like to get to there's only one thing preferable to the open universe except that the open universe is where you continue to expand forever this is where the rate of expansion due to the big bang exceeds the amount of mass energy in the universe so the gravity is insufficient because of the amount of matter in the universe to prevent the expansion from going on forever and effectively what we've got there is escape velocity of all the galaxies one from another and eventually all the galaxies wink out from existence so that would mean that you're going on forever to make more and more progress but in a kind of way that means things are winking out of existence you're becoming less and less populated with galaxies and from your perspective the light seems to die in the sky which is what really will happen in our universe if it was like that if the universe continues to expand in an open way eventually almost all the galaxies will recede away from us the night sky will become completely dark because all the other sources of light in the universe will have been expanded beyond the horizon from where we can see but this is trillions of years hence so no need to worry about it the situation we're really in is not like any of those three but most resembles the third one in the third one we had a rapid big bang and then the expansion slowed down slowed down slowed down but would never stop we've achieved escape velocity but in truth what's going on according to our observations but for reasons we do not understand is that there is an energy in space itself driving and accelerating expansion and so rather than gravity causing things to slow down the expansion rate of the universe there is something there that is more powerful than gravity pushing things apart at an ever increasing rate this is the accelerating universe and I guess this is what the modern longevity type people the effective accelerationists would call an accelerating person if you could emulate that in your life be the kind of person that managed to find ever more energy from an untapped source that we don't know about to make ever more progress or faster that's the ideal so I pushed the analogy way too far there and some people didn't uh like that okay so questions that I missed yesterday this one was hidden under a label that said probable spam which I thought was so unfair it's not probable spam it's a it's a great question the question is sparsh mather is the asker's name his question was can the hard problem of consciousness be solved using propyrion epistemology my main question is can you ever really falsify any theory of subjective experience so the first part of that can the hard problem of consciousness be solved using propyrion epistemology? Propyrion epistemology is a framework for understanding how knowledge works so let's swap out the hard problem of consciousness for the hard problem of dark matter can the hard problem of dark matter be solved using propyrion epistemology? can open-ended questions within evolution by natural selection be solved using propyrion epistemology? well, propyrion epistemology is just a framework for understanding how other areas of knowledge science and philosophy and mathematics and so on manage to achieve what they do what the process is, conjecturing ideas so it itself is silent on any given theory with any any domain it just says that the way in which those theories are produced is via this method of conjecture which is then criticized in some way whether by the real world or by argument and so on so I do not think that the hard problem of consciousness will come out of propyrion epistemology as such it will begin somewhere in philosophy a philosophy of mind and then migrate I guess into some area of science computation physics biology something like that I doubt biology because I endorse the idea that something like a mind is an abstract entity which is substrate independent so biology then will become irrelevant to this question but computation wouldn't be in computation it's a part of physics and so it's ultimately a physics question how can we incorporate this idea of consciousness and who knows I don't know can the hard problem of consciousness be solved using you may as well say x and my answer is I don't know if I knew that I'd be famous and then sparsely say my main question is can you ever really falsify any theory of subjective experience well no you can't by which we mean if someone is saying to you if if if someone comes along to me and says I'm sad there's no way that I can I can falsify their claim even if I was to put them into an fMRI scanner or take a you know stick a needle inside of their brain and pull out a sample of the neurotransmitters and say aha the happy part of your brain is lighting up in a fMRI scanner and according to the sample I've just taken you have very high dopamine and serotonin levels you must be lying about being unhappy and that's not a false obligation because they might just be idiosyncratic we don't know you know we don't know enough about the brain to be able to say with such a high degree of confidence and this is the problem this the hard problem of consciousness is why does anything seem like anything at all why should as Sam Harris says reality be illuminated in the place where you stand right now why don't zombies exist now my answer to this all comes down to well it may have something to do with the capacity to generate explanations and that as soon as you admit the capacity to generate explanations what you're doing is admitting that these entities people can have problems problem situations can understand something about the present in order to hope for or dread about the future and so this capacity to create explanations invokes a lot of consciousness or subjectivist sounding terminology so it's hard to separate out those two things but knowledge creation the creativity part is at least amenable to physics and epistemology and regular science and philosophy whereas the consciousness side of things can only be experienced from the first person perspective and so we do have these difficulties but being unable to falsify something is no criticism remember that the other one the majority of our knowledge claims are not falsifiable it's only in science that that is a requirement a necessary but not sufficient criterion for a theory to be scientific let's go back to the grass the cure theory okay or let's change it for a change but this is based upon David Deutsch's grass cure theory let's say I say to you next time you get a positive test for the coronavirus go out and buy a dozen roses and eat them all and that will cure your coronavirus now that's a testable theory does that make it scientific of course it doesn't of course it doesn't just because something is testable does not make it scientific any crazy person wearing a sandwich board that says that next Tuesday the world is going to end as a testable theory in order for something to be scientific it needs to be both a good explanation of the physical world in some way that is testable okay so the hard to vary criterion applies here and one way in which in science something is particularly hard to vary is it is testable because the testability means that it makes predictions and predictions are precise and what so we can you know there's a very small margin of error for what it is so when we say eat a dozen roses and you come back and say my coronavirus was not cured and I say well try 11 or 13 I'm easily varying it why because I've never given the mechanism of action unless and until I can say why eating a dozen roses should cure the coronavirus I've got nothing I've literally got nothing it's just a it's crazy talk it's a it's a random hypothesis it's easily varied it's a bad explanation a bad idea what we want our explanations and that's not that yesterday again this fellow R.P Richard was asking me again about wave particle duality so let me go back to your Richard again and it's one of the it's this is one of those questions where I was talking about earlier where I do enjoy answering questions you know enjoy this kind of stuff but it's one of those ones where having talked about it so often it's hard to know how to come at it a different way going over all ground so to speak so Richard Pickett has asked thank you yesterday for answering my questions at the end of your answer to my second question you mentioned the experiments that can be done in the lab to reduce lights intensity down via lenses to the point where the light will flash what is the measuring device that picks up that flash and isn't it susceptible to the measurement resolution problem I mentioned in my first question the name of the device that picks up low intensity lights such as single photons is called a photo multiplier a photo multiplier is used in astronomy for example in order to which is basically it's one of the very first charged couple devices which is another fancy word for digital camera and so astronomy we have we can thank the astronomers for the digital cameras we have today on the iPhone and smartphones and all that kind of stuff because they were interested in developing buckets for light you know ways of collecting light that were highly sensitive to even single photons and so we have those now these are and so photo multipliers can take in a single photon and amplify it so that it can be seen by a single person has a flash of light so that's the name of that thing does it stuff from the measurement problem it's related to this idea of the measurement problem in that if you were to do a twin slit experiment with a single photon and you're not trying to detect which of the two slits that this single photon goes through then repeating the experiment over and over and over again you'll get an interference pattern using single photons and you know the single photons because you're firing them one at a time and if you want to check at any moment you can put this device this photo multiplier this thing that will will catch the photon so to speak absorb it and you will see that it's only ever catching one at a time now the thing is that if you do put it in front of the apparatus it destroys the experiment because of course in order for the experiment to work you want the photon to go through the apparatus not to be absorbed by a device detecting photons because once it does that it's destroyed the photon can only do one thing it can't both be detected and passed through the apparatus to be detected means to be seen to be observed and at first approximation what a person does when they're observing something is shining light at things so I can see my cup here only because the light from my room is hitting the cup bouncing off it and reflecting into my eyes when it comes to photons things are much more difficult because you can't shine a light at a photon so what you have to do is to absorb the photon it's the only means by which we can detect these photons to have them collide with something else perhaps with an electron let's say and so if you look at it in order to confirm to check whether or not it actually is a photon you can do that but if you don't look and just allow it to go through the experiment then you can see that it will produce a dot that should be reasonably convincing behind the apparatus on a screen where you can look this up on the internet right look up single photon interference experiments or single electron interference experiments here these things are done with whole atoms and molecules now not just photons not just photons so lots of small particles can be used in interference experiments involving twin slits or multiple slits whatever you happen to like and you find them one at a time one at a time so you absolutely know the electron is an electron it's a particle it's a bit of mass it's got mass it's got momentum yeah oxygen atoms uranium atoms these things have been used in interference experiments to demonstrate that quantum mechanical effects can be seen with large aggregates of fundamental particles and fundamental particles are things like photons and electrons but whole atoms are aggregates of those things okay so then Richard goes on something about i mentioned that light doesn't travel in waves because traveling in waves implies a medium i agree that waves imply medium but don't we observe light traveling in waves as indicated in experiments i double slit no what we observe is single particles and we can as i just said either you can choose to fire your single photon at a time or you can choose electrons or you can choose and fire atoms whatever it is you know you have no doubt so to speak that these things are particles that you are firing now the word particle has to be understood as something more complex than what people normally regard it's not point like you know an oxygen atom is not a point like thing it has a size it has a mass but you can nonetheless fire it at this twin slit setup but you know the oxygen atom is not a way of you know what it is you can even look at it under a scanning tunneling electron microscope to see it looks like a little sphere fuzzy little thing but sphere it is approximately speaking and you fire you fire this thing at the apparatus and it will end up on a screen behind the two twin slits and over time having repeated it again and again you'll get an interference pattern why do you get the interference pattern not because it magically changes into a wave but rather because if you fire it at the apparatus it takes both parts in fact it takes all possible paths through that interference experiment apparatus so the one you do observe and where it ends up can only be explained by the existence of entities you do not observe call those what you like we call them the the instances of the the electron of the oxygen atom each of which occupy a different universe which is the multiverse and the invocation of this that can be modeled by something like the shredding a wave equation this mathematical description of all the possible places or paths or momenta of whatever to have whatever the system is you have to be looking at like for example the oxygen atom and the mathematics says that all these possible places or paths exist so they're invoked in the explanation they're required for us to explain what we do see as the mantra goes we're explaining what we observe in terms of what we do not observe a particle is a thing that is isolated around a point but a wave is something that is extended throughout space not isolated near a point you can't both you can't be both simultaneously can't be both isolated around a point and extended throughout space isolated around no point that makes no sense it's a strict contradiction and quantum mechanics must also be rational and a biologic the laws of logic rich it says my read on the people who are confused about the dual nature of light are actually just trying to see that it's a discrete packet all the time based on the idea that must be a discrete packet because our measuring device have a discrete resolution to their consternation a single packet of light or even electrons and buckyballs behave like it's traveling as a wave and creates the interference pattern it appears to me that a more useful explanation is light is energy and when traveling travels through a medium so wave behavior and when it's measured it's absorbed into something like an electron at a discrete resolution which resolution is based on the properties of the things absorbing it a electron not the light itself. Neil Evans has responded underneath that single word shadows and I would yes encourage you to read chapter two of the fabric of reality shadows where it should clear up a lot of this. The confusion is absolutely on the side of the people who endorse this idea of wave particle duality or the dual nature of light what we are after are explanations of reality and just because a good explanation is an explanation you do not prefer is independent of the truth of that explanation there are certain things we might not like about reality but the fact is that light and electrons and matter the standard model of particle physics is about particles not about waves light does not travel through a medium that that's been demonstrated as well it can travel through the vacuum of space and this was settled even before quantum theory really you know there was the suggestion there should have been an ether but it's just not true so when light does pass through a medium like air or glass or water or whatever it happens to be it tends to get absorbed degraded over time photons are interacting with matter so it's not a vibration of the matter which is what a wave would be it's a particle that moves through the matter and can actually physically collide with the matter a stream of particles is not a wave and that's as cut and dried as we can get in science I would say we know what photons are to a good first approximation and well enough to categorically rule out that their waves in a higher dimensional space when we talk about what any object seems to be like in a single universe when viewed from a God's eye perspective across the multiverse then we can talk about it being extended across the multiverse in a continuous way like a wave but no one ever experiences the wave you are a wave in that sense across the multiverse but of course you only have the singular experience of being a person not the copies of yourself that are extended across the multiverse so we have to be careful to keep tight our explanations of what is going on in these situations it's simply not the case that particles are waves ever become waves it's an old idea this wave particle duality it violates logic in the law of the excluded middle it's a retreat from rationality and it wants to have things to both ways it also tries to ascribe consciousness at times two fundamental particles for example there was a popularizer of science in Australia he's still around dr carl who would say similarly clever things would actually were more like deep at ease another pejorative term used for something that sounds like it's really intelligent but in fact is vacuous and he would say a photon is born as a particle lives as a wave and dies as a particle now how does it know when to turn into a wave and how does a particle turn into a wave all these questions just went answered it just sounded like a nice way of getting around this idea of how to explain what's going on the twin stood experiment but as I agree with Neil there just read chapter two of the fabric of reality if you're not persuaded by that I mean you can ask more people now read more widely or yeah stick to your guns I suppose but I prefer an understanding and that that helps me understand I want to understand what's going on these experiments okay let's go over to um YouTube here now Brad Inga fun you mentioned fun can you expand on Deutsches Fun Criterion probably not expand on it um look it's nothing more than I there are many ways of coming at this and probably the best way for anyone is interested in this is literally to look up David Deutsches Fun Criterion where he's is in conversation with Lulee Tannen about this idea of David's of finding the final pursuing front or doing things that are fun but it's not a vacuous kind of fun it's not a nihilistic kind of fun it is solving your problems it is when the explicit implicit and then explicit knowledge that you have in solving problems comes together and you're just in a kind of flow state where you are flourishing you're not coercing yourself into doing things that you don't want to do um so the fun criterion is insightful for many people who I guess have been brought up in authoritarian ways of living their lives and thinking well I've got to get this task done we're talking about goals earlier I'm going to try and you know achieve this goal I've got to do this work for my boss and get this particular thing done rather than just focusing on what it is they're interested in and curious about what they find fun because you will find and this is the great difficulty people have because people have been indoctrinated and trained at school to work hard and if you've been trained to work hard then you will feel guilt if you're not working hard that whole idea of the Protestant work ethic that people tend to feel great guilt if they're not working hard if they don't feel as if there is blood, sweat and tears that comes along with their day-to-day routine that if at the end of the day you're not exhausted if at the end of the day you um can't point to this number of bricks that have you you have moved or this many thousands of words that you have written or this many speeches that you have given or this many sales that you have made if you haven't met your targets and your metrics then in some way you're a failure that your life needs to be set up in such a way that fun is nothing but a luxury for other people or what you do when you're not working and even then it comes down to distracting yourself from the stress of your life and so fun amounts to I don't know people um doing things that they're not really interested in but are distracting them from what they're going to have to do tomorrow I guess an argument for why people turn to alcoholism that kind of thing rather than being engaged fully and completely in the life of the mind for one of another work there are things there that you're really curious about and interested in and they are the things that you should be pursuing as much as you possibly can to find fun in doing those things that you even if no one was paying you you'd still be doing so this is the luxury that I understand few people can enjoy it's true Navarabakan has talked about this how what you want is to be unemployable in other words someone comes along and offers you a job and you say no no matter how much money it is because you've got better things to do you're having fun he talks about you don't want to be a slave to a wage or a salary now he says all of this and people sometimes do not hear the second half of this and he's talked to his co-founder of AngelList Nivi and they've talked about this like everyone hears that first part it's like you know you don't want to be stuck in a in a job at a company where you're just earning a wage week or fortnightly or monthly you don't escape from that you want to be independently rich and wealthy but the second part of that that the people ignore is he says but sometimes it's absolutely essential to at first do the hard work and make the money in order to get to a place where that can be a possibility Navarle himself is an example of this who studied hard and worked hard and and came from very little to become one of the wealthiest people in the world and this is an argument for what you may want to aspire to no goal problems you might want to solve fun things that you can find to do along the way to make ascending for one of another word the ladder of life easier to not get stuck in a rut where you're just moving the bricks day after day or writing the words in the articles week after week or making a certain number of sales but if you're you are doing that and you think there's no way out of this well make sure you're doing something else that you're finding fun in the meantime that thing and I've wrote a twiks terminus something like um you know eventually turning your hobby into a career turning your career into a body of work and then your body of work into a legacy so if you do not if you're listening to me and you do not and you're you're stuck in one of these jobs where you think if only I could do whatever I wanted every single day but I can't I've got to dig this ditch but I can't I've got to write this article but I can't because I've got to write this code for my boss but I can't because I've got to cut this hair but I can't because I've got to drive this bus or whatever it happens to being you think it's all very well for those people to talk about living the the life where they are not coerced by a boss where they've escaped from the the weekly or the monthly grind it's all very well for them no I've certainly absolutely been there but in every spare moment that I had where I wasn't working for someone else where I wasn't doing the thing that my boss required me to do I was doing the thing that I found fun I was putting effort into that hour after hour day after day week after week year after year now some people said well good for you that you had the energy to do that you have to at times problem solve you have to find time you know you have to find time to exercise you have to find time to walk and clear your mind you have to find time to read you have to find time to get certain things done some things are necessary to figure out that life is about problem solving and we are all at the moment in a transitional phase as the AI transformation occurs between where for many of us a lot of our work is laborious and toil and David Deutsch quipped the other day on twitter just stop toil exactly just stop toil we need to somehow escape from a society which is set up where people are toiling engaging in laborious work tasks obeying their bosses structuring society in such a way that we have a hierarchy between boss and middle management and the service we need a way in which everyone can pursue their creative interests but at the moment we are singularly not set up that way because people are indoctrinated at schools into thinking that working hard is a virtue which means that it dampens curiosity and creativity because people begin to feel a sense of guilt for not working hard they're told by their parents like I am I have you done your homework they're told by the teachers and make sure you got your assignment for you to hand in by this friday make sure that you're studying for the test that's coming at the end of next month all of its hard work and so they go into the workforce thinking the way to succeed is to do hard work talk about it for ages you know the idea that the more difficult the subject is at school the highest possible levels of mathematics and the more boring it is the more it should be desirable how bizarre is that? Children are often encouraged not to take on the subjects at school that they're interested in within the very fixed confines of the small amount of freedom they do have hey you can choose what subjects are studying but even then they are coerced to not take subjects they otherwise might be interested in you know little little Jane might want to study dance and creative arts and the parents are saying no we want you to be a doctor you need to study chemistry and mathematics so poor little land does that instead the creativity dampened her enjoyment of school for whatever what it possibly could have been destroyed and just maybe you know the land rebels and and and files the subjects and and does something else after school anyway so that never helped where she may have very well have succeeded um but yes so there's much to say on this topic of how it is that the fun criterion is an ideal we can all have operating in our mind to some extent but many of us yes admittedly spend rather a lot of our day engaging things where it's a very difficult problem to solve of how to turn this laborious work that you are required to do in order to get paid and not defeat yourself and your family into something fun the only advice I have is that there has to be time in that day or that week however long or short where you can engage with your own passions and interests and curiosity and be creative in that area because there will be we are all unique as I say we're all our own universe and if you devote yourself passionately to one thing people tend to notice and not only that the problems that you solve for yourself can be generalizable they can help others as well so don't downplay yourself that that your passionate interest in this strangely esoteric thing is of no use to anyone at all you don't know that we cannot predict the content of future explanations we cannot predict the way in which your peculiar love for 18th century Russian poetry might have very important consequences for the future we can't predict how we can't predict the future growth knowledge okay going back over to youtube but that's fun Randy again hi Randy can we communicate with that we can communicate with other people versus which through teaching and rational criticism can we accelerate the expansion of multi-person versus conjunction criticism the dark energy here yes I guess so the amazing thing is that we can communicate with each other we are as I like have said pushing the analogy perhaps too far separate universes and one person is different from the next person has one species is from another species and that might be underselling things as well you know you take two chimpanzees and they're very similar take two cats and they're very similar even they cats have different personalities and so do chimpanzees but people wow I mean not only different personalities but just it is it is almost a miracle it's not a miracle but you know it's it's miraculous that we can communicate at all because if I had different we are from each other and so this leads pop up to say things like it is impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstood because we are each of us speaking suddenly different versions of the English language if English is our the language in which we're communicating and so we always misunderstand each other uh Randy's gone on to say could you discuss your reasons for not agreeing with Roger Penrose's claims that human brains cannot be entirely computational in the function why cannot quantum information play a role in brain function or it could in principle it could in principle and well the first thing to say is Roger Penrose is wrong as a matter of physics that human brains cannot be entirely computational in a function whatever that means because of the universality of computation the church Turing Deutsch principle is a principle in physics it is what all other laws of physics must be compared to could it possibly be false yes in the same way the second law of thermodynamics could be false the law of conservation of energy could be false general relativity could be false everything could be false and in the final analysis will be false but as of right now our best understanding of reality tells us that all physical processes can be regarded as computations and the human brain what it's doing can be regarded as a computation that's just a principle it's the law of physics and so he's rejecting that but not inserting anything better in its place now to take one thing to take it a bit further and I think Penrose along with it was Hammerhof forget his name neuroscientist I think it talked about how there might be microtubules in the brain which enable consciousness to arise something to the effect it's a quantum effect well it's related to this notion that could the brain be a quantum computer well we can't rule out that yet because we just don't know how the brain manages to achieve consciousness and creativity and all that sort of stuff so everything is still on the table so to speak so long as it doesn't violate the laws of physics which rejecting the idea that it's computing things would do now I guess you can do that so long as you have a good explanation but I prefer to start with the best of what we understand now and see where that will take us as far as it will take us it's like saying is there life out there in the universe beyond earth you know are there alien civilizations well I would like to begin at least with the assumption that whatever life is out there obeys the laws of life and biology that we hitherto discovered namely evolution by natural selection in other words there's not life out there that has been appeared on a planet because god magically put it there now you could say that but I don't think it helps and I don't think it helps in the search because if instead you go down the road of our best explanations now at least you can narrow in on where to look among other things you can say well life evolves by evolution by natural selection requires some sort of information to be passed on from one from parent to sibling sibling from parent to child there needs to be generation so that's a genetic material if that's what life is elsewhere however exotic it might be it's going to be some sort of information carrying thing that's what life is so it's a good place to start there so therefore we need to look in places where information can be preserved in other words looking inside of and David Deutsch's example is looking inside of a quasar jet for alien life is probably not the best way to go better to look in you know the Goldilocks zone around a sun like planet somewhere in our galaxy you know metal rich and so forth okay that would be more promising we have ideas we have constraints parameters that we can put around these things rather than just it being free for all parameters set by our best understanding right now and in the same way if we want to understand how the brain is achieving what it's achieving why not start with our best explanations now of what computation is the universality of computation that kind of thing I'd rather start there than say let's throw that in the bin and let's go for some completely different idea which itself is not a good explanation they're under good explanations of the brain but at least we can have parameters placed around what we might be looking for parts of the brain which are giving rise to certain things processing things in a certain way maybe we can come to understand that a bit better as far as I understand we're a long way from really understanding anything like people talk about the neural correlates of conscious and so forth which I think is really going to help us to solve the problem because it's a it's a philosophical problem at the moment but as for the human brain for example harnessing quantum mechanical effects in order to achieve what it does the great difficulty I see there is one of engineering because the best models of quantum computation that exists out there right now appear to be using qubits entangled at temperatures very close to absolute zero you know minus 273 degrees Celsius fractions of degrees above absolute zero by the way that's to enable them to perform the computations without you know error exploding everywhere there could be a way in which just as we have higher and higher temperature superconductivity maybe there'll be higher and higher temperature quantum computation but we're not there yet and I don't see a way but just because I can't see why doesn't mean it's not possible but I would just observe that this would be a clue that if it can't be done in the laboratory okay quantum computation at room temperature that maybe just maybe it's not being done inside the neurons of your brain but who knows we just don't know I'm not dogmatic on this point it could be possible but absent a good explanation there's no reason to place bets anywhere except to be constrained by what we know at the moment so yes I think that answers that I mean go to twitter one final time Adam Quirk has asked me for someone with a pop site understanding of quantum physics can you recommend a good book or any media that introduces the subject in a bit more depth well of course of course of course I can it's all I ever do Adam read the fabric of reality by David Deutsch read the beginning infinity by David Deutsch by far and away heads and shoulders above every other pop science book because they're not really popular science books but they will give you an understanding of quantum physics if that's what you want now you then say a bit more depth well I don't think if you read chapter two shadows and then chapter 11 10 the multiverse in the beginning infinity that's more than up depth and then if you still want more if you still want more I would go to David Deutsch's papers his academic papers which are not a super difficult read look at interviews with people like Sam Kuiper's or Kyara Maleto on the same topic or David Deutsch himself there's lots of stuff out there on YouTube things that I've produced over the many years that I've been doing this now as well so if you just want to pop science understanding if you want to go deeper than that well it depends on how deep I mean once you want to go beyond that then you want to get into the formalism of quantum theory then you're talking about you know picking up textbooks and that kind of thing but all the textbooks are framed in terms that are not to do with ever read ever it's paper read you ever it's original paper on the multiverse the formalism can come along for the ride learning as you go if you like learn a little bit about matrices perhaps would be a way to go learn a little bit about differential calculus it depends on how much you know about the kind of mathematics that would be used in quantum theory but those things serve to help you make predictions and to solve certain problems and therefore the professional physicist I think you can get a good understanding to the point where you can explain it to other people without needing to refer necessarily as a formalism I sometimes do but it's not usually necessary unless you're talking to another physicist about some of these things can I recommend a good book to introduce the subject in a bit more depth um yeah I say both of David Deutsch's books Brian Cox's book was reasonable on this what was it called in your check why anything that can happen does correct so he's he's throwing in a little bit with um with the idea of the multiverse I don't know if he I think he kind of avoids the word one of these physicists still is basically all there but not quite for whatever reason and so yeah our quantum universe by Brian Cox and there's someone and some second author Jeff Foreshore oh yeah it's his colleague from the university that he's at in England yes okay I think that that exhausts our questions for today thank you for those who tuned in and to ask tomorrow we'll do this again soon until next time bye bye [Music]
