Here I get to the part of the discussion Peter has about my own "airchat" explanation of "anyone can understand anything". I go through arguments based on the Church-Turing Principle, computational universality and how denials of explanatory universality are appeals to the supernatural and other topics.
ToKCast
Ep 218: Peter Boghossian Response PART 2
Here I get to the part of the discussion Peter has about my own "airchat" explanation of "anyone can understand anything". I go through arguments based on the Church-Turing Principle, computational universality and how denials of explanatory universality are appeals to the supernatural and other topics.
- Duration:
- 1h 2m
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
Okay, now Peter's going to get to actually talking about me, I apologize, it's taken so long. But we'll, here we go. Okay, now here's something from Brett Hall. He's an Australian physics and epistemology educator. He disagrees with Richard and Michael and we're going to hear when it's a longer clip, but we're just going to take a piece of it. The claim that people are universal explainers is a new one and it's hard for people to get their head around. But what it means is that people can explain any physical phenomenon that's out there. That's what our minds can do. It's built upon the University of California computation, which is a deep theory, a deep explanation, a deep fact about what the laws of physics are and what they say about matter. I'm pausing myself there because I said it's a deep theory, a deep fact about what the laws of physics are. What I fail to say and what is more pertinent actually is that the universality of computation is a principle of physics. The Church Turing Deutsch principle, the principle of the universality of computation, the possibility of a universal computer existing in this world and that that universal computer can compute anything is effectively a law of physics or a law about laws of physics that they should be, must be, computable. If your law of physics is not computable, you've got a problem. Now there is the universality of explanation, which is over and above that, which I've already explained, and any denial of our minds as being universal explainers is just an appeal to the supernatural. It just says that there is a thing that we cannot explain. And traditionally what has served that role is God. You appeal to the inexplicability of God. You can't understand that thing because God did it or whatever you want to say about that. And just changing the topic or changing the subject from God to a twin slit experiment in those particular cases they keep coming back to or as Peter will come to consciousness or the hard problem of consciousness, what it's like to be a bat and so on and so forth, this kind of thing. Just changing the topic to that and saying that well this is the inexplicable thing I'm going to hold up, Richard holds up the twin slit experiment, quantum entanglement or the physics of the very small, Peter holds up consciousness. It doesn't matter what it is. It serves the same purpose philosophically speaking, epistemologically speaking, it just fills the gap left by God when you say that something about reality is inexplicable. I think I've made that point over and again. The universality of computation says that anything that happens out there in physical reality is itself computable, it just follows laws of physics because the laws of physics are themselves computable and so therefore whatever the thing is, whatever the motion of the particles out there, that can be represented in a computer, there can be a one-to-one correspondence between, specifically speaking, the motions of what's going on in the quantum computer and the motions of any physical thing out there in reality. In truth, you don't need a quantum computer, you can just have a classical computer, but the quantum computer makes things more efficient if you like. Now the human brain runs on a universal computer, that universal computer being the brain of the human being, the mind runs on the brain, okay. The mind also has this capacity to explain stuff and explaining is a certain kind of computation. How can that be, sir? Because anything the brain does is a certain kind of computation because the motion of particles is a kind of computation where you have initial conditions, the laws of physics and then final conditions. That represents input, processing and output when it comes to computation. That's what the brain is doing. The mind is doing a special kind of computation, which we call comprehending, understanding or explaining, I regard these things as kind of synonyms. So that's humans, a certain kind of person. Anything that's out there can be comprehended or understood by us, explained by us, whatever the physical phenomena is. It can be on the other side of the universe. This is important. This is an important distinction, go ahead. The go-to example is the quasar, a system so completely unlike the physics of the human mind that you couldn't think of two structures more different, the wetware of the brain and a black hole are creating materials such that huge lobes of energy are shooting out gas and radiation in particular directions that outshine entire galaxies. This is a quasar and yet the human mind can have inside of it a model of what's going on in that quasar on the other side of the universe. It's an astonishing fact about reality that this can happen. I don't think I really made the point there very well. The point of the quasar example is to say that you have this structure in the universe of the quasar whose physics is completely unlike that of the brain. The quasar consists of, so far as we understand it, a black hole are creating matter which shoots out jets of gas, illuminating huge lobes which outshine entire galaxies and so on and so forth. That structure is completely unlike the physics of the brain. You'd struggle to think of two things more different, however there's something about a brain that allows it to contain a model, an explanation of what's going on with that quasar and over time the two things, the model inside the brain and the quasar itself, come to resemble each other with higher and higher fidelity, they come to be alike, that self-similarity in the universe, that's a remarkable fact about the universe, that it can allow for this structure of the brain to become like that structure of the quasar. How does this happen? We don't know. That's the great mystery at the heart of AGI, what it would take to make a computer creative in the same way that we do and generate explanations the same way that we can. The point about the quasar is that if we can understand a quasar and we can to some extent, that serves as the first point in almost something like a mathematically inductive proof, not scientific induction, mathematical induction, where you just say look, we can prove it for this case, the quasar, therefore it follows that for anything less unlike a human brain than a quasar, which is basically everything, we can understand that thing as well, which includes quantum mechanics and includes general relativity, includes all the laws of physics and so on and so forth. Because we can understand the quasar, which is an explanation, requires us to invoke quantum mechanical explanations and general relativistic equations, both come to bear on what a quasar is in terms of the black hole and now electromagnetic radiation, all this kind of stuff. So that was the purpose of the quasar and I don't think I explain it very well. What's this got to do with the fact that we can understand anything? Who really tries to understand quasas, astrophysicists, why? Why was I a person who was born in such a way that I was interested in astrophysics? Not everyone is. Okay, so this is important, so I respect Brett. So Brett, if you're listening to this and I got this wrong, let me know and I will correct it. So I think that the disconnect here is, well, let me take a step back. What is Hall saying? He's saying that the brain is a computational unit and the brain can apply the same tools in any kingdom to compute. So it's not me that's saying that the brain is a computational unit. It's the laws of physics themselves in the form of the church cheering thesis, principle, whatever you want to call it, that says all physical processes can be considered computations, all physical processes can be computed, that a universal Turing machine can simulate and principle any physical process that's out there. All of these ways are coming up the church cheering thesis in the same way, but it constitutes a law or a principle of physics. So it's not me who's making this claim, it is the objective laws of physics. I'm just explaining what the laws of physics are, I'm not making any bizarre claim about the mind or anything like that. What we do over and above this is we also say that there is software running on this brain, which itself has to be universal because among many of its capabilities is the ability to simulate or emulate the action of a universal quantum computer to some degree of accuracy, arbitrary accuracy if you like. The reason for that is because I can explain what a Turing machine does, I can write out the program for a Turing machine for anything in principle I could. If I can act like a bunch of things, I can act like a turkey if I want to, I can act like a sprinter if I want to, I can act like a dancer if I want to, I can act like a poet if I want to, I can act like a Turing machine. People are universal, we can act like stuff, we can do stuff and there's no limit to really what we can do. If you want to take it further we can change our bodies. In so far as a car is an extension of my body when I'm controlling it or a computer is an extension of my body when I'm controlling it, therefore I have universal capacity to act like anything that can be computed which is literally anything because the computer is an extension of me, I can control it, the tool becomes part of my body. It's a bit far out for some people but there we have it. So yes, it won't be me that you're disagreeing with Peter or it will be the laws of physics themselves which actually say of themselves that they are computable and all physical processes can be conceited computations. And so the brain can be considered, the actions of the brain, the physical processes that are going on inside the brain, the firing of neurons can be considered as a computation. And in so far as I can be considered they actually are computations as I say, literally speaking. Okay. There's no, you're just taking a look at naturalistic phenomena. Reading into that you do that through observation and you do that through instrumentation. So we create instruments and we create tools to enable us to get more knowledge about different realms, the UV realm, infrared, et cetera. This idea that we observe and we create instruments in order to generate knowledge, it's misleading in the popurian sense it's misleading. What observation does? An instrumentation is just an extension of observation. As David Deutsch points out as Karl Popp points out, decides between theories already guessed. Say it again, observation serves the purpose of deciding between scientific theories already guessed. Observation can't really adjudicate things like which mathematical theorem might be true. That comes down to reason and now going through a mechanical proof, which is a physical process never mind that, or a philosophical argument which trying to superior that doesn't necessarily come down to a matter of observation, may but more often than not comes down to who has the better argument rather than observing things out there in the real world. Science in particular rests upon our capacity to observe phenomena in the physical world and we hold up to different theories, Einstein's general relativity, Newton's universal law of gravitation and we have observations in the world which decide between these theories that are already guessed, but we don't derive from our observations either of these theories. After all, if we did that, why would we have derived the incorrect theory in the first place? If there is a theory which there must be which is going to supersede or improve, correct, something like Einstein's general theory, why haven't we derived that from our observation chip? Okay, so I can go on and on, I'm like this, I didn't, I didn't, I did not. The problem I have with this, it's not debunking, but the problem that I have with this putative disagreement is, and this may seem overly pedantic if it is, if it is, it's not meant to be, is with the word understanding. So you can use the computer to get knowledge, the brain, you can use this to get knowledge through observation of the world, and then you can make inferences, reasonable inferences about things. You can even create math, whereas the British same maths, like Ramanujan did to figure out what happens in the inside of the black hole, but that's very different from understanding. So what Dawkins is saying is we didn't evolve to understand this. So how can a particle be in the same place at the same time? For example, if you're talking about quantum phenomena, a particle cannot be in the same place at the same, two different places at the same time. That's a violation of logic, yeah, we can't understand the illogical arguments, I agree with you. And that is why, that is why we understand, can explain that there is no such thing as a particle being in two places at the same time, unless you're willing to think in a higher dimensional space of the multiverse where copies of the particle occupy a different two different places, but it's not the same particle, it's not the same particle by virtue of the fact that they're in two different places, they're different particles. So this violation of logic, which many people point to and say, "Ah, look, that violation of logic tells us that there is something we don't understand about quantum theory." No, that violation of logic points to the person who is claiming there's a violation of logic not understanding quantum theory, quantum theory does not violate logic. You cannot have any contradictions in reality, you cannot violate logic even if you're a quantum mechanic, okay, even if you're a quantum physicist, you can't violate logic. And people who attempt to do this just don't understand quantum theory. The actual explanation of quantum theory, as we say, is the ever-retting and relative state formulation or whatever you, however you want to put this, the multiverse. You don't like to hear that, the many worlds interpretation. I would like to be able to talk to Peter about this, as I've talked to Naval about this before and various other people who initially may come to this area, as I did, as everyone who comes to quantum mechanics after ever it can hear the theory for the first time and go, "I reject that on the basis of something like parsimony or comsraiser." I tell the story quite often, Paul Davies said to me, "Invoking the existence call of a vast number of universities in order to explain the one we observe is a violation of our comsraiser." But of course it's not because you only need one assumption. There's a multiverse. It's a minimal number of assumptions. You don't need to go around saying, "Well, consciousness is this thing that causes the collapse of the wave function and the way it works is we're not really sure how." And the collapse of the wave function is this particular, you need to add a whole bunch of assumptions. You need to add a whole, this whole vast array of inexplicable things in order to explain an inexplicable thing. That's an inexplicable thing to not an explanation, Mike. Okay, let's give you that. So we can have descriptions of these phenomena. We can capture that phenomena in language, but that doesn't mean we can understand it. We didn't evolve to understand it. Okay, so we're going to ask chat GPT about this in a second. We can have descriptions of this phenomena, but that doesn't mean we can understand it. I would say by definition, if we can have an explanation of a thing, then we can understand it. These are two sides of the same coin, understanding and explanation. Explanation is what you give to the world, understanding is what you have subjectively. An understanding, strictly speaking, is the feeling you get about an explanation. It's not a feeling you get about a phenomenon. It has to be about an explanation. The phenomenon is separate to the explanation. So you're given an explanation of something, and you can feel rightly or wrongly that you understand it. So you might think you've understood something, but in fact, not. You might be mistaken. You can have the feeling of it. So understanding something, I don't think has an objective analog, except if you can provide an explanation, but even then your explanation could be flawed and faulty. There are many, many cases where someone purports to have an understanding, and indeed feels, okay, I understand this thing, I have an understanding. You may have an understanding, but the understanding you have is incorrect, because when asked to articulate this thing that you understand, you don't. So, for example, many people who claim to understand quantum theory, don't understand quantum theory, anyone who says, "Oh, I get a quantum theory now. I'm satisfied with the explanation that, for example, wave particle duality is the way in which to explain it. I am being told by this science communicator, as known as Dr. Carl Krizolinsky, or Krizolinsky in Australia, it's famous in Australia, and he appears on radio shows and whatever else he has a degree in physics and medicine and all these other things, and his explanation of quantum theory, when I first heard it, I think it was all the way back in high school, so I didn't understand much at all about quantum theory at all. I would say next to nothing, but I heard him say that in order to explain wave particle duality, what you would do is you would say that something like a photon of light is born as a particle, lives as a wave, and dies as a particle. And so this would explain certain experiments, to clever way to explain a way or to deny an explanation of what is really going on. What it says is that when you detect, whenever you detect a photon, namely when it dies because you absorb it, you only have to detect the photon, the photoelectric effect type thing. You detect a single flash of light, a particle, a quanta of energy. But while the photon is moving through space, while the light is moving through space, for example through a twin-set experiment, then you get interference phenomena, and so therefore you detect a wave. And so saying it's born as a particle, lives as a wave, dies as a particle. It sounds poetic, but of course when subject to analysis makes no sense after all, how does the particle of light know when to transition, know, is the word, how does it understand, how does it get when to go from being a particle to a wave, and from a wave to a particle again? It doesn't. All experiments can be explained in terms of the particle theory of light, because light really is a particle, the wave theory is refuted by experiment. We could go on it. Anyway, let's go on with what Peter has to say. But before we do that, I just want to make the final, just want to repeat something that I find so interesting. Can you train children to understand, not just know, but to understand, even though we didn't evolve to understand it, physics in different realms? I think it's an extremely interesting question. I guess you could look at it as an analog, just as you can explain certain technologies, certain programming languages, or children have a more plasticity, they can just take in and understand things or make connections better than we can. I don't know if that's possible with the physics of different kingdoms, but I think it's interesting. Can you train children not just to know, but to understand? If you know, you understand, I would argue. To know is to have an explanation of, that's what no means, to know something. It doesn't always mean that you can give the explanation, but you have some sort of at least in explicit, in explicit, sometimes explicit, explanation of what's happening. For example, you understand how to ride a bike, you have an in explicit understanding and partially, in explicit, partially, explicit explanation of what's going on. You can't teach a person to ride a bike by giving the explicit explanation, they have to come to learn themselves to gain that in explicit knowledge. Just know is to understand, and I await the camera examples of that. Okay, so let's run this through some of these ideas through chat GPT using the Oxford physicist David Deutsch's book on infinity. Hello, chat GPT, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you, what's on your mind? Give me a 45-second summary of the PDF that was just uploaded. I think running chat GPT by using David Deutsch's book at the beginning of infinity as a library is a terrible thing to do, because it's going to mess up. It does mess up. I've already listened to this twice before. It's embarrassing how badly it does at times. It gets some things sort of right, but it makes catastrophic errors, which a human being, a creative human being, will do after the first or second reading of the beginning of infinity. It's that kind of book. We can't expect a large language model to get these things right, to understand, speaking about understanding. It doesn't understand a thing. Large language model doesn't understand a thing. It's a search engine, and it's going to search through the book and then rehash a mangled version of the good explanations given in the book and turn them into bad explanations. That's what we hear. Okay. Let's persist. The beginning of infinity, explanations that transform the world by David Deutsch, explores the nature of knowledge and the limitless potential for progress through good explanations. Deutsch argues that all progress, whether in science, technology, or philosophy, stems from the quest for better explanations, which are theories that are hard to vary. He posits that the human mind, capable of universal computation, can understand any explanation given the right tools and effort. The book challenges the notion that some knowledge might be inherently beyond human comprehension, emphasizing that the pursuit of knowledge is unbounded and driven by creativity and critical thinking. A 45-second summary of the beginning of infinity. I've complained before about people doing 10-minute summaries, one-hour summaries. I think that you increase or multiply exponentially the number of misconceptions every time you reduce the number of hours devoted to the beginning of infinity by a factor of 2, something like that. So, 45 seconds. We can't expect much out of this. It talks about good explanations. Good. That changes the notion that some knowledge is beyond the capacity of humans to understand. That's good. But of course, this is really summarizing or providing a summary of sort of the first chapter or two. It doesn't say anything about physics, voting systems, mathematics, the reality of abstractions, bad philosophy, obviously it misses far more than it actually includes. You cannot possibly hope to even do a summary of chapter 1, the reach of explanations. We don't even get to reach of explanations. Fallibleism. Gosh, we get very little here in 45 seconds. So, Richard Dawkins gives the example of the water strider. Those are those little bugs that exist, they float effortlessly on the top of water. How can a human understand the water striders epistemology? Or how can a human understand a dog's ability to smell in ways that are the minute differentiations between smells? How can a human understand that? So, how can a human understand the water striders epistemology? Now, far-bait for me to critique a professional epistemologist, I'm not one, okay, I regard myself as a fan of the epistemology of David Deutsch, of Popperian epistemology. I'm not a professional. That said, I thought I understood what the word epistemology meant, it meant I used the word epistemology, and what I thought was the common usage of epistemology as it appears in universities, which is the study of knowledge directly, the study of knowledge as a subject in and of itself, the study of how knowledge is created, what knowledge is, what this thing called knowledge actually is. Whether that knowledge is generated in science, mathematics, philosophy, history, wherever it happens to be generated, the new knowledge arises via certain mechanisms, and the study of those mechanisms is epistemology, that's what I thought epistemology was. As such, if you ask what is the water striders epistemology, it is equivalent to saying what is the water striders science, what is the water striders mathematics, what is the water striders philosophy, that makes no sense to me. Hita idiosyncratically, to my mind, uses the word epistemology as a substitute for subjectivity or consciousness, what is the water striders subjectivity or consciousness, because he goes on to correct chat GBT's answer, and then he comes back to this question over and again, seemingly demanding of David Deutsches' work to include an explanation of the hard problem of consciousness, what it is like to be a water strider or a bat or whatever else it happens to be. But of course, David provides no such explanation, in fact, he deals with the hard problem of consciousness in the beginning of theory and just observes that he has no answer for it, no one does. If you did, then you would earn one would presume the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in philosophy there is no such, if you can understand it, because he does come to this eventually, if you can't program it, you haven't understood it, he doesn't quite understand what that means to my mind, but we'll come to that. But consciousness is the very thing that David is talking about, if you can't program a system to be conscious and you haven't understood what consciousness is, now, for important reasons, that's why I made a video like this, where I posit, I'm not saying I believe this theory, I'm not saying that this is the theory that I think is true or anything like that, I'm just saying I'm putting it out there as an alternative to the theories everyone already knows, which are when it comes to consciousness, there's panpsychism, in other words, everything is conscious from human beings through to lower primates, through to more basic mammals, through to insects, through to water striders and gnats and atoms themselves, non-living things too, that's panpsychism, you just add more and more complexity in terms of matter and you get more and more consciousness, that's that idea, now related, but technically different to that, is the nervous system complexity idea, the more complex the nervous system and the more consciousness you get, so human being is the most conscious thing able to suffer the most, a nervous system that's slightly less complex, such as that if a cat would have less consciousness, less capacity to suffer, go down to a mouse, go down to a flea and you have nervous systems, those things can all suffer to some extent, but once you get into the realm of mollusks, which have no functioning brain or nervous system, there's no capacity to suffer, and certainly with the bacteria, there's no capacity to suffer, so those things, they cut off the consciousness at, not the, you know, a single particle, you know, with panpsychism, there is no limit, right, everything is conscious, to some extent, it's just that when you arrange the matter in a more complex way, as you get more consciousness, that idea, the idea with the computational one, this one, the complexity of the nervous system, says that you do cut off consciousness at a particular line, there's a black and white line, and the line is drawn either side of the existence of a nervous system, more complex nervous systems have more capacity to suffer, less complex nervous system, less capacity to suffer, that seems logical to most people, okay, but you're drawing an arbitrary line, I would say, a nerve in and of itself, a single nerve or a group of nerves, there's no reason to presume that that nerve has qualia associated with it or conscious associated with it, after all, it might just be a mechanical thermostat-like device, a thermostat's conscious, that's kind of what a nerve can do, a nerve can control a muscle, it can cause a reaction to things, it doesn't mean it's conscious, and if it is conscious, then you're basically arguing that consciousness is a part of the hardware, and so we can already program it because we could program what a nerve does, I won't go into the computational arguments from that, the argument I give here in our consciousness and creativity, the same thing, I'm asking the question, I'm positing a hypothesis, I don't think it's been put out there before, which is that there are two sides of the same coin, and one side of the coin is what other people notice in other people, which is their capacity to explain their own inner feelings, their capacity to be creative, their capacity to suffer, all that kind of stuff, the fundamental, deepest thing that is there is the capacity to generate explanations, and derivative of that is what other people often point to as this is the thing that is defining characteristic of human beings or people, namely their capacity to reason morally, do mathematics, suffer, experience any conscious phenomenon, or let's say understand a lot of physics, I say those are all derivative of a deeper truth about what people are, which is the capacity to generate explanatory theories, to be a universal explainer, and so that's the fundamental thing and everything else that rises down to that now, I'm saying that's one side of the coin, the other side of the coin is what it's like to be a universal explainer, what it's like to be a universal explainer, I just say it's consciousness, consciousness, creativity, something, it just depends whether you're coming at it from the first person perspective or you're looking at it in someone else's, the third person perspective, so that's where I'm coming from on that, so the water strider has no epistemology, in two senses, one prosaic vanilla sense that I thought everyone agreed with, especially epistemologists, namely that it can't conjure an explanation in explicit terms of anything whatsoever, it doesn't have a theory of knowledge, but in the second sense that Peter appears to be using, namely, it also, according to my theory, it doesn't have consciousness on ever, it doesn't experience anything, it can't explain anything, it doesn't have an epistemology, it doesn't have consciousness, to say that it does is to make a substantive assertion about the nature of consciousness, and I don't know what the nature of consciousness is, I don't have an explanation, I'm saying there are at least three theories, I know, at least three, panpsychism, the prosaic one about the complexity of nervous systems, and you know, my one, I'm offering here, I don't know which is true, how can a human understand a dog's capacity to understand things, so the bar that Peter's setting here is impossibly high for David to reach, after all, if David had answered this question, he'd be more famous than what he is, he would have answered Nagel's question, what does it like to be about, he's just restating that again, saying to chat GPT, you know, basically, explore the beginning of infinity for the answer to this age-old philosophical question, what does it like to be a dog, what does it like to be X, where X is literally any other thing that has a brain, no one knows, no one knows the answer to that question, so why he would expect it to be found in the beginning of infinity, I don't know, but it's an unfair question, and that, the answer is not to be found in the beginning of infinity, as it isn't, is no refutation whatsoever of the universality of computation, or the universality of explanation, or the universality of anything, it's not a refutation of anything, it's just an open question, that's all, that's all it is, it's an open question, and the fact that you can't find an answer to the open question does not refute the explanations we do have, the existence of dark energy and dark matter does not refute general relativity, it's a problem for general relativity, it makes it problematic, but it doesn't refute it, because there's no other theory to jump to, that we do not have a comprehensive answer to what it's like to be a dog, or a bat, or anything else, to be found within the Church Turing Deutsch conjecture, is not a refutation of the Church Turing Deutsch conjecture, it just says this is an open problem, it makes the Church Turing Deutsch conjecture problematic, because it says they could possibly be a thing, consciousness, which is itself not a function of computation, and if consciousness itself is a physical process, which I think it is, but it's not computable, okay so that's a problem, but we don't know that yet, it could just be, and I would say, I would say, that it will just turn out to be a part of regular computation, now David Deutsch thought it's worth doesn't think this, he thinks that there's an extra ingredient that will be required, and let's see the podcast by myself and the violers David here, where he speaks to exactly that, now we'd have to interrogate David further to find out what precisely he's got in mind here, I don't know, anyway, let's keep going. Humans can understand phenomena like the waterstrider's ability to float on water, or a dog's acute sense of smell through scientific inquiry, and the development of explanatory theories. For the waterstrider, scientists study the physical properties of water, such a... No, no, how can a human understand not the physical properties of what it's like to float on water, but what it would be like to be that creature, what it would be like to be another creature, how can a human, according to David Deutsch, or possibly Brent Hall as well, how could a human understand that, not know the physics of it, but understand it? How can a human, according to David Deutsch, or possibly Brent Hall, how can a human understand that, not know the physics of it, but understand it? Again, Peter, no one knows, no one knows. I can't speak for David, I can speak for myself, according to me, how can a human understand what it's like to be a dog? I say, I'm just throwing it out there, I don't, first thing to say is, I don't know, the second thing to say is, again, I point the viewer and the listener to my podcasts are consciousness and creativity, the same thing, where I argue that there's nothing it's like to be a dog, in the same way it's nothing that's like to be a non-creative computer program, like an AI or chat GPT. It could be argued that chat GPT is so sophisticated now already, that it outperforms dogs on any metric where you might think the dog has the capacity to suffer, and chat GPT, I could readily imagine being programmed to act as if it's suffering. Now, why do animals have this seeming capacity to appear as if they're suffering? Well, we're projecting onto them, I would argue, we're anthropomorphising. So when we suffer, we grimace and we do all these evolutionary things, which are isomorphic with what dogs and apes do. I don't think dogs and apes are capable of creating explanatory knowledge, ergo, I don't think they can suffer. And I've got long reasons for that, here's one argument here, where I talk about animals and humans and other animals and their capacity to suffer. Okay, so I've thought about this extensively, I know there are people out there who immediately want to jump in and say, "Oh, Brett Hall, you don't understand the first thing about this question," I've thought about it for many, many hours, produced many, many hours of content written in many tens of thousands of words on this exact topic of what it would take for a system to be able to suffer. I know all the arguments that are out there, I've heard them all, I've heard them all, I've listened to Sam Harris talk about this stuff and the well-being of conscious creatures and all that kind of thing, I get it. I understand what people are saying, comes down to, people talk about the complexity of a nervous system and the complexity of a nervous system is in one-to-one correspondence with the capacity of a creature to suffer, the capacity of a creature to experience anything, to have consciousness. I get all that, I'm saying there are alternatives to that, it's not a scientific theory, it's not a hard to vary explanation, it's not a good explanation, not yet. So I'm offering alternatives to that, one of which is it could be black and white between humans or more broadly the category of what we term people of which there are three kinds, I just remind everyone, human beings are one or our extinct ancestors, recently extinct ancestors that also have the capacity to create explanatory knowledge. The other creatures able to create explanatory knowledge would be alien intelligence out there in the star somewhere, but can also build rockets and travel across the galaxy and do science and all that stuff because to do any of those things would mean a capacity to generate explanations and finally artificial general intelligence is a third kind, so we've got regular human type people, we've got alien intelligent people and we've got artificially general intelligent people, computer systems that can explain something. All three of those can generate explanations and all three of those would be conscious, but nothing else, nothing else. By definition, by definition what a person is, dogs aren't people, even higher apes and not people. Why? Because they can't generate explanations. If you can't generate explanations, you don't have consciousness and you can't suffer. I'm not saying I believe that again, I have to emphasize, I'm not saying I believe that I'm saying this is a possibility, let's get done. Understanding what it's like to be another creature, such as a water strider, a dog or a zebra, involves what philosophers call the phenomenal experience or qualia, the subjective first-person perspective of another being. Yeah, it involves qualia, David Dauch talks about qualia that is in the beginning infinity, he discusses it at some length. According to David Dauch and the framework of his ideas, this kind of understanding can be approached through the development of detailed and accurate explanatory theories. David Dauch emphasizes that while we may never fully experience another creature's subjective reality, we can create increasingly accurate models of their experiences. This involves one empathy and imagination, using our own sensory experiences and emotions to empathize and imagine what it might be like for another creature. Yeah, I don't know that David actually says that, I could be wrong, but I think I have a reasonable understanding of the beginning infinity. Does he talk about us using our imaginations to imagine what it's like to be another animal? I don't know, I remember that section of the beginning of infinity where he talks about the hard problem of consciousness, which is where he talks about qualia and he talks about the blue room experiment, having an operation on someone who doesn't have blue combs or blue receptors in their brain or in their eyes, whatever it happens to be, and the thought experiment runs that although you might be able to explain that after having the operation, you would then be able to see blue, that wouldn't enable you to predict what blue would look like. While this is limited, it provides a starting point, two, scientific study investigating the biology and behavior of the creature. For example, understanding the sensory organs, nervous system, and brain function of a dog helps us infer how it processes smells, three, explanatory models, developing theories that explain not just the physical capabilities but also the likely subjective experiences of these creatures. For instance, how the structure of a tiger's vision might influence what it sees and how it perceives its environment. This is all conjecture, extrapolation, conjecture about what David Deutsch might think, extrapolation from the beginning of infinity. Peter's nodding along as if Chatsu Bitti's got this right, it hasn't got it right at all. This is an unreliable interlocutor, Chatsu Bitti, on this topic. David doesn't talk about what it's like to be a dog at all, and none of this is coming from the beginning of infinity, it's just Chatsu Bitti making stuff up, it's not hallucinating so much, it's just sounding reasonable, making reasonable sounding conjectures and they're okay, but they're not from the beginning of infinity. And there's no way of thinking this is David Deutsch's position on any of this. Deutsch's view is that through this process, humans can get closer to understanding the experiences of other creatures. Deutsch's view is that this is how humans get closer to understanding the experience of other creatures. It sounds reasonable, but again, David does not have a theory of consciousness and it's certainly not one that is expressed in the beginning of infinity. He just says that it's basically says it's an open question, explains how it's an open question and that sort of thing, but none of this is coming from the book. The more comprehensive and detailed our explanations, the better we can approximate what it might be like to be another being, even if we can never fully experience it ourselves. In summary, while we cannot directly experience what it is like to be another creature, we can use empathy, scientific investigation, and the creation of explanatory theories to approximate and understand their subjective experiences. Well, we cannot directly experience what it's like to be another creature. We can use empathy and so on. That definitely doesn't come from the beginning of infinity at all, it doesn't talk about things in those terms. But yeah, sure, sure, we can't directly experience what it's like to be another being. But David would say we can't directly experience anything, anything, full stop period end of story. But you'd know that if you read the book. So this is all very poor conjecture on the part of chat puberty, which adds nothing to the discussion. It's certainly, it's not helping, it's not helping with anything here. It's just confusing things, it's just getting me to talk about what's actually in the book rather than the substantive issues. So we shouldn't have consulted chat puberty, it is far better if you want to talk about the beginning of infinity, or David or if you used to pull out excerpts, relevant excerpts, not to have chat puberty, summarize poorly, to mis-quote, mis-summarize, you know, just get things wrong or insert ideas or attribute ideas to the beginning of infinity go to David or just aren't there. It's just making reasonable sanding guesses, which we can talk about, but we have to delineate. Do we want to talk about what chat jpts views are on this, or do we want to talk about what's in the beginning of infinity? I can do either, but at the moment, you know, Peter's using this as some sort of authoritative summary of what is in the beginning of infinity, and that is of no use. I can do a discussion of the beginning of infinity as literature, as philosophy, but we need to cleave to what is actually said in the book in order to do that. Okay, I think we can skip out of this. I think that's largely correct. My question is, as Richard Dawkins says, "Queer than we can suppose. The universe could be clearer, could be more bizarre and unusual than we can imagine it to be, because we're limited by our evolutionary understanding. We're limited by evolution to what we can understand." How does that square with Deutsch's idea? Okay, unfortunately, Peter is misquoting Richard Dawkins. It's not Dawkins who says, "The universe is queer than we suppose." It's J. S. Haldane who says, "Not only is the universe queer than we suppose. It's queer than we can suppose." Which is wrong. Okay, Dawkins would agree with that, because he believes in this middle-earth thing, so the idea doesn't originate with him. So J. S. Haldane said that the universe is not only queer than we suppose, which is fine. The universe is queer than we suppose, but it's not queer than we can suppose, because we can suppose anything. We're universal in our capacity to imagine stuff. That implies a limitation to our imagination, it implies a physical limitation to what we can explain, all of which is wrong, because of the argument of universality. Anyone can say that. It's very easy to just make that assertion based on a little more than a folk understanding, unfortunately, of evolution. And I say folk understanding, because it's this trope that we are evolutionarily closed to imagining things or explaining things or understanding things that our brains have not evolved to. But as I've already said earlier on, that is completely invalid to make, because our minds are universal. They can understand anything. They can understand, for example, evolution by natural selection. They can understand physics. They can understand physics. Dawkins is just picking out of thin air, certain things he doesn't understand and holding them up and saying, "No one can understand this." But he's just picking out random bits of physics, bits of physics. He's not picking out geology, he's not picking out biology, he's not picking out parts of anatomy or mathematics or philosophy or morality or politics or anything else, he's just picking on quantum theory and he's picking on relativity. He's saying, "Too fast and too small." There's no reason for that, apart from an appeal to the supernatural, you may as well say, "God is something that we cannot understand." The idea that the universe might be "queer" than we can suppose, as Richard Dawkins suggests, reflects the notion that our cognitive and sensory apparatus, shaped by evolutionary pressures, may limit our understanding of reality. We're not limited by our evolutionary understanding. We're not. It's an assertion. It's not based on anything more than, as I say, a folk misunderstanding, misunderstanding of evolution by natural selection and what our brains are supposedly evolved for. But they're not evolved for anything, as I keep on saying. If they're evolved for anything, they're evolved for a capacity to explain stuff and to create knowledge in a universe and a capacity to deduce or create explanations, that is, in which case, they are actually evolved for understanding quantum theory and understanding relativity, but I'll repeat myself. The idea that the universe might be "queer" than we can suppose, as Richard Dawkins suggests. Even, even Chatty Piti gets it wrong. He just said that. Chatty Piti just said that. Following from what Peter Bakosian said, this shows you how inept Chatty Piti is. It said, "As Richard Dawkins says, 'Queer than we can suppose.'" But it's not Richard Dawkins. He says that. It doesn't originate with Richard Dawkins. It originates with the biologist J. S. Halvane from the 1800s. Look it up. The universe is not only "queer" than we suppose, it is "queer" than we can suppose. J. S. Halvane, the famous biologist, possibly more famous than Richard Dawkins, second only to Darwin himself. Look, I don't expect Bakosian to know that off top of his head, but the fact that Chatty Piti doesn't know that is a huge red flag that Chatty Piti cannot bear a light upon, not only to get factual things like that correct, to correct Peter. And actually say, "I've just consulted my library, I've just consulted the internet," or whatever it happens to be. And I have found that, in fact, it wasn't Dawkins who said that, it was J. S. Halvane who said that. And so far as Dawkins said it, he was quoting Halvane. The fact that it can't get that right is a red flag. It's a red flag about whether or not it gets anything that Deutsch says right either. The best you can say about what Chatty Piti does is it's a first pass approximation to anything. It's not reliable, one would hope, an academic knows this, and if you have students, this is why you would teach them, "Hey, Chatty Piti is useful in the same way that Google is useful, but you don't just go to the first link that is provided amongst a list of things. Chatty Piti can give you a good overview, but it's not going to give you the answer." It's true that our brains and senses evolved to handle specific survival tasks. This might suggest that there are aspects of reality that are fundamentally inaccessible to us because our cognitive tools were not designed to understand them. Correct. He says correct. He says correct. Let's just hear that again. What does he say? Or does Peter say correct to? There are aspects of reality that are fundamentally inaccessible to us. This might suggest that there are fundamental aspects of reality that are inaccessible to us because our cognitive tools were not designed to understand them. Correct. Because our cognitive tools were not designed to understand them, that our cognitive tools were not designed to understand anything. They weren't designed in the first place. That's the first thing to say. And they weren't designed, even if they were designed to understand anything, anything. And if they were designed to understand anything, they were designed to understand everything. If the frustration is written all over my face, forgive me, but there's so many errors just multiplying here in terms of the misuse of chat capability. That's one thing. The way in which chat capability has gotten wrong, David Deutsch's position on this thing, all of this stuff, and it's being taken as some sort of useful guide to what David Deutsch's thoughts are, what the contents of the beginning of the infinity is, it's better to just go to the book. It's better to just go to the book, pull out actual quotes, discuss the quotes as I say to people so often, if you want to talk about what David Deutsch says or what I say, what Papa says, what Feynman says, or what anyone says, get a quote. Don't just summarise what they're saying in your own words, don't just use some other person's summary of it. Simply do the work of pulling out a quote, and then we discuss the quote and how different interpretations of that are. Don't summarise. I'm skipping through parts of this, a lot of this actually. I'm skipping all the way to near the 24-minute 40 mark, I'm just going to listen to the last minute or so where the cosine summarises and reaches some kind of conclusion. How could technological art allow us to learn what it's like as many philosophers such as David Deutsch have posited? How could technological art allow us to learn what it's like to be a bat? Technological art has the potential to offer profound insights into what it might be like to be another being by using immersive and interactive technologies. Here are some ways in which technological art can facilitate this understanding. Virtual reality, VR and augmented reality, AR, one immersive experiences, VR can create highly immersive environments that simulate sensory experiences of other beings. For example, VR could replicate the visual perception of a bee, which sees ultraviolet light, or the echolocation experience of a bat. Two, sensory augmentation. AR can overlay additional sensory information onto the real world, allowing users to experience augmented senses. Okay, so that, we just played around with that, that was a little experiment. If you like that, let me know and we can do some more of those. I think it's a really important point which Shimmer and Dawkins were talking about. The disconnect between David Deutsch and Dawkins, and I know those guys are buddies, but I'm not sure that the disconnect is an actual disconnect. It could be just a semantic disconnect over what understanding means, what, over the word, understanding. So, again, if you like that, if you want me to review some, some videos and such, let me know if you, if you want more kind of philosophical content, or if you want more broad commentary within my area of expertise, let me know and we can do that. So, 24 minutes, he says, you know, you ask the audience, if you'd like me to do more of those. Look, I think the responses are great. I think this is wonderful. Idea Peter to do response videos to different people, I think it's entertaining, it's informative. But the use of chamois petit is not, not that, it's a, it's, it's a, it provides you with bumsters, it's a misguided attempt summarizing the extensive and deep work of a thinker. One would hope that you can test it on your, your own work, you know, written books and speeches out there, other content out there, have chat UBT, you know, consumer PDF of your own work, and then ask questions and see how well it does it, formulating answers. Maybe it will do a good job of yours. But not with someone like Deutsch, who has these iconoclastic counterculture opinions about things. And so, when you do have that, when you do have an opinion that stands and starts contrast to the common understanding that people typically have about any given topic, then what chat UBT is going to do is to miss the differences between something like the common understanding and your iconoclastic understanding, which is what it's done here with Deutsch, okay. It's completely misconstrued what he's saying about these topics. Okay, so I think that'll do, well done again to Peter, for this, it's good to, you know, reflect on, I think like to have Deutsch, I just don't think it's useful to consult chat UBT on any of this stuff, because it's just going to my you in more and more misconception and error about what someone like Deutsch actually writes or says on any of these topics, much less thinks, okay. It's not going to get it right, it's made, what it's given you here is replete with errors and misunderstandings and misconceptions. So yes, until next time to everyone, and thank you again to Peter for the shout out, I'm happy to talk to you about these issues in greater depth, if you like, that could be instructive for us both to see where our disagreements line with all of this stuff. And to my own listeners and viewers, until next time, bye bye. [ Silence ], bye. [ Silence ], bye bye, bye bye, bye bye, bye bye. [ Silence ], bye bye, bye bye, bye bye bye. [ Silence ], bye bye bye bye, bye bye bye. 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