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. Hello and welcome to Topcast. And today to the first episode of three, approximately, on the same theme. Firstly, a response video, which is itself in two parts, the first of which is in response to philosopher Peter Bechosian. And the second part of this first episode is going to be a response to Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. The next episode, altogether a completely separate sort of thing, kind of a standalone episode, isn't going to be a critique as I'll be doing today of Bechosian or Murray and Peterson, but rather it will be a positive vision about the things that Peterson and Murray are talking about and critiquing themselves. So I'm critiquing them. They're critiquing a lack of positive vision and I'm going to provide a positive vision. So I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go to the first person that I'm responding to today. And that, as I mentioned, is one of the most famous philosophers on earth right now. And of course, it's not a high bar to be a famous philosopher as such because there are not many famous philosophers. So he would be one of the most famous people who's known, primarily, indeed, I guess exclusively as a philosopher. He's not a physicist pretending to be a philosopher, something like that, of which there are many. I don't include David Deutsch in that, of course, because I think he is a philosopher as well as a physicist, but many other scientists who like to play their hand at philosophy and rather often don't particularly well at it, putting all that aside. Peter Bikozin is a philosopher and he worked at Portland State University. And if you know anything about Portland in the USA, you'll know that someone like Bikozin, who's a great hero when it comes to enlightenment and defending the West, well, he's not exactly going to find a warm welcome, apparently, in that city. From what I can tell on YouTube and X, and that might be a very, very biased perspective about what's going on in certain so-called liberal cities in the US. So Bikozin, from what I understand, was caught up in a maelstrom of work ideology and activism, and basically he lost his job due to an impossibly hostile work environment at Portland State University. So understandably, he left that institution and the violent neo-Marxists and the post-modernist movement. He left that behind to basically begin his own work and outreach and business. And as far as all that goes, standing up against the work movement, violent neo-Marxists, post-modernism and all that nonsense, the anti-critical attitude that is sweeping through various institutions for that time. I'm entirely on his side, and regular watches and listeners may hear in my words echoes of how, for example, I always say, in many respects, I'm on the effective acceleration side when it comes to being anti-duma. It's just that when they start to make a positive case, the effective accelerationists, I think they get it all wrong. They're very good when they're critiquing the doomers. That's great. But when they start to say what their own underlying philosophy is, how it's from the laws of physics, they can derive inevitable progress that human beings will make, that success is kind of guaranteed, given the laws of thermodynamics, and techno-capital is the thing that we're going to maximize and all this sort of stuff where it's laced with jargon and pseudocytic nonsense. Then I kind of get off the cart, so to speak, I'm no longer with them on that journey. But as long as they're complaining about the doomers and explaining why the doomers are wrong, Modulo saying that progress is inevitable when it's not as neither inevitable, nor going to cause progress is not going to cause that destruction, which is the doomer's perspective, but rather progress is something we can work towards with an effort. So that all of that is kind of irrelevant to what I'm talking about today. I'm just saying that I so morphing with that distinction that I make with doomers versus accelerationalists, I would make with the woke versus a epistemologist, such as Peter Picosian. I'm with him when he's against all of those people. I'm on his side and he's a great hero of the Enlightenment with respect to that. But when it comes to actually the meat of the matter of epistemology and explaining some of the stuff that he's going to talk about today, and by the way, I'm responding to him because he's responding to me personally. And so I thought it it's worth actually teasing out some of the areas where I think there are misconceptions in what he says, what he says about my position, what he says about to have a delicious position, what he seems to think about per period of epistemology or epistemology broadly. All of that stuff is where I kind of again get off his cart, no longer with him on the journey. I'm with him against the work, I'm with him against the neo-Marxist, I'm with him against the post-modernists, but I'm not with him on all the stuff that he gives a positive explanation of, in other words, how epistemology works, what people are, what brains are capable of. That's what we're going to hear today. He tries to be fair to him. He does try to walk a line between my perspective and what we'll hear is what everyone knows, Richard Dawkins perspective, but he doesn't appear to come up balanced on this. He doesn't walk the line. He takes Dawkins side because he nods along and he says yes to that, but he doesn't understand the position that I'm making, which is derivative of David Deutscher. So I'm going to try as hard as I can not to put words into David Deutscher's mouth by simply crediting him here up front with his deployment of universality, the concept of universality throughout his books and his talks and his many podcasts that he's done on this, especially recently talking about computational universality and more relevantly here as we will get to explanatory universality as well. These things are crucial to understand in order to understand the perspective that Richard Dawkins is wrong because he is going to play Richard Dawkins' recent interview excerpts thereof with Michael Schurma and we're going to hear from Richard that old idea that he's got that our brains have evolved for, unfortunately for him, he uses the word designed, appearance of design, but be that as a minor thing, he's just speaking loosely, he's waving his hands as I'm doing now. But he says that the brain has not evolved for the purpose of understanding anything outside of middle world, which is a term that he uses in his books. I think Peter Beccosian quotes him the same Middle Kingdom, which is irrelevant, maybe he says that. I can't remember the exact quote of the book now, I've always thought it was middle world. Anyway, what Dawkins means by middle world is we understand middle-sized stuff, the stuff that is roughly the size of human being. What does that mean? Well, it means we don't have much hope of understanding the quantum realm because we didn't evolve, our brains didn't evolve to understand things smaller than presumably we can see or things that move faster than we can notice, so it is no mystery why people struggle or indeed find it impossible to understand relativity and quantum theory, which is all rather bizarre when you actually think it through. After all, Einstein did understand relativity and people like Schrödinger and Everett and Deutsch do understand quantum theory, just because there is not a consensus on how to understand these things does not mean that no one understands. After all, we can turn that argument back on to Richard and say, well, did our brains evolve to understand evolution? Not everyone agrees with you, Richard, about the selfish Jane. Perhaps we're just incapable of understanding genetics. Stephen Jay Gould didn't believe the end of the selection was the Jane, the selfish Jane. He thought there was such a thing as group selection. Now, does that dispute that exists within evolutionary theory say anything about our capacity to understand evolutionary theory? I should hope that Richard would say no, of course, we understand evolutionary theory, but he might very well say, but we can see evolution, of course, we don't generally see evolution unless we're watching a video of bacteria evolving or something like that. We can watch them evolving resistance to antibiotics, for example. You can see that happening in real time, but you don't tend to see the ancestors of human beings evolving into human beings. You can look at a fossil record, but that's not the same thing. You're looking at fossils. You have to interpret the fossils. We know this argument very, very well. So, I shouldn't ramble on. I should just get to the clip, but I think there's a few more things to say about this. As I've already hinted at, Peter and I are broadly on the same side when it comes to what can, I guess, be termed cultural or stuff, or the war over truth, or the war against objective knowledge and so on. But I would split more than just hairs when it comes to things like epistemology, as I would with someone like Sam Harris, who again is a hero of the Enlightenment, in many respects, he stands up against Islamism, not against Islamism, fundamentalist Islam. He's a great opponent of certain kinds of irrationality, a violent irrationality in particular. But Sam Harris, for all the kind of good that he does out there in the world and spreading enlightened ideas, he makes a lot of mistakes. And I think the mistakes come down to him getting the epistemology wrong. How is that possible for someone so bright reaching such correct conclusions to get the epistemology wrong? Well, I think where he gets the epistemology wrong, causes him to go wrong in a whole bunch of other areas. And it's not quite dumb luck that he gets to the correct position on the whole number of things. After all, many scientists don't have the right epistemology, but they do have, broadly speaking, a rational worldview. They get the details wrong. And when they try and explain what they've actually done, they get it wrong, rather a lot of the time. But as David liked to say, everyone's a purian in the area where they excel. And you listen to a sports star, but you know, someone who's accomplished Olympic athletes and asked them about how they've improved, how they've actually created the knowledge, so to speak, of becoming a better wrestler, or becoming a better weightlifter, or becoming a better gymnast, and so on. And it's all about conjecture and refutation, not in those words, but it's about trial and error, repeated practicing, iterating, as Navarro Vercan would say. You just need to keep trying over and over again, doing many, many iterations, which is what Karl Popper points out. It's all about incremental improvement. It's about making a mistake as fast as we possibly can, all of that stuff. So when you excel at something, when you do really well at it, you understand natively that what you've got to do is just try again and again and again to get things right. And the more iterations you do, the more mistakes you make, the more errors you make until you have identified the error, corrected the error, eliminated the error, and made progress, improving your gymnastic routine, improving your weightlifting technique, and there's an objective metric. You know, you get the gold medal, you lift a heavier weight than you ever had before. All of that kind of stuff is true. And scientists, also, when they go to explain what they've actually done, you listen to Feynman talk about, here's what he's actually done. Great scientists, I should say, tend to get this right. The middling scientists, of course, will say they're just extrapolating and quite often they are. All they're doing is collecting data and they're doing science inform only. All of that stuff happens to be true as well. So two things can happen simultaneously. You can have a scientist who really makes any progress ever. They're just working within the existing theory rather than challenging the fundamentals of any given theory. And so therefore, they can describe what they're doing as something other than trial and error, repeatedly trying and failing and then trying again. Although, yeah, it's pretty rare for a scientist to actually admit that they're not trying really hard and failing repeatedly. If you're not failing repeatedly, you're not doing something right, which sounds like a contradiction, okay, in order to succeed, you must fail again and again and again. And that's the way in which you learn because we can't hope to spontaneously generate knowledge. We can't hope to get it right on the first go. By absolute dumb luck, we might hit the nail on the head the first time if we're hammering things in the complete and utter darkness, which is what we're doing when we're trying to create knowledge in a sense. We're out there in the dark, we're blindly groping, we're looking for a way in which to make contact with reality in some way. We're looking for a way in which to solve our problem with conjecturing solutions. We don't know which one will work ahead of time, but eventually we get there or at least we hit a glancing blow against the nail in the complete darkness and realize, ah, we were on to something. And so we were fine, I guess, refined, refined, refined, and then we hit the nail on the head and we get there as Einstein kind of did with general relativity and mutant did with his universal gravitation or Darwin did with evolution by natural selection or indeed, Richard Dawkins did with the selfish chain. Okay, so it's not like he, you know, at the beginning of his career, he came up with a selfish gene idea or as a school child account with his idea, all of his attempts working up to that, all of the things that he learned, all of his background knowledge formed him in such a way that he ended up with the problem situation of what is the unit of selection and they came up with a solution and I doubt it was on the first try of guessing that we'd have to talk to Richard about that with respect to San Harris. I was saying that I agree with him on everything, but when it comes to epistemology, just like with Peter, I have these disagreements and I regard them as pretty severe, disagreements, in fact, that which tend not to cause me to disagree with them in the areas where they're actually doing what I regard as great work. So in San's case, standing up against violent irrationalities and in Peter's case, standing up against the woke mob, the modern maladies of our time, because in a similar respect except Harris' focus is more on kind of a timeless problem that human beings have with their relationship to ideologies, both political and religious and Peter is speaking to something that is quite modern indeed, this woke thing. Now, Sam also says things like his agrees want to get around to using phrases like when we get down to quote, unquote, epistemological bedrock, I would say to him, I would respond. And indeed, we do have a disagreement there because as soon as you utter a statement like when we get down to epistemological bedrock, then you misunderstand what epistemology is in fact all about because there is no bedrock, there are no foundations trying to paint epistemology or knowledge broadly, including science, even mathematics by the way, but put that aside, but certainly epistemology, it's not an edifice. It's more like, as Xenophanes calls it, as I quote very often, a woven web of guesses. So there's a great difference between a woven web of guesses, where all these strands capturing things, and it's all very tenuous versus an immovable edifice built upon bedrock. So these are two quite different just visual images of what's going on, much less actual literal descriptions of the way in which to understand what epistemology is, built upon foundations so that you have a building, a tower that becomes very, very teetering, but every step is a logical brick in that building, any one of which can completely destroy the entire thing. And so that's why if you attack someone's foundations, the entire thing falls down. Versus what vision popa gives us, and Xenophanes describes poetically as the woven web of guesses, or as popa says, conjectural knowledge, or as David Deutsch puts a spin on all his misconceptions, and so it would be far better if we just agreed that what we're talking about are misconceptions most of the time, rather than truths, because knowledge is not truth, explanations are not truth. Now they may contain some truth, but they're going to contain falsity as well. And so truth plus falsity, okay, the conjunction of those two things is falsity, logically speaking. So in the final analysis, all explanations contain this conception, therefore all explanations contain some falsity, so all explanations are in the end false, not equally false and not equally useless and cannot be equally dismissed. There is always a best explanation, or there's no explanation, in some given field. Peter spoke recently with David Deutsch. He interviewed him, and he was accompanied by his off-sider. Read Nice Wonder. Now read Nice Wonder as a follower of mine. He is clearly across the luvois of David Deutsch and of my own work, and so I think he is more knowledgeable about copyright epistemology and David Deutsch's work, and as I say, even my own back catalogue, than what Peter is. And so it was a shame that he didn't speak up quite as much during the interview, because I think a lot of misconceptions could have been corrected by Reese. That's a relevant because I'm not going to respond to that interview. Here, there's this, it's a long interview, it's worth listening, you know, certainly for what David Deutsch has to say, but there are many misconceptions that you can hear in the interview, if you're a fan of David Deutsch, for example. What I am responding to is an episode that Peter did of his podcast, where he's responding to a piece that I put up on Navarre Ravecans platform air chat. So in that episode, I was just speaking off the cuff, because that's what Navarre's platform air chat is all about. It's not about pre-prepared remarks or anything like that. You're just having conversations with people and sometimes they do monologues, but they just literally me talking into the microphone. So kind of am now, I've got a few notes here because I don't want to forget certain things that I need to say about these particular issues, but broadly speaking, I'm just speaking off the cuff. And so when it comes to what I've said here and what Peter is responding to, I may not have couch things in as precise a version of the language that I normally use, as I would be if I'm doing my regular podcast, where I am carefully considering every single word that I'm using. Instead, I'm just talking very fast and talking quite rapidly. And I'm just throwing a whole bunch of stuff onto the canvas, so to speak, in order to not so much provoke, but to elicit conversation from people so that we can refine things. I certainly didn't expect that a prominent podcast that was going to pick up something like that. It's always bizarre, you know, like, we're doing the job that I do here. If I can prepare a podcast that takes me days to, you know, author, edit, and publish, it gets almost no attention. And then something that I strive for under the internet that takes me the best part of 10 minutes to do gets all of this attention. And so this is one of those cases where I was just speaking loosely, but but all of that said, the substance of what I say, I do not take back any of it, I'd be more careful with my language. But I think that the errors are not so much in my phrasing of these concepts and ideas, but more about what we might say is Peter's lack of knowledge on these particular topics, which is no sin. Ignorance is never a sin. He's only got so much time in the day, and he's spending a lot of his time doing, as I say, you know, God's work for one of another word that is very important for him, for someone to do, for a number of people to do. And so he is dealing with work mobs, he's dealing with neo-Marxists, as I say, and post-modernists, and he's using a version of critical thinking in order to counter that. And he does all sorts of interesting outreach stuff. Does street epistemology, I think it's called, which is an interesting idea. Of course, I wish that it was poparian. Maybe I should do street poparian epistemology. No, I don't think I can do this. But it's an interesting idea, you know, it asks for volunteers to come over and he has a chat with them about various things when he calls a street epistemology. So my central point is, if I haven't emphasized enough, Peter does fantastic work, I'm a great admirer of Peter, but I am going to critique him today, take him to task a little bit for his interpretation of what I've said and his understanding of David Deutsch's position, and his coming down on the side, it appears of Richard Dawkins' position, which, just to remind people, Richard Dawkins puts forth the common sense but false idea, because it's common sense and false. It's something that kind of everybody knows, which is. He asks the rhetorical question, how can we ever hope to understand the very small or the very fast? Our brains, after all, did not evolve to understand the very small and the very fast. We might add to that, by the way, that why doesn't Richard Dawkins also say it's not only the too fast, in other words, we can't hope to understand relativity or the too small, the quantum. We might as well say the too large, okay, that cosmology, we have no hope of understanding the big bang, you know, and then what's happening now with the entire cosmos. You know, tell the cosmologist that, tell the astrophysicist that, or the too slow, tell the geologist, we can't understand plate tectonics or continental drift, or even evolution by natural selection that happens too slowly, too gradually. And again, if we're talking small, like how small, the gene is pretty small, it's like, you know, part of a molecule, it's not that much bigger than, you know, a subatomic particle, really, you know, so how small is small, Richard? But he never picks on things like evolution, of course, which happened too slowly. He doesn't pick on things that are too big like stars, you know, the star is a lot bigger than a human being, but we understand stuff very, very well, we understand stars, we understand geology, we understand all of these things. So our brain didn't evolve to understand those things. Presumably he thinks we evolved to understand things that proximate the size of things on the African savannah, like lions, and impala, and flat surfaces, and yet makes no sense because we do understand high-level mathematics, we understand abstract ideas, we understand morality, these things can't even be seen. Almost everything of interest cannot be seen. So we understand things, we understand what we do see in terms of the unseen stuff. Richard's own area again, we tend not to see genes in action. What we see is a diversity of species. So again, explain that, Richard. So everyone, however, despite everything I've just said there, understands and kind of accepts that argument, that argument being that we cannot hope to understand anything outside of middle world, we cannot hope to understand it too fast, it's too slow, or too small, too large, et cetera. But but what everyone does not understand and what no one much seems to get, modulo a few people who follow the work of David Deutsch, which is the notions of both two kinds of universality come to bear on this and refute, roundly refute, that claim, that very claim, that we can't understand certain things. And that is one, computational universality, and two, and more importantly, explanatory universality. Now, we need the first one for the second one. The second depends on its existence for the first. The first acts as a substrate. Computational is about hardware, explanatory is about software, so you need the universal computer in order to run the universal explanation software. Because among many things that the universal explainer could do would be to emulate, approximately to arbitrary accuracy, you might say, the actions of a universal computer. Okay, I can emulate the actions of universal computer. It's very easy to emulate what a Turing machine does by me actually acting as the readhead and writing symbols on a piece of paper and buying the rules that a Turing, universal Turing machine would obey in order to do so. Of course, I will get bored. I will not be perfectly obedient as a universal Turing machine would do. The point is, I can approximate it to some degree of accuracy. Also, we just might as well say here for any pedants that are out there in the audience, there is no actual computational universality available in our physical universe, because the physical universe has only finite memory. And therefore, a universal computer can never actually be built because a Turing machine needs infinitely long type to run any program or simulation, or a universal quantum computer needs an infinite amount of memory, phrase it how you want. But to arbitrary accuracy, we can build universal computers, we just need to keep adding more and more memory to run ever larger programs and that kind of thing. Now, computational universality, by the way, and I will return to this, is a law of physics, or if you prefer, it's a principle of a kind, because it's kind of like the law of conservation of energy. Those terms can be confusing, okay? So, for example, you'll hear about Newton's law of gravity. Ah, it's a law, it's a law of gravity. Newton's law of gravity is known to be false, so in what sense is it really a law? The actual law of gravity is, so far as we know, Einstein general relativity, or at least Einstein's field equations, which look kind of like this. So that equivalence there constitutes a law of gravity, if you like, but it must obey conservation of energy law, and not vice versa, okay? The law of conservation of energy is a deeper law. If you come up with a new theory of relativity and it violates the conservation of energy rule, or so much for your theory of relativity, okay? You have to judge these things as consistent with our best understanding of the way in which physics operates, and you can't create energy out of nothing, because if you decide you can do that, you're going to undermine all of physics. Now, if it's possible you could be right, anything could be wrong, but there is such a thing as a hierarchy of these laws. There are emergent laws and there are fundamental, deeply fundamental laws, and this is a deeply fundamental law is the conservation of energy. So deep that, as Deutsch refers to it as, it's a principle, it's more of a principle, let's say, in other words, there's lots of law about laws, it's a law that other laws must obey, and the same is true of the church-turing Deutsch principle, once called the church-turing conjecture, because David Deutsch proved it, follows from quantum theory, and quantum theory is kind of totalitarian in the way in which all other laws of physics have to, in some sense, comport, or certainly all other physical laws or claims about physical reality, you have to comport with quantum theory. You end up with this principle of computation, which is the church-turing Deutsch principle, which is on a par with the conservation of energy law, and the church-turing Deutsch principle says that all physical processes are computable, they're computable, you can create a program in a quantum computer, if you like, if you want to do it efficiently, which can model or simulate that particular process. So any physical process out there can, in principle, have a program written for it. Now that doesn't mean that we know what the program is, and we'll also come back to that. For example, we don't know what program is for creativity, we don't know what the program would be for consciousness, but the fact that we don't know what it is doesn't mean that in principle there isn't one. David Deutsch seems to think that there needs to be something else over and above, perhaps physics, as we know, including instructor theory, to explain consciousness, but that's not to say that it's a not-computable thing. That if you could invent AGI, for example, I would fully expect the AGI, in fact, of necessity, I would expect the AGI to be conscious, because the AGI would be a person, and all people are conscious, and so, necessarily, logically, necessarily, the AGI will also have to be conscious. It makes no sense to say, well, it's got to be made of biological substrate. You can't have it made in silicon. Why? What magical property does biological substrates have? What magical property does wetware have that hardware doesn't? That kind of thing. When we speak, so that's computational universality. When we speak of explanatory universality and how people or human minds are universal, in that sense of explanatory universality, what we mean is that we don't just start holding things up in the physical world and saying, well, this thing here, this thing is literally inexplicable. That's an appeal to the supernatural. That has a long history. It goes back to prehistory, namely, when tribes of illiterate people were saying things like, oh, the lightning and the clouds or whatever is magic, the magical forces, the earth goddesses creating this thing, and we can't hope to understand it. Or even just ancient history where people would say, and they still do, you know, you can't understand that thing. In particular, you can't understand God or miracles, because God is omnipotent. God is all-powerful. God is omniscient. He knows everything. God's mind is the universe, if you want to go the sponosic way, whatever. And today, of course, we have people like Neil deGrasse Tyson who say, it's not God. It's not magic. That is the inexplicable thing. It's literally the laws of physics that we ultimately may not be able to understand. But if we're committed to rationality and reason, then we can throw all of those claims into exactly the same bucket, and we can say all of them are forced, and for exactly the same reason, whether it's magic or gods, or is it did it, or the laws of physics are inherently inexplicable, all of them are appeals to the supernatural. Because it's just claiming that no one understands it now, and therefore, no one ever will understand this. No, explanatory universality is the claim, the assertion, the rejection of appeals to the supernatural that says our minds can understand anything. Because anything can in principle be modeled or simulated, or a program can be written for that thing, and that program can itself be understood in principle. And that, by the way, is my own version of explanatory universality, which might be a little bit stronger than what Deutsch's original formulation of it is. But I explained it here in my blog post, Alien Intelligence, what I want. Go through that now, but suffice it to say, I'm basically suggesting there that if you can outline the argument, which includes writing out a program, then what prevents you from understanding the program? Well, you might say, well, the program's too long to fit into memory. Okay, so either compress it or understand the first line, can you understand that of the code, the second line, the third line? Can you understand those together? Can you be given an explanation of the first six lines, then the next six lines? Can you be given an explanation of how the first six lines connect to the second six lines? I don't see any logical reason or refutation of this idea that not everything is explicable if everything could be programmed. If a program can be written in principle, then in principle, it can be understood. And understanding is a kind of computation. The reason why understanding is a kind of computation is because it is a thing that brains do and what brains do is physical. There's nothing over and above the physical. There is the abstract, but it's not a supernatural thing. It's not something that stands apart from the firing of neurons that are going on inside of a brain. That is what thought is, that is what the mind is, that is what understanding is, that is what creating an explanation is. So to hold up certain things in the universe as being inherently inexplicable is, as I say, or unable to be understood by us, understood mind you, which means to generate an explicit explanation or at least an in explicit explanation, okay, something that we could perhaps make explicit if only we focused on trying to make an explicit. The fact that we struggle sometimes to come up with an explanation is no proof that we cannot in principle one day explain it. And this is an argument from ignorance. Okay, the argument from ignorance is we don't understand it now. Therefore, we never will understand it, something like that, or no one will ever have an explanation for that thing. But that's just not true in many ways. You know, again, ancient tribes might very well have said no one can possibly understand what goes on in the heavens or with lightning or anything like that. Of course, now it's routine for us to simply explain lightning is electric chard jumping from one place to another. The heavens are explained by these large spheres of gas called stars moving around the sky because the earth is rotating on its axis. And by the way, there's also these other spheres of smaller and closer called planets, which are orbiting around the sun. And so I want to go so we can understand the heavens as well. Okay, let's begin with Peter's response to me, which actually begins with his analysis of or commentary upon the interview between Michael Sharma and Richard Dawkins. And so we're going to begin with what Richard Dawkins says and the thing that almost everybody already knows. Hey, everybody, I'm going to be doing something different today. I'm going to be reacting to some videos. And the first video is a video of Michael Sharma, Richard Dawkins, talking about what we can know in quantum physics. Let's do it. It is one answer. But when you go to the quantum, the explanations for like quantum physics, like the double slit experiment, those sorts of things, you know, the Copenhagen interpretation and the multiverse and all the, there's like 15 different theories there on the Wikipedia page. To me, this indicates that there's something wrong with the field, not wrong with it, but that there's some conceptual problem that hasn't been solved yet. And so none of these is emerging as the probably the right one and the rest of them are probably wrong. Well, there's Michael Sharma there talking about which interpretation of quantum mechanics is probably right and probably wrong. Now, of course, this vision of the way in which to arbitrate between explanations and science itself, wrong, not probably wrong, just wrong. There is no way of probabilistically assigning credence to a given theory which causes it to be less valid. There's no way of conjuring the number. You can talk about Bayesianism all you like, but the point is that no Bayesian analysis is ever going to allow you to calculate the prior probability that a particular theory is actually incorrect. And many Bayesians will say, well, hold on, you don't calculate the prior probability exactly. How do you come up with the prior probability, the initial prior probability? I'll tell you how and the Bayesians are quite upfront with how when you press them on it or when you read the literature, you need a subject matter expert to have a guess as to what the initial prior probability of a theory being true actually is, or the truth content or the credence one might have in a particular theory. So, for example, you might assign a prior probability of the truth of Newtonian gravity to be 65% or 0.65. And then, as you do more and more experiments, which apparently do not refute, fail to refute, or in other words, in their terminology, confirm the truth of Newton's theory, that prior probability can be reassessed. You can update your priors, so to speak, and the prior probability of Newton's theory being correct goes up and up and up and up every time an experiment agrees with the theory. And so, of course, as I have said very often, on this podcast, on that theory about how science works, namely Bayesianism, that you can actually increase your credence, increase your confidence in a particular theory being true, or probably true, or something like that, as you gather more evidence, or as you have confirming instances of these particular theories that allow you to say, ah, this observation agrees with my explanation. So, therefore, every time you drop a ball, every time you observe a planet moving in its orbit, every time you see the tide go in and out, and all of these things apparently agree with Newton's theory of gravity. Your confidence that Newton's theory of gravity is true increases, your prior probability increases, and so you go from 0.65 or 65% likely to be true, or true, or whatever, however you want to phrase them. It goes up to 70, 85, 95, 99, asymptotically getting closer to 100, I don't know if they ever get to 100, maybe they don't, they probably can't, probably. And so, on this analysis, Newtonian gravity, you become more and more confident in it. Every observation that you make up until the moment that it is refuted, falsified by experiment, in light of a better theory like general relativity. In other words, the maximum confidence you have in the theory being true is immediately prior to it being shown false, which apparently only takes one observation. It takes you one experiment and a better theory in order to show the thing is false. Which is the proparian view. It's just the proparian view. You don't bother ever going through this sharad of saying this theory is probably true or 0.65 true or 65% true or anything like that. You don't need to say that. All you say is that it is the best known explanation, the best explanation that we have right now, phrase it however you want, but you don't need to assign a number to it. In fact, assigning a number pretends precision in an area where it's not required. You don't need to. You just have a binary, a simple binary between this is the best explanation of a given phenomena or it's not. This is shown to be false or it's not yet. And so, that's the position we're in with respect to general relativity, quantum field theory, quantum computation, neo Darwinism, evolution by natural selection as implied by the surface gene theory. All of this kind of stuff, pop here in epistemology, all of this kind of stuff, we just say it is the best known explanation yet to be refuted. But we should expect that like all extinct theories that one day are extent best theories of the things we regard as being our best knowledge or one day be improved or technically speaking superseded, refuted by a better theory and perhaps in the case of science observations, which rule in favor of a better theory against a worse theory in a lot of the observation. All of that is just to say that Marcus Schurmer is incorrect, strictly speaking incorrect that there's no probabilistic way of talking about these things. It's black and white. And unfortunately, for someone who is a proponent of the importance of science, does not understand the appearing view of science, which I think would only enrich his ability to defend a scientific worldview, so-called scientific worldview and the scientific revolution and the enlightenment and all that kind of stuff, which he spends a lot of time doing. He would only enhance his own skepticism, what he calls skepticism, what I would call a critical latitude rather than a skeptical latitude, put all of that side. This idea that there are competing interpretations of quantum mechanics, and so therefore it means it's a problem for the field is likewise incorrect. It just means it doesn't mean anything about the field. What it means is that Marcus Schurmer has a poverty of knowledge about this particular area. That's all it means. People can point to different interpretations of evolutionary theory, of which there are many, many of which are falsified as they are in quantum theory by the way, by the way, so we can talk about evolution according to Lamarckism. No one's willing to hold that up, no proper evolutionary biologist would hold that up these days, although some kind of do, with epigenetics and that kind of thing. But that aside, Lamarckism is a way of understanding evolution. You could even say that God massages evolution in order to bring about complexity and human beings in the world, and so this idea of intelligent design as a kind of evolution. But one could also say, as I've already said, people might well say that the individual is selected for or against under Neodarwinism, the group is selected for or against under Neodarwinism, or the gene is selected for or against under Neodarwinism. Now, these competing interpretations of how evolution works say nothing about the truth of evolution or what the actual best explanation of evolution is, it's the selfish gene with Richard Dawkins there, that there is dispute among people who talk about evolution says nothing. It is, it has no bearing on the truth of evolution, or on whether or not some people understand it versus some people misunderstanding it. So that the proliferation of so-called interpretations is beside the point, and by the way, as David Deutsch will say, there are only two interpretations really. There is the multiverse or the multiverse in heavy disguise versus retreats to irrationality, a retreat from logic, saying things like wave particle duality or the Copenhagen interpretation or collapsed models and all that kind of stuff, which are literally anti-science and anti-logic, anti-science because well, what causes the collapse? Apparently, well, this is not stated very often, but you know, it could be consciousness. I think we don't understand explains. I think we don't understand or the human mind or observation has a force coming out of it, which causes the collapse of the wave function. There's non-physical thing causes the physical thing to happen. So that's anti-science. Wave particle duality is just a violation of logic. A particle cannot be both extended in space and isolated at a point in space, more or less, but that's the kind of denial of the logical excluded middle, the denial of the excluded middle that you get. You can't both be ex and not ex simultaneously. Okay, so that's Michael Schimmel. Now let's listen to Richard. I think our brains are not designed to understand the double-sweet experiment. I think there's no, well, well, we have no right to expect necessarily that our brains are equipped to understand everything. We have no right to expect our brains are equipped to understand everything, but we have every right because of explanatory universality, as I've already argued. As I've already argued, in this episode, if you go back, if you only decided to pick it up, where I'm now just talking and responding to Richard, Michael, and ultimately Peter, go back and really listen to that part. Okay, the first 40 minutes, that's approximately half our 40 minutes of this podcast. We're specifically about we have every right. We have a principle called the Church Turing Deutsch principle, which means that all physical processes are computable. They can be simulated. Inside of a computer, we can write a program for them in principle, even if we haven't done it yet. And because of this in principle capacity that can be done inside of our computers, we can, in theory, understand any of those programs. We can model those things inside of our own minds. We can understand those things. And the denial of this, as I say, is an appeal to the supernatural. It says that there are certain things beyond our capacity to understand. This is something that people have said throughout prehistory with respect to magic, throughout ancient history with respect to the monotheistic God. People have said it over and again that there are certain things we cannot understand. We are trying to just have a universal rationality, a universal application of reason, saying that there is nothing of limits. Some people want to put things off limits, God, the spiritual realm, literal magic, superstition, this kind of stuff. Neil deGrasse Tyson says the ultimate laws of physics cannot be groked by us. Richard Dawkins says our current understanding or our current theories of physics, never mind the ultimate laws of physics, but our current ideas about quantum theory, the twin slit experiment of all things, cannot be understood by us. So he should more precise, as I say, a single particle twin slit experiment or something like that, because the wave theory of Thomas Young explained what was going on with the twin slit experiment, but never mind that we're talking about particles. We can understand these things. And if you want to hold them up as going into the same bucket that the religious people have forever held up God as being this thing that isn't explicable, then go ahead. But you are in the same bucket as those people. You are appealing to the same kind of thing, the inexplicable nature of some aspect of reality. Now, you might very well say, but God is not part of reality. And I would agree with you. But at the same time, I would say that not understanding physical phenomena is also not a part of physical reality, given the existence of people. We can understand reality with some efforts, sometimes with your own field and your own work in this particular domain of biology, demonstrates that something that was forever thought up until very recent times to not possibly be explicable in the scientific worldview, namely how the diversity of species arise. And so therefore, we need to invent this thing called creationism, which rests upon the creator and upon God, but that could never possibly be understood. But your own hero, Charles Darwin. And then you, Richard, were able to come up with an explanation which was well within the scientific worldview. You refuted this idea that that was not explicable, that biological diversity was not explicable. It is. You explained it. Darwin explained it before you. And now, various people from Hugh Everett, Richard David Wallace, through to modern-day quantum physicists, like Sam Keipas, or his mentor, David Deutsch, these people do explain and quite well how it is, things like the twin slit experiment work, how it is that quantum computers could work in principle, how quantum mechanics, quantum theory, quantum field theory, broadly actually works, what the multiverse is, and so on and so forth. These things can be understood, but let's persevere with this. And so we shouldn't necessarily be surprised that fundamental reality is ultimately strange to us because our brains were shaped by natural selection to survive as medium-sized objects, chasing other medium-sized objects at speeds much less than the speeds of light. But again, by that same argument that we evolved as medium-sized objects chasing medium-sized objects, we shouldn't understand genes or evolution or anything outside of the African savannah. If that's what natural selection has shaped us for. And by the way, not everything is evolutionarily advantageous, right? Some things are mutations which don't have any great advantage, so they haven't evolved for any particular thing. The whole framing of how dare I talk to the great Richard Dalton about evolution. However, he should know better than anyone that evolution doesn't shape you for anything. It's a random mutation where there's a reflection between, yes, the organism, the phenotype itself, and the environment in which it finds itself. So in that sense, shaped, but not shaped for a particular thing. There's no, evolution is blind, so it's not striving to shape an organism for a particular thing. You might say, "Well, wings are shaped for flying," but it's just the fact that wings are able to fly rather than they're shaped for this particular thing. This is not what they are. They are for, so to speak, to give it a teleology, because that implies a teleology that has a purpose out there in the world. And in the same way, you might very well ask, "Well, why do people get bad backs or bad knees or why do they get appendicitis?" Well, surely on Richard's account, bad backs and appendicitis and bad knees have evolved for something. There's an evolutionary reason why those things happen. But no, it's a wrong way of phrasing it. There is an evolutionary reason that these things go wrong, but it's not because evolution has shaped backs for back pain, even though it happens. It's not like evolution has shaped the appendix of the human being for appendicitis. No, this is a vestigial organ, I think we call it. And it used to be the secum in our ancestors, and you can see it in other species that exist alongside us like, I remember we dissected a rat when I was at high school, and I don't think they do anymore. But we, or I remember the teacher say, "Do not perforate the secum," which is where all the muck and the smelly stuff that's about to enter the rectum, the rat got to go. And of course, some people did, and once they did that, then people started throwing up everywhere because it stunk. It's really smelly. It's where all the decaying food that the rat had eaten. And anyway, as the teacher explained to us later on, and as I've read elsewhere, the secum in the rat, like the secum in our prehistoric ancestors, evolved over time into the appendix. Now, what is the appendix for? And I'm not very well say it's for part of the immune system, or it's for part of digestion. And in fact, it's a relic that more often than not causes problems in the human being. Are those problems evolved for something? No, again, it's the wrong way of framing things. And in the same way that things can go wrong, therefore not evolved for, things can go spectacularly right. Whatever you might say, the genes for a brain encode, they do encode a mind. Now, you, if you're rich, you might say, "Well, that mind is only capable of understanding middle world." Okay, so maybe that's the advantage, okay, that the evolutionary pressure and the advantage that provides is to allow people to solve problems like finding water and escaping from animals and hunting and all that kind of stuff. But just as a side effect, happy accident, if you will, unlike the unhappy accident for appendicitis, happy accident is that all such minds running on human brains are capable not only of hunting and finding water and solving those problems, but universal solving problems they encounter. The repertoire is infinite. In other words, you're not just going to be able to solve problems on the African savannah, but you can solve problems in evolution and poetry, language broadly, communication, quantum theory, relativity, every area of science from geology through to cosmology. Everything from the ground beneath your feet to the sky above your head is well within the remit of our capacity to reason to solve problems. It's universe and there are no barriers you can just put around it, where strictly would these barriers be rich and exactly how small is small? Apparently, we can understand on your account genes, so it's somewhat smaller than genes. Is that where you draw the line? Is that the black and white line? This side of a large molecule, we can understand, but that side of a large molecule, we can't understand. This side of particular velocity, 1000 meters per second, we can understand, but that side, more than 1000 meters per second, up to and including the speed of light, we can't understand. We can, but that's the whole point, we can't just because some people come, namely you and Michael, in this case, I'm sorry to say, but more broadly, is not a refutation of the idea that some people, and it's only some people that will understand these things because there are only some people that take an interest in them. The vast majority of human beings on planet Earth, as Richard will no doubt attest to, reject evolution by natural selection, don't understand it, don't understand the selfish gene idea, never mind if they don't understand evolution, full stop, they don't certainly don't understand the selfish gene idea, even people who endorse evolution as a kind of religious perspective, and they take on, they don't understand it, but they're willing to vociferously argue against creationists, but they never have much to say, except believe the science kind of thing. Richard should appreciate that just because people don't understand a thing, or have a misconception about a thing, says nothing about the objective truth of a thing, or otherwise, and whether or not some people understand it or not. It has, it's silent on that, it's just a whole bunch of people saying boo, I don't like it. Okay, so boo, I don't like quantum mechanics because I don't understand it, boo, I don't think anyone else understands it, if I don't understand it, then no one understands it. That's Feynman's kind of unfortunate quip, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics, taken as a religious doctrine these days in certain areas of physics or in certain popular accountifies, but it's just false, even brilliant people can make mistakes and find that this was one of his mistakes. Trottinger seems to have understood quantum theory, ever understood quantum theory, David Deutsch understands quantum theory. Okay, let's keep going. We simply, our brains are not geared to understanding everything, and maybe that we can never understand. What I think is remarkable is how far we have got. I mean, it's astonishing that there are people in the world who, if they don't quite understand quantum theory, pretty close to it. Yeah, so there he goes, he contradicts himself. So there are people who are pretty close to understanding quantum theory. I couldn't agree more. Hey, no one can understand everything about quantum theory, precisely because there will always be open questions. There will always be new things to understand about the theory. There will always be problems that we can solve. So I'm with him there. So on the one hand, he says our brains didn't evolve to understand quantum theory. So therefore, we shouldn't be surprised that no one understands quantum theory. But then he goes on to say, but some people apparently do understand or almost understand quantum theory. Yeah, that's right. How the human brain is so emergently powerful, given that it was only designed to survive and reproduce on the African savannah is a pretty mysterious fact. Yeah, it is a mysterious fact, but it wasn't designed to do anything. Richard knows his own thing. He's just misspeaking. He's not speaking precisely. Of course, it wasn't designed to do anything. The evolution gives the appearance of design. But again, a design has a teleology. By teleology, I mean, it's a fancy word for having a plan. Evolution didn't have a plan. It didn't, it's foresee the outcome. It wasn't striving for any particular thing. It is blind. It's the drunkard's walk, if you like. It tends in a particular direction. But this is only by sort of dumb luck that it gets there. There is no mind behind evolution designing it. Design requires a designer. Design requires a designer. A watched demands a designer behind it. An explanatory knowledge creator, explanation knowledge creator to explain the mechanism. But eyes do not, eyes don't have designers. Why? Because Darwin solved that problem. Darwin solved the problem of how you can have the appearance of design without it being designed, the appearance of design. And that is through random mutations, and then selections thereof. Teaching Richard Dawkins to suck eggs here, of course. But it's important to be precise by the language here, because again, the brain has evolved this capacity to survive on the African savannah. And that capacity brings with it, or at least brought with it, a universal capacity to understand. Now, he's right that that's a mystery. The power of the universal power, perhaps ultimately one day, the most powerful force in the universe will be the brain. Human creativity or the creativity of people, explanatory creativity, universe, all of you, whatever you want to call it, will be the most powerful force in the universe. And the reason I say that, and if Peter happens to be watching this, the reason that we say this, people like David Deutsch, myself, is because ultimately speaking, although things that are often called forces, influences, if you want, whatever gravity curvature is based on, can bring together not only things like planets like Earth, but bring together stars to cause fusion at their cause, bring together entire galaxies. And indeed, superclusters of galaxies, that's a powerful force. But one day, just as we have here on Earth as people, terraformed entire landbases so that they look something less like an uninhabited savannah and more like downtown New York or Manhattan Island, to explain that transformation from a grassy field or a forest into an island of skyscrapers, requires us to invoke a powerful force, force in scarequotes, that works against gravity and all the other natural physical forces. That's human creativity. And we just imagine that, in the distant future, the entire Earth will be so terraformed if we choose to. And on other planets, the solar system, galaxy, and in the distant future, whether it be thousands, millions, or billions of years, you can imagine people taking over, overcoming the force of gravity in some sense. Or at least using it to their advantage in order to generate structures that rival the size and complexity of entire galaxies. And that will require an explanation. And it won't be an explanation in terms of human brains that evolved on the African savannah. Because then we will have people that won't have evolved on the African savannah by any stretch of the imagination. We'll have people in silicon called them artificial general intelligence, but they will be people and they won't have genes. They will have minds, but they won't have genes. That's a whole other argument that, again, I can only appeal to you listening to my podcast or reading through my tweets on that exact issue. Okay, let's get going. We're making a very slow progress here. Okay, so this is the same point that Dawkins makes in his TED talk. And it's a point that he's written about quite extensively over the years. And I think it's extraordinarily important. What did our brains evolve to do? And what did we evolve to do through natural selection? We didn't evolve to do anything. If anything, we've evolved to do something completely different to every other species. In so far, as you can say, kangaroos evolved to hop, fish evolved to swim, and birds evolved to fly, modulus and exceptions to the last rule. People fly free of their genes, as I like to say. They generate memes. They generate ideas. And this gives them a universal capacity to do anything they like. In fact, everything I just mentioned there, namely hopping, as a kangaroo does, swimming as a fish does, or flying as a bird does, is within the repertoire of things that people can do. Okay, we can't flap our arms and fly, but we can build devices that allow us to fly. We can build submarines that allow us to dive for longer and better than basically any fish. We have structures that are more robust and any animal than anything that we apparently evolved for, that anything that biology has gifted to us. It's not a matter of biology. It's not a matter of genes. It's a matter of memes. It's a matter of our ideas. That's what we've evolved to do. If we've evolved to do anything, it's to generate ideas, which ideas all ideas? All ideas that are possible to think we can think. Now, are we going to think all ideas that are possible to think? No, of course, at any particular point, we're only going to have a finite number of ideas. And that's off into infinity. We will never have an infinite amount of ideas, even if there is literally an infinite amount of ideas that we could have, could have. But the ideas that we will have will always be finite. But are unbounded. There's no limit, aside from the laws of physics, to be placed upon the ideas that we can. Modulate the difficult ones. Keep saying modulo, but you know, except for the things that are difficult for us to think because of antiretical meant. That's a whole other area of our philosophy as well. Let's keep going with Peter. So we did not evolve to understand the physics of the very, very small, or the very, very large. We evolved to understand what Dawkins terms the middle kingdom, the physics of the middle kingdom. So the fact that we can understand these things at all is fascinating. So in the beginning of that clip, Sherman was talking about, but if you don't know the work of Michael Sherman, his books have been absolutely influential on my intellectual development, I can't recommend them highly enough. At the beginning of that clip, Sherman says, perhaps there's something wrong. We just the field isn't advanced enough. We have different interpretations of the same phenomena. We look at a phenomenon and then we make inferences from that phenomena. Dawkins is saying that we can do that at all and have some idea of some coherent interpretation of what's happening itself is rather extraordinary. That's one of the contributions which is Richard's made is that he has brought the idea of biology to the understanding of physics and other phenomena. The other thing that Richard's written about, and then he, I believe that he mentions in his TED talk as well, is could we train children from very young ages to understand the realm of the very, very small quantum, quantum entanglement, double slit experiments, etc. Or is it that we're kind of stale at this point and that it's just our understanding being so seeped in physics that we cannot. I think that's a really good clip and I think it's an important clip and I think it's something worth reflecting upon. Could we train young children to understand the realm of the very, very small? Again, this is a rank misunderstanding of philosophy and I would just say epistemology generally. People are born with universal minds. It's people. Children have universal minds. What does that mean? It means they can learn anything. Children are learning machines, engines of creativity. They have to create language and they will do. They have to create everything that they learn. That's the way that learning works, learning is literally knowledge creation, as I like to say. Popper, it might be thought, was not a philosopher of learning, but rather of knowledge. But everything that he says about the way in which knowledge is conjectured and tested in the real world, when it comes to science, can be applied to the way in which a child learns anything. There is one epistemology. It's a popurian epistemology. It explains how knowledge creation works. It explains how learning works. There is only one way you have to be able to guess what is true and check it in some way, whether against other people's ideas or against the physical world, both the manifestations of the physical world, of course, you're encountering things outside of your mind and counting things out there. You are in the darkness of your skull, so you're guessing at what is really going on via these imperfect, limited channels of information that come to us via our optic nerve, auditory nerve, sensors in our skin or factory taste buds, that kind of thing. We have to interpret all of that. We are not presented truth as the objectivists like to try and imply by physical reality. You're guessing at what's going on. You're a mind in the darkness of your skull, as I say, as David Deutsch points out. You are in perfect, complete darkness. But your eyes are delivering electrical signals via the optic nerve into this brain of yours, giving you the illusion of bright light. I say illusion because it's an interpretation. It's a virtual reality rendering of what is going on in physical reality. You're interpreting it all. It's a program running inside of your head. That's what's literally your mind is. It's a program running inside of your head. You are that program and the program is trying to interpret these channels of information, these channels of data, and out of that, trying to create an explanation, which is a visual image, an auditory and visual hallucination, if you like, a dream like state. Now, most of the time, it's fine. Putting aside the explicit explanations, which can be terribly wrong. Most of the time, what you see is really there. What you hear, you really hear, but people do have hallucinations and they make simple errands as well about what they see. People think they see the sky. There is no sky. People think they see a smooth table. There is no smooth table. It's bumpy atoms. It just feels smooth and it looks like there's a sky, even though there's nothing but air and space above you. There is no sky. As I like to say, the sky is a word we invented for a thing that doesn't exist. It's like ghost. We can talk about the rally scattering of light and how nitrogen atoms or nitrogen molecules produce blue light when excited by ultraviolet radiation. That's what gives the appearance of this blue sky. The point is, our senses do not give us the capacity to infer truth. We have to work hard to come up with explanations of what is going on. It's an important clip that's worth reflecting on. Yes, if you've never heard the idea of Middle World before, worth reflecting on it, I've talked about it at length on the podcast over and again, and various other forums. But I don't think it's all that instructive. I think it's one of those things which everyone hears and everyone agrees with, uncritically, because it makes sense. It makes sense at first blush. You hear it for the first time and you go, "Yeah, it sounds logical." Yeah, our brains did evolve on the African savannah, so we shouldn't be surprised that we don't understand things like quantum entanglement and a twin slit experiment, because those involve things that are so small. Now, never mind that the actual explanation of quantum theory is a universal explanation, which does not just apply to the very small. It's not just the theory of the very small. That is a common misconception as well. The emergent multiverse makes this point by David Wallace, the theoretical physicist. It's a universal theory. It makes claims about the universe, about everything in physical reality. Everything in physical reality should obey quantum theory according to quantum theory. It doesn't arbitrarily draw a line between the small and the large. I know some physicists are very animated. We're trying to figure out where the quantum effects stop and that kind of thing, but that's not within quantum theory. That needs to be added as an additional assumption. If that's what you want. We can understand a twin slit experiment. We can understand quantum entanglement. This is part of what David Deutsch's work has been about, and just because some people don't understand it, purport to no matter standard, is not a refutation of the idea that it's inexplicable, that it's explicable rather. It is explicable. It can be understood there are explanations out there. Okay, now Peter's going to get to actually talking about me. I apologize, this has taken so long. But we'll, here we go. [Music]
