Parts 1 and 2 were, admittedly, long. So if you could not persevere through those, this gets the major points out serving both as an appendix to tie up some loose ends and as a summary of parts 1 and 2.
ToKCast
Ep 219: Response to Peter Boghossian Part 3, Appendix
So this is an appendix, which really serves as a summary of everything I said, because I realized I've gone on for far too long. And so because I've gone on for far too long, people can just skip to this as the cliff notes version of everything else that I said. Maybe a few extra sprinkles thrown in for those people who did make it through the previous hour and a half, two hours that I put out there. So what I'm responding to is essentially what amounts to, I think, an appeal to ignorance that in the work of David Deutsch, there's no explanation given of, for example, consciousness. And so therefore, there's something wrong with his argument about explanatory universality, as if it's a flaw of explanatory universality that it can't account for literally all the mysteries out there that are still mysteries in our universe, one of which is consciousness is often held up by people like Sam Harris, for example, as being a mystery equivalent to why there is anything rather than nothing. I don't see it this way. It's just another problem to be solved. Now, perhaps it is somewhat more mysterious than something like Dark Matter, maybe, or maybe not. Maybe it is just a form of computation we don't yet understand. Maybe it is a special kind of program. No one knows yet, but to say that it is a mystery that rivals, well, any other mystery is to misconstrue what mystery means. It's just a problem. Trying to rank order things that we don't know, in order of how much we don't know them, pretends that we can quantify our ignorance. And we actually can't quantify our ignorance, except in a place like physics where we have error bars, which actually do try and quantify ignorance. That's a separate case. Putting all that aside, any appeal to ignorance of this sort of, well, David Deutsch hasn't explained it, or pop that hasn't explained it, or the laws of physics haven't explained it. Therefore, it's a problem for the validity of our knowledge of the laws of physics, or the work of pop, or Deutsch, is to misunderstand what the project of science, philosophy and epistemology happens to be. It's not to provide a comprehensive answer to every single question, but rather a guide for how to go about answering questions, or more importantly, how to critique answers given in the future, or now. So, we've also heard appeals to Middle World, and what our brain evolved to do, and we also heard uses of the term epistemology, which I don't understand, and I guess my own viewers and listeners won't understand either, because I tend to use the word "as synonymous" with the dictionary definition, or the philosophy definition, which is theory of knowledge. Now, if you have a theory of knowledge, that's higher order thinking, I would say. Dogs and, you know, water striders, they don't have science, they don't have mathematics, they don't have an understanding of anything much less epistemology. And when it comes to an internal sense of self, even that can be questioned, even whether or not they're conscious to be questioned. I know that that is a controversial statement, so if you are concerned about that, how could Brett Hall ever possibly entertain the idea that other animals are not conscious? What a ridiculous claim to make. Then I just urge you to go back into the meat of the matter where I referred to one of my own videos on precisely that topic, and I link, or attempt to link, consciousness to creativity and the capacity to generate explanations. I'm not going to go through it again now. There's also a claim that appeals to empiricism, this idea that we get knowledge from observational instrumentation. I think that's wrong. We get knowledge through conjecture. Conjecture is how we come up with conjectures as a mystery. If we could solve that mystery would solve problem of AGI. We're also heard a claim that particles are never seen in the same place at the same time. Peter certainly makes this claim, but that's incorrect for reasons that Deutsche explains, and many other physicists have explained as well. You can't be in two places at the same time as a single particle. Two versions of the particle can be in different places. They can be in different universes indeed, but that's again a separate issue to single particle being in two places at the same time. That's a violation of the excluded middle. The idea of middle world, this idea that we can't understand things like the quantum realm, particles in two places at the same time, that doesn't make any sense, but that's because someone else has a misunderstanding of what quantum theory is about it. But even if we push that to one side and say, "Well, there's still something about quantum theory we don't understand," and that this somehow refutes the idea that human minds are universal in the key sense, the explanatory sense, would seem to suggest that we're drawing arbitrary lines between what human brains are capable of understanding or human minds are capable of understanding and what they're not. So we're putting into a particular bucket, something like quantum theory or relativity, the capacity for us to understand what it's like to travel near the speed of light, and we can, even if we can't actually achieve that yet, we routinely put protons, streams of protons, travel near the speed of light, and we can describe and explain and predict their behavior when they start traveling near the speed of light. So we can understand things traveling very fast, and we can understand it very small, but why on earth we would say that we can't understand those things, our brains haven't evolved to understand those things, but they are capable on Richard Dawkins' account of understanding evolution by natural selection and the selfish gene. The selfish gene, after all, the gene is a small particle. Well, it's a molecule. It's part of a molecule. In any case, it's very, very small. It's well beyond our limit of seeing with our eyes. And indeed, it's basically beyond our limit of seeing with instruments, scanning, handling electron microscopes, put those aside. It's not like you can get an average microscope and get a good visual image of what's going on with genes. We don't see the evolution of natural selection using the selfish gene. No one's made a movie of that, as far as I'm with. And I think it would be almost impossible to do so because you'd need generations upon generations of the selfish gene actually being selected for a selected, yes, selected for in an environment. It doesn't make any sense. It comes to us via a deep explanation rather than what we can see, which is the problem that Richard has. We can't see things traveling at the speed of light or near the speed of light and we can't see things in the quantum realm. So therefore, we don't have an understanding of these things because the understanding must come via the observation. Again, it's appeal to empiricism, that kind of argument. But all of this is to say that Richard and Michael and Peter are coming from a very different place, epistemologically speaking, in the sense of understanding how knowledge works, what it is and how it's created as compared to car pop at David Deutsch, myself or anyone else who exists in that tradition of conjunctural knowledge and trying to explain conjunctural knowledge and fallibleism and that kind of thing. And by the way, even if we were to grant Richard's premise about middle world or the middle kingdom, whatever you want to call it, that we can only understand things that we evolved to actually understand on the African savannah. Obviously, almost everything that we do understand didn't evolve on the African savannah, including evolution by natural selection, including chemistry, including cosmology, including modern medicine, including politics and morality and everything in the modern day. Putting all that aside, even if we were to grant his premise that we couldn't understand those things, that's no argument that we won't understand those things at some point in the future by creating the knowledge of how to do so. Again, it's an appeal to ignorance, a strict logical fallacy. Now, as I say also, it's a problem with using chat GPT, for example, as some sort of authoritative source in summarizing what David Deutsch's views are, it messed up royally in the clip that I was responding to. It didn't get the content at the beginning of infinity, right? It certainly did not get what David Deutsch's thinking is right. I wouldn't get what David Deutsch is thinking, what David Deutsch would be thinking about any given issue that isn't dealt with directly in the beginning of infinity or in any of these works. And I've said this over and again on platforms like X, when people ask, what would David Deutsch think about, you know, this, that or the other thing? Ask the man, he's still alive, you can ask him, but trying to have someone else guess to get into his psychology, it's ridiculous. To get into any one psychology is ridiculous, you need to actually ask the person no one else can guess for you, except in the case where he's written explicitly about it, in which case you wouldn't say what he's thinking, you'd say what he wrote. And then you'd provide a quote and you can talk about the quotes. As you would with any thinker living or dead, by the way, so to have Chatech EPT and, you know, give its opinion on what David Deutsch might think about a particular thing is a completely invalid move. And it undermines any argument based upon that particular move, what would David Deutsch think and then, you know, someone tells you what he thinks and then you go, oh, well, I'm going to ignore what David Deutsch says because that answer is absurd. And it may well be absurd because it's not David that's talking at someone else or, in that case, Chatech EPT. We heard that Richard Dawkins made the quote about Queerr than we can suppose. That was John Haldane, but, you know, that's a minor issue, I'm nitpicking there unfairly. The point is that the Queerr than we can suppose thing is just to say that whatever the thing is that is Queerr than we can suppose, can suppose is the same argument, but X is Queerr than we can suppose. Okay, there it says the universe is the Queerr than we can suppose, but you could substitute the universe for literally anything else that people have traditionally associated with being Queerr than we can suppose, like God or the mind of God or magic or the actions of wizards and so on. So Queerr than we can suppose has all the properties claimed for traditionally the monotheistic God. So, you know, claiming that our minds, our human minds are too puny and all that kind of stuff to ever understand something as sophisticated as God and his actions or the universe or the laws of physics, the modern incantations of this. But all of it isn't appealed to the supernatural. All of it can be dismissed on exactly that basis as a bad explanation. So all that brings me to a summary really at this point, which is a response to the question asked in the title of Peter's own video, which is, "Anyone can understand anything?" question mark. And my answer is yes. Yes, because people are universal explainers or universal in their capacity to learn, create knowledge and so on. However you wish to frame that. And as we say, the denial of that is an appeal to the supernatural. The idea apparently that we can't understand absolutely anything is gifted to us by this idea that our brains have evolved only to do certain things. So in other words, they're genetically incapable of doing certain things. And I know that this is hard to follow and hard to swallow for scientifically minded types, supposedly scientifically minded types. I guess saying supposedly is a little bit insulting, but it's not meant to be. What I mean when I say the supposedly scientific minded types is because they're relying upon this misconception about evolution. So they think they're coming from a place of science. They think that they are referring to evolution by natural selection. They're going, "Oh, look at the science. The science tells us that we have genes for hair color and genes for height and genes for any physical characteristics." So therefore, of course, we're going to have genes for the physical characteristics of the brain, which are what give us the capacity to understand. And there will be differences in these genes, by the way, so they would argue in our capacity to understand mathematics. And so this explains people like Terence Tao or Edward Whitten, geniuses in mathematics, versus lesser physicists who are proficient at mathematics versus the average person versus people who've failed at mathematics that have returned at school. This is explained by genetic differences, and not something else, which I would say, which is a problem situation the person has, even poppers terms, or what I would term as people's simple interests. A curiosity about a particular thing that may be formed certainly early on in the age of the life of a person. When you're a child, you are existing in an environment where, let's say, your parents help to kind of provide you with opportunities, we might say, where mathematics tends to arise in the household versus a place where it never does. And if you exist in a particular environment, or you're offered opportunities where mathematics is required in order for you to solve your problems, and you end up finding it fun, that's the important thing. And who knows why you find certain things fun? Is there a genetic component there? I don't know, but I doubt it, and I doubt it because of the universality of the mind, which trumps everything. There's a provider there, which I also think is that people are not born as blank slates, and not a blank slightest. I think you are born with certain inborn ideas. And the inborn ideas are the things that your universally explainer mind works on initially, very early on in your childhood, perhaps just straight after birth kind of thing, or even before birth. It's chewing away on these problems that it has that arise due to genetics, but I think they're just ideas. The ideas, whether they are coming from the genes, or whether they're coming from the environment, or whether they're coming from your own internal conjectures, wherever the source of these ideas is irrelevant. What matters is what you do with your ideas, and you can change your ideas over time. So, memes crump genes. Memes can overrule genes. Absolutely they can. As we like to say, the evil example is that people have, if they have genes for anything, they have the gene for survival, the gene to live. But people commit suicide, often, especially in Western culture. So, what's going on there, all the suicide bombers in non-Western culture, let's say. Now, what's going on there? How can we explain that? Well, the geneticist, the evolutionary psychologist, they would say something where their theory explains everything, and so therefore explain something. So, in other words, they would say something like, where you'd have genes for suicide bombing, or you'd have genes for committing suicide, or if you're anorexic, you don't have genes for eating, you have genes for not eating and starving yourself. In other words, the gene for theory, it just could explain everything, and I think this. I think that you can have ideas that can come from anywhere and you can change your ideas. So, if you do have genes for survival, which I think might be plausible, you can develop ideas later on, which crump those genes, and so you can commit suicide. Or you may have no genes for survival whatsoever, and what you have is just genes for hunger, let's say, or genes for continuing to breathe, more likely. And so, you can then change that into fostering a sense of wellbeing and wanting to survive and thrive, or you can develop ideas which counter that and want you to commit suicide. I think it comes from ideas that come from your names, going on for too long about this. Obviously, we have different genes for learning mathematics. Obviously, we have genes for our capacity to understand the laws of physics, and maybe all humans lack genes for knowing the ultimate laws of physics, let's say, or knowing more sophisticated mathematics. There is a ceiling to how sophisticated our explanations can be or how complex the mathematics is that we can understand. That's common sense. And I would say, well, that sounds very scientific because you're talking about genes and you're talking about evolution, but what you're ignoring there is another very important part of science. You're ignoring laws of physics. A deeper than a law of physics, a principle of physics, the Church Turing thesis, the Church Turing thesis, which is about our capacity to model anything on a universal computer. One of the capacities of our own mind is to model the behavior of a universal computer. We can build universal computers. We can write programs. We could write a program for basically any physical process, including the operation of minds, and we can understand anything. There's a long argument that I made in the first hour and a half. And anyway, the idea that we can't understand things because of evolution, I say, as a form of scientism. Because no genes have ever been identified that can rank order people in terms of their mathematical ability or their capacity to understand certain things. Much less linking genes to specific mental behaviors like that or mental choices that we make. You have genes for hair color. We can identify those and genes for height, let's say. Although we've mapped the human genome, no one can point to a genes or a sequence of genes and say, ah, there is where the mind is. That's where the mind is encoded. If we could do that, by the way, that would be a great way to figure out AGI because you'd figure out the code that is written into the DNA and decode that and put that into an algorithm. And therefore, you'd be able to code AGI that way. And some other computer programming language, you'd just translate the DNA code into C++ or Python or whatever happens to be. A free speech violation here in Australia again. So no one has ever identified the genes via a good explanation with some nebulous notion of intelligence they have. That just hasn't happened. And so I continue to argue from the position that we have genes for anything there for a brain that runs a universal mind and we all have the same set of genes for that. Everyone has not only the capacity to understand anything that anyone else can. So if Terence Tao proves the theorem in mathematics and you think that's beyond me to ever understand or Kurt Goethe does, you can if you tried. And you'd try if you had the interest and you'd have the interest if you had that problem of, you know, a lot of people say things to me like, I'd love to be better at physics or I'd love to be better at mathematics. You know, how do I go about doing this and swell. You have to first cultivate the interest, but I'm not interested. They're not really genuinely interested. They just want to be interested. They want to be good at mathematics. So they're actually going through the work of being good at mathematics and the work means you'll only complete the job of work, so to speak, and being good at mathematics. If you actually find it fun and therefore not work, so they're stuck in this bind. I don't know how to make someone not bored of mathematics. I get bored of mathematics. But I'm not worried about it anymore. Now that I've left school and university back then, I was worried because you don't want to be bored by mathematics because if you are, then you'll file the tests and so on. The fact is, you have a mind that is universal, and so if you genuinely wanted to be good at mathematics or anything else, you could be unless it's a physical thing like doing gymnastics, in which case, yeah, the genes for particular muscle size and particular size of body and frame and flexibility and all that stuff is absolutely going to come into play. But mentally, no, it's not a thing because your body is not universal for all different kinds of physical capacities, absolutely not, but your mind is, which your body can't do anything that any other body can. You'll be limited in how high you can jump, for example, but universal for jumping, but it is universal for understanding stuff. Not only can you understand anything that anyone else can, you can understand anything that can be understood in physical reality. But some people don't understand universality, in which case, as I referred to, I referred to this particular video of mine, podcasts of mine, so go to that one, but I made for a colleague and a friend, actually, so that's why this one exists because he didn't understand universality or told me to notice in universality. And very recently I had a very prominent, renowned physicist dismiss me and dismiss the argument of David Deutsch by saying, I don't understand universality as if this was some kind of refutation. And so when I started to give him the explanation of what universality was, I could see him mentally switch off. He was like, I can't be bothered with understanding this, I don't care about it, because I was trying to make a point people can understand anything. And so I explained it to a universality, it rests upon something called computational universality, he just rejected universality out of hand that he didn't understand it. And it was like, well, don't you understand Turing completeness or Turing universality and this kind of stuff. And I was interested, really wasn't interested in this, I will, why do you have such a strong opinion on whether or not people are special in the universe and are able to understand things, which he said no they're not special in the universe and they can't understand anything. But he was vociferous in arguing that his position, so I will, in order to argue that position you have to counter, you have to refute universality, but his reputation of universality was, as I say, I don't understand it is. I don't understand it as this renowned physicist, therefore, it can't be understood because I'm a smart person, it's like, that's not a good argument. Okay, so I've made the point. Thanks again to Peter and to Reed for constructing this response to my own stuff that I put out there, hopefully this wasn't too berating and impolite or anything like that, it's not meant to be, it's just supposed to be a somewhat lengthy exploration of the position offered by Peter and sort of buttressed up against the position that I think David Deutsch takes in the beginning of Finney and the position that I've argued for in my own work, and to see how these sit beside each other and against ideas like Richard Dawkins' "Middle World" idea. So, until next time, stay optimistic and have fun. Bye-bye. [BLANK_AUDIO] You