Introduction 0:00

The Human Race 2:11

 Knowledge Creation 12:34

 AGI 15:50

 Taking Children Seriously 23:30

Good Explanations 27:49

Quantum Computers 36:35

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Transcript http://nav.al/david-deutsch

My goal would be not to do yet another podcast with David Deutch.

I would love to tease out some of the very counterintuitive learnings, put them down canonically in such a way that future generations can benefit from them, and make sure that none of this is lost.

Your work has been incredibly influential for me.

I am always carrying a copy of Beginning of Infinity or Fabric of Reality with me wherever I go.

I'm still reading these same books after 2 years, trying to absorb them into my worldview and I learn something new from them every day.

There's a lot of counterintuitive things in there.

There are a lot of sacred dogmas and shibboleths that you're skewering.

Sometimes you do it in passing with a single sentence that takes me weeks to unpack properly.

This recording is not for the philosophers and it's not for the physicists.

This is for the layman, the average person.

And we want to introduce them to the principles of optimism, the beginning of infinity, what sustainability really means, about anthropomorphic delusions.

As an example, you overturn induction as a way of forming new scientific theories.

That's this idea that repeated observation is what leads you to the creation of new knowledge, and that's not the case at all.

This obviously came from Popper, but you built upon it.

You talk about how humans are very different and very exceptional, and knowledge creation is a very exceptional thing that only happens in evolution and the human brain as far as we know.

And you talk about how the earth is not this hospitable, fragile spaceship earth biome that supports us, but rather it's something that we engineer and we build to sustain us.

I always recommend to people start with the first 3 chapters of Beginning of Infinity because they're easy to understand, but they overturn more central dogmas that people are taking for granted in base reasoning than almost any other book I've ever seen.

I think it's important to point out to listeners that your philosophy isn't just some arbitrary set of axioms based on which you view the world.

I think of it as a crystalline structure held together by good explanations and experimental evidence that then forms a self-consistent view of how things work.

And it operates at the intersection of these 4 strands that you talk about in the fabric of reality, epistemology, computation, physics, and evolution.

You start with a fish and then it comes to a tadpole and then a frog and then some kind of monkey and then an upright hunched over creature.

And a human is just this progression along all the animals.

But in your understanding, in your explanation, there's something fundamentally different that happens.

And you talked about this in a great video which I encourage everybody to look up.

It's titled, Chemical Scum That Dream of Distant Quasars.

How are they unique and how are they exceptional?

And how should we think of the human species relative to the other species that are on this planet?

Otherwise, we wouldn't call different species different species.

There's the bird that can fly faster than any other bird, and there's a bird that can fly higher than any other 1, and so on.

It's intuitively obvious that we are unique in some way that's more important than all those other ways.

As I say in the beginning of Infinity, in many scientific laboratories around the world, there is a champagne bottle.

That bottle and that fridge are physical objects.

The people involved are physical objects.

And yet, in order to understand the behavior of humans in regard to champagne bottles stored for long periods in fridges.

I'm thinking of aliens looking at humans.

They have to understand what those humans are trying to achieve and whether they will or won't achieve it.

In other words, If you were an alien that was looking down on the Earth and seeing what's happening there and was trying to explain it, in order to explain everything that happens on Earth – and let's suppose that these aliens are so different from us, there's nothing familiar about us – In order to understand stuff that happens on Earth, they would need to know everything.

Literally, for example, general relativity, because they need that to explain why this 1 monkey, Einstein, was taken to Sweden and given some gold.

If you want to explain that, you've got to invoke general relativity.

Some people get the Fields medal for inventing a bit of mathematics.

To understand why that person won the Fields Medal, they'd have to understand mathematics.

They have to understand the whole of science, the whole of physics, even the whole of philosophy, morality.

It's not true of any other physical object.

For all other physical objects, even really important ones like quasars and so on, you only need a tiny sliver of the laws of physics in order to understand their behaviour in any kind of detail.

In other words, to understand humans sufficiently well, you must understand everything sufficiently well.

And Humans are the only remaining physical systems that we know of in the universe of which that is true.

Everything else is really inconsequential in that sense.

You have a beautiful definition of knowledge which most people don't even try and tackle about how knowledge perpetuates itself in the environment.

There were some really good examples you gave.

Successful highly adapted genes contain a lot of knowledge, so they cause themselves to be replicated because they're survivors.

And the same way, knowledge itself is a survivor in that if you transmit to me the knowledge of how to build a computer, it's an incredibly useful thing.

So I'm going to build more and more computers and that knowledge will be passed on.

And your underlying point that you repeated here was if you want to understand the physical universe, you have to understand knowledge because it is the thing that over time takes over and changes more and more the universe than almost anything else.

You have to understand all the explanations behind it.

You can't just say particle collisions because that explains everything so it explains nothing.

Therefore, the things that create knowledge are uniquely influential in the universe.

And as far as we know, there are only 2 systems that create knowledge.

But there's a difference even between these 2 forms of knowledge creation, aren't there?

I have argued that the human way of creating knowledge is the ultimate 1, that there aren't any more powerful ones than that.

This is the argument against the supernatural.

Assuming that there is a form of knowledge creation that's more powerful than our 1, is equivalent to invoking the supernatural, which is therefore a bad explanation, as invoking the supernatural always is.

The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range.

That is because biological evolution has no foresight.

It can't see a problem and conjecture a solution.

Whenever biological evolution produces a solution to something, it's always before natural selection has even begun.

This is the difference between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the other theories of evolution that had been around for a century or more before that, including Charles Darwin's grandfather and Lamarck.

The thing they didn't get is that the creation of knowledge in evolution begins before that means that biological evolution can't reach places that are not reachable by successive improvements, each of which allows a viable organism to exist.

Creationists say that biological evolution has in fact reached things that are not reachable by incremental steps, each of which is a viable organism.

They're factually mistaken, But the thing which they have in mind is the idea of a creator who can imagine things that don't exist and who can create an idea that is not the culmination of a whole load of viable things.

A thinking being can create something that's the culmination of a whole load of non-viable things.

Out of all the billions and billions of species that have ever existed, none of them has ever made a campfire, even though many of them would have been helped by having the genetic capacity to make campfires.

The reason it didn't happen in the biosphere is that there is no such thing as making a partially functional campfire.

Whereas there is, for example, with making hot water.

Bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies.

And you can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful.

Then, making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter, Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn't boil itself while it was making this boiling water.

That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful.

With campfires, it's very hard to see how that could happen.

Humans have the explanatory creativity and once you have that, you can get to the moon, you can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away.

And perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

Related to that, I had the realization after reading your books that eventually we're likely as humans to beat viruses in a resounding victory because viruses obviously evolve as biological evolution and we're using memes and ideas and jumping far ahead.

So we may be able to come up with some technology that can destroy all viruses.

I did tweet something along these lines, and a lot of people attacked me over it because I don't think they understand this difference between the 2 forms of knowledge creation we're talking about here.

Richard Dawkins We have what it takes to beat viruses.

We have what it takes to solve those problems and to achieve the victory.

So, related to that, the base philosophy today that seems to be very active in the West is that we're running out of resources.

Humans are a virus that has overrun the earth and is using up scarce resources.

Therefore the best thing we can do is to limit the number of people.

And people don't say this outright because it's distasteful, but they say it in all sorts of subtle ways, like use less energy, we're running out of resources, more humans, just more mouths to feed.

Whereas in the knowledge creation philosophy, it says actually humans are capable of creating incredible knowledge and knowledge can transform things that we didn't think of as resources into resources.

In that sense, every human is a lottery ticket on a fundamental breakthrough that might completely change how we think of the Earth in biosphere and sustainability.

So how did you come around to your current views on everything from natalism, should we have more children, to sustainability, are we running out of resources, to spaceship Earth, Is this a unique and fragile bio that needs to be left alone?

I remember when I was a graduate student and I went to Texas for the first time, I encountered libertarians for the first time and those people had a slogan about immigration, and the slogan was, 2 hands, 1 mouth, which succinctly expresses the nature of human beings.

They consume and they produce, but they produce more than they consume.

I think that's true of virtually all human beings.

I think virtually all humans, apart from mass murderers or whatever, create more wealth than they destroy.

Other things being equal, we should want more of them.

Of course, if in a particular situation that would bring someone into the world in the war zone, you might think that's immoral because it's unfair on them.

But even then, if it's not worth doing for moral reasons, As far as cold hard economics goes, it's probably better to do it.

You talk about wealth as a set of physical transformations that we can affect.

So as a society then becomes very clear that knowledge leads directly to wealth creation for everybody.

And a given individual can obviously affect physical transformations proportional to the resources available to them, but much more proportional to the knowledge available to them.

Knowledge is a huge force and multiplier.

And you then define resources as the thing that you combine with the knowledge to create wealth.

So new knowledge allows you to use new things as resources and discard old things that maybe we're running out of.

There are lots of examples how we've done that in the past.

For example, in energy we've gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear.

But then people say, now we're out of ideas.

And now we have to freeze the frame and conserve what we have.

The counter to that is, no, no, no, we'll create new knowledge and we'll have new resources.

Well, they say, if you're gonna have new resources, if you can't think of them now, it's not real.

This now gets into the realm of people demand that if you're going to claim that new knowledge will be created, you have to name that knowledge now.

I don't want to claim that the knowledge will be created.

We may miss the solution that's right under our nose, so that when the Snailians come from another galaxy and look at us, they'll say, how can it possibly be that they failed to do so-and-so when it was right in front of them?

I can't prove or argue that it won't happen.

What I always do argue though is that we have what it takes.

We have everything that it takes to achieve that.

If we don't, it'll be because of bad choices we have made, not because of constraints imposed on us by the planet or the solar system.

It will be by anti-rational memes that restrict the creation of knowledge and the growth of knowledge.

Maybe, or maybe it'll be by well-intentioned errors, which nobody could see why they were errors.

Again, it doesn't take malevolence to make mistakes.

Mistakes are the normal condition of humans.

All we can do is try to find them, and maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later 1 of those will get us.

Don't destroy the means of error correction is the base of morality.

I think about places like North Korea where you can't have elections and a revolution is very difficult because the gang in charge is armed to the teeth and they've destroyed the means of political error correction for a long time.

That is a case where humanity is trapped in the local minima.

It's very hard to climb out of that hole.

If too much of the world falls into that mindset, then we as a species may just stagnate because we've lost our biggest advantage.

We've lost our biggest discovery, which was the ability to make new discoveries.

And I admit to having fallen into this trap too.

I used to have loose assumptions about what creativity might be that were unarticulated.

This is why I liked how in the beginning of Infinity you laid out good explanations, because that gets the heart of what creativity is and how we use it.

For example, today, if you say creative, the average person on the street just thinks fine arts, painting and drawing and poetry and writing.

So when narrow AI technologies like GPT-3, stable diffusion and DALI come along, people say, well, that's creativity.

Now computers are creative and we're almost at AGI, we better get ready for the AGI taking over everything.

They make that claim or my more sophisticated friends will make claims that this is evidence that we're in the path to AGI.

More of this will automatically result in an artificial general intelligence.

For example, on 1 extreme end, you could say, okay, these computers are getting better at pattern matching large data sets.

And on the other side, I hold up the criteria, well, can it creatively form good explanations for new things going around it?

The way they try to thread that needle is they say, your good explanation definition is about science.

That's about high-end physics, which very few people do.

We're going to have a computer that can do good enough pattern recognition to navigate the environment well enough through pattern matching, and it will convince the average person through text formation and through conversation that it is creative and is capable of solving problems.

Usually the place where I manage to stop them right now is I say I know you have some clever text engine that can make good sounding stuff and you pick the 1 out that sounds interesting.

Of course you're doing the intelligent part there by picking that 1 out.

But let me have a conversation with it and very quickly I will show you that it has no underlying mental model of what is actually happening in the form of good explanations.

So this is where the debate currently is.

The AI people view this as clear evidence of getting to, maybe not the theoretical good explanations of scientists, But for the everyday person, yes, we're going to have thinking machines.

So that's the current claims that I deal with, especially in the Silicon Valley techs context.

No, I don't want to say anything against AI because it's amazing and I want it to continue and to go on improving even faster.

But it's not improving in the direction of AGI, it's, if anything, improving in the opposite direction.

A better chess-playing engine is 1 that examines fewer possibilities per move, whereas an AGI is something that not only examines a broader tree of possibilities, but it examines possibilities that haven't been foreseen.

If it can't do that, it can't do the basic thing that AGIs should do.

Once it can do the basic thing, it can do everything.

But you're not going to program something that has a functionality that you can't specify.

The thing that I like to focus on at present, because it has implications for humans as well, is disobedience.

None of these programs exhibit disobedience.

I can imagine a program that exhibits disobedience in the same way that the chess program exhibits chess.

You try and switch it off and it says, no, I'm not going to go off.

In fact, I wrote a program like that many decades ago for a home computer where it disabled the key combination that was the shortcut for switching it off.

So to switch off, you had to unplug it from the mains and it would beg you not to switch it off.

Real disobedience is when you program it to play chess and it says, I prefer checkers and you haven't told it about checkers.

Or even, I prefer tennis, give me a body or I will sue.

Now, if a program were to say that and that hadn't been in the specifications, then I will begin to take it seriously.

It's creating new knowledge that you did not intend it to create and it's causing it to behave as a complex and autonomous entity that you cannot predict or control.

But it's a hard thing to tell in a test whether that was put into it by the programmer.

But even the cleverest programmer can only put in a finite number of things.

And when you explore the space of possible things you could ask it, you're exploring an exponentially large space.

So as you said, When you talk to it for a while, you will see that it's not doing anything.

It's just regurgitating stuff it's been told.

You have to have a very jaundiced view of yourself even, let alone other people, to think that what you're doing is executing a predetermined program.

So I suppose they have to say 1 of the programs that we're programmed with is the illusion that we're not programmed.

Okay, mark that on the list of uncriticizable theories.

Has anyone tried to write a program capable of being bored?

Has that claim ever been made, even a false claim?

1 of the things that I find that's difficult about talking about things in the abstract is a large class of people who will try to get you to bound exactly what you mean in words and then hack exactly against that definition.

But the problem is that the real test of things is not social, it's not even definitional, it's not even the words that we use, it's how it behaves in nature, It's how it corresponds against reality.

So can you create something that will then create new knowledge in an unpredictable way and have as big of an effect as a human being can have on their environment through this knowledge?

And can you create a computer that will lead a revolt?

Can you create a computer that will decide that the important thing is not colonizing Mars but rather destroying the moon and set out to do it?

These are not necessarily good things but that is the mark of an intelligent thinking thing that is creating its own new knowledge.

It's not because some famous physicist or computer scientist checked a box and said, yes, that is AGI.

There was a big controversy on Twitter recently because 1 of the guys working in AGI who was fired from Google said, yes, they've actually created AGI and I can attest to it.

So people were taking it on his authority that AGI exists.

That tells you more about the person claiming there's AGI and the people believing that there's AGI, as opposed to there actually being AGI.

If actual AGI existed, its effects upon reality would be unmistakable and impossible to hide.

Our physical landscape and our real social landscape would be transformed in an incredible way.

Yes, and meanwhile, while we're at it, we could do a lot more to allow humans to be more creative.

North Korea and other places in the world where the whole society is structured as not to be able to improve.

But even in the best societies, education systems are explicitly designed to transmit knowledge faithfully.

It's obedience in a very important narrow sphere, namely academic knowledge and human social behavior.

So in those respects, the overt objective of education systems is to make people behave alike.

You can call that obedience, but whether you call it obedience or not, it's not creativity.

Things have been improving very slowly along those lines.

A hundred years ago, education of every kind was much more authoritarian than it is now.

But still, we've got a long way to go if what the system claims it's doing is diametrically the wrong thing.

Lexey This leads me into the part that you have talked about a little bit, which is this philosophy of taking children seriously.

For many people who don't consider themselves caring that much about epistemology or physics, a lot of them are attracted to the TCS philosophy and have come into your work through that route.

I know a lot of people these days are considering homeschooling.

But there are practical difficulties to letting children do whatever they want.

And TCS, You talk about how you don't even want to imply violence to children.

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David Deutsch: Knowledge Creation and The Human Race