Science Is the Engine That Pulls Humanity Forward 0:00

This Book Changed the Way I Think 2:13

Nullius in Verba 4:11

Explanations That Reach the Entire Universe 6:25

Read the Best 100 Books Over and Over Again 8:19

We’re at the Beginning of an Infinity of Knowledge 10:21

People Are a Force of Nature 12:18

It’s Impossible to Predict the Growth of Knowledge 14:36

Humans Are Unique in Our Ability to Understand Things 16:30

Good Explanations Are Acts of Creativity 17:36

Good Explanations Are Hard to Vary 19:15

There Is No End of Science 21:41

There Is No Settled Mathematics 23:48

The Methods of Mathematics Are Fallible 26:43

All Knowledge Is Conjectural 29:27

Is the Universe Discrete or Continuous? 32:36

Every Theory Is Held Inside a Physical Substrate 34:44

We Can’t Prove Most Theorems with Known Physics 36:27

Probability Is Subjective 38:03

Is Light a Particle or a Wave? 40:09

The Multiverse 43:28

We Explain the Seen in Terms of the Unseen 45:10

Science Expands Our Vision of Reality 46:36

Science Is an Error-Correcting Mechanism 48:08

Theories Are Explanations, Not Predictions 50:12

Make Bold Guesses and Weed Out the Failures 52:44

Science Advances One Funeral at a Time 54:56

It’s Rare to Have Competing, Viable, Scientific Theories 56:13

We’re All Equal in Our Infinite Ignorance 59:13

It’s Easy to Extrapolate How Things Will Get Worse 1:00:38

Pessimism Seems Like an Intellectually Serious Position 1:02:14

Rational Optimism Is the Way Out 1:04:11

—

Transcript http://nav.al/infinity

This is Part 1 of my interview with @bretthall9080 about The Beginning of Infinity. Also see Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EPuJZWIBJk

The main topic that we started out on was timeless principles of wealth creation.

And then we've been touching a little bit on internal happiness and peace and well-being.

But I am first and foremost a student of science and failed physicist, if you will.

I loved physics, I wanted to pursue it, but I never felt I was going to be great at it and I was pulled into more technology, which is applied science.

Nevertheless, I've remained a student of science, I've remained fascinated by it, and all of my real heroes are scientists because I believe that Science is the engine that pulls humanity forward.

I've been lucky to live in an age where scientific progress and technological progress seem not likely but inevitable.

So we've gotten used to this idea that life always gets better, despite all the complaining that goes on about how productivity growth is stagnant.

The reality is anyone who owns a smartphone or drives a car or even lives in a house has seen technology improve their quality of life over and over again.

We take this progress for granted and it's thanks to science.

So I continue to be fascinated by science.

And to me, science is also the study of truth.

And as I get older, I find myself incapable of having attention span for anything which is not steeped in truth.

So the background on this particular podcast series is I thought I knew a lot about science and there was a lot about science that I took for granted such as what scientific theory is and how scientific theories are formed.

Most of us have a vague idea of it And it can range from some people think science is what scientists do, which has a definitional problem, as in what is a scientist?

And other people think, well, science is making falsifiable or testable predictions, and maybe that's closer to it.

And then sometimes people say, well, it's a scientific method.

And then they start describing their junior high school chemistry experiment and lose the trail after that.

Especially in these days where we're told to, quote unquote, believe in science, which is an oxymoron.

People respect science, but they don't understand what science is.

The idea of what science is, is getting hijacked, sometimes by well-meaning people who want to convince you of the science, and sometimes by not so well-meaning people who just want to influence the way that you think and feel and act.

I was very pleasantly surprised a couple of years back that I reopened an old book which I had read or I thought I'd read about a decade ago called The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

Sometimes you read a book and it makes a difference right away.

Sometimes you read a book and you don't understand it, then you read it later at the right time and it makes a difference.

This time when I reopened this book and I went through it much more carefully than I had in the past, meticulously, rather than reading it to read it and to say I was done reading it, I read it to understand the concepts and the topics and stopped at every point where something was new, it completely started reforming my worldview.

And I would credit this book as being probably the only book in the last decade, except maybe a few of Nassim Taleb's works and maybe 1 or 2 other scattered books that I feel made me smarter.

They literally expanded the way that I think, they expanded not just the repertoire of my knowledge, but the repertoire of my reasoning.

People throw around words like mental models a lot, and I find most mental models not worth reading or thinking about or listening to because I find them trivial.

However, the mental models that came out of the beginning of infinity are transformational because they very convincingly completely change the way that you look at what is true and what is not.

Karl Popper laid out the theory of what is scientific and what is not.

And what Deutsch does is he expands on that dramatically in the beginning of Infinity.

The wide-ranging nature of what he covers in the beginning of Infinity is incredible.

He goes from the theory of knowledge, which goes by the fancy word epistemology, all the way to quantum mechanics and physics and multiverse theory, to infinity and mathematics, to the reach of what is noble and what is not noble, Universal explanations, the theory of computation, what is beauty, what systems of politics work better, how to raise your children.

These are all encompassing long range philosophical ideas.

The beginning of infinity is not an easy book to read.

To some level, Deutsch could not but write for other physicists.

He has a certain peer group that he respects and who respect him, and he has to meet them at their level.

So he has to write for other physicists and philosophers.

Part of what I wanted to do was I wanted to understand these principles in the book, verify, confirm them for myself or not.

I love the old motto from the Royal Society, which says nullius in verba, which says take no one's word for it.

So I wanted to confirm the principles in the beginning of infinity or to refute them for myself.

So to do that, I was reading and re-reading the book.

I started reading some blog posts on it and then eventually I found a guy online named Brett Hall and I started listening to his podcast which was called Talkcast, but T-O-K cast, for the Theory of Knowledge cast.

And Brett, I'm going to let you introduce yourself, but I would say that listening to your podcast has helped me clarify a lot of these principles, and I would love to have you talk with me so that we can both understand the depth, the clarity, the reach, the importance of these ideas, and then hopefully someone else out there can become smarter by it.

You've raised so many interesting aspects of the beginning of infinity, which has become a real passion of mine.

Like many people who enter into science, when I was at school, I thought, I want to be an astronomer when I enter university.

I want to go and do a physics degree, do an astronomy degree, and then become a professional astronomer.

It wasn't until 1 day I was in a bookstore and I found this book called The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.

I started reading it and the first chapter described what I was trying to achieve in my life.

It was putting into words what I felt my university studies, what my general outlook on life was about.

Because David Deutsch says there, the ancient philosophers thought that they could get an understanding of the entire world.

Then later on, as time passed, modern science made it seem as though this was an impossible project.

There's no way you could understand everything about reality.

David Deutsch presents, at the beginning of The Fabric of Reality, this idea that You don't need to know absolutely every single fact that needs to be known in order to understand fundamentally everything that can be understood.

He was presenting this vision that there are certain fundamental theories in science and outside of science.

His 4 theories that he had were quantum theory, the theory of computation, a theory of epistemology, and evolution by natural selection.

But these together formed a worldview, a lens through which you could understand anything that could be understood.

I saw a beautiful video with him on YouTube where he was making the same points, where he was saying, you don't have to memorize and know every fact.

You don't have to know where every particle moved.

But if you understand the deep underlying theories behind everything, then you know at a high level how everything works.

This can all be understood by a single person, a single brain, a single human being.

We can have explanations that can reach the entire universe.

It's worth going through the 4 that you'd mentioned.

Theory of computation is another 1 of them.

The theory of evolution is another 1 of them.

And then the theory of knowledge or epistemology is the fourth.

That's the way he presented it in Fabric of Reality.

Is it interesting that relativity is not in there?

He regards quantum theory as being deeper than the theory of relativity.

At some point most physicists expect that we're going to have a unification of quantum theory and relativity.

That's not to say that in that worldview that we're dismissing relativity, but his guess is that quantum theory will be more foundational than what the theory of relativity is.

There'll be a space-time of the multiverse.

That's why relativity doesn't appear amongst them.

The beginning of infinity reminds me the most of Godel, Escher, Bach as a book in that it's very wide-ranging.

It stitches together ideas from many different disciplines.

It's very difficult to understand and follow completely.

Everyone claims to have read it, but as far as I can tell, very few people understand it.

I had this experience in college where I first found Go To Lesher Bach.

And I remember that I put it on my bookshelf and I started reading it and I started reading it and I started reading it.

And about a year later, I was probably about halfway through it.

And I remember that I would approach my other friends in college and I would say, either, this is a great book, you should read it.

And they'd all say, yeah, yeah, that's great.

And a week later, they'd roll back and say, yeah, I read Gertil Escher Bach.

And I felt like the stupidest person in college.

And it was only years later that I realized nobody has read it.

As you get older, you get more confident in those confessionals where you either say, either I didn't read it or I read it at a constant pace.

And when I encountered something I didn't understand, I kept going.

I went back much later and I still confess to this day I've not read all of Gödel, Escher, Bach, but at least at this point I went through and I found the parts that were most interesting to me, which were the Gödel parts, and skipped the ones that were not as interesting to me, which were the Bach parts, And I did read those and I did try and understand them.

Everybody has it on their bookshelf in my social circle.

Many claim to have read it, but very few have gotten it.

I do go back to this point that was first eloquently stated on Twitter by a character named Elisertus, where he said, I don't want to read all the books, I just want to read the best 100 over and over again.

And I would say that I'm currently stuck in a loop where at least in science, I'm only going to read the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality over and over again until I understand them fully.

If I had read them 20 years ago, I would know a lot more because then I would have chosen the right books and the right authors to read subsequently.

You should buy a hardcover and electronics so you have both and the audio.

If you can get through it in the first sitting and understand all the points at a deep level, then congratulations.

But we're hoping to break it down for you.

The difference with the beginning of infinity, you're getting a worldview.

You're not being given the standard take from physicists about how to understand quantum theory.

You're not being given the standard take of how to understand knowledge from philosophers, and you're certainly not being given the standard take of how to understand mathematics from mathematicians.

So the worldview itself, what's at the core of it?

Deutsch's worldview is that reality is comprehensible, problems are soluble.

It's a deeply rationally optimistic worldview.

It believes in good explanations, good scientific explanations and progress.

Progress is inevitable as long as we have these good explanations.

Humans are problem solvers and can solve all problems.

All sins and evil are due to a lack of knowledge.

1 can be optimistic about constant progress.

That's what the title, The Beginning of Infinity, refers to, that we're at the beginning of an infinite series of progress.

It believes that we are at home in the universe, the universe is ours as a resource to learn about and exploit, that material wealth is a set of physical transformations that we can affect, that everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is eventually possible through knowledge and knowledge creation.

He also talks about how humans are universal explainers, that anything that can be known and understood can be known and understood by human beings in the computation power of a human system.

It's all knowable, it's all knowable by humans.

We're the beginning of an infinity of knowledge and as we understand things using good explanations and we create new theories that are constantly being destroyed and replaced by better ones, there's no end point in sight.

Every theory can be falsified and improved that we are on our way to being able to do everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics.

We can take some raw material that had no particular use and within that raw material we might find uranium nuclei, which then can be used in a nuclear reactor to create energy or bombs, we can find within something that for almost the entire geological existence of the Earth sat there inert and would have done nothing absent people.

People are the entities within the universe that create explanations.

They're able to explain what raw materials might be transformed into.

Now, what are they transforming these raw materials into?

People creating knowledge end up becoming literally a force of nature.

If we seek to explain something like the shape of a galaxy or the shape of a star, any astrophysicist will give you a story based upon the known laws of physics about how gravity will pull things into spheres, how the laws of thermodynamics will cause certain kinds of gas to heat up and expand.

All of the known laws of physics are sufficient to explain what we see out there in the cosmos.

But the laws of physics alone will not be able to explain the appearance of Manhattan.

You have to invoke things other than merely the fundamental laws of physics.

You need to invoke the existence of people and their capacity to explain the world scientifically, philosophically, politically.

It's all of those things that will come together to explain why we have certain structures like skyscrapers in Manhattan.

That's an idea that seems to have been overlooked by scientists, many of whom have a reductionist idea about how to explain what we see in our environment.

They will seek to explain only the natural phenomena that are in our environment.

Of course, everyone wants to know how the laws of nature work.

But if we want to understand how the universe, from this point onwards, whether it's locally on our own planet, eventually the solar system, eventually the galaxy, is going to evolve over time.

We're going to have to talk about the knowledge that people create and the choices that they're going to make into the future.

This is a different vision of the place of people in the universe.

Stephen Hawking famously said, people are nothing special.

People are chemical scum on a very typical planet, orbiting an average star in the outer suburbs of a very typical galaxy, which is 1 among hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.

This vision of what people are and of what the planet Earth is, it's true in a trivial sense, but it misses the point that people are a hub of a kind.

We are, so far as we know, the sole place in the universe which is creating knowledge.

An open-ended stream of knowledge that could transform the rest of reality.

In the same way that gravity is able to pull that galaxy into a particular shape, knowledge in the future will be able to shape the course of the planet, the solar system, eventually the galaxy.

We will have this profound impact upon everything that we can see around us.

And there's nothing that the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, or even the laws of biology can predict what is going to happen in the future.

The attempt to predict the future growth of knowledge is impossible.

That's the nature of knowledge, because knowledge creation is genuinely an act of creation.

It is bringing something into existence that wasn't there prior.

If you could predict it, you would have invented it already.

A lot of our deeply pessimistic worldviews come from a straight line linear extrapolation of negative trends while ignoring positive trends.

And positive trends mostly come through creativity and knowledge creation, and it's inherently unpredictable.

So every generation has its doomsayers and Cassandras, the modern Malthusians who say on this trajectory we're all going to die.

They're very popular for the same reason that zombie movies and vampire movies are popular, but the reality is that they cannot predict what we're going to do in the future that is going to improve our quality of life and save us from inevitable ruin.

The value is in the knowledge, and the knowledge is inside the observer and the creator, in other words, the human.

For example, oil is useless unless you know how to refine it, burn it, and use it for combustion.

Information is useless unless there's a brain there to receive it.

There could be a signal broadcasting English into outer space, but if there isn't a creature capable of understanding what that language is, how it works, and who's conveying it, then it's just modulated electromagnetic frequencies that don't mean anything.

So a lot of the information and a lot of the value is within a particular knowledge-bearing entity.

As science grows its reach, we've gotten to a very reductive science where we break things down to smaller and smaller pieces, and then we try and explain things on the basis of that.

And there is a counter-trend in science, which is complexity theory, where We talk about emergent properties and higher level systems where we're starting to now look at systems as they operate chaotically and unpredictably at a micro level, but at a macro level, we can make certain statements about them that do have explanatory power.

So humans are unique in our capability to understand things.

There's a phrase that you're going to hear both Brett and I use over and over again, and that phrase is good explanations.

Good explanations is Deutsche's improvement upon the scientific method.

It's not just true in science, but in all of life, we navigate our way through life and we do it successfully by creating good explanations.

If you take away nothing else, try and understand what a good explanation is.

A good explanation, first and foremost, is testifiable slash falsifiable.

You can run some experiment in the real world to see if it's true or not.

Stepping back from that, it's a creative explanation.

It looks at something that's going on in the real world and says, this is why it's happening.

It is a creative leap that says this is the underlying explanation for how the thing works.

For example, when I talk to my young kids and we're out watching the sunset, I keep telling them, is the sun setting?

Or is it maybe we're moving and we're moving in such a way that it looks like the sun is setting?

Which is the proper explanation because looking at it naively, you would think the sun is hurtling across the sky and there goes the sun again going around the Earth.

But that may not be the only explanation.

There is a completely creative explanation that seems to fly in the face of the obvious observation of the Sun's movement but could also fit the facts.

But it requires some creativity and that creative explanation is that the earth is rotating.

Good explanations don't have to be obvious.

They're not derived from just looking at what happened in the past, but they are testable.

There are experiments we can run to figure out, is it the Sun that is growing around the earth or is it the earth turning?

Brett, would you say that a scientific theory is a subset of a good explanation?

BRETT DERIENCE, PhD Yes, they're the testable kinds of good explanations.

Falsifiable theories are actually a dime a dozen.

This doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the explanation you're being given.

The example that's used in the fabric of reality is the grass cure for the common cold.

If someone comes along to you and says, if you eat 1.0 kilograms of grass, it will cure your common cold, they have a testable theory.

Because they haven't given you an explanation as to what the mechanism is that would enable grass to cure the common cold.

And if you do eat the 1.0 kilograms of grass and it doesn't cure your cold, they can turn around and say, 1.1 kilograms might do it.

Or you need a different kind of grass, or you need to always do it on a different day.

It's always testable, but you're not getting anywhere, you're not making any progress.

So I think the second piece of good explanation is hard to vary.

It has to be very precise and there has to be a good reason for the precision.

The famous example he used in the beginning of Infinity is the, why do we have seasons on the Earth?

And there was the old Greek explanation, well, it's driven by Persephone, the goddess of spring.

And there was this whole theory involving gods and goddesses.

Not only was that not easily testable, it was very easy to vary.

Persephone could have been Nike and Hades could have been Jupiter or Zeus.

It's very easy to vary that explanation without the predictions changing.

Whereas if you look at the axis tilt theory of saying the earth is angled at 23 degrees relative to the sun and therefore would expect the sun to rise here in the winter and over there in the summer, the facts on that are very hard to vary.

They can predict the exact length of summer and winter at different latitudes, and you can test that very precisely.

So beyond it being a creative theory that is testable and falsifiable, it should be hard to vary the pieces of that theory without essentially destroying that theory.

And you certainly don't want to vary it after the fact, like your grass example.

Oh, it was 1 kilogram, now it's 1.1, now it's 1.2.

Finally, the predictions that it makes should be very narrow and precise and they should be risky.

For example, I believe in relativity, was it Eddington who did the experiment and showed that star light gets bent around an eclipse?

And that was a prediction that Einstein had made in relativity, which turned out to be true.

That was a risky prediction that took a long time to confirm.

That's an excellent example of what's called a crucial test, which is sort of the pinnacle of what science is all about.

If we do a test and it doesn't agree with a particular theory that we have, that's problematic, but that doesn't mean that it refutes the theory.

See all Naval transcripts on Youtube

The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1