With a Good Theory of Knowledge, You Can Decide What Else Is True 0:00

No Truth Can Be Justified 1:35

There Can Be No Final Theory of Gravity 3:49

Genetic Evolution Was a Prelude to Memetic Evolution 7:03

Humans Are Exceptional 9:27

We Are Qualitatively Different From Other Species 11:45

More Compute Power Doesn’t Produce AGI 13:18

It’s Mind Blowing That Our Minds Can’t Be Blown 14:55

Where Are the Aliens? 17:29

Intelligent Species Have Risen Only Once on Planet Earth 18:33

The Probability of Human Existence Is Infinitesimally Small 21:40

If You Can’t Program It, You Haven’t Understood It 23:03

Aliens Might Just Be Too Far Away 23:46

Aliens Would Visit for Knowledge, Not Resources 25:59

Ideas Are the New Oil 28:19

One Einstein Is Worth A Legion Of PhD Drones 31:22

Don’t Rely on Credibility Stamps 32:44 

Innovation Requires Decentralization and a Frontier 34:27

The Poverty of Compromise 37:21

Free Markets Provide the Best Feedback 40:18

Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It 42:52

Groups Never Admit Failure 45:17

Knowledge Makes the Existence of Resources Infinite 47:24

To a Caveman Very Few Things Are Resources 49:56

—

Transcript http://nav.al/infinity-1

This is Part 2 of my interview with @bretthall9080 about The Beginning of Infinity. Also see Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEmJIA0pEf0&t=1s.

Deutsch has this great view of the world where he believes that everything important is understandable by a single human.

By important, he means underlying base theories that drive most of reality and he fixates on 4 theories.

I could argue maybe there's a few more, especially if you start getting into Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations and a few other sociological ones.

But he's obviously a physicist, he's concerned more with reality and truth-seeking, not human systems.

The 4 that he picks are the theory of epistemology, the theory of evolution by natural selection, quantum theory, he subsumes relativity and other physics into that, and then the theory of computation, which includes his theory of quantum computation.

It's probably worth touching on each 1 for various listeners.

What is interesting about each of these theories?

What is the breakthrough here that might be non-obvious?

The reason I love the beginning of affinity is because Deutsch does a very rigorous review of what is correct in epistemology.

What do we know to be the best answers in epistemology.

And once you have that, once you have a good theory of knowledge, then you can decide what else is true.

If you're starting with a bad basis for a theory of knowledge, then you're going to decide on a bunch of things that are false when you think they might be true.

His epistemology is centered around good explanations.

It takes Popper's view of science and truth-seeking as being error-correcting mechanisms and expands on it.

But I'd love to hear your summary of the theory of knowledge or epistemology as Deutsch lays it out.

The initial guesses at what knowledge was all about amounted to what is known as the justified true belief vision of knowledge.

And It's still the most prevalent idea today.

Anyone who calls themselves a Bayesian is a justified true believer.

That's the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify as true your beliefs.

If you've done so, then you can say, I know that thing.

If I can justify as true my theory of gravity, then I should believe that theory of gravity and only then can I say that it's known?

The problem with this is that there is no method of showing as true any piece of knowledge.

The improvement Deutsch promotes in his books is this vision that Popper gave us, that all we have are guesses about reality, conjectures.

People think, oh, that sounds a bit wishy-washy, it's just a guess.

Well, it's not a random guess, it's not just anyone decides to have a guess and therefore that stands on equal footing to every other.

No, it's a guess that has stood up against trials, against attempts to show that it's false.

When people are unable to show that it's false via this method of refutation, then we accept it as a piece of knowledge.

This allows us to thereby accept the fact that we're going to be able to make progress in the future because all of our knowledge is conjectural.

Therefore, there's this elasticity within the knowledge that allows us to say, there's going to be errors, we're going to correct them, and thereby be able to make progress off into the infinite future.

This is unlike the previous conception of knowledge, which says, once you've justified something as true, well it's true.

If it's true, that means there is nothing false about it, and therefore it can't possibly be refuted.

The modern incantation of this is Bayesianism.

Bayesianism says you have a theory, you collect more evidence, and you become more and more confident over time that your theory is correct.

It gets a little bit worse than that because then it says this Bayesian reasoning enables you to generate new theories, which it can't.

The best that it can hope to do is to show you that you are more confident in this theory than what you are in that theory.

The Popperian view says If you can show that there's a flaw in a particular theory, you can discard that theory.

In almost all cases, you only ever have 1 theory on offer.

In the case of gravity, there literally is only 1 theory on offer at the moment.

We had Newtonian gravity and we had general relativity.

This idea of crucial experiment is the cherry on top of science.

You've got these 2 competing theories and you have a particular experiment that, if it goes 1 way, 1 theory is ruled out, but the other theory is not.

In which case, you keep that theory for so long as no problems arise.

This vision of knowledge enables us to have an open-ended quest for progress, which is completely unlike any other idea about knowledge.

The overwhelming majority of physicists are still Bayesian.

The reason they're still Bayesian is because this is typically what's taught in universities and this is what passes for an intellectually rigorous way of understanding the world.

But all it is, is what I would call a species of scientism.

It's because they have a formula behind them, Bayes' theorem, which is a perfectly acceptable statistical formula.

People use it all the time in perfectly legitimate ways.

It's not a way of guaranteeing or even being confident that your theory is actually true.

My favorite example of this is prior to 1919, approximately.

Every single experiment that was done on gravity showed that it was consistent with Newton's theory of gravity.

What does a Bayesian say in that situation?

What a Bayesian has to say is getting more and more confident in Newton's theory.

How do you square that circle of the day before it was shown to be false was the day when you were most confident in it.

Now, Popperian doesn't have this problem.

Popperian just says, at no point was Newton's theory actually true.

It contains some truth, but that truth isn't a thing that we can measure.

I say it contains some truth because it's certainly got more direct connection to reality than some other random person's guess about what the nature of gravity is.

Gravity does indeed approximately vary as the inverse square law, but not exactly.

So we need general relativity to correct the errors in Newton's theory of gravity.

And even though general relativity is our best theory right now, it can't ultimately be the final theory of gravity.

All we have is better and better approximations to reality.

I think the reason we fall into Bayesianism so easily is probably related to why we fall into pessimism so easily.

We're evolutionarily hardwired for Bayesianism.

Every other animal on the planet that can't form good explanations is a Bayesian.

They're just looking at repeated events and saying the sun rose yesterday, the sun will rise tomorrow.

If I touch that thing, it's hot, it's probably going to be hot in the future.

So that is how most of our biological systems and how most of our evolutionary heritage worked.

It's just now we have this neocortex that can form good explanations that can explain the seen in terms of the unseen and that gives us a higher level of reasoning.

But that higher level of reasoning is not instinctual to us.

But we default to Bayesianism because that is how a lot of the natural world around us seems to work at least at the purely biological level.

In fact, I've got behind me Hopper's book called Objective Knowledge and it's subtitled An Evolutionary Approach.

There's symmetry between the theory of epistemology and the theory of evolution as we understand it.

Before we understood what is known as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the only idea that people had was these entities had to be created.

All the plants and animals that you see around you had to be created by a creator.

Some people came up with the idea of gradual change over time.

The reason why giraffes have long necks is because their ancestors had slightly shorter necks, so they tried to stretch their necks to reach the leaves they couldn't reach.

But again, there was no mechanism for this beyond the fact that when an individual goes off to the gymnasium and works on their biceps and their biceps get a little bigger over time, although you can work out in the gym and increase the size of your biceps, that doesn't mean your children are going to inherit those characteristics.

What Darwin came up with is a similar idea to what Popper had in knowledge.

The idea that an organism would trial itself out in a particular environment.

If it wasn't, as we say, fit for that environment, then it would die off.

But if it was fit in that environment, then it would survive.

So you have this encounter with reality between living organisms and the environment.

It's the environment that's giving you feedback from reality and destroying those organisms that aren't fit enough to survive.

The neo-Darwinist view is to give us what the unit of selection is.

It's the selfish gene idea, which comes to us from Richard Dawkins, who says if any 1 of those genes happens to be not fit for the particular environment, that could cause the death of that organism.

But the species might not go extinct, the species might survive, but its entire DNA will ever so subtly change over time as the environment changes.

We human beings are the next step in that evolutionary process where we can create explanatory knowledge which does the same thing.

Deutsch likes to say genetic evolution was merely a prelude.

The history of the universe from here on out is going to be the history of ideas undergoing the same evolutionary process as what the genes did previously.

3 out of these 4 theories have an interesting pattern to them.

With good explanations in epistemology, we're saying conjectures and their refutations and error correction is how we improve knowledge.

With genetic evolution, genetic mutations, variation and natural selections weeds out the ones that didn't work.

And then there's mimetic evolution on top of that, where we have ideas and then criticism weeds out the ideas that don't work.

Related to that, in invention there's trial and error.

Or in capitalism, startups get created and the ones that have bad ideas fail.

So we see this pattern recurring over and over.

What's interesting though is another meta-pattern here, and the meta-pattern here is that humans are exceptional.

In epistemology, humans are the only non-Bayesian reasoners.

In evolution, humans are the only mimetic creatures that we know of.

In the theory of computation, humans are the only universal explainers that we know of other than of course the computers that we've invented.

So what's interesting is that science took us from this view of humans being at the center of the universe to being actually humans are nothing special.

You're just 1 little planet out of an almost infinite number of now Kepler-like planets that could be bearing life out there.

But 3 of these 4 theories that we're talking about are pointing us in this direction of humans are extremely exceptional.

1 interesting realization for me was that even if you were God, even if you had infinite knowledge and power, even if you control the entire universe, you still wouldn't know you're not in a simulation.

You still could never prove that you're not in a simulation.

And even as a guide, there's no concept that you could hold in your head that a human being couldn't hold.

Unless of course the laws of physics are different.

If the laws of physics are different, then all bets are off.

But working within the current laws of physics, humans are capable of maximum knowledge, of maximum awareness.

And that points to a world where humans are exceptional and not just another form of bacteria that got out of control and overran this planet.

A lot of these fundamental theories lead to a viewpoint that humans are special, that knowledge is infinite, and as long as we don't destroy the means of error correction and we're always creating new knowledge, then there's good reason to be optimistic.

Now you're pointing at a minority opinion there.

I think culture is still stuck in the second part of what you were saying.

Originally, we thought that we were at the centre of the universe.

This was the religious conception of man's place in the cosmos.

The Earth was surrounded by the celestial spheres and everything was orbiting around the Earth.

So we were the inheritors of the entire universe and God had gifted us with this.

Science showed us that in fact we're not at a particularly special place in the universe.

This is the cosmological principle, this idea that the universe is roughly the same at every single place and we are just 1 of those particularly unspecial places.

Not only are we unspecial in the cosmological sense, but biologically we're nothing particularly special.

We're just on the continuum between bacteria to cockroaches through to dogs and chimpanzees.

An astrophysicist I absolutely love on almost every other topic, Neil deGrasse Tyson, was talking about how chimpanzees are a lot smarter than what we think and chimpanzees might be thinking about all sorts of stuff.

But this third view that a lot of us are trying to promote now is that it's not a slight quantitative difference between chimpanzees and us.

There is a continuum between bacteria to cockroaches to dogs and chimpanzees, but we're off axis.

And all you need to do is open your eyes.

You look out your window and you look at that beautiful city that happens to be out there.

That cannot be explained by this gradual increase of biological complexity.

The artificial general intelligence crew gets this completely wrong too.

Just add more compute power and you'll get intelligence when we don't really know what it is underneath that makes us creative and allows us to come up with good explanations.

People talk a lot about GPT-3, the text matching engine that OpenAI put out, which is a very impressive piece of software.

But they say, hey, I can use GPT-3 to generate great tweet.

Well, that's because first, as a human, you're selecting which tweets out of all the garbage that it generates are good.

Second, it's using some combination of plagiarism and synonym matching and so on to come up with plausible sounding stuff.

But the easiest way to see that what's generating doesn't actually make any sense is just ask it a follow-up question.

Take a GPT-3 generated output and ask it why.

Or make a prediction based on that and watch it completely fall apart because there's no underlying explanation.

It's parroting, it's a brilliant Bayesian reasoning.

It's dating from what it already sees out there generated by humans on the web, but it doesn't have an underlying model of reality that can explain the seen in terms of the unseen.

That is what humans do uniquely that no other creature, no other computer, no other intelligence, biological or artificial that we have ever encountered does.

And not only do we do it uniquely, but if we were to meet an alien species that also had the power to generate these good explanations, there is no explanation that they could generate that we could not understand.

We are maximally capable of understanding.

There is no concept out there that is possible in this physical reality that a human being, given sufficient time, resources, and education could not understand.

There are scientifically minded types, it's astonishing, who say perhaps we won't be able to understand the next set of laws of physics, perhaps we won't be able to understand the next set of laws of physics.

Perhaps we won't be able to understand the aliens.

It's nothing but the appeal to the supernatural.

It's logically equivalent to God's out there and you can't possibly understand what God is.

God is this infinite, omniscient being that is beyond us.

You can believe the simulation hypothesis.

They're all metaphysical claims about a reality that we have no access to.

Whether or not you want to introduce aliens who will have ideas that we can't comprehend.

At least the god metaphysics, you could say, okay, that's in a different universe that's outside of our laws of physics.

But the aliens presumably would be under the same laws of physics.

So I don't even see what the basis for that is.

Any species that is smart enough to get off its home planet, knows that the limiting factor is ideas.

So the thing that they should want the most from any other species they encounter is new ideas.

And the trade that they should be making is the trade of ideas.

There's this Malthusian philosophy in science fiction now called the dark forest hypothesis that every human species like bacteria we're gonna run out of room.

No, the universe is infinite in size, it's expanding.

The multiverse is even more infinite in size.

Smart alien civilizations trade ideas and successful civilizations trade ideas because those ideas take things that were useless before and turn them into resources.

And every alien civilization can trade ideas with every other civilization ideas because they're all universal explainers.

They're capable of maximal understanding.

In fact, the mind-blowing thing here is that your mind cannot be blown.

There's no idea out there that your mind cannot absorb given the time and the effort.

So if we encounter an alien species, we should probably rejoice.

They probably don't want anything from our planet other than our ideas.

And the best way to trade ideas is to have a dynamic, abundant, thriving civilization.

Because I grew up on road sci-fi, I used to be pessimistic about alien encounters.

Oh yeah, if we encounter aliens, they'll just destroy us.

Like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Vogons thoughtlessly demolished the Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass.

But the reality of it is that any species that finds us is going to immediately give us all the knowledge that they have and they're going to be craving new knowledge that we have because they will realize that that would allow them to light up the dark matter, the dark energy, the unused resources in the universe to have themselves thrive as well.

Let's talk briefly about the Fermi paradox since we're talking about aliens.

For those listeners who don't know, Enrico Fermi was a famous physicist, part of the Manhattan Project.

The universe is so large, there's probably so many planets that are capable of supporting life of some kind or another.

Around almost every star, there is a contingent of planets much like our own solar system.

And the number of stars that exist within a typical galaxy like the Milky Way is something like 200 billion, although the estimates go up to about 400.

The number of galaxies that we can see is around 200 to 300 billion, but the observable universe is just a small fraction of the entire universe.

That means that the number of planets is absolutely astonishing.

Surely, given these numbers, it has to be the case that there are not only planets out there that are suitable for life, but the universe should be teeming with civilizations far more advanced than ours, less advanced than ours, and some that are similar in advancement to ours.

We have to be humble in the face of uncertainty here.

But I want to give an argument that rarely gets any airtime.

The argument has nothing to do with astronomy.

Look at planet Earth and look at the number of species not only that exist right now, millions of them, but the number of species that have ever existed on planet Earth.

When life arose, something like 3 and a half billion years ago, for about 2 and a half billion years, for most of the history of life on Earth, there was nothing but bacteria.

Life apparently doesn't have much impetus to evolve quickly beyond bacteria.

A lot of people have this misconceived idea that Darwin really did away with.

The idea that evolution has a direction in mind.

You see these pictures of evolution that appear in high school textbooks of the monkey that's hobbling around on all fours and he's hunched over and then eventually he's standing up and holding a briefcase.

As if this is what evolution had in mind.

It only seems to be what evolution had in mind in retrospect by looking backwards.

There's an American academic, his name's Charlie Lineweaver, and he calls this the planet of the apes hypothesis, as if if you remove the humans from a planet, the apes would naturally evolve to fill the intelligence niche.

He said, you can imagine another situation where you're an elephant that is able to think about themselves.

They reflect on the length of their trunk and they look back through biological evolution and they see that trunks get ever shorter.

So what they conclude is, ah, evolution has been geared towards making ever longer trunks.

Of course, we can say that that's ridiculous.

It just happens to be the case that this creature called the elephant has evolved and it's got this long trunk.

But length of trunk doesn't appear to be a convergent feature of evolution, so we say.

A convergent feature of evolution is a feature that exists within biological entities which has arisen again and again independently.

Butterflies have wings, so we've got them in insects.

See all Naval transcripts on Youtube

The Beginning of Infinity, Part 2