I made a transcript and added the questions. Q: What is ”fallibilism”? Fallibilism is the philosophical position that all human endeavors, attempts to create knowledge or achieve anything, are subject to error. But there's no such thing as a guarantee that a project to create something new will succeed. And in the case of knowledge, having got something that you consider knowledge, there's no such thing as a foundation which, if it's put on that foundation, is guaranteed to be true. No such thing as a foundation such that if it's on that foundation, it's guaranteed to be probable or anything like that. What we have is, on the other hand, fallibilism also says the very idea that we are subject to error implies that there is such a thing as being right, that there is such a thing as the truth, and that we can sometimes find some of this truth. So fallibilism, as I understand it, is a fundamentally optimistic, positive worldview. It's not, although it says we are subject to error, the closer you look at that, for example, if you look at its negation, which is that there are some things that are infallible, some people that are infallible, that's all a very pessimistic and frightening kind of take to have on the world. Q: Are you asking us to be comfortable with uncertainty? Yes, I am. I think that the kinds of certainty that have been offered traditionally, I should say that this idea that we can obtain certain truth, justified truth, authoritative truth, and so on, is very old and has permeated both philosophy and popular culture and everything for thousands of years. The sources that have always claimed to offer this have not only been factually wrong, if you just think back to all the different claims of infallibility that have been made in the past, including within science, you'll see that all of them were built on sand, in fact. Not only were they factually wrong, they also cause tyranny, either intellectual tyranny or actual political tyranny. Karl Popper said on one occasion that ”the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny,” which when I first read it sounded rather an exaggerated claim, but I've come to think that that's true. Everywhere where somebody is claiming to be entitled to do things against other people's wills and not vice versa, there is somewhere a claim that the knowledge by which, under which they do this is somehow authoritative, incontrovertible, holy, in some way founded on infallible truth or an infallible source, actually. Fallibility and infallibility are properties of sources of ideas. Ideas themselves are either true or false. Q: How can we live without a foundation? I think one thing we need to look at to be comfortable with not having a foundation is that when something is true, it doesn't need to be entrenched. Criticizing it, conceiving that it might be false, actually strengthens one's understanding of such a truth. So if you take an idea on board critically, then you will see why your criticisms actually fail. And criticisms failing is what we actually have. That's what is really possible, unlike authority or infallibilism or whatever. If you see why the criticisms fail, then you can be comfortable that, not that it's true, but that the rival ideas that you might have entertained are false. And if they aren't false, there'll be some reason that they aren't false, which you don't know yet, which you need to find via criticism again. And on the other hand, if you are told even perfectly true things in a way that either prevents you from criticizing, or if you've already given up on criticism and don't criticize yourself, then you never really understand why they're true, even if they are completely true. Because people, again, it's a commonplace observation that people can, say, pass an exam in a subject, get all the questions right, without ever actually understanding what they're saying. So that when they then come up with a practical situation that's framed in a different way from the way that an exam can be framed, or a way that they're accustomed to exams being framed, then they don't know how to connect what they learn to say with the actual situation. Q: Have you had run-ins with authority? No, I've been very lucky that in my research career, I've never had to take position in the authoritative hierarchy of either research or university. I've always just done research. And the only time I ever give lectures or talks or something is when I have something new to say. So I give a research seminar or something like that. But I've never given a course that was for credit. To be honest, although I think that the authoritative structure of universities isn't good, I don't - the reason I don't participate has got nothing to do with getting on my high horse. It's just that I don't like it. It's boring. You know, I want - if I give a talk, I want to know that the people sitting there came because they want to - they think that I might have something to say that might interest them, rather than that they need the remaining four points of this - four credits in order to make up their degree or whatever it is.
Q: Are you an optimist? Yes, I'm an optimist both in the everyday sense that I try and look on the bright side, but more importantly, in the sense of what this means for knowledge, for the possibility of growth and progress. I always regard failure or any kind of evil as being due to lack of knowledge. And knowledge is obtainable. We may not be able to - we can't obtain it just by an act of will, by wanting it, and we can't ever be sure that we're going to attain it. But on the other hand, it is attainable and we have the means, namely rational thought, which includes science, but also includes every other kind of rational endeavour to discover knowledge. Q: Is there a ”most foundational” theory? There can't be a most foundational theory, and it may seem odd that I should say this, and I should say that the foundations don't matter, the starting point doesn't matter, even though my - the whole of my work, my research, is about trying to discover the foundations of the laws of physics, for example, and actually the foundations of the laws of physics, if you go down deep enough, are the foundations of things other than the laws of physics as well. The thing is, that's not what foundations are for. There can't be an ultimate foundation if you have the right motivation for seeking them, because if there were - here's a contradiction - if there were an ultimate foundation, the question of why that is the ultimate foundation rather than some other thing would never be answerable. So, as soon as you have something, you've discovered something that underlies all the existing theories, you want to know why is it that and not something else. And because of fallibility, this process is good, and the fact that it can't end is good. Whenever we solve something, thus removing an existing problem from our problem situation, we automatically create more problems. What's more, they are deeper problems for this very reason. So they're deeper and more interesting problems than what we had before. Q: How do you explain the rise of ”the expert”? I think that there is a good and a bad side to the rise of the expert. The benign aspect is that information is growing exponentially and is indeed growing faster than any human can possibly know, can possibly assimilate. Now, that's not important because what we ought to be doing is trying to understand the world and delegating information processing to mindless computers or to other kinds of machines. So it is possible to have a broad perspective on knowledge. There's been a sociological phenomenon in the intellectual world, in universities and society generally, to confuse these two things, the information type knowledge and understanding type knowledge, so that people acquire their understanding much too much via acquiring the information. In some fields, like for example medicine, technology has for several decades not caught up with the need for a lot of information to be stored in a human brain. And that, for some people, and certainly more in other fields where it wasn't so necessary, has been at the expense of having a broad understanding. That never was necessary. And I think that in the future, as the means of dealing with brute information become more and more easy and convenient, people will no longer see themselves as holders of that kind of information. And people won't value other people who are holders of that kind of information, but instead they will value in themselves and in other people explanatory information, which is not fragmenting. New knowledge is typically unifying, not fragmenting. Fragmenting does happen, but typically a fundamental new discovery unifies things and therefore makes it easier to understand a broader field.
Q: What is ”objective beauty”? The distinction between beautiful and ugly is objective, is the only way we can explain why the only animals in nature that appreciate flowers, in the sense that they are attracted by flowers, are insects and humans. Now why is that? Insects we know why. It's because the insect species and the flower species co-evolved their genes to make the insects attracted to the flowers and the flowers attractive to the insects. That doesn't explain why humans like flowers, because most things in the animal world that evolved to be attractive to other animals, we find repulsive, at least I do. And so, you know, ugly animals, whatever animals you don't like. Q: What do you mean by ”aestethics can improve”? First of all, the theory only says that aesthetics can improve, not that it must and not that it has. Now, I think what's happened in art, fine art, is a rather unusual thing, which is that the elites in fine art went backwards for several decades and rebelled against the very idea of truth, or in their case, beauty. They rebelled against that, so they reconceived art as being either intended to serve a practical purpose, like socialist realism or something, or to shock people out of their complacency, or to supersede something, or to transcend boundaries, something like that, rather than to pursue beauty. And if physicists had conceived of physics in that way, physics would have gone backwards. So however, I don't agree with people who think that civilization, even in the sense of art and the humanities and so on, has gone backwards, because at the same time that this was happening, the broader picture of art was actually improving. For a start, an entire new art form came into existence, namely cinema. And that clearly has made progress over the decades, not just technological progress, but progress in the sense of new ways of something being a movie, new ways of acting in a movie. And then television came along, and people were saying, "Ah, this will be the death of the movie industry," but the exact opposite happened. It on the one hand enhanced and diversified the movie industry, and secondly, created a whole other art form in parallel with that one, namely television, where they overlap. So I think this is another of those situations where the, I'm not sure if I can call it the institutions in this, but the broad momentum of what real people were doing was much wiser than what the experts thought they should be doing and what the experts tried to do. So the experts went haywire for a while. I think even that is now, I won't say it's back on track, but I think that tendency has been successfully criticized, and there are people who would like to go back to making actual progress in regard to actual beauty. Q: What is ”moral progress”? I think that morality has been progressing much more slowly than progress in science, but it's nevertheless clearly been progressing. If you look back, say, to the 19th century, there was a situation in which a large proportion of, say, in the early 19th century, most civilized people had little or no objection to slavery. And very few people thought it was an absolute abomination. Whereas today, the overwhelming majority of people, the overwhelming consensus is that it's an absolute abomination. That is an objective change. Nobody can deny that that change has actually happened. And I would argue that morally, that change has been for the better. And it hasn't just been in these sort of big issue things. You've only got to watch, and over that length of time scale, you've only got to watch, say, a television program from a few decades ago, watch early series of Star Trek, for example, which was a program that was consciously trying to look ahead to see what society would be like in the future. And it's got things which are like, you remember an episode where there was a female captain who couldn't hack it as captain because she was a female. Now, we now, not only is that now politically incorrect, they wouldn't be sort of allowed to do it, but, which I think, by the way, is a bad tendency, but the reason, but the thing I'm pointing out is not that they wouldn't be allowed to do it, it's that it seems ridiculous! Most people today consider that theory ridiculous. So, and that is also moral progress. So, and this moral progress happened in some societies and not others. And that's a very important fact. The distinction, the difference between the societies in which it did happen and in which it didn't happen are the institutions that deal with ideas. So, whether ideas are thought to be authoritatively derived or criticized. And the societies in which this progress took place were the ones that were best, that had best institutionalized criticism. This idea of a tradition of criticism is itself an almost paradoxical thing, like fallibilism itself, because throughout human history people have lived by tradition and tradition means doing the same thing generation after generation, whereas criticism means trying to change things moment to moment, let alone generation to generation. But nevertheless, there is such a thing as a tradition of criticism and it's the most valuable thing in the world. It's the thing that all progress, not only political, but everything else depends on.
Q: Speaking of TV, why do you like “House”? The first couple of seasons, anyway, of House were a remarkable exploration of epistemology, it seemed to me. You know, there were all sorts of side things about this series that were fun, like the portrayal of this eccentric idiosyncratic character. Although even then, they built the personal quirks around the epistemology. So, there was, I remember there was an episode where the world's leading expert in something or other, I think it was tuberculosis or something, was ill and said that he had tuberculosis. And House said, "No, you don't." And he said, "Why not?" "Well, because you've got atypical symptoms. And the expert said, "No, I've seen thousands of cases of this. You've only seen a handful of cases in your whole career. I've seen thousands of cases. And I know that this disease can present atypically." And House said, "The fact that you've seen thousands of cases is exactly why you're not the right person to make this decision. This is the gambler's fallacy, you see." Or is it the inverse gambler's fallacy or whatever? The expert in thousands of cases of tuberculosis who doesn't have a broad understanding of other diseases to match his understanding of tuberculosis is going to be terribly subject to bias. He's going to be trying to explain things in terms of the things that he knows. And if you're trying to explain an unknown thing, you want, and in terms of your expertise, you've got to be careful that the expertise itself doesn't bias you. Every time House makes this kind of decision, he allows for his own expertise. So, he's all, whenever he has a theory, he wants to test it right away. And you know, in the drama of the series, that usually involves risking the patient's life or something, you know, just to make it more exciting. But the logic of it is that you form an explanation, which is the best available explanation at the time. There are other explanations that are not quite as good, but are also viable explanations in that they're not just pulled out of a hat. Like for example, you know, "It's a disease we've never heard of, period." Now that could be true, but it's a bad explanation because you could always say that, no matter what the patient was. So you have to, there's a methodological rule that you don't consider that kind of explanation. You've got to say in that case, "It could be a disease we've never heard of that does so and so and is testable." So then he has the best explanation and then he immediately tests it. And what usually happens is that the test proves him wrong. That's another remarkable thing because usually when a fictional story wants to portray somebody as superhuman, you know, to have superpowers or something, they overwhelmingly have to show the superpower working. But with House, yes, he usually gets it right eventually, but he almost never gets it right immediately. And I've never seen that before. So that's why I like the epistemology in that series. Q: When did you discover your hero Karl Popper? That happened when I was an undergraduate. It was a tremendous stroke of luck. I think this must count as the biggest stroke of luck in my whole career. I was interested in the theoretical side of physics. This was before even becoming interested in the foundational side. I was interested in the theoretical side and therefore I thought that I needed to fully understand the relationship between the experimental and theoretical side of physics, because the theoretical side is useless if it becomes disconnected from experimental physics. So not wanting to do actual experiments myself because every experiment I tried failed, but nevertheless I wanted to understand what the connection was. So, I read Bertrand Russell because Bertrand Russell was, I think, probably just about the only philosopher I'd ever heard of. And he wrote books about induction and the scientific method and so on. So, I read that and I thought that I understood it. And of course, everything I read there was completely wrong. It was empiricism, inductivism, all these horrible mistakes. Even gave, he wasn't a positivist, but he gave some credence to positivist ideas as well. But I wrote it all down to try and clarify my ideas and I showed it to my tutor. Now you should understand that in Cambridge terminology, a tutor isn't a tutor. It's the, I don't know what you call them in America. Here in Oxford, they're called moral tutors. It's a person who's like your contact person in the university who, like if you get into trouble, that's who you go to. He'll stand up for you, that kind of thing. And the practice was that we would go to see him at the beginning of each term and at the end of each term to say hello. And he would say, do you have any problems and that kind of thing. But I never had anything to say to him. And so I thought, well, I'll take this essay that I wrote. And I sent him the essay before I went to see him. And I said, yes, did you read the essay? You know, what do you think? He was a historian. Charles Parkin was his name. He was a professor of history. And he said, yes, I read it. You know, it seems all right. But this induction stuff, hasn't that all been disproved by that Popper chappy? And I had only once before even heard of Popper and certainly had no intention of reading him. And it's really amazing that Charles Parkin even had the idea that inductivism had been refuted by Popper, because that was contrary to what the overwhelming majority of philosophy, professional philosophers thought at the time. They thought that Popper was just ridiculous for having claimed to solve the problem of induction and to have an epistemology that superseded inductivism. By the way, I think even today, the majority of philosophers would say that. But in those days, Popper was just unheard of in that kind of area. But somehow he had heard of it. Somehow he told me about it. Somehow I got the idea of getting a book of Popper's out of the library. And I was bowled over because the standard of argument was simply head and shoulders above anything I'd read in Bertrand Russell. So, you know, with the hindsight, I could see that Bertrand Russell was trying to kind of fob me off with things that aren't really arguments. Whereas Popper was getting to grips with the actual thing and finding, yes, this part is right, this part is wrong, this is why, and so on. Q: When did you first get interested in physics? As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be what I now call a physicist. But for some reason, and I don't know how this happened, but for some reason I didn't ever know what physics is until I was 11 and encountered a physics lesson in the school that I entered at the age of 11. Somehow it had passed me by, that this thing. And as soon as I realized what that subject is, I knew that I wanted to be a physicist. Q: What would you be if not a physicist? I can more easily answer the question if I wasn't allowed to be any kind of scientist, then I would be a film director, yes. But I think it's not a well-formed question in the case of science, because if I were somehow prohibited from being a physicist, I would tend in that direction as close as the prohibition allowed. As I think, in fact, I have done. I mean, the way that I got to the particular take on physics that I have is by finding that that's where I tend to, by trying to solve things.
@perwis9893, great job 👏. It feels different reading the transcript. I have time to parse the ideas and play them around in my mind before continuing. If you can make more transcripts of other videos you enjoy, that will be great. I will pin them in the comment section for easy accessibility.
@@deutschexplainsyes i agree. I like to do transcripts of particularly interesting talks. This one is gold for example. Here Deutsch just drops lines that you really want to underline and reflect upon. I use Macwhisper. Transcriptions are much more accurate than YT own.
This is fantastic - I love his edifying, clear, and novel take on things. Question - is this channel or are these videos David Deustch official, or a 3rd party compilation?
Thanks for sharing. I haven’t seen this one and am compiling all his interviews. Do you have the reference or any info about this, such as date and interviewer?
I strongly suspect that David did two interviews with Robert Lawrence Kuhn, both initially posted to Kuhn's Closer to Truth UA-cam Channel. I noticed that this interview vanished from UA-cam a few years ago and I just came across it here. You can tell that there were at least two interviews, this interview being the first, because the length of David's hair is shorter in this one than in the other. :-)
When we understand something about reality, we have aquired knowledge. Knowledge has reach. I wonder if knowledge is a hierarchical structure (he was saying about unifying explainations) and so whether there is always a higher level explaination or whether there is one top level grand explanation, or multiple etc. Based on his love for infinity I guess the idea is there are no limits in any direction. Imagine being able to traverse this hierarchy of knowledge. Scientists wrestle with how to traverse this structure either to climb one level higher (unifying explaination and gaining new reach) or link two specific locations - i.e understand how one concept maps / relates to another but without gaining much new reach. Traversal to a higher level in this knowledge structure is a hard problem because there are no rules to deduce or infer what the new knowledge will look like, so its not just a simple transformation or computational problem. you are attempting to guess what the new knowledge is by guessing and then refining those guesses to slowly fill in a candidate, and then use tools to test this candidate - like unit tests (self consistency), integration tests (compatible with other knowledge in this structure), system tests (can it be applied in the real world and be useful) etc etc. It does feel like the further we go in this structure there are common themes - that helped us guess new knowledge, concepts such as beauty, symmetry etc etc. It feels like the more we approach the top, perhaps this things will actually emerge as being real.
These are some good questions. Based not only on this video but several others where he talks about the mistaken idea of epistemological "foundations", I would guess that he does not think it has a hierarchical structure. He follows in Popper's footsteps, who was the first modern philosopher to refute this idea. Popper in his turn followed after the ancient, pre-Aristotle Greeks philosophers, in particular Socrates, and loved Xenophane's "woven web of guesses" conception of knowledge. Popper has one beautiful idea I'll paraphrase as: "all science starts with religion", so you can start at any part of a mythological structure of guesses and through error correction begin to move towards scientific truth. However, Popper and Deutsch (moreso) do distinguish between *deeper* versus less deep forms of knowledge. A deep truth has greater "reach", the property of an explanation that enables it to extend "out into the universe" and be applied to phenomena far beyond the problem situation of the creator of the original idea. For example, Einstein's theory is being used to help coordinate GPS systems for billions of people, a hundred years after his breakthrough. Another way of thinking about depth is to consider how many other theories or explanations are constrained by the deeper theory. Neo-Darwinianism is a good example because it applies to all life on Earth, not just any particular category of life; any theory of any category of life on Earth is constrained by Neo-Darwinism. And if we discover biological life on another planet, our best guess would be that it is evolved through the same process of competition between abstract replicators, even though we would expect the physical substrate undergoing variation and selection to be something other than DNA/RNA. Your last sentence is also really interesting. Popper and Deutsch are both "realists", the idea that (1) there is a real world outside of our subjectivity, (2) that scientific knowledge corresponds to it, and (3) through error correction, our scientific knowledge can come to correspond to the real world more and more. I think if you re-read your comment, you'll see that there is an implicit mistake throughout the comment: that there is a zenith, and that when we reach that zenith our knowledge will be "real" (or "ultimate" or "final" in some sense). This mistake is intuitive, common, and quite understandable, which is why Popper and Deutsch have done such wonderful jobs of putting their countervailing ideas out into the world. But the dual mistake of hierarchy and finality has been thoroughly refuted and an alternative explanation of how knowledge works has been developed by Popper and now Deutch and his peers such as Imres Lakatos and Chiara Marletto. Namely, that all knowledge is conjectural, that all knowledge contains error, that there is no final truth, that there is no authoritative source of knowledge, and that only through persistent and humble error correction of bold conjectures can we hope to make infinite progress indefinitely into an open future. If you want to find out more, I strongly recommend The Beginning of Infinity and the accompanying books in the reading list at the end of that book. I'll leave you with a favourite quote of Popper's from Xenophane: "The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, All things to us, but in the course of time Through seeking we may learn and know things better. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter The final truth, he would himself not know it: *For all is but a woven web of guesses*"
@@levimk101 I've had time to digest the above thanks. Let me address some of your criticisms: 1. Where I talk about a hierarchical structure to knowledge, I am talking about knowledge in the Popperian view as you descirbe - i.e conjectures that are criticised and error corrected and are the best guesses or theories etc. Where I am talking about hierarchy I think I probably shouldn't use that term. I was thinking about the notions such as "Depth" and "Reach" which certain knowledge has. I am imagining some conceptual space in which we could plot or map out human knowledge. In this space you'd see the knowledge that has great "reach" would be linked to many more areas of knowledge which require it or are in some sense "built on top of it" - in other words I was thinking of things like chemistry and physics. We need knowledge of chemistry even though technically chemistry cam be explained by physics, the physical explaination is at the wrong level of abstraction to provide the benefits and usefulness that we get from chemistry. However my thinking initially was then that there was a clear hierarchy where knowledge about the laws of physics was at the foundation if you like. I no longer think this because knowledge about physical reality is only one domain of knowledge. There are infinitely many others all with their own possible hierarchies. Some like physics and maths, interrelate. Therefore I now see an infinite space of interlapping circles where each circle is some domain of knowledge (in the popperian sense). So the landscape I am imagining is now slightly different than before. But my main ponderance is still the same: the more we navigate in this landscape, and the more we find that navigational tools such as "beauty" or "symmetry" can be used in multiple domains as guiding principles if you like to expand our knowledge or to find useful links between different domains, perhaps these navigational tools will emerge as being so useful not because they are abstract tools, but they actually map to something in reality. In other words - it could be that fundamental physics will eventually explain that our universe is in some sense symetrical and objectively beautiful - due to the laws by which it operates and this knowledge ends up having so much reach that it links to all domains of knowledge where we see beauty or symetry. Or it could be that beauty and symetry emerge as being "real" i.e so no meaningful explaination at a fundamental physics level, but an explaination at a higher level of abstraction like the way brains (computation) works for example. This was my main curiosity. P.s I have David Deutsch's books now!
Interesting, but NOT reading the questions aloud is very annoying.... I'm not staring at the screen while listening quite often, and then have to induce what the question is.... Just read them aloud as well! I don't even care if it's a dumb AI voice....
I made a transcript and added the questions.
Q: What is ”fallibilism”?
Fallibilism is the philosophical position that all human endeavors, attempts to create knowledge or achieve anything, are subject to error. But there's no such thing as a guarantee that a project to create something new will succeed. And in the case of knowledge, having got something that you consider knowledge, there's no such thing as a foundation which, if it's put on that foundation, is guaranteed to be true. No such thing as a foundation such that if it's on that foundation, it's guaranteed to be probable or anything like that. What we have is, on the other hand, fallibilism also says the very idea that we are subject to error implies that there is such a thing as being right, that there is such a thing as the truth, and that we can sometimes find some of this truth. So fallibilism, as I understand it, is a fundamentally optimistic, positive worldview. It's not, although it says we are subject to error, the closer you look at that, for example, if you look at its negation, which is that there are some things that are infallible, some people that are infallible, that's all a very pessimistic and frightening kind of take to have on the world.
Q: Are you asking us to be comfortable with uncertainty?
Yes, I am. I think that the kinds of certainty that have been offered traditionally, I should say that this idea that we can obtain certain truth, justified truth, authoritative truth, and so on, is very old and has permeated both philosophy and popular culture and everything for thousands of years. The sources that have always claimed to offer this have not only been factually wrong, if you just think back to all the different claims of infallibility that have been made in the past, including within science, you'll see that all of them were built on sand, in fact. Not only were they factually wrong, they also cause tyranny, either intellectual tyranny or actual political tyranny.
Karl Popper said on one occasion that ”the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny,” which when I first read it sounded rather an exaggerated claim, but I've come to think that that's true.
Everywhere where somebody is claiming to be entitled to do things against other people's wills and not vice versa, there is somewhere a claim that the knowledge by which, under which they do this is somehow authoritative, incontrovertible, holy, in some way founded on infallible truth or an infallible source, actually. Fallibility and infallibility are properties of sources of ideas. Ideas themselves are either true or false.
Q: How can we live without a foundation?
I think one thing we need to look at to be comfortable with not having a foundation is that when something is true, it doesn't need to be entrenched. Criticizing it, conceiving that it might be false, actually strengthens one's understanding of such a truth.
So if you take an idea on board critically, then you will see why your criticisms actually fail. And criticisms failing is what we actually have. That's what is really possible, unlike authority or infallibilism or whatever. If you see why the criticisms fail, then you can be comfortable that, not that it's true, but that the rival ideas that you might have entertained are false. And if they aren't false, there'll be some reason that they aren't false, which you don't know yet, which you need to find via criticism again.
And on the other hand, if you are told even perfectly true things in a way that either prevents you from criticizing, or if you've already given up on criticism and don't criticize yourself, then you never really understand why they're true, even if they are completely true. Because people, again, it's a commonplace observation that people can, say, pass an exam in a subject, get all the questions right, without ever actually understanding what they're saying. So that when they then come up with a practical situation that's framed in a different way from the way that an exam can be framed, or a way that they're accustomed to exams being framed, then they don't know how to connect what they learn to say with the actual situation.
Q: Have you had run-ins with authority?
No, I've been very lucky that in my research career, I've never had to take position in the authoritative hierarchy of either research or university. I've always just done research. And the only time I ever give lectures or talks or something is when I have something new to say. So I give a research seminar or something like that. But I've never given a course that was for credit. To be honest, although I think that the authoritative structure of universities isn't good, I don't - the reason I don't participate has got nothing to do with getting on my high horse. It's just that I don't like it. It's boring. You know, I want - if I give a talk, I want to know that the people sitting there came because they want to - they think that I might have something to say that might interest them, rather than that they need the remaining four points of this - four credits in order to make up their degree or whatever it is.
Q: Are you an optimist?
Yes, I'm an optimist both in the everyday sense that I try and look on the bright side, but more importantly, in the sense of what this means for knowledge, for the possibility of growth and progress. I always regard failure or any kind of evil as being due to lack of knowledge.
And knowledge is obtainable. We may not be able to - we can't obtain it just by an act of will, by wanting it, and we can't ever be sure that we're going to attain it. But on the other hand, it is attainable and we have the means, namely rational thought, which includes science, but also includes every other kind of rational endeavour to discover knowledge.
Q: Is there a ”most foundational” theory?
There can't be a most foundational theory, and it may seem odd that I should say this, and I should say that the foundations don't matter, the starting point doesn't matter, even though my - the whole of my work, my research, is about trying to discover the foundations of the laws of physics, for example, and actually the foundations of the laws of physics, if you go down deep enough, are the foundations of things other than the laws of physics as well. The thing is, that's not what foundations are for. There can't be an ultimate foundation if you have the right motivation for seeking them, because if there were - here's a contradiction - if there were an ultimate foundation, the question of why that is the ultimate foundation rather than some other thing would never be answerable.
So, as soon as you have something, you've discovered something that underlies all the existing theories, you want to know why is it that and not something else. And because of fallibility, this process is good, and the fact that it can't end is good. Whenever we solve something, thus removing an existing problem from our problem situation, we automatically create more problems. What's more, they are deeper problems for this very reason. So they're deeper and more interesting problems than what we had before.
Q: How do you explain the rise of ”the expert”?
I think that there is a good and a bad side to the rise of the expert. The benign aspect is that information is growing exponentially and is indeed growing faster than any human can possibly know, can possibly assimilate. Now, that's not important because what we ought to be doing is trying to understand the world and delegating information processing to mindless computers or to other kinds of machines. So it is possible to have a broad perspective on knowledge.
There's been a sociological phenomenon in the intellectual world, in universities and society generally, to confuse these two things, the information type knowledge and understanding type knowledge, so that people acquire their understanding much too much via acquiring the information. In some fields, like for example medicine, technology has for several decades not caught up with the need for a lot of information to be stored in a human brain. And that, for some people, and certainly more in other fields where it wasn't so necessary, has been at the expense of having a broad understanding. That never was necessary. And I think that in the future, as the means of dealing with brute information become more and more easy and convenient, people will no longer see themselves as holders of that kind of information. And people won't value other people who are holders of that kind of information, but instead they will value in themselves and in other people explanatory information, which is not fragmenting. New knowledge is typically unifying, not fragmenting. Fragmenting does happen, but typically a fundamental new discovery unifies things and therefore makes it easier to understand a broader field.
Q: What is ”objective beauty”?
The distinction between beautiful and ugly is objective, is the only way we can explain why the only animals in nature that appreciate flowers, in the sense that they are attracted by flowers, are insects and humans. Now why is that? Insects we know why. It's because the insect species and the flower species co-evolved their genes to make the insects attracted to the flowers and the flowers attractive to the insects. That doesn't explain why humans like flowers, because most things in the animal world that evolved to be attractive to other animals, we find repulsive, at least I do. And so, you know, ugly animals, whatever animals you don't like.
Q: What do you mean by ”aestethics can improve”?
First of all, the theory only says that aesthetics can improve, not that it must and not that it has. Now, I think what's happened in art, fine art, is a rather unusual thing, which is that the elites in fine art went backwards for several decades and rebelled against the very idea of truth, or in their case, beauty. They rebelled against that, so they reconceived art as being either intended to serve a practical purpose, like socialist realism or something, or to shock people out of their complacency, or to supersede something, or to transcend boundaries, something like that, rather than to pursue beauty.
And if physicists had conceived of physics in that way, physics would have gone backwards. So however, I don't agree with people who think that civilization, even in the sense of art and the humanities and so on, has gone backwards, because at the same time that this was happening, the broader picture of art was actually improving. For a start, an entire new art form came into existence, namely cinema. And that clearly has made progress over the decades, not just technological progress, but progress in the sense of new ways of something being a movie, new ways of acting in a movie. And then television came along, and people were saying, "Ah, this will be the death of the movie industry," but the exact opposite happened. It on the one hand enhanced and diversified the movie industry, and secondly, created a whole other art form in parallel with that one, namely television, where they overlap.
So I think this is another of those situations where the, I'm not sure if I can call it the institutions in this, but the broad momentum of what real people were doing was much wiser than what the experts thought they should be doing and what the experts tried to do. So the experts went haywire for a while. I think even that is now, I won't say it's back on track, but I think that tendency has been successfully criticized, and there are people who would like to go back to making actual progress in regard to actual beauty.
Q: What is ”moral progress”?
I think that morality has been progressing much more slowly than progress in science, but it's nevertheless clearly been progressing. If you look back, say, to the 19th century, there was a situation in which a large proportion of, say, in the early 19th century, most civilized people had little or no objection to slavery. And very few people thought it was an absolute abomination. Whereas today, the overwhelming majority of people, the overwhelming consensus is that it's an absolute abomination. That is an objective change. Nobody can deny that that change has actually happened. And I would argue that morally, that change has been for the better.
And it hasn't just been in these sort of big issue things. You've only got to watch, and over that length of time scale, you've only got to watch, say, a television program from a few decades ago, watch early series of Star Trek, for example, which was a program that was consciously trying to look ahead to see what society would be like in the future. And it's got things which are like, you remember an episode where there was a female captain who couldn't hack it as captain because she was a female.
Now, we now, not only is that now politically incorrect, they wouldn't be sort of allowed to do it, but, which I think, by the way, is a bad tendency, but the reason, but the thing I'm pointing out is not that they wouldn't be allowed to do it, it's that it seems ridiculous! Most people today consider that theory ridiculous. So, and that is also moral progress.
So, and this moral progress happened in some societies and not others. And that's a very important fact. The distinction, the difference between the societies in which it did happen and in which it didn't happen are the institutions that deal with ideas. So, whether ideas are thought to be authoritatively derived or criticized. And the societies in which this progress took place were the ones that were best, that had best institutionalized criticism.
This idea of a tradition of criticism is itself an almost paradoxical thing, like fallibilism itself, because throughout human history people have lived by tradition and tradition means doing the same thing generation after generation, whereas criticism means trying to change things moment to moment, let alone generation to generation. But nevertheless, there is such a thing as a tradition of criticism and it's the most valuable thing in the world. It's the thing that all progress, not only political, but everything else depends on.
Q: Speaking of TV, why do you like “House”?
The first couple of seasons, anyway, of House were a remarkable exploration of epistemology, it seemed to me. You know, there were all sorts of side things about this series that were fun, like the portrayal of this eccentric idiosyncratic character. Although even then, they built the personal quirks around the epistemology. So, there was, I remember there was an episode where the world's leading expert in something or other, I think it was tuberculosis or something, was ill and said that he had tuberculosis. And House said, "No, you don't." And he said, "Why not?" "Well, because you've got atypical symptoms. And the expert said, "No, I've seen thousands of cases of this. You've only seen a handful of cases in your whole career. I've seen thousands of cases. And I know that this disease can present atypically." And House said, "The fact that you've seen thousands of cases is exactly why you're not the right person to make this decision. This is the gambler's fallacy, you see." Or is it the inverse gambler's fallacy or whatever? The expert in thousands of cases of tuberculosis who doesn't have a broad understanding of other diseases to match his understanding of tuberculosis is going to be terribly subject to bias. He's going to be trying to explain things in terms of the things that he knows. And if you're trying to explain an unknown thing, you want, and in terms of your expertise, you've got to be careful that the expertise itself doesn't bias you.
Every time House makes this kind of decision, he allows for his own expertise. So, he's all, whenever he has a theory, he wants to test it right away. And you know, in the drama of the series, that usually involves risking the patient's life or something, you know, just to make it more exciting. But the logic of it is that you form an explanation, which is the best available explanation at the time. There are other explanations that are not quite as good, but are also viable explanations in that they're not just pulled out of a hat. Like for example, you know, "It's a disease we've never heard of, period." Now that could be true, but it's a bad explanation because you could always say that, no matter what the patient was. So you have to, there's a methodological rule that you don't consider that kind of explanation. You've got to say in that case, "It could be a disease we've never heard of that does so and so and is testable."
So then he has the best explanation and then he immediately tests it. And what usually happens is that the test proves him wrong. That's another remarkable thing because usually when a fictional story wants to portray somebody as superhuman, you know, to have superpowers or something, they overwhelmingly have to show the superpower working. But with House, yes, he usually gets it right eventually, but he almost never gets it right immediately. And I've never seen that before. So that's why I like the epistemology in that series.
Q: When did you discover your hero Karl Popper?
That happened when I was an undergraduate. It was a tremendous stroke of luck. I think this must count as the biggest stroke of luck in my whole career.
I was interested in the theoretical side of physics. This was before even becoming interested in the foundational side. I was interested in the theoretical side and therefore I thought that I needed to fully understand the relationship between the experimental and theoretical side of physics, because the theoretical side is useless if it becomes disconnected from experimental physics. So not wanting to do actual experiments myself because every experiment I tried failed, but nevertheless I wanted to understand what the connection was.
So, I read Bertrand Russell because Bertrand Russell was, I think, probably just about the only philosopher I'd ever heard of. And he wrote books about induction and the scientific method and so on. So, I read that and I thought that I understood it. And of course, everything I read there was completely wrong. It was empiricism, inductivism, all these horrible mistakes. Even gave, he wasn't a positivist, but he gave some credence to positivist ideas as well.
But I wrote it all down to try and clarify my ideas and I showed it to my tutor. Now you should understand that in Cambridge terminology, a tutor isn't a tutor. It's the, I don't know what you call them in America. Here in Oxford, they're called moral tutors. It's a person who's like your contact person in the university who, like if you get into trouble, that's who you go to. He'll stand up for you, that kind of thing. And the practice was that we would go to see him at the beginning of each term and at the end of each term to say hello. And he would say, do you have any problems and that kind of thing.
But I never had anything to say to him. And so I thought, well, I'll take this essay that I wrote. And I sent him the essay before I went to see him. And I said, yes, did you read the essay? You know, what do you think? He was a historian. Charles Parkin was his name. He was a professor of history. And he said, yes, I read it. You know, it seems all right. But this induction stuff, hasn't that all been disproved by that Popper chappy?
And I had only once before even heard of Popper and certainly had no intention of reading him. And it's really amazing that Charles Parkin even had the idea that inductivism had been refuted by Popper, because that was contrary to what the overwhelming majority of philosophy, professional philosophers thought at the time. They thought that Popper was just ridiculous for having claimed to solve the problem of induction and to have an epistemology that superseded inductivism. By the way, I think even today, the majority of philosophers would say that.
But in those days, Popper was just unheard of in that kind of area. But somehow he had heard of it. Somehow he told me about it. Somehow I got the idea of getting a book of Popper's out of the library. And I was bowled over because the standard of argument was simply head and shoulders above anything I'd read in Bertrand Russell. So, you know, with the hindsight, I could see that Bertrand Russell was trying to kind of fob me off with things that aren't really arguments. Whereas Popper was getting to grips with the actual thing and finding, yes, this part is right, this part is wrong, this is why, and so on.
Q: When did you first get interested in physics?
As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be what I now call a physicist. But for some reason, and I don't know how this happened, but for some reason I didn't ever know what physics is until I was 11 and encountered a physics lesson in the school that I entered at the age of 11. Somehow it had passed me by, that this thing. And as soon as I realized what that subject is, I knew that I wanted to be a physicist.
Q: What would you be if not a physicist?
I can more easily answer the question if I wasn't allowed to be any kind of scientist, then I would be a film director, yes. But I think it's not a well-formed question in the case of science, because if I were somehow prohibited from being a physicist, I would tend in that direction as close as the prohibition allowed. As I think, in fact, I have done. I mean, the way that I got to the particular take on physics that I have is by finding that that's where I tend to, by trying to solve things.
@perwis9893, great job 👏. It feels different reading the transcript. I have time to parse the ideas and play them around in my mind before continuing. If you can make more transcripts of other videos you enjoy, that will be great. I will pin them in the comment section for easy accessibility.
@@deutschexplainsyes i agree. I like to do transcripts of particularly interesting talks. This one is gold for example. Here Deutsch just drops lines that you really want to underline and reflect upon. I use Macwhisper. Transcriptions are much more accurate than YT own.
David is an inspiration to all fallible animals!
20:00 tradition of criticism is the most valuable thing in the world
Thank you for uploading this
Great thinker
Excellent!
He’s just brilliant
I felt so much freed, brave to face possible failures ......
So interesting. Thank you
Art has never been about persueing beauty alone
This is fantastic - I love his edifying, clear, and novel take on things.
Question - is this channel or are these videos David Deustch official, or a 3rd party compilation?
Genius.
Dear respected sir (david Deutsch) quantum physics helps to achieve our goal please upload video
Thanks for sharing. I haven’t seen this one and am compiling all his interviews. Do you have the reference or any info about this, such as date and interviewer?
I strongly suspect that David did two interviews with Robert Lawrence Kuhn, both initially posted to Kuhn's Closer to Truth UA-cam Channel. I noticed that this interview vanished from UA-cam a few years ago and I just came across it here.
You can tell that there were at least two interviews, this interview being the first, because the length of David's hair is shorter in this one than in the other.
:-)
@@aspTrader I do not think it is Kuhn interviewing. Seems more like a young person.
I’m also compiling. If you would like to share your findings let me know.
When we understand something about reality, we have aquired knowledge. Knowledge has reach. I wonder if knowledge is a hierarchical structure (he was saying about unifying explainations) and so whether there is always a higher level explaination or whether there is one top level grand explanation, or multiple etc. Based on his love for infinity I guess the idea is there are no limits in any direction. Imagine being able to traverse this hierarchy of knowledge. Scientists wrestle with how to traverse this structure either to climb one level higher (unifying explaination and gaining new reach) or link two specific locations - i.e understand how one concept maps / relates to another but without gaining much new reach. Traversal to a higher level in this knowledge structure is a hard problem because there are no rules to deduce or infer what the new knowledge will look like, so its not just a simple transformation or computational problem. you are attempting to guess what the new knowledge is by guessing and then refining those guesses to slowly fill in a candidate, and then use tools to test this candidate - like unit tests (self consistency), integration tests (compatible with other knowledge in this structure), system tests (can it be applied in the real world and be useful) etc etc. It does feel like the further we go in this structure there are common themes - that helped us guess new knowledge, concepts such as beauty, symmetry etc etc. It feels like the more we approach the top, perhaps this things will actually emerge as being real.
These are some good questions. Based not only on this video but several others where he talks about the mistaken idea of epistemological "foundations", I would guess that he does not think it has a hierarchical structure. He follows in Popper's footsteps, who was the first modern philosopher to refute this idea. Popper in his turn followed after the ancient, pre-Aristotle Greeks philosophers, in particular Socrates, and loved Xenophane's "woven web of guesses" conception of knowledge. Popper has one beautiful idea I'll paraphrase as: "all science starts with religion", so you can start at any part of a mythological structure of guesses and through error correction begin to move towards scientific truth. However, Popper and Deutsch (moreso) do distinguish between *deeper* versus less deep forms of knowledge. A deep truth has greater "reach", the property of an explanation that enables it to extend "out into the universe" and be applied to phenomena far beyond the problem situation of the creator of the original idea. For example, Einstein's theory is being used to help coordinate GPS systems for billions of people, a hundred years after his breakthrough. Another way of thinking about depth is to consider how many other theories or explanations are constrained by the deeper theory. Neo-Darwinianism is a good example because it applies to all life on Earth, not just any particular category of life; any theory of any category of life on Earth is constrained by Neo-Darwinism. And if we discover biological life on another planet, our best guess would be that it is evolved through the same process of competition between abstract replicators, even though we would expect the physical substrate undergoing variation and selection to be something other than DNA/RNA. Your last sentence is also really interesting. Popper and Deutsch are both "realists", the idea that (1) there is a real world outside of our subjectivity, (2) that scientific knowledge corresponds to it, and (3) through error correction, our scientific knowledge can come to correspond to the real world more and more. I think if you re-read your comment, you'll see that there is an implicit mistake throughout the comment: that there is a zenith, and that when we reach that zenith our knowledge will be "real" (or "ultimate" or "final" in some sense). This mistake is intuitive, common, and quite understandable, which is why Popper and Deutsch have done such wonderful jobs of putting their countervailing ideas out into the world. But the dual mistake of hierarchy and finality has been thoroughly refuted and an alternative explanation of how knowledge works has been developed by Popper and now Deutch and his peers such as Imres Lakatos and Chiara Marletto. Namely, that all knowledge is conjectural, that all knowledge contains error, that there is no final truth, that there is no authoritative source of knowledge, and that only through persistent and humble error correction of bold conjectures can we hope to make infinite progress indefinitely into an open future. If you want to find out more, I strongly recommend The Beginning of Infinity and the accompanying books in the reading list at the end of that book. I'll leave you with a favourite quote of Popper's from Xenophane:
"The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
*For all is but a woven web of guesses*"
@@levimk101 I've had time to digest the above thanks. Let me address some of your criticisms:
1. Where I talk about a hierarchical structure to knowledge, I am talking about knowledge in the Popperian view as you descirbe - i.e conjectures that are criticised and error corrected and are the best guesses or theories etc. Where I am talking about hierarchy I think I probably shouldn't use that term. I was thinking about the notions such as "Depth" and "Reach" which certain knowledge has. I am imagining some conceptual space in which we could plot or map out human knowledge. In this space you'd see the knowledge that has great "reach" would be linked to many more areas of knowledge which require it or are in some sense "built on top of it" - in other words I was thinking of things like chemistry and physics. We need knowledge of chemistry even though technically chemistry cam be explained by physics, the physical explaination is at the wrong level of abstraction to provide the benefits and usefulness that we get from chemistry. However my thinking initially was then that there was a clear hierarchy where knowledge about the laws of physics was at the foundation if you like. I no longer think this because knowledge about physical reality is only one domain of knowledge. There are infinitely many others all with their own possible hierarchies. Some like physics and maths, interrelate. Therefore I now see an infinite space of interlapping circles where each circle is some domain of knowledge (in the popperian sense). So the landscape I am imagining is now slightly different than before. But my main ponderance is still the same: the more we navigate in this landscape, and the more we find that navigational tools such as "beauty" or "symmetry" can be used in multiple domains as guiding principles if you like to expand our knowledge or to find useful links between different domains, perhaps these navigational tools will emerge as being so useful not because they are abstract tools, but they actually map to something in reality. In other words - it could be that fundamental physics will eventually explain that our universe is in some sense symetrical and objectively beautiful - due to the laws by which it operates and this knowledge ends up having so much reach that it links to all domains of knowledge where we see beauty or symetry. Or it could be that beauty and symetry emerge as being "real" i.e so no meaningful explaination at a fundamental physics level, but an explaination at a higher level of abstraction like the way brains (computation) works for example. This was my main curiosity.
P.s I have David Deutsch's books now!
Interesting, but NOT reading the questions aloud is very annoying....
I'm not staring at the screen while listening quite often, and then have to induce what the question is....
Just read them aloud as well!
I don't even care if it's a dumb AI voice....
is this amazing channel official or fans' ??????