Deutsch Explains
@DeutschExplains
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A Compendium of @DavidDeutschOxf 's Explanations.
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All history is the history of ideas. Ideas cause history, not vice-versa.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists, and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They
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Many mathematicians, to this day, don’t realize that information is physical, and there is no such thing as an abstract computer; only a physical object can compute things.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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@krysboydthink
: You disagree with the notion, made popular by Stephen Hawking and others, that free will is, in fact, a sort of illusion. Can you talk about that?
@DavidDeutschOxf
: Yes, this is the idea that because we are made of atoms, and atoms are subject to laws of
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Our society, society of the West, is quintessentially, it's not the society that makes the right decisions all the time. It's the society that corrects errors. That's what the West is good at. And I have pointed out from time to time that the optimistic view and the
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Many civilizations have been destroyed from without. Many species as well. Every one of them could have been saved if it had created more knowledge faster. Not one of them destroyed itself by creating too much knowledge in fact. Except for one kind of knowledge, and that is
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The eye only detects light, which we don't perceive. Brains only detect nerve impulses, and they don't perceive even those as what they really are, namely electrical crackles. So we perceive nothing as what it really is. Our connection to reality is never just perception; it's
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When it became more and more obvious that computation is built into the laws of physics at a fundamental level, a lot of people immediately jumped to the conclusion, oh, well, the reason that mathematics is useful in physical sciences is that the world is a computer, and we are
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The West is not a location, not a race, not a nationality, but a set of ideas.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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The idea of working for months, or years, on a boring thing in order to get a reward, is terribly dangerous.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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The idea of sustainability, I think, is a terrible mistake. It is a hyper-optimistic view, ironically, of what humans are and what humans can do. The idea is that we can find a way of life which will not be dangerous and will not be threatening, and will not require any further
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One can't tell in advance what kind of knowledge will be needed to solve a particular problem. So, if you had asked somebody in 1900, what kind of knowledge will be required to produce as much electricity as we want in the year 2000, the answer would never have been that the
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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 in the early 19th century, most civilized people had
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I think existing approaches to AI, Artificial General Intelligence, are all philosophically flawed, and I think that's why they haven't succeeded for decades, because a philosophical advance is needed, and they are trying to get the answer without making any philosophical
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What's currently called AI and AGI are not only different from each other, they are very close to being the exact opposites of each other. The reason is that an AI, current AIs, like an AI that diagnoses diseases, or an AI that plays chess, or an AI that controls a huge factory,
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When the theory of computation was first discovered by Babbage and then developed by Alan Turing in the 1930s, it wasn't realized that this was a branch of physics at all. It was invented as a branch of mathematics to study mathematical proofs. And the theory was built up from a
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A DNA molecule is an information storage and retrieval device, and so is a computer drive that holds something like the design of a new iPhone. These two objects, the molecule and the drive, are physically very different. They have in common that they both hold information, but
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One of the mistakes of epistemology is to assume that we start with evidence, or that we should start with evidence, or that if we want to make progress, we need to gather the evidence and then think about the evidence and then extract from the evidence a conclusion, which is
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Most of the parents who object to school do not really object to the underlying epistemology of school. They still believe what Popper called the bucket theory of knowledge or the bucket theory of the mind. They only think that the school has been pouring bad stuff into their
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Education as conceived at present, is entirely the transmission of memes. Now, without transmission of memes, we would be reinventing the wheel all the time. So it's highly desirable that memes be transmitted. It's also highly desirable that they not be transmitted faithfully,
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Q: —Joe Boswell: This concept of error correction, which sounds like a harmless bit of jargon, but for you it's a very deep fundamental principle. Can you lay that out for us, and where are you getting that from?
A:
@DavidDeutschOxf
: So this is the political theory of Karl
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"All knowledge is explicit." That couldn't happen because if all knowledge were explicit, then the meaning of words, let's say I use a word like "castle," and somebody doesn't know what a castle is, they would have to look in a dictionary. And then in that dictionary, a castle
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To those who still cling to a single-universe world-view, I issue this challenge: explain how Shor’s algorithm works. I do not merely mean predict that it will work, which is merely a matter of solving a few uncontroversial equations. I mean provide an explanation. When Shor’s
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The future of civilization depends entirely on what we think and do. If civilization fails, that won’t be something that just happens to us. It’ll be the consequence of choices that people have made. And if civilization survives, then that will be because people have succeeded in
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Knowledge is a species of information, but very little information is knowledge. Because the vast majority of the information that exists in the universe does not have causal power. It doesn't have the power to replicate itself, basically. But it also doesn't have the power to
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Postmodernism has taken a deep truth from Popperian epistemology (namely experience is theory-laden and needs to be criticised), misunderstood it, and used it to justify the opposite (experience is infallible and mustn't be criticised).
@DavidDeutschOxf
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It's amazing that Marxist economic nonsense is still being seriously argued even though it had been comprehensively refuted 70+ years before Marx wrote it down.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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We do not experience time flowing or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences correctly as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them
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We have a duty to be optimistic because the future is open, not predetermined, and therefore cannot just be accepted; we are all responsible for what it holds. Thus, it is our duty to fight for a better world.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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Wealth is not a number. I don't think it can be characterized very well by a number. It is a set. The set of all transformations that you are capable of bringing about, that is your wealth. And obviously, if optimism is true, then there's no limit to wealth. And at any one time,
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If we somehow could succeed in changing the nature of human beings so that they were not capable of creating new knowledge, then the same thing would happen to our species as has happened to 99.9% of all species that have ever existed; namely, we would go extinct. In fact, we
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I argue in the book [The Beginning of Infinity] that all sorts of abstract entities, like numbers and indeed ideas, do exist objectively. And the argument for that is that the causal effects of an idea are independent of the physical substrate in which they're instantiated. For
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The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress. It's the basic regulating principle of the Enlightenment. So, in science, two false approaches blight progress. One is well-known, untestable theories. But the more important one is explanationless theories.
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Systems that are good at error correction make more errors, and that sounds paradoxical, but they make more errors than systems which are bad at error correction—until the catastrophe happens. So, systems that are bad at error correction fudge and fudge and fudge until, at some
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Q: You disagree with the notion, made popular by Stephen Hawking and others, that free will is, in fact, a sort of illusion. Can you talk about that?
Yes, this is the idea that because we are made of atoms, and atoms are subject to laws of motion that don't allow any wiggle
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I have argued that everyone in our society is struggling with some very harmful memes, and that society as a whole is in an unstable condition as a result. Because most anti-rational memes function largely at the unconscious level, merely understanding that they exist may give us
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I am a physicist and I'm profoundly opposed to any idea of non-physical explanations that contradict physics. So that's a no-no and really doesn't make sense. However, there are ways in which both emergent properties such as minds and life and so on have an effect. And as you
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No precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee; hence, we need a stance on problem fixing, not just problem avoidance.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories "misconceptions" from the outset, instead of only after we have discovered their successors. Thus, we could say, Einstein's misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton's
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An AGI that is constrained to be obedient is a slave. And having slaves and basing an economy on slaves is a way to total disaster.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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I think we do not have the slightest clue how to make an AGI. I think what's standing between us and making an AGI is an explanatory theory. It'll be largely a philosophical theory rather than a computer science theory or mathematics or physics or anything like that. It'll be a
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All those pessimistic accounts of the human conditions contain some truth, but as prophecies, they're all misleading, and all for the same reason. None of them portrays humans as what we really are. As Jacob Bronowski said, man is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper
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Arguments by analogy are fallacies. Almost any analogy between any two things contains some grain of truth, but one cannot tell what that is until one has an independent explanation for what is analogous to what, and why.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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I've often said there was a stultification in theoretical physics starting in, let's say, the 1920s, and it still hasn't fully disappeared. If it wasn't for that, quantum computers would have been invented in the 1930s and built in the 1960s. So that is just an accidental fact,
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The future of civilization depends entirely on what we think and do. If civilization fails, that won’t be something that just happens to us. It’ll be the consequence of choices that people have made. And if civilization survives, then that will be because people have succeeded in
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Every human being who is functional at all, is rational and creative and capable of being more so.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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Wealth is not a number. I don’t think it can be characterized very well by a number. It is the set of all transformations that you are capable of bringing about. That is your wealth. And if optimism is true, then there’s no limit to wealth.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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@derspiegel
: Can the Enlightenment still fail today?
@DavidDeutschOxf
: Definitely. If it fails, it will be because people lack the knowledge to prevent failure. That's why our top priority should be to make progress as fast as possible. And I am talking here not only about
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Every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge. And hence, the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism, the principle of optimism, namely that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge.
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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. If you take an idea
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A deep fact about the physical world, which is that epistemology is substrate-independent. Once knowledge or feelings or consciousness or any kind of information or computation is instantiated in a universal device, then the laws it obeys are completely independent of the
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Morally, the worst thing of all is to impede the correction of errors. We should judge all political and social institutions by how well they promote the correction of errors.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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Happiness is a state of continually solving one’s problems, they conjecture. Unhappiness is caused by being chronically baulked in one’s attempts to do that. And solving problems itself depends on knowing how; so, external factors aside, unhappiness is caused by not knowing how.
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Thinking of oneself as seeking truth has the constant danger of imagining that one has found it. Which is a notorious cause of dogmatism, tyranny etc. Thinking of oneself as trying to correct errors is less dangerous.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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A theory of computation within any laws of physics is the theory of how you can use physical objects to represent abstract objects. So you want to represent the integers, 1, 2, 3, and you can use physical objects like fingers to say that will be 1, that's called 2, that's called
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One reason I liked science: a single, comprehensible theory can cover an infinity of facts. As knowledge increases we find that the world is not a heap of facts but, on the contrary: great discoveries are often unifications, revealing simplicity where previously we had seen only
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Some people get depressed when they find out how huge the universe is. They feel tiny and insignificant and think that nothing matters in this world. That makes no more sense than getting depressed when you find out that cows are bigger than you. What is the big deal
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Fallibilism is the philosophical position that all human endeavours, attempts to create knowledge or achieve anything, are subject to error, that 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
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There is basically only one kind of computer. Whether it's your laptop or a supercomputer for modeling the climate, any computer can run the same computations. And our brain is nothing more than a universal computer. Its hardware can run any program, and we can use extra memory
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The tradition of criticism is responsible for moral progress in societies that best institutionalize criticism.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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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 the whole of my work, my research, is about trying to discover the foundations of the laws of
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The world is currently buzzing with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at almost any cost. But it ought to be buzzing much more with plans to reduce the temperature, or for how to thrive at a higher temperature. And not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. Some such
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Error correction is an extremely simple concept, although very profound, and absolutely everything depends on it, since everything depends on knowledge, and knowledge doesn't come to us on a single platter. So everything depends on error correction. But although that's a simple
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The brain has no access to reality. Only to some electrical currents inside itself. Sense impressions do not come with labels saying that [what] caused them. We provide those, fallibly, by conjecture and criticism.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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I was flabbergasted when ChatGPT came out, because it's basically a chatbot, and I wrote in my last book that the technology of chatbots has not improved since the 1970s. In other words, it stayed where it was for 50 years, like the single-celled organisms in the past history of
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Indeed, of all civilizations in history, the overwhelming majority have been destroyed, some intentionally, some as a result of plague or natural disaster. Virtually all of them could have avoided the catastrophes that destroyed them if only they had possessed a little additional
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Rather than wanting to have learned something, I would recommend studying or beginning to go into something that looks interesting.
I don't believe in curricula.
Something that interests you is going to be the way to find out what you should be learning.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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One cannot predict the growth of knowledge. When you are trying to predict the economy or the behavior of a human, you are trying to predict what knowledge that system is going to create in the future. And predicting the growth of knowledge, as Karl Popper taught us, is
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If the Sun does become a red giant, it will engulf and destroy the Earth. If any of our descendants, physical or intellectual, are still on the Earth at that time, they might not want that to happen. They might do everything in their power to prevent it.
Is it obvious that they
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Wealth is not merely an amount of money in a bank account, it is the repertoire of physical transformations an entity is capable of causing.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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The laws of physics, as best we know them, don’t forbid us from traveling back into the past; and when the laws of physics don’t forbid something, and we want to do it, we end up doing it.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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If we only hope, we're doomed. We must think. And then change. Every one of us is responsible for the future.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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Marx, Engels, and Diamond’s ‘ultimate explanation’ of the different histories of different societies is false: history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even
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A Theory of Computation within any laws of physics is the theory of how you can use physical objects to represent abstract objects.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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It will be a crime, not only a crime against the AGI but a crime against humanity, to bring an AGI into existence without giving it the means to join our society, so to join us as a person. Because that’s really the only way known of preventing a thing with that functionality
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@tferriss
: I believe you've said humans are fundamentally disobedient, and is it fair to say that AGI would fit that same description? [Yes.] And let's begin with that.
@DavidDeutschOxf
: I refer, nowadays, I refer to anything that has this kind of explanatory creativity or
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Understanding does not depend on knowing a lot of facts as such, but on having the right concepts, explanations, and theories.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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The pursuit of science is, as my old boss John Wheeler used to say, who was in Austin, Texas at the time when I worked with him, our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. And in the book, I say that it might help people to understand better the nature of the
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The art of making a good AI is to limit its possibilities tremendously. You limit them a trillion-fold compared with what it could be. There are a trillion ways of being wrong for every way of being right. The same is true of chess-playing programs. Whereas the perfect AGI, as it
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The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as
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@krysboydthink
: What's the relationship between curiosity and intelligence?
@DavidDeutschOxf
: Curiosity, I think, is a way of referring to the desire for good explanation. It's a way of thinking that there's something here that we don't know, or some problem, some puzzle, and
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Thinking of oneself as seeking truth has the constant danger of imagining that one has found it. Which is a notorious cause of dogmatism, tyranny etc. Thinking of oneself as trying to correct errors is less dangerous.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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Mistakes are inevitable, and the exponential growth of knowledge causes an exponentially increasing rate of mistakes, unforeseen mistakes. And so we need to prepare for contingencies that we don't know about today because they're going to be dominated by knowledge that we do not
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If we only hope, we're doomed. We must think. And then change. Every one of us is responsible for the future.
@DavidDeutschOxf
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Science is one gigantic error correction mechanism where we try to find out all our misconceptions, and we're expecting even our most cherished beliefs eventually to turn out to be flawed in some way or another. So we have to be open to that, and we have to be ready to cope with
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