BeginningOfInfinity
The Beginning of Infinity (David Deutsch)
- Outstanding! Need to reread. "This is where your heroes come to die"
- Dead Hero List:
- Empiricism
- Instrumentalism
- Spaceship Earth
- Principle of Mediocrity: Dawkins argument that "Universe being is not only queerer than suppose, but it is queerer that we can suppose"
- Martin Reese: "there could be life and intelligence in forms we cant conceive"
- Boltzmann Brains
- Anthropic Arguments for fine-tuning puzzles
- Daniel Dennett: who claims in Consciousness Explained that qualia dont exist
- Finitism: the doctrine that only finite abstract entities exist
- Simulation hypothesis: leads to infinite regress (bad explanation)
- Claim that we are uniquely posed to destroy ourselves
- Hawking's fear of extraterrestrial civilizations
- Human civilization as on the "final second" on the "last day" of the cosmic year
- Guns Germs and Steel as a bad explanation
- Domesday argument
- AI supremacy: Universality implies that, in every important sense, humans and AIs will be other than equal.
- Hero List:
- Popper
- Fallibilists
- Assumptions:
- There are no contradictions in reality
- The world is fundamentally explicable: all regularities have explanations; the world is not supernatural
- Our brains are universal computers
- Books main argument is that all progress (theoretical and practical) comes from creating better explanations. This activity is both uniquely human AND a fundamental fact about reality at the most "impersonal cosmic" level. The relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of the central role in people in the cosmic scheme of things.
- Although progress has no end (unbounded) it does have a beginning.
- Example of Cosmic reach of humans: Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand how stars work, but by nothing else in the universe. (Neutron star Mergers?)
- Scientific theories are explanations of what is out there and how it behaves.
- For most of the history of science it was mistakenly believed that we "derived" scientific theories from the evidence of our senses - a philosophical doctrine known as Empiricism. In reality scientific theories are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering, and adding to existing ideas with the goal of improving them. Experience is needed, but not as the source of the theories, but in order to choose among those that have already been guessed. This was first understood by Karl Popper.
- Although being dead wrong in terms of where scientific knowledge comes from Empiricism was a great step forward in both the history and philosophy of science.
- It denied the legitimacy of traditional authorities in seeking answers.
- However it did this by setting up two new false authorities:
- "raw" sensory experience
- "derivation" or induction of science from this sensory experience
- The key to science is that our explanatory theories can be improved through: conjecture, criticism, and testing.
- Fallibilists expect even their best theories to have some misconceptions included with the truth and so are predisposed to change them for the better.
- It is fallibilism, not the mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the (unlimited) growth of knowledge.
- We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are "theory-laden" and hence just as fallible as our theories.
- We perceive nothing as it really is. It is all theoretical interpretation: conjecture.
- What is needed for the sustained rapid growth of knowledge is a tradition of criticism. This happened in the enlightenment which was a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.
- Scientific theories are not derived from experience, but they can be tested by experience.
- Prediction is not, and cannot be the purpose of science.
- Instrumentalism denies explanation exists at all. (It is still very influential especially in QM)
- Just as conflicting predictions are the occasion for experiment and observation; conflicting ideas (in a broader sense) are the occasion for all rational thought and inquiry.
- Define a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas as problem.
- Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality (Assumption?), every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.
- "Bad Explanations": The idea that even testable, explanatory theories are not the crucial ingredient that leads to progress. Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account for all the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one over the others (apart from Occam's razor). So a great freedom to make drastic changes (as in eg: ancient mythical explanation for the seasons) is a fundamental flaw. These types of theories are not an effective way to understand the world; even if they make predictions than can be tested. Whether it is easy to vary an explanation with the same prediction or to vary it to make different predictions, here experimental testing is almost useless for correcting their errors. These easily changed explanation are called "Bad Explanations". If a bad explanation is disproved in favor of another bad explanation, no real progress toward the truth is made. So the scientific mindset is not about testing theories, or even refuting theories, but in seeking better explanations of relevant phenomena.
- "Good Explanations" are hard to vary. It is only with good explanations that it even matters whether a theory is testable. (Bad explanations are useless even if testable.) Discoveries of good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.
- Quest for Good explanations is the basic regulating principle of not only science, but the Enlightenment in general. It is the path (only?) to progress and truth.
- Criterion for reality: a particular thing is real if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something. Abstract entities can be real and can play a role in causing physical phenomena (see: Hofstadter example of prime number domino calculator)
- Occam razor: is a common way of removing arbitrariness of a bad explanation, that can sometimes yield a good one.
- Conjectures are the product of imagination, but imagination can create fiction much more easily than reflect reality.
- The explanation-based conception of science is why we can know so much about unfamiliar aspects of reality. Know Reality Although our senses cannot detect neutrinos or quasars or most other significant phenomena in the universe, our brains can understand them.
- The "Reach" of an explanation is its ability to solve problems beyond those that it was created to solved (SUSY with DM and gauge coupling unification).
- It makes sense to also speak of the reach of a non-explanatory forms of knowledge ("Rules of thumb").
- eg: knowledge implicit in genes for biological adaptation)
- (To be elaborated on later:) There is something greatly significant about explanation in the cosmic scheme of things.
- Scientific Instruments: correct errors through indirectness that is guided/inspired/designed by theory. Strips away illusions misleading perspectives and gaps. It is amazing that object exist that when we observe them take on the appearance, other properties of other objects that are elsewhere are very different. (scientific instruments – and our sensory organs – are examples of these incredible things.) Explanatory theories tell us how to build and operate devices in exactly the right way to make this miracle work. Like conjuring tricks in reverse: these instruments fool our senses into seeing what is really there. It is ironic that scientific instruments bring us closer to reality when in purely physical terms they only ever separate us further from it. (An example that all observation is theory laden.)
- To say that we have genuinely observed a thing is to say that we have accurately attributed our evidence (which is always ultimately inside our own brains) to that thing. Scientific truth is when we have accurately attributed physical reality to theory.
The Spaceship Earth metaphor and the Principle of Mediocrity are almost universally accepted among scientifically minded people. Despite the fact that naively they argue in opposite directions:
- Principle of Mediocrity says how typical the earth is
- Spaceship Earth emphasizes how special the earth is
However Truth is: -) Humans are cosmologically significant -) the Earths biosphere is incapable of supporting human life
- The biosphere only ever achieves (temporarily) stability by constantly neglecting, harming, disabling, and killing individuals. Earth is not a life-support system! Almost the entire capacity of the earths "life-support system for humans" has been created by us using our ability to create new knowledge. The extent to which we are on a spaceship we are its designers and builders, before humans it was not a vehicle, but a heap of dangerous raw materials
- Biological evolution did not provide us with enough knowledge to survive. (Here we differ from most other species which do have all the knowledge they need encoded in their brains "by the biosphere")
- The Principle of Mediocrity is paradoxical: it implies that all human abilities, including our special ability to create new explanations, are necessarily parochial. Which implies that science, despite all its successes and aspirations would turn out to be inherently parochial and anthropocentric and thus that at some level the universe must be inexplicable.
- Any assumption that the world is inexplicable can lead only to Bad Explanations.
- There is an intimate connection between explaining the world and controlling it. In the set of all conceivable transformation of physical objects, there are those never happen because they are forbidden by the laws of physics; those that happen spontaneously; and some that are possible given enough knowledge. And these are all the options. So all potential physical transformations are either impossible (excluded by the laws of physics) or possible with the right knowledge. If there were transformations that technology could never achieve it would be a regularity that is testable in nature, but all regularities have explanations (assumption?) and so the explanation would be the consequence of a law of nature.
This is ultimately the source of the cosmic importance of people; they have the ability to create knowledge which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, but only by universal laws. Anything that can create explanatory knowledge has cosmic significance. Astrophysics is incomplete without a theory of people. eg: It is not true that the attributes of a supernova in general are independent of the presence or absence of people, or of what these people know and intend. Generally, if we want to predict what a star will do we have to know whether there are any people near it and if so, what knowledge they have and what they might want to do.
eg: The only phenomena that our best instruments can detect at stellar distances are 1) extremely bright objects 2) a few things that obscure these objects 3) the effects of certain types of knowledge designed for communication (lasers/radio transmitters etc)
- Using knowledge to sustain life is not unique to humans; but is the basic method which cells use to stay alive. DNA is a coded description of knowledge of ancestral environments. The difference is what kind of knowledge they use (explanatory vs rule-of-thumb) and how its created (conjecture and criticism vs variation and selection of genes).
- Humans are Universal Constructors: factories for transforming anything into anything.
- Why should only one adaptation (human intelligence, problem solving, knowledge creation) out of the trillions that have been tried have unlimited reach?
- There cannot be intelligence in forms we cant conceive (contra to Martin Reese's claims). If there were some thing that we were qualitatively unable to understand this would be a claim that the world is not explicable and is the same as an appeal to the supernatural.
- Minimum needed to affect change in the Universe is matter, energy and access evidence: the information needed to test scientific theories.
- Access to evidence: As far we know all the constants of nature can be measured here and every fundamental law can be tested here. So everything needed for open-ended knowledge creation is available in the earths biosphere. Not only is the Universe full of evidence, it is full of the same evidence everywhere. All people in the Universe face the same opportunities.
- In the Universe at large knowledge-friendliness is the rule, not the exception. Or person-friendliness to people who have the relevant knowledge; Death is the rule for people who do not.
- Typical child born today in the US is more likely to die as a result of an astronomical event than a plane crash.
- Death: an unproblematic state with out creative thought
- There can be no ultimate explanation. Nothing can be explained only in terms of itself. So any purported ultimate explanation will be a bad explanation; it will be easy to vary because it cant answer the question why this foundation and not another. A implication of this is that the deep an explanation, the more problems it creates. (JA:Not sure I completely buy this)
- The Continental Enlightenment was impatient for the perfected state, while the British Enlightenment was impatient for institutions that did not stifle gradual, continual change and pushed small improvements, unbounded in the future. (Liberal vs Conservative)
- Knowledge is a significant phenomena in the Universe. To make almost any prediction about astrophysics one must take a position on what types of knowledge will or will not be present near the phenomena in question. All explanation of what is out there mention people and knowledge even only implicitly.
- The class of transformations that could happen spontaneously (ie: in the absence of knowledge) is negligibly small compared to those that could be affected by intelligent beings. So, explanations about almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring about these phenomena.
- When our brains learn of diverse phenomena in the Universe (eg a quasar), we have physical objects that are extremely different (brains and quasars) whose behavior is dominated by totally different physics with the same mathematical and casual structures – and doing so more accurately over time. Only knowledge can exhibit this underlying unity.
- Only explanatory knowledge can be universal. (eg: the SETI instrument is precisely adapted to detecting something that has never yet been detected. Biological evolution could never do this) Science (explanatory knowledge) can conjecture the existence of something, calculate its implications, and then construct an instrument to detect it. Non-explanatory knowledge cannot cross the conceptual gap that conjecture does.
- Humans and knowledge are not only objectively significant, they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behavior cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance. Eg: the behavior of humans wrt a champagne bottle in a SETI refrigerator depends on the existence of life in other solar systems. Similar proxy behaviors in other scientific labs. Consider also how completely different the evolution of an environment with and without the presence of a tiny sliver of knowledge. Almost all regions of the universe are just waiting doing nothing at all, which if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity.
Physics Philosophy We Are Special
- Both the principle of Mediocrity and the Spaceship Earth idea are fundamentally parochial and mistaken. Science (the least parochial perspective available to us) implies that people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not supported by their environment, but support themselves by creating knowledge.
- Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to create knowledge is biological evolution. However the knowledge it creates (apart from via people) is inherently bounded and parochial.
- Good adaptation and good explanations are hard to vary while still retaining their function.
- Error Correction: Once they are physically embodied DNA and memes in human brains tend to cause themselves to remain so. This information is very unlikely to come into existence other than through the error correcting process of evolution and thought.
- In any good explanation of the origin of biological adaptation, God cannot play the role assigned by creationism. Who created God ? The answer can only be a bad explanation.
- The existence of an unsolved problem in physics is not more evidence for supernatural explanation than the existence of an unsolved crime is that a ghost committed it.
- The idea that similar laws of physics can be expected to give rise to similar environments in undermined by the very existence of fine-tuning.
- Boltzmann Brains are bad explanations. At any given instant, the theory predicts that we are going to be killed in the next picosecond and is hence refuted by observation a picosecond later.
- Anthropic explanations are attempting to account for purposeful structure in terms of one single act of selection. This is unlike evolution, and cannot work. It is too easy an explanation. The solution of the the fine-tuning puzzle is going to be in terms of an explanation that will specifically explain what we observe.
- Scientific discovery is profoundly unpredictable despite the fact that it is determined by the laws of physics. Before a discovery, not predictive process could reveal the content of the discovery; if it could it would be that discovery.
- There is no better destiny for a theory than to point the way to a more comprehensive theory to which it lives on as a limiting case.
- Progress is made by creatively varying the explanations of a theory, not the predictions.
- Our brains are computers which we can use to learn about things beyond the physical world, including pure mathematical abstractions. These mathematical abstractions are not possible objects of any observation, and yet we come to know about them. (Plato concluded that this knowledge must come from the supernatural) However our knowledge of these abstract entities actually comes from conjecture, criticism, and seeking good explanations.
- Common claim: "You can't derive an ought from an is, therefore morality cannot be justified by reason"
True, but you also cant derive a factual theory from an "is" either.
Factual evidence and moral maximums are independent, but factual and moral explanations are not.
Factual knowledge can be useful in criticizing moral explanations.
eg: Success at making factual discoveries implies many values that the scientists has to commit to.
- Value of truth, good explanations, and be open to ideas and change.
- Reductionism and Holism are both mistakes. Explanations do not form a hierarchy with the lowest level the most fundamental. Explanations at any level can be fundamental.
UnpopularImportantTruth Physics Philosophy
- The Jump to Universality is a tendency of gradually improving systems to undergo a sudden large increase in functionality, becoming universal in some domain. It has a typical transitions: Before the jump there are specialized tools for each use case After the jump once customizes (or specializes or programs) a universal object
- There is more of a reason to model the brain as a computer then as a steam engine: A computer, but not a steam engine, is a universal simulator. Expecting a computer to do whatever neurons can is not a metaphor.
- There is no such thing as an universal analog computer. Analog computers cant do error correction (every value in an analogue could be correct) and without error correction, the growth of knowledge is bounded. So all universal computers are digital and all use error-correction. All jumps to universality occur in digital systems. eg: Spoken languages build words out of a finite set of elementary sounds.
- All known jumps to universality have be done by humans except one: DNA
- Initially the genetic code was evolving along with everything else in the organism, but became a point where the code itself stopped evolving, despite the fact that the organisms continued to. When the DNA stopped evolving it was only coding for single-celled organisms. Despite that all organisms today have been based on exactly the same alphabet of bases, and three-base "words". Considered as a language, the genetic code has displayed phenomenal reach. DNA might have been the first universality to exist, We do not know why DNA which evolved to describe bacteria has enough reach to describe dinosaurs and humans.
- AI must be possible in principle because a universal computer is a universal simulator.
- In Consciousness Explained, – some refer to it as Consciousness Denied – Dennet claims that qualia dont exist. To deny them is a bad explanation.
- If you cant program it, you dont understand it
- Judging whether something is really a genuine AI will always depend on explanations of how it works.
- A chatbot responds as though it had created knowledge in composing a response to a question, in reality the knowledge was created earlier and elsewhere.
- The field of AGI has made no real progress because there is an unsolved philosophical problem at its heart: we dont understand how creativity works. Claim: Once that problem is solved, programming AI will not be difficult.
- Mathematicians realized centuries ago that it is possible to work consistently and useful with infinity.
- Case against Finitism: Problem, is there a real largest natural number or not ? Finitists have to deny the "law of the excluded middle" ie: A or ~A. Finitism is Instrumentalism applied to mathematics. It is a principled rejection of explanation. All access to abstract (and physical) entities, finite or infinite is via theory.
- Universality of Reason: All branches of philosophy, science, and mathematics have inherent limitations. But there is no bound to reason. Believing in a bound on the domain of reason is equivalent to the belief in the supernatural.
- The best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity.
- Whenever we refer to infinity we are making use of the infinite reach of some idea. Whenever an idea of infinity makes sense, it is because there is an explanation of why some finite set of rules for manipulating finite symbols refers to something infinite. (This underlies our knowledge of everything else as well!)
- There are uncountably many orders of infinity, each too large to be put into one-to-one correspondence with the lower ones. (Is the number of order of infinity the same as any one of the infinities?)
- When we have unbounded growth of knowledge we are always (and forever) just scratching the surface.
- The attributes of probable or improbable, rare or common, typical or untypical have literally no meaning in when comparing infinite sets of natural numbers. This is bad news for Anthropic arguments. None of the Anthropic-reasoning theories that have been proposed provide any measure. Most are little more than speculations "What if there were universes with different parameters?"
- The set of all functions is uncountably infinite, while the set of all programs is merely countably infinite => almost all mathematical truths have no proofs. They are unprovable truths. Most of all mathematical statements are undecidable: there is no proof that they are true and no proof that they are false. Each of them is either True or False, but there is no way of using physical objects (brains or computers) to discover which is which. All undecidable statements are directly or indirectly about infinite sets. To finitists, this is because of the meaninglessness of these statements. To Deutsch it is further proof that abstractions exist objectively, these statements cannot merely be a convenient way of describing the behavior of some physical system. Interestingly, very few questions are known to be undecidable, even though most are.
[BROKEN LINK: 1E2F3G4H-5I6J-7K8L-9M0N-1O2P3Q4R5S6T] Paradox
There is nothing mathematically special about the undecidable questions. They are distinguished by *physics_ only. Different physical laws would make different things infinite (?), different things computable, different truths (scientific and mathematical) knowable. It is only the laws of physics that determine which abstract entities and relationships are modeled by physical objects such as mathematicians brains, computers, and sheets of paper. Our knowledge of whether a proposition is true or false always depends on knowledge about how physical objects behave; the mathematical proposition is independent of physics, but the proof of the proposition is a matter of physics only. There is no such thing as abstractly proving something (just as there is no such thing as abstractly knowing something)
All mathematical truth is absolutely necessary and transcendent, but all knowledge is generate by physical properties, and its scope and limitations are conditioned by the laws of nature.
- A computation or proof is a physical process in which objects (computers or brains) physically model or instantiate abstract entities (numbers or equations) and mimic their properties. This is our window on the abstract. Every mathematical proof depends on our knowing the rules that govern these physical objects. Contrary to what most mathematicians believe, proof theory can never be made into a branch of mathematics, it is a science (computer science)
Connection of Math and Physics
- The point of mathematics is to understand (explain) abstract entities. Proof is like observation in science, mainly a way of ruling out false explanations. Mathematics (like all fields) does not seek random truths but good explanations. The motivation for seeking a perfectly secure foundation is mistaken, a form of justificationism.
- Another potential fine-tuning in the laws of physics: They support computational universality: so human brains can predict and explain the behavior or very un-human objects (eg: quasars) If the laws of physics depended on non-computable functions (most functions are non-computable) we could not make predictions, and hence could not exist. So there is something infinitely special about the laws of physics as we actually find them. They are fine-tuned for computation, prediction, and explanation. "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" (This problem seems to attract bad explanations) eg: simulation hypothesis
- Simulation hypothesis: It is the very nature of computational universality that if we and our world were composed of software, we would have no means of understanding the real physics – the physics of the simulator. So the simulation hypothesis entails giving up on explanation in science. Against the simulation hypothesis: There is no good argument for any way of counting simulations. eg: why should repeating the same simulation 1e6 times make it more likely that I am a simulation? Another point: Would the universe as we know it really be simulated often in the future? Would this be immoral given the suffering that exists today? (Counter point: maybe identical instances of the same suffering (quale) doesn't create any new suffering. Reading a book about past suffering is not immoral.)
- P!=NP says there are classes of mathematical questions whose answers can be verified easily once you have them, but that cannot be computed easily in the first place by a universal computer. Almost all researchers in computing theory are sure that this conjecture is true.
[BROKEN LINK: 2F3G4H5I-6J7K-8L9M-0N1O-2P3Q4R5S6T7U]
Conjecture: If a question is interesting, then the problem is soluble. However, fallibilism tells us that we can be mistaken about what is interesting.
Corollaries:
- Inherently insoluble problems are inherently uninteresting.
- In the long run, the distinction between what is interesting and uninteresting is not a matter of subjective taste but an objective fact.
- The interesting problem of why every problem that is interesting is also soluble is itself soluble.
- We currently dont know why the laws of physics seem fine-tuned; we dont know why various forms of universality exist; we do not know why the world is explicable. But eventually we shall, and when we do there will still be infinitely more left to explain.
- Computation: a physical process that instantiates the properties of some abstract entity.
- The property of infinite sequences is that every element is exceptionally close to the beginning.
- Fundamental limit to scientific prediction: The future of civilization is unknowable because the knowledge that is going to affect it has yet to be created. So even the possible outcomes are unknown, let alone their relative probabilities. No good explanation can predict the result of something that will be significantly affected by new knowledge. The moment when creation begins to make a significant difference in the future is the moment at which scientific prediction begins to fundamentally fail. (Some explanations do have reach into the distant future: eg: One of them is that fact itself, another is the infinite potential of explanatory knowledge.)
- Existential Danger from Increased Technological Innovation : Its not the case that only since the mid 20C have we be capable of destroying civilization with technology. Many civilizations in history were destroyed by the simple technology of fire and the sword, actually the overwhelming majority of civilizations in history have been destroyed, intentionally or b/c of natural disaster. Almost all of them could have avoided destruction if they had more knowledge, very few if any could have benefited from greater caution in innovation.
- Civilizations starved long before Malthus form drought and famine ultimately due to lack of knowledge of irrigation and farming. The distinction between a "natural" disaster and one brought about by ignorance is parochial.
- Hawking's fear of extraterrestrial civilizations: Ignores the opportunity cost of not making our existence known. Could be destroyed by accident. Failed to be saved. Also assumes that progress is limited by raw materials and not knowledge.
- Because there can only be one type of person: universal explainers and constructors; the idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.
- Political policies (like scientific theories) cannot be derived from anything; they are conjectures. We should chose between them not based on their origin, but based on how good they are as explanations, how hard they are to vary.
- Popper (in knowledge and authority) proposes to replace the question of where the knowledge comes from by the question: How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?
- Objective progress is possible in philosophy, politics, and morality just as it is in science by seeking good explanations. Just as science seeks explanations that are experimentally testable, a rational political system makes it easy to detect and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad and to make a non-violent change. Political institutions should be judged not for their ability to make prophetic decisions about policies and leaders, but to remove bad ones that arise. Munger Invert
- Principle of Optimism: All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Optimism is a way of explaining failure. It implies that there is no fundamental barrier (law of nature or supernatural decree) to progress.
- Argument against the Entrenchment of old people in positions of power: we have traditions of criticism in our society well adapted to removing bad leader from office, even when they are in good health.
- We should be upset by the failed versions of the beginning of infinity throughout history (Athens, Islamic's golden age, Florence in 15C) If any of these earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded our species would be exploring the stars and individuals would be immortal.
- Wealth: the repertoire of physical causes that one is capable of causing.
- Good customs: Defy anyone who seeks your submission Gave a hearing to anyone who offers honest criticism, seeking to change you mind by persuasion.
- Moral Imperative: Do not destroy the means of correcting mistakes. (possible the only moral imperative, all others follow?)
Summary of the views of Karl Popper: When we hear something being said we guess what it means, without realizing we are doing it. (Learning is an creative act!) We sit here in imprisoned our heads (a dark, almost sealed cave of our skull) forever guessing about the outside worlds: physical, moral, mathematical ect. But we not only guess we seek explanations that remain robust against the limited input we receive, against each other, logic, reasonableness and anything else we can think of. When we can improve them no longer we have understood some objective truth, and (at the same time) what we understand we can control. Its like magic, only real. We are like gods!
We constantly underestimate the difficulty of communication. Communication depends on guess work on both sides and is inherently fallible. Our default assumption should be that misunderstandings are ubiquitous and that neither intelligence nor intention can guarantee against them.
The way to converge to each other is to converge upon the truth
- Odd that philosophy places such great weight on reading the original texts to understand the minds of the originators of theories. eg: The main goal in physics texts is to understand the theory, not the opinions of the authors.
- If you have a good theory – as the fundamental theories of physics are – it is exceedingly hard to vary while still remaining a viable explanation.
- Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science.
- "Many-universes" interpretation remains a minority view despite the fact that many well-studied phenomena have no other known explanation. The "Science-as-explanation" position that is advocated in this book, ie: an account of what is really out there, is itself still a minority view even among theoretical physicists.
- It is consistent for two identical entities to become different under deterministic and symmetrical laws if the two entities are fungible: identical in literally every way except that there are two of them. Examples of fungible configurational entities in classical physics is amounts of energy. In quantum physics elementary particles are fungible entities. It is counter-intuitive that identical objects obeying deterministic laws cannot become different, but fungible objects (which on the face of it are even more alike, can; this is at the heart of quantum physics. Diversity within fungibility is widespread in the multiverse.
Quantum Mechanics Physics Philosophy
Three ways which a phenomena can appear unpredictable to an observer
- Physics is affected by some fundamentally random variable (not present in real physics)
- We only have partial knowledge, even thought underlying system deterministic (partly responsible for most everyday unpredictability)
- (New in quantum theory) Two or more initially fungible instances of the observer become different.
The laws of physics of the multiverse is deterministic; the apparent randomness is due to initially fungible instances of objects becoming different.
- There are ways in which the different histories of the different universes can affect each other in ways that do not amount to communication. The need to explain these effects is the main argument that our multiverse is real. Under certain circumstances histories can rejoin, becoming fungible again. (Interference)
- Knowledge is the only phenomena whose effect do not fall off with distance. Knowledge can be aimed at a target, travel a vast distance having nearly no affect, and then utterly transform the destination.
- The only way for the laws of physics to simultaneously meet the criteria of being universal, deterministic, and forbid faster-than-light communication is to have multiple universes.
- Common sense and classical physics contain the parochial error that only one history exists.
- Universes, histories, particles (?) and their instances are not referred to by quantum theory at all (Just as planets, human being and their lives and loves are not). These are all approximate emergent phenomena in the multiverse.
- Different times are special cases of different universes. Time is an entanglement phenomena.
- Since knowledge growth is a process of error correction and because there are many more ways to be wrong than to be right, knowledge creating entities rapidly become more alike across different histories than other entities. Knowledge creating beings are unique in that their effects do not diminish with distance and they tend to stay constant across histories.
- The proof of other universes in in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The path that was not taken affects the one that was.
- In a quantum computer the final output will depend on the intermediate results being computed in the vast number of different histories of the same few atoms.)
- Although Schrodinger and Heisenberg's theories seemed to describe very different worlds – neither of which was familiar– it was found that if a simple rule of thumb was added, each theory would always make identical prediction, which turned out to be very successful. The rule of thumb is whenever a measurement is made, all the histories but one cease to exist. Instead of trying to improve and integrate these two powerful but slightly flawed explanatory theories, and to explain why the rule of thumb worked, most theoretical physicists retreated to Instrumentalism. If the predictions worked, why worry about the explanation? This meant ignoring the fact that the rule of thumb was grossly inconsistent with both theories, and not even self-consistent when applied to once observer making a quantum measurement on another ("paradox of Wigners friend").
- Bad Philosophy: Philosophy that is not only wrong, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge.
- For decades, various versions of bad philosophy regarding quantum theory was taught in physics courses. The theory claimed to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal modes of reason ("If you think you've understood quantum mechanics then you dont") A hallmark of bad philosophy.
- Vagueness, inconsistency, and the perceived authority fundamental physics opened the door to countless pseudo-science supposedly based on "quantum theory".
- David Bohm struggled to construct an alternative theory that was compatible with realism. His was a complicated theory that can be seen as a multiverse theory in disguise.
- Schrodinger joked that he might be considered mad for claiming that his own equation – for which he had one the Noble prize– might actually be true.
- "Because I say so" four simple words contain many themes of false and bad philosophy.
- perfect example of bad explanation: It can be used to "explain" anything
- It is about who said something, not what was said.
- it reinterprets a request for true information as a request for justification
- It claims to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism
Positivism is a bad effect of taking empiricism literally. Mach's positivism led him to oppose relativity (because it claimed that spacetime really exists even though it cant be "directly" observed) and atoms, which were too small to observe. Most philosophies of science since Mach have been even worse (Popper being an exception).
eg:
- logical positivism asserts any statements not directly verifiable by observation are meaningless (note that logical positivism itself is not directly observable).
- Postmodernism (aka deconstructionism or structuralism) claims that because all ideas are conjectural and impossible to justify are essentially arbitrary: no more that stories or "narratives"
- Creating a good explanation is hard not because of what anyone has decided but because there is an objective reality that does not meet anyone's prior expectations.
- One legacy of empiricism that continues to cause confusion and bad philosophy is the idea that it is possible to split a scientific theory into predictive rules of thumb and assertions about reality (or "interpretations") on the other. This doesn't make sense as with out an explanation it is impossible to know when and where the rule of thumb applies.
- All scientific measurements use chains of proxies, each link in the chain is an additional potential source of error. We can avoid fooling ourselves only by criticizing each step in chain, which is only possible if there is an explanatory theory behind each proxy. One can claim to have measured something only when there is an explanatory theory of how and why the measurement procedure should reveal its value and with what accuracy.
- Bad philosophy can be countered by progress, much more easily than by good philosophy. People want to understand the world. Progress makes bad philosophy harder to believe. Its not refutation by logic or experience, but by explanation.
Arrows axioms: all 5 are intuitively not just desirable, but seem to be essential for making a system of preferences ("Will of the people") fair and rational. Yet they are inconsistent. There is no such thing as "the will of the people". Wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish for.
- Proportional representation assigns disproportionate power in the legislature to the third largest party!
The essence of democratic decision-making is not the choice made by the system at elections, but the ideas created between elections.
- The voters are not a fount of wisdom from which the right policies can be empirically derived.
Advantage of plurality system of proportional system: The key defect of compromise policies is that when one is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it. In a plurality system, the winning parties policies do not need to be watered down with comprise as with proportional systems.
In proportional systems, small changes in public opinion seldom count for anything, in practice the power can easily shift in the opposite direction from public opinion. What counts most is changes in the opinion of the third largest party. This shields most of the incumbent politicians from being removed from power through voting.
The all-or-nothing system of plurality systems make the overall outcome sensitive to small changes in opinion.
The idea that representative government depends on proportionate representation in the legislature is unequivocally a mistake.
Politics UnpopularImportantTruth
- Popper's Criterion: Good political institutions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove them without violence when they are.
- Choice and decision making is NOT a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula of preference. This ignores the most-important element of decision making: creating new options.
- Aesthetic truths can be linked to physical facts through explanations (just like moral truths are) eg: facts can be used to criticize moral and aesthetic theories also, artistic problems can emerge from physical facts and situations.
- Nature often has beautiful explanations. And when beautiful explanations are shown to be wrong they are often replaced by even more beautiful ones. This is a regularity in nature and must have an explanation.
- Why do humans find flowers beautiful. We find flower beautiful reliably, even for flowers we have not seen before. We dont find roots, stems, or leaves beautiful.
- The flower-insect co-evolution involved the creation of a complex code for signaling across species. The code had to be easily recognizable and difficult to fake. Deutsch guesses that the easiest way to make these signals is to use objective standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty and insects have to be able to recognize it. The only species that are attracted to flowers are the insect species that co-evolved to do so and humans. Hypothesis: The best replicating genes depend on embodying objective prettiness to get themselves replicated Signaling across the gap between two humans is like signaling across the gap between two entire species. (b/c of memes). The amount of information in a human mind is more than in the genome of any species.
- Beauty comes in two forms: parochial and universal. The parochial is local to a species, culture, or individual. The universal is as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind requires knowledge but creating universal beauty required knowledge with universal reach. Human appearance as influenced by sexual selection satisfies the standards of objective beauty as well as species specific ones.
- There is a need to create objective knowledge in order to allow different people to communicate.
- A culture is defined as a set of closely related memes "variant", not strictly identical, (kind of like the virosphere) that lead to slightly different characteristic behaviors.
- Almost any analogy has some truth, but one cannot tell what that is until you have an independent explanation of what is analogous and why.
- Genes and Memes are similar at the lowest level of explanation: they are both replicators that embody knowledge. However at higher levels they are about as different as can be: there are no cultural analogues of species, organism, cell, sexual or asexual reproduction.
- DNA duplication is automatic: genes are copied indiscriminately. Memes are completely different. Each meme has to be expressed as a behavior each time it is copied.
Meme evolution is enormously faster than gene evolution. The cosmic year analogy is of the history of life is misleading. A significant fraction of all the evolution that has happened on our planet has occurred as memes in human brains.
- Static societies always have ways of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties (otherwise they would not remain static.) Static societies must leave its members chronically balked in their attempts to achieve anything positive. The fact that all societies before the current Western civilization where static implies that most humans before now were constrained by social convention and were unable to achieve self-expression. Contrary to conventional wisdom, primitive societies are an unimaginably bad place to live in. Either they are static and survive only by extinguishing their members creativity, or they are unstable and lose their knowledge and quickly disintegrate.
- Just as genes for the eye implicitly "know" the laws of optics. Long-lived memes of a static society possess knowledge of the human condition. So ironically there is much truth in the typical static society fear of change. Any change is much more likely to do more harm than good.
- What sort of meme can cause itself to be reliably replicated in a dynamic society, ie in a rapidly changing environment? A true idea that is useful to all people. To be transferred to one person it only need to seem useful to that person, to be transferred to a group it need be only a a parochial truth. The ideas with the best chance of surviving throughout many generations are truths with reach : deep truths. Such memes are antifragile in the sense that they actually rely on the their ability to survive rapidly changing criteria of criticism (the alternative die out)
- Rational meme: an idea that relies on the copiers critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated
- Anti-rational meme: An idea that relies on disabling the recipients critical faculties.
- Existing accounts of memes have neglected the all-important distinction between rational and anti-rational modes of replication. and so have missed most of what is happening and why.
- In a dynamic society, scientific and technological advances are made creatively. They emerge from individual minds as novel ideas, after having acquired significant adaptations from meme evolution (ie: variation and selection).
- Biological evolution was merely a finite preface to the main story of evolution, the unbounded evolution of memes. (so was the evolution of anti-rational memes in static societies)
- Western civilization is in an unstable transitional period between being a stable, static society consisting of anti-rational memes and a stable dynamic society consisting of rational memes.
- Modern humans evolved from ape-like ancestors very rapidly by gene-evolution standards. Creativity is an unlikely target for sexual selection, its a complicated adaptation which we are unable to reproduce artificially. A more plausible explanation for the selection of creativity is that people choose mates according to social status, rather than creativity directly.
- Meme evolution comes so natural to us that it is hard to see what is really going on and how special it is. Rather than just imitate someone who does something, humans try to explain it – to understand the ideas that caused it – which is a special case of the general human objective of explaining the world.
Two puzzles: Why was human creativity evolutionary advantageous at a time when there was almost no innovation ? How can human memes be replicated, given that they have content that the recipient never observes ?
Both puzzles have the same solution: What replicates human memes is creativity. (JA: "Learning is a creative act") While it was evolving, creativity was used to replicate memes. So at first creativity was used to acquire existing knowledge, not to create new knowledge. But b/c the mechanism to do both things is the same, so gaining the ability to acquire existing knowledge automatically selects for the ability to create new knowledge.
- Someone trying to acquire a meme from someone else has the same challenge as a scientist. Both are trying to discover an hidden explanation. For one it is in the mind of another person, for the other it is a law of nature. Deciphering the underlying theory of the meme from the observed behavior involved the same jump/creativity as when developing new scientific knowledge.
- Paradoxically it requires creativity to thrive in a static society – one that explicitly suppresses creative acts. It requires the creativity to be less innovative than other people.
- Replicating memes is the function for which creativity evolved. And that is why our species exists.
- Contrary to Jared Diamond's argument in Guns Germs and Steel; the conditions for the beginning of infinity exist in almost every human habitation on earth. Diamond thinks that psychology, philosophy and politics of historical events are not relevant "to the great river of history." Counter argument: Why did the West win the cold war ? It has nothing to do with climate, minerals, flora, and diseases. Mechanical theories of human history lack explanatory power and are morally wrong, as they deny the role of humans and ideas on history. Diamond says that the main reason for writing GGS was cut off racist interpretations of the fact that the West came to dominate. However the landscape did not cause the enlightenment, if anything its the landscape of our ideas that have far more powerful influence. Knowledge alone converts landscapes into resources, humans alone who create explanatory knowledge and thus history. Ideas are the determinants of the broad sweep of history.
- The idea that the future can be scientifically planned is one that reliably causes disaster.
- We need the capacity to deal with unforeseen and unforeseeable failures. For this we need a large and vibrant research community, interested in explanations and problem-solving. We wealth to fund it and technology to implement its discoveries.
- The world is buzzing with plans to reduce reduction in gas emissions at almost any cost. Instead we ought to be thinking about how to reduce the temperature, or how to thrive at higher temperatures, efficiently and cheaply.
- The growth of knowledge is a continual transition from problems to better problems, not from problems to solutions.
- Infinite ignorance is a necessary condition for infinite growth of knowledge. Rejecting the idea that we are "nearly there" is a necessary condition to avoid dogmatism, stagnation, and tyranny.
- Against Domesday argument (which attempts to estimate the life expectancy by assuming that the typical human is roughly halfway through the sequence of all humans): Does not apply if the total number is going to be infinite or if the lifetimes become infinite.
- Illness and old age are going to be cured soon – certainly within the next few lifetimes. This would imply effective immortality for the whole human population.
- Against superhuman minds: because human minds are universal constructors and explainers they already transcend parochial origins. There can be no such thing as a superhuman mind only further automation allowing th existing kind of human mind to be carried out faster and with fewer limitations (eg: memory). Universality implies that, in every important sense, humans and AIs will never be other than equal.
- What we know and do not know:
- Know: AI is possible (from universality) by writing computer programs; Dont Know: how to write them.
- Know: of working examples of qualia and creativity (inside of each of us) Dont know: what qualia are or how creativity works.
- Know: the genetic code; Dont Know: Why it has the reach it has.
- Know: People are of fundamental significance; Dont Know: whether we are among those people, (we may fail or give up)
- There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run: through seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism.