2011-10-06 David Deutsch radio interview on "What Now" with Ken Rose (Transcript)

[Josh Jordan]

Here is a very lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance
on "What Now" with Ken Rose on Oct 6, 2011. The audio is available at
http://www.pantedmonkey.org/podcastgen/download.php?filename=2011-10-06_1105_what_now_david_deutsch.mp3

Ken Rose: KOWS 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. The "What Now" show, Mondays
11am-2pm. Live on the telephone from the United Kingdom we have David
Deutsch. Good afternoon, good evening.

David Deutsch: Good evening.

Rose: What is it, 7:00, 8:00 where you are?

Deutsch: It's just past 7:00.

Rose: All right, excellent. Have you had your supper?

Deutsch: Not yet.

Rose: All right, well, maybe we can stimulate your appetite just a
little bit more.

Deutsch: Yes, I've just been playing badminton, so I'm having a nice
rest now.

Rose: Yeah, how's your game?

Deutsch: Bad.

Rose: Well, practice, practice. Thank you very much for joining us.
Should I refer to you as "Dr. Deutsch" or "Professor" --

Deutsch: "David".

Rose: David, absolutely. I'm getting a little bit of an echo, I don't
know if you're hearing any, but it's tolerable, it's not bad at all.

Deutsch: OK...

Rose: Yeah, I don't want to take the time to call back. I think we're
going to make do here.

Deutsch: OK.

Rose: Are you in Oxford?

Deutsch: Yes.

Rose: Ah, okeydokey. By way of introduction, David Deutsch, fellow of
the Royal Society, is an Israeli-British physicist at the University
of Oxford. I'm reading from Wikipedia. He is a non-stipendiary
Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser physics at
the Centre for Quantum Computation in the Clarendon Laboratory at the
University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by
being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing
machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a
quantum computer. He is also a proponent of the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics. I want to go through this, David.
Hang on with me.

Deutsch: OK.

Rose: In the Royal Society of London's announcement of Deutsch
becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society a couple of years ago, the
Society described Deutsch's contributions thus: "David Deutsch laid
the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, and has
subsequently made or participated in many of the most important
advances in the field, including the discovery of the first quantum
algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum
computational networks, the first quantum error-correction scheme, and
several fundamental quantum universality results. He has set the
agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new, interdisciplinary
field, made progress in understanding its philosophical implications
(via a variant of the many-universes interpretation) and made it
comprehensible to the general public, notably in his book The Fabric
of Reality." And the Fabric of Reality is some 14, maybe 15 years old
now, and the new book, which is causing quite a buzz, is called The
Beginning of Infinity. So, we're very privileged to have you on the
show and welcome and thank you.

Deutsch: Well, thanks for inviting me.

Rose: I'm a New Yorker, and I've been reading the New York Times for
55 years. A couple of months ago, I suppose, let's see, yeah, the New
York Times Review gave The Beginning of Infinity -- subtitled
"Explanations that Transform the World" -- a very rare double-page
centerfold in the book reviews section, with the headline, "Explaining
it All". This is quite a feather in your cap to be so celebrated, yes?

Deutsch: I was very pleased, especially since the reviewer, David
Albert, is someone with whom I have some profound disagreements about
with more or less all the issues in the book. What we have in common,
though, is our sense of what is important, rather than what the answer
is, and therefore each of us thinks that the other one is making
really good contributions but isn't actually right.

Rose: What is important, David?

Deutsch: The main issue in the book, through which all the other
themes of the book flow, is, what is the difference between ideas and
ways of thinking that work, that can make progress, that can make
things improve and those that can't. And this comes up in all sorts of
different issues, starting with the fact that progress, from the point
of view of the human species as a whole, is very recent and very rare.
Through most of human history, people would live their entire lives
without ever encountering an innovation, whereas now, we take it for
granted that iPhone updates come more often than is comfortable.

Rose: David, I'm going to backtrack and get off the phone and call you
back. The echo is a nuisance and we're going to try again.

Deutsch: OK, I could give you another number to try, but try this one
again and see what happens.

Rose: It'll take a couple of minutes I'll be right back with you.

Deutsch: Yeah.

Rose: OK we're going to try it again, here's a little more music.
David?

Deutsch: Hi.

Rose: We'll see if we can pull this thing off. As I said a minute ago,
I wanted to just take it from the top again. I hardly feel qualified
to discuss quantum anything with you, let alone physics or the higher
reaches of the kind of brilliance that's attributed to you. If you
don't mind, there are a couple of things that I want to offer you.
First of all, this is an opportunity for you to speak to our
listeners. So I'm interested in primarily in what you might feel is
important for us to know. So I invite you to address us in that
manner.

Deutsch: OK.

Rose: There are two ways to do that. One is to meet us more than
halfway, and speak to us as the common women and men that we are here,
and maybe later in the interview I would happily invite you to speak
to those of us who may be familiar with the rarified intelligence that
you represent. So would you do us a favor, would you do me a favor,
and just make a general statement about the nature of our life here,
the nature of the world we live in?

Deutsch: Indeed.

Rose: Thank you, sir.

Deutsch: Yes. So, I guess the elephant in the room is that progress
that we are so used to now that we're used to reading about new
technology, new political ideas, new moral ideas, and new ways of life
all the time. You pick up the newspaper and you're told that something
that was very familiar is soon going to disappear. Or you're told that
something that was very familiar is actually wrong and you never knew
this before and so on. This is what our way of life is about nowadays,
rapid change. And although a lot of people are very cynical about it,
if you take the longer-term view of decades at a time, this is
definitely for the better. So we have to call it, not just rapid
change, but rapid progress. And the elephant in the room is that rapid
progress in that sense, in the history of our species, has been
exceptionally rare. Our civilization is the first one ever on the
planet to sustain rapid progress for more than two or three
generations; we sustained it for two or three centuries.

Rose: Is our progress actually accelerating?

Deutsch: The signs are that it is indeed accelerating. If you look at
the sort of rate of change -- I'm talking about rate of change of the
way of life of everybody, not just things like the volume of
scientific literature and so on which is going up exponentially --
just in terms of the number of things you can list on the fingers of
one or two hands when you say, "I can't imagine what life used to be
like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever, before we had the World
Wide Web, or before we had Google", and so on, then yes, I think we
are now used to a lot of things happening fast along those lines.
Whereas for most of human history, even, say, a century ago, they also
thought that progress was happening fast but it was nothing compared
with the speed now.

Rose: Right, and we're thinking how fast it is now, and likely we
literally cannot imagine what it's going to be like in another 10 or
20 years.

[10:00] Deutsch: That's exactly right. It's going to be unimaginably
different from today. And so one of the themes... I said that was the
basic theme of my book, what the difference is between what can bring
about progress and what cannot bring about progress. So one of the
things that this tells us is that if there is going to be rapid
progress continuing, we cannot predict the future. And that raises
some very interesting and important questions about what is the
rational way to think about an unknowable future?, how can we plan for
an unknowable future?, and so on. And some of the commonsense ideas
about what to do in that situation are just wrong in my opinion.
Assuming that our best technology of today is still going to be the
best 50 years from now, which is sort of assumed in a lot of planning,
is just silly.

Rose: It's preposterous.

Deutsch: Indeed. But then, the interesting question is, what can we
do, since we don't know the content of future technology, future
ideas, even future conceptions of right and wrong? Things that we
thought were fine 50 years ago are considered horrible crimes today.
Things like beating children or racial discrimination and so on. And
that is going to accelerate, too. So what can we do? I think the main
thing to realize is that the same thing that causes this horizon of
predictability is the very thing that is our only possible defense
against it, and that is: rapid progress. We're going to encounter
problems that we cannot predict, and the only way to deal with that
prospect is to make as much progress as we can in understanding the
world in a fundamental way. Because if you have fundamental theories,
then there is a chance that they will be able to cope with unfamiliar
situations. If you merely have parochial rules of thumb that work for
the moment in a certain situation, then you're going to be in real
trouble when the unexpected arises. And we're already doing that, so
I'm not calling for a radical change in society. I think our society
is already like this. It's more that people find it scary when it is
actually the reverse.

Rose: It's an absolutely unprecedented opportunity.

Deutsch: It is. And we change things for the better whenever we can
see it's for the better. So the unforeseen problems are going to be of
the form, "something or other looked as though it was going to be
better, but raised an unforeseen problem". And that's not too bad. A
lot of times, in the past, people intentionally caused horrible things
to happen. That's not what we're doing in our civilization.

Rose: The title of the book, "The Beginning of Infinity", is actually
an optimistic... or "optimism" isn't maybe the right word, it's
actually an intuition that we may well be on the verge of quite
possibly a Golden Age.

Deutsch: Yes. I think it's more than an intuition. I think that this
follows from the best knowledge we have about how knowledge works,
what the relationship is between theoretical knowledge on the one hand
and technology on the other -- the ability to change the world. And I
do call that optimism, even though it's slightly different from the
conventional meaning of the word, [which is] something like,
"expecting the best outcome." I don't necessarily expect the best
outcome; it's just that the best outcome is possible. That is, there
are no fundamental barriers to progress. That's optimism in my sense.
In other words, to achieve things that we want to achieve is just a
matter of knowing how, provided we don't want to violate the laws of
physics by going faster than light or something, [or by] making a
perpetual motion machine. Provided we don't want to do that kind of
thing, we can do anything if we have the right knowledge. Fortunately,
we already know how knowledge is created: basically, through the
methods of science and reason.

Rose: And we also need the right heart, don't we?

Deutsch: Yes, well, another of the themes of the book that comes out
from this is precisely that. Moral ideas, and also aesthetic ideas --
I have a whole chapter on why flowers are beautiful, objectively
beautiful -- are objective. There must be objectively such a thing as
right and wrong. There is no automatic way of knowing what it is, any
more than there's an automatic way of knowing whether the Higgs boson
exists. What we have to do in the case of the Higgs boson or
scientific controversies is conjecture testable theories and then do
experiments to distinguish between them. With moral theories, we can't
do tests. You can't test experimentally whether a given goal that you
have is morally right or morally wrong. But what you can do, and what
is perfectly analogous, is apply rational criticism. You can see
whether that theory meets the criteria that it is intended to meet,
whether it's consistent with other things, whether it's consistent
with facts which we can test, and so on. This is how the moral
progress that we've made already has happened. So, there is such a
thing objectively as right and wrong, objectively beautiful and ugly,
just as much as objectively true and false in science and mathematics.

Rose: You've written in that chapter that deep truth is often
beautiful and that mathematicians and theoretical scientists call this
form of beauty "elegance", which you say is the beauty in
explanations.

Deutsch: Yes, explanations are the theme that links knowledge in
different fields. So what you just said is an example of aesthetic
knowledge being linked -- in a way that we don't yet understand but
which is perfectly obvious when you're participating in it -- that
there's a link between aesthetic knowledge about beauty and
mathematical knowledge which is about abstractions, and also knowledge
in science which is about the laws of physics. So explanations are the
link. Explanations are statements of what is there in reality and why
and how it works.

Rose: Are we coming to understand who we are? Are we starting to get
some clarity about human identity?

Deutsch: The true answer is yes, but this is one of the least
understood things. We know who we are, what we are, as animals, that
is, we know quite a lot about our evolution and we also know quite a
lot about how evolution in general takes place. But how our minds
work, which is the distinctive thing about humans that makes us
qualitatively different from every other currently existing animal on
Earth, is our minds. And we don't know how those work. There are lots
of ideas that claim to know. The field of artificial intelligence for
the last 50 years has believed that it was on the verge of creating an
artificial one of these things, an artificial mind, and it hasn't yet.
And in my opinion that is because there is a very important
outstanding problem about how creativity works. As I say in the book,
I have learned to apply a single criterion to all claims by people who
claim that they understand the human mind, namely: can you program it?
Can you make an artificial one by programming what you think is the
explanation of how it works into a computer? No one at the moment can,
and therefore I don't take any such claims seriously at the moment.
It's definitely the case that such computer programs can be written,
but we just don't know how to do it yet.

Rose: Do you have some sense of what we're living for other than just
participating in the unknown phenomenon of being here and developing
and evolving?

Deutsch: Yes. Again, this has to do with both moral and aesthetic
values. What we're trying to do, even though many people try to deny
this, they deny that they are trying to do what is right, or trying to
create what is actually beautiful and so on, but that is what we're
trying to do. And that is the meaning. Religions traditionally thought
that the meaning was already known or had been revealed to humans, and
our task is to live up to that, to enact it. My view is the other way
around, that the meaning of life is something that we are using
creativity to discover, to build. There isn't a perfectly accurate
word for what we're doing. But we can't find the meaning of life in
the world out there, nor just by pure thought or by reference to an
authority. What we have to do is form explanations about what is right
and wrong, what is better and worse, what is beautiful and ugly, and
hone those theories while also trying to meet them. At any one moment,
we will meet them imperfectly, just like scientific theories at any
one moment are only an imperfect explanation of what the physical
world is like. But through criticism and conjecture and seeking the
truth we can eliminate the errors in what we have previously thought
and thereby make progress. And that is trying to find the meaning of
life. Trying to create the meaning of life is the meaning of life.

Rose: So we want to model and articulate reality.

Deutsch: Yes. Both moral, aesthetic as well as abstract and physical
reality. Yes, exactly.

Rose: Is the idea of a single universe quaint? Is it already
anachronistic?

Deutsch: In my opinion, yes. But I have to give a warning to go along
with this theory, [which is] that the overwhelming majority of my
colleagues who work on fundamental physics would disagree with me.
Clinging to a single-universe worldview and trying to explain away
both the theory and the experiments of quantum mechanics is the
majority view. Now I think this is deplorable, but I don't want to go
around giving the impression that my view is the only one about this.
Quite the contrary. I think perhaps fewer than 10% of my colleagues
would agree with this, but I think this is just a sociological
phenomenon. Something went badly wrong with the physics community
'round about the 1930s, and we haven't yet got over it. And it's a bit
of a scandal, I have to say. The denial that quantum mechanics
describes parallel universes is exactly the same logic as denying that
fossils represent dinosaurs, that fossils are evidence of dinosaurs.
So what people say is, OK, the quantum mechanics experiments come out
as if the photon in our universe was being affected by photons in
other universes and so on, but that doesn't mean that there are other
universes, because no one's ever seen one. And that's the same logic
as saying, OK, so dinosaurs are the only known explanation of fossils
as we see them, but no one's ever seen a dinosaur and no one ever
will, and therefore it's optional whether you say those dinosaurs are
real or not. And so just as people say that quantum mechanics is only
the study of what we will see when we do an experiment, it's exactly
the same as saying paleontology is only the study of fossils, not the
study of what animals brought about those particular patterns in
rocks. I'm not saying that the state of mind of physicists when they
try to avoid the many universes conclusions is the same as that of
creationists, but I am saying, I'm afraid, that the logic of their
argument is identical to that of creationists who say that there are
fossils but no dinosaurs.

Rose: Are you satisfied with the precision of language?

Deutsch: No, but that's only because new ideas, if they're
fundamental, often make existing language misleading and imprecise.
This certainly happens in parallel universe theory and in some of the
other fields that I've worked in. But I think the idea of having a
perfectly precise language in order perhaps to get rid of all human
disputes and so on, I think that's a chimera. There's no way to do
that. What we have to do is be as precise as is necessary to express
the explanations that we want to express, but perfect precision is
impossible. Also, terminology, language always contains also built-in
assumptions, some of which will be wrong. And therefore, language
contains built-in false theories. One of the ones that I described in
my first book was: language contains this whole theory that time
flows, that the present moment moves from yesterday to today to
tomorrow. But of course, nothing moves from yesterday to today to
tomorrow. Yesterday always remains where it always ways, behind today.
This idea of the flow of time, which is built into our very language,
is just a mistake, and it's one of the things that one has to unlearn
when one deals with time in physics. That's a general thing, that
language contains assumptions and theories which may be false.

Rose: Do you find existence fascinating, and more than that, do you
find it worthy of ecstasy?

Deutsch: Yes, now here we come immediately to a place where language
is perhaps not precise enough. Because of this unity of these many
different kinds of truth that I mentioned, physics, morality,
aesthetics, and so on, the pursuit of joy, I would say, rather than
ecstasy, on the larger scale, it's really the only token that we have
that we're doing the right thing. And yet, I've immediately got to
contradict what that sounds like. It sounds like advocacy of a
hedonistic worldview. You have to remember that if we try to fit this
into the general scheme of being at the beginning of infinity, of
expecting unlimited improvement in the future, that means that we have
to be critical of the criteria that we use to be joyful about
something. So while using it as a criterion, as a guide, we must not
use it as an authority. So it's not that we subordinate everything to
joy or pleasure and so on, but we use it as a guide while being open
to changing it. So we should be ready to change what we enjoy to
something better. This is, by the way, one of the things that's wrong
with utilitarianism. The idea that morality consists of maximizing
one's preferences or maximizing the greatest good of the greatest
number. It's assumed that our preferences are fixed or biological and
so on, and in fact that denies the most important thing about human
beings: namely, that we alter our preferences. We can improve them
just as we improve all our other ideas. Preferences are just ideas. So
the stereotypical refutation of utilitarianism is that your friend
asks you, "Which of these two job offers should I take?" "Which of
these two jobs should I want?” is really the question. And you say,
"Well, choose the one that you prefer." And he says, "Yes, well, don't
be silly, that's what I'm asking you, I'm asking you which one I
should prefer." And utilitarianism cannot describe the meaning of that
exchange, but I think it's perfectly obvious what it means. It is
possible to be undecided about what to prefer. This is something that
only humans, again, can do. Because animals do have fixed preferences.
They can be trained to do one thing or another, but if one animal can
be trained to do it, then so can another, and for each animal, there
are things that it is impossible to train it to do, which seem
perfectly obvious and natural to a human to do.

Rose: I'm curious why you chose to turn away from the word ecstasy.

Deutsch: Because ecstasy to me has a connotation of renunciation of
criticism. One "falls into" an ecstasy. One is "dominated" by ecstasy.
And it is something supposed to be primal and beneath the level of
critical thought. Whereas the thing that I'm aiming for is entirely
subject to critical thought.

Rose: Do you have regard for the work of Thomas Berry and Brian
Swimme?

Deutsch: I don't know them, I'm afraid.

Rose: I see. Well, among other things, they produced a book called
"The Universe Story" about 20 years ago. It's kind of like the family
album. It kind of gives us a beautifully articulated sketch of the
history of our universe, this particular universe. I just thought you
might be familiar with it. David, these days we're witnessing a
tremendous social phenomenon around so-called spiritual ideas and
practices. Does the word "spirit" have any real meaning?

Deutsch: Rather than ask about the word, I would prefer to concentrate
on the phenomenon. I think the progress that I referred to at the
beginning which was caused by the pursuit of truth and good
explanations and so on has been accompanied from the outset by various
forms of rebellion against it. Some of them are very overt and I think
the spiritual trend that you were referring to, if I understand
correctly what you were referring to, is sort of rebellion against
reason. It is saying that there is something more to the world than
true and false. That perhaps if we feel that something is true, that
can make it true. That if we want something to be true, that can make
it true.

Rose: Right, or hope it to be true.

Deutsch: Or hope that it's true. Of course, there is a grain of truth,
as I said earlier, that only the laws of physics and knowledge stand
between us and what we want. But that's not what we mean here. The
spiritual angle that I was criticizing is that we can make things be
true just by believing them to be true, or hoping, or wishing, as you
said. That rebellion, I think, is wholly false. It's a sort of
hangover from pre-rational times, but it also has an entirely modern
aspect which is that it is a rebellion. The ancient spiritualism and
religiousness was not a rebellion against reason. Reason, as we know
it, hadn't really been invented. But the modern one is. And just for
completeness, let me say that I think a more dangerous enemy to reason
is not this overt rejection of it in spiritualism, but the apparent
acceptance or even worship of it. The best way I can describe this is
that the French Revolution described itself as the triumph of reason.
And the result was mass slaughter, including the killing of the most
prominent scientists in France, and the imposition of bloodthirsty
dictatorship followed by Napoleon and war and so on. All this was done
by people who believed that they were overthrowing ancient unreason in
favor of reason, and they called this the Enlightenment. To me, this
is just another rebellion. This is the Enlightenment rebellion against
reason. But the Enlightenment also had another strand, which was
initially followed more in the English-speaking countries, which was
in favor not of establishing immediately a state called "reason",
which would be the ideal state, and which would then not need any
further improvement, but on the contrary, to try to improve things so
that institutions were able to correct their own errors. This was a
very gradualist and evolutionary approach to unlimited progress. One
of the paradoxes of the bad kind of application of "reason” is that
even if you were to succeed in doing that and achieving your utopia,
it would mean that no further progress was possible. And if no further
progress is possible, then what we were saying earlier is the essence
of humanity would no longer be possible either. Humans would just be
functionaries in this idealized utopia, and there'd be no point in
being one. But, in practice it just led to violence. Whereas the good
side of the Enlightenment is the thing that is now the basis of
Western civilization and has the potential for unlimited further
progress in the future if we make the right choices. If we make the
wrong choices, we could just destroy it and go back to stasis or
worse, just as happened with every previous attempt at progress in
human history.

Rose: Do you sense any obligation that we have to succeed?

Deutsch: I suppose we do. If you recognize that you have an obligation
to future generations, then really I don't see any alternative but to
say that we need progress. Because progress is simply, on that
timescale, helping future generations not to suffer, not to be
thwarted in their attempts to improve their lives, and helping them to
be better in whatever ways they turn out to want to be better, which
we hope will be better ways than we currently think better, so
everything can improve. The only alternative, which is sometimes
called "sustainability", is to assume that everything that works
today... we should never do anything today that isn't going to work
indefinitely. And if we take that seriously, that means that we're
aiming for stasis. I know that people who are in favor of
sustainability don't think of it that way. They think of
sustainability as "sustainable progress". But that is a contradiction.
If you analyze that in the light of what progress actually consists
of, and what is required to make progress, unfortunately, it is
impossible because progress requires conjecture and criticism, and
therefore it requires errors. And conversely, if we try to achieve an
error-free state, we will also have a progress-free state. As my old
boss John Wheeler used to say, "Our whole problem is to make the
mistakes as fast as possible." He was speaking about within physics,
trying to improve our knowledge of the laws of physics. But the same
thing is true of all knowledge. Our whole problem is to make the
mistakes as fast as possible. Conversely, arranging things so that we
don't make any mistakes, so that we can't make any mistakes or that
we're trying to make a way of life that doesn't have mistakes is also
necessarily a way of life that can't make progress.

Rose: You were at one time - maybe you still are - involved in a
project called Taking Children Seriously. Is that still something
that's alive?

Deutsch: Yes. This is just another application of the same idea. A lot
of ideas that are prevalent today are hangovers of a time of stasis,
the time of a static society that preceded what we call Western
civilization. There was a gradual change beginning 'round about the
time of Renaissance. Those ideas were all about trying to keep
existing knowledge the same, because they thought that all things
worth knowing had already been said, perhaps in holy books and
whatever. And the whole of society was just a gigantic machine for
keeping the existing ideas, morality, knowledge, technology, ways of
life, and of course religion, the same, preventing change. If you
think about how we think about education today, it's one of the things
that hasn't really caught up with the Enlightenment. When we think,
for example, of what makes a good school, a good university, a good
educational system, it's high standards. Well, "high standards" means
as many people as possible should meet the standard. In other words,
they should be as alike as possible. And what's more, they should be
alike in the way that was defined by the previous generation. And
really, that is the exact opposite of what we need to make progress.
As a result, the values that are embodied in educational systems, like
"do as you're told" and "become standardized" and so on are actually
in conflict with the values of our society in the broader sense. So
constantly, issues arise about a conflict between one of the things
that people take for granted should be normal in a school or in a
family between parents and children on the one hand, and things like
freedom of speech, free group association, freedom of thought and so
on on the other hand. We need to... I was just going to say,
"emancipate children from compulsory education", but "emancipate" is
the wrong word because it has a connotation of politics. Just having
freedom for children is not the same thing as it is in freeing slaves
or making women equal and so on, because what really counts with
children is not so much what they're allowed to do or not do as how
their thinking is supposed to go, what one expects a good life to be,
or a young person [to be]. And at the moment, the idea is that youth
is a time during which one becomes assimilated to the standards by
which one is going to be judged when one is older. And a freer concept
which is closer to the values of the Enlightenment is to say that,
youth/childhood is a time of creativity, and creativity is
unpredictable. The real thing we need to try to do is to make the
whole of life like that, rather than to shoehorn children and young
people into an existing path.

Rose: All of us, yes. Amen to that. We have to wrap it up in a minute,
sir. I have one question and it's this, at least for now: is the
universe or the multiverse anything other than blazing intelligence
itself?

Deutsch: We can make it so. Well, I don't know about "anything other".
But it is implied by the idea that there are no bounds on progress,
that if we play our cards right, if we want to, we can become the
major thing that is happening in the universe. Both in the physical
sense, that is, by leaving the planet on spaceships and going to other
planets, and then to other star systems, and eventually other
galaxies, and spreading across the universe, and making all the matter
and energy there increasingly do what we want it to, what gives us
joy, what we think is right for it. (And when I say "we", I don't just
mean humans; if there are any extra-terrestrials out there, then we
and they will be doing this together. There's only one kind of person
possible in the universe.) Not only in that physical sense, but also
in the moral sense, in the aesthetic sense, we will be the thing that
is deciding what should happen next and what is beautiful. So, yes, I
don't think it's quite right to say that mind will be everything, but
mind can, if we play our cards right, if it plays its cards right, can
dominate everything, can be the most significant thing about the
universe.

Rose: And we have every reason to trust it.

Deutsch: It's not really a matter of trust, because trust again
suggests that there is something immutable about the values that will
come up. Trusting them would mean that we're not going to change them.
But we are in fact going to change our values. We are doing it very
fast already, and we will be doing it faster.

Rose: I'm very grateful that you came and spoke to us today. Many,
many "thank you"s.

Deutsch: Well, very interesting questions. Thanks for having me on the
show.

Rose: Hope to speak to you again. All the best.

Deutsch: OK, bye-bye then.

Rose: David Deutsch in Oxford, Great Britain. The author of The
Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World.

[Westmiller]

Josh Jordan wrote:
>What Now" with Ken Rose on Oct 6, 2011

thttp://www.pantedmonkey.org/podcastgen/download.php?filename=2011-10-...

Delightful interview, as always. Thanks for the transcript.

The discussion prompted me to wonder whether David has participated in
QUBIT conferences. I had an opportunity to attend QUBIT 2006 in Santa
Barbara, California and found all of the sessions interesting.
However, I couldn't determine whether David spoke or attended. If so,
we may have met casually.

[David Deutsch]

On 10 Oct 2011, at 10:30pm, Westmiller wrote:

> The discussion prompted me to wonder whether David has participated in
> QUBIT conferences.

I'm afraid not. I very rarely attend conferences.

-- David

[Elliot Temple]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 1:45 AM, Josh Jordan <therealj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Here is a very lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance
> on "What Now" with Ken Rose on Oct 6, 2011. The audio is available at
> http://www.pantedmonkey.org/podcastgen/download.php?filename=2011-10-06_1105_what_now_david_deutsch.mp3
>
> Ken Rose: KOWS 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. The "What Now" show, Mondays
> 11am-2pm. Live on the telephone from the United Kingdom we have David
> Deutsch. Good afternoon, good evening.
>
> David Deutsch: Good evening.
>
> Rose: What is it, 7:00, 8:00 where you are?

who cares?

and if you care, google it?

> Deutsch: It's just past 7:00.
>
> Rose: All right, excellent. Have you had your supper?

who cares?

> Deutsch: Not yet.

why answer an irrelevant personal question instead of direct things to philosophy?

>
> Rose: All right, well, maybe we can stimulate your appetite just a
> little bit more.

dumb joke, not very funny

> Deutsch: Yes, I've just been playing badminton, so I'm having a nice
> rest now.

ah, so DD wants to bring up his irrelevant status hobbies, he isn't actually looking to focus on philosophy

> Rose: Yeah, how's your game?

DD brought this continued off-topic on himself.

> Deutsch: Bad.

so cute, am i right?

> Rose: Well, practice, practice.

DD brought this continued off-topic on himself.

> Thank you very much for joining us.
> Should I refer to you as "Dr. Deutsch" or "Professor" --

ugh this host

>
> Deutsch: "David".

finally a correct statement. though DD missed the opportunity to give an explanation for this.

>
> Rose: David, absolutely. I'm getting a little bit of an echo, I don't
> know if you're hearing any, but it's tolerable, it's not bad at all.
>
> Deutsch: OK...
>
> Rose: Yeah, I don't want to take the time to call back. I think we're
> going to make do here.

why bring it up if you don't want to do anything about it?

>
> Deutsch: OK.
>
> Rose: Are you in Oxford?
>
> Deutsch: Yes.

so boring

>
> Rose: Ah, okeydokey. By way of introduction, David Deutsch, fellow of
> the Royal Society, is an Israeli-British physicist at the University
> of Oxford. I'm reading from Wikipedia. He is a non-stipendiary
> Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser physics at
> the Centre for Quantum Computation in the Clarendon Laboratory at the
> University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by
> being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing
> machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a
> quantum computer. He is also a proponent of the many-worlds
> interpretation of quantum mechanics. I want to go through this, David.
> Hang on with me.
>
> Deutsch: OK.

blah blah blah, interviewer talks a lot. more crap intro.

DD could have said "please don't status me bro" but didn't, he is "OK" with this.

>
> Rose: In the Royal Society of London's announcement of Deutsch
> becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society a couple of years ago, the
> Society described Deutsch's contributions thus: "David Deutsch laid
> the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, and has
> subsequently made or participated in many of the most important
> advances in the field, including the discovery of the first quantum
> algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum
> computational networks, the first quantum error-correction scheme, and
> several fundamental quantum universality results. He has set the
> agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new, interdisciplinary
> field, made progress in understanding its philosophical implications
> (via a variant of the many-universes interpretation) and made it
> comprehensible to the general public, notably in his book The Fabric
> of Reality." And the Fabric of Reality is some 14, maybe 15 years old
> now, and the new book, which is causing quite a buzz, is called The
> Beginning of Infinity. So, we're very privileged to have you on the
> show and welcome and thank you.
>
> Deutsch: Well, thanks for inviting me.

blah blah blah, shouldn't DD be the one doing most of the talking?

>
> Rose: I'm a New Yorker, and I've been reading the New York Times for
> 55 years. A couple of months ago, I suppose, let's see, yeah, the New
> York Times Review gave The Beginning of Infinity -- subtitled
> "Explanations that Transform the World" -- a very rare double-page
> centerfold in the book reviews section, with the headline, "Explaining
> it All". This is quite a feather in your cap to be so celebrated, yes?

god this is all about status

> Deutsch: I was very pleased,

DD you suck. you should be pleased by actual merit, not perceived merit. you should by pleased by actual accomplishments, not people's opinions.

DD should have said like, "No, I think my book is a feather in my cap. The review is merely its due, not a further accomplishment" or something less diplomatic than that (tons of good options).

> especially since the reviewer, David
> Albert, is someone with whom I have some profound disagreements about
> with more or less all the issues in the book. What we have in common,
> though, is our sense of what is important, rather than what the answer
> is, and therefore each of us thinks that the other one is making
> really good contributions but isn't actually right.

I'm extremely skeptical that David Albert is making really good competitions and that DD's comments here are honest.

> Rose: What is important, David?
>
> Deutsch: The main issue in the book, through which all the other
> themes of the book flow, is, what is the difference between ideas and
> ways of thinking that work, that can make progress, that can make
> things improve and those that can't.

BoI is relevant to that in many places but doesn't actually say that clear enough. it'd be better if it did.

> And this comes up in all sorts of
> different issues, starting with the fact that progress, from the point
> of view of the human species as a whole, is very recent and very rare.
> Through most of human history, people would live their entire lives
> without ever encountering an innovation, whereas now, we take it for
> granted that iPhone updates come more often than is comfortable.

wtf is uncomfortable about iPhone updates? i'm not uncomfortable. I doubt DD is uncomfortable about that, either. this is appeasement of people who find the open society uncomfortable – he's basically saying their immorality is natural and understandable.

>
> Rose: David, I'm going to backtrack and get off the phone and call you
> back. The echo is a nuisance and we're going to try again.
>
> Deutsch: OK, I could give you another number to try, but try this one
> again and see what happens.
>
> Rose: It'll take a couple of minutes I'll be right back with you.
>
> Deutsch: Yeah.
>
> Rose: OK we're going to try it again, here's a little more music.
> David?
>
> Deutsch: Hi.

more boring crap

>
> Rose: We'll see if we can pull this thing off. As I said a minute ago,
> I wanted to just take it from the top again. I hardly feel qualified
> to discuss quantum anything with you, let alone physics

you're not even qualified to discuss your qualifications, Rose. this sentence is nonsense. it says "i hardly feel qualified to discuss a specific part of physics known to be difficult which you are an expert at, let alone any part of physics"

> or the higher
> reaches of the kind of brilliance that's attributed to you. If you
> don't mind, there are a couple of things that I want to offer you.
> First of all, this is an opportunity for you to speak to our
> listeners. So I'm interested in primarily in what you might feel is
> important for us to know. So I invite you to address us in that
> manner.

why doesn't DD spend more time speaking to people who do have stuff to say?

> Deutsch: OK.
>
> Rose: There are two ways to do that. One is to meet us more than
> halfway, and speak to us as the common women and men that we are here,
> and maybe later in the interview I would happily invite you to speak
> to those of us who may be familiar with the rarified intelligence that
> you represent. So would you do us a favor, would you do me a favor,
> and just make a general statement about the nature of our life here,
> the nature of the world we live in?
>
> Deutsch: Indeed.
>
> Rose: Thank you, sir.

Ah, what's going on is this Rose interviewer dude thinks DD is a stupid arrogant blowhard and is trying to guide him to make not-completely-useless statements. so while Rose sounds like a bit of an idiot here, he's actually doing a reasonable job of manipulation for the benefit of his audience, plus Rose playing the role of the fool will make the audience feel less bad about being confused.

Why does Rose think this, that DD will say crap on the show and confuse the audience? Because DD hasn't done a good enough job rejecting status, being clear, etc

DD should be saying like "I'm sorry you expect me to be like that. it's a flaw in our culture that many so-called intellectuals are like that. i try very hard to be clear. when i'm confusing, i consider that my failure."

but again DD misses the opportunity to say something good. so far he's said nothing good.

>
> Deutsch: Yes. So, I guess the elephant in the room is that progress
> that we are so used to now that we're used to reading about new
> technology, new political ideas, new moral ideas, and new ways of life
> all the time. You pick up the newspaper and you're told that something
> that was very familiar is soon going to disappear. Or you're told that
> something that was very familiar is actually wrong and you never knew
> this before and so on. This is what our way of life is about nowadays,
> rapid change. And although a lot of people are very cynical about it,
> if you take the longer-term view of decades at a time, this is
> definitely for the better.

how isn't it for the better in the short term too?

when the iPad Mini with Retina Display comes out, people's lives are better THE NEXT DAY. everyone who gets one has a better life. and the people who don't get one are basically unaffected.

> So we have to call it, not just rapid
> change, but rapid progress. And the elephant in the room is that rapid
> progress in that sense, in the history of our species, has been
> exceptionally rare. Our civilization is the first one ever on the
> planet to sustain rapid progress for more than two or three
> generations; we sustained it for two or three centuries.

note that Rose's attempt to manipulate DD was kinda a waste of time. I think this is what DD would have said anyway. it's actually not as clear and simple as it should be, or as Rose asked it to be. like it doesn't say clearly enough how this thing DD is talking about directly answers the question Rose was asking.

>
> Rose: Is our progress actually accelerating?
>
> Deutsch: The signs are that it is indeed accelerating.

start your answer with "yes". it's clearer and simpler.

drop the "indeed". don't talk to impress. ugh.

and this "signs" thing is such a BS approach. DD has arguments, he has reasons, he has made a JUDGMENT, but he is dropping the RESPONSIBILITY and passively blaming the position on external "signs". this is a close cousin of induction (but DD is doing it for (bad) social, not epistemological, reasons)

> If you look at
> the sort of rate of change -- I'm talking about rate of change of the
> way of life of everybody, not just things like the volume of
> scientific literature and so on which is going up exponentially --
> just in terms of the number of things you can list on the fingers of
> one or two hands when you say, "I can't imagine what life used to be
> like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever, before we had the World
> Wide Web, or before we had Google", and so on, then yes, I think we
> are now used to a lot of things happening fast along those lines.

holy fuck this sentence is way too long for text let alone voice. the average amount of punctuation per sentence, internal to the sentence, should be like half a comma. that's like a reasonable goal. maybe less. DD just shot his average through the roof.

DD just lost most of the audience and the host. despite Rose asking him not to do that.

> Whereas for most of human history, even, say, a century ago, they also
> thought that progress was happening fast but it was nothing compared
> with the speed now.
>
> Rose: Right, and we're thinking how fast it is now, and likely we
> literally cannot imagine what it's going to be like in another 10 or
> 20 years.
>
> [10:00] Deutsch: That's exactly right.

"exactly" is an unnecessary word. actually, worse than that, b/c it wasn't actually exact. it's bad.

> It's going to be unimaginably
> different from today. And so one of the themes... I said that was the
> basic theme of my book, what the difference is between what can bring
> about progress and what cannot bring about progress. So one of the
> things that this tells us is that if there is going to be rapid
> progress continuing, we cannot predict the future.

what is "this"?

this is really unclearly written and i'm not sure what the actual argument is supposed to be.

if DD wants to make a difference what he needs to do is teach people they can think, they can understand arguments. what he needs to do is actually give them a sample of thinking and learning. he needs to make arguments that matter and which they understand. he should be focusing all out on that. but it's more like an afterthought in his quest for status, which he vaguely imagines will somehow be good for something other than his ego.

> And that raises
> some very interesting and important questions about what is the
> rational way to think about an unknowable future?, how can we plan for
> an unknowable future?, and so on.

that's misleading. makes it sound kinda like we're totally blind but we aren't.

> And some of the commonsense ideas
> about what to do in that situation are just wrong in my opinion.
> Assuming that our best technology of today is still going to be the
> best 50 years from now, which is sort of assumed in a lot of planning,
> is just silly.

DD is arguing with something most of the audience won't recognize that anyone does. this is so unclear. it looks like a straw man, not a quality argument.

DD may well be right. maybe he has in mind all kinds of planning of which this is a good description. but he has to share that.

>
> Rose: It's preposterous.

bad host doesn't ask what planning DD refers to. maybe he's completely lost.

also like notice how the host thinks he is with DD, he and DD are on the same side, in the same group. how is DD going to change anything when his communications leave tons of the world thinking they are already on his side (or he is on theirs) and don't need to change?

> Deutsch: Indeed. But then, the interesting question is, what can we
> do, since

DD is moving on quickly after not being clear enough. bad.

he's at the same time managing to be too much of a wordy blowhard and also not including substance. cuz he wastes most of his time on useless status junk.

> we don't know the content of future technology, future
> ideas, even future conceptions of right and wrong? Things that we
> thought were fine 50 years ago are considered horrible crimes today.
> Things like beating children or racial discrimination and so on. And
> that is going to accelerate, too. So what can we do?

those examples, about horrible crimes, aren't very true

> I think the main
> thing to realize is that the same thing that causes this horizon of
> predictability is the very thing that is our only possible defense
> against it, and that is:

jesus fuck this sentence structure. it doesn't even matter what you say with structure and reference use like this.

regarding references: words like "that" and "thing" and "it" are reference words – they refer to something else – which generally makes communications a lot harder to follow because they aren't giving you any information themselves, they are just kinda saying the information is somewhere nearby and hopefully you already understood it. that can be a good shortcut when used just a little, but if you flood your language with it, or otherwise use it badly, then it's confusing

regarding structure: DD puts all this lead up in a convoluted way and sticks the key words of the sentence at the very end and most of the sentence is glue words that stick stuff together, not substance. when you see a bunch of text then an "and that is:" it's a really bad sign. and this sentence makes you try to hold everything in memory as it goes along, it keeps you waiting for information coming later to figure out what the current stuff means.

> rapid progress. We're going to encounter
> problems that we cannot predict, and the only way to deal with that
> prospect is to make as much progress as we can in understanding the
> world in a fundamental way. Because if you have fundamental theories,
> then there is a chance that they will be able to cope with unfamiliar
> situations. If you merely have parochial rules of thumb that work for
> the moment in a certain situation, then you're going to be in real
> trouble when the unexpected arises. And we're already doing that, so
> I'm not calling for a radical change in society. I think our society
> is already like this. It's more that people find it scary when it is
> actually the reverse.

if DD was gonna spend years writing a book so he could get some press coverage, do some interviews, etc, he should have had a top quality plan for how to use the interviews effectively. he didn't. paragraphs like this are just not good enough.

>
> Rose: It's an absolutely unprecedented opportunity.

the host is doing the equivalent of nodding along

>
> Deutsch: It is. And we change things for the better whenever we can
> see it's for the better. So the unforeseen problems are going to be of
> the form, "something or other looked as though it was going to be
> better, but raised an unforeseen problem". And that's not too bad. A
> lot of times, in the past, people intentionally caused horrible things
> to happen. That's not what we're doing in our civilization.
>
> Rose: The title of the book, "The Beginning of Infinity", is actually
> an optimistic... or "optimism" isn't maybe the right word, it's
> actually an intuition that we may well be on the verge of quite
> possibly a Golden Age.

then the host just abruptly changes the topic cuz he has nothing to say and the discussion isn't valuable enough to want to keep going with, he'd rather just try something else

also lol this question is so utterly wrong. we're always at the BEGINNING of infinity and the BEGINNING does not constitute a "golden age".

>
> Deutsch: Yes.

WHAT THE FUCK DD, DIAF

the interviewer said something strongly contrary to BoI, attributed it to BoI, and you said "yes"

> I think it's more than an intuition.

so DD means "No, it's more than an intuition"? but used "yes" instead?

the intuition thing is second more minor thing the interviewer got wrong

also BoI does advocate optimism and this host is uncomfortable with optimism.

> I think that this
> follows from the best knowledge we have about how knowledge works,

you can't persuade people like this

> what the relationship is between theoretical knowledge on the one hand
> and technology on the other --

long convoluted sentence again

> the ability to change the world. And I
> do call that optimism, even though it's slightly different from the
> conventional meaning of the word, [which is] something like,
> "expecting the best outcome." I don't necessarily expect the best
> outcome; it's just that the best outcome is possible. That is, there
> are no fundamental barriers to progress. That's optimism in my sense.
> In other words, to achieve things that we want to achieve is just a
> matter of knowing how, provided we don't want to violate the laws of
> physics by going faster than light or something, [or by] making a
> perpetual motion machine. Provided we don't want to do that kind of
> thing, we can do anything if we have the right knowledge.

So DD has ignored the golden age thing, compromised his integrity, and failed to make a clear useful point.

> Fortunately,
> we already know how knowledge is created: basically, through the
> methods of science and reason.

oh dear god that's a misleading sentence

>
> Rose: And we also need the right heart, don't we?

wtf?

>
> Deutsch: Yes,

DD means "no", but said "yes", again? did his minder teach him never to contradict an interviewer?

> well, another of the themes of the book that comes out
> from this is precisely that. Moral ideas, and also aesthetic ideas --
> I have a whole chapter on why flowers are beautiful, objectively
> beautiful -- are objective.

that's not what Rose meant by "heart". and DD knows it.

> There must be objectively such a thing as
> right and wrong. There is no automatic way of knowing what it is, any
> more than there's an automatic way of knowing whether the Higgs boson
> exists.

don't use something the audience is unfamiliar with, or confused about, or scared of, as your example.

> What we have to do in the case of the Higgs boson or
> scientific controversies is conjecture testable theories and then do
> experiments to distinguish between them. With moral theories, we can't
> do tests. You can't test experimentally whether a given goal that you
> have is morally right or morally wrong. But what you can do, and what
> is perfectly analogous, is apply rational criticism.

better without the word "perfectly"

and again DD structures things so the important part, in this case "apply rational criticism", is delayed a ton, it comes AFTER tons of words. he should say it early then explain it.

> You can see
> whether that theory meets the criteria that it is intended to meet,

wtf is "that theory"? does DD mean "a moral idea", and wrote it with 15% as much clarity?

and no one knows what "the criteria that it is intended to meet" are. that's something that requires explanation and maybe some better phrasing too.

look, without reading, at the last quotes. just look at sizes and shapes. they aren't having a very interactive back and forth. DD is in lengthy lecture mode and Rose is just pretending now and then it's a discussion with some brief comment from his notes that's vaguely relevant.

also the content isn't very good. i don't blame Ross for not following this *in real time* where one has to be way clearer than in writing.

>
> Rose: Do you have some sense of what we're living for other than just
> participating in the unknown phenomenon of being here and developing
> and evolving?
>
> Deutsch: Yes. Again, this has to do with both moral and aesthetic
> values. What we're trying to do, even though many people try to deny
> this, they deny that they are trying to do what is right, or trying to
> create what is actually beautiful and so on, but that is what we're
> trying to do.

another convoluted sentence

> And that is the meaning.

what?

> Religions traditionally thought
> that the meaning was already known or had been revealed to humans, and
> our task is to live up to that, to enact it.

the "that" and "it" in the last 4 words of this sentence refer to the same thing. it's bad to use too many references. it's really bad to use different words to refer to the same thing. sooo confusing. when you use different words you communicate that you're saying different things.

> My view is the other way
> around,

"the other way around" is a type of reference that's harder to follow than "it" or "that".

> that the meaning of life is something that we are using
> creativity to discover, to build. There isn't a perfectly accurate
> word for what we're doing.

meh, just say something good, focus on that

> But we can't find the meaning of life in
> the world out there, nor just by pure thought or by reference to an
> authority.

the setup seemed like he'd be explaining how it does work but then he didn't. confusing and also the wrong focus.

i mean if you wanna talk about authority, cool, that'd be a good topic. but you'd have to explain it. and it isn't the topic.

> What we have to do is form explanations about what is right
> and wrong, what is better and worse, what is beautiful and ugly, and
> hone those theories while also trying to meet them. At any one moment,
> we will meet them imperfectly, just like scientific theories at any
> one moment are only an imperfect explanation of what the physical
> world is like. But through criticism and conjecture and seeking the
> truth we can eliminate the errors in what we have previously thought
> and thereby make progress. And that is trying to find the meaning of
> life. Trying to create the meaning of life is the meaning of life.

so basically Rose asks how we know life has meaning and DD says like "we learn about morality by making and improving explanations". and he says that in a lot of convoluted words. is anyone impressed?

at the end DD asserts he answered the question but doesn't explain that part. how is creating better knowledge about decision making (morality) finding the meaning of life?

> Rose: So we want to model and articulate reality.

no that isn't what DD was saying.

>
> Deutsch: Yes.

another "yes" when it should be "no". this is so pathetic.

> Both moral, aesthetic as well as abstract and physical
> reality. Yes, exactly.

wait, make that a "yes exactly" instead of "no".

i wonder if DD is doing more harm than good now. more destruction than creation.

and this interview is from years ago and DD's been trending downwards.

>
> Rose: Is the idea of a single universe quaint? Is it already
> anachronistic?

another abrupt topic change after a non-discussion. the host isn't engaged, it's lecture mode with no signs anyone is following.

now watch what happens:

epicly long part

> Rose: Are you satisfied with the precision of language?

tiny comment to make it look more like a discussion

>
> Deutsch: No, but that's only because new ideas, if they're
> fundamental, often make existing language misleading and imprecise.
> This certainly happens in parallel universe theory and in some of the
> other fields that I've worked in. But I think the idea of having a
> perfectly precise language in order perhaps to get rid of all human
> disputes and so on, I think that's a chimera. There's no way to do
> that. What we have to do is be as precise as is necessary to express
> the explanations that we want to express, but perfect precision is
> impossible. Also, terminology, language always contains also built-in
> assumptions, some of which will be wrong. And therefore, language
> contains built-in false theories. One of the ones that I described in
> my first book was: language contains this whole theory that time
> flows, that the present moment moves from yesterday to today to
> tomorrow. But of course, nothing moves from yesterday to today to
> tomorrow. Yesterday always remains where it always ways, behind today.
> This idea of the flow of time, which is built into our very language,
> is just a mistake, and it's one of the things that one has to unlearn
> when one deals with time in physics. That's a general thing, that
> language contains assumptions and theories which may be false.

super long part

>
> Rose: Do you find existence fascinating, and more than that, do you
> find it worthy of ecstasy?

tiny comment

long ass lecture

>
> Rose: I'm curious why you chose to turn away from the word ecstasy.

tiny comment

>
> Deutsch: Because ecstasy to me has a connotation of renunciation of
> criticism. One "falls into" an ecstasy. One is "dominated" by ecstasy.
> And it is something supposed to be primal and beneath the level of
> critical thought. Whereas the thing that I'm aiming for is entirely
> subject to critical thought.
>
> Rose: Do you have regard for the work of Thomas Berry and Brian
> Swimme?
>
> Deutsch: I don't know them, I'm afraid.

lol interaction

and why does DD say he is "afraid"? that's dumb.

long ass lecture

>
> Rose: Do you sense any obligation that we have to succeed?

tiny comment

long ass lecture

>
> Rose: You were at one time - maybe you still are - involved in a
> project called Taking Children Seriously. Is that still something
> that's alive?

ohhh TCS let's pay attention again.

>
> Deutsch: Yes.

no thanks to you, DD

> This is just another application of the same idea.

wow way to downplay TCS as nothing special

> A lot
> of ideas that are prevalent today are hangovers of a time of stasis,
> the time of a static society that preceded what we call Western
> civilization. There was a gradual change beginning 'round about the
> time of Renaissance.

so DD was explicitly asked about TCS. also whether it's alive to which he said "yes" but nothing else yet.

now, given this wonderful chance, he is not yet talking about TCS. let's see how this develops while keeping these issues in mind.

> Those ideas were all about trying to keep
> existing knowledge the same, because they thought that all things
> worth knowing had already been said, perhaps in holy books and
> whatever. And the whole of society was just a gigantic machine for
> keeping the existing ideas, morality, knowledge, technology, ways of
> life, and of course religion, the same, preventing change. If you
> think about how we think about education today, it's one of the things
> that hasn't really caught up with the Enlightenment. When we think,
> for example, of what makes a good school, a good university, a good
> educational system, it's high standards. Well, "high standards" means
> as many people as possible should meet the standard. In other words,
> they should be as alike as possible. And what's more, they should be
> alike in the way that was defined by the previous generation. And
> really, that is the exact opposite of what we need to make progress.

ok there's a pretty good point there, though he's talking about schooling instead of parenting b/c he's a coward.

> As a result, the values that are embodied in educational systems, like
> "do as you're told" and "become standardized" and so on are actually
> in conflict with the values of our society in the broader sense. So
> constantly, issues arise about a conflict between one of the things
> that people take for granted should be normal in a school or in a
> family between parents and children on the one hand, and things like
> freedom of speech, free group association, freedom of thought and so
> on on the other hand. We need to... I was just going to say,
> "emancipate children from compulsory education", but "emancipate" is
> the wrong word because it has a connotation of politics. Just having
> freedom for children is not the same thing as it is in freeing slaves
> or making women equal and so on, because what really counts with
> children is not so much what they're allowed to do or not do as how
> their thinking is supposed to go, what one expects a good life to be,
> or a young person [to be].

ugh convoluted sentence.

no statement of what TCS is still. audience is lost in details.

the good point was drown out by just rambling instead of explaining some clear points in some kind of meaningful context.

> And at the moment, the idea is that youth
> is a time during which one becomes assimilated to the standards by
> which one is going to be judged when one is older. And a freer concept
> which is closer to the values of the Enlightenment is to say that,
> youth/childhood is a time of creativity, and creativity is
> unpredictable. The real thing we need to try to do is to make the
> whole of life like that, rather than to shoehorn children and young
> people into an existing path.
>
> Rose: All of us, yes. Amen to that. We have to wrap it up in a minute,
> sir. I have one question and it's this, at least for now: is the
> universe or the multiverse anything other than blazing intelligence
> itself?

so here DD is getting "Amen" from this guy who is not at all TCS. so DD has failed to communicate even that TCS and Rose disagree. you can't spread ideas this way.

Rose doesn't even know what he was saying "Amen" too. he doesn't know what DD was talking about. DD sorta said a few things in ways people wouldn't notice. ugh.

and no elaboration about TCS being alive, or statement of what it is, or how or where to get info about it, etc. and instead of saying TCS is important DD minimized it.

TCS is alive but no thanks to DD.

> Deutsch: We can make it so. Well, I don't know about "anything other".
> But it is implied by the idea that there are no bounds on progress,
> that if we play our cards right, if we want to, we can become the
> major thing that is happening in the universe. Both in the physical
> sense, that is, by leaving the planet on spaceships and going to other
> planets, and then to other star systems, and eventually other
> galaxies, and spreading across the universe, and making all the matter
> and energy there increasingly do what we want it to, what gives us
> joy, what we think is right for it. (And when I say "we", I don't just
> mean humans; if there are any extra-terrestrials out there, then we
> and they will be doing this together. There's only one kind of person
> possible in the universe.) Not only in that physical sense, but also
> in the moral sense, in the aesthetic sense, we will be the thing that
> is deciding what should happen next and what is beautiful. So, yes, I
> don't think it's quite right to say that mind will be everything, but
> mind can, if we play our cards right, if it plays its cards right, can
> dominate everything, can be the most significant thing about the
> universe.

this fits the short Rose statements and long DD lectures pattern again. the TCS stuff did too.

and what happened to the listener questions that Rose advertised earlier on?

>
> Rose: And we have every reason to trust it.
>
> Deutsch: It's not really a matter of trust, because trust again
> suggests that there is something immutable about the values that will
> come up. Trusting them would mean that we're not going to change them.
> But we are in fact going to change our values. We are doing it very
> fast already, and we will be doing it faster.
>
> Rose: I'm very grateful that you came and spoke to us today. Many,
> many "thank you"s.
>
> Deutsch: Well, very interesting questions. Thanks for having me on the
> show.
>
> Rose: Hope to speak to you again. All the best.
>
> Deutsch: OK, bye-bye then.
>
> Rose: David Deutsch in Oxford, Great Britain. The author of The
> Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World.

well that sucked


-- Elliot Temple
http://curi.us/

[Michael Smithson]

I saw a guy cut off a status-y introduction IRL once with an "ok
that's enough people are probably bored and I wanna talk now" kind of
reaction, heh.

The guy doing the introduction looked a bit sheepish but everyone
laughed and it was even socially OK as a result!

BTW if you want to see a different sort of introduction to an
interview here's a good example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAFKnfN4bfk

Guy lists some books Rand has written, admits he didn't read the
latest one (ITOE) because Rand said she wouldn't mind if he didn't
(heh), and then they are off to the races in terms of substance.

I would think it'd be quite possible, in setting up an interview with
even a somewhat fluffy interviewer (to the extent you think such
things have value), to specify terms of engagement along the lines of
"no multi-paragraphy statusy intros. Let's jump right into substance.
My time is valuable and so is the time of your listeners." And if
someone didn't want to do that much, why talk to them?

I suppose it's possible that the publisher makes u agree to a certain
number of interviews and doesn't tell you who they'll be with in
advance or something. Even still...

Near the beginning of the Albert review is a paragraph I can only
describe as unrelentingly hostile while pretending to be friendly:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/the-beginning-of-infinity-by-david-deutsch-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

>>>It hardly seems worth saying (to begin with) that the chutzpah of this guy is almost beyond belief, and that any book with these sorts of ambitions is necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure, or a fraud, or a joke, or madness.

So Albert says BoI is "necessarily, in some overall sense, a failure,
or a fraud, or a joke, or madness."

>>>But Deutsch (who is famous, among other reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his head. He writes as if what he is giving us amounts to a tight, grand, cumulative system of ideas — something of almost mathematical rigor — but the reader will do much better to approach this book with the assurance that nothing like that actually turns out to be the case.

So Albert says BoI should be approached as if "nothing like" it
presenting a "tight, grand, cumulative system of ideas" is the case.

>>>I like to think of it as more akin to great, wide, learned, meandering conversation — something that belongs to the genre of, say, Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” — never dull, often startling and fantastic and beautiful, often at odds with itself, sometimes distasteful, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, sometimes (even, maybe, secondarily) true.

So Albert says BoI is "often at odds with itself . . . distasteful . .
. unintentionally hilarious."

DD's response to all this is that he is "very pleased" and that Albert
has a "similar sense of what is important."

[Elliot Temple]

cool

> The guy doing the introduction looked a bit sheepish but everyone
> laughed and it was even socially OK as a result!

yes, lots of stuff can work fine socially. it's not all required to be done exactly. actually doing that can be too formulaic and deviating a bit, in the right ways (to them), can impress people (socially). people can think things like e.g. "wow he's bold" or "i wish i had the confidence not to color inside all the lines". deviating can also impress people in non-social ways.

> BTW if you want to see a different sort of introduction to an
> interview here's a good example:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAFKnfN4bfk
>
> Guy lists some books Rand has written, admits he didn't read the
> latest one (ITOE) because Rand said she wouldn't mind if he didn't
> (heh), and then they are off to the races in terms of substance.
>
> I would think it'd be quite possible, in setting up an interview with
> even a somewhat fluffy interviewer (to the extent you think such
> things have value), to specify terms of engagement along the lines of
> "no multi-paragraphy statusy intros. Let's jump right into substance.
> My time is valuable and so is the time of your listeners." And if
> someone didn't want to do that much, why talk to them?

is the time of the listeners valuable? i think some of them are killing time. some want to feel fancy/smart so they enjoy hearing all the status stuff. some want to be able to list that status stuff later when they quote something from the interview, so their friends think they are smart. some will ignore anything that contradicts other authorities unless it has status behind it.

i don't think one should cater to bad listeners (see Wynand in FH!!), but many existing shows do.

ridiculous. worse than i would have guessed from not checking the albert piece. so DD's interview was even worse than i thought. this stuff is pretty significant. he's sanctioning his destroyers. except to the extent DD is already dead, and is on the side of irrationality, in which case he'd just be having a fun day with friends, i guess. but those are the two basic options (which can be mixed somewhat) – sanctioning one's destroyers or siding with irrational destroyers.

-- Elliot Temple
http://fallibleideas.com/