Here is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on
KERA's "Think" with Krys Boyd on August 29, 2011. The audio is
available at
http://www.kera.org/2011/08/29/explanations-that-transform-the-world/
Krys Boyd: You're listening to Think on KERA 90.1. I'm Krys Boyd. Does
understanding the universe give us the power to control the universe?
Humans have sought to explain the workings of the natural world for
millennia and have used the methods of modern science with ever
greater effectiveness since the Enlightenment. We've learned to do
things that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined, from global
telecommunications to life-saving medical treatments to tracing the
history of the universe to within seconds of the Big Bang. And my
guest today will argue that while there was a beginning to humankind's
scientific achievement, there is no reason to believe our achievements
will someday reach an end point. Given what we know about ourselves,
he is hopeful that our acquisition and application of scientific
knowledge could last as long as the universe itself. David Deutsch is
a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Physics at Oxford
University. His new book is called "The Beginning of Infinity:
Explanations that Transform the World". David, welcome to Think.
David Deutsch: Hi, Krys. Thanks for inviting me.
Boyd: You write that, "All progress comes from the human quest for
good explanations." How has our definition of a "good explanation"
evolved over the centuries?
Deutsch: One of the most noticeable changes that happened in the
history of our species was the scientific revolution, which made the
difference between making progress that was either absent or so slow
that no human ever noticed it in their lifetime, and what's happened
since then, which is that we've got used to change happening all the
time and being part of our lives. And because that change was so
noticeable, people wondered what caused it. Initially, they got all
sorts of wrong theories about what it was that made science
successful, and some truths as well. For example, it was realized
almost immediately that rejecting authority was a necessary condition
for making progress. That is, authority in regard to knowledge, though
this spread to political authority as well. But then, in the positive
sense, what actually caused science, people got really confused and
thought that we kind of absorbed knowledge of nature by being open to
experience, and that experience somehow implanted true ideas about the
world in our minds. Now, this is completely untrue, and one of the
things I do in the book is trace how wrong that is and also how the
real explanation, which is that we seek hard-to-vary explanations,
applies not only in science, but in all sorts of other fields,
including art, morality, political philosophy, and so on.
Boyd: It's so interesting, David, to reflect on the idea that the
before the Enlightenment, many people, learned people, assumed that
everything worth knowing had already been revealed. Today, that lack
of curiosity strikes us as almost dangerous.
Deutsch: Yes. It's basically very implausible today, because we're all
hoping and expecting that improvements will be made. The whole of
politics is about who has the best idea for improvements and so on.
It's difficult to imagine, but if you try to imagine what it was like
during most of human history when nobody ever experienced an
improvement in anything, then, in regard to knowledge, it was sort of
common sense that there was this thing called knowledge. We knew that
the sun would rise every day, but there was nothing new to discover,
because all that was going to happen tomorrow was that the sun would
rise again just like it did today.
Boyd: What's the relationship between curiosity and intelligence?
Deutsch: Curiosity, I think, is a way of referring to the desire for
good explanations. It's a way of thinking that there's something here
that we don't know, or some problem, some puzzle, for which we would
like to have the explanation, that is, a statement about reality which
explains why the thing we are curious about is as it is.
Intelligence... Well, I shy away from that word, because it is laden
with this wrong idea of where knowledge comes from. The idea of
intelligence is that there is some ability that allows us to get good
knowledge. But in fact, knowledge comes from criticism, it comes from
conjecture about what might be better than the ideas we have. And
conjecture is fallible. So, curiosity is great. Intelligence, I think,
is a misleading term, and I'd rather refer to things like criticism
and creativity.
Boyd: I find it fascinating that many of the scientists we speak to on
this program have a similar philosophy about intelligence. They're the
last people to say that being a physicist is tantamount to being a
genius. And there are a lot of people in other fields who don't have
any problem at all feeling as if they are very intelligent.
Deutsch: I do think that it's a disservice to humankind to promote the
view that success in anything intellectual is due to something innate.
It's not due to an innate ability, because there is no such ability
possible. It is only due to a critical attitude, an open attitude, a
desire for truth, that sort of thing. And abilities are knowledge
themselves. They are things that we learn in the course of trying to
discover the truth.
Boyd: Can we trust ourselves to use our newly gained abilities for
good rather than evil?
Deutsch: This is part of the question of whether the spectacular
growth of knowledge that has happened in science can happen in other
fields as well, and the one you are asking about is morality. I think
that the answer must be, "Yes, there is such a thing as an objective
difference between right and wrong." And although it's easy to be
cynical and look around at all the evils there are in the world and
also at all the disagreements about right and wrong that there are in
the world, I think if you look more deeply and over a longer time
scale, you can easily see that there is progress and that it's not
just a matter of cultural prejudice or just a matter of definitions.
For example, there was a time, only a few hundred years ago, when
every reasonable person would have thought that slavery is a natural
state of some people, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with
it. Whereas now, you'll hardly find any thinking person who doesn't
agree that it is a great evil, and that steps could and should be made
to abolish it.
Boyd: Let's talk about some of the ways that we've physically changed
the world that we live in. For example, a lot of modern cities today
are shaped as much by human intervention as by geologic forces. Will
you talk about that a little bit?
Deutsch: A city is the obvious example of what I think is a general
truth. Remember, we're only at the beginning of infinity and always
will be and on Earth, we're only at the beginning of shaping it, but a
city is an example of the fact once knowledge is involved in physical
processes, it is the determining factor of the landscape. That is,
whereas other species, the ones that are incapable of generating
knowledge, are shaped by and adapted to their landscape, humans create
their own landscape and shape it and adapt it. So, for humans, there
is no such thing as a resource until some human has developed the
knowledge for making it a resource. I think that if we choose to do
the right thing and continue to use knowledge and to seek better
things and progress, then this will extend to anything and everything.
We'll move off the planet and improve things as we go. But, no doubt
many people will be thinking as I say this, cities and things haven't
always improved things; there's pollution and so on. But I think this
is a myth of a rosy past. It's no good thinking of a rosy past in
which the rivers were clean the air was pure, if people at that time
actually were plagued by cholera.
Boyd: I want to talk about something like global warming. You are
confident that we will be able to survive it given that in the past we
have used our technologies and our intellects to survive inhospitable
climates which occurred naturally all over the planet.
Deutsch: Yes. Global warming is one of the first global challenges
that we face as a result of technology or improving things. We've
improved a whole lot of things, and as a result, a slow worsening has
happened in part of our environment. Now, this has happened on a
smaller scale thousands of times. I'm old enough to remember when many
of the cities in England had smog, and the London fog was deemed to be
part of the London scene. It wasn't even thought of as a thing that
humans could undo. And yet, as technology improved, wealth increased,
and standards raised, the London fog became a thing of the past. And
just as the London fog can become a thing of the past, so can the
problems of global warming.
Boyd: So, we should strive not for sustainability of our current
existence, but for innovations to match our needs as they change?
Deutsch: Yes. The idea of "sustainability", I think, is a terrible
mistake. It is a hyper-optimistic view, ironically, of what humans are
and of what humans can do. It is the idea that we can find a way of
life which will not be dangerous and will not be threatening and will
not require any further creativity or progress. I take the opposite
view to that: I think that problems are inevitable, and that any kind
of stasis is bound to end in catastrophe, so the only thing that's
sustainable is actual progress. And what we need to do, in regard to
global warming, but even more in regard to the things that are coming
up that we don't yet know about, but which might be far more dangerous
for all we know, is to build up the scientific knowledge,
technological knowledge, and wealth to be able to deal with unforeseen
problems when we discover them and, alas, also to recover from
disasters that we fail to foresee.
Boyd: And, I guess, as challenging as it is to create new solutions
and innovations technologically, that's still easier than changing the
basic nature of human beings and what they want and how they act.
Deutsch: Well, it's more than that. If we somehow could succeed in
changing the nature of human beings so that they were not capable of
creating new knowledge, then the same thing would happen to our
species as happened to 99.9% of all species that have ever existed:
namely, we would go extinct. In fact, we would go extinct much faster
because our ecological niche depends on creating new knowledge. All
our sister species, our cousin species, whatever you want to call
them, went extinct. And they went extinct not because they created too
much knowledge and fell afoul of the unintended consequences of their
knowledge, but precisely because they lived a sustainable lifestyle to
which evolution had adapted them. And evolution played the same nasty
trick on them as it usually plays on species: it wiped them out for
doing so.
Boyd: Is it reasonable to imagine we could someday make ourselves
immortal?
Deutsch: Oh yes. It's obvious that the things that make humans die --
I'm talking about natural causes as opposed to accidents and wars and
so on -- are all just technological matters and we have already solved
them. We've increased human lifespan from its natural level of 20-
something up to 80-something or whatever it is now, and we know that
death is caused by certain organic processes in the body, which in
principle can be engineered away. So, while things like travelling to
intergalactic space will no doubt not happen for thousands of years,
it would be very surprising if death were not conquered in the next
few centuries.
Boyd: Well, if you think about it, ideas already have the potential to
outlast the brains and bodies that conceived them. Do we need human
bodies to be fully human or would preservation of the contents of our
brains be close enough?
Deutsch: There are several different strands of technology that might
eventually lead to the effective end of individual people's death,
such as uploading minds into computers and so on. I don't know which
of those will come first. They're all of similar levels of
technological difficulty, so the chances are that pretty soon after
one of them is invented, they will all be invented, and we will think
it just as ridiculous not to back up our minds into some back up
medium as we do today not to back up our life's work from a computer.
Boyd: What an interesting series of challenges we would have then,
deciding who deserves to be backed up, because surely there would be a
financial cost to it.
Deutsch: Well, there will no doubt be a transitional period during
which the technology will be too expensive to apply to everybody. That
is already the case. After all, there are medical treatments now that
can save some people's lives, but cannot save the lives of everybody
with that disease. We have institutions in place that can take care of
that situation. But it will only be temporary, because progress always
consists of alternating phases. First, a creative phase which solves
the fundamental problems, and then, what Thomas Edison called the
"perspiration" phase, where we optimize things. And the perspiration
phase can always be automated. Once something is automated, its cost
goes down to zero, because the only thing that ultimately costs
anything is human attention and creativity. So, soon after the
technology is available, it will become cheaper and eventually will
become just as much taken for granted as the supply of fresh drinking
water.
Boyd: Let's talk about the evolution of human knowledge and culture.
Rather than genes, in this case we talk about memes. And you explain
that some survive because they're good and rational, while others
survive specifically because they crowd out people's appetite for
seeking new ideas and new explanations.
Deutsch: The theory of memes was first thought up by Richard Dawkins
and then elaborated by Susan Blackmore and many others. And I think
it's fundamentally true that all the existing treatments of memes
missed the most important thing about them, which is this distinction
that you just mentioned between what I call rational and anti-rational
memes. The rational memes you characterized just about correctly. They
are the memes that are transmitted from person to person because the
recipient finds that having that knowledge or that behavior benefits
them. But then the anti-rational memes, it's not that they remove
interest, it's that they disable people from criticizing them. So
there are ideas that disable criticism of themselves. And of course
Richard Dawkins' favorite examples of this are certain religions. I
don't think it's true of all religions, but still, it's the archetypal
example that he cites. If you start believing that there's a god who
will punish you if you stop believing in him, then thoughts about that
get suppressed in your mind, and therefore that meme gets hard to
abandon. But I think that this kind of meme, which has an overt
content of saying, "Don't stop believing in me," is actually a rare
kind, and the more insidious kinds are the ones that we don't really
know why we're doing them, such as, well, you mentioned immortality a
while ago. I think that there is an irrational meme that makes people
suspicious of the idea of immortality. They don't mind lengthening
lifespan, but once you talk about lengthening lifespan without a
limit, they start imagining purely imaginary objections. And I don't
think that is rational.
Boyd: Yeah, it is funny that we have many religious traditions that
look forward to an afterlife, that it's something completely separate
and apart from what we have here. But if you look even at literature,
in the stories of human beings who somehow become immortal, they're
always miserable and desperate to end this thing.
Deutsch: Yes, this is an example of the irrationality I was thinking
of. And it is very ironic that religions take this view that having
real immortality would somehow cheat people of the imaginary
immortality that religions offer. By the way, it's also interesting
that the first mathematical theories of infinity were bitterly opposed
by the Church and religious people on the grounds that it was
inherently wrong for humans to try to usurp the functionality of God
in trying to understand the infinite.
Boyd: Let's speak with Ken on the phone in Fort Worth. Hi Ken.
Ken: Hello. Thank you for taking my call, ma'am. I love the show, and
I appreciate what the gentleman has been saying. My question is, if we
allow companies to use all the finite resources on the earth and not
go on in a sustainable way, how can we rely on technology to sustain
us?
Deutsch: The idea that the resources of the earth available to humans
are finite is a mistake. First of all, it's only knowledge that
converts something into a resource in the first place. Nobody knew
that pitch-blend uranium ore was a resource until Henri Becquerel
discovered radioactivity. Soon we will be mining the asteroids for
minerals that are extremely rare on earth. The universe is to all
intents and purposes unlimited and it is our home. To regard just the
resources that you know about today as being "the resources" will
always lead you into the error of thinking that, "they are finite, and
then, once we have used them up, what will we do then?" Unfortunately,
we have no choice, because even if we remained at the present level of
technology and sustained it forever, all that would do is postpone our
extinction. If we want to avoid our extinction, there is nothing
sustainable except the growth of knowledge.
Boyd: You're not arguing of course that we should want to only go out
and waste physical resources. That's not the point that you're making.
Deutsch: No, that's not the point. The question is whether there is an
inherent limit on our progress or not.
Boyd: You disagree with the notion made popular by Stephen Hawking and
others that free will is in fact a sort of illusion. Can you talk
about that?
Deutsch: This is the idea that because we are made of atoms and atoms
are subject to laws of motion that don't allow any wiggle room,
therefore everything we do also doesn't allow any wiggle room, and
therefore our free will must be an illusion. Now, I think that's
called reductionism, and it is simply a mistake. It's sort of assuming
that the laws of physics are a kind of a person, a kind of a
supernatural being that makes us do things. But it's not true. The
laws of physics are simply a description of what we do. So it's not
the laws of physics that make atoms move around. The laws of physics
are simply a description of what they do. And the thing that we see
about the world is that there are levels of description. There are
descriptions at the atomic level and descriptions at the molecular
level and the biological level. And then there are descriptions and
explanations at the level of human thought. And there's no reason to
expect that just because there's a low-level description, there isn't
also a high-level explanation and description. In the book I give some
arguments both due to me and due to people like Douglas Hofstadter
that the high-level description is sometimes the only reasonable
explanation of what is happening. For example, if you play a game of
chess against a computer, then it's not the silicon that has beaten
you. It's the program in the computer, and that program is an
abstraction. The program doesn't consist of atoms. The program is an
abstraction over the atoms, just like human thought is an abstraction
over our atoms, and it is the program that has beaten you. When I make
a decision, it's I who have made it, not my atoms, and not the laws of
physics.
Boyd: So we get really unnecessarily and detrimentally hung up on this
sense that we can get to the absolute foundation of anything.
Deutsch: That's true as well. The idea that there's an absolute
foundation is a formula for stagnation in science and for tyranny in
politics and so on. There will never be an absolute foundation for
knowledge, because there will always be the question, once we have got
a particular fundamental theory, of why it is that way and not some
other way.
Boyd: We have an email here from Paul in Farmer's Branch who says, "It
seems to me we will have many opportunities to go extinct regardless
of how creative we are. Nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions,
solar mass ejection, uncontrollable disease... We may simply not have
enough time to prepare to survive."
Deutsch: I agree with everything in that except for the "regardless".
In all those cases, there is a way that we could make the wrong
decisions and be wiped out as a result, including refusing to make
decisions or shutting our eyes to problems, but there is also a thing
we could do to prevent that. And in all those cases, sufficient
knowledge would solve that problem.
Boyd: So if we were at a place where we could handle it, then we could
handle it.
Deutsch: Yes. And of course there is the possibility that it would
happen before we had that knowledge. For example, an asteroid strike
by something going too fast and too big for us to stop it right now.
The lesson of that is that not only do we need to make progress, we
need to make *rapid* progress, or we will be wiped out.
Boyd: Will knowledge continue to grow even if our brains and bodies
don't evolve in quite the same way they did when we were simply trying
to survive?
Deutsch: Yes. We have become universal computers, universal
explanation machines. And that means that the limits of our ability
are fixed only by the laws of physics, and not by our own
constitution. For example, humans without technology couldn't possibly
live in Oxford, where I live, because the winters in Oxford would kill
any human that wasn't protected by technology such as clothes and
weapons to hunt with. Even in the Great Rift Valley in Africa where
our species evolved, by the time we had evolved, we were already
absolutely dependent on technology to survive. Technology like fire
and clothing. So we're not dependent on our physical constitution,
because we can always adapt nature by using knowledge to compensate
for any physical defects that we may have, or, as we like to think of
it, any physical defects that our environment may have.
Boyd: Let's go back to the phones now. Our next caller is Adam in
Dallas. Hello, Adam.
Adam: If doctors really are able to offer immortality via science,
will that come with infinite use, so that we'll never age? Or will it
just be a constant state of near-death, kind of like living on a life
support machine?
Deutsch: It will be the former. The same argument that tells us that
death is merely a technological problem tells us that youth is also
merely a technological problem. The task of transforming an older body
into a younger body is ultimately just a task of engineering the cells
to be in a slightly different way, and that requires only knowledge.
Boyd: It would be impossible to argue that faith in an ultimate
solution, say, a cure for cancer, has not driven a great deal of
progress and spurred the acquisition of a great deal of knowledge over
time. You say, though, that absolute faith in an ultimate solution can
actually hinder progress after a certain point. Will you explain that?
Deutsch: Yes, certainly. This is, in philosophy, the debate about two
different meanings of the phrase that "humans are perfectible". In one
meaning of that, it means that there is a perfect state that we can
reach if we only do the right thing, like chant the right syllables or
whatever, or a utopia, a perfect society that we can reach if only we
kill the right people and so on. And that notion of perfectibility
leads to stagnation and tyranny. But the other notion of
perfectibility, which is that improvement is always possible, which in
some ways is equally optimistic but in other ways is much more
rational, is also true. And that's the sense of perfectibility that I
argue for, that problems are always soluble. Problems are also
inevitable, and that's why we have no choice but to embark on an open-
ended pursuit of knowledge and good explanations.
Boyd: There's always room for improvement.
Deutsch: Yes.
Boyd: It's interesting. Just this morning on the radio there was a
story about how the philosophy of thinking that people are either
auditory or visual learners has been disproven, at least in one large
study. And it's funny because, for a long time, we based our education
systems around this idea that we understood how people learn one way
or another and we could cater to that. Had we not continued to
question that, we wouldn't have gotten to the place where maybe we can
teach even better.
Deutsch: Yes. I hadn't heard of that study but it sounds extremely
plausible to me, and I would have expected that to be so. I would even
go further and say that even if it had been true that some people are
auditory and some people are visual, this is itself merely a problem
that people could overcome if they wanted to. An auditory person could
become visual if they were interested in doing so. The reason I think
that would have been true is that we are general-purpose knowledge
creating machines.
Boyd: Let's go back to the phones now. We have Sal on the line in
Richardson.
Sal: Your advocacy of Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum
mechanics seems to be not amenable to the kind of scientific inquiry
dynamics that you talk about in your book, that is, conjecture,
criticism, and testability. Would you care to comment on that? It's so
dogmatic that it's almost bearing on a religious kind of belief.
Deutsch: Yes. It's a line of criticism that is often heard. The idea
that, "Quantum mechanics forces upon us the theory of parallel
universes as a sort of religious belief, because all that quantum
mechanics can actually tell us is the outcomes of experiments. It
can't actually prove that the mechanism by which these outcomes are
brought about is as the theory says. So maybe it isn't and maybe there
aren't these parallel universes." The trouble is that that is exactly
the line which would let you say that the observations of the planets
don't necessarily tell us that the sun is at the center of the solar
system. It could still be the Earth, and all that happens is the light
reaching the Earth is as if there were planets out there orbiting the
Sun. This is exactly the argument that the results of quantum
mechanics are just as if there were parallel universes producing them.
Or to give a rather notorious topical example, it's like the people
who say, “Fossils were put there exactly as if there had been
dinosaurs that gave rise to them. But nobody has ever seen a dinosaur,
nor will anybody ever see the dinosaurs that produced the fossil, and
therefore it's a matter of religion to believe in them.” But that is
to misconstrue what science is about. Science is not about just
predicting the outcomes of experiments. It is about understanding the
world.
Boyd: What's the value of the mistakes we have made and continue to
make over time in our pursuit of science?
Deutsch: The pursuit of science is, as my old boss John Wheeler used
to say, who was in Austin, Texas at the time when I worked with him,
our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. And in
the book, I say that it might help people to understand better the
nature of the scientific process if we called scientific theories
"misconceptions" right from the outset, rather than only after we have
discovered what's wrong with them. If we are going to expect continual
improvement, we must expect that all our existing theories -- although
they contain a lot of truth -- contain misconceptions, and therefore,
in the final analysis, are misconceptions. We could talk about
Einstein’s misconception of gravity being a better misconception than
Newton's misconception of gravity. Error is the natural and ubiquitous
state of human minds. The only difference is whether we improve upon
our errors or don't, or refuse to. And if we want to improve upon
them, we have to do these specific things involving criticism, seeking
better explanations, seeking the truth, openness, tolerance, and so
on.
Boyd: Your way of thinking really appeals to me, because there are
people who would find our consistent and predictable fallibility as
time goes by really depressing, but it's a source of delight for you.
Deutsch: It is. It is the means of progress. You talked about
education just now; another thing that has held back education is the
idea that education is about finding ways of not making errors. But in
fact, progress only ever comes through making errors. Errors ought to
be encouraged! As I said, our whole problem is to make them as fast as
possible.
Boyd: Let's go next on the phone to Colleen in Dallas. Hello, Colleen.
Colleen: I've heard an argument, I think due to Descartes, that if you
can imagine an infinite being, then that is a proof of the existence
of God. But from what I understand, the idea of infinity is more of a
scientific idea, and that idea itself merely refers to a physical
reality. To apply that to something completely non-physical is kind of
a fallacy. So I was just wondering what your take on that was.
Deutsch: I almost agree. Certainly that purported proof, called the
ontological argument for the existence of God, is a fallacy. We can't
blame the early philosophers for making that statement, because
infinity wasn't properly understood until about the 19th century. But
infinity is meaningful not only in physics -- for example, that
there's an infinite number of points in a one-inch distance; we now
know how to make sense of statements like that -- it's also meaningful
in mathematics, and it has been found that we can reason validly about
infinity and deeply understand infinity in mathematics too.
Boyd: Is it possible that some other civilization somewhere in the
universe could arrive and explain all this to us, or will it only have
meaning if we as human beings find the answers we seek on our own?
Deutsch: Here's another education theory point. Whenever you
understand something, it is you who have created the idea in your
mind. It may feel as though somebody has poured it into you, like wine
into a glass, but that is an illusion. All knowledge arises by
conjecture and criticism. And when we listen to somebody speaking, we
don't download their theory into our brain. If we did, we wouldn't
understand it; it would be like learning it in a foreign language.
What we do is conjecture what it means, and then use what that person
is saying as a means of criticizing and improving our conjecture, and,
with luck, we then find a way of understanding what that person is
saying, and with even more luck, we find a way of improving on it.
Boyd: You have a fascinating chapter in the book, which might surprise
people, devoted to the question of why flowers are beautiful. And you
demonstrate that at least some things of beauty are in fact
objectively beautiful, or appear to be. Why do flowers fit that
description?
Deutsch: The conventional view of beauty is that it has no objective
basis, that it is purely subjective or else purely cultural. So when
we say, "it's a matter of taste," that's a way in everyday language of
saying there isn't any objective truth in it. But the thing about
flowers is that the evolution of flowers had to make a signal of
attractiveness that would be difficult to forge, but also easy to
recognize by someone else -- in this case, insects -- who knew the
code. And so the insect/flower co-evolution produced a standard, which
was an artistic standard, for what flowers should look like. Now,
here's my argument for why it hit on an objective standard. Tthere are
plenty of examples of signaling in nature, but most of them don't look
beautiful to humans. So the question is, why do flowers, which evolved
to look attractive to insects, also look attractive to humans? And I
make the argument in detail in the book that the only explanation for
this is that the most efficient way of solving this problem of inter-
species signaling was for both the insects and the flowers to evolve
towards a criterion of objective beauty, which then appealed to humans
as well, because humans are capable of understanding objective things.
Boyd: What is the best way to guard against our tendency to lose sight
of our own fallibility?
Deutsch: I think we have to look at whether the things we are saying
and doing meet the problem that they are purported to meet. So, if you
ask, "Why am I in this job?", and if the best explanation that you can
come up with is one that you would think was silly if someone else
said about their job, then that's prima facie evidence that you're in
an irrational pattern of thinking. By the way, like anything else,
this is not conclusive evidence, because it may be that you are in
fact in the right job, but don't actually know the reason. But in that
case, it would do you good to know the reason.
Boyd: Do you find it challenging to have these conversations with
people like me, or people in a general audience, or do you find that
discussing these ideas with regular people who haven't studied them in
depth actually helps to clarify your own thinking?
Deutsch: Definitely the latter. If anything, professionals are more
likely to be stuck in their ways than people who, if I can put it this
way, have real lives, and whose philosophical problems grow out of
real life problems. There's also the fact that, as you will have
noticed, I really like pontificating.
Boyd: Which makes you an excellent radio guest.
Deutsch: Well, thank you.
Boyd: David Deutsch is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of
Physics at Oxford University. His new book is called, "The Beginning
of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World". David, it's been
quite a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending this hour with us.
David: Thank you for having me on the program.
Boyd: My name is Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.