2011-08-18 David Deutsch radio interview: "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook (transcript)

[Josh Jordan]

This is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook on August 18, 2011. The audio is available at http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/08/18/david-deutsch

Tom Ashbrook: From WBUR Boston, I'm Tom Ashbrook, and this is On Point. David Deutsch made his name in the high science of quantum computing, theoretical computers so powerful they could master the secrets of the universe. And that is the scale on which he works in his new book, "The Beginning of Infinity". Since the scientific revolution, he says, human potential has become just that: infinite. We are a player, the player, in the universe. This hour On Point: quantum physicist and philosopher David Deutsch on humanity's place in the cosmos. Joining me now from Oxford, England is David Deutsch, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he's a member of their Center for Quantum Computation. He's been called the founding father of quantum computing for his groundbreaking work in the field, and is a champion of the theory of parallel universes, the "multiverse". He's the author of several hugely bold, wide-ranging books, including "The Fabric of Reality" and his latest, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World". David Deutsch, it is wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for being here. 

David Deutsch: Hi, Tom. Thanks for inviting me on the show. 

Ashbrook: You draw an enormous line through human history at the Enlightenment and scientific revolution. Describe the before and after a little bit for us in broad strokes. We'll dig in, but stepping back from it, what do you see?

Deutsch: This line is the most important thing that's ever happened because, prior to it, the world was static in terms of ideas. That is to say, sometimes things did improve and sometimes they got worse, but from the point of view of any individual, from the time they were born until the time they died, everything that they could notice about the world -- the technology, the economics, the ways of life -- would not have changed, would not have improved. And after the Enlightenment, it was the exact opposite. We have learned to live with the fact that everything improves in every generation, and what's more, previous ways of life become unviable as better ways of life appear. This staticity, I call it a horrible practical joke played on the human race by nature, because for hundreds of thousands of years, we had the capacity to improve, to reduce human suffering, to increase our knowledge of the world, but almost none of that happened. And then suddenly there was this explosion where it has happened.

Ashbrook: And it's not just a matter of us then going on to develop all kinds of technology from microwave ovens to high-speed cars, you name it. You say that this change introduced us to -- or created -- the Beginning of Infinity, the title of your book. What do you mean by that?

Deutsch: The phrase "The Beginning of Infinity" primarily means the universal power of explanatory knowledge. But it turned out -- and I didn't really plan this when I wrote the book -- but it turned out that in every chapter there were several different meanings, several different senses in which there was a beginning of infinity which hadn't happened before: either a condition for unlimited progress, or a beginning of unlimited progress, or the sense in which progress can be unlimited.

Ashbrook: To tie it to the scientific revolution coming in with the Enlightenment, how does that produce the Beginning of Infinity?

Deutsch: Well, it's like this: science is about finding laws of nature which are testable regularities. We've discovered this method, the scientific method, which I think is essentially trying to find good explanations of what happens, rather than bad explanations which could apply to absolutely anything. Once one has this method -- which is the scientific method, but it also ranges more broadly over other fields, like philosophy -- the scope of both understanding and controlling the world has to be limitless. The reason it has to be limitless is basically, everything that isn't forbidden by laws of physics has to be possible, because, this is the simplest argument in the book, if it weren't possible, then that would itself be a testable regularity in nature. For example, we can't travel faster than the speed of light. That's a limitation on our technology, and it is a law of nature. If it were the case that we could, for example, never get off the earth and never survive on any other planet, that would also be a testable regularity, it would be a law of nature, but there is no such law of nature, and therefore, everything that isn't forbidden by laws of nature must be possible. And that's a momentous link between explanatory, theoretical knowledge, and technological knowledge, the ability to control the universe.

Ashbrook: You are just thrillingly bold in the way you think and the way you write. There's a lot I want to dig in to, but if you take just that, what you've just shared with us, David Deutsch, if that scientific revolution means, with everything that comes with it, a tradition of criticism, willingness to conjecture and then test, discovery of how to make progress, as you describe it, that means that there is, in your words, no limit to understanding and controlling the world. I'm trying to get my mind around that. By "the world", you don't just mean this earthly planet, you mean the universe. Really? Humans? No limit to their understanding and controlling the universe?

Deutsch: That's right. Both on the largest scale, and in some ways more exciting, the smallest scale. As Richard Feynman said, there's plenty of room at the bottom, with nanotechnology, and space exploration at the highest scale. The thing is there can't be such a limit, because, as I just said, any limit that, let's say, confined us to the solar system or even to our galaxy, either would have to be imposed by the laws of physics or it would have to be an illusion.

Ashbrook: What gives you the nerve, the cojones, to assert that? The traditional way of looking at ourselves is, we're so puny, we're such a little speck in the vast cosmos, but you're literally saying that we can, without limit, understand and control that cosmos.

Deutsch: Indeed. It's ironic that this idea that we're puny and unimportant and the world isn't here for our benefit and so on, at the time when it was invented about 400 years ago, was one of the driving forces of the scientific revolution, because the previous world views had been anthropocentric. The idea was that the world was built around us, it was built either for our benefit or as a punishment or for us to obey its moral laws and so on, and this was tied in with traditional authoritarian modes of knowledge. The early part of the Enlightenment was a rebellion against those ideas, and we found that we're not the center of the universe, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, and later we found that even the sun is not, and so on. But, I think that once we have got over this early anthropocentrism, we find that, although humans are not central to the universe, explanatory knowledge is. And we have a choice: we don't have to jump on the bandwagon of this built-in potential of the universe if we don't want to. We could destroy ourselves, we could chose not to do it, but, because we are capable of explanatory knowledge, we're also capable of unlimited progress if we so choose.

Ashbrook: So if we don't turn away from this path of the scientific revolution laid out, and if we don't blow ourselves up (we'll talk about both of those), you're picturing a future, with those two very large "if’s, in which human beings -- what, little by little? -- come to get their hands on the levers of the universe? What would that mean?

Deutsch: Certainly. The thing is that the idea that this isn't possible is essentially a reversion to the archaic, supernatural view of the universe. The idea there would be that there are things that are beyond our understanding forever.

Ashbrook: Let's accept it for a moment. What would it mean if we do indeed achieve it? 

Deutsch: Well, the title of the book is The Beginning of Infinity, and that refers to an interesting property of all kinds of infinity, including this one, namely: one is never "nearly there". One is always just beginning to scratch the surface of infinity. So once there was a time when the earth was unimaginably huge, just the surface of the earth was unimaginably huge, and now we have learned to regard it as tiny and vulnerable. And Stephen Hawking has said that we'd better get off it soon, just so that we hedge our bets. And there was a time when even the Northern Hemisphere was unimaginably hostile territory compared with where we evolved in Eastern Africa. And so we have learned not only to conquer the Northern Hemisphere technologically, with things like clothing and fire and so on, but having conquered it once and for all, we take that for granted and we then regard it as home.

Ashbrook: David Deutsch walks in very high company, both as a scientist, and as a communicator of science and philosophy as well. Let's here just briefly hear from a couple of others, very briefly. The late astronomer Carl Sagan spoke evocatively of the wonders of the cosmos. You can hear the sort of early pre-echo of David Deutsch's infinity. Here is Carl Sagan in the Cosmos series episode, "The Edge of Forever". 

Carl Sagan (audio clip): Every human generation has asked about the origin and the fate of the cosmos. Ours is the first generation with a real chance of finding some of the answers. One way or another, we are poised at the edge of forever.

Ashbrook: Or to put it another way, maybe at the beginning of infinity. And here's physicist Stephen Hawking who speaks through a voice synthesizer, warning, and we'll put this to David Deutsch, warning here, Stephen Hawking, that traits humans needed for survival may also lead to their downfall. Here he speaks at the online forum Big Think.

Stephen Hawking (audio clip): If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were a survival advantage in the past.

Ashbrook: In the past, but maybe a danger in the future. David Deutsch, our listeners are paying close attention. We have lots of questions and comments coming in for you already. Here from online, Lark writes, let me put this to you, professor: "Does Professor Deutsch see that mankind has sufficient wisdom and self control, self-knowledge, to make our potentially infinite influence on the universe positive, rather than destructive?"

Deutsch: We have the power to make mistakes as well as to get things right. In fact, as my old boss John Wheeler used to say, in a sense, our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. There is no way of doing science, and indeed there is no way of life altogether, that avoids mistakes. To try to do that is a recipe for disaster, because one does not then build in error-correction mechanisms. Science is one gigantic error-correction mechanism where we try to find out all our misconceptions and we're expecting even our most cherished beliefs eventually to turn out to be flawed in some way or another. So we have to be open to that, and we have to be ready to cope with the practical consequences of being wrong.

Ashbrook: But what if the error is, say, to Stephen Hawking's fear, the destruction of a planet that we very much need to live on?

,

Deutsch: Well, okay, I entirely agree with Stephen Hawking that we should hedge our bets by moving away from the Earth and colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy and so on, but I disagree with his reasons. His reasons, I think, are all rooted in this rather ancient, pre-scientific way of looking at the world, which has survived in certain prevailing attitudes. The idea, for example, there we're inherently selfish and aggressive and so on. That is an echo of many of the static society type of bad ideas that used to inhibit progress, such as the original sin, and the idea that everything worth knowing is already known. In other words, when your listener asked, "Do we have the wisdom?” this kind of assumes that wisdom is a kind of static thing which you can have in advance, but that is not the case. The truth of the matter is that wisdom, like scientific knowledge, is also limitless, and what we call wisdom today is going to be laughable silliness in centuries to come.

Ashbrook: In that time, if I understand you correctly, centuries or eons to come, if all this rolls forward it may look laughable because our understanding, our knowledge, our explanations, as you say, would be so much deeper and greater, and with that our power? It's hard to grapple with, but you seem to be talking about humans actually influencing big swaths of the universe or maybe even the multiverse, as we've influenced Earth. Is that really what you're suggesting? Will we re-engineer the cosmos?

Deutsch: Yes, this is not only desirable, as Stephen Hawking says, but it's really inevitable. Suppose that for some reason we hadn't colonized Europe and had stayed in Africa until the present day, and somehow our existing state of knowledge had formed. Then we would at that point colonize the Northern Hemisphere, because we would want to, and there would be no reason not to, because, in this rather silly thought experiment, we would see that we could easily make it our home. Unlike any other species on Earth, our home, our spaceship Earth, our life-support system is entirely provided by our own knowledge. This is different from any other species. For other species, their way of life is determined by the knowledge embodied in their genes, in their biological makeup, and given to them by evolution.

Ashbrook: But we also depend on some fundamentals that we don't create with our minds: oxygen, H2O...

Deutsch: Well, in fact, that's not the case. Soon there'll be a lunar colony, and the oxygen and H2O that the people there will use will be entirely generated by human technology. The first people to arrive there will find they have to think about this a lot. They will have to make sure that their oxygen generators that will generate oxygen from the moon rock are reliable and that there's redundant capacity to avoid possible errors and things going wrong and so on. But then, after a while, the whole thing will be automated. It will become easy for them, so easy that they won't think of oxygen as being something that has to be provided with great effort in order to make this inhospitable environment hospitable. They'll just think that it's there, just as we take for granted that water will come out of the tap.

Ashbrook: Maybe I misunderstood you, but when you described this almost infinite -- or infinitely expanding -- knowledge, and with that, control, I didn't think simply of zipping around the universe or space travel. It seemed to you were describing something even more profound than that: almost the ability to re-shape, as we have in many ways, re-shaped Earth.

Deutsch: Yes, it's all part of the same thing. We can go and visit the moon without re-shaping it, but if we want to live on the moon, then we have to have an environment in which humans can not only survive, but thrive. And in order to thrive, there have to be facilities in place to create resources that people don't have to think about. Just like most of the places that are inhabited on the planet Earth today were originally, at the time when the human species evolved, death traps. In fact, as I argue in the book, even the Great Rift Valley in East Africa where we did evolve was also a death trap. Our species came into existence already possessing technology that people had invented. I say "people", because I use that as a generic term for all entities that can create explanatory knowledge. The species that were our predecessors already had explanatory knowledge. Most of those species, by the way, were killed by the environment in which they evolved. It's a terrible mistake to think that the environment in which we evolved is especially friendly to us. That is not the case. Environments usually kill their species. The overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct, killed by the very environments in which they evolved.

Ashbrook: No small number by human beings themselves, but that's a very alternate view to the sort of cozy blue-green planet spaceship Earth view that's out there. David Deutsch is with us from Oxford, England. His new book is The Beginning of Infinity. Professor Deutsch, David Deutsch, our listeners are responding to those. You're talking about unlimited understanding and control. Carlos, on Facebook, is thinking about somebody, something else out there, all knowing, all-powerful, maybe. He writes, "I recall the Niels Bohr / Albert Einstein argument. Albert Einstein saying, ``God does not play dice.'' (i.e. we can know about things), Neils Bohr saying, ``Quit telling God what to do!'" Are you describing humanity challenging the role of what traditionally has been/is/was thought of as God?

Deutsch: It's funny you should mention the Bohr / Einstein debate, because the context in which Bohr said to Einstein, "Don't tell God what to do", was basically when Einstein was saying, "The Universe makes sense." And Bohr was promoting an interpretation of quantum mechanics that tried to say that the universe doesn't have to make sense, that there are certain questions we're not allowed to ask, that if you think you have understood it, then you haven't, that sort of blatant irrationalism. And when Einstein used that metaphor, of "God doesn't play dice", Einstein was in fact an atheist, but what he meant by that metaphor is, that the universe makes sense. To say that the universe doesn't make sense is a reversion to a supernaturalist view of the world, and your listener was saying, perhaps there's some power out there greater than us, and so on. This is the kind of thinking that prevented progress for millennia. If there is a power out in the universe that is greater than us, it's just people, people who have more knowledge than us.

Ashbrook: And by "people" you don't necessarily mean "Earthlings" or "human beings", but rather, "knowledge-makers", or something.

Deutsch: Exactly, entities that can create explanatory knowledge. And there can't possibly be more than one kind of those. There can only be ones that have made more progress and ones that have made less progress. 

Ashbrook: Now why is that? We've all seen the scientific movies. Some of them look green and scaly and act very bizarre. What do you mean there can only be one kind of knowledge-creating entity like ourselves?

Deutsch: The thing is that they, like we, would gain their ability to control matter and energy and motion and so on by understanding universal laws of physics. And those are the same for them and for us. So we have the ability to understand, because we are, among other things, universal computers. The only barrier to understanding things for us is the amount of energy or the speed of computation that we have, and we can always increase those with technology. And the same will be true for the aliens. 

Ashbrook: You say, don't fear them. Stephen Hawking says, "Fear them!". You say, "Don't".

Deutsch: Yes. That is because we have to understand the lesson of universality. The lesson of universality is that there is only one set of laws of physics on our planet, in our solar system, in our galaxy, in the whole universe, past, present, future. It's the same set of laws, and they provide the same set of opportunities for control and the same set of barriers. You were speaking about controlling the universe. The statement is not that we can do anything we like, like gods, the statement is that we can do everything that isn't forbidden by the laws of physics. And that limitation is common to us and to these advanced aliens that you're thinking of.

Ashbrook: Let me bring our listeners in. Dana in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, you're on the air with David Deutsch in Oxford, England. Welcome, Dana, you're on the air.

Dana: Hi Tom. Mr. Deutsch, given our record of hubris and the resulting plunder of this planet, whether it's pollution of our life-sustaining systems or pushing other animals and plants to the brink of extinction, I really hope your thesis is wrong. I really don't want to see the footprint of humankind spread beyond the Earth. I really feel that humans need to learn humility in the face of the cosmos and nature before we attempt to even "colonize" (another word with imperialist connotations) even the moon, let alone the galaxy.

Ashbrook: Dana, I'll put that to David Deutsch, but he's kind of suggesting that, with the scientific revolution, it is inevitable. We keep thinking, our thinking figures things out; it pushes our footprint further and further into the universe, Dana.

Dana: Well, he's handing a sword then to the religious fundamentalists who say, "See? Science has no ethics. As long as it's possible, it's permissible."

Ashbrook: Dana, let us pick it up. David Deutsch, what do you say to these observations? He sees hubris, he sees us as plunderers, says, "Humility first, please."

Deutsch: The avoidance of hubris and the glorification of humility is the thing that kept us suffering for hundreds of thousands of years. The guilt of which we are accused by this worldview, although it has some modern fashionable forms, is actually not a new idea. It was the prevailing idea throughout most of history. Ironically, as I said earlier, really the reverse is the case. It's not that we have polluted the Earth, on balance; the Earth was killing us with pollution from the moment our species began. The cholera bacillus evolved to do exactly that. It killed millions of people, and before human beings existed, it killed the people that were our predecessors. The biosphere killed all our cousin species like the Neanderthals, and it has only been since the invention of human technology that we have managed to lift ourselves a little way out of this. 

Ashbrook: David Deutsch, let's go straight to our listeners. Joe, in Farmville, Virginia. Joe, you're on the air with David Deutsch.

Joe: I have a question for Mr. Deutsch, but before that, let me make a comment. He's saying that man's destiny is to colonize space. Well, actually [unintelligible], in Psalms 8, it says that, the stars are the work of God's fingers. And then it says that God gives man dominion over the work of his fingers, and then it says what form that dominion will take. It says God will put all things under man's feet. So that's like saying that God will put the moon and the stars under Man's feet.

Ashbrook: And you've got a specific question about that, Joe. Give it to us.

Joe: Yes, the idea is that because of the expansion of the universe, all the galaxies are going away from us, and the further away they are, the faster they're going, so it seems to me that we won't be able to colonize [unintelligible], but that does leave our own galaxy with 300 billion stars. So my question is, how can we get beyond?

Ashbrook: Joe, you're breaking up, but I think we've got it. If the universe is expanding rapidly, that means it's moving away from us. David Deutsch, in that case, how do we get out there?

Deutsch: I only heard part of that question, but I think I understood what it was. One of the great growth areas in fundamental physics in the last few years has been in cosmology. We have learned that all the cosmological models that anybody believed until, let's say, 20 years ago are definitely wrong. But what we don't yet know is the cosmological model that is in fact right. The prevailing one at the moment is that the universe is not only expanding, which we've known for nearly a century, but is expanding at an accelerating rate through this thing which we call dark energy (just because we need to call it something). But we have absolutely no idea what it is.

Ashbrook: So how do we catch up with it? How do we get a tail-hold out there if it's rushing away from us?

Deutsch: Well, the exact implications of the accelerating expansion of the universe on the controllability of the cosmos are not well known yet. The caller's assumption was that eventually we would be just left with one galaxy and all the others would be receding at the speed of light so we'd never catch up with them. If that is so, then only a few trillion years after that, the galaxy itself will start being torn apart by these same forces, and what we would have to do is put more and more information into a smaller and smaller volume. And whether that will be possible or not depends on details that we don't yet know. All I can say is that there are plenty of cosmological models in which progress can go on literally forever, that is, literally no upper bound, and there are some in which progress is forced to come to an end after a few trillion years. But with cosmological models currently changing on a timescale of a decade or so, I think it would be rash to build our plans for a trillion years on whatever the current theory of that is.

Ashbrook: For any number of reasons. People listening very closely here. Ellen was listening when we played the clip from Stephen Hawking; he talked about survival genes for aggression in humanity now holding us back. She asks if you can address that. You said it was an artificial limitation, but what does that mean? Do human beings need to re-evolve into something where we don't destroy one another for survival purposes?

Deutsch: The idea of an "aggression gene" or a "selfishness gene" is a misunderstanding of what humans are. It's a misunderstanding of the universality of humans. The thing is, humans can decide that any pattern of behavior that they think best is best, and then act according to it.

Ashbrook: So you say, but an awful lot of humans have felt hostage to violence and war for such a long time. Ask somebody with a spear in his back. It looks like it's baked in the cake.

Deutsch: Yes, you can't really go by most of human history prior to the Enlightenment, because those societies were all the same.

Ashbrook: But our wars just got bigger after. Our wars just got larger, more deadly.

Deutsch: If you think about the kind of things that are built into our genes, like the desire to eat food when we're hungry or to have sex or to preserve our lives, if you think of any of those which are going to be much more deeply in our genes, if anything is, than, let's say, aggression or selfishness, then you can easily see millions of examples of those things being violated at a whim of culture or individual decisions. People become anorexic and don't eat. People become pacifists and sacrifice their lives, or suicide bombers, to name an evil example. If those things, the things which are most heavily built into our genes can be swept away just by a little bit of culture, including very bad culture, then there is really no case to be made that more subtle things like selfishness are built-in in an irretrievable way.

Ashbrook: If I may, you pull this view beyond science itself, and you write, very early on in the book, that the scientific revolution has also been a revolution in technology (we've seen that), political institutions (not so sure where that's gone), moral values, art, every aspect of human welfare. We have listeners who are wondering on that front. Greg says, "You are talking about ability, not morality. Morality is the realm in which stories remain the relevant method of figuring things out." What do you say?

Deutsch: It is much more controversial that there is objective truth in things like morality and art than in things like mathematics and science, but the arguments are really the same in all cases. The fact is, before the enlightenment, there was practically nobody in the world who thought that, say, slavery was morally wrong, or that sexism was morally wrong, or that parents didn't have the right to beat their children. These were all things that had virtually 100% acceptance. Only lunatics, if anybody, disputed it. Whereas now, it's gone entirely the other way around. In other words, now there is an absolute consensus among thinking people that slavery is wrong and those other things I mentioned are also wrong. So we've gone from 100% to 0%, and I think that it doesn't make sense to regard that change as arbitrary. In other words, it could have gone either way just like skirt length fashions or something.

Ashbrook: You think it's the enlightenment, the scientific revolution. It worked there as well.

Deutsch: Yes, well, the scientific revolution is just one facet of what I call the Enlightenment. It reached into morality as well, and these examples that I've given are cases where morality has improved objectively.

Ashbrook: Vijay is calling from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vijay, you're on the air with David Deutsch. Thanks for calling.

Vijay: Hi, Tom. I think that Professor Deutsch's thesis is deeply misguided and badly written, and here's why. His basic idea is that, since we can reason, we can do anything (aside from violating the limits placed by physics). But we also know, from computer science and mathematics, that there are many things that are beyond reason. These are called independence results or incompleteness results. There are things that we cannot know, and these lead us to deep issues and philosophical issues the context of computer science and mathematics. Professor Deutsch is most likely aware of these things, and still his basic thesis is that because we can reason, we can understand anything and therefore we can do anything. And secondly, technically, the statement that, "aside from the limits placed by physics and incompleteness results, everything else is possible" is essentially a truism. So what exactly is he trying to say? What is new here?

Ashbrook: Vijay, stand by. David Deutsch, what do you say?

Deutsch: Okay, I'll deal with the first question first. In mathematics in can be proved that the overwhelming majority of mathematical truths cannot be proved, and indeed cannot be known. So the question is, how is that compatible with the idea that we can do anything? The short answer is this: if a mathematician is interested in a certain problem, let's say to do with prime numbers, then one way that will lead to the bottle of champagne being opened is if this mathematician discovers a proof that this thing is true or a proof that it is false. But another way that you could get exactly the same success in human terms would be to prove that it is unprovable. This is as much a reason for writing a mathematics paper and opening the bottle of champagne as proving that's true or proving that's false. And if you can't prove that it's unprovable, then maybe the next best thing is that you conjecture that it's unprovable. And then you write a paper about what would be the consequences if it were, and another paper about what would be the consequences if it weren't, and therefore you get twice the number of papers just because the thing you were working on is unprovable. So, in the human sense, mathematics provides no barrier to progress, even though, as a matter of logic, there are things that we can't know. But they're not things that matter ultimately to humans. Now, to answer the second question, "what have I said that's new?" In a sense, you're quite right, it's almost a trivial consequence of regarding the scientific worldview as true, but listen to the other commentators! They are saying that gaining control of the universe is (a) impossible and (b) wrong, and I am saying that the scientific worldview is incompatible with those ancient ideas of limitation.

Ashbrook: Vijay, our time is so short at this point. Let me move on, but I appreciate you raising it, and the question will no doubt be worked on for a long time. Let me get one more right here, David in Boston. David, thank you for calling.

David: Thanks for having me on. Mr. Deutsch, I'm very much a fan of science and I'm not opposed to the idea of progress and knowledge. I guess for me it's a question of whether the story of human history is simply a story of the development of knowledge or a moral struggle. It seems to me that since Francis Bacon first formulated this idea of technology of control over nature, the results have always been ambiguous, and people have always felt that the way we use technology is sometimes good and sometimes ill. Our modern technology from nuclear weapons to the capacity for a modern famine, which is very different from famines in the past, is as ambiguous as it ever has been. So I'm sort of surprised, especially at this moment, when this critical environmental crisis is going on, and we're really at risk of destroying the life-giving value of the Earth, that you're so optimistic.

Ashbrook: David, let us pick it up right there and use the time we have. David Deutsch, what do you say to our young, smart listener?

Deutsch: Okay, two things. One is that you're grossly underestimating how bad the past was.

Ashbrook: You mean the Edenic, environmentally unscathed past?

Deutsch: That past, yes. It was bad not only because of what nature was doing to us but because of what humans were doing to each other. The staticity that was imposed by bad human ideas and violence channeled into bad directions is simply incomprehensible to someone who is used to our society. 

Ashbrook: But the environment certainly looked better 50 years ago than it does today.

Deutsch: Well, I think that is not comparing like with like, but let me just say the other half of that first. In regard to modesty, this idea that we're going to control as much as we want to control sounds like hubris if you think that the total amount to be controlled is finite and therefore, we're going to be nearly there and we're going to be like gods. But actually, the title of the book is The Beginning of Infinity. No matter how much of this we do, we will always be just scratching the surface. We will always be looking out at an infinite vista that we have not yet understood, not yet conquered, and so on. And when we look back, we will think that the previous people's ideas of being nearly there, like our present-day idea that having conquered the surface of the Earth, we're nearly there, the idea that that is hubris will seem pathetic.

Ashbrook: Final question. We have just one minute. The Enlightenment, the thing that you see behind all of this, might we turn our backs on that? There's certainly a lot of pushback and denial in substantial parts of American politics and culture to science and the scientific revolution. Might we turn our back on that very thing?

Deutsch: There are no guarantees. I believe that the Enlightenment has sort of tried to happen several times in human history, such as in Athens, and in Florence during the Renaissance. I describe these in the book as well. There will have been other cases as well, which were less spectacular because they were put down earlier. It is always possible to turn one's back on enlightenment and reason, and we could do so, in which case, perhaps our whole planet is doomed, and somebody else will the people that have the beginning of infinity.

Ashbrook: David Deutsch, we could go on, maybe, to infinity here. It's been fantastic. Thank you for joining us today from Oxford.

Deutsch: Thank you for having me.

Ashbrook: It's wonderful to have you with us. The new book is, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World." I'm Tom Ashbrook. Thanks for joining us. This is On Point.

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 8, 2012, at 3:27 PM, Josh Jordan <therealj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> This is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook on August 18, 2011. The audio is available at http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/08/18/david-deutsch

Why did you transcribe several of these? Did you think they were good? Did you learn stuff? If you learned from them, what did you learn? Why didn't you write any comments on the stuff you transcribed? Wouldn't you learn more if you discussed what you thought was good or bad about the interviews?

> Tom Ashbrook: From WBUR Boston, I'm Tom Ashbrook, and this is On Point. David Deutsch made his name in the high science of quantum computing, theoretical computers so powerful they could master the secrets of the universe. And that is the scale on which he works in his new book, "The Beginning of Infinity". Since the scientific revolution, he says, human potential has become just that: infinite.

if human potential is infinite now, it always was...

like how the potential for beating zelda OOT in under 20 minutes existed from day 1, it wasn't actually created when wrong warp was found.

> We are a player, the player, in the universe. This hour On Point: quantum physicist and philosopher David Deutsch on humanity's place in the cosmos. Joining me now from Oxford, England is David Deutsch, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he's a member of their Center for Quantum Computation. He's been called the founding father of quantum computing for his groundbreaking work in the field, and is a champion of the theory of parallel universes, the "multiverse". He's the author of several hugely bold, wide-ranging books, including "The Fabric of Reality" and his latest, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World". David Deutsch, it is wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for being here.
>
> David Deutsch: Hi, Tom. Thanks for inviting me on the show.

don't say "thanks" in reply to prestige whoring.

say "i'm just a person, like everyone else. i'm going to explain some ideas on your show and i want people to judge if they think the ideas make sense to them. i don't think my credentials are relevant to whether my explanations are persuasive. let's not worry about them"

> Ashbrook: You draw an enormous line through human history at the Enlightenment and scientific revolution. Describe the before and after a little bit for us in broad strokes. We'll dig in, but stepping back from it, what do you see?
>
> Deutsch: This line is the most important thing that's ever happened because, prior to it, the world was static in terms of ideas.

athens...?

> That is to say, sometimes things did improve and sometimes they got worse, but from the point of view of any individual, from the time they were born until the time they died, everything that they could notice about the world -- the technology, the economics, the ways of life -- would not have changed, would not have improved. And after the Enlightenment, it was the exact opposite. We have learned to live with the fact that everything improves in every generation, and what's more, previous ways of life become unviable as better ways of life appear. This staticity, I call it a horrible practical joke played on the human race by nature, because for hundreds of thousands of years, we had the capacity to improve,

DD is implying the interviewer's comment about potential is wrong. but he's doing it so unclearly no one will notice he's contradicting. BS

> to reduce human suffering, to increase our knowledge of the world, but almost none of that happened. And then suddenly there was this explosion where it has happened.
>
> Ashbrook: And it's not just a matter of us then going on to develop all kinds of technology from microwave ovens to high-speed cars, you name it. You say that this change introduced us to -- or created -- the Beginning of Infinity, the title of your book. What do you mean by that?
>
> Deutsch: The phrase "The Beginning of Infinity" primarily means the universal power of explanatory knowledge. But it turned out -- and I didn't really plan this when I wrote the book -- but it turned out that in every chapter there were several different meanings, several different senses in which there was a beginning of infinity which hadn't happened before: either a condition for unlimited progress, or a beginning of unlimited progress, or the sense in which progress can be unlimited.
>
> Ashbrook: To tie it to the scientific revolution coming in with the Enlightenment, how does that produce the Beginning of Infinity?
>
> Deutsch: Well, it's like this: science is about finding laws of nature which are testable regularities. We've discovered this method, the scientific method, which I think is essentially trying to find good explanations of what happens, rather than bad explanations which could apply to absolutely anything.

this is anti-popperian and wrong

if it's "essentially" about something, that thing would be CRITICISM – pointing out ERRORS, not bragging how "good" your claims are in a positive way.

> Once one has this method

it might help clarify matters to mention you think most "scientists" don't have/use what you call the "scientific method". coward.

> -- which is the scientific method, but it also ranges more broadly over other fields, like philosophy -- the scope of both understanding and controlling the world has to be limitless. The reason it has to be limitless is basically, everything that isn't forbidden by laws of physics has to be possible, because, this is the simplest argument in the book, if it weren't possible, then that would itself be a testable regularity in nature. For example, we can't travel faster than the speed of light. That's a limitation on our technology, and it is a law of nature. If it were the case that we could, for example, never get off the earth and never survive on any other planet, that would also be a testable regularity, it would be a law of nature, but there is no such law of nature, and therefore, everything that isn't forbidden by laws of nature must be possible. And that's a momentous link between explanatory, theoretical knowledge, and technological knowledge, the ability to control the universe.
>
> Ashbrook: You are just thrillingly bold in the way you think and the way you write. There's a lot I want to dig in to, but if you take just that, what you've just shared with us, David Deutsch, if that scientific revolution means, with everything that comes with it, a tradition of criticism, willingness to conjecture and then test, discovery of how to make progress, as you describe it, that means that there is, in your words, no limit to understanding and controlling the world. I'm trying to get my mind around that. By "the world", you don't just mean this earthly planet, you mean the universe. Really? Humans? No limit to their understanding and controlling the universe?

so his question is "really? you mean what you published? i don't have any counter-argument, but really?"

>
> Deutsch: That's right.

bad answer to the "really?" question. better to say like "that's the wrong way to look at it..."

> Both on the largest scale, and in some ways more exciting, the smallest scale. As Richard Feynman said, there's plenty of room at the bottom, with nanotechnology, and space exploration at the highest scale.

this feynman cite is for prestige, it doesn't add anything to the concept of nanotechnolgy here. maybe for an audience where a decent number of people have actually read feynman discussing this it'd be good, but for a lay audience he's just saying "i'm a fancy dude quoting fancy dudes"

> The thing is there can't be such a limit, because, as I just said, any limit that, let's say, confined us to the solar system or even to our galaxy, either would have to be imposed by the laws of physics or it would have to be an illusion.

note how much focus there is on this limit without ever talking about its practical applications and meaning. for example, it means there is no limit on how little you can coerce your kids.

tho ppl might say: u physically can do that. but is immoral. which raises an important issue. all this talk about limits without talking about morality is kinda fucked up, you need to consider morality for it to connect with human life

and like, as i told DD before he published BoI, stuff being moral is a major factor in it actually happening. put another way, there is basically a law of physics (actually an indirect consequence of various laws of physics) where people don't choose to do things they are immoral. but DD doesn't inform his audience that he's counting morality within the laws of physics in a way. and no one is guessing that, he's misleading them.

> Ashbrook: What gives you the nerve, the cojones, to assert that?

ok this is an interesting question. it sets up a good opportunity for DD to say some important stuff about how e.g. anyone can and should use their mind and shouldn't just assume anything which is a Big Idea is automatically false. if you use your mind and you cross some lines about what are normal expected ideas, that doesn't mean you're wrong. you should do everything you can to check if they are wrong, but don't just automatically give up.

let's see how DD handles it.

> The traditional way of looking at ourselves is, we're so puny, we're such a little speck in the vast cosmos, but you're literally saying that we can, without limit, understand and control that cosmos.
>
> Deutsch: Indeed. It's ironic that this idea that we're puny and unimportant and the world isn't here for our benefit and so on, at the time when it was invented about 400 years ago, was one of the driving forces of the scientific revolution, because the previous world views had been anthropocentric. The idea was that the world was built around us, it was built either for our benefit or as a punishment or for us to obey its moral laws and so on, and this was tied in with traditional authoritarian modes of knowledge. The early part of the Enlightenment was a rebellion against those ideas, and we found that we're not the center of the universe, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, and later we found that even the sun is not, and so on. But, I think that once we have got over this early anthropocentrism, we find that, although humans are not central to the universe, explanatory knowledge is. And we have a choice: we don't have to jump on the bandwagon of this built-in potential of the universe if we don't want to. We could destroy ourselves, we could chose not to do it, but, because we are capable of explanatory knowledge, we're also capable of unlimited progress if we so choose.

so DD passed up the opportunity to say all kinds of important stuff, and instead stuck to repetitive safer territory that won't change the world. why does he even do interviews if he's unwilling to say much?








ok i'm done. i've left the rest below for others to comment on.

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Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com
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