2011-09-19 David Deutsch radio interview on "AirTalk" (Transcript)
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Josh Jordan
Jan 8, 2012, 2:51:31 PM1/8/12
to Beginning of Infinity
Here is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on
AirTalk with David Lazarus on September 19, 2011. The audio is
available at http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2011/09/19/20721/infinity-book
David Lazarus: You're listening to AirTalk on 89.3 KPCC, I'm David
Lazarus from the LA Times, sitting in for Larry Mantle. In just a
little bit, I'll be joined by my colleague Mary McNamara, who's the TV
critic for the paper. We'll be doing a little "Emmy recap" for you.
Right now, I want you all to be good doobies and put on your thinking
caps, because we're going to be talking about a new book called "The
Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World." It's by
David Deutsch, who's also the author of "The Fabric of Reality", in
which he details his theory of everything. Yes, this is a man who
covers a lot of ground. David Deutsch, thank you very much for joining
us.
David Deutsch: Hi, David. Thanks for inviting me.
Lazarus: It's interesting when you look at the title of this book,
"The Beginning of Infinity." You might think it has some sort of
spatial or chronological meaning, but you're describing more a
journey. Tell us about that journey.
Deutsch: It's primarily the beginning of an infinity of knowledge.
That is to say, we're only just scratching the surface of what is
possible for thinking beings like ourselves to understand. And there's
an intimate link between understanding nature and controlling it. So,
in fact, among other things, there is a spatial implication. We are
going to spread out across space and throughout time, but the main
thing is that we're going to spread out across the space of ideas, and
the message of the book is that there is no fundamental limit to what
we can understand and explain.
Lazarus: One thing that's very interesting here is that you make a
very sharp distinction about saying that it is not so much that we are
pursuing truth or knowledge, but rather that we are pursuing
explanations, good explanations, for what's around us. What's the
difference?
Deutsch: The only reason that one might avoid the words "truth" and
"knowledge", which I don't, is that they have traditionally been given
very irrational meanings. Knowledge has been defined as "that which
you know for certain" and that sort of thing, and that's not
available. But if, like the philosopher Karl Popper (whom I sort of
follow in these matters), you define knowledge as just being true and
useful information, then we certainly can gain knowledge. But an
explanation, to me, is a statement about reality. And a good
explanation is a statement about reality that accounts for something
and is hard to vary while still accounting for it. And that, I think,
is the key difference between science and pre-scientific ways of
trying to understand the world, such as faith or myth.
Lazarus: I notice how artfully you just phrased that, of the "non-
scientific ways". And in your book, it's much the same: you do address
creationism briefly, you do address intelligent design briefly, but
you don't really get into the tension between faith and science. And
yet the undercurrent of your work seems to be a very cunning broadside
against religion, because that would seem to qualify as what you call
in your book a "bad explanation", or a bad philosophy. "Bad" only
insofar as it doesn't provide a good, rational, substantial
explanation for things.
Deutsch: Yes, well, I'm only interested in criticizing religion and
such-like things as explanations of, for example, the adaptations in
living things. Religion may have other uses, such as cultural ones,
which I have no real objection to. And as for "broadside", I think
that's not quite the right word, because I made a decision even before
I wrote my first book, that it's just going to take too much time to
address all the reasons why all the wrong theories are wrong, and I'd
rather make progress, because it's making progress that is really
convincing to people. You never really convince people of anything by
proving to them that their current ideas are wrong. They have to have
somewhere to jump to, somewhere which is better by their own lights
than their existing place. And therefore I want to show what I
consider to be the true situation of the universe and our place in it,
and let people decide for themselves how they will change from
mistaken views which have held us back.
Lazarus: Mr. Deutsch, I'm going to read a little excerpt from the New
York Times review of your book, in which David Albert writes, "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. 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." And yet that "notwithstanding everything" is a key phrase here,
because he goes on to shoot down some of the things you say.
Deutsch: Yes. David Albert and I have had many debates on these
issues, and I could almost use the same words about him. He's a great
iconoclast. One of the themes that he particularly disputes was the
many-universes interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which I'm a
proponent --
Lazarus: And just for everyone playing at home, that means there's an
infinite number of parallel universes out there, and things are
happening all the time.
Deutsch: That's right, and there are many instances of ourselves
having this conversation and slightly different conversations. Our
idea is that this follows inexorably from our deepest theory of
physics, namely quantum theory. But only a minority of physicists
believe this. The thing about David Albert is that he's the only
physicist I know who was once a proponent of this and has then changed
his mind.
Lazarus: What I don't understand is, you write in the book about the
importance of developing a good explanation for things, and yet, when
we talk about the multiverse and these parallel worlds and what-not, I
have no way of challenging you, nor do I have any way of challenging a
person of faith when they say that God created the world in seven
days.
Deutsch: Oh, the difference is quite profound. The thing is that the
parallel universes interpretation is really just the statement that
quantum theory is a description of reality, and isn't to be argued
away as some kind of illusion or just a description of how we perceive
the world. It's not a description of humans, human minds, human
experiences, but the equations literally describe the world. So, in
that sense, it is purely a scientific theory, and the objection to it
is purely a bit of bad philosophy. It's the same bad philosophy that
says that fossils are not evidence of dinosaurs, because no one has
ever seen dinosaurs. You might as well say that you couldn't challenge
a paleontologist, because he cannot prove that there ever were
dinosaurs and you can't prove that there weren't. The logic of the
denial that quantum theory is true is the same as the logic of the
denial that evolution is true. The psychological motivations may be
different, let me hasten to add, but the logic is the same.
Lazarus: But do we have the same record of proof that paleontologist
would be able to offer up for the theory of evolution (moreover that
there were brachiosauruses and what not tromping all over the place at
one time)? Because he can hold up the bones, he can hold up the
fossils, he can say, "There, in your face, dude."
Deutsch: Yes. You see, the thing he's holding up isn't dinosaurs, and
the thing that I'm holding up, namely interference phenomena, isn't
parallel universes. But in both cases, the dinosaurs and the parallel
universes, respectively, are the only known explanations of those bits
of evidence. When I say "explanations" I mean "accounts of reality".
That's the sense in which I mean the logic is the same.
Lazarus: Your questions or comments for David Deutsch, author of "The
Beginning of Infinity" are very welcome. Don, calling from Costa Mesa,
welcome to the program.
Don: Hi, good morning. I'm curious what your guest thinks about, I've
always wondered about, what is the ontological status of ideas?
Lazarus: Are you talking about creativity, Don?
Don: No. In what sense do ideas exist?
Deutsch: I argue in the book that all sorts of abstract entities, like
numbers and indeed ideas, do exist objectively. The argument for that
is that the causal effects of ideas are independent of the physical
substrate in which they're instantiated. For example, the ideas that
I'm telling you now begin as sort of electrical charges in neurons in
my brain, and then get translated into vibrations in air, and then
electrical vibrations in copper wires, and so on, but the effects that
they have have nothing to do with copper or air. You couldn't deduce
them from any amount of study of copper or air. The thing that is
having the causal effect and will make you now do one thing rather
than another, perhaps buy my book or whatever, is contained in the
information, in the knowledge, which is an abstraction. It isn't the
atoms that are making you do it. It's not the atoms that are now
hitting your ear that are having that effect, it's the information
that is embodied in them.
Lazarus: Back in college we used to get high and talk like this.
You're making a living out of it.
Deutsch: (Laughs) Yes, well, it's a matter of whether one is critical.
The ideas always come by an undirected variation of existing ideas,
and it could be that that's what getting high is. But what makes the
difference between making progress with it and not making progress is
the criticism afterwards.
Lazarus: You're also defining an almost organic process, this
generation of ideas, this perpetuation of progress, and you are indeed
a very optimistic person. In your book, you do write that problems are
inevitable, but you also write that problems are soluble. And yet, you
focus on the European Enlightenment as one of those signal moments in
mankind's history where things sort of kickstarted to a whole other
level. Why did we see that one moment? Why aren't we seeing a steady
progression of ideas as opposed to this one sudden flurry of ideas?
Deutsch: Perhaps I understated what the Enlightenment was. I think the
reason why the Enlightenment is a sort of one-off idea is that it is
the *beginning* of infinity. It's not that everything happened at that
time. In fact, scientific progress is happening much faster now than
it did at the height of what is called the Enlightenment in the 18th
century. But what changed between the 18th century and the whole of
human history before that, apart from a few attempted Enlightenments
that very tragically failed, is that they found a way of making
sustained progress and of having a tradition of criticism. For most of
human history, those are two opposing concepts. Tradition is usually
about preventing change and preventing criticism. But this magical
thing, a tradition of criticism, if it can be stabilized, and it only
has been stabilized once in history, at the time we call the
Enlightenment, is the beginning of an open-ended creation of
knowledge, exponentially growing, indefinitely.
Lazarus: Prior to the enlightenment, in the so-called Dark Ages, was
it a matter of us not having this criticism around us, or was it a
matter of something holding it back -- that something, more than
likely, the Church?
Deutsch: I think the external manifestations of repression which hold
back the growth of knowledge are only ever a secondary effect, a sort
of tidying-up effect, tidying up the few ideas which manage to get
through the primary effect, which is cultural. It's not that there
were all sorts of ideas bristling up like they are today, but that
were then being suppressed. For the most part, it's that people were
not having ideas. They did not think that problems were soluble. They
thought that the situation of the world as the saw it was inevitable
and unchangeable, and they thought that the only route to betterment
was a supernatural one, and couldn't happen on Earth anyway. So,
that's the difference.
Lazarus: Dave, calling from Costa Mesa, welcome to the program.
Dave: Back in ancient times, Indians thought, or some civilization
thought, that eclipses were caused by God, that that was the best
information they had. So, your theories don't necessarily mean that
they are true, because obviously you're working with the information
you have. So, do you agree that you may be way off if new information
comes up?
Deutsch: Not only do I agree, I insist on that. The whole point of the
beginning of infinity, in other words, that unlimited improvement is
possible, is that even things that we consider incontrovertibly true
today are eventually going to be improved upon. Not all of them; we
don't know which ones will and which ones won't, but there will be
things that we consider incontrovertible today that will be improved
upon tomorrow. In science, we have examples of this all the time.
Cosmology has recently discovered that the expansion of the universe
is accelerating, and only a few years ago, the debate was whether the
universe was going to re-collapse or expand forever without
accelerating. That it might accelerate was simply not in the cards. So
a whole new kind of explanation was needed, and that gives us a whole
new conception of cosmology.
Lazarus: We've only got about one minute left, but based on your
thinking that all problems are soluble, even if we don't see the
solution readily, does that mean that we will save the environment,
that we will save the planet, that we will harness alternative
energies, that we will fly to other planets?
Deutsch: Yes. It means that we can do this if we chose to (if we want
to), and if we do it the right way, which is to understand that such
improvements are caused by the growth of knowledge. We need to
maximize that at the expense of parochial details that might obsess us
in the moment.
Lazarus: Gosh, you make it sound so easy.
Deutsch: (Laughs) Very hard.
Lazarus: And in the multiverse, I assume there's a conversation just
like this going on in which I am actually showing my deep fluency in
quantum mechanics right now.
Deutsch: There is.
Lazarus: Fantastic. I knew I could do that somewhere. David Deutsch is
the author of "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform
the World." He's also the author of "The Fabric of Reality." Mr.
Deutsch, thank you so much for joining us.
Deutsch: Well, thank you. It's been fun.
AirTalk with David Lazarus on September 19, 2011. The audio is
available at http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2011/09/19/20721/infinity-book
David Lazarus: You're listening to AirTalk on 89.3 KPCC, I'm David
Lazarus from the LA Times, sitting in for Larry Mantle. In just a
little bit, I'll be joined by my colleague Mary McNamara, who's the TV
critic for the paper. We'll be doing a little "Emmy recap" for you.
Right now, I want you all to be good doobies and put on your thinking
caps, because we're going to be talking about a new book called "The
Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World." It's by
David Deutsch, who's also the author of "The Fabric of Reality", in
which he details his theory of everything. Yes, this is a man who
covers a lot of ground. David Deutsch, thank you very much for joining
us.
David Deutsch: Hi, David. Thanks for inviting me.
Lazarus: It's interesting when you look at the title of this book,
"The Beginning of Infinity." You might think it has some sort of
spatial or chronological meaning, but you're describing more a
journey. Tell us about that journey.
Deutsch: It's primarily the beginning of an infinity of knowledge.
That is to say, we're only just scratching the surface of what is
possible for thinking beings like ourselves to understand. And there's
an intimate link between understanding nature and controlling it. So,
in fact, among other things, there is a spatial implication. We are
going to spread out across space and throughout time, but the main
thing is that we're going to spread out across the space of ideas, and
the message of the book is that there is no fundamental limit to what
we can understand and explain.
Lazarus: One thing that's very interesting here is that you make a
very sharp distinction about saying that it is not so much that we are
pursuing truth or knowledge, but rather that we are pursuing
explanations, good explanations, for what's around us. What's the
difference?
Deutsch: The only reason that one might avoid the words "truth" and
"knowledge", which I don't, is that they have traditionally been given
very irrational meanings. Knowledge has been defined as "that which
you know for certain" and that sort of thing, and that's not
available. But if, like the philosopher Karl Popper (whom I sort of
follow in these matters), you define knowledge as just being true and
useful information, then we certainly can gain knowledge. But an
explanation, to me, is a statement about reality. And a good
explanation is a statement about reality that accounts for something
and is hard to vary while still accounting for it. And that, I think,
is the key difference between science and pre-scientific ways of
trying to understand the world, such as faith or myth.
Lazarus: I notice how artfully you just phrased that, of the "non-
scientific ways". And in your book, it's much the same: you do address
creationism briefly, you do address intelligent design briefly, but
you don't really get into the tension between faith and science. And
yet the undercurrent of your work seems to be a very cunning broadside
against religion, because that would seem to qualify as what you call
in your book a "bad explanation", or a bad philosophy. "Bad" only
insofar as it doesn't provide a good, rational, substantial
explanation for things.
Deutsch: Yes, well, I'm only interested in criticizing religion and
such-like things as explanations of, for example, the adaptations in
living things. Religion may have other uses, such as cultural ones,
which I have no real objection to. And as for "broadside", I think
that's not quite the right word, because I made a decision even before
I wrote my first book, that it's just going to take too much time to
address all the reasons why all the wrong theories are wrong, and I'd
rather make progress, because it's making progress that is really
convincing to people. You never really convince people of anything by
proving to them that their current ideas are wrong. They have to have
somewhere to jump to, somewhere which is better by their own lights
than their existing place. And therefore I want to show what I
consider to be the true situation of the universe and our place in it,
and let people decide for themselves how they will change from
mistaken views which have held us back.
Lazarus: Mr. Deutsch, I'm going to read a little excerpt from the New
York Times review of your book, in which David Albert writes, "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. 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." And yet that "notwithstanding everything" is a key phrase here,
because he goes on to shoot down some of the things you say.
Deutsch: Yes. David Albert and I have had many debates on these
issues, and I could almost use the same words about him. He's a great
iconoclast. One of the themes that he particularly disputes was the
many-universes interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which I'm a
proponent --
Lazarus: And just for everyone playing at home, that means there's an
infinite number of parallel universes out there, and things are
happening all the time.
Deutsch: That's right, and there are many instances of ourselves
having this conversation and slightly different conversations. Our
idea is that this follows inexorably from our deepest theory of
physics, namely quantum theory. But only a minority of physicists
believe this. The thing about David Albert is that he's the only
physicist I know who was once a proponent of this and has then changed
his mind.
Lazarus: What I don't understand is, you write in the book about the
importance of developing a good explanation for things, and yet, when
we talk about the multiverse and these parallel worlds and what-not, I
have no way of challenging you, nor do I have any way of challenging a
person of faith when they say that God created the world in seven
days.
Deutsch: Oh, the difference is quite profound. The thing is that the
parallel universes interpretation is really just the statement that
quantum theory is a description of reality, and isn't to be argued
away as some kind of illusion or just a description of how we perceive
the world. It's not a description of humans, human minds, human
experiences, but the equations literally describe the world. So, in
that sense, it is purely a scientific theory, and the objection to it
is purely a bit of bad philosophy. It's the same bad philosophy that
says that fossils are not evidence of dinosaurs, because no one has
ever seen dinosaurs. You might as well say that you couldn't challenge
a paleontologist, because he cannot prove that there ever were
dinosaurs and you can't prove that there weren't. The logic of the
denial that quantum theory is true is the same as the logic of the
denial that evolution is true. The psychological motivations may be
different, let me hasten to add, but the logic is the same.
Lazarus: But do we have the same record of proof that paleontologist
would be able to offer up for the theory of evolution (moreover that
there were brachiosauruses and what not tromping all over the place at
one time)? Because he can hold up the bones, he can hold up the
fossils, he can say, "There, in your face, dude."
Deutsch: Yes. You see, the thing he's holding up isn't dinosaurs, and
the thing that I'm holding up, namely interference phenomena, isn't
parallel universes. But in both cases, the dinosaurs and the parallel
universes, respectively, are the only known explanations of those bits
of evidence. When I say "explanations" I mean "accounts of reality".
That's the sense in which I mean the logic is the same.
Lazarus: Your questions or comments for David Deutsch, author of "The
Beginning of Infinity" are very welcome. Don, calling from Costa Mesa,
welcome to the program.
Don: Hi, good morning. I'm curious what your guest thinks about, I've
always wondered about, what is the ontological status of ideas?
Lazarus: Are you talking about creativity, Don?
Don: No. In what sense do ideas exist?
Deutsch: I argue in the book that all sorts of abstract entities, like
numbers and indeed ideas, do exist objectively. The argument for that
is that the causal effects of ideas are independent of the physical
substrate in which they're instantiated. For example, the ideas that
I'm telling you now begin as sort of electrical charges in neurons in
my brain, and then get translated into vibrations in air, and then
electrical vibrations in copper wires, and so on, but the effects that
they have have nothing to do with copper or air. You couldn't deduce
them from any amount of study of copper or air. The thing that is
having the causal effect and will make you now do one thing rather
than another, perhaps buy my book or whatever, is contained in the
information, in the knowledge, which is an abstraction. It isn't the
atoms that are making you do it. It's not the atoms that are now
hitting your ear that are having that effect, it's the information
that is embodied in them.
Lazarus: Back in college we used to get high and talk like this.
You're making a living out of it.
Deutsch: (Laughs) Yes, well, it's a matter of whether one is critical.
The ideas always come by an undirected variation of existing ideas,
and it could be that that's what getting high is. But what makes the
difference between making progress with it and not making progress is
the criticism afterwards.
Lazarus: You're also defining an almost organic process, this
generation of ideas, this perpetuation of progress, and you are indeed
a very optimistic person. In your book, you do write that problems are
inevitable, but you also write that problems are soluble. And yet, you
focus on the European Enlightenment as one of those signal moments in
mankind's history where things sort of kickstarted to a whole other
level. Why did we see that one moment? Why aren't we seeing a steady
progression of ideas as opposed to this one sudden flurry of ideas?
Deutsch: Perhaps I understated what the Enlightenment was. I think the
reason why the Enlightenment is a sort of one-off idea is that it is
the *beginning* of infinity. It's not that everything happened at that
time. In fact, scientific progress is happening much faster now than
it did at the height of what is called the Enlightenment in the 18th
century. But what changed between the 18th century and the whole of
human history before that, apart from a few attempted Enlightenments
that very tragically failed, is that they found a way of making
sustained progress and of having a tradition of criticism. For most of
human history, those are two opposing concepts. Tradition is usually
about preventing change and preventing criticism. But this magical
thing, a tradition of criticism, if it can be stabilized, and it only
has been stabilized once in history, at the time we call the
Enlightenment, is the beginning of an open-ended creation of
knowledge, exponentially growing, indefinitely.
Lazarus: Prior to the enlightenment, in the so-called Dark Ages, was
it a matter of us not having this criticism around us, or was it a
matter of something holding it back -- that something, more than
likely, the Church?
Deutsch: I think the external manifestations of repression which hold
back the growth of knowledge are only ever a secondary effect, a sort
of tidying-up effect, tidying up the few ideas which manage to get
through the primary effect, which is cultural. It's not that there
were all sorts of ideas bristling up like they are today, but that
were then being suppressed. For the most part, it's that people were
not having ideas. They did not think that problems were soluble. They
thought that the situation of the world as the saw it was inevitable
and unchangeable, and they thought that the only route to betterment
was a supernatural one, and couldn't happen on Earth anyway. So,
that's the difference.
Lazarus: Dave, calling from Costa Mesa, welcome to the program.
Dave: Back in ancient times, Indians thought, or some civilization
thought, that eclipses were caused by God, that that was the best
information they had. So, your theories don't necessarily mean that
they are true, because obviously you're working with the information
you have. So, do you agree that you may be way off if new information
comes up?
Deutsch: Not only do I agree, I insist on that. The whole point of the
beginning of infinity, in other words, that unlimited improvement is
possible, is that even things that we consider incontrovertibly true
today are eventually going to be improved upon. Not all of them; we
don't know which ones will and which ones won't, but there will be
things that we consider incontrovertible today that will be improved
upon tomorrow. In science, we have examples of this all the time.
Cosmology has recently discovered that the expansion of the universe
is accelerating, and only a few years ago, the debate was whether the
universe was going to re-collapse or expand forever without
accelerating. That it might accelerate was simply not in the cards. So
a whole new kind of explanation was needed, and that gives us a whole
new conception of cosmology.
Lazarus: We've only got about one minute left, but based on your
thinking that all problems are soluble, even if we don't see the
solution readily, does that mean that we will save the environment,
that we will save the planet, that we will harness alternative
energies, that we will fly to other planets?
Deutsch: Yes. It means that we can do this if we chose to (if we want
to), and if we do it the right way, which is to understand that such
improvements are caused by the growth of knowledge. We need to
maximize that at the expense of parochial details that might obsess us
in the moment.
Lazarus: Gosh, you make it sound so easy.
Deutsch: (Laughs) Very hard.
Lazarus: And in the multiverse, I assume there's a conversation just
like this going on in which I am actually showing my deep fluency in
quantum mechanics right now.
Deutsch: There is.
Lazarus: Fantastic. I knew I could do that somewhere. David Deutsch is
the author of "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform
the World." He's also the author of "The Fabric of Reality." Mr.
Deutsch, thank you so much for joining us.
Deutsch: Well, thank you. It's been fun.
Elliot Temple
Apr 21, 2014, 9:50:57 AM4/21/14
to FI, FIGG, BoI
it's not like some advanced context where he has some subtle disagreement that's relevant, it's a basic context where, as far as is relevant, he's just plain a Popperian.
> you define knowledge as just being true and
> useful information, then we certainly can gain knowledge. But an
> explanation, to me, is a statement about reality.
> And a good
> explanation is a statement about reality that accounts for something
> and is hard to vary while still accounting for it. And that, I think,
> is the key difference between science and pre-scientific ways of
> trying to understand the world, such as faith or myth.
>
> Lazarus: I notice how artfully you just phrased that, of the "non-
> scientific ways". And in your book, it's much the same: you do address
> creationism briefly, you do address intelligent design briefly, but
> you don't really get into the tension between faith and science. And
> yet the undercurrent of your work seems to be a very cunning broadside
> against religion, because that would seem to qualify as what you call
> in your book a "bad explanation", or a bad philosophy. "Bad" only
> insofar as it doesn't provide a good, rational, substantial
> explanation for things.
>
> Deutsch: Yes, well, I'm only interested in criticizing religion and
> such-like things as explanations of, for example, the adaptations in
> living things. Religion may have other uses, such as cultural ones,
> which I have no real objection to. And as for "broadside", I think
> that's not quite the right word, because I made a decision even before
> I wrote my first book, that it's just going to take too much time to
> address all the reasons why all the wrong theories are wrong, and I'd
> rather make progress, because it's making progress that is really
> convincing to people. You never really convince people of anything by
> proving to them that their current ideas are wrong.
i wonder if there's a subtle hint here that DD doesn't value it. it's reading between the lines, but i have a bit of a hard time imagining someone saying this who really valued refutations of their ideas a lot.
> They have to have
> somewhere to jump to, somewhere which is better by their own lights
> than their existing place. And therefore I want to show what I
> consider to be the true situation of the universe and our place in it,
> and let people decide for themselves how they will change from
> mistaken views which have held us back.
>
> Lazarus: Mr. Deutsch, I'm going to read a little excerpt from the New
> York Times review of your book, in which David Albert writes, "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. 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." And yet that "notwithstanding everything" is a key phrase here,
> because he goes on to shoot down some of the things you say.
>
> Deutsch: Yes. David Albert and I have had many debates on these
> issues, and I could almost use the same words about him. He's a great
> iconoclast. One of the themes that he particularly disputes was the
> many-universes interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which I'm a
> proponent --
> For example, the ideas that
> I'm telling you now begin as sort of electrical charges in neurons in
> my brain, and then get translated into vibrations in air, and then
> electrical vibrations in copper wires, and so on, but the effects that
> they have have nothing to do with copper or air. You couldn't deduce
> them from any amount of study of copper or air. The thing that is
> having the causal effect and will make you now do one thing rather
> than another, perhaps buy my book or whatever, is contained in the
> information, in the knowledge, which is an abstraction. It isn't the
> atoms that are making you do it. It's not the atoms that are now
> hitting your ear that are having that effect, it's the information
> that is embodied in them.
>
> Lazarus: Back in college we used to get high and talk like this.
> You're making a living out of it.
DD has higher social status than the druggie, but he isn't being more convincing and understandable, Lazarus isn't learning stuff and seeing how to think.
>
> Deutsch: (Laughs) Yes, well, it's a matter of whether one is critical.
> The ideas always come by an undirected variation of existing ideas,
> and it could be that that's what getting high is. But what makes the
> difference between making progress with it and not making progress is
> the criticism afterwards.
>
> Deutsch: I think the external manifestations of repression which hold
> back the growth of knowledge are only ever a secondary effect, a sort
> of tidying-up effect, tidying up the few ideas which manage to get
> through the primary effect, which is cultural.
> It's not that there
> were all sorts of ideas bristling up like they are today, but that
> were then being suppressed. For the most part, it's that people were
> not having ideas.
Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com
www.curi.us
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