The video presents a critical rationalist perspective on human progress, arguing that problems are inevitable but solvable through critical thinking and knowledge creation. The speaker, Jaber Hassoun, explains that anti-rational memes (ideas that resist criticism) create static societies, while dynamic societies thrive through open inquiry and error correction. This framework, rooted in David Deutsch's 'The Beginning of Infinity' and Karl Popper's philosophy, emphasizes that human uniqueness lies in our capacity for universal explanatory knowledge and creativity, which can be enhanced through technology and education. The speaker advocates for an 'epistemological optimism' that recognizes both the fallibility of our knowledge and the potential for continuous progress through rigorous criticism.
Conversation with Jaber Hassoun.追加:
So there's a whole bunch of people out there arguing the best way to defend the enlightenment in the west is to return to these traditional Christian values which is what I think Hersei has fallen into as well.
>> We have our versions of Jordan Peterson who speak Arabic. His version of Christianity I imagine as a new mutation of Christianity that's trying to survive because old style Christianity obviously in the west is not surviving anymore. A focus on memes seems to denigrate the ability of people to make a free will choice about things.
>> Many people would say, "Oh, but even if there's a cure for aging, only the billionaires will get it." I hear the argument that, "Oh, who would want to live a few hundred years? Won't you be bored of out of your mind?" Absolutely not. Look at this. It's unidentified.
So, I'm going to choose to say, "Well, it's aliens." Like the meme, you know them. Aliens. It's sort of an alien of the gap.
>> Aliens of the gap.
>> Exactly. Welcome back to the Conjecture Institute podcast. Today I'm with Jab Hassoon who is one of the Conjecture Institute fellows who has been traveling on a parallel path with me but in a very interesting way because like myself he likes to promote the ideas of David Deutsch and the beginning of infinity enlightenment ideals and he's produced a wonderful YouTube channel but it's a YouTube channel about the beginning of infinity and David Deutsch and all that sort of optimistic stuff with a bit of a twist and the twist is that it is largely but not exclusively in Arabic.
So, I'm very excited to talk to a fellow traveler today who seems to have possibly an even more difficult job than I have. It's hard enough to explain some of these ideas sometimes in English.
You're doing it in two languages over there. How did you come to this? What's your background and what are your interests that led you to crafting a wonderful channel all about the beginning of infinity and associated ideas?
>> Uh, thank you so much for this lovely introduction, Brett. Um I'm from Syria um originally but uh I left like around 14 years ago while I was doing a masters in artificial intelligence between 201 12 and 14. Um I was my interest in philosophy had always been maybe around there somewhere. Uh maybe I would have even said that explicitly but I maybe what the word philosophy meant to me back then was different. My interest in epistemology I think was a bit um I mean one interesting milestone because I think ultimately we all care about epistemology even if we don't know the word. Maybe that's something we can uh discuss a bit later uh because it's very fundamental. Uh but yeah I think I read um a book back then um uh by Stephven Hawking and Leonard Leenov.
>> Universal nutshell. Is that what it's called?
>> Uh the next one they wrote together.
>> They wrote together cuz I know they did that one. Yes. Yes.
>> Uh the grand design. the grand design.
>> Grand Design. Yes. Okay.
>> And uh and in it they they discuss realism and anti-realism and then they say, "Okay, we're going to take a third path somehow." And I think they called it model dependent realism and it was interesting and um it was sort of you know I mean I didn't know back then again I didn't know about Carl Paer. I didn't know about all that besides maybe I'm sure falsificationism had come up somewhere you know. uh and yeah reading such books uh I'm like okay I enjoy these during the masters I'm going to just uh maybe um make some videos this is while basically uh I don't know social media was you know blowing up everywhere on the around the world including the Arabic speaking world and uh there were different types of Facebook pages you know back then Facebook was the thing and like Facebook pages and stuff like that trying to translate trying to have some new translation movement in Arabic if you will uh which was nice of them and I I really supported their like their efforts and stuff like that. Uh but I figured okay like I would like to make videos and discuss some other things not just translating or something like that and I think one of the first videos was about that book and later on I think I made the first year again I was doing my masters I thought I was just doing this just for fun this was never a plan this was never I didn't know what you know what the future was had for me and I think the second book I I u made a couple of videos about was about AI it was like by Ray Corw was about uh how to create a mind so it was his vision of what AI would be and in it he discussed also like all kinds of philosophical problems that um I mean you know we know them the identity problem like you know what is intelligence all these things that as you know we care about now but those all these things were sort of seeds uh and yeah long story short yeah after I finished my masters started my PhD I was like um h I actually I'm enjoying making videos and reading about all kinds of things more than what I'm doing any although I did enjoy my field I did enjoy computer science in AI. I so I did that full-time. I dropped out of my PhD. It wasn't an easy decision, but uh uh and yeah, and then a few years later, I don't know how many um I was listening I listened to a lot of podcast. I was listening to Sam Harris and David Deutsch. I think it was the first appearance uh for because David appeared on that podcast at this point four times, I think, or at least three.
>> Yeah.
>> Um I hadn't heard of David before. I loved what he was uh talking about. I found it very intriguing, but I still had a lot of course to unpack because it was new to me. Uh and yeah, and then I uh I read the book and the rest is history. As you know, once you read that book and you take it seriously and so I guess I heard stories about people who read it the first time and didn't appreciate it right away because maybe I think Naval talks about this like the first time he read it, you thought, "Oh, it's a good book." And then 10 years later it was like I guess I read it at the right time because right away I'm like whoa this like this is so yeah it's discussing things obviously I find it very important and yeah I sort of read it very carefully and took it very seriously and slowly and uh and uh yeah started making videos about it too and that's how we got into it. Yeah, Sam Harris is a gateway for many people, I think, into David Deutsch, which was really exciting for many of us because I remember when there was a a small much smaller community orbiting the work of David Deutsch and discussing the book.
We thought, why isn't he getting invited onto podcast and interviews and that kind of thing? He had made a few appearances, but everyone was waiting for the Sam Harris appearance, the first one, and then when it happened, it was such a cool thing. I remember that I happened it happened around about the same time as a new episode of Star Wars and I couldn't figure out in my own mind what was I more excited about this new Star Wars or David Deutsch appearing on Sam Harris but the Sam Harris one the interviewers stood the test of time more than what Star Wars has I would say.
>> Absolutely. Now, you're a fellow with the Conjecture Institute, which is very cool because it demonstrates you're the fact that you're a fellow there demonstrates the Conjecture Institute is committed not only to things like research into pure fundamentals of physics, which is one of the big ticket items as far as the Conjecture Institute's objectives go, but also more broad avenues into creativity. And so, your channel, as we said, is one of those. I I just mentioned the fact that okay it's it's sort of dual language.
You're doing I think that most of your videos are in Arabic but you do have a number of videos that are also in English as well. Why did you think it was important as an Arabic speaker to begin to make videos in Arabic about the themes that are in the beginning of Infinity?
>> Uh so yeah I have a few like different uh I think reasons. One of the main ones is like the content is in English uh already. So, you know, there's already people who speak English well already have, you know, access to to that content. Uh, second of all, I mean, I didn't know about you back then. Uh, unfortunately for me, but later on, I I mean, I saw you you're the OG and all these things. You started very early and you discuss in in depth all kinds of uh um you might take a an hour to explain a few pages of like u the beginning of like u uh Poppers's work also and stuff like that. So uh so that was one of the reasons um yeah another is of obviously when I started I mean barely like all the thing of science communication and philosophy communication uh again was super new uh in the in Arabic um even on YouTube in general I mean you know the whole of YouTube thing is a new thing particularly in like in Arabic this was very new and yeah I felt like there is a like there is a huge importance here to a huge opportunity and like a lot importance here to uh discuss such ideas. Uh now obviously the importance of ideas like uh uh again like enlightenment values and all these things we particularly need them and back then you know a lot of political and social things were happening uh in the 2010s they're still happening of course we're going through that process uh in the Arabic speaking world and yeah I I called my channel Ripples uh because you know to just play contribute my part play a little uh a little uh part in that whole hopefully movement that will again contribute to um uh more and more understanding of the importance of such values uh of the >> you're very modest you're very modest hopefully hopefully the ripples become waves and maybe a tsunami and then we can radically change the world >> yeah and about the language also um so the new content I'm I'm hoping to do now as a fellow in conjunction institute is to be more in English or maybe both and I'm thinking uh now to make like short form videos because this is something I I think I was a bit late to you know how like I fairly there when the YouTube thing was happening, but now the short form video is the new thing and it takes I mean for me maybe for our generation it's it I was a bit slow to appreciate it maybe like the Tik Tok thing the whole phenomenon the whole short video form uh it's a different challenge because yeah we we like to dive deep into these ideas right because they're very deep ideas they tickle so it's a challenge to how to find a way okay how can I make I don't know talk about fallibilism or talk about optimism and just make a series of short videos and uh yeah so the plan is to to make those in English now and that's what I've been writing recently and hopefully they will start coming out soon.
>> Is it more difficult to explain these concepts in Arabic? Is there a more limited vocabulary for example? I'm completely ignorant. So you tell me.
>> Yeah, it's not um um it's not about the vocabulary per se. I think it's about so it's interesting right? So people use a word in a language or a dialect or something and it has its own connotations and um and this connotation is very uh local or parochial to use to use the word we like. Uh so yeah so that's something to navigate maybe and uh but however it's doable but yeah it's a creative process like anything else there yes there were challenges for sure like to uh there is a translated version of beginning infinity in Arabic and it's good um and I would check it out from like from time to time when I'm making video sometimes I wouldn't agree with the way it you know something was um presented uh it's also you know book form is very different from video form and in Arabic there is a particular sort of particular for Arabic where there is classical Arabic uh which everybody uh which nobody speaks at the mother tongue like zero people speak it as like no no siblings speak classical Arabic to each other it's a very old language you know it's we're talking about 1,500 at least years old while in day-to-day we speak dialects that are not in the books so the classical Arabic is used in the news or like in books you know when you write a book you write it in classical Arabic and or maybe a documentary or something but anything else you're speaking in your own dialect. Um, so yeah, how to like to navigate all that to make your dialect accessible to everybody who speaks Arabic yet without being too um too official. That's my that's why I never like made my videos in classical Arabic that much because uh usually I think at least in the beginning that my thought was it's associated with authority and as you know we're anti- authority and um so I knew I I wanted it to be always you know this is fallible this is u uh you know like I I I want to be challenged I I want to see where where anything I'm saying could be wrong and all these things. Uh so that was another another aspect of it.
Uh so yeah sometimes I had to choose a particular translation that I for example something like fibalism that was that was tough to translate to Arabic.
>> Uh so yeah yeah >> it sounds similar to the story with Mandarin Chinese where there is a standard Mandarin Chinese mandated by the government that's ostensibly everyone in the entire nation is supposed to learn but in in practice lots of people have quite different dialects all over the like a nation of that size kind of thing. Imagine across the Arabic speaking world it's similar like even in English as we know you say the word knowledge to someone or you know I know to someone and I have this discussion all the time on social media it's like people think they know what the that term know means and they have you know they think it it means I am certain that and when it comes to knowledge they you know if they've been philosophically trained at all they think it's justified true belief or something similar to that again it's got something to do with certainty so I imagine that these kind of words whatever the one to one is with Arabic what is the word for knowledge in Arabic and does it carry the connotation of you know certainty >> um so the word is mar and also alm means science and by the way the word science also came from Latin to just means knowledge so >> in in Romanian that it's it's obvious also the roots because it's very close to um um to Latin I mean fairly close Uh so yeah it it means um I think the word for again the word for science you can use it in classical Arabic to mean I know um in day-to-day the other one yeah the knowledge one is more common uh will it have that connotation yes it will like that it's more certainty um and that's something to navigate because also it is common for people who are scientifically literate uh to think that knowledge is justified true belief as as you know is very common worldwide including including people who are into science and philosophy they would think that and uh yeah you might say that I don't know for a fact but I think you know that type of thing uh which I I don't I mean you know there is no war on words here like it's okay like you know we can uh explain any uh idea after we say it and I and this is something actually reading Deutsch and Popper sort of illuminated my mind on I would say because um you know I think as popper there is a quote by Popper but you can see it also in practice a lot with David never caring too much about the label.
Okay, let's this is the idea. We're talking about a problem. Let's see if it solves it or not. And also their um their stance against inventing new words rather like so no like optimism like I think you used to have in your description maybe not anymore but you would say optimism in the Deutschian sense >> because optimism for most people >> in David Deutsche sense. Yes.
>> Yes. in David Dutch sense. Yeah, exactly. Because yeah, optimism for many people it might be like hope like the future will be good and and that's very vague. That's probably prophetic. Maybe we can talk more about it. I I like these topics and uh so yeah the same in Arabic of course when I I have to say when we say optimism or we say knowledge when we say depends on the context I have to say okay but here we don't mean maybe what we usually mean by the word and here is why and here is how. And then I would like dive deeper into it.
>> Yeah. I like to say, yeah, optimism comes out of well, David's principle of optimism, which is the idea that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge.
But also just the general statement that problems are soluble. And I can often spot the person that's read kind of chapter 1, chapter 2 of the beginning of infinity and nothing else because they will argue that there are certain classes of problems that cannot be solved in some way. And so they don't fully grapple with the idea that David deals with that. David deals with the fact that for example there are certain results in mathematics for which we'll never have proof. That's just a consequence of girdle or a law of physics stands in the way. You know you can't get from here to the other side of the galaxy instantly unless you're traveling at the speed of light. That kind of thing. Um yeah that that's kind that kind of falls out of the optimism is that it does consider the fact that humans are fallible and we might not solve the problem but we can if we try.
>> Exactly. And that's the the beauty of um the two parts of like uh problems are inevitable but problems are solvable because maybe people when they hear optimism they might think again a part of their uh idea of what optimism is might be blind optimism like oh I don't know the god the universe the karma whatever like things will be fine they they might think of it that way and some people say that in as if and they support it they're like I know um I I like it cannot be so bad I I know it it it will work out uh like it's like a faith or something like that. So it's sort of a prophetic or people who are pessimistic they might say no it will always be bad something like that and we're saying yeah problems will like problems are inevitable of as as long as we have thinking being and uh even the word problem by the way a very interesting uh innovation by popper uh so because we have to explain what what we mean by the word problem uh it does include what people in day-to-day like use like use the word problem for but also it's uh yeah and even a problem in in one's own mind because one discovered that oh I have two ideas that sort of contradict each other somehow okay that's a fun problem to uh like to work with although as David says people sometimes have like they have a negative connotation for their problem but I always remind people also we say solve solve this problem like in math it happens to be in English like we say solve this problem and yeah so they're solvable like you have that also in in the background of your mind. Uh so yeah, they're inevitable. They will happen all the time and that's beautiful. That's fun. That's where all the fun is actually like there is no fun except like with some type of problem in the philosophical sense and um and yeah they're solvable as long as the laws of physics allow and uh our knowledge of the laws of physics of course is fallible. So yeah, for now a good example we always give I also always give it like you just did like the speed of light but yeah if somehow wormholes or whatever I know they're just like more science fiction maybe now but whatever it is if if we discover a new way that we can um bypass uh that okay then the laws of physics allowed and that's that's >> and the other optimistic >> the other optimistic way in which optimism itself and problems are linked is the fact that we never run out of problems as well. You solve something only to reveal more problems. But those problems are more interesting. And in theory, again, this is another thing that sometimes comes up is, and this is something Jordan Peterson talks about, you know, that life is suffering. And I think Buddhists sometimes have this as well, life is suffering. And I've often said, well, suffering itself might label an entire category of different problems, but they will be finite in number. And in theory, you know, it's probably going to be a very distant future, but you could solve all of those ones, all the ones that involve suffering, leaving you with a state where you're just solving interesting stuff. Now, I can't imagine what that would be like, that society, but again, as I like to say, it's just my failure of imagination. The fact that I can't imagine what a society a thousand years or a million years more advanced, which has effectively fixed suffering and pain and disease and decay and death and that kind of thing.
>> And isn't that so beautiful? Like actually yes like there is a whole category that's technically solvable and we've been solving it like as a humanity thankfully like since the enlightenment for a while and like as long as uh we want to hopefully we can keep doing that but another thing that comes to my mind also the words the word enlightenment which which funny enough you mentioned Buddhism as like as you know probably in the side if you hear enlightenment you'll either think Buddhism or you will think you know the western enlightenment. Uh I know of course like there is like more details in the western light but maybe most people will think oh there's the enlightenment that happened in the west in the last 100 and or they will think of but yeah our view is is like the the critical rationalist barian doian view of it's not like life is suffering. It's like yes uh like find a problem fall in love with it and and like enjoy it sort of that's almost the meaning of life or something like that in some as if somehow like you know we're saying life is fun as opposed to life is suffering like we're going sort of the opposite we're saying there's more fun for you to enjoy as long as you want like as long and some people when we talk about for example aging itself is a solvable problem and I I hear the argument that oh who would want to live a few hundred years won't would you be bored of out of your Absolutely not. The amount of we can't even imagine the problems that hopefully will occur when we're 500 or 600 or whatever it is assuming this if these things get solved. Um th those problems will be fun and beautiful like all the things that we enjoy doing today. I don't do you enjoy watching a movie or creating a musical piece or something like that.
Well, all these things were not imaginable. I don't know if if my favorite music uh genre is classical guitar before the classical guitar was invented that could not have existed and add that to even I think when when I I was interviewing uh David Deutsch and we talked about like how basically senses I mean senses are sort of input but ultimately we have the creative brain that's what matters the most we can imagine new senses and I think he talks about this in in the beginning of also and we can so there's a whole type of like dimension of art that we haven't we cannot imagine yet because it hasn't been invented yet. And uh yeah, infinitum like literally like you know it's indefinite. We can keep doing that as long as we have the chance to create knowledge and uh and as long of course as um uh we want to.
>> Yeah. the uh one of my favorite um computer scientists Geron Lenier that I talk about quite often on the podcast.
He you know he was one of the pioneers of virtual reality and talks about the experience of being in the early virtual reality machines where they would give participants the experience of being a lobster having something like 10 arms and legs kind of thing and people their their minds would adapt and they would think that they have these 10 different appendages. So unless you've had that experience, you don't realize that it's actually possible for the mind to do that. You know, the infinite elasticity of the human mind when augmented with technology. I think the future ahead of us in terms of exploring art or exploring different bodies, it's real possible. And and so you you're you're a computer coder.
>> Can I ask you what do you think of that?
I haven't coded in so long now. I haven't coded. Yes. Yes. I I'm full time doing what I do now. Yeah. Like creating.
>> What did you think though about the movement? And it's still sort of going on the movement of learn to code.
Everyone should learn to code. If you don't learn to code, then you're not a contributing person to society or something like that.
>> Yeah, I think I was under that spell. Um I I never put it that way, but I I think I put it maybe in a in a worse way. I would say when I was uh in college so late 2000s I think me and my friends we had this uh lingo because you know me and my colleagues somehow you know when you're learning something dealing with it all the time I don't know object-oriented pro programming all these types of things so um I mean some of them are philosophical concepts but we learned them through programming like abstractions like this is concrete this more abstract stuff like that and when a friend from another college would join us they'll be so annoyed by how how annoying we are and how we're trying to optimize everything. We're trying to find the shortest path in everything with you know what I mean and u so we're yeah we're focused on all all kinds like the complexity of any process and all these things and uh yeah we were under the spell I think under the um mistaken idea that uh oh programmers think differently uh which is I mean it's like saying uh my language is special it is special so is any other language somehow like so Yeah, of course you're impacted by what you do all the time.
Uh yeah, so that is a very interesting thing. And now with VIP coding, it's also fun to see the change to this um like to sort of this as you call it movement or something like that.
>> Yeah. Yeah. It remind cuz really this sort of took off what was it sort of 10 15 years ago or something like that >> when the classic media print media was going through a period where >> a whole bunch of websites were just hoovering up all of the news articles and so a whole bunch of newspapers went out of business. So journalists on mass began to lose their jobs and so now we have concentrated media. All that aside, the injunction at the time from so many people who were technically trained, whether in the sciences or in coding itself, was to have a go at the poor reporters and journalists who had just been made redundant and told them, "Learn to code." And now it's almost like it's reversed. All the people who are good at writing, you know, doing the vibe coding thing, they're now telling the coders, "Aha, you're losing your job now. You should learn to write more clearly." So, you can never predict these things. You know, that's also part of our philosophy that we wouldn't be surprised by the fact that don't get too confident or comfortable in whatever you happen to be doing because it may well be taken over by AI as we've seen. But, you know, if you're a if you're a creative person, as we like to say, the AI will never be able to augment that.
It won't be able to take over creativity. People don't get that either. like the number of times I've tried to explain this simple idea to other people that what makes a person unique is the fact that we are creative in a in a unique kind of a way that only people can be and that can't be automated away by the AI but we should be excited about the fact that the things that can be automated will indeed be automated away do you know like speaking of AI how in the Middle East like Syria for example, is it just as ubiquitous there? Are people easily able to access all of these large language models and therefore is that having a cultural effect?
>> Uh that's that's I love that question and I love that fact. So yeah, of course, everybody has a smartphone, everybody has uh access to these large large language models despite, you know, difficulty having electricity uh because of all these things that happen like in different parts of the Middle East. But it also reminds me of something speaking of pessimism and optimism like I I face this everywhere with non-Arab like with like people here in Eastern Europe and stuff like that. Um when you mention when we talked about aging just a second ago, many people would say, "Oh, but even if there's a cure for aging, only the billionaires will get it or something like that. Now again, I don't want to prophecy. We don't prophecy. We don't know for a fact." Um uh I said we don't know for a fact. Uh but so we cannot prophecy for the future uh the future. But uh I give always the example of the AI like of AI. So the the example used to be that uh the average person who has access to the internet has more access to information than I don't know the sitting uh United States president in the late 90s I think Bill Clinton they used to say or something like this and now we can I can say like think of the richest man in the world like Elon Musk and his access to AI and the average person's access to AI like you both have access to the cutting edge because of all the uh you know free market dynamics and like uh competition between like these different uh uh companies you know claude and openai and uh gro and all these things XAI uh so yeah the average person even if they're not paying anything and of course all the open source also models I didn't mention them and all this um and I say average person meaning just like because like people say again financially in this context because they were saying oh you have to be a billionaire to get the uh so yeah there is you you can't you can't be pessimistic about that either about the access to the cutting edge technology and we you have many examples where that the exact opposite happened where it actually made everybody more or less have access to the same crazy powerful new tools that can like help us be a bit more productive.
>> Yeah, it's amazing how we are living through an era where almost everyone whatever side of politics they happen to be on whatever philosophical tradition they're coming from will argue something along the lines of inequality has never been worse. Look at how rich and wealthy the billionaires are compared to the people who are poor. But in fact, there's a sense in which we can argue we've never been more equalized as an entire global civilization. Yes, there are still problems in tiny pockets with severe wealth inequality or severe poverty, that kind of thing. However, the overwhelming majority of people around the world do have a smartphone and do have access to all of the information. That's never been true before in the history of humanity. And as for these things like medical treatment, you know, the the billionaires only get to be um immortal at first or they get the life extension technologies. But this is always true and you want that kind of thing because if the billionaires are going to invest in the you know life extension technologies, then very soon by matter of scale, you're going to have everyone being able to afford it. And if you don't go through the transition period where some people are investing huge amounts of money into these different technologies, then you'll never reach a point where everyone has access to it. A common thing is also how um the first version of something will be very bad and expensive and only for the billionaires and by the time it's super good, it's super cheap and now everybody has it. Um now of course that doesn't again we're not prophesying. We don't know that like this is happening in every u aspect of society but knowledge in general and technology in particular let's say uh is of course knowledge is unpredictable and technology has uh had tends to has to have this effect that we've been talking about. Uh now some one thing that Ray Corwell prophesied in in in their past was that with virtual reality for example like for now maybe people talk about um owning property this is something that like technology maybe hasn't like equalized or like u these types of he used to think that he used to say I don't know if he changed his mind on this or he believes this will still happen but in the future I haven't followed in a while but uh he used to say that with virtual reality everybody will you know live more in the virtual reality than like in the physical reality and people will keep working uh even before virtual he was saying the internet because we will have uh remote work uh he was under the impression that like I don't know like something like Netflix and something like uh um um zoom will make people less likely to move to cities because he said that historically people move to cities uh mainly to work and maybe some cultural things here and there that we can access remotely now uh like in the future. So he prophesied that actually people will be much more distributed worldwide and thus things will be maybe cheaper or something like that because even the size of one's home wouldn't matter because you live mostly in virtual reality stuff like that. That didn't pan out for example but I we also don't know how the future technologies will affect these things either.
>> No exactly. Yeah. Um now you're interested in epistemology. What other aspects of philosophy have really captured you? What have you spent time making content about? So particularly in the beginning of course epistemology was a very important aspect like fallibism the fact um and as we mentioned optimism was a huge part um one thing that yeah realism of course I was already a realist but as I told you maybe I was a bit seduced by the model dependent realism that I read by uh like by Stephven Hawking before um which was trying to acknowledge but it didn't have a good way to present it somehow it was it was lacking I mean, I think they even say in the book, I read it in 2012 or something, so this is very old, but like I'm grabbing from an old memory here, but I think it was something like if you have two models that work equally well, then they're both equally correct, even if they're different, which is not a realist sentiment, although they're trying to be realist. They said like we're more realist than uh so uh and the use of word model, I know like now it's very mathematical. So like uh >> model realism it sounds to me like um social justice in the sense that there is justice and then there is not justice. As soon as you put some kind of adjective in front you're denying it. So there's realism and then there's denial of realism. So if you start to say model dependent that worries me. Yeah.
>> Yeah. So so there was that. Um and particularly I think something that I I loved a lot in uh I mean so many things of course every chapter as as you know you know more than most people how every chapter is so full of like amazing ideas with like with the farthest reaches to to mention the uh title of your book but also um the idea of memes. I had already heard of the idea of memes of course and I thought oh cool yes a cool way to express something you know uh like in that so of course as our viewers know you know like Richard Dawkins came up with the idea of a meme sort of at the end of his book uh and he joked even later that oh the idea of a meme itself became a meme because many scientists are working on it this is even before the internet took off with the word meme to mean the joke that that like spreads uh around the internet uh and yeah and then to see the idea of rational and anti-rational memes. It was such an amazing it was such an amazing thing like to >> let's go down that let's go down that that rabbit hole for a moment because um you have particular insight here and I do like to talk about >> static versus dynamic societies and you know how it comes down to you know the presence or absence to a large extent of the anti-rational memes. In your experience, does that map on to uh places in the Middle East, for example, where it seems like that's a good account in my mind? But I have heard some people who claim to have read the beginning infinity say it doesn't work.
They think that, you know, this idea of memes is um is flawed in some way. I haven't been able to understand their perspective, but what do you think?
>> Um yeah, it's I'm curious to hear what more they have to say like how is it how how would it be flawed? I found it uh very explanatory. Yes. So just to just in case a viewer hasn't heard of the concept. So the idea of an anti-Rational meme is it's a meme that has um more of an advantage uh in spreading when it's the way it spreads is it tries to throttle our critical capacity. So it doesn't want us to criticize it. So it could be anyway if anything that is for example trying to shame me to question something for example an idea that tells you uh how dare you question this. So using authority using um any type of thing that's clearly the opposite of letting it be criticized and survive on its own merit. So that's an anti-rational meme as opposed to a rational meme. And by the way we're not saying irrational.
You're saying anti-rational because as I think Deutsch puts it like it's sort of actively trying to block the critical faculties in the mind uh of the holder uh like hold this idea make it sacred make it holy make it uh whatever it is that just not don't touch it untouchable don't like leave it as it is it's good as it is and that's how it spreads uh while rational memes are the memes that have an advantage the more we criticize them the more I criticize an idea a very good idea idea or an example I always give is like a scientific um uh like theory like um general relativity there the more we try to basically take it down the more it stands and actually and then we move to the static and dynamic societies. So when we have a dynamic society that means people can criticize left and right ideas criticize each other left and right they basically they are like hitting each other left and then yeah the best ones survive on the long run and um uh while aesthetic society is using anti-Russian memes as much as possible to because again that we can hypothesize why it's a very interesting question that David tries to deal with like that the humanity lived for the longest time since its beginning in static societies more or less with a few pockets of enlightenment here and there that that never like that never managed to survive except our longest surviving enlightenment which we we're living in right now. Uh so that would be a static society where um basically antational ideas are surviving through their like nonrational means. Uh yeah, I do think it works of course. Uh we have u authoritative thinking. We even have uh I mean depends of course on different areas and different you know as there's always um uh contrast between I don't know cities and rural areas and then between different cities and different area and different of course uh countries or etc. And uh thankfully there are again with the internet there are always pockets here and there that are more enlightened than it's it's all these things but yeah uh religious thinking authoritative thinking through again politics or religious thinking uh that's super common very common obviously throttling progress uh in all kinds of ways uh so there is that that like obvious level uh again using authority is an anti-rational meme so and uh the lack of freedom of speech for example freedom of expression. All these things are clearly trying to block this um uh um dynamicity we've been talking about like you know like for ideas to interact with each other freely and let like may the best one win and uh there are also like even little things here social here and there for example our idea of respect or honor or stuff like that and how we connected to irrational things but it just survived throughout history because people believed that at some point uh so people literally might take it personally if you could some of their ideas. Again, they could be religious, they could be personal, etc. Um, yeah, all kinds of things. Even the language, the way, for example, you address an older person, like again, as if they're in authority, >> schooling systems. Um like yeah we grew up revering our teachers not just like in the positive sense but also like you know we don't we don't tell them like to to tell them that they're wrong or something or to imagine that it's normal as you know taking children seriously in school not being mandatory and all these things. It's it's it's very it would have been impossible for me to imagine of course back then.
>> Yes. uh fear of punishment in particular and fear of eternal punishment can be among the most powerful motivators for behavior and for not criticizing particular things and it is that the critique that I've heard I'll run this by you all also explain my reputation of the critique but the critique goes something like as an explanation of human behavior a focus on memes in the way that David has explained it seems to denigrate the ability of people to make a free will choice about things because it casts memes as themselves being a kind of authority on the mind of a person dictating how they behave. Now that critique now I may not be faithfully representing it. I may be straw manning it or whatever. However, anyone who comes away from reading I the fabric of reality or the beginning of Infinity thinking that David Deutsch doesn't exalt free will and the agency of people to create knowledge and to choose to do particular things I think has kind of missed the point because the idea of an anti-rational meme is that it's anti-rational in practice not in principle. It's not like it's impossible for people to change their minds even if they are inculcated with these anti-rational means. even if their mind is plagued with it. After all, we see people all the time leaving, for example, the the religion of their birth. They might decide to turn around and then begin to critique things. They they they lose their beliefs. And so, >> it doesn't mean but that that fact, the fact that you can >> walk away from an anti-rational meme or criticize the anti-rational meme, which is what we all want to do because we all have these anti-rational memes. And we can choose to be more reflective and and to evaluate our own ideas. And when we do that, we've used our free will to actually overcome. So although anti-rational memes are bad and we don't want to fall into a static society, there's always hope, you know, problems are soluble. But that's the critique anyway is that that it casts memes as dictating behavior when we shouldn't do that.
>> I I like it. I feel the critique is actually trying to like take it seriously to some uh to some extent even if maybe they haven't gotten it right.
It's I I don't think it's a bad question because you know when we're explain something through some a good explanation has different elements and the elements we we consider it real. If it's a good explanation if it's actually connected to something in reality and all the so so when they're saying okay you're saying there's an irrational meme and you're saying they're think they're like actual things these memes they're not like some again pragmatic idea just to make us understand something. No they're they're real because they're solving a problem and they're explaining something. Uh so well if you say so then let me try to take it to its u natural um uh how do we say um uh like progression and see like yeah does does that mean we don't have free will because you say that we have free will. Uh by the way to be I I used to have videos also that like free will doesn't exist in like the whole Sam Harris shebang. Um I don't yeah I think I think what people mean by free will is so like wide also and I do think also critical rationalist use it in a more um clear way although we still admit that like I think David Deutsch says that um creativity free will maybe the problem of identity he suspects he says we don't know yet we we're far from a good theory about the but he suspects they will be solved together and yeah he he like he puts free will and creative but yeah we mean humans are universal explainers uh we mean that like we're creative uh we'll face problems of course but we can solve them uh because yeah I mean of course people like Sam Harris who defend uh who the stance that there is no free will he says that his email is full of people who change their minds or religion and stuff like that in fact he had this big argument with um a psychologist uh Jonathan height at some point in his podcast where he in his book the righteous mind sort of flirts strongly with the idea that uh like rationality like rational arguments don't don't do much uh you remember maybe you you remember that and uh and of course Sam was in the no like rational argument does everything like that's all we have that so so for him this doesn't contradict free will but in our understanding of free will like it it yeah it does so I think there's also some semantics involved. Um but yes, absolutely. U many many >> I like to say that we just you know like so many of the chapters in the beginning of infinity and broadly in David's work and Popper as well they're trying to provide some solution to a very real problem. And so we have this actual philosophical problem. Why do people do A rather than B? Why do they choose the things they do? How do they come with the knowledge? And so free will might not itself be able to for example if you don't understand if you can't program it you don't understand it kind of thing maybe we can't program a system with free will but that doesn't mean that free will doesn't exist it just means that there is a gap in our knowledge so far and the same is true of you know the mimedic account of why some societies thrive and why some societies are static. It comes down to this very deep thing about criticism versus anti-criticism. And when do you get the enlightenment? You get the enlightenment when you have a tradition of criticism.
I mean so many other thinkers have tried to explain what the British and you know Dutch enlightenment have been over time and you can talk to well a rejection of authority. You can talk about uh uh new kinds of enlightened political systems, new ways of understanding morality, the industrial revolution, all of these kind of things. But really, it's that insight that it is a tradition of criticism, preserving the means of critiquing and error correcting that is fundamentally at the base of these things. And again, it's something that David Deutsch, I think, for all the work that we do, still deserves more credit for because so few people understand that basic concept. It's only out of that like people talk about well free will is the thing that not free will free speech is the thing that differentiates you know good societies from bad societies it's yes but that's that's just an aspect of something that's deeper the same as the free trade or name your thing that comes out of the the scientific enlightenment as well all of this comes out of out of criticism >> I was once explaining to a friend of mine and I was talking to a friend of mine and telling him all these ideas about memes rational international memes and then static academic scientist went back and forth. It was such a fun u uh conversation and at the end of it he told me now you gave me one of the best arguments for for uh free speech and freedom of expression. So yeah, he took like it's it's one of the elements that are very important and I think it's a very fun way also to to argue for it because some people yeah maybe they come up with sort of patchwork about like arguing about this and but when you go with something as fundamental as here is how societies can be open or closed here's how societies can be dynamic or uh uh static and here is how simp a simple thing that I understand as a person every person had had the experience of like with an international name with something and this is something beautiful also uh David says in the in that chapter where basically the the best functioning anti-rational meme which means the worst meme basically is the one that blocks me from the inside to even doubt doubt doubt it so not only I cannot express it so there's it's one level if I if I'm too afraid to express to you that I doubt something it's a deeper level a worse level if I'm even if I even blocked my own mind to even doubt it like that's that's like that it's such a deep Um uh yeah so everybody has experienced maybe something along the lines of when they trying to doubt it they're literally shaking if it's a religious deep belief it's a deep religious belief that they grew up with for example and then they started doubting it uh some like you might literally shiver like physically you might if if it's too troublesome uh or it might be you know some cognitive dissonance as people talk if it's something political that they're changing their mind on and um and yeah I think it's also testament to our fallibilism and to end an optimistic testament that we can we can all look back and remember how sure we were about our about ideas we currently consider completely wrong and yeah it's optimistic because it means we change our minds and we can be rational and we can knowledge can grow within our own minds and I think also the anti-rational meme thing has psychological dimensions also that are very interesting to like to also consider sort of similar to the I think taking children seriously is one of the uh let's say domains or fields or whatever that uh do take do take that idea seriously about like how an international meme can live in one's mind and how basically non-coercion is the way to be more dynamic uh psychologically and psychological freedom to to go back to play on the word enlightenment in Buddhism versus like enlightenment in the epistemological sense Buddhism is supposedly trying to seek uh psychological freedom and funny enough I do think proper epistemology is is one of the best pathways to that enlightenment.
>> Yeah, I think yeah, that that that enlightenment seems to me to be a state and even if it's a state that is kind of open in inquiry or something like that, nonetheless, it's still something where you achieve it and it's as if there's no more because you've achieved enlightenment. So, >> yeah. Yeah. It's very pessimistic that way. But exactly, it's the opposite. So rather than thinking it's suffering and I and grew out of suffering, problems are fun and like suffering is solvable and it's this will go forever. It's such a piece of mind that's very different from a blocked static state of uh bliss and doing nothing. I know that's a straw man sometimes that's not what they always mean but it's one wrong idea that is common about that which I find ironic again with the words.
>> Um now you've there are two videos that I noticed on your website. I don't know if you're happy to talk about them or not. One of them is about the immorality of declaring someone an infidel. And um that's something I think um Ian Hersy Ali her her her book her her her what do you call it the autobiography is um called called infidel. And you also have a video there and I don't know what it's about cuz I just saw the thumbnail but the thumbnail is Richard Dawkins and I am hers.
>> What what's that one about?
>> Uh so um I'm trying to remember. I think the first one is clearly about like the a simple moral math that's horrible if one takes it to its you mentioned earlier like the basically uh eternal punishment if you if you if you were if somebody like you know grew up with the idea with this idea and they buy it they take it in seriously and they yeah they take it seriously they could do anything to avoid that it's just like it's it's so it's such a terrible international meme as we Um it's it's it's like simple moral calculus for them if that's their view of reality and I put reality to quotes because for them yes the afterlife or whatever like it is that that is real also for them real somehow hyper real I don't know what what they would call it more real than reality because you mentioned Peterson earlier and uh and the um the other one I think was about if you said it had Iron Hers Ali I I talked about the leap of faith I think uh which is I think the idea that she took and the idea that um Turkey guard I think was the originator of somehow and to take this le leap of faith and um basically she wrote this uh you remember when she declared that she became a Christian.
>> Yes. Uh so >> and uh it is interesting right like so she thought oh I always could start religion because I was because like the problem what with Islam or something like that and I think no there are some simple problems that you can apply universally and somehow sort of like now Richard Dawkins forgot recently his good arguments against like all his good arguments that made him very you know famous throughout these years about uh no when when you tell me God did evolution or God directed evolution ution or God created us or something like that. I this is not a good explanation. Somehow he would not put it in our you know epistemological language that this is uh too easy to vary because it could be anything and it's opposite and all but he would say something like that and then now he said uh he has no good reason to believe that cloth is not uh is not conscious. I mean maybe maybe it's not them.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I think yeah, I I made a video on that and um well, I did live stream talking about it because I went to the the Unheard website and I read the entire article because a lot of people did were accusing Dawkins of having said things that he didn't say.
However, to be fair to those critics, he wasn't entirely clear. At one part of the article, he was saying it's obvious that Claude is conscious and then later on he was sort of vacasillating about it. He was in two minds about it. So it was difficult and this is not like Richard you know he was he wrote a little bit unclearly to summarize what he said. I should have asked Grock, you know, summarize this thing and tell me what his position is because by the end of the article, I really wasn't entirely sure. But the disappointing part was that he saw language as a proxy for consciousness. And yet really his series of questions, the cheuring test type questions that he was doing, at best they would possibly reveal, or at most I should say, they could possibly reveal that Claude was um creative in some way.
Now whether or not that means consciousness now I might say that creativity is consciousness but it seemed like he just was assuming that the reader of the article would also attribute consciousness to a system which was effectively you know completing the next sentence kind of thing. So yeah >> yeah yeah also actually but then it reminded me of one of his uh previous statements that I I disagreed with a while ago. He um I disagreed uh with on epistemological grounds which was I think he he said once something along the lines I really hope I'm not misrepresenting him he said something along the lines that if he lived pre- Darwin or for people who lived pre- Darwin he understood their belief uh although he's a you know well atheist and everything but he said no back then we did not have um a better explanation so sort of like what is it called um um blind watchmaker argument sort of like sort of u would have been convincing for him if he lived before uh uh Darwin but I think we live pre Darwin in many things that we haven't understood yet but our the honest epistemological view is to say we don't know not not to jump okay god did it because that's still a god of the gaps anyway >> uh so maybe he did something like this with he assumed okay I have no explanation for this great uh language model that speaks seemingly perfect English and seemingly interacting with me as if I'm talking to a person and passed the Turing test. So I'm going to say it's uh again to be fair at the end of the article as he said he did seem to >> speaking of speaking of god of the gaps and I hers the new the new god of the gaps that I've noticed and I encountered this on my last trip to the United States where I had a few conversations with people including some Australians who happen to be there as well by the way and we can blame blame or credit Jordan Peterson with this and I think it was a noble exercise which was okay.
They want to defend the west. They want to defend the enlightenment and so on against all the anti-enlightenment forces that are now assaulting the west from uh Daniel Hannon was saying recently. It's mainly it's mainly our fault as in it's the fault of the west in not being um masculine or strong enough in defending its own values on the basis that these are the values which allow for rapid progress and allow for people to flourish and all that kind of thing. but as well as our importing cultures, importing maybe Islamist cultures that are going to attack it and we're not going to defend against that as well. Well, what Jordan Peterson suggested and a few other people simultaneously it seemed was well, we need to return to Christianity. We need to return to the values of the religions that are at the base of, you know, certainly in places like Great Britain, they're literally there sort of in the Constitution. You know, the the king is the head of the Church of England as well. And in the United States, well, there's a return and a resurgence of Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. And so there's a whole bunch of people out there arguing for the West and the Enlightenment on the basis that and the way the best way to defend the Enlightenment and the West is to return to these traditional Christian values, which is what I think Ion Herse has fallen into as well. She bought this argument and a lot of people have bought this argument and I can see why it's seductive. If you don't have something like a knowledge of secular philosophy, analytical western philosophy, in particular, David Deutsch and Carl Pa.
>> Exactly.
>> Then then then it it does make sense to you. And so trying to explain to people, hey, do you want optimism? Do you want people to be, you know, the the hub of the universe where something really important is happening? Do you want to be able to preserve the uniqueness and almost sacredness of the human mind and all that sort of all of that comes out of not Christianity but something deeper? Um I don't know what you think about that.
>> Absolutely.
>> Do you think this is a good thing this return to Christianity or or do you think there's going to be some severe downsides?
>> Uh yeah, I I think that's um exactly as you started that uh line of thought.
It's exactly a god of the gaps argument.
And uh what uh I will say jokingly pisses us off and annoys us is that we know that uh I say jokingly because of course we're fallibist. We know that's totally not it's okay like u but uh yeah we know that we have a much simpler more beautiful uh here is a couple of books just taking them seriously and tell me if doesn't solve your problem without the leap of faith or without something like that. Um I think the that that explains more about um I and Hersy Ali than Richard Dawkins uh sorry than uh Jordan Peterson. I think Peterson has a deeper connection to the faith like that's more uh psychological. uh as you know he has this thing with um um Yungian archetypes and all these types of things and he mocked the idea of memes like that it's a bad version of archetypes of like Yung got it better because he connected it to biology and all these things. So um I think in in his case I let me float this idea by you. So, you know, when like when a meme gets criticized so hard, I imagine it's as if the meme is trying to mutate to survive.
And I think his version of Christianity I imagined as a new mutation of Christianity that's trying to survive because Christianity like uh old style Christianity obviously in the west is like is not surviving anymore and has had a huge hit with the whole you know new atheism movement and all these things like existed fairly pretty well.
All these debates after 10 years they actually seemingly had their effect.
Maybe not direct, maybe maybe just correlation, but you know uh religiosity was on the uh it was declining. Uh and then I felt something like that started popping up again like uh Peterson and yeah, of course it connected with other memes as meme plexes do and all these things. But uh I do think yes, that was one interesting thing. I I imagine it like that where people trying and this is something I think he had a debate with Sam Harris. He told him like like he would ask him a clear question and then of course he give him an an easy to vary answer about Christianity that it's very difficult to criticize like you don't know where to hold it like and I'm I'm avoiding the word falsified because we're not talking about science we're talking about like philosophy and uh yeah so some people it's like it's like his claims are here on one side and then a more um realist view of Christianity where they believe Christianity is literally real like more literalist than him. They would like that he is defending Christianity because that keeps their meme alive somehow. That was one he >> Yeah, >> I was going to say, yeah, he holds his ideas immune from criticism. And the iron irony about some of Jordan Peterson's responses is that they fall into relativism because he's one of the greatest critics of postmodernism and relativism that are out there. Very eloquent and powerful. But when you ask him the straightforward question as I think Sam Harris has and many other people do you know do you believe in God then he gets very upset and he will say what do you mean by believe and what do you mean by God and these are this is not a simple question it's like well yeah okay it's not a simple question that's one thing but this is exactly what the postmodernists do let's just like have our own private language for everything and not agree on a a simple vernacular everyone knows what you mean when you say do you believe in God and Jordan doesn't want to answer that question you could you can you can answer it in a deeply philosophical ical way. But to say that, you know, it's incumbent upon the other person to give you the definition, which happens so often in these debates, um, is really just moving the goalposts around. He once was talk speaking of Peterson and and his language. It's very interesting how colored how by religion it is. He was once talking to the physicist who who wrote the universe from nothing.
What was his name? Uh, Loris Krauss. So Jordan Peterson was talking to Lawrence Krauss. And Loris Krauss was the empiricist he that he is was explaining empiricism to to Peterson and Peterson was disagreeing with him and I think he was trying to say something that's sort of approximating critical nationalism in in our view maybe but he would use words like inspiration uh sorry relevation revelation he said that >> revelation yes >> the idea comes as revelation to us first because we don't know where ideas come from >> and I'm like so critical rationalist would say yes we don't understand creativity, an idea might come, but we we would never use that term because that term if I was trying to be misleading, I wouldn't I like I would use that term. It's it's revealed to me out of nothing because it goes to that it seems to imply that truth is manifest somehow, but now it shows to reveal itself. It's like sort of the opposite of knowledge creation. as you know he's a pragmatist philosophically but you know but that's also interesting about the use of language and how it could be useful or not and how much a meme can be stuck in someone's mind that yeah he still uses such a religious language even while he was I think was trying to correct something about the empiricism uh of Lawrence K because Lawrence was trying to say something like you know the senses first and then the you know that the digist empiricist view of science >> I think Plato had a similar idea which is that we before we are born we know all the truths and then we forget them and we have to try and remember them throughout our life.
>> Yes. And another another contemporary thinker who opines on this kind of thing is Brett Weinstein who seems not to be a believer in religion but he tries to have this s like he his channel and all that sort of stuff. It's called the evolutionary lens. And so he tries to explain basically everything through the lens of evolution. I think once you go down that road of everything can be explained by one thing you've automatically taken a wrong turn. But again, he's another person who says that in our system of ideas, it's really a battle of religions and the battle of religions is going on and so therefore we want to pick the best religion and double down on that in order to preserve the west.
That kind of thing, you think, >> but it it sort of it begs the question. It starts with the assumption, well, we've always got religion. It's always been there. It will always be here. And it's just a matter of which religion is going to survive. Never thinking well there could be a way that you could have distill out what is good in religion, reject what is bad and have something where you don't need to take things on faith nor endorse belief in the supernatural which is what religion needs to do. You can have a a rational reasoned enlightened vision of reality.
>> Yeah. Otherwise also many religions can claim that. Many religions can claim that speaking of coming back to the true one. This is not an uncommon thing in some uh Islamic or Islamist ideologies where they say we have to go back to the good days like when people were following Islam better and that's when we were better that's where things were good and all these types of things and some would have the audacity to even go back to the you know mini enlightenment that maybe the like golden era under the Islamic uh empire at some point it was there like they would say something like oh because they were applying Islam well although obviously there are like um um examples to the contrary uh in many ways it was more about the freedom of expression that like a little pocket of freedom of expression that existed there uh here and there again like not not everywhere it wasn't universal and like as David talks about when he gives such examples but also uh for example I talked about this on my channel before and also I interviewed somebody and we talked about this so there are some countries in the world that are Christian but but they happen to they happen to be in in other parts of the world that did not go through the enlightenment and they do not live uh nearly they don't have any of these values that we've been talking about although they do hold the book as Peterson calls it he believes that there's a book like you know that's that's that's that's the secret of it all there's a book in the in the middle >> yes >> and it means like like uh another thing is like other religions do have a book as well I I think it's a challenge to to many thinkers who defend and Christianity let's say like to to tell me one idea I don't mean story I mean idea that was never touched in like I don't know Islam or another cuz usually a lot of these stories are added up you know culturally especially they're close to each other geographically so of course you will find everything you will find it there you will find it in the book that you think it will not have it if you haven't and uh in fact there are people who are who we have our versions of Jordan Peterson who speak Arabic and who are pragmatist and actually with a psychological background funny enough. I knew of these people like into the 2000s. So before Peterson was and and and to be fully honest with you back then I liked them a lot. So so uh when he came to the scene and then I I I was very familiar with these types of arguments but it was the Islamic version of it and uh and and in some regard it was more enlightened than the mainstream. I I will give you that and I will give him that. But we're saying yeah don't stop there like the there's keep going. Maybe there is a better solution. That's >> Yes. Yes, it's unsurprising that yeah, many societies over time have codified things like the golden rule and rediscovered it over and over again. Uh whether you know Asian cultures figured that out, Islamic culture figured that out, you know, um Jewish Christianity obviously they've all got a common ancestor I suppose there. Um one other area that you're interested in as well, and we've only just briefly touched on it, is this intersection that's going on now between AI and consciousness, but also neuroscience. Now, uh tell me a little bit about your interest in in that those areas.
>> Yeah, I um I think at some point I was so much into neuroscience because of how much I got about consciousness. Uh so I I didn't mention this. I used uh I used to believe in like sort of spiritual pseudo science type of thingy like I don't know back in in a past life to put it colorfully and uh uh so yeah of course I was interested in consciousness and you know all these claims about like psychism or consciousness everywhere or uh and there are all kinds of versions of this like consciousness everywhere and that's just a physical thing or consciousness is everywhere and that's our brain is just a radio you know have you heard this claim before >> yes I have heard that one yes it's a receiver >> exactly And all of them are like again without without the proper epmology or something one might seem more attractive psychologically than the other. And uh yeah once I I I had more uh my mind became more like my thinking became more scientific um and as my philosophy philosophy was getting better my epistemology let's say was getting better yeah I I I got more into I don't know if Sam Harris wrote something about neuroscience David Eagleman which of course I learned a lot from like you know Eagleman mentioned something what we mentioned earlier about how you can add new senses just by you know like even there was the TV show um where they used his vests to to explain the idea sort of uh to sense like sensorally where like the map of the whole uh area that one is at and because you can train that it's based on something he's doing in reality where people who are hard of hearing for example they just put a something like this but it like it translates the audio like the the audiary input into something sensorial and then uh the person learns how to like uh decode it.
Uh so yeah, I got into all these kinds of things. I was very interested in psychology and I still am and uh despite the despite all the problems and evolutionary psychology and all these things and yeah of course because consciousness is such a big interesting question that of course you you try to go everywhere you try to go I don't know you read Thomas Nagel and you read the like you want to know you want to know what's what's going on and or to see you know what what has been figured out till now. A lot of these were prior to me maybe reading Deutsch and um uh yeah it's interesting also how I mean one learns after a while not right away that how a lot of these studies are just not interesting like oh we can turn off this part of the brain and this will happen and know when you do this this part of the brain fires up sort of I mean the bad version of it the worst version of it now is like oh you get dopamine if you're if you're swiping how terrible and uh like if you're in what's doom scrolling or whatever they call it and um uh so yeah I was interesting all these questions uh I guess um yeah there was beauty in that curiosity and like to to to basically discover that map although you arrive at like ah even reading again Ray Corwell how to create a mind he had his own theory I think he would say now it doesn't work out I I don't know but it was called the pattern recognition theory of mind and uh yeah all they trying to explain some things and you feel oh here yeah it might seem to explain something but like this is a very fundamental theory like does it work so till now we don't we don't have it but uh yeah >> I remember um not knowing what people were talking about when they talked about consciousness studies back when it would have been like first year uni or something and I took a philosophy subject and they were talking about consciousness I literally never thought about this question at all prior and so I just thought, oh, the word means awake, doesn't it? It's just like the difference between someone who has passed out or someone has been knocked unconscious and consciousness. It took me a long time to figure out, ah, okay, they're talking about the subjective sensation that you have and qualia and all this sort of stuff. It slowly dawned on me, but it's amazing now. Um, this is why I think I don't know, you're not on X, are you? Or Twitter?
>> I am. I am. Yeah.
>> Oh, you are. You are. Okay. Yeah. that the the level compared to other social media, the level of discourse there certainly in the part of Twitter that I occupy is quite high and although I think that people are sometimes completely lost like consciousness as an example and AI as an example as well nonetheless people are having really interesting deep philosophical discussions and they're talking about things most recently especially with LLMs and with what Richard Dawkins was saying all about consciousness and having these really deep sort of discussions which is just one sign of just how far we've come kind of um as a society and the the benefits of social media. However, all of that said, um even though I think it's good that people talking about consciousness and taking it seriously as a philosophical and scientific question, the number of the number of papers that are out there that have been coming out recently from scientists, neuroscience, philosophers saying, "We've solved it. We've we've got the answer for what consciousness is." And I just read part of them and I think there's nothing new here. you know, you're you're rediscovering pans psychism or you're explaining the computational thesis of what consciousness is, you know, but um yeah, but it is interesting that um there's a lot of there's a lot of attention seeking going on out there with some of these these issues and people will make very bold claims which I I guess is popular, you know, bold conjecture, but >> Exactly.
>> but often it's quite disappointing.
>> Yeah. Yeah. It's exactly till now it's disappointing.
I I will also uh uh like remember how I seductive it seemed at some point like maybe yeah it is a hard problem that that's unsolvable which is terrible epistemology of course or we can't imagine how to solve it now so it's the hard problem of consciousness which means it's impossible to solve we will never understand it >> u I think maybe you wrote something when somebody lost a bet to somebody that like h they um like they I think they they had uh bet that by the end of 2024 or five somebody will solve the hard problem I think it was David Schmer's and somebody else uh so yeah just to claim that it's impossible to solve something because uh and they always like they put it very nicely they say uh it's qualia it's subjective as you just said and um however like they try to explain like however and they give some examples uh however you try to solve it uh computationally you still can't prove that uh that this is conscious and all these things and then you have to take some shortcuts or something like that and um yeah it could be it could seem seductive because all these new papers are not pic like they're not actually explaining what they're what they're supposed to explain but yeah we just don't know and it's okay not to know and we always don't know till we do and that's okay uh but yeah I guess um it's actually I haven't come across like new papers on the subject but I'm I'm curious now >> the last deep dive I I did um I can't I can't recall the most recent ones that I've read through because I I sort of you know read the abstract, read the conclusion and think nothing there. Um but Michael Leaven who's that biologist and I did a series about his stuff and he was talking about how well he attributes not merely consciousness >> but cognition is the word he uses to basically every biological system down to single cells. And he will talk about how single cells engage in a kind of cognition. And his explanation for this is well you know cognition is kind of a problem-solving exercise and you can't draw a line which is what the panists do. They they argue from we don't know how to draw the line between what a human being is experiencing versus a chimpanzeee versus a dog. And there's this this slow continuum down into fundamental particles. And so if you don't know where to draw the line, they conclude therefore you can't draw the line and so everything is conscious. And and Michael Leven does the same with cognition and all these other things.
And it's like well well you okay fair enough. I don't know. I don't have a good explanation that the dog is or isn't conscious. But just because I don't have a good explan doesn't mean that there is no such explanation waiting around the corner and we'll find out because I wouldn't be surprised I >> if if we prove prove we have a good explanation at some point in the future that only people are conscious or >> if only animals with sufficient number of neurons you know you reach a phase change in the number of neurons inside your brain the complexity or everything with a nervous system I can imagine all of these scenario I can also imagine pansychism might be true in some rudimentary way as But yeah, a lot of people are deeply committed to all to to to having a bet on one of these as being the answer.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Fun. But I I think also one of the amazing ideas that sort of flicks when one reads the beginning of infinity is the universality idea and the jump to universality which is like also an interesting aspect of because yeah it might seem like it's all uh there like it it well we share so much with animals in so many little ways but then we go we go and do something alone completely which is like this universality of explan explanatory knowledge creating the creativity all these things we just talked about and yeah we we know only of one one type of being, not just one species that can do that. Uh so what what caused that jump is the explanation. It's the the crux of the matter, right? Like that's what I get.
So uh yeah, surely they all have neurons. We we all have neurons. We all have nervous systems. Maybe we'll discover that okay, one setup of neurons. It's not about the number. It's about the the way they're like set up somehow. I I cannot find a better way like the architecture, let's say, or all kind. it could so it's very tough again we're speaking about something we just don't know at all about but it's it's uh good to keep into account that there is that jump >> like of universal so and >> we we hypothesize I guess just once we understand universality and we see the uniqueness of that in uh humans that okay so they're all connected uh like these uh features creativity consciousness etc and if so there was a jump in all of them together And maybe maybe it will be evolutionary like David Deutsch tried to do in the beginning infinity to like maybe meme replication had something to do with like the the pressure uh the evolutionary pressure that ultimately gave us uh uh this universality.
So maybe all these things will add up together and we understand something in particular. Uh it's fun to see people betting on on these different uh views.
Uh but yeah, I >> also think I think there is a and it might be a consequence of this strand of antihumanism that exists in the intellectual culture. We it seems like the the people who have understood the beginning of infinity, it's us and the religious people really because other people other rationalists, atheist, rationalists or whatever you want to call them. They will denigrate or play down the uniqueness of people except in one area they'll talk about how people are particularly damaging and destructive and all that kind of stuff.
They will say that we're uniquely that.
But it is amazing how many intellectuals will focus on the many many similarities between human beings as people and other animals or human beings as people and random chemicals. You know, we're all made of matter. We're all made of atoms.
So there's nothing special about us or we we're alive and we're an evolved species just like every other species.
So therefore, we must have a similar cognitive experience or architecture or call it what you like as you know all other mammals. So the dolphin is having as rich a experience of the world as what we are for example. But all of this completely elides completely ignores downplays doesn't understand universality as you just said that's a jump that's a specific jump. So even if the dolphin or the chimpanzeee or whatever um is more advanced more intelligent if you like than than other species you know reptiles or fish and so on. They're still an infinite distance away from what we are by the measure that they haven't accomplished universality. And we know this. When I was a high school teacher, I remember um having a discussion with a a year seven girl. She would have only been 12, 13 years old or whatever. And she we we were debating. She was having fun. We were all having fun with her, but she was trying to explain to me how bees in their hive were conscious and just as creative as what people were. And so I think there is this individual bee. Ah, >> I think there's a hive. There's a hive.
They have a hive mind and they have all this experience. But, you know, that was a very cute little thing, but I think that some people never grow out of that.
They they love the animals so much that they want to say animals are just as important as us. You know, we're nothing's particularly special. And I'm not saying we need to be cruel or disregard or be mean to the animals or anything, but there is something really really special and we should want to preserve that. And it can't just be that oh we have an immortal soul or something like that or God has chosen us as the the this these entities in the universe.
No there's a scientific robust philosophical way to understand all this.
>> Beautiful. Beautiful. So yeah you mentioned now you reminded me. So I I imagine that maybe human like humans were trying to explain their because a human understood that they were different from the rest of the animals despite living in static societies throughout these hundreds of thousands of years till like very recently. So they would try to come up with and I imagine maybe those stories that we have like uh whether in mythology where somebody stole the fire from God or whatever or in Islam there is a story that when God created Adam, he taught him the names. He taught him the names and like nobody else knew. So uh and you know in in Christianity it's the image of God. Adam is in the image of God. H cuz clearly they saw that there is this type of species that's very different from everything else. And how can we explain it? and they came up with their mythological views about the bees and stuff. I think also because it's common to explain emergence through uh the story of the bees or like uh you social animals in general uh where because an individual ants or bee cannot solve a problem but for example u a bunch of a hive of bees or the bunch of ants together can I don't know solve the traveling sales problem or something like that. So maybe it comes up like that. And um I remember people were saying maybe the internet because again a misunderstanding of emergence but they would say maybe the internet is conscious because we're all little consciousnesses here and there that are writing on it all the time. So maybe it uh like maybe on some higher level the internet is is conscious and um and yeah you mentioned dolphins. I remember also how I was under the wrong impression that one of the important aspects of being a human like I mean as a species is having a an opposable thumb and then like David just David do mentions in the book that if we didn't have we could we could have created it with our creative uh mind technology we could have we could have made the thumb we could have made we some people now make two thumbs if they need it in their work and it's that doesn't matter what matters is universality is creativity and uh that's also a common mistake I think >> yes yes um Yeah. So, there could be other, you know, creative universal explainers out there, you know, alien life somewhere other. Have you got any opinions on the Fermy paradox and UAPs as they're appearing right now?
>> Yeah. Um, I I mean, maybe that speaks more about me. I I got bored at some point. I got I mean the amount of terrible explanations uh that so maybe maybe that's interesting also to to like to remind the maybe some of the viewers about some principles in critical nationalism. Uh so again every observation is theory laden. So when I look at something I am like it's theory laden. Okay, I have my theories and I'm I'm looking at that thing through my theories uh of all types and also the if I'm using a device to see something I'm also that device has embedded knowledge in it that basically we just said we programmed we know what what it means to embed knowledge in something that's what programming is here and um all knowledge is fallible and the truth isn't manifest so there are so just to keep all these things in mind and then to Look at these um sightings or I don't know what they call them. all kinds of uh uh maybe one of them is an alien may but that's one like it's almost a forced choice when we're or I look at this it's un unidentified so I'm going to choose to say well it's aliens like the meme you know them aliens it's sort of an alien of the gap >> aliens of the gap >> exactly nice nice it's uh so it's like uh so again maybe one of them one day will turn out to be an alien but I I am just not I I just got so bored by it and um I'm very glad that you are not bored that you're you're making these videos and you're explaining every time every few years at least you have an old video we can link to that shows that what is the problem with thinking so easily jumping so easily to the alien explanations and uh yeah but we can say we don't know and uh it's I mean yeah some people enjoy it it's it's attractive that oh there's something out there as for the products in itself Um I mean yeah I also don't know it also has a lot of assumptions of course and maybe uh depends people who studied them more maybe can criticize them better than I can but um yeah I wouldn't it's one ah that's an interesting also thing for the people who like the UFO sightings and or they called now UAP or something sighting it's like um even if you think there are aliens it's completely another claim uh to think that they uh that they're here like they they came to earth and they have been it's a completely different story because the amount of assumptions you need to add to that to the first one to make it the second is more than double. You're assuming you know people hiding things from us, thousands of people cooperating together. The average the average conspiracy theory more or less if you believe in the the Area 51 or something like that. And uh what was that funny joke you once linked to? Maybe I'll let you say it. uh car >> if uh if they are trying to hide from us. Are they trying to hide from us or not? Because they jump in and then they disappear. They jump in and then disappear. If they're trying to hide, they're not doing a good job. If they're trying to show us themselves, they're not doing a good job. So, what's up with that? So, yeah, >> that the extension of that joke was by a comedian, female comedian in Australia.
Her name is Suanne Post. And she did this whole bit which goes on for quite a long time. But she talks about how Yeah.
Are they trying to be seen? Trying not to be seen? Because some of them seem to be coming down with all these flashing lights that are spinning around, you know? And then she realized, she went, "Oh, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The these must be the police aliens.
These are the cops that are chasing all the others." So that's just the tip of the iceberg.
>> Exactly.
>> All the others don't have lights that are flashing lights on them. But yeah, the amazing thing too about the UAP phenomenon is that if these really are intergalactic visitors from somewhere else, they seem to have technology that is only about one decade ahead of ours or less than that, maybe five years.
They're getting around in drones.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. But and yet they managed to come across like galaxies or something >> and then they crash when they get to the last minute.
>> Yeah. Yeah. This atmosphere was particularly tricky.
>> Yes.
They're just not used to gravity or something like that. Yeah. So, behind you is the poster. What does it say?
Fallable Optimist.
>> It says Fable Optimist. That's our um me and a bunch of friends. Uh we play pop quiz or trivia or what do you call it?
Uh almost every week. And uh you can imagine that I chose the name and that's u that's a question mark >> and it's a web guesses. Exactly. is the >> now the camera doesn't show it but >> uh on top of that question mark there is a what translates it's in Greek and it says something like uh it's all but a woven web of guesses >> oh no sorry it says um no the guesses one is the question mark uh that part says u problems are inevitable problems are solvable >> so to to uh to express both optimism and uh the question mark is the is the guesses is the conjectural nature of knowledge.
>> We did touch on the fact that you're in Eastern Europe. Do you find that to be an optimistic part of the world? I can tell you my I was I and Peter Beosian is also another fan, but he's a fan of Hungary and Peter and I had a had a long discussion about where would be better to move to cuz after I visited Eastern Europe, I thought I I fell in love with Romania. I thought their startup culture is really really good in in in certain places. Um and I thought yeah that that that would be a great but but he he he thinks Hungary's Hungary is the place to be. What do you think about um Romania?
>> So yeah I studied in Romania and I don't know I don't know much about Hungary but I would say that uh it is interesting uh what you said because yeah in the in college like when I while doing the masters I did see that optimism that you're talking about that we're talking about but it's interesting to mention something also David do mention in the book about optimism. Optimism isn't like the demeanor. It isn't like, oh, somebody who is like smiley is it's not about that. We're not talking about that. I think David Deutsch says how and maybe if you talk to Churchill, he wouldn't seem like the uppery guy, but he was optimistic in terms of how he dealt with the war. So we're talking about epistemological optimism and problem solving not about let's like some people it matches like you look at them the way they speak you feel it's you know optimistic in the general sense of the word and also they are optimistic philosophically but these two things are not necessarily uh onetoone uh so yes I I do feel it in the you mentioned the startup culture um I I'm I'm again not in touch anymore but while I was in uh doing my masters I did feel that completely which you know my masters was in the in uh artificial intelligence. So those are the people who go and work in in these types of things. So I agree with you. Uh interestingly also yeah there is something that psychologically might seem like an apathy that I notice sometimes when I'm talking to people uh and yet I would from the outside remind them but we've we've witnessed quite some progress even in the in the short time that I've been here in the last 14 years and they agree so they see it and uh and so the apathy is more maybe again uh psychological proclivity here and there I don't like to generalize but I I to be honest I have like noticed it uh but yeah it It thankfully did not kill the optimism and uh and the tradition of criticism seems to exist at least in the minds of people and that's good.
>> Yeah, I think it was collusion poker I think was the place where um there's a lot of lot of tech startups and things I just noticed. I mean I was just there as a tourist but it it seemed like they had >> they had programs to try and attract people there. Something that you know my own country Australia we're just terrible at. I mean, we had a the government released a budget just yesterday, in fact. And you know, it's all about taxing people's capital gains and all this kind of stuff. It's like the worst place in the world to to try and start have a startup.
>> Yeah, that's optimis optimis psych psychological optimism in many senses is dying. But yeah, I I like the fact that you talk about optimism and phrase it the same way I do with epistemology more broadly as more than just about people's beliefs and it's more than just about critical thinking. It's about actually the physical effects of knowledge in the world. And so, you know, of course, all the knowledge initially begins in the mind, but eventually it does more than just change people's ideas. It changes the world radically. And I think a a more mature epistemology which I think David Deutsch has certainly um built upon KL PA with respect to is having a physical understanding of epistemology and exactly what kind of structures can be uh constructed out there in reality given the knowledge. And so um optimism is is very much about that that we can take you know random matter and learn that it's a resource of some kind and then use that resource to to transform uh everything on any scale.
>> Yes. Beautiful. Also one of his beautiful ideas is like the common myth basically of u like limited resources >> also once once one understand like what makes something a resource isn't the thing itself but rather our knowledge itself. I think he says uh something like people who died I forgot what disease but who died of something died on top of the uh wood that they could have boiled water with. They could have burnt and boiled water with to not have died through that disease. So they had the resource if it was the resources they had. So it's not about the resource, it's about the knowledge. And that's also such a uh like a a deep fundamental idea that would change uh how one thinks about the world and the importance of knowledge.
>> Possibly the most significant thing physically in the cosmos that exists right now and will only continue to get more significant over time. Um it's been a wonderful conversation. We should do this again because I think we can explore uh more of the themes of the beginning of infinity and more about what's there on your channel. We've gone for so long. I think I'm going to it's going to be um enough to edit what we're doing so far. So, um thank you for your time.
>> Thank you so much, Brett. Thank you so much for this uh besides this lovely uh conversation, all the great conversation you've had on this uh channel on conjunction and for everything you've been doing. You're what you've been doing throughout I don't know how long you've been doing at that. you're, as I told you, you're the OG of popularizing these ideas and uh you've done it more and uh you've you've done it so well and your consistency uh in doing it. I know many people I see on Twitter how like the recommendation is read that chapter, go watch uh Brett's uh videos on it and then go to the next chapter. Uh please keep uh keep doing what you're doing. Thank you so much for everything.
>> Well, thank you. That's very very kind of you and I all more power to you because I think we need to make more inroads into various places around the world that don't speak English as a first language and so you're doing I I I hesitate to say it but you're doing God's work.
>> Say that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's very kind of you, bro.
>> All right, J. Thanks very much.
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