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And here Brian Greene gets from David Deutsch his latest view on free will. He says it exists - and is about knowledge creation. A thing wasn't there, then it was, and we can't explain that by "the Big Bang" or any other prior state of the universe. People...

11,290 次观看 • 3 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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.Naval: You define wealth in a beautiful way. You talk about wealth as a set of physical transformations that we can affect. So as a society it becomes very clear that knowledge leads directly to wealth creation for everybody. A given individual can obviously affect physical transformations proportional to the resources available to them—but much more proportional to the knowledge available to them. Knowledge is a huge force multiplier. You then define resources as the thing that you combine with knowledge to create wealth. New knowledge allows you to use new things as resources and discard old things that maybe we’re running out of. There are lots of examples of how we’ve done that in the past. For example, in energy we’ve gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. But then people say, “Now we’re out of ideas. Now we’re caught up. Now we’re done. There aren’t going to be new ideas, and now we have to freeze the frame and conserve what we have.” The counter to that is, “No, we’ll create new knowledge and have new resources. Don’t worry about the old ones.” Well they say, “If you’re going to have new resources, if you can’t think of them now, it’s not real.” This now gets into the realm of people demanding that if you’re going to claim that new knowledge will be created, you have to name that knowledge now. Otherwise it’s not real. But that seems like a Catch-22. David Deutsch: It does, and it’s a bad argument. I don’t want to claim that the knowledge will be created. We’re fallible; we may not create it. We may destroy ourselves. We may miss the solution that’s right under our nose, so that when the snailiens come from another galaxy and look at us, they’ll say, “How can it possibly be that they failed to do so-and-so when it was right in front of them?” That could happen. I can’t prove or argue that it won’t happen. What I always argue, though, is that we have what it takes. We have everything that it takes to achieve that. If we don’t, it’ll be because of bad choices we have made, not because of constraints imposed on us by the planet or the solar system. Naval: It will be by anti-rational memes that restrict the creation of knowledge and the growth of knowledge. David Deutsch: Maybe. Or maybe it’ll be by well-intentioned errors, which nobody could see why they were errors. Again, it doesn’t take malevolence to make mistakes. Mistakes are the normal condition of humans. All we can do is try to find them. Maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality; because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later one of those will get us. Naval: Don’t destroy the means of error correction is the base of morality. I love that. I think about places like North Korea where you can’t have elections and a revolution is very difficult because the gang in charge is armed to the teeth and they’ve destroyed the means of political error correction for a long time. That is a case where humanity is trapped in a local minimum, and it’s very hard to climb out of that hole. If too much of the world falls into that mindset, then we as a species may just stagnate because we’ve lost our biggest advantage. We’ve lost our biggest discovery, which was the ability to make new discoveries.

Deutsch Explains

143,949 次观看 • 2 年前

.David Deutsch: “There is an inherent conflict in the human condition—both individually and in society—between the need to preserve existing knowledge and the need to create new knowledge. For most of human history, preserving existing knowledge trumped any kind of attempt to improve knowledge. Because attempts to improve knowledge risk error. Or rather, to be exact, it risks error that has never occurred before. There were plenty of errors that had occurred before. Plenty of kings got overthrown because they couldn’t solve the problem of how to fend off the enemy. But they were in familiar territory conceptually, and they were afraid of changing culture. This fear of changing culture was built into culture itself. And this conflict exists to this day. The most extreme example known to me in the West, anyway, is the conflict in education between preserving existing knowledge and creating new knowledge. Even today, education—education theory—is conceived as the theory of how to decant existing knowledge from the brains that already know it to the brains that do not yet know it. And that’s what Popper calls the ‘bucket theory of the mind’—that the mind is a bucket and knowledge is a fluid. What he stressed, and what I always also want to stress, is that not only is that a mischaracterization of knowledge and of the use of knowledge, but it is the wrong way around. As a practical matter, even right back two million years ago, the transmission of cultural knowledge was not something done by the transmitter; it was something done by the receiver.”

Arjun Khemani

10,523 次观看 • 1 年前

.Naval: Marxism, besides denying human incentives, also has a problem where it just assumes that everything is finite and we're all just dividing up the same small set of things. Well, the cavemen didn't have color TVs, computers, cars, antibiotics, or medicine. They were not sitting around dividing up the same few things. The knowledge grows, and we create more. It also tends to assume that we can freeze frame at some point in society and say, 'Well, we have enough different kinds of sneakers, enough different kinds of housing, we just need to allocate it better.' And that is not how anything works. David Deutsch has a great definition of wealth, which he says is the set of physical transformations that we can affect. So, when you think about it that way, you realize that knowledge is not just stored capital in the classic Marxist sense (capital vs. labor), but it's also knowledge on what to do with that capital. The cavemen or Palaeolithic ancestors had access to all the same resources we did. They were living on the same Earth, and by the modern environmentalist arguments, they had a better Earth—they had more to do things with. But yet, they couldn't do anything. They were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. Why? Because of knowledge. Life is not a zero-sum game, it's a positive-sum game. But we are hardwired to think it's a zero-sum game because, for millions or billions of years, there was no such thing as wealth. There was no such thing as persistent knowledge creation in the environment. What you had was a small amount of resources being divided up, and most of the games were status games—'Which monkey outranks which other monkey?' And that decides which monkey gets to eat first. We played that game for a billion years. Now, we come onto a recent game where, actually, we can all eat, and the big problem is obesity. It's no longer starvation. The big problem is boredom. It's not actually work. There's enough work. So, in this environment, switching your evolved mindset from a zero-sum game to a positive-sum game where we can all win, if we create knowledge together and use the resources that we have to create more resources and more wealth, that's the game we all need to be playing now.

Arjun Khemani

163,525 次观看 • 1 年前

.Naval: Epistemology, which is a fancy word for the theory of how knowledge grows or how knowledge growth occurs. And we've all been told since we're young that there's a scientific method and that scientists sort of do this stuff in white lab coats and we're supposed to accept it because of this thing called the scientific method. And then they give us true beliefs that we can then say, well the science is settled and we take that we move on. And we all only have a very, very vague understanding of how this works. And people say, well maybe you go out in the real world, you look at what's happening, you make all these observations, and then based on that you form a theory, you test the theory against more observations, and the more observations you get the closer you get to the truth. And once you have enough observation it's true and then you call it a scientific theory or a law and it's settled and you move on. And this is the popular conception of how science works. And as Popper pointed out and as you take even further, this is completely wrong. And so I'd love for you to get into that, which is what is knowledge? How does it grow? What is the real scientific method? And how do we figure things out? David Deutsch: I love the way you just stated the prevailing view there and laced every aspect of it with the contempt that it deserves. So you just went through touching every base. It's amazing that this series of misconceptions is still common sense. I mean, that it was common sense at a time when we didn't really have science or when science was just starting up, when the main issue in science was freeing itself from dogmatism, freeing itself from religion, freeing itself from authority, and so on. There it was understandable that people would look for an alternative source of authority and they would think, oh, it's sense impressions. We can see the world and you know, these religious people, they can't even see God and so on. And so we are confined to what we can see. That's where we get our ideas from. And as you say, that is completely false. Sense impressions, like all observation, even the most careful scientific observation is all theory laden. And theories are inherently fallible. I mean, we actually want to replace our best theories. Everybody who does a PhD is technically anyway, working to overturn something in the existing body of knowledge. You're not turned away at the door if you say, I don't believe this stuff, I'm going to produce something better. Whereas for most of human history, that was exactly what you were forbidden to do. The idea was that we already had all the important knowledge. If you want to discover something new, what you had to make sure of was that it didn't contradict the existing knowledge. Now, you have to make sure that it does contradict existing knowledge. So more or less. Naval: Yeah, it's this tradition of criticism that you've talked about in the West, that the Enlightenment really ushered in the Enlightenment era. David Deutsch: It has been institutionalized. So in many ways, our institutions are wiser than we are. So the institutions of science, for instance, have this built in, even if scientists actually don't always act that way. In fact, they often don't act that way, and act in a dogmatic way and try to preserve the status quo and are resistant to new ideas and so on. But the institutions, the way the procedures of science work, makes the right thing happen in the end anyway, regardless of what the people are trying to do. Naval: So you're saying the knowledge of the true scientific method is embedded in the institutions of science in the PhD process? David Deutsch: Well, the best scientific method that we know of, and one shouldn't really think of it as a method, you know, there's this wonderful lecture by Popper when he first was made a professor at the London School of Economics. He was made a professor of scientific method, and his first six lectures, I wish the rest of them were, the first six lectures are on the internet somewhere. And he starts the first one by saying, I am the first professor of scientific method in the British Empire. The British Empire still existed at the time, more or less. And so the first thing I want to say to you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method. And then he goes on from there. So this subject does not exist. So if any of you have come here to learn the handle that you have to turn in order to make scientific knowledge come out the other end, you're going to be disappointed.

Deutsch Explains

114,992 次观看 • 1 年前