The Tyranny of Explanation

David Deutsch, in his book, The Beginning of Infinity, argues that good explanations are how knowledge grows and thus good explanations are what lead to progress. Deutsch believes that the enlightenment was only possible because of Western society's quest for good explanations. As such. Deutsch believes quite optimistically that humanity's ability to cure all evils has reach. As long as we keep searching for good explanations.

Deutsch disregards philosophies that are explanation and instead believes elegant explanations of our world are the ultimate guide to truth. Deutsch argues that substantial creativity has only existed since the enlightenment. Since creation must depend on a culture of critique using good explanations. I will argue that explanations are indeed needed but not in the way Deutsch thinks rather than good explanations leading to progress. It is bad explanations that move us forward.

And in fact, almost all explanations are bad. I argue that ultimately, it does not matter if an explanation is correct as long as we believe they are. Since this is what motivates us to keep trying more to the point. It is not an explanation's proximity to truth that solves problems, but rather movement and naivete that make problems tractable I will argue that explanations are not truly testable for most natural phenomena and as such are not aligned to the culture of critique.

As Deutsch suggests, I will argue that the notion of unlimited knowledge growth is problematic running counter to what we know about the convergence and cyclical nature of ideas. I will contend that philosophies that reject explanation should be preferred and that ultimately knowledge is not required for progress. Let's get started the tyranny of explanation. What do I mean by that? OK. Let's go ahead and jump in uh for Patreon subscribers.

They get access to the visuals that I use throughout this talk. So if you're a visual person and you kind of like to see the uh very creative visuals that I come up with that help anchor this conversation. Um I think that helps a lot. I'm a visual person. I like to see them.

So if you'd like to see the slide deck that I put together that I speak to throughout this conversation throughout this podcast episode, head on over to patreon dot com and check out non-trivial and you will uh if you subscribe for as little as $1 a month or up to, you know, five or $10 a month, whatever you want, you'll be able to um see the visuals that accompany these podcast episodes. But as usual as I say, the audio is exactly the same. So if you are on a usual podcast platform.

Uh You get the exact same content from an audio perspective. But again, if you want the visual head on over to patreon dot com and check out the nontrivial podcast. OK. So as an overview, got the overview slide here. Those on Patreon can see, I've got a lot of topics that I wanna cover uh in this episode. I'll try to keep it not too long. It could go as long as two hours. Hopefully not, I am a, a fast talker, so hopefully I can keep it within a reasonable amount of time. But I just wanna.

So, first of all, let me talk about the book that I'm gonna be discussing as an anchor to this episode and then the process or, or kind of structure that I'm gonna use to kind of divvy up the topic. So the book this week is called The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. The beginning of Infinity explanations that transform the world.

So this book has a number of topics that are near and dear to my heart because it talks about things like progress and knowledge, growth and creativity and, you know, kind of computational solving and universality and all that good stuff. A lot of things that I uh kind of talk about on a regular basis. So David Deutsch has a number of opinions as they relate to important concepts. I have ones that are different.

Uh Although there are definitely some overlaps there So the way that I want to do this episode is I will first spend the first half talking about what David Deutsch thinks about a number of these things. And then the second half, I'll talk about what mcclure he thinks about a lot of these things. And we'll kind of compare the Deutsche and mcclure philosophies.

And I think that comparison is really useful to, to kind of ultimately tease out a number of these core patterns and concepts, the core patterns and concepts that I want to talk about in this episode will be things like knowledge, creativity, universality, invariance, recursion, evolution and infinity. So lots of interesting stuff. Let's go ahead and jump in again for Patreon subscribers.

You can kind of see the, the, the whole list of uh topics that I have on the left there between Deutsch and myself. Um I'm not gonna read them all off right now. You'll know them just by listening. Um But yeah, check that out if you want. OK. So again, this week's book is the beginning of Infinity Explanations that Transform the world by David Deutsch.

So this is a very optimistic look at knowledge, scientific method, the enlightenment, some of the things that I've talked about in a few other episodes, but David Toy, uh David Deutsch, sorry, it takes a very um optimistic view because he thinks knowledge is essentially a cure for all evils. OK? So knowledge is a cure for all evils.

In other words, if you take a look at the world today and you notice the social and political and economic problems, he'll say, yeah, I mean, you know, it's not all great, but we've also done a lot of good things, but ultimately, whatever those problems are, we have the capacity to figure them out. We have the capacity to figure them out because knowledge, as long as it keeps growing, we, you know, make those problems tractable.

We we will or at least sort of bring the solution to the problems along as long as they can be solved. So, optimism is required for knowledge growth. That's a key ingredient here as David Deutsch talks about. So he says knowledge is a cure for all evil. You gotta be optimistic. He he makes a statement and this is kind of really kind of anchors his point of view of just how optimistic he is.

He says that if earlier social experiments and optimism had succeeded, we would be exploring the stars by now. If earlier social experiments and optimism had succeeded, we would be exploring the stars by now.

So what he means by that is that if you look at most of human history, there was obviously a lot of appeal to authority, whether that was kind of more, you know, dictatorship rulers or, or or religion or whatever it is, there's appeal to authorities, there wasn't really a culture or tradition of challenging that, right? You just accept it, it is what it is.

Um But then, you know, you could say the enlightenment was kind of this big social experiment, you know, so predominantly on the West, uh especially in the US, there's this social experiment to uh you know, have individualism and freedom and to challenge authority and to come up with new ideas and you get into the scientific method and you have this enlightenment that happens in the West and, and that social experiment is really where that optimism and that knowledge growth came from.

So if that had occurred earlier in other parts of the world, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago where you know, that kind of culture of critique did not exist because it was all just authoritarian, then he believes we would have been exploring the stars by now. In other words, you know, there would have been that much more progress.

And so he has this very optimistic view of knowledge of, you know, the scientific method of the enlightenment, you know, knowledge as the cure for all evils. Now he goes deeper into that to really, you know, into the premise of this book, which is that good explanations mean progress. In other words, the mechanism by which we make progress as society is really our capacity to come up with good explanation, right?

Because there's all kinds of ways you could think about the mechanism, you could say kind of the the you know, the gun germs and steel kind of take, which is a book, right, which, which says, look based on where you were born and the geography and the access to resources that explains a lot of the success of certain cultures over others. You know, there's all kinds of other takes or theories you could have on that. David Deutsche's take is basically that it's not all that stuff.

And he, and he makes those comparisons in his book actually at the beginning of infinity, it's not all of that, you know, where you were born and access to resources, it really comes down to having a culture that makes you come up with good explanation that, that that's the mechanism behind knowledge growth and that knowledge growth is what leads to prosperity. So coming up with good explanations is what moves us forward. OK. Now what is a good explanation?

So he defines it as an explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for. So an explanation is obviously something that describes kind of the the the why and the how behind something, right? Specifically the how like you, you're, you're noticing something, you observe it, you measure it, you experience it and then you explain why that is or or more specifically, you explain how that is, I guess, right? So that's an explanation, a good explanation.

He says is hard to vary and that makes sense. So I've talked about things like invariants before where you know, if something survives the test of time, we could say it's invariant because all kinds of things are happening and swirling around it. But that thing, that explanation in this case doesn't change, right?

So I come up with an explanation for something and then, you know, it seems to describe reasonably well what we're looking at and then 10, 2030 years goes by and new stuff happens and that explanation still seems to map to what we observe. So it's hard to vary. So a good explanation is an explanation that's hard to vary, seeking good explanations rather than relying on authority is really kind of what he's pushing at here, right?

You, you ever since the enlightenment, we had this new tradition of criticism. So it's going against the authority. It's, it's being able to challenge the criticism, sorry, challenge the authority uh critique the explanations. And you've kind of got this error correction, right mechanism where you come up with an explanation, whatever's wrong about gets corrected, new explanations, get forward and on and on and on through iteration.

And so it's very much kind of the narrative behind the scientific method. So I've talked about things that I've kind of challenged this idea on a number of points. You know, one whether or not the scientific method is something that's actually, you know, followed or whether that's kind of more a narrative. Uh whether it's, you know, you, you really have these dark ages and then all of a sudden you, you uh have this tradition of criticism.

Thanks to the enlightenment that was really getting more objective and away from that. You know, uh I'll return to magic my episode on that. Obviously, you kind of challenge that. But anyways, I'll get into some of my challenges uh against what Deutsch thinks later. But that is the mechanism that David Deutsch is, is, is using to explain uh progress, that good explanations mean progress. Now, just how good is that? Well, again, going into this kind of knowledge as a cure for all evils.

He believes that the reach of explanations are essentially limitless. So the idea that good explanations can grow knowledge without limit the notion that everything not forbidden by the laws of nature are achievable.

So out of all the problems that we have today and that we're going to have tomorrow, you know, as long as they are soluble, as long as those problems are in principle solvable, soluble, then we can solve them because we as, as long as we respect this culture of critique, as long as we kind of have this, you know, continued scientific method specifically around science.

But this can also touch on areas of philosophy and stuff too potentially into the moral areas, more, you know, morality and ethics. But but really kind of a focus on science that as long as we keep coming up with explanations, coming up with good explanations, good explanations, good explanations that there is no limit to the knowledge that we can gain. And because knowledge is ultimately the cure for all evils, then we'll just keep making progress.

So once we understand the power of the universal power of explanation, there's no reason not to be optimistic according to David Doy. So I've got this image on this slide on the right here. Uh I've kind of got hopefully, it's clear, um these little kind of blue balls are the good explanations and they, we keep coming up with them and coming up with them and it just has this infinite reach kind of going up to, to, to, you know, ultimately infinite knowledge, I guess.

Now, uh he's not necessarily saying we ever have infinite knowledge. He, he actually takes a look at the properties of infinity, you know, this idea that um you know, but, but prior to, you know, a lot of the scientific method of mathematics coming into play, we never really thought about infinity, right? Because infinity was essentially God or whatever you believed in right infinity was there's no point in kind of picking that apart.

But then infinity became a concept that we actually kind of folded into the mathematical makeup of our understanding of the world and we defined it and then it had these properties. And so the book is called the beginning of infinity. Because if you actually look at the properties of infinity. You can never get to the end, obviously, because it's infinity, but you can never get halfway. There are three quarters or where there are one quarter.

You're always at the beginning of it because it's infinite, right? It's, it's obviously this kind of tricky thing to get our head around because we can't really, you know, visualize infinity because it's got no bounds on it, right? Um But we're always at the beginning of it.

So what is, you know, and, and so he's really just saying that because coming up with good explanations according to Deutsch is, is this process that has universal reach, limitless reach that it keeps coming up with, with more and more knowledge and that more and more knowledge is the cure for all evils that this is never gonna end. We're just gonna keep solving problems. So, so that's what he means and, and I'll talk about universality. I think it's in the next slide.

Yeah, in the next slide, typically what that is and what that means. It's kind of a mechanism behind that, but that's his very optimistic dare you, you know, I might even say utopian kind of view of, you know, what is essentially the scientific method or this ability to keep coming up with good explanations. Now, universality does have, you know, it's not just kind of a hand wavy term like, oh, it applies to everything, what it really means.

Kind of from a computational standpoint is that you have a system in place like a language that has symbols. And if you have enough of those symbols, they can keep being mixed and matched in infinite ways or near infinite ways. OK. So let's say we take uh the English language and we've got 26 letters to the alphabet, 26 letters is not a lot of symbols really, right. It's like only 26 and yet those 26 letters can be mixed and matched in seemingly infinite ways.

We come up with so many stories, narratives, uh tales, uh you know, manuscripts and whatever it is we're creating, I mean, the, the fact that we're speak, you know, that I'm speaking right now, we can mix and match those letters into various levels of abstraction, right? They, they come together to words and words into paragraphs.

These are thoughts, these are ideas, these are concepts all the way into books and manuscripts and whatever it is and we keep mixing and matching and coming up with new stories. And so there's this inherently limited ability to create more than yourself. So the language is limited, it's only 26 letters.

But if they keep feeding back in on themselves, like a feedback loop, you know, uh A with a B with a L with an E to form able, but then, you know, letters come back and then you mix able with something else. And now you have able to go to the store and then you feedback that you kind of just keep mixing and matching, you keep making these new ideas. And so that idea of kind of feeding back in on itself is called recursion.

And so when, when languages or really any system have enough symbols and have this capacity to feed back in on themselves, they can mix and match in their infinite ways. And from a computational standpoint, this kind of gets deterring completeness. And you know, the ability of let's say AAA program or a piece of software to basically compute an answer to any problem.

Uh It's a little more detailed than that, but it's this idea that, you know, once you reach this kind of threshold of recursion, if you take a language English language, another language uh mathematics, another example, you have a number of symbols and they all represent different things and you have operations that you can do with those symbols, right?

Whether we're talking like, you know, grammar rules or whether we're talking about something in mathematics like add subtract multiply divide those symbols and the rules that govern their internal consistency. If they reach uh enough symbols and enough interactions, then they will get into this feedback loop, this recursion that allows them to essentially express anything.

And so you can imagine that uh you know, me speaking the English language right now, I could argue that there's nothing that I can't express I can talk about anything I can try to use different words and I might not be, you know, sometimes I'm better at it than, than other times, I might not always pick the right words. But really, I should be able to use the English language to essentially uh describe any concept, at least any concept that's in my mind.

Uh And mathematics is a similar idea, right? I mean, if you really believe that mathematics can capture reality, can model the reality that we look at that we should be able to mix and match mathematical symbols in a near infinite way to eventually be able to describe it. It might take a long time to get there. But if it is soluble, if there is a solution to the problem, we should be able to do it. And when you encapsulate the mathematics inside a computer, right?

So that you can actually rapidly mix and match these mathematical symbols in a digital fashion, then you really get into this idea of touring completeness and this idea that a computer can really come up with solutions to problems of any kind as long as those problems are indeed trackable. So anyway, that's what universality means.

And and David Deutsch is basically using that concept of universality to say well, because explanations coming up with good explanations is is kind of like a language, right? It's, it's, you know, we're using symbols, whether it's math or English or some other language to explain something. And it's part of this process where it can keep getting mixed and matched in li limitless ways, then it becomes part of infinity. So, so good explanations can keep growing and keep growing and keep growing.

We will be able to solve all problems if they are indeed soluble. So I hope that makes sense. That's how he's calling upon universality. Now, I'm gonna think about universality in a different way which I'll like, I'll describe later. I don't actually think it leads to uh the infinite knowledge, the way that Deutsch is interpreting that. But universality alone as a concept is, is true. I mean, we do see that and you can go look that up and you can research universality really, really interesting.

It gets talked about in different ways across different domains, but we're basically talking about it in kind of the, the computational mathematical way right now. But ultimately, I think they're all the same. OK. So, so David Deutsch has this thing called the principle of optimism. I kind of already talked about this, right? That again, the idea that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. OK. Um But he does contrast this to uh to things like blind optimism and blind pessimism.

So blind optimism according to David Deutsch would be like if you, if you thought you knew what was going to happen. So in other words, you, you, you're saying things like, well, I know that we're going to cure cancer and I know that we're going to specifically solve, you know, let's say a climate crisis or you're being very specific about what's going to happen. He's saying that's not really what he's saying. Right. That's kind of blind to optimism where you actually know the future.

He's saying it's not that, you know, the future and actually he argues that you can't know the future and that's a critical part of that. But, but, but it still makes sense to be optimism just because of the properties of infinity and universality. In other words, just because good explanations have this ability to continually come up with knowledge. We will figure it out. He's not saying, you know, it's when we're gonna figure it out, he's not saying the specific problems will figure it out.

So he said, you know, David Deutsch is saying, it's not a blind optimism where he's like pretending to predict things um or a blind pessimism where some people would pretend they know what's going to go wrong. Like I know when the stock market's going to crash or I know that uh you know, cancer can never get cured or whatever it is, right? He says it doesn't belong into that camp.

He just says he's looking at explanations, he's looking at the culture of critique, essentially looking at this kind of, you know, scientific method approach and says that has limitless ability. And if you believe knowledge cures all evils. And that's, that's the type of optimism. So he, he makes that distinction there. Um Now, I don't know, I, I, it still kind of seems like blind optimism to me.

But, uh and you know, and maybe it's just getting caught up in semantics, but he does make that distinction so well, maybe we'll talk about a little bit more about that later. Um But, but yeah, he believes there's no fundamental limitations to the creation of knowledge. Um It says it requires societies with a tradition of criticism.

OK. So again, going back to this idea that like throughout most of history, it was very authoritarian, you know, whether that was just, you know, the ruler or the tyrant or the, the monarch or maybe it was a religious thing. Um There was not a lot of encouragement to uh challenge authority.

But if you do get a society that challenges that authority, then you get into this kind of constant error correction with your explanations and they keep growing and growing and you get more and more knowledge and that's what leads to progress. So if you think about, you know, in the media right now, obviously, there's, there's kind of two camps, there's the camp of the climate crisis, right? That says, look, the earth is getting to a point of no return.

If we don't get our act together, let's say in the next 10 years, we're not gonna be able to fix this, this is a crisis we need to act. Now there's the other camp that says, look, I mean, some of this is, you know, anthropogenic or whatever, you know, it's caused by humans. A lot of it is maybe just kind of periodic in nature. And this is what the earth goes through throughout its history anyways. And look at the end of the day, humans are gonna figure this out because we're an adaptive species.

So, you know, we'll figure this out. So you got the camp that's, that's screaming the alarm bells. You've got the other camp that says, no, we're gonna figure this out that that would kind of be the example I guess in the news right now of of kind of the the really optimistic view of, hey, humans are adaptive species. We'll get, we will solve these problems and and then the other side and, and I would say Deutsch is obviously on the kind of extreme optimistic side, right?

He believes that they, these are problems, we will figure it out. And I talked about this in, in one or two episodes ago, right? This idea that um all technology is humanity a couple of episodes ago where um there is a cost to technology, right? It's not free. Uh There is a cost to progress, a social cost, an environmental cost, other costs that come into play. But then ultimately, you could argue that uh things do get better, right.

And that's, that's kind of the angle that David Deutsch is taking um through the use of good explanations. Then he touches on creativity and this is definitely near and dear to my heart. I talk about creativity a lot. I do this a lot on Twitter. You know, I think that the only true way to access knowledge is through creation, right? You have to build things, you have to, you have to try to lower the entropy of your surroundings into some construct that uh didn't exist before.

And in doing that, you tease out so many of these universal patterns, right?

Uh You know, I always say if you read books, which is very much kind of like what I'm doing with these podcast episodes, you should already recognize the patterns that are in there because if you keep building and you keep doing things, uh you know, with your hands, whether that's, you know, building a shed or building software or putting a, you know, a program together, whatever it is, you know, building a company, if you're creating things, all of those universal patterns that people talk about are, are, are in there and you will understand them uh instinctively.

Uh And so then when you do things like read books, you'll be like, yeah, I totally recognize that patent. I totally recognize that patent and, and that's kind of very much obviously what I'm doing to this podcast. So anyway, one of those uh So, so creativity is something that that's very near and dear to my heart, the ability to create and what that means. So David Deutsch thinks that we don't really understand how creativity works.

Now, this is something I definitely disagree with, but I'll talk about that later. And, and so where does this come from? Well, so David Deutsch is looking at certain philosophies like instrumentalist and behaviorism and saying that those are deeply flawed. OK. So what do those mean? So on the right Patreon subscribers, you can kind of see that. Well, you can see the slide that I'm looking at. I compare realism to instrumentalist.

Here's so, so let me just make that distinction and then go back to what I'm talking about uh with, with respect to David Deutsch philosophy. So realism is this idea that scientific theories accurately describe the world instrumentalist is this idea that scientific theories are useful for predicting and classifying but do not relate to objective truth. So realism is saying if you come up with an explanation, a theory, you are actually describing the world, like it's not just a fairy tale, right?

It's not just a narrative like you really are saying something OK, about what you're observing, about what you're experiencing, about what you're measuring instrumentalist is kind of saying maybe whatever, right? Like it's it's yeah. Oh you have a theory and it is good for predicting, right? And it is good for classifying, but it's not necessarily relating to an objective truth. OK. Now David Deutsch really, really doesn't like instrumentalist. He makes that quite clear in his book.

And there's other philosophies that are analogous to instrumentalist, like behaviorism, which would come from, I guess, psychology, the behavioral sciences and there's a few others, but basically, behaviorism, instrumentalist, whatever it is, those kind of philosophies are explanation lists, meaning they don't put much weight in the, on the explanation of something they're more interested in just the direct measurement, the direct observation, the thing that you're seeing, the thing that you're measuring uh what I would say, yeah, that you know the properties of the actual phenomenon, right?

Whereas the explanation is like, well, you know, this is kind of what humans have to do. They have to come up with a story, they have to come up with a narrative. So isn't that cute? You know where? Whereas the realism, which is more what David Deutsch believes in is, you know, he's saying no, these explanations are the thing like that's what you know, obviously, that's what we should be doing in things like science and philosophy come up with the explanations describe the actual world.

That description does relate to reality.

OK. So instrumental behaviorism, you're kind of only looking at surface level properties you might say or only what you directly uh measure those philosophies are, are David Deutsch does not like those because they, they strip the explanation away or they, they strip the importance of the explanation away and, and you should see why that rubs David Deutsch the wrong way because he's, he, he believes good explanations are at the heart of how we make progress.

Ok. Uh He goes on to say things like we don't understand the nature of, of the universality of the DNA replication system. Uh I actually don't have that here. Yeah, he kind of compares, you know, the DNA replication to the replication of ideas like memes meme, right? Memes these kind of cultural units of information that go viral.

Uh they obviously they're all over the internet, like little jokes and stuff like that, but really meme is just kind of any idea that kind of replicates um throughout society or throat time, right? And uh and become viral and, and, and people study, you know, why, why do certain ideas catch on and why do they not catch on? And then that kind of relates to creativity and these kind of all tie together and, and I'll talk to more about this later.

But I, what I really the take home message on this part of the talk here is that understand that David Deutsch obviously really, really believes in explanations. He thinks they relate to reality and he's very, very against philosophies that take the counter counter approach to that and that kind of gets into, you know, creativity and how ideas spread and how things get discovered. Um you know, uh not understanding how creativity works. Uh I'll, I'll touch a little bit more on that later.

Um And I, I'll explain what I mean by that, but let's, let's keep moving just to, to kind of get through the deutsch pieces here. Um And so, OK, so this relates to interpretation versus prediction. So if you can kind of think of the two pillars of science, right? You have, you know, what do you do as a scientist? Well, you're kind of doing two things. Ultimately, at a higher level of abstraction, you're you're interpreting things and you're predicting things, right?

You're interpreting because whatever you measure or observe, you want to kind of come up with an explanation. That's kind of why you're doing science, right? Like why bother, why bother studying anything if you're not trying to explain what it is you're seeing. OK. And that's, that's actually still debatable. But that, that most scientists would, would kind of say, yeah, like I want to interpret what I am looking at and then prediction is to then predict what's going to happen.

And typically what you do is you would use your interpretation, your theory, your model, your explanation of something in order to make the prediction, right? If Einstein comes up with his theory of relativity, then he can spit out a bunch of new numbers and say, OK, well, if you go look for things, you're gonna see these numbers right?

In other words, use my explanation of reality to go predict things and then you'll see them and then that might have some utility to it because hey, we can use this theory to predict things. So maybe you're using those relativistic equations in GPS, right? Um in order to kind of take into account time dilation and make some corrections to, to uh to, to what happens to the signal so that they, they, they're properly in sync.

So there's a utility to prediction, like you could use the predictions to do things that are useful. And then of course, it goes back to the interpretation itself. Oh What you're validating my explanation. I mean, if I predicted the right numbers, I must be saying something true about reality. And isn't that interesting? Isn't that kind of the point of science? So you've got the interpretation of things and then you got the prediction of things.

Now David Deutsch goes into some other philosophies here, positivism, the philosophy that everything not derived from observations should be eliminated from science. So if you didn't observe it, like you shouldn't even be talking about it, right? Um Positivism, logical positivism, instrumentalist. OK. Again, related to the things I've already talked about with respect to instrumental uh Wigan Wickens linguistic philosophy, postmodernist movements.

You, you can look at a lot of examples where people kind of take that look, just look at what you see or just look at what you observe and measure and the explanation is all just kind of that does not necessarily map to objective reality. So again, Deutsch is just really against that. This is gonna be really important when I talk about my view of things, that's why I'm kind of harping on this for a bit.

He says, separating scientific theory into explanation, list predictions and arbitrary interpretation is a problem. So in other words, when you get into things like positivism and instrumentalist and even like some of these postmodernist movements, you end up separating the scientific theory into predictions that have no explanation and then just kind of arbitrary interpretation.

In other words, if you don't think the explanation really does map to reality, he thinks it's problematic, he thinks that causes a lot of problems and there's this kind of shut up and calculate uh expression that's famous in science that came out of quantum mechanics where people kept philosophizing and philosophizing.

Uh you know about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is nowhere near resolved today because it's very philosophical and it's, it's, it's just kind of, it seems like a dead end. You've got the Copenhagen interpretation, you've got these other interpretations and and in quantum mechanics, people are kind of like look just shut up and calculate, like we can philosophize about this stuff all, all day long. But does it really matter?

I mean, we just, you know, because if we calculate it, we'll see what there is and, and that will form the theories and that's what we need to do. So just shut up and calculate. Um So at the end of the day, you know, David Deutsch is kind of saying like, look if, if we get the separation of, of explanation from prediction. In other words, if we just, if we, if we don't give much credence to explanations, are we kind of legitimizing the dehumanization of explanations? Right?

The the the the such separation, legitimize dehumanizing explanations of humanity. In other words, people are trying to explain things about the world. But if it doesn't really matter because you kind of think it's this mindless explanation less, you know, machine that just chugs along and does what it does. If you just kind of shut up and calculate, if you just kind of look at what is and that's all that matters. Does it kind of dehumanize things?

Because now you're taking the story out of how something comes to be, you're taking the explanation of why something might happen. And so I think that's what makes David Deutsch really uncomfortable and he talks about this in his book, right? Um Does it also immunize us from criticism if you're not coming up with explanations, do you lose the ability to, to critique things? OK, so we can go on and on about this. But again, I want to keep this to a reasonable time.

So, so I'll bring some of this up again. Uh when I talk about the mcclean side of things, OK. He also talks about beauty as a heuristic guide to truth. So this is a very common thing in science, right? Um This idea that you, you know, you got books, books like The Elegant Universe by Brian Green, you've got uh this longstanding notion that, that beauty, that symmetry, that elegance is kind of this heuristic guide to what is true.

So if you're coming up with mathematical equations to try to describe something, you've got a really hairy, messy one, and then you've got a really clean one, you should probably gravitate towards the clean one. It kind of relates somewhat to Hawkins Razor, but really uh more to the point.

It's, it's basically saying that um you know, if you find beautiful things that humans find beautiful in your theory, so your explanation is, is really clean and it's, and it's got symmetry to it and it's just nice to look at that. That is kind of a guide to truth. Things are beautiful for a reason. So elegant theories as true theories closer to truth because of their elegance. Um you know, flowers are beautiful despite evolving for uh an entirely unrelated purpose.

So, you know, uh David Deutsch kind of goes on about why things might be beautiful. Um And uh and anyway, I'm not gonna go into all that right now, but we, I might talk about a little bit more about that later. But um he talks about objective knowledge, being required for people to communicate, you know.

So so beauty being a guide to truth being, getting back to explanations, explanations and theories that are beautiful, that are pretty, that are elegant, that leads to objective knowledge, right? Objective knowledge must be true and objective knowledge is required for people to communicate. So this all ties into this idea of this is what you need. You need to come up with explanations, you need to notice that they are beautiful, you need to have objective knowledge.

So people can center around a singular idea or set of ideas and that, that will facilitate communication. And then the con the the continued communication will allow more and more explanations to be brought up and so forth and we'll continue to make progress. So this all kind of ties together into the same paradigm. Um Yeah, so let's, let's keep OK, so that, that basically wraps up there, there's way more we could have talked about there. Um by all means, go check out that book.

But now what I I wanna do specifically is is challenge this what I'm calling this kind of obsession with explanation. OK. And, and for those of you who, who kind of know me or have heard me talk before, this shouldn't really surprise you. You know, I talk a lot about narrative fallacy.

I I talk a lot about getting away from this idea that, you know, we can, you know, pretend that the causal opacity and complex system doesn't exist that we can really connect the dots, you know, talk about the difference between simple and complex systems and all that. So I want to challenge this obsession with explanation and it's not that I disagree with everything that David Deutsch says. But uh I think it's important to challenge it. So let's take a look at a number of the concepts.

So universality and convergence. OK. So this idea that unlimited growth uh occurs with explanations and it's because of universality. So let's just step back and, and be clear here. So he said, you know, you take a look at universality as this ability to basically compute problems, compute solutions to any problem. You've got this ability, you know, you, you've got these symbols and you've got recursion and they kind of get in this infinite loop.

And because of that, you can keep coming up with creative new solutions, new solutions, new solutions. So this universality and David Deutsch is taking the opinion that that universality leads to limit limitless knowledge growth. We keep getting more and more knowledge, more and more knowledge. Well, to me, the idea of unlimited knowledge growth ignores convergence. OK. So what do I mean by convergence?

What I believe is that universality does not lead to infinite growth, but rather it allows things to converge on a few timeless patterns. So if you actually look at how knowledge works, how it happens throughout society throughout time, throughout history. It's not really a story in my opinion of more and more knowledge, more and more knowledge. What you actually see is the convergence of a few timeless truths of repeat. You, you see repetition, you see the same things kind of coming back.

And if anything, when you make a new discovery, whether it's scientific, Phil, philosophical, whatever, you know, religious, anything, you know, theological doesn't matter if you make a discovery, if you can, if, if something new is revved to you, what you do is you kind of immediately recognize it as something that has occurred elsewhere. You recognize it as something that has occurred before it has a familiar pattern to it.

So, rather than universality, constant leading, leading to an infinite growth of knowledge, I think what it actually does is it is, it keeps converging to a two time, a few timeless truths that exist. OK. Uh uh some, some core patterns that, that happen again and again and, and so again, like with non-trivial, I do in this podcast, you know, the first couple of seasons, I was going through a lot of patterns that I thought were, you know, universal.

And now in this third season going forward, I'm, you know, taking a number of books, I'm taking all these different books and I'm reading them and I'm describing them and, and none of the patterns are particularly surprising, right? We see the same thing again and again, because I think there are only a few universal truths uh that you learn. Now you're gonna take a lifetime to learn them potentially. And who's to say that you'll learn them all right.

But by and large, even though it takes a long time, you keep coming back to the same truths. OK. So I, I really want to be clear about this. It's not that you don't keep making discoveries and it's not that new things don't get revealed in terms of, you know, nature's doing this or here's a concept, here's an idea. But in doing that all that swirling new quote unquote, new stuff that is happening in the midst of that, you are seeing things that don't change, that goes back to this invariance.

OK? And it's kind of funny that he would describe that, that David Deutsch would describe an explanation as something that is invariant that's hard to change. Because in that you should realize that there are uh there are timeless patterns that don't change. And what I'm saying is that as you continue to make discoveries, you continue to do science, you continue to come up with ideas. What you're doing is you just keep converging on the same view and it's worth doing that process.

You might say, well, what you know, what's the point? Then if you keep going back to the same ones, well, because you keep seeing them in a new light, right? It's like if I describe, if I give you this talk right now and you walk away and, and maybe you understood half of it or 70% of it.

And so you kind of get it and then maybe somebody else came and gave the same talk, but did it in their own language or their own kind of way, maybe they use different pictures, maybe they use some different words, You would understand it even better even though the content was largely the same. Why? Because what your mind is doing is it's is it's seeing all the things that are changing and noting the things that don't.

And that's what learning is, is is it seeing what doesn't change when everything else does.

If a third person came in and gave the same talk and they used yet different pictures and different words, what you're seeing is is you would learn better and better by having three different people give this talk than if I gave the talk to you three times because you would have a slight shift in context, different visuals, different words and your mind would be noticing what was preserved while all those other things were changing. You understand what I'm saying?

So that invariance, the things that don't change when everything else does. That's what learning is so universality, which is true. I believe in the mechanism of universality. The idea that you can take things like mathematics or the English language or another language and you can mix and match them in near infinite potentially infinite ways. You can keep creating and creating and creating. Yes, I do believe that is true.

But the purpose of constantly creating and creating and creating is to notice what doesn't change as you do that. And that's what gives you deeper understanding of the core concepts that matter. So that's why I say there's only a few things worth knowing, but it can take a lifetime of constant variation and changing in different contexts and different things being explained in different ways to truly understand the depth and profoundness of those few things.

So, whereas David Deutsch is saying, universality will continue to grow more and more knowledge and that that will be the cure for all evils. What I'm saying is universality actually reinforces only a few bits of knowledge. It's not knowledge keeps growing and growing, growing. We just get a deeper appreciation of the few timeless patterns that exist.

So to me, the idea of unlimited growth actually ignores convergence, you know, and, and if you do this, if you go read old books and you'll be surprised and it could be like 1000 years ago and somebody will say something that was happening in their life and they'll be like, I, I totally get that, that that's happening in my life.

How could someone one or 2000 years ago be talking about things that seem so relevant today, even if they're, even if it's political, you know, socioeconomic, political doesn't matter, they were dealing with much of the same things we do today today. It's different in how it looks and how it feels and maybe the pace is faster, but so many of those patterns are the exact same. So that's the point of universality of the engine of growth and creation.

It's not that you're getting more knowledge, you're just reinforcing through the changing of context, the few timeless patterns that exist. So to me, that's a very distinct view than the idea that that knowledge is gonna keep growing and curing all evils, right? And so this idea of what progress is kind of changes as well, right? I mean, what does it mean to make progress? Is it to just we learn more, we learn more, we learn more. Well, it depends on what you mean by learn.

Are you really learning more? Are you are or are we just kind of reinforcing the few universal patterns? Of course, you have to be someone who's looking for universal patterns, right? That has to be the goal. If you really think that you're getting new knowledge every time you discover something, then then you kind of are aiming away from convergence and chasing after what I think is something that doesn't really exist, right?

You, you, you keep doing things but because you think you're getting something new or as I'm saying, if you realize you weren't actually getting something new, we could maybe make a better definition of progress because we'd be focusing on these few timeless truth. So anyways a lot more to talk about there, hopefully that makes sense. But that's my take on the universality. I think it's more about convergence than unlimited knowledge growth.

Ok. Um He's a uh so I, I'm saying that we have to keep creating via universality to see what doesn't move and everything else does. Um Truth is what doesn't move. OK. I think that's really the way you should think about truth, right? Which is what we're doing, whether it's science, philosophy, religion, whatever, whatever, you know, you're, you're trying to make your life better, right?

You're trying to get better understanding, you're trying to maybe know your place in the world, however you wanna frame that you're, you're after truth, like what is real, right? Well, it's not about trying to come up with specific explanations because I don't think those are real.

In fact, I favor I'll talk about this in a bit more of kind of that instrumentalist type philosophy because I think coming up with explanations pretends like you have access to information that you don't, an explanation might be right? It might not be right. It doesn't really matter. All that matters is what doesn't move.

And so the only way to know what doesn't move is to continue to do things and partake in the world, you can do experiments, you can measure, you can look at what you observe at and you can notice what doesn't move, noticing what doesn't move doesn't require an explanation. You don't need the explanation. You just need to know it doesn't move. It's a way of dealing with the epidemic uncertainty.

It's a day uh a way of dealing with that fundamental opacity that exists in the overwhelming number of phenomena that govern our lives, which are complex phenomena, right? Not simple phenomena govern uh simple uh sorry, complex phenomena. So hold that thought, let's keep going. I I'll circle back on some of that. So this gets into this idea of reasons versus properties. OK. So I'm saying that rejection of explanation is a good thing. OK. This is very much my philosophy.

So you look at things like the instrumentalist, the finite behaviorism and other rejections of explanation. Uh I think those are much less problematic than Deutsch suggests because only the top level targets are required for any kind of evolutionary process. So, so, so Deutsch himself admits that ideas and discovery and progress kind of very much fall into this evolutionary process. But he thinks it's the explanations that are part of that.

But I'm saying, if you actually look at the evolutionary process, it's much more about only focused on the the top level targets. When I say top level targets, I I, you know, let let's take biology as an example. Um you know, you, you, you have an organism in there and they have to survive based on whatever constraints the environment presents to it. And that's it. That's it. It, it's just, you need food, you need water, you need to avoid predators.

You, you could add to that list, but there's really only a few high level target things and then everything else is just about. You either do or don't survive. You move through that, it goes through iterations, it goes through its cycles. You, you, you uh you know, you, you have offspring, right? And you have a whole species that go through this process.

And you can say, oh, well, you know, it's kind of like when I gave that zebra example where people take this kind of um I guess teleological approach to describing a zebra where they would say uh you know, zebra has stripes because that's what allows it to avoid. It's, it's the predator, right? If you're running and you have stripes and you keep darting back and forth, it's gonna confuse the predator. Well, maybe how could you know that? It's, it's it uh maybe who cares? Right?

It doesn't even matter. I mean, that might be the explanation. It might not be. There's another theory that says, well, actually, you, you have uh the black stripes and you have the white stripes. And so you actually, you, you, you have a different temperature of air above the black and the white and that causes these little eddies and that causes a cooling effect. So the zebra probably has stripes because it's cooling its skin. Ok. Maybe. And that's why it survived and you can keep going.

You think there's not going to be more theories about why the zebra has stripes. You understand the problem. It's not about why the zebra has stripes. It's just the fact that it survived. It's the fact that it, it has what it takes to survive. It's the high level meta level targets that are important targets of you need food, right? You need water, you need to avoid the predator.

And out of all the variation that exists with stripes, with, with stripes, without stripes, maybe different colored stripes, whatever, whatever the versions of zebra are, that's what's going to survive. There's nothing else to say. And that rubs a lot of scientists the wrong way, the wrong way because we no, we gotta come up with an explanation. But what I'm saying is you're not gonna know if that explanation is correct or not.

You're not because there's that causal opacity, you can't connect the dots like that. It's not physics. Physics is simple by definition, right? No offense to physicists. But it is, it's simple, it's very simple. That's why there's so much math to it, right? Simple things have a lot of math because simple systems condescend or nature condescends to explain itself to simple systems. It doesn't condescend to explain itself to complex systems because there's the opacity there.

So I've talked about this stuff before. I don't want to get all into it now. But this is why complexity is simple because it has to be simple because you can only use high level targets. The way you make complex problems tractable is by only focusing on high level targets. You don't get to go into the details. The details are a fairy tale.

So philosophies that reject explanation are particularly important when we deal with complex phenomena, which of course is like 99.9% of all phenomena like if we're being realistic. OK. Yeah, there's a lot of phenomena out there in space but you're not in space. We're on earth, we're in, we're in extremely um low entropy constructs that have been created through the highly complex evolution of life on earth. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about life. And that is complex.

It's not billion of balls bouncing into each other. It's not Newton's cradle, it's not balls and forces between balls and gravity. No, that's not, that's not life. That's not the overwhelming number of phenomena that we need to explain phenomena is nonlinear. It's emergent, it's complex. So the idea that you're coming up with something to explain it. Remember I talked about the great disconnect in my episode on uh science is is uh saying more but explaining less, right?

It it you can't, you can't get the explanation in the overwhelming majority of phenomena on our planet because, and we know that because because the causal opacity doesn't allow you to see how things are connected. And explanation is telling you how the billiard balls come together to produce the outcome. You don't get that in the overwhelming of phenomena. It's only top level targets that are required for the evolutionary process. OK. Ockham's razor, I've talked about epistemic uncertainty.

So, so epistemic uncertainty, right, which is really what we're talking about here, right? You, you have so many unknowns, so much uncertainty in the real world that, that the explanation is not going to help you, at least in the way that Deutsch thinks I'll, I'll tell you what I mean by that in a second. So, so the question is how do you deal with that epidemic uncertainty?

Well, the way that you deal with it with so much unknown with so much randomness with so much uncertainty is not by coming up with explanations because you can't explain it anyway. It's by dealing with only high level targets and having an evolutionary process that either survives or not. So, epidemic uncertainty precludes the notion that explanations are required for discovery in the way Deutsch thinks, explain that in a second, I've got this visual on the right.

I've got reasons and explanations on the left properties on the right. So II, I like to say a lot, I'm not sure if I came up with this, this is something that I say all the time um reasons versus properties, right? So properties are much more about instrumentals, finite behaviorism only looking at the surface because the surface is all you have. And that's actually a very powerful thing to do. Whereas coming up with reasons is, is much more fairy tale is much more.

It makes us feel smart and sound smart because we think we're explaining something. But are we really explaining it? Are we really explaining it? And even if you were, what would be the purpose of that? So I, I I'm going all the way to saying good explanations are actually useless. Good explanations are useless because they're largely fairy tale and, and I, and I, I, I put more definition around this in a second. So bear with me.

But but good explanations are useless, bad explanations are actually the necessary condition. So, so my take on this is we do need explanations but not because they provide knowledge for the next step. They don't largely but because they forced us to put naive structures, attempts into the environment. This image I got on the right for the Patreon subscribers that can see this. I've used this one before where I went from wrong wrong structure to right structure, right?

I think it was in the Paracelsus episode. Um So I've got at the top you, you put something naive forward and then it breaks because it's not. Right. It's stupid. And so then you put another one and part of it's right. Part of it's not, and it goes on until you get to the quote un quote right structure. Now, I don't know if you ever really get to the right structure. Right.

But the point is if you actually want to talk about the evolutionary process, it's not good explanations that are part good explanations. Can't be part of the evolutionary process. That doesn't make any sense. Because to be part of the evolutionary process, you must be coaxing information out of the environment. This is why most species die through an evolution. This is why most uh you know, versions of a species are garbage and they don't work.

And so they die off, you have to have that kill rate, the kill rate has to be there. You have to be killing things. If you're not, you can't coax the information out from the environment. You don't want good if you started with a good explanation or, or, and and again, we're always at the beginning of infinity according to Deutsch, right? So anytime you have a good explanation, that's pretty useless because that means you're not, you're no longer coaxing information out from the environment.

The only way to coax the information that you need from the environment is to break, you have to break something. Right? Again, epistemic uncertainty, you, you wanna talk about philosophy, you want to talk about o you know the true meaning of Ockham's razor. How do you want to say this the way that you do uncertainty is, is trial and error, which means you don't know the answer. You, you put something out there, you see what does and doesn't survive and then you see what is invariant.

You see what persists, that's how ideas move. They don't move through society because of good explanations. They do it because people keep putting bad explanations forward. And it makes the most sense to, to, to, to just assume all explanations are bad. Anyway, good explanations cannot be part of the evolutionary process because good explanations are invariant and do not break. You need something to constantly break.

And it's only those invariant pieces that you will notice that have some potentially sense of truth to it. So our explanations have to be bad by definition because they must be continuously destroyed to evolve. So what is a good explanation? So be because let me step back for a second when we're saying when I'm saying that that good explanations are useless and bad explanations are a necessary condition. We can take that even further and say, what do you even mean by a good explanation?

The entire edifice of explanation is actually flawed. The idea that there are good explanations fundamentally flawed, fundamentally flawed because when it comes down to almost all relevant phenomena, they are emergent again, I I've, I've spoken about this already they have this causal opacity. You don't have access to that information. How could you possibly know you had a good explanation?

Now, the the immediate thing most people will think here is, well, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. I mean, if you think about physics isn't this kind of obvious, right? Like if, if Einstein, so, so the classic example is you've got um Newtonian mechanics, right? So Isaac Newton came up with the descriptions of gravity and, and bodies and movement.

And then Einstein came along and, and that superceded that it encompassed everything that Isaac Newton had, but then it went above and beyond it. And, and why do we say that? Well, because it's a better explanation, right? If you use Einstein's explanation of, let's just say gravity or whatever, you know, the fabric of space time.

And that theory, that explanation comes up with new numbers that you haven't yet seen and then someone goes out to an island and reserves some gravitational lensing around the sun and says, oh, wait, those numbers are correct that we all say, you know, yes, you're right. Einstein's explanation must be better and that is largely true. So how does that not go against what I'm saying? Well, you got to remember that the overwhelming amount of physics is simple.

There's this great disconnect between what physicists are studying and what actually happens and what we measure and what we experience because they but by and large don't deal with a merchant phenomenon. Some of them do, right. Condensed matter physicists kind of get into complexity, obviously, but the overwhelming amount of physics is disconnected from what is actually there. In reality.

If you go study, you know the fabric of space time, if you go study particles, if you go study the quantum mechanical description of something that doesn't mean you're studying what actually emerges in reality. This is, is that that reductionist approach is a fundamental disconnect from what we actually experience so much. So and I, and I've, I've talked about this before that. What does it even mean to explain something in those sciences?

Like if I explain the atomic structure of something, what is it you're explaining? And you can say, well, I'm explaining the object. Well, no, you're not because the object doesn't, doesn't exhibit those kinds of properties. The, the the the properties that the object exhibits are emergent. It has causal opacity, the properties that, that overwhelmingly dictate the object you're looking at do not map to those individual components. We know that. So what is it?

You're explaining when you, when you, when you pick apart something and you look at the components and you describe the components, I agree that you're describing the components, but that's not the same thing as describing the phenomenon because the phenomenon is almost always emergent by and large phenomena or emergent or nonlinear have this causal opacity OK. So this whole edifice of explanation is a bit goofy, right?

Our explanations are narratives, not objective, truth, causal opacity, the fact that you can't really see what causes the thing you're looking at. That's the rule, not the exception, the great disconnect between components and emergence, what we actually experience is absolute. It's not like, oh, we'll get there. No, we're not even close to. We've never been close to together. We've never even pushed the needle on that.

It's not like as science has gone, we've got better explanations of what causes what we look at. No, as time has gone on, you've gotten better explanations of the components, but the components are wholeheartedly disconnected from the emergent phenomenon. So you're not getting closer to describing the emergent phenomena. You're just getting better at explaining the components.

You gotta, if you haven't listened to that episode again, you know, science is, is saying more explaining less to understand what I mean by the great disconnect, please go listen to that. So the, the whole idea of there being a good explanation and my mcclean philosophy is a bit is, is totally flawed, it doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make any sense.

Um uh So again, Einstein's just, just to go back to that Einstein because I don't know if I came full circle on that, you know, again, descriptions like that in, in, in one, in one sense, they can make sense because they're simple systems but again, you're only describing simple things, right? I know there's a lot of math. So people get kind of worked out. What do you mean? Simple? The chalkboard is full of equation. Again, simple systems have more math than complex systems, right?

Think about it. Biology has much less math and physics because it's biology is way more complex than physics. The more variables you deal with, the less math you get to do. So I don't mean di I when I say physics is simple, I mean, it's simple systems. OK? I don't mean it's simple to study. I mean, it's simple systems. Um So now let's get into the creativity. So how does creativity actually work? And, and here, here's kind of my big statement, right?

For, for my, my philosophy in comparison to someone like David Deutsche's creating new things does not require knowledge, creating new things, does not require knowledge. So there's this idea obviously that a lot of people think creativity is very mysterious, right? You've got business books on this, you've got probably entire courses on creativity, you know, uh creativity obviously leads to innovation. It can make companies money, it can make people happy.

So people want to understand creativity. If you look at someone like Steve Jobs, you know, Elon Musk, he said, well, these must be creative individuals, right? Why can't I have that? What are some people just more creative than other people? You know, creativity is such a mystery. And David Deutsch believes that we can't ultimately know what creativity is. He talks about. Um you know, not really understanding how even DNA replication from a creative aspect happens.

He compares that to ideas, but he, but he takes the stance that creativity is, is ultimately mysterious and unknown to me, this is getting uh the directionality of problem solving wrong. OK. So let me explain this. So creators are great at filling gaps. We always kind of hear that rightly, what, what makes someone creative? Well, they can take a look at the situation and they can notice what's missing and then they come up with solutions.

So, so creators are great at filling gaps and creating opportunities. But they're doing, they're, they're able to do that because of their ignorance, not because of knowledge, they don't have access to knowledge someone else has, it's actually their ignorance that gives them the ability to do this. Why?

Well, because if you're ignorant, you're now unconstrained by whatever paradigm tells you how things supposedly go, you know, all those explanations that supposedly tell you how things happen, those are going to restrict you because you're gonna think. Well, here's where I move and here's why I don't, right? A so someone who is creative is gonna be ignorant.

If someone, if someone goes into an observatory and you say, OK, well, as a scientist, you obviously are going to point your telescope into a certain direction, right. Correct. Why? Well, because you're, you're working in a paradigm and you're a scientist and, and you know, which quadrant of the sky to look at and yada, yada yada, because there's a way to do it.

That sounds like a smarter thing to do than somebody walking into an observatory or where, you know, wherever the telescope is and they spin it around randomly, wherever it lands I'm gonna look. But which one do you think is more creative? Well, the second one, it doesn't sound very smart, but it is because the ignorance is is causing you to statistically sample from the possibility space in ways that someone who is using their own paradigm never would have thought of doing.

OK, ignorance is what makes you move because you're now unconstrained movement is what enables statistical sampling from the possibility space. So the possibility space is the space of all possibilities. All the things that could possibly be. So a creative person is obviously getting access to those things, but they're not getting access to it because they know things that other people don't, they do it because they're quite random and ad hoc in their, in their ability in, in their movement.

And that's naivete that, that ignorance is a superpower. So this idea that you want to use a bunch of knowledge to go create things is really, really problematic. OK. Creative people are unconstrained by the paradigm because they have no other choice, right? I I talk about, you know, the, the the the importance of variance and variation, uh how details are meant to die. You know, things that I've talked about in other episodes.

I had this tweet that I, that I get, I I tweeted recently, I said the idea that creativity is mysterious and allotted only to a special few who have a knack for spotting gaps and opportunities is pure fallacy. It's a classic example of getting the directionality of problem solving wrong.

So when I say directionality, what I'm saying is is the usual academic narrative is that you have this foundation of knowledge, you have to learn how things work and how they and then you take that and then you go discover things well. No, that's stupid. That's just not. And, and I and I have a right to say that that's stupid because if you actually look at how complex problems are solved, if you actually look at the tractability of problems, you know that that's just not how it works.

It's not 100% that's not an opinion like 100%. There is no process on this planet that solves truly complex problems. If you wanna look at computational complexity complexity theory doesn't matter where you are every algorithm under the sun that goes to solve anything.

That is that, that has a true definition of, of non linearity and causal opacity to it does not use that approach it, it it by and large uses randomness and ad hoc, it bounces around the possibility space to get the statistical sample. And then it uses that discovery. In other words, things are discovered, right? You have to bounce around and get the discovery. Um So the the so the capacity for massive creativity, it's not, it's not a mystery, it's inevitable, it's inevitable.

The creativity is not something we don't know, we do know how it works, we do know how it works. But when I say how it works, I don't mean some detailed explanation because again, I think explanations are largely BS, we know how it works because we know it works by largely random statistical sampling bouncing around the possibility space until something is revealed. The narrative that a knowledge foundation must precede the creation of something new is patently false.

I can go on and on about this. I'm sure I'll have a lot more episodes on this. This is at the core of, of, of my philosophy. In contrast to David Deutsche's, we, we creativity is not mysterious. It's mysterious in the sense that you don't know how all the billiard balls connect, but that's something you have to accept as complexity anyways, that's just causal opacity, right? The anything more than that, any detailed description of creativity is absolutely just a false narrative.

You don't have access to that information. But as a process, just like evolution, we do know how it works. We do know how it works nothing but high level targets, right? That are that, that, you know, constraints that must be adapted to and everything else is just movement and the more that you move, the more you sample from the possibility space, the better chance you have at solving the problem. So creativity is not some magical thing.

If you look at creative people, you will notice their behaviors fit into exactly what I'm saying. Right. You're not gonna find a creative person who's super, super knowledgeable, whatever that means, right? I mean, about a specific area, I mean, you see this all the time, all in so many scientific discoveries have happened by people who weren't even in the field, right? Like, you know, chaos theory had nothing to the guy who just, he was like a meteorologist. I mean, it it happens all the time.

They weren't even in that area, right? They were doing other things they were against. I mean, even Einstein was against the grain working in a patent office wasn't getting accepted to universities, whatever. It's just constantly like this. And it's not surprising that the fact that it keeps surprising people is because they, they get this directionality of problem solving wrong.

They think that you need a foundation of knowledge to go discover something that foundation of knowledge, whatever you think it is not only is it a fallacy, but it's totally constraining you. You need ignorance, you need naivete, you need movement, movement, not you know, knowledge the way that it's been described by Deutsch. So, um I've got this, this gift, right? This gif on the end, uh Sorry, on the slide here that shows um you know, we've got this kind of narrative that there are geniuses.

I've talked about this before too. There are people who really know what's going on and then I've got this, this kind of animation here which really just has a bunch of people come together swirling in a big mess and then someone gets the credit, right? Someone pops out of that and, and they, they get the voice and that's very much you know, this stupid idea of geniuses, this is where this comes from, right?

We we we want to point the finger at an individual and say that's the person that came up with that. So anyways, it's not individuals who create its groups. Creativity has always been, it does not even require humanity actually because nature is the culture of criticism, right? Nature is creating all the time. So this idea that we weren't really creating until the enlightenment that Deutsch takes. It doesn't make any sense. Nature has been creating all the time, right?

Humanity is part of nature, but we didn't need the enlightenment, right? So, so nature is very much the culture of criticism that exists because it has external stressors in the environment and you have to adapt and you either adapt or you die. So, so So that's the process of creativity, creativity was happening even before humans were here. So it's, it's, and we, and we know this nature computes nature computes nature computes solutions to problems, they just solve problems.

I also want to challenge this idea that explanations are truly testable. So sciences love affair with explanation really holds it back. Explanations are assumed to be correct and this protects explanations from genuine test stability and the and and, and, and, and are thus not truly. OK. So, so David Deutsch talks about, you know, explanations, we put them forward and then we test them and then it's got this error correction and then it goes through this process of evolution.

Well, explanations are often assumed to be correct regardless of how bad they are. And that ends up protecting those explanations from genuine test ability. So there's kind of this what I like to say, kind of self dampening aspect to explanation as well.

If you think about, you know, back in the day where they said the end of physics, it's all, you know, we're kind of getting there again where, where people say it's the end of physics, uh that only would have been possible by believing in the power of explanation which shows its flaw. OK. So, so whenever it was leading to 18 hundreds or whatever they said, OK, this is, it, it's the end of physics, we pretty much there's a few things left to figure out but that's it.

I think, I don't think there's much more. And then the black body radiation problem was this outstanding problem. And then all of a sudden, Max Bone came in and said, well, wait a second there, this is actually totally fundamental and huge. And then quantum mechanics was born and then relativity came and most of what we think of as physics today, uh modern physics anyways came after this end of physics, right? So they totally got it wrong.

They, they, they, they thought but, but, but you have to ask why did they think it was the end of physics? Well, it's because they were believing so much in the power of explanation, right? As opposed to thinking about high level of uh you know, observations as opposed to being more about instrumentalist and and the top level properties of a system, right?

If you didn't believe so much in your ability to explain things, you wouldn't have thought it was the end, you would have kept moving forward, naively measuring and looking at properties. The current scientific crisis I would say is due to our trust and explanation. OK, we have this massive replication problem uh on on kind of the social science side of things, on the physics side of things, you've got this chasing of elegant explanations.

So again, that David Deutsch uh opinion like so many others that that beauty is truth, right? If you look for the symmetry, if you look for the elegance. It sounds really nice. I I think it sounds nice too, right? And there is some truth to that because symmetry and invariants are actually quite related. But the problem is it also that, that it, it makes you trust your explanation so deeply that they become, you know, a means to an end.

In other words, you you, so so in theoretical physics, you see this where people have been chasing elegant mathematics, they they they kind of become Bewitched by their the beauty of their own explanations that they start to depart from reality. Or at least it's quite possible that those things are departed by reality, right? Physics has been Bewitched by mathematical explanation and is suffering because of it.

I talked about how the last 30 years of theoretical physics is is according to many largely a failure, right? And you could say, oh, well, maybe it's just a gap and maybe that's just how science works. So much of what is being explained in physics right now is so it's so out there and so disconnected from anything that we experience that you have to kind of question the entire field I think. And I'm not saying it's the end of physics, right? But uh it definitely must be the end of a paradigm.

And I think a lot, uh a lot of the blame is because they, they've become enamored in the ability to come up with these elegant mathematical explanations. It's the love affair with the explanations. So where is the culture of critique there? Right.

Where's the culture, where, where is the culture of critique in supersymmetry which is failing in, in string theory, which is failing in, you know, in, in on the biological side of things, you know, the genetic description of diseases which is failing uh the these reductionist because that's what explanations are. They're largely reductionist, right? And it's not, that's not quite an exactly correct statement, but largely reductionist there.

You're picking apart a system, you're telling a story about how supposedly things come to be and people start to fall in love with that explanation and, and it just holds people back. So I think getting away from explanation is one of the big paradigm shifts that has to happen in science. Now, before I move on, I'm almost done, I'm gonna wrap this up here. I want to be clear about something explanations are needed. You know, when I talked about um good explanations being useless, right?

But I said bad explanations are really, really needed. So even though I'm a huge proponent of more explanation list philosophies, I want to be clear that we really, really, really do need explanations, but not for the way David Deutsch thinks, right? We need them because they keep us moving, right? Go back to that observatory example I gave where I said, why don't you just go, go in there and spin the spin the, uh, telescope around randomly. Well, who would do that?

All right, because it looks stupid. I mean, who would say, you know, don't, don't bother doing any kind of education? Don't bother getting a bunch of knowledge about things. Let's just go do random stuff. Let's go spin telescopes and see where they land. Let's go into the chemistry lab and start, you know, just totally mixing random chemicals together.

Uh, let's go, you know, I don't know, you know, do some physics, do some measurements, let's just aim random lasers at each other and random into, into whatever whatever, I mean, you know, you're gonna look at that and you're gonna say, well, why would, you know, what are you, what, what does it even mean to be a scientist? It just looks like whatever you're doing is random.

Now, I would argue that a lot of that would actually be better because the sampling from reality would be more beneficial than being constrained by the, you know, the, the, the naive narrative that you actually are using knowledge to do what you do? Ok. But would you do it, would you go do a bunch of random stuff? What would be the motivating reason? I mean, think about your own life, people go through life and they obviously try to make their life better for the most of us.

So, and, and, and the only reason we keep doing that and getting up every day to do that is because we think we're figuring something out, right. We get up in the morning, we think more about, you know, the business we're trying to build or the friends we're trying to make or maybe the partner you're trying to meet or whatever it is, whatever stage in life, you are your retirement, whatever it is, you, if you didn't feel like you were figuring something out, why would you bother doing it?

So there's this kind of paradox where explanation I believe is largely just narrative fallacy. But if you didn't believe that you were coming up with explanations, I don't think you would do it in the first place. And again, the tractability of problems comes down to movement, right? It comes down to, to movement and naivete. So you have to naively believe, remember in a few episodes ago, I was talking about self delusion, right?

And the role that, you know, magic plays last episode actually, you know, return to magic. Well, a lot of that might be self delusional and it might not be, it kind of doesn't matter. You have to do it. You have to have this self quote unquote, delusional aspect to what you're doing. Otherwise you wouldn't be motivated to do it in the first place.

I think, I think the, you know, a major reason why if you look at the progress through Western civilization, it's not so much the enlightenment and scientific, you know, methods, you know, and all these kind of supposed ideas, a lot of that's narrative fallacy, a lot of what it is, is actually religion, right?

If you look at um in the number of books out on this as well, you know, whether you like it or not, uh you know, uh is a lot of the reason why education became important, literacy became important. Uh We started to look at the stars, we tried to explain things not because we're trying to be objective and get away from mysticism and magic and, and religion. But because we were trying to explain the magic, right?

In other words, you know, the, the the the belief in something supernatural made you think about causality, made you think about correlation, made you want to come up with explanations and via indirect targets. That's the reason why we went after stuff. You have to have that self delusion and I don't mean delusion, you know, to be uh you know, offensive because I don't actually know if it is delusional, right? I don't think anybody does. I think that's what's beautiful about it.

You don't really know, you choose to, you decide to believe in whatever it is you believe. But that kind of thing is what leads to progress because you have to, you have to believe you're figuring something out. OK. So explanations, I agree with David Deutsch are absolutely needed. But the idea that there are good explanations, that's what I disagree with and it's bad explanations, if anything that would be much more useful, right?

Because like I said, stupid questions are more important than so-called smart questions for that same reason. Right. Ok. Where are we here? Um Let me move into. So the explanations themselves may not be that testable. Uh David Deutsch says, never say never. Right. And that goes, that goes back to his optimism, right?

He believes in this kind of ultimate optimistic view of keep coming up with good explanations, keep attempting to describe the world and and that will lead to limitless knowledge, right? Uh I I think it instead leads to convergence, right, rather than knowledge, but whatever, he optimistic more and more knowledge. And because of that, we should never say never. We hear that all the time, right? But this this is not right either. I think that you can say never. And this is not a bad thing.

I don't think it's like a nihilistic thing. I think it's be because and this gets back to the convergence thing. I think that if you actually take more of an instrumentalist type of philosophy, where you're understanding the properties, not the reasons, but the properties of things, the surface level properties, then you really notice fundamental properties that keep repeating themselves. And if you do that, then you can say things about the future. OK?

And it's not blind optimism or blind pessimism. I could know that certain things are not possible because there are certain. So let me give you an example. Are we ever going to um you know, have a causal description of emergent phenomena? No 100%? No, I can say that. Well, how do you, you can't say that? Yes, I can because we know it's a fundamental property of complex systems, right?

We, we know that are you ever going to come up with an exact mathematical solution to the earth, the moon and the sun, the three body problem? No 100% confident. No, not gonna happen. You can't say that. Yes, I can.

Because if you look at languages, if you look at how computation works, if you understand the properties of simple versus hard problems, you understand complexity classes, you understand universality, you understand recursion, you actually understand the properties of things, these things keep repeating, it's not new. So we can say certain things are not going to happen and certain things are going to happen. It's not a blind pessimism or blind optimism, right?

We we know something is or is impossible. Can, can, can it let's use the optimistic maybe view? Well, not for everybody but something that's um that can happen. Can true artificial general intelligence uh occur. Yes, you can't say that. Well, I can say it with quite a bit of confidence. Now, now, why now I'm not saying we are going to achieve it. Ok. I don't know that. But is it possible that it could be achieved. Yes, you can't say that. Well, yes, I can say that. Why?

Well, because if you look at, unless you think something magic is happening in the human brain because that's what you would have to believe, to say no to that. Then what we're talking about is is a massively complex system with parallelization with recursion, with analogy with on and on all the different things that we know happen to make complex problems tractable. And that's what intelligence must be, right? The human brain is a machine if you think about machine correctly, right?

Most people get offended by that because they're thinking a machine in terms of cogs and piston like no, I mean, like an actual complex machine, right? It's a part of nature, it's a part of complexity. It doesn't make sense that something wouldn't be able to eventually get to that point. Now, are humans going to be able to actually do what they need to do to create that thing? I don't know for sure. Right? Because that's a very high level of complexity.

But, but, but there's, there's nothing magic happening in the brain. Even emotion must be some emergent phenomenon that comes out of massive complexity. So yes A I is possible. A G I must be possible. In fact, it already is possible because it should be the same thing as the human brain, right? I guess, I guess maybe depending on how you frame the question, you might say, well, do you think it's possible with silicon? Right.

Do you, do you think it's possible with computers or, you know, would it need silicon organic component? But, but again, ultimately, if you can get the complexity high enough, right? I know, I don't, I'm not saying the current paradigm of A I is gonna get there. Right? What we have right now is extremely narrow, right? But of course, it must be possible.

So what I'm saying here is that you can say things about the future, good and bad or, or optimistic and pessimistic uh positive and negative because you understand the properties of, of, of how things work, not explanations of how they work properties. We understand how evolution works, understand how problem solving works. We understand how creativity works. Despite what David do says we do understand these processes. So you can say this is possible and this is not possible. OK?

You can see how convergence happens, you can see how things come back to the same timeless patterns, but you have to want to do that. So explanation lists philosophies I I would say should actually be quite preferred. Um I have this tweet that I can again, I did recently a few days back actually more than a few days, sorry, but that I tweeted um a while back uh just because you can't predict something doesn't mean you should be surprised it happened.

There are fundamental properties to nature that humans regularly intervene on through modern behavior. True wisdom understands nature's attributes, not her reasons. True wisdom understands nature's attributes, not her reasons. Ultimately kind of the big take home message here is um progress doesn't require knowledge. OK. So this is, it gets back to the directionality problem. The notion that technology stems from knowledge cannot be correct.

This is another big statement and people always get upset. Well, how can you say that? How can you know again going back to what I just said here, if you understand the properties of things, you get, you can say things like this right? Technology stemming from knowledge cannot be correct because it's not the directionality of how problems are solved. The real directionality is technology being revealed largely through randomness and naive explanations. Right?

Again, explanations are there but they're naive, they're wrong. They keep us moving, movement randomness, high level targets. That's how problems get solved. OK. Do you need quant? I mean, drives me nuts. People say things like you know, well what you know what someone say, well, what what use is quantum mechanics, right? And say, well, it gave us the modern computer age like what are you talking about? No, it did not. You do not need quantum mechanics for computers.

I mean, you need nature to have quantum mechanics because presumably something quantum is happening among transistors. But that's a stupid thing to say because obviously there's something quantum happening in everything. So it is kind of a dumb thing. But, but, but people get this directionality wrong. They think that because we've studied quantum mechanics, that's what led to the computer revolution. Like what are you talking about? No, no, we would have had computers regardless. Right.

We would have had relativity without Einstein. Right. Right. It was, it was going, you know, we talk about simultaneous invention again, how can I say this so confidently because you just have to look at how these things work at the meta level, right? Not the detailed explanation level, the meta level, right? How processes happen, not how reasons happen, they don't happen or maybe they do, but you don't know that those are just fairy tales.

You just look at the properties of how problems get solved, what makes them tractable and you and that's all you need to know to know that quantum mechanics as a theory was not needed to come up with computers, right? And there's of course, so many versions like this, but this is the this is the unfortunate aspect of the um what what I call the academic narrative, which I've talked about before, right?

Is is we go into this world saying, well, you know, you go to school and you get the education and you learn how things work and then you'll be able to take how those things work and go build new things, right? School will give you a ticket because people will think, you know what you're talking about. So if you get letters after your name, you'll get better jobs. But that's not the same thing as saying you needed that supposed knowledge to go create things. You do not.

And I can say that with 100% confidence, just understand the properties of systems and you'll know that that's true. A foundation is not required to create ignorance and movement makes all soluble problems tractable as long as there is a solution, that's what does it ignorance and movement, right? And it's crazy, but it's true. It's not crazy.

But I mean, it's, it's if you think about it like it's, it's better to have ignorance because you, it's better to be unconstrained by the paradigm that will make you sample things in reality, take different pieces of it, use randomness to your benefit, right? And that, that's what makes things soluble. OK. So that is pretty much it. I know that we talked a lot, a lot of things and, and, and I, I bet you there's certain things you agree with and certain things you don't.

Um I've got this Ven diagram, if you know what that is, it's basically, you know, two circles that overlap partially. Uh and on the left, I've got David Deutsche's opinions on and, and on the right, we've got mcclure me, my opinions. So kind of the only major things that we agree with uh in the middle of the Venn diagram for Patreon subscribers, you can see this is that optimism is required for progress. Correct. It is.

Why would you get up in the morning if you didn't believe you were figuring things out and in line with that? The other one, explanations are why we make progress. Correct. It is but not good explanations. They should be bad explanations. And a lot of times you don't really know if they're good or bad. And what I'm saying is it doesn't matter. So on the left, we've got things like coming up with good explanations, moves us forward.

My counter to that is coming up with bad explanations, moves us forward. David Deutsch says knowledge is the cure for all evils. I say knowledge is not required for progress period. David Doy says universality means endless growth. I say universality means convergence to a few timeless patterns. David Deutsch says explanations are testable. I say explanations are rarely testable and actually not when I talked about that. Uh David Deutsch says, we cannot say never. I say we can often say never.

David Joy says good explanations are possible. I say good explanations may be possible but only in the simplest of systems. David Doy says philosophies that reject explanation are flawed. I say philosophies that embrace explanation are flawed. David Deutsch says, we don't understand how creativity works. I say we do understand how creativity works. David Joyce says rapid creativity has only happened since the enlightenment. And I say that creativity is what nature has been doing since it began.

And that is it OK. I've got some suggested reading at the end. So again, the book is the beginning of an infinity explanations that transform the world by David Deutsch. I've got an article out there called Human Intelligence Computation and the Universal Machine that touches on some of these topics. And there's a bunch of wiki articles you can of course go read related to creativity, universality, invariance, recursion, turing completeness and infinity.

And a lot of those concepts that we, that, that, that I talked about throughout this episode. So uh I know there was a lot to digest there. Again, probably some of you will take more of David Deutsche's side, some of you will take more of my side. Um But I think it was really neat to just again, have a book that touched on a lot of the concepts that I am very passionate about. Um hopefully, most of that made sense and I think it was good to strike the contrast.

You can see that my philosophy is quite a bit different than David Deutsche's, but there are some similarities there. And uh and I think this is just a conversation that is worth continuing to have. So I'd love to get your guys feedback on that. You can, you know, jump on a Twitter, you could DM me or you could just kind of do a public tweet, whatever you want. Again, I've got a number of visuals that are used throughout the slide.

I think it really helps, you know, anchor the conversation, get more conceptual understanding of what I'm talking about. So if you are a visual person and you want to follow along with the slides that I have put together for this head on over to Patreon and for a little contribution, you can, you can get access to that on a regular basis. But of course, the audio is the same for everyone. Thank you so much. Until next time, take care.