David Deutsch on Multiple Worlds and Our Place in Them | Conversations with Tyler 

Every time I hear Deutsch speak, even on topics I’ve heard him speak hundreds of times before, I find his insights penetrate deeper. The most brilliant thinker I’m familiar with who has changed my mind on so many issues.

The Beginning of Infinity By David Deutsch is STILL the best book I've ever read, I truly believe the world would be a better place if everyone read it. To this day the vast majority of humans don't understand how science works. Learning about the scientific method in a high school or college textbook simply is not enough to understand how science works. Read The Beginning of Infinity. It will truly expand your mind.

This was like a metaphysical interrogation. Great work on both sides.

Thanks for having David on the show.

Superb interview. Good questions and the interviewer effaces himself in the interest of letting Deutsch's genius flow.. Rare and much appreciated.

The brilliance of David Deutsch shines in this interview.

This guy played the bad guy so Deutsch could shine I admire the efforts :)

Phenomenal. Fantastic conversation. Thank you

More evidence that David is the most brilliant mind alive!! 😁

David Deutsch is so far up the exponential curve even Tyler looks flat. Just incredible. Edit: I think my statement was unfair; Tyler and David spend their lives thinking about different things. Still, I am so often knocked back by David’s ideas. You wonder how you thought about things before hearing his explanations. More likely, you didn't have the concept before hearing him explain it! That is a rare mind.

Problems are Soluble. David is such a clear thinker. Too bad the questions asked were not very good…

A “reaction” video for anyone in the comments who wants a follow up: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-A59hkrfQSzs.html

The most brilliant and articulate man on the planet right now

"Disobedience lessons" I liked that :) ! Great conversation ,by the way.Thanks!

David is the only person I listen to at 0.75x speed.

I agree with David, that “The Myth of The Framework” is a short and supple introduction to Popper. Then I would read Mark Notturno and Rafe Chsmpion. And then return to either “Evolutionary Knowledge” or David Miller’s edited collection “Popper Selections.”

I loved this one!

Loved it !

I'm not sure how old this interview is... probably not very, but I get the general impression that today, Hugh Everett's interpretation and a multiversal bulk universe, has a growing amount of acceptance and discussion.

Joscha Bach and David Deutsch are IMO the most beautiful minds around, what a pleasure to listen wow

Ladies and gentleman, the *actual* smartest man on Earth.

Great chat

Great cast but I can't help thinking David's response when challenged about a Dog's knowledge came across as somewhat cartesian. Not buying into the idea that "Dogs have genes which contain knowledge but it is fixed knowledge and it is not the kind of knowledge that constitutes understanding." Poitevin literally wrote a book on what a clockwork dog would do. Tyler really packed in a lot of questions without taking anything personal, so much respect to him for allowing a fast flowing set of thoughts.

Mind blowing ❤️

David says humans act based on their explanations but there's a lot of experiments that show that the explanation comes after. Like when we trigger a behaviour in someone and then ask them why they did that thing and they tell us something that can't have been there prior to the triggered action.

I love that man

Enjoyed the interview. I think the show is misnamed, these aren't conversations with Tyler. They are interviews.

At 39:50- 40:00 my partial understanding is that Deutsch laughs at the suggestion from the interviewer that deutsch might have made something like a transcendental argument. And deutsch’s response if I’m hearing correctly is “first of all, that is* a transcendental argument and therefore refutes itself”. Can someone help explain this piece of the exchange. The interviewer looked momentarily perplexed also possibly because he wasn’t sure he heard deutsch correctly either (‘is’ vs ‘isn’t’ in David’s response, I think it must be ‘is’ but that only becomes clear after he finishes his response). Do transcendental arguments refute themselves? Did I mishear or misunderstand this bit of the interview?

There is a common knowledge gap between natural science scholars and social science scholars. Seems like their intuitions and priors are different at many points of the discussion. And my intuitions are much closer to Tyler's.

Deutsch is an incredible intellect. I don't think he's read philosophy very widely though. His comment about not having read Nietzsche's Will to Power in this interview for example is telling. Perhaps he should read more widely around philosophy. I'm really enjoying his The Fabric of Reality at the moment and have The Beginning of Infinity queued up immediately afterwards.

The interviewers remark on the quality of Popper’s writing around 33:00 is the most hilariously arrogant thing I’ve heard in a long time

beautiful

Is there any chance the wave nature, of an elementary particle, rather than a particle from another world, could explain the interference pattern? Thanks

J. Krishnamurti speaks volumes on freedom and may be the Rosetta Stone to understanding the human condition...

There is only ONE version of you,David Deutsch.

Understanding through rhetoric and symbolic representation is mediated and insulating.

After deciding that Deutsch is a genius, I'm onto another dilemma: I can't decide whether he more closely resembles Bill Gates or Bertrand Russell

David is right on animal behavioral circuitry. I had to youtube the squirrel+nuts+concrete thing and what a laugh. Wish I new the details of how such random behaviors arise and get selected in any reasonable amount of time. David definitely does not have the budget model in the brain industry. One wonders how common "understanding" is in our galaxy and what other types of ""understanding" circuitry could be accessed through direct connection to new neuromorphic substrates.

For every forking in the multiverse - where does the energy come from to sustain such a ballooning of worlds?

🕊

I assume that many of the persons that watched this video are aware of David Deutsch quotations. For that reason I'd like to remind you that it's much more easier to fool somebody, than to convince him that he's been fooled.

To get around the fact that this universe has the overwhelming appearance of design and that a creator must have caused all time, space and energy to come into existence, then came the multiverse. So now some appeal to the multiverse and infinity of universes. If there are infinite number of universes then “anything is possible in one of these other universes. Thus anything anyone does in this universe can happen by chance in one of these other universes. Thus, there is no meaning to these great works and gret minds. But they do not live, what they teach. As we look at the universe we see that the laws of physics, design of the universe and the formation of the universe had to be correct (is a very narrow way) for Mankind to live here on Earth at this time. But, this multiverse only moves the problem, where did the multiverse come from? Plus there is no evidence of the multiverse and there never will be. As living in the time and space dimensions of our universe, we can never observe anything outside the time and space dimensions we are in. So the multiverse is not science, just lots of wishful thinking (Si-Fi). I have found that those that talk about the multiverse, are those that hate the God of the Bible the most (there are exceptions). We have lots of evidence that this universe from its very beginning was designed so life would have a place to live (thus the multiverse distraction). If the universe was any smaller, it would not have rocky planets anywhere in the universe. If the universe was any large, it would all be black holes and no rocky planets. The universe is expanding, but this just means the space between galaxies is growing. The multiverse is the gambler's fallacy: A coin has flipped that lands on heads repeatedly. The multiverse would say, there are other flppers just like you in many other universes, so the odds of your coin coming up head again and again is correct. But in the real world, it would be better to say the coin either has two heads or is some way designed to come up heads ieach time.

I cannot take seriously anyone who would take the star trek transporter. it is literally death....

I know the answer to many of these questions. AMA.... No . I'm not kidding

Modal realism is much like constructor theory in that it determines the truth conditions of counterfactuals. He may be more interested in actualism by Robert Stalnaker. Constructor theory tends toward that than the possibilism of Lewis, because Deutsch doesn't like possibilia. I don't think he understands what Lewis means by real. What is possible really exists, and if it could then it does. Deutsch can try Tim Maudlin's own view (not really actualist, but it's a weaker kind of modal realism than Lewis') which disagrees with the anthropic principle and says that possibilia or even probability is negated by the Everett view. Maudlin is a philosopher-physicist. Though more philosopher than physicist. He's also being a bit of a behaviorist about nonhuman animals. It's true they have no understanding, but some do seem like it, when there is actually complex planning involved, e.g. orcas know how to corner great white sharks and which organ they'll eat exclusively, which is odd for carnivores given they will eat the whole carcass normally. This case, I forgot which island, we have orcas acting like human hunters. No other animal acts with such understanding of what has value and what does not. Also he would be very interested in the philosophy of Einstein. More so than Popper's whose epistemology is too rigid in its demarcation of science and pseudoscience. It would castigate most physics, most economics, and most psychology as pseudoscience, even if there's a balance of data and evidence, especially if it historically starts too rationalistically heavy on theory or gets too hypothetico-deductive. He's also not a great critic of historicism, constantly misapprehending them. Peirce is a better critic, and is a historicist. Nietzsche is as well, especially if read like Matthew Meyer does who conceives him as an ontic structural realist (structures are real and do exist out there as 'relata'). He doesn't realize historicists are fallibilists, including Marx or even Engels, before Lenin dogmatized everything, and begins from a position of oscillating between certainty and uncertainty, and usually start from ancient Greek philosophical concepts of the One and the many, which we can now replace with the cybernetics from Weiner or complex systems theory. Also, the problem of induction has not been resolved with Popper. It's gotten worse since Nelson Goodman, which Popperians have had no answer to. The only real workaround to it is to start to go into metaphysical nihilism, and from there move into monism, like Jonathan Shaffer has done. Robert Brandom does the same, but overemphasizes the value of discursive reality. Overall, given how amazing constructor theory has looked recently, I'm a little disappointed that Deutsch is quite simplistic in his philosophical foundations. Having Popper as your first read in philosophy is kind of a death knell to thinking. Bertrand Russell would have been much better. Even William James.

I wonder how he and Penrose would get on, lol

There are many books for humans, which can predict our behavior very accurately, and our instincts are no less important and I think we need to try to ignore them less to be happier. The book "Are we smart enough to understand how smart animals are" can be recommended for people wanting to get out of dark ages of zoology. It is just hard to agree to animal robot theory prevailing in 1920th.I have 2 cats, they have personalities and understand a ton in different ways just like 2 humans would. To understand difference you need really precivilization humans. Because over thousands of years we learn to copy very well, but we lost many things along the way and, probably, lost much more important things. Brain of a gorilla might be no more primitive, but copying is only one faucet of personality, they might be much better in something else. How genes can be so programmed to make animal survive in everchanging unpredictable world? Even a bee thinks on its level and processes information as is proven more and more by modern zoology. I think modern theory is that animals think in exactly the same way, differently I am sure, but all are processing information, explaining and adjusting to changing world. Octopuses learn immediately from observing others of their kind, btw. Never heard about Gorillas being slow, will check it out. Sounds like some archaic crap to me, honestly.

You definitely *don't* need Everettianism to explain single-particle interference.

8:30 really illuminating on number of multiverses 27:30 woke 53:49 nature hasn’t enslaved us 58:00 how institutions work

Does DD believe everything is comprehensible in principle-that is, everything has a logical explanation that confirms to physical laws-or does he take the further step that humans are capable of comprehending it, albeit maybe not completely? He seemed to make the former claim but then implied the latter by dismissing the simulation theory out of hand. It’s quite possible that a world in which there are high fidelity simulations is also comprehensible-it just wouldn’t necessarily be comprehensible to the subjects in the simulation. I also don’t buy his argument around human cognition/explanation being so distinct from other animal cognition for reasons perhaps too lengthy to discuss here. In short, he makes specious comparisons to animal behavior interpreted through an anthropocentric lens that evaluates animal intentionality by the metric of human intentionality. To beings with much greater intelligence, much of our behavior could seem as programmed as a squirrel scratching concrete-you can’t ascertain intentionality or the lack thereof because it could be (and likely is) just a lack of intelligence on the squirrel’s part. Finally, I disagree with his refusal to distinguish between children and adults in terms of rights. Some people (mentally disabled, children, or the incapacitated) are reliably incapable of making choices in their best interest, which is why they don’t have all the freedoms others do.

"Do dogs understand?" Deutsch: "Mumble, splutter fig newtons and milk..." "OK, major primates?" Deutsch: "Lemme run around in circles for a while here." {spin, zing, voom...} "When you disable your thumb blah, blah, blah."

Tyler = lost in the woods like a baby lamb without its mama, within first 3 min

Deutsch displays tremendous patience with this clown.

I don't know Tyler, but this felt awkwardly scripted in a way. What's the point of talking live to someone and then reading questions from a sheet of paper without starting a _real_ conversation?

L o L

Deusch has an overly deterministic view of animal behaviour. Making out humans to be different in kind than degree. I don’t entirely agree.

Some people take physics too seriously and if you push anything too far it reverses itself.

Lost me at dogs (or animals) not understanding anything - differentiating humans as the only animals with free will is misguided hubris. We are just as much programs running our genetic code as animals - just with a more persistent capacity for awareness of the code in action and assuming we’re controlling the code we’re running.

If you can draw a circle and use a ruler you are able to understand prime numbers.

He is a bit like David Icke - says some interesting correct stuff among incorrect stuff.

Anyone who has experienced the mandela effect knows this is truth.

Awkward start.

really bad interviewer. Loved how David handled it

This is a terrible interview. Reads through his disjointed list of questions. I prefer a conversation.

Human arrogance in his comparison between dogs and humans. He overestimates our capacity

Stop watching after four 5 mins FYI. Geometric infinite interactions = all possible outcomes all possible timelines. Atom up geometric entanglements. He said .... 2 way 🙃 ... and the infinity? Too much information to process for a system. 2by2 vs Kinetic geometric timelines ... atom up.

Ugh... memes. Even Dawkins gave up on that one. For a materialist he's happy to draw upon a completely subjective notion.

Multiverse hypothesis is the death of science

I reserve for you the Quantum Whip of Bacon. Mullah Medulla Oblongata has issued a FatWad. God is the Glorious and Imperious owner of the $tinkularity, bruh. Patent that. Whoops, busted.