Episode 3: The Popper-Deutsch Solution
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Thank you. Welcome back to Theory of Anything podcast. So where we left off last time is we've been talking about the problems of science and the various things that skeptics have brought up about it and the fact that there's just simply no certainty with science.

We looked at this slide, for those who can see the slides. So we looked at this slide previously, and we talked about, okay, here's kind of what we talked about in the past, that science must be based on induction, but induction doesn't work. It's not possible to verify that something is true at all. No matter how certain we are about a theory, it can at any moment turn out to be wrong in fundamental ways. There's no such thing as scientific fact. It's only conjectures slash theories slash hypotheses.

And we don't have any direct connection to the real world via our senses because our senses themselves are often fooled, have illusions, things like that. So these seem like very, you know, some people, postmoderns in particular, but there are people out there who feel like these are very strong reasons to doubt science, to be skeptical as science as a whole institution. Okay.

And then we talked about a partial solution to it, which was falsification. The idea of the black swan, you see a single black swan and suddenly the theory that all swans are white vanishes with a single observation, no matter how many quote confirming observations you had prior to that point. But even falsification had a problem and that was the doom quine thesis and I gave some examples of how

When you have an observation that falsifies a theory, it's hard to know if it's the theory itself that was falsified or if it was something wrong with the instrument, or in other words, a problem with the theory about the instrument, maybe something else. You know, I gave the example of a body of gravity that moves Mercury's orbit, right?

Is it a problem with Newton's theory or is it just that we don't see the body of gravity that's moving Mercury's orbit? So even falsification, although it's a good step in the right direction, has some problems itself.

So now what we're going to talk about today is the actual solution to this dilemma. That sounds promising. Yes. So this is Popper's solution with some things added by David Deutsch that I think clarify it quite a bit. Popper's solution, these are quotes from Popper. A new theory should conflict with its predecessor. It should lead to...

at least some conflicting results, it should contradict its predecessor, and a new theory must always be able to explain fully the success of its predecessor. Hopefully this seems fairly straightforward what I'm getting at here, why this would make sense. But the obvious example here is Newton's theory of physics

and Einstein's, right? If you can remember way back to your, you know, high school or maybe college physics classes. Yeah. Yeah. And you probably remember that any prediction that Newton's makes that is correct, Einstein's will make the same prediction. Right. Einstein's will make predictions that are correct that Newton's will get wrong. Right. Okay. So Einstein's,

Einstein's, at least as far as we know, fully subsumes Newton's theory. We don't know of any cases where Newton's theory is superior to Einstein's. Right. So, and this is really common within science, right? There can be other cases that come up, but this is kind of the gold standard of the ideal, right? That when we take a theory and we adopt it as kind of the prime paradigm, to use Thomas Kuhn's language, it's

It's because there really isn't a good alternative to it. The next best alternative to it is known to be inferior in some way. Right, right. We already are suspicious of it or believe it is wrong. Yes. And we have a better theory. That's actually the important point here, right? There's no reason to embrace a theory like Newton's

when we have Einsteins. There was great reason to embrace Newton's when we didn't have Einsteins, even if we had thought there was a problem with it. Right. But once we have Einsteins, there's just no reason to embrace it. Now, just one clarification on that, because I have a friend who tried to argue with me. He would say, well, actually, we still embrace Newton's and we use it as a mathematical shortcut to

Under circumstances where there's not a lot of gravity or we're not close to the speed of light. Okay, that's true, but we're playing with words, okay? It's, yes, we still use Newton's theory, but we use Einstein's theory to tell us when it's okay to use Newton's theory as an approximator. Right, right. That's still not really a success of Newton's theory compared to Einstein's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The truth. That's interesting. Okay.

So this is the quote from Popper that really is like the big breakthrough for me, right? He says, this allows us to decide of any new theory, whether it will be better than the old one. But this means that we have something like a criterion for judging the quality of a theory compared to its predecessor, and therefore a criterion of progress. And

And so it means that progress in science can be assessed rationally. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense to you, right? You wouldn't argue with that point, would you? No, I would not. Okay. Which means science or any knowledge, not just science, progresses via theory to theory comparison. Okay. Yeah. This seems like a really simple point. I mean, it really does. And it seems kind of self-evident and it seems kind of straightforward, but it totally solves everything.

the skeptic problem from the previous slide. Because as it turns out, it doesn't actually matter if we can get at the truth. All that matters is that we can recognize progress, that we're progressing towards the truth. Okay. Okay.

You could never really know this theory is 90% of the truth or 99% of the truth, or you have no clue how close you actually are to whatever the ultimate truth is out there. But it doesn't matter because you know when you have a better theory, so you know when you've made progress. And you know that at the moment, this is the best theory we have, so it's the most true, so it's the one we should currently tentatively embrace.

Okay, does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense. Okay, very clever solution that Popper came up with here. I think it's a very profound solution. I think it's hard for people to wrap their minds around it because they're still kind of thinking in terms of, yeah, but how do I know it's true? Right, right. Trying to justify something is true. And what Popper's saying is, stop doing that. It's a wrong philosophical question. You shouldn't even be asking that question. The only question that matters is, what's your current best theory? Right, right.

Okay, and science, I'm asserting, Popper's asserting, is built on this. Okay, maybe scientists don't really explicitly realize this, but this is the basis for science. This is the basis for progress in modern society. As we'll see maybe in some future podcast, it's the basis for moral progress. Okay? Oh, yes, yes. You and I have, I think...

Talk about this. Started to talk through this. I think we could have a very fascinating conversation just specifically on that one point. We will make that one of our future podcasts. Okay. I'll make a note in our spreadsheet about that. Okay. Excellent. You were saying you think scientists philosophically understand this. Sometimes I think scientists willfully ignore this. Yeah. Wherein they want to be...

stating that the thing that they've now their new theory is truth yes okay so let me clarify I didn't actually say that they philosophically understand this I said this is what science is built on whether or not they explicitly understand it okay yeah I can get behind that yeah so

So in fact, I think there's really good evidence that individual scientists rarely, if ever, really get this. There's probably a lot of benefit that would come to the realm of science if they did get this. For one thing, as we'll see in some future podcasts, I do have some slides about this. There are whole theories out there that get a lot of attention that really could just be eliminated, right? And we shouldn't be wasting time on them.

Maybe a lot of attention is the wrong word, but there are theories out there that are known to be bad under this criteria and people waste time on them. Let me just say that.

And like you said, scientists are just humans. They've got beliefs. They've got meaning memes. They've got agendas. They've got biases. And so there are reasons why a scientist might want to take their conjectures and their attempts at criticizing their conjectures. We'll see in a second how one goes about that. And then want to claim that this is scientific fact. Want to claim that it's settled science when there's literally no such thing as scientific fact or settled science. Right. And you don't need it.

And it's not desirable. Yes, and it's not desirable. There's actually, we haven't gotten into that, but there's actually a good argument for it is not desirable. For one thing, a state where you couldn't make progress would probably be a very undesirable state. A completely undesirable state. The very worst state ever. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's talk about now Popper's theory of knowledge. I'm going to restate it here. This is the scientific method. This is the real scientific method. Not the one that we teach in schools, that we teach children that scientists ignore. This is what scientists, even if they're not aware this is what they're doing, this is what they're doing. This is an actual description of what science does. We start with problems that we care about.

Okay. So for a scientist, now this doesn't apply only to science. This is for knowledge in general, but we're going to look at it from a scientific perspective. For a scientist, that's probably some unresolved problem in science that's standing out there that they've decided they're interested in and they want to try to resolve. You know, just hypothetically, maybe Einstein sees the experiments where light has a maximum speed and he's curious how to resolve that and

And I don't think this actually happened in real life. I used to think it did, but digging into it historically is suggested that maybe I was wrong about that. But theoretically, he could have seen the experiments where they actually had an experiment where they would measure the speed of light when the Earth is moving towards the sun versus when it's moving away from the sun. And they found that the speed of light was identical in both directions.

In theory, that's an observation that is a problem for Newton's theory. But in practice, it could just be a problem with the instrument. There's various ways you might be able to explain it without actually falsifying Newton's theory. It's the doom-quine thesis all over again. So I don't think Einstein actually knew about this experiment. But in theory, he could have been aware of this experiment. And then he could have said, well, wait a minute. What?

What if light actually is the maximum speed, speed that nothing can move faster than the speed of light? What would that imply? And he could have pulled his theory out of that because that, that is just enough that you can start down the process towards obtaining his theory from that thought. As long as you keep forcing yourself to stay consistent, you end up with his theory as the final result. Okay. Right. Right. Okay. He may have actually approached it from a different angle. I I'm not a historian in this area, but,

Well, and nobody probably knows for sure anyway. Yeah, yeah. So then you're going to conjecture how to solve the problem via an explanation. And that via an explanation is really important. There are maybe some small exceptions to that. We could talk about explanationless science. Sometimes when you don't know where to begin, that's where you begin. Right. But ultimately, you're looking for an explanation. This is something that's in severe doubt with a lot of philosophers, and it's in severe doubt with even some scientists.

that maybe science isn't about explanation. Okay. Popper's theory is it is absolutely about explanation. That is what we're trying to determine is an explanation as to explain what's going on. There are whole areas where people don't agree with that. What do they think science is for if it's not to? There is one philosophy that science is just about making predictions.

Okay. And that actually sounds a little seductive, doesn't it? Well, I don't know because I don't find the mystical very interesting and predictions has a mystical kind of a feel to it. Yeah. So Deutch just pointed out the problem with this whole line of thinking that without an explanation, you don't even know anything.

what to try to predict, right? If you had a box that you could type in whatever you want and it would give you an accurate prediction, you wouldn't even know what to type in to make a prediction. So like, let's say that you wanted to build a spaceship, right? In theory, this box can help you do that. You can type in the numbers, you can figure out, okay, this is how I'm going to build a spaceship. And then it would tell you, oh yeah, that spaceship's actually going to work and it's going to get you to Mars or whatever, right? Okay.

But you wouldn't even know what to enter if you didn't have an explanatory theory in the first place about metal and about thrust and about, you would have to have all those explanations in the first place to even figure out what to predict. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. Okay.

So, okay, so once we have a conjecture, then we're going to criticize the conjectured explanation or explanations that we've come up with. This is just a wild guess, at least initially, right? We just come up with, okay, here's this conjecture of how I'm going to solve this problem that I'm working on and

It's just a wild guess and now I'm going to try to criticize it. Now, how do you go about criticizing it? There's going to be tons of slides where I get into detail on this. Okay, but at a high level, one of the first things you would want to know is does the conjectured explanation fail to solve the problem? Now, this seems so incredibly stupid, but it turns out it's really important.

It is easy to state things in English so that they sound like an explanation, but they don't actually explain anything. Right. And then you feel like you have an explanation, but you don't. Right. So one of the first things that you have to look at is, does this...

explanation I'm looking at actually solve the problem. Okay. Another one is that you take the conjecture or hypothesis to its logical conclusions and are these acceptable? One of the things that I'm going to emphasize in future slides, maybe not today, is that it's really easy to come up with conjectures that solve a problem. It's not easy to do it in such a way that it doesn't have consequences. Sure.

And so one of the main things that scientists need to do is they need to think through what are the consequences of my explanation that I'm conjecturing. And if it comes up with problems, let's, let me just give a really obvious example. I use this in a future slide. If your conjectured explanation violates, say the laws of thermodynamics or the laws of conservation, there's a very good chance because scientists have this

with those two laws that they just don't get violated, right? And, you know, maybe in principle, theories will force us to violate it or something, but there are no cases we know of where they get violated. I'm exaggerating slightly in the case of dynamics. If you have a single particle, then obviously it's going to get violated. There's no such thing as thermodynamics at a single particle level. But

but there aren't cases where these principles get violated. So if your theory causes those to be violated, you probably just throw them out. You probably just don't even bother with them. You never even get to experiment. It's just like, okay, that's a bad explanation and you move on. Okay. And this is a very important part of science is that often people try to put science in terms of experiments. So empiricism, for

In fact, this is so deeply rooted in scientific, the thinking of scientists that science is rooted in empiricism or experiment. Oh.

But really the vast majority of conjectures get killed way before the experiment stage for various other reasons. And it's happening in the background and they're not thinking too hard about it, but they're doing it. Is the explanation a good explanation? Now this is the one I have a bunch of slides on. I need to explain what I mean by good explanation. And that takes a little bit of effort, but for the moment. And bring the, bring the next slide into it. And then we can hop back to this one. Well, I,

I kind of have it in a certain order. And there's a whole bunch of slides on it. So I kind of want, maybe want to do that as a separate podcast. Okay. That's fair. For the moment, you can take it on faith that there's such a thing as a good explanation and such a thing as a bad explanation. Okay. And it's possible to recognize the difference between the two. Okay. Okay.

Okay, so then we subject it maybe to other people's criticisms, right? So you've done your best to criticize it yourself, but you're biased. So you go to your colleague and you say, okay, I've got this idea, what do you think?

And the colleague goes, oh, that's, have you thought of this? Or that's a stupid idea or, or whatever. Right. And so you're putting it out there for other people. And this is something that Popper points out that because this is what science is really about is criticism, criticizing conjectured explanations, that science is really a community project. The idea of the professor on Gilligan's Island that does all the science by himself just isn't reality, right? That,

the reality is is that science is what comes out of a community project of community criticism okay and that's a hugely important part of science and then of course after we do all this

Then maybe if it survived that far we actually go perform an experiment, which is really an experiment is a special type of criticism It's not really separate from criticism It's where we come up with this experiment you say okay if my conjecture is true then I expect this to be the result of the experiment and if it's not then I expect this to be the result of experiment and you're doing your best to really falsify your your explanation by criticism and then ultimately by experiment and

Then after that, actually the process kind of repeats. Then you go and you publish your results. It has to go through maybe peer reviews. It's going to get published to the scientific community. It may get ripped apart. It probably will get ripped apart by the scientific community. And this whole process, every step of the way, is just in trying to take your conjectured explanations and subject them to as much criticism and possible falsification as is possible. Okay. And then here's the key thing.

of the competing explanations that maybe you're thinking about here, which solves the problem the best without introducing unacceptable new problems. Right. And then here's the key point. An explanation that is more correct will survive all criticism, whereas an explanation that is not correct won't. There's

There's an intuitiveness to this and so much of this is just obvious, and yet you've probably never heard it stated this way before, right? But if you have a correct explanation and it matches nature, there's no way to come up with an experiment that falsifies it. There's no way to come up with a criticism that will permanently falsify it, right? Okay.

It's what nature is really doing. And this is the basis for how science actually works. Something that is true, or at least more true, we'll see in the future that nothing's ever actually fully true, but something that is as true as we can currently get it,

There simply won't be a way to criticize it. And the fact that it survives criticism, that's what matters. If it isn't true, then we will come up with some way to criticize it. And then it will fall by the wayside and die as an idea because it didn't survive criticism. Now, ultimately, that means that you've got all these explanations out there, possible explanations, conjectures, conjectured explanations out there.

And the ones that rise to the top are the ones that survive criticism. Okay. Does this process sound familiar to you? Yeah, absolutely. You're probably looking for a specific thing that this is a process that I like to use even when trying to create new things, specifically like when we're trying to build product solutions. Okay, go on. This is a good example. Exactly how I would do it. Yes.

Okay, that's not an accident. Okay. The thing that I actually had in mind was that this is survival of the fittest. Oh, oh yeah, survival of the fittest idea. Yes. Okay. Popper points out that biological evolution is just a special case of this theory. A special case? Yes. Okay.

So the idea of knowledge coming from survival of ideas, biological evolution is knowledge in genes. Okay. Knowledge about how to be adapted to your environment or survive compared to your predators or something along those lines. Right. Biological survival of the fittest Darwinian evolution is a form of this process.

That just happens to be embedded inside of biology. That's a fascinating way to look at it. Okay. It's not just a fascinating way to look at it. It's actually a really important point. And here's why. And this goes right along with your own example. The fact that this is your process for creativity. This is the only process in existence for creativity. Okay.

Okay. Okay. It's how you do it for projects. It's how scientists do science. It's how we create knowledge. It's how we create moral knowledge. It's how we improve our political system. It's how biological evolution created more advanced organisms. It's how biological evolution created us with the ability to criticize ideas and to be able to be generally intelligent, you know,

general intelligence in the sense of artificial general intelligence, except I'm dropping the artificial because we're not artificial. We are general intelligence. Now let's take a look at good explanations versus bad explanations. So I'm going to give you an overview and then I've got like tons of examples, but I think the tons of examples will probably need to go into a different podcast.

Okay, I like that. This seems like a silly example, but it actually makes my point pretty well. Suppose you ordered milk from a milkman and then soon thereafter milk arrives on your doorstep. We're going to conjecture theories as to why the milk is arriving on your doorstep. So theory one, the milkman you paid for the milk brought it to you.

Okay. Theory two, the milkman you paid pocketed the money, but your nice neighbor is now leaving milk for you because they can see you need it. Okay. Okay. And number three, angels saw the milkman pocket the money and started bringing you milk because they knew you needed it. And then I put it, et cetera, because I mean, particularly that angel one there, we could probably vary that one really easy. We could say elves, angels.

instead of angels, we could say monsters, we could say fairies, you know, wizards. We could even go sci-fi on it and, you know, aliens from the future came back and...

Yeah, okay. So, in fact, there's an infinite number of logically possible explanations for anything we care to explain. Yeah, the History Channel bases their entire programming off of this. Yeah. Okay, so now here's my question for you. And we're kind of like these are the only three that are possible. Which of those three is the best theory? Well, I like one the...

I don't know that that necessarily makes it the best, but it's the one that seems the most reasonable to me. Which is the angel one, right? Yes. No, let's say theory one is the one that's the most reasonable to me. Okay. So now it's interesting the language you just used right there, right? It's the most reasonable to you. You absolutely mean something by that. But if I were to tell you, okay, explain to me what you mean by the most reasonable, you could probably partially explain it, but...

But you might struggle. In fact, go ahead and try. Explain to me what you think you mean by it's the most reasonable. Well, darn you, Bruce. Well, I like an explanation that fits with what I see as the order of events. I asked somebody for something, they brought it to me. Yes. It's reasonable that they brought it to me because I asked them to bring it to me.

Yes. And in fact, you're paying them to bring it to you, right? Okay. In fact, that's actually a really good answer. I mean, it may not feel like it is, and I'm going to put it into stronger terms where it will become more obvious why that is a good answer. Okay.

Okay. Okay.

A best theory can be false and a bad theory can be true. You might think, oh no, it has to be true if it's the best theory. Okay, but that's not what we're talking about in this case. We're talking about good explanations, the nature of what makes a good explanation versus the nature of what makes a bad explanation.

Right. Okay. And so truth and false isn't what we're currently talking about. Okay. So, but there, but for some reason you just immediately sense theory one's the best theory. It's the most reasonable. There's something about it. There's some quality or set of qualities to it that just make it the far more appealing theory.

And this is without you even understanding Popper's theory, right? You are intuitively doing something when you say it's the most reasonable theory. And so what Popper is helping us do is understand what it is you're doing inexplicably, if that makes sense. Yeah. So now let's talk about what makes a good scientific explanation. So this is from David Deutsch from his paper Logific of

of logic of experimental tests, which is somewhat of a hard read, but it's a seminal paper that scientists should read. I don't know if it's as popular as it should be yet. Okay. But future generations will remember this paper, I predict. So he says, how bad or good an explanation is depends on how it engages with what it's trying to explain and with other knowledge that happens to exist at the time, such as other explanations and recorded results of past experiments.

an explanation is better the more it is constrained by the explicanda, the thing that we're trying to explain, and by other good explanations.

Okay. Okay. It's fancy words. The way he puts this a little more colloquially is he says good explanation is hard to vary. Okay. It's constrained. Okay. When an explanation is not well constrained, it doesn't feel like a very good explanation and for good reason. But when explanation is constrained by other things, it fits with other things.

That's when we can sense it's a good explanation. So here's an example of determining, examples of determining which of two or more competing theories would be the best explanation. The way I state these, each of these sounds so intuitively obvious, but in future podcasts, I will give you examples of where it challenges your sense of reality. Okay.

Okay. So we should prefer, so number one, we should prefer theories that are explanations of the problem we're trying to solve over ones that are not.

I already kind of talked about this one. If the theory doesn't actually explain the problem that we're trying to solve, obviously it's a bad theory. Right. The fact that this, that we have held onto theories throughout centuries that don't explain things, we do it all the time. Humans get really bad at this sometimes and have held onto non-explanations because they were worded as explanations. So this is actually a big deal.

Okay, so there was medieval theories about phlegm that because phlegm was slow that if someone was slowing down, it was because they were sick, it was because they had too much phlegm.

Okay. Phlegm oozes slowly, and that's why when you're sick, you slow down. I mean, it's stuff that today we would just see as silly, right? Right, right, right. Okay, and the real reason why it's a problem is because it didn't actually explain anything. Right. But to them, they held on to it and based medical science, quote, science, around it for centuries because it really felt like a good explanation to them.

them. So number two, we should prefer explanations that are hard to vary and still solves the problem over ones that can be easily adapted to account for anything. And just really briefly, the reason why that's true, all of these are actually examples of hard to vary, but this I'm trying to get specific here. The reason why this is true is because if it's easily adapted, it will not only account for the real world, but it'll account for any imagined world too.

Right. And therefore it doesn't really explain anything, even if it feels like it's explaining something.

So number three, we should prefer explanations that do not conflict with other good explanations. This makes sense, right? If I come up with a theory and it conflicts with some other well-established theory, there's a good chance my theory is just wrong. Unless what I'm trying to do is maybe I have actually found some way to disprove the currently most popular theory. I mean, that is a possibility. I mean, we wouldn't make progress if that didn't happen sometimes.

But a lot of times what you really want is you want, if it's conflicting with another theory, then you've got something extra to explain. If your theory happens to also explain that and why that other theory is wrong too, then maybe that's a good thing.

Okay. But if it doesn't, then now you need to figure out how you're going to explain why that other good theory is wrong. Okay. And the more it conflicts with other theories without having a good explanation for those theories, the more that we should really just start thinking about abandoning that theory. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. We should prefer explanations that explain why the previous competing theory worked well and predicts when it will not work. Okay. This, this last one is,

The gold standard, it's what's known as a critical test or a crucial test.

where you have two competing theories and you say, okay, based on my new theory, the old theory will be wrong in the following way. And then when you go out and you actually do the experiment and it turns out that the new theory is making a correct prediction and the old theory is now making a bad prediction. At this point, this usually causes scientists to start abandoning the old theory. Right. Um,

It should be noted that scientists are human and sometimes you have to wait for the old guard to die off.

And this is something that Thomas Kuhn brings up in his book about this subject, which a lot of people who believe in Popper really dislike Kuhn, but Kuhn is an interesting historian. And he brings out some really interesting things that are true, even if his overall epistemology isn't the greatest, right? And one of the things he points out is that we do have this history of when a new good explanation comes along, the old guard just hates it, but then they die.

And the new kids on the block coming in and learning science from the ground up, they don't have the same biases that the old guard have. And so they end up picking the one that's actually the better theory that explains things better. And so eventually, just by death, the new theory succeeds.

right you see this in in politics and in um our social interactions um yes well very much so yes it's it's interesting though that this is not always the case there i could give you examples of where new theories came in and took over within a few years and everybody bought it so sometimes there's really heavy resistance and sometimes not

And there's actually maybe an interesting question. Why do you sometimes get heavy resistance and why do you sometimes not? Fascinating question, actually. Yeah. So let me give you maybe one of the most straightforward examples here. Are you familiar with the standard model, that term, the standard model in physics? Yeah. Okay, so that's our current best theory that tries to combine together all our different theories and our understanding of how particles work, right? Mm-hmm.

And the standard model is a mess and everybody knows it is, right? It's ugly. It doesn't always, sometimes it just establishes numbers by experiment rather than by principle. So, okay, just so happens that this constant is this, we don't know why.

It doesn't properly take care of gravity. Right. I mean, it really is just an ugly theory and everybody knows it. But it was accepted by the scientific community as the best theory very quickly. They adopted it.

Okay. And I actually think psychologically, part of the reason why it was adopted was because it was so ugly. Typically, scientists prefer beauty. But I think that the adoption of it was kind of like, okay, we all know this isn't the true theory. It's just the best we can come up with. And I think that made it really easy for people to not resist it.

Right. Because it wasn't making maybe as strong claims about reality and it just sort of overcame biases because of that. Right. I don't know. That's, that's my guess. I'm making that up.

Okay. Okay. Now, let me give you an alternative one or two alternative ones. One of them is the theory of group selection. So in biology, in evolution, for a long time, there was this theory that there was such a thing as group selection. When you talk about Darwin's survival of the fittest...

Who is it that is surviving and is the fittest? And what does even fittest mean? Is it at the species level or at the individual level?

Yeah. In fact, it actually turns out that both of those are wrong. It's actually at the gene level. And that's what Darwin's, sorry, Dawkins' Selfish Gene, that book is about. And that's actually our best theory of evolution today. The idea that it's the genes that are what is actually survival of the fittest makes different predictions than it's the organism. Yeah, totally. Totally.

And so, but at one time people thought maybe the species like, like survival of the fittest happened at a species level. Okay. And then there was a whole series of theories and experiments. And what they found was, is that unless you were talking about a super organism, so like answer bees, where they actually share the same.

DNA and thus could be considered a single organism, that there simply was no such thing as group selection. There's really strong reason to believe that that just isn't true and that there's a really big exception to that rule. And that exception is humans. And this comes from Jonathan Hyatt, and I would probably have to do a totally separate podcast about it, but humans have this really weird thing called memes where we're able to transmit knowledge through culture instead of through genes. And

it allows us to do something like group selection. Because of that, the theory that there's no such thing as group selection, which is still the prevailing theory in biology today. In fact, the idea that group selection could be real is heresy today. That's a real word used by Richard Dawkins. Heresy? Yeah.

By the way, he's the one who invented meme theory. So it's his theory that disproves this. He hasn't figured out that it does. Okay. And it has taken 50 years so far for this idea to catch on that humans are an exception.

And it's still a minority view, although it's gaining ground because it's surviving criticism. Sure. And eventually it's going to be... We definitely need to have a whole podcast about that because it's such a fascinating concept to me. Yes. Okay. So that's one example where we have good reason to believe that the prevailing theory is wrong and that most scientists are wrong and that the minority view is the correct view because it's surviving criticism better.

And yet there's still tons of resistance to it because it's so deeply embedded in the way biologists are taught to think.

Wow. Okay. Okay. Now let me give you another one that's even weirder. So you had mentioned in a past podcast that nobody really knows what's going on with quantum, with quantum mechanics. Yeah. Right. Okay. And I said, actually, that's not true. Yes. There is in fact, a theory of quantum mechanics that explains most of the mysteries of quantum mechanics. No, no theory ever explains everything. It usually opens up new mysteries and,

So I don't want to overstate this, but in terms of like the main mysteries people think of with quantum mechanics explains all of them.

It's called the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. And that word interpretation is wrong. And I'll have to do a separate podcast on this to justify what I'm saying because it's so hard to believe. And I get that. But the simple truth is, is that the many world interpretation of quantum physics is the only interpretation of quantum physics that we have. Because the rest of them don't match the criteria I just put on the screen here.

Okay. They simply aren't examples. Most of them are non-explanations, in fact. Okay. And if what you're looking for, if you accept that science is, in fact, about explanation, there's only one in its many worlds. There's not a single competitor to it.

Scientists do not believe this. I have a friend, a good friend who's a physicist, and he would laugh out loud if he heard me say this. He has laughed out loud to my face when he's heard me say this. Okay. And he is representing probably the vast majority of physicists in the world, people who clearly know more about physics than me. And he is wrong. And the reason why I know he's wrong is because I know more epistemology than him. I understand theory of knowledge better than he does.

If you combine knowledge of quantum mechanics with theory of knowledge, it becomes obvious it's our only interpretation. If you don't actually combine them, then you're able to, for a long time, put off accepting many worlds based on non-explanations that sound like explanations, which is what the world of physics has actually done. Right. Okay, and I don't expect you to believe me on this yet. Okay.

Oh, I believe you. And you know what? I spent years convincing myself this was true because I could not believe it. And I bought book after book that purported to give an alternative explanation. And each one I had to, at some point, put the book down and go, oh my gosh, they don't have an alternative explanation. And then I moved on to the next book and the same thing happened in the next book and let the same thing happen. And,

I learned to work out the math for myself, just basic examples. And I started to realize, Deutsch is right. This actually is our only theory. Now, you might argue here, well, that doesn't make it true. And that's always a fair statement, right? For all theories, that's a fair statement. Well, because we've already established there cannot be.

there cannot be truth necessarily. That's right. We're never really claiming it's the full truth. But once you fully understand the epistemology I'm laying out here, it basically forces you to accept it as true. The parts about it that are false are

are the things that are going to show up in the next theory, but the next theory is going to have all the things that you really dislike about many worlds quantum physics. They're going to be parts of the next theory because they're so hard to remove. Now, for the record, I have never stated a personal dislike of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Yeah.

I have. I'm telling you right now that I was so strongly against it. That was why I spent so much time trying to find an alternative. I was kind of forced into my position by logic, the logic of what I'm laying out here. You know, what is a good explanation? Why...

why you dis disliked it so much. That's a good question. And that's a different podcast to be honest. I would have to go into details of, I think at a, at a basic level, most people dislike it. And the reason why is, is for example, it means that there are an infinity versions of yourself right now doing different things.

And I think it kind of bothers us, this idea that it makes us kind of question our identity a little. Interesting. It doesn't affect me like that at all. I think for a lot of people, it's a little too, I almost want to say mystical, but we use mystical a certain way. Yes. But we are used to thinking about the fantastic things

as truth when it comes to like religious belief. You know, people tell somebody that you believe you're going to go to a heaven state after this where your soul is going to live forever in happiness and glory. And that sounds to me like super weird. I don't see this as any more radical, but I think for a lot of people, they've kind of accepted one mystical answer. And this mystical answer seems...

radically the kind of the other side of kind of freakiness. Yes. I think there are other reasons why people reject it. Part of it is just inertia. I mean, like if you're a physicist and you have been taught by your teachers that many worlds isn't even an option and been taught other interpretations instead, there's a good chance you don't spend a lot of time questioning it. There's actually a group of physicists out there who it's their job to try to figure out what does this,

physics mean in reality called cosmologists okay most physicists aren't cosmologists so they don't have a particular reason to start digging into this amongst cosmologists overwhelmingly many worlds is accepted okay because they just they've just got nowhere to go right i i read the book by roger penrose i mentioned him in the past who's one of the really strong exceptions

And it was actually his book that shook me up and made me realize that many worlds had to be taken seriously because he was making his strongest arguments against it. And it started becoming increasingly clear his arguments are bad. And so I...

I'll have to show you like what he said and how it started to affect me, right? But here's this world famous scientist who's a cosmologist who doesn't believe in many worlds and his arguments are increasingly making me feel like they got to be true. Have you read Beyond Weird? No. By Philip Bell. It came out in 2018. No. What's that about? Um,

Well, he wants to check. I mean, it's challenging the whole notion of many worlds. And it's essentially his book about why everything we believe around many worlds is wrong. Oh, interesting. I've read multiple of those books, but his is one I'll have to add to the list. Yeah. So, yeah. I can usually get through the book up to a point where I suddenly realize they have...

misinterpreted many worlds in some way. And I know enough about it that I can tell when they've crossed that boundary and that they're actually not criticizing the theory anymore. Right. Well, and I am, you know, with, without a doubt, you understand this stuff at a level way beyond what I do. Yeah.

Many worlds actually does have some very cool qualities to it. And we should probably talk about that too. It's not all freaky and bad. I do think as a physicist, it should be noted that many worlds is making a prediction that's a little hard to accept, right? And so maybe it makes sense that you've got this long-term resistance to it that's only very slowly coming down. It is coming down. In fact, I predict that within a generation or two, many worlds will just be the same as quantum mechanics ever.

and they'll be taught as if they're one of the same. And everyone will accept it because it gets taught in schools that way.

All the children learn it that way. And it won't seem weird anymore at that point because it won't be new anymore. Right. But it's because that isn't where we're at today. Maybe it makes sense that it takes time for this to process through the community and through the system for all the criticisms to come up and then slowly get counter-criticized and die. Right. But inevitably, just because of the way science works,

you know, many worlds is going to get accepted and it's already well on its way. It was when it first came up as a theory, when Everett wrote his PhD thesis on it and was the first one to come up with it, it was literally considered crackpot science. Right. And, and,

And it has, because it has survived criticism so well, people are adopting it very slowly. And Max Tegmark, who's a famous physicist, who believes in many worlds. That's one of the things that is his area of interest. He did an informal survey at a conference, and I'm going off of memory here, but he was talking about how the official interpretation of quantum mechanics is something called Copenhagen interpretation. Okay.

Okay, which is, by the way, a non-explanation, which is why it gets eliminated right off the bat under the epistemology we're laying out. Okay, but that's the one that most scientists have been taught to accept. So he took a survey. He wanted to know which interpretation do you accept of quantum mechanics? And the number two interpretation, if I'm remembering this correctly, was many worlds. Okay.

Copenhagen is actually below many worlds in this non-scientific survey. Oh, really? They didn't make the list that he was going over. Okay, so Copenhagen is dying, if this is to be believed. It's non-scientific, so I'm reading something in here that may not be true, but I suspect this is fairly accurate to representative of...

the scientific community. The number one interpretation that was embraced by science at this point was, I have no idea. Well, and that was why I said that the interesting thing about quantum mechanics is that we're using it, but we don't understand it. Yes. Because part of the interest, the ongoing interest in quantum mechanics is that we are able to use it. It's solving real problems. Yes.

In fact, it's our best tested theory. I would argue it's not our best tested theory. It's our best tested theory of physics. Let me put it that way. There's a slight exception to a theory I can think of that's better tested than it. But most people would consider it our best tested theory. And it is accurate to like,

sixth, seventh decimal places and things like that, right? I mean, it is just a, as far as testament, and there's no known exceptions to it. So unlike general relativity, where we actually know of actual physical cases that it doesn't explain, you know, black holes, things like that. Quantum mechanics doesn't have known exceptions like that.

So it really is, in many ways, our deepest scientific theory. So it stands to reason that there are going to be scientists who are going to not accept I don't know and are going to go look for an explanation. And when they do that, there is only one, it's many worlds, they will end up with it.

Okay. And that's why it's going to win over time. Okay. Each new generation of scientists, there's a few that won't accept what is being taught because they can see it's a non-explanation and they don't like mysteries. And they're going to say, I want an explanation. They go and explore it on their own because it's not taught in schools. And then they come across it and they go, Oh, this explains it. The other alternatives don't explain it or, or, or literally non-explanations. And so the,

Slowly over time, scientists, the younger scientists are picking it up

and accepting it and they become very sold on it, right? I mean, it's, I went out and I was on one of the like stack overflow sites, but except for the one for physics. And I, somebody asked a question about quantum physics and I explained it using many worlds. And there was this eruption of people arguing and I got tons of points because people were trying to upvote it and downvote it and making comments. And like in one day I jumped,

jumped a whole level or something. It was the first time I ever used the site, right? And there was great passion around it on both sides, right? The thing that was interesting was just how many people, including scientists, are just really embracing it now. There's a lot that don't.

In my opinion, that discussion is worth looking at because I feel that without a doubt, many worlds survived criticism there well, and the alternatives didn't. Right. I think this is something that's just going to keep happening. Not everybody can accept that. Not everybody would agree with me. And there's some subjective choice as to what you believe was a good argument or not. Right.

But in each case, like they would make arguments with me and I would point out to them the problem with their argument using epistemology. And they may or may not accept that. There was obvious objective criticisms I could put out there, right, to what they were bringing up. One of the main arguments that they used was that it didn't explain everything, that it had its own mysteries around it.

Which is true. Yeah, of course. But those same mysteries applied to all the alternatives also. So you can't really use that as... As a justification. Right, right, right. We'll have to do like, I really would like to do a podcast specifically on many worlds where I lay out the case for many worlds. Basically taking my own experience with it where I tried to criticize it and how I failed to.

So let's plan on that for a future one, not for next week though. Yeah, not for next week. You have a plan for next week already? Yeah. So I actually do have more where I can go into depth on this. We could do that next week, but I actually think we should put that one off and then do that as a, okay, let's recap what we talked about previously, but now we're going to get into specific examples. I like that. And, but I think like we should look at maybe next week,

I kind of have in mind something lighter. Either I will invite my friend Saruka to do Hindu dance. Okay. Or dance therapy or something related to dance. Or we will have a discussion about Star Wars. Okay. I can go either one of those ways. And specifically what I have in mind with Star Wars is what went right, what went wrong, or more to the point, what went wrong. And I'm not trying to be overly critical of Star Wars. I'm not a Star Wars hater. But I know both of us at least...

feel like there were some substantial mistakes that were made with Star Wars. And one of the things that is interesting from this theory I've just experienced

explain to you, okay, based on this concept of constrained or hard to vary, is trying to come up with a really good movie or story or any work of art is hard to vary, right? Making a small change to your script can break the whole story. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, what that means is that in some sense,

a good story or a good movie or a good work of art is an objective thing. Interesting. Okay. Okay. Stop you right there. Okay. Let's save that conversation for next time. If we, if we talk about star Wars and I propose we wrap it up for today. Yeah. I think we should wrap it up for today. Okay. Well, thank you, Bruce, as always. Great discussion.