Episode 4: What Makes a Good Explanation?
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Thank you. All right. Welcome back to the Theory of Anything podcast. I'm Bruce Nielsen, and we've got Cameo and Carrie here today. Carrie was out last time. How are you doing, Carrie? Fantastic. All right. Good to have you back. Thank you. Where we left off last time on the podcast is we're going to go into in-depth examples.

So let me pull up, this was the slide that we kind of looked at the last time. If you're one of the people who's looking at the slides, you don't need to have that though. But it was what makes a good scientific explanation. And I was going to go into in-depth examples of what each of these were. So just to repeat them quickly, we should prefer theories that are explanations of the problems we're trying to solve over ones that are not. Notice how each of these seems different

really self-intuitively obvious, right? And that's intentional. I've written them to try to seem fairly obvious. But of course you should prefer a theory that actually solves the problem you're trying to solve over one that doesn't, right? So, but...

It's surprising how often people will go to theories that don't actually solve the problem that they're trying to solve. So we prefer explanations that are hard to vary and still solves the problem over ones that are easily adapted to account for anything. We should prefer explanations that do not conflict with other good explanations. That's an all things being equal kind of statement.

We should prefer explanations that explain why the previous competing theory worked well and predicts when it will not work. That last one is kind of the gold standard of, they call them critical tests. And so it's the gold standard. When that happens, that is when the paradigm starts to shift towards a new theory is because you now have a theory that actually makes predictions when the old theory will be wrong that you can go out and you can experimentally test.

So what I'm going to do today, and this might be a slightly longer episode because I don't have a really good breaking point for this, and this will wrap up the discussion on epistemology, but I'm going to go through kind of detailed examples. And feel free to jump in and ask questions about these. There's a lot of interesting examples here. And I'm being very careful to word everything in such a way that it seems obvious, but

But I assure you, there are cases where your intuitions will go strongly against some of these things that I'm saying. Even though they seem obvious, there are cases that will come up where you'll go, eh, I don't know if I'm still okay with this. And that's one of the things that I'm going to hopefully make a point of. So let's talk about corollaries to principle number one. So we should prefer theories that are explanations of problems we're trying to solve over ones that are not.

Deutch says the explanation must actually account for the explicanda. I've never even heard that term before, but the thing you're trying to explain. And we should prefer actual explanations over pseudo explanations, particularly explanation spoilers that are disguised as explanations. And again, that seems obvious. Why would you prefer a pseudo explanation over an actual explanation? If the explanatory power of a theory comes from referencing another theory, then we prefer the other theory because that's the one that actually explains things.

So all of this comes down to the idea that we care about explanations. There are various, Cameo asked me last time, what are other philosophical theories out there? There are ones that claim that explanation doesn't matter. And so I'm claiming very strongly it absolutely does matter. In fact, it's the core of what makes science be able to make progress. I will go to some examples now.

All right. So here's the one I was trying to find last time, Cameo. According to medieval medicine, laziness is caused by a buildup of phlegm in the body. The reason phlegm is a vicious substance, its oozing motion is analogous to sluggish disposition. So what do you think about that explanation? Okay. Well, what's wrong with that explanation? Okay. I've already given you the answer to this, but just kind of think about this for a second. It seems silly to us because we live in a modern world, right? Sure. Okay.

Okay, and we know about modern medicine. We've seen it work. People bought this explanation for centuries, okay? For centuries, this is how doctors would think of phlegm and think about how it's related to laziness, okay, by this analogy. But what's wrong with this explanation? Like really try to analyze, besides the fact that it just seems silly to us now, what's actually, take it seriously as an explanation for a moment and then analyze it.

Well, it's correlation, not causation. So they're taking correlation. They're saying, okay, there's something in your body which is viscous, viscous,

It seems sort of sluggish and therefore your disposition. There's nothing really directly saying this causes that. Okay. There's no cause and effect. Very, very good example right there. Which we fall prey to all of the time. All of the time. Yeah. The, the, the whole correlation versus causation thing. Yeah. Yeah. Let me, any, any, any other analysis anyone wants to make of this one? Cause I'm going to actually reference this one again a couple of times.

of explanation versus a non-explanation. So this is cameo. I think you'll enjoy this one. So it's,

in the debate of creation, creationism versus evolution, this one gets referenced all the time. And this quote is referenced all the time from William Paley. Now, mind you, he said this before Darwin published his book. Okay. So this wasn't actually a response to Darwin as it gets used today, but it's,

people will famously use this explanation today to try to combat belief in evolution. So let me read the actual quote. William Paley says, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer that it had lain there forever, but suppose I had found a watch upon the ground and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. The answer I had given before, the

it'd been there forever, would not suffice. There must have existed an artificer or artificers who formed the watch for the purpose which we find it. Have you heard this quote before or some version of it before either of you? I haven't, but I don't hang out with people who try and disprove evolution either. As a rule.

I actually heard this one all the time growing up. But yeah, so this is a quote. Now, what's wrong with this argument? You know, no fair looking at the slide for a second. What is it that's wrong with this argument? My first reaction is I take issue even with the first point of if I asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that it had lain there forever. I think using that as the justification for the second part of the answer, both are interesting.

erroneous assumptions. Yeah. Okay. I agree with you. I think what he's trying to say there is there's no need for an explanation for how the stone got there. That would be kind of an interesting thing to even ask.

based on their understanding of physics at the time they thought that the universe was eternal they had no concept of a big bang so for us that's kind of a silly thing to say but for them the idea of it laying there forever was consistent with their understanding of physics in the universe and things like that well and and and maybe that's really my problem with it is the concept of

of the universe as a non-changing construct is a really lazy way to ever, that in and of itself is a non-explanation. Yes, it is. And that is absolutely true. And there are scientists today who champion that view as if it's an explanation. And in fact, it's not.

And so this would be an example of how even today, very famous scientists like Stephen Hawking, I believe I've seen him try explanations like this, will use non-explanations as if they are explanations. And it is really more common than you might think.

Hopefully opened your eyes to when people try to you do something like this and you'll go, oh wait, that was a non explanation. And we should always prefer an explanation over a non explanation that's intuitively obvious, but people will do it all the time they will try to take a non explanation and dress it up like an explanation.

So there's a lot in the day to day of people interactions just in my job, you know, why did this thing happen? Well, here's this non explanation. Well, that, that didn't explain anything. Yes. Yeah. You know what? And we need to do like an episode on software development, maybe more than one episode on software development. There are so many things that people say in software development, they get repeated over and over again, like the term scope creep. I mean, like,

I'm not even sure scope creeps a real thing, but people talk about it like it's a real thing. Right. I believe it is not, but yes. Like it's a well-defined thing. It's vague enough. Maybe it's a real thing under some definition, but what people mean by it is never clear. And I could give you tons of those that people say over and over again that are passed off as wisdom. And yet they, I'm not sure they mean anything, you know, it's so,

So one of the things that like agile development tried to do is try to get down to a real explanation of what was going on. And that's why agile is more effective than a lot of its competitors. We should definitely have that be something that we do because I think it would be very enjoyable for all three of us. Oh, I agree. Yes.

We will definitely have to make that like a top of the schedule and talk about that. I actually feel like agile development ties in really well with the theory of knowledge that we're talking about here. Yeah, agreed. Yeah, so it's, of course, they probably weren't aware of it.

of popper's specific theory but it's interesting that we can actually assess is agile on the right track right you know and what what is actually wrong with traditional methodologies and traditional methodologies aren't valueless but what is specifically wrong with them having a good theory of knowledge really helps us understand what is wrong with it and how we know agile is on the right track things like that yeah let's let's let's schedule that i think that'll be enjoyable

Okay. Okay. So the first thing that I want to point out is when we talked about what the actual scientific method was, I said it started with problems that needed to be solved, not with observations.

And what is the problem that we're trying to solve here? We have to actually know that. Okay. And the problem is how is it that animals came to look like they're designed? Animals have a hard to vary nature. Okay. Just like a good explanation, animals themselves are hard to vary. You know, the, the lion has this, this was an example that comes from Darwin himself. The lion's

Claws are adapted for exactly the type of prey it needs to kill to eat. And the prey, you know, a gazelle or something is adapted to try to escape, you know, and it is very much looks like it was designed for a purpose. There is purpose in it.

Okay. So how is it? It came to be that way is really the problem that we're trying to solve. Okay. And evolution is an attempt to solve that problem of adaption. And it does it through this explanation of survival of the fittest. Okay. And we could probably do a separate, uh,

podcast on evolution and some of the gaps that exist. You know, the creationists aren't entirely wrong. They often point out real gaps that exist, but that isn't the problem with their arguments, okay? The problem with their arguments is that creationism does not even attempt to solve the problem. It just declares it a non-problem. And the easiest way to show this is with

this example I've got here, typically with a creationist, they'll say, oh, it's the animals look like they're designed because they are designed because God designed them or something along those lines. All you have to really do is substitute a watchmaking machine in place of God. Okay. So a watchmaking machine, you know, has made laid here forever and it is what made the watch. Okay. The moment I put it in those terms,

even a creationist would say, oh, that's ridiculous. You haven't explained anything because you need to now explain where the watchmaking machine came from. This is actually what creationism is doing in its kind of most naive forms is it's trying to simply declare the problem a non-problem. It's trying to say, oh, there is no need for an explanation because it's not a problem in the first place. Well, that's why we prefer evolution. That's why evolution is a scientific theory and creationism isn't.

is because evolution is the only known current theory, hard to vary explanation, for how animals came to be, seem to be designed, right? It actually attempts to solve the problem. And there isn't really a competing theory out there. Creationism isn't a competing theory because it's not a competing explanation at all. Okay, does that make sense?

Absolutely. Okay. So now let's talk about realism versus solipsism. Are you guys familiar with the term solipsism? You are familiar with it. Okay, good, good, good. So solipsism is the idea that...

That there is no real world out there, that in fact you're the only person and the only mind that there is and everything else is just a dream. And you can kind of see why people might try to advance this as a possible explanation because all of us have had the experience of being in dreams and

meeting people in dreams that for a moment we thought were real or something along those lines, right? So you can kind of see why this one caught up, but nobody really takes solipsism seriously. It's more of a, well, how do you disprove solipsism? They're trying to show you can't really eliminate it as a possibility, okay? However, as if you remember from our past podcasts,

you can't disprove anything. The fact that solipsism can't be definitively disproven is completely meaningless statement because nothing can be definitively disproven. So this is actually an uninteresting point. And this is an example taken from David Deutsch from the Fabric of Reality. But this is, I'm actually going to lay out for you now the actual philosophical proper response to people who bring up solipsism as if it's a real possibility. There is a response to it.

There is a proper philosophical response that makes good sense, that eliminates it from the running. Okay, so what's the problem we're trying to explain? And this is where solipsism starts to fall down. So we want to explain why the world is not under our control, why it kicks back at us and acts independent of us in inconsistent ways.

Okay, so we've all had that experience. We know the world does behave in such a way. We don't really control it. It might hurt us. It might harm us. It might help us. Things are out there that don't seem to be under our control. Why is that? And why is there great consistency in the way it behaves? You know, things that are predictable. So that's a problem that we might want to solve. And so we might, trying to solve that theory, we might theorize,

A theory called realism, which is the theory that there is an objective reality out there that is independent of us. Okay, so that is, you can see how that attempts to solve the problem. And in fact, does solve the problem. Okay, that since there is an objective reality out there. That's why it's not under our control because it's independent of us.

Okay. So that's theory one. Now let's take a look at theory two, which is solipsism, the theory that there is only one mind or own and the rest is just a dream. Okay. So yes, it's true that solipsism can't be disproven. Okay. But theory two doesn't actually explain the problem that we set out to explain. Okay. We're right back to now asking, okay, great.

So the world's actually just a dream. But hey, you know, I've lucid dreamed before. Why is it that it doesn't actually explain why there's an independent reality out there separate from us? Because if it's just a dream, maybe it shouldn't be independent from us. So it doesn't actually solve the problem at all. It doesn't even attempt to solve the problem. In a way, it's a lot like the creationist answer. Yes.

You know, it just says, oh, don't you worry about that. It pushes it up the next level. Yes. Okay, now here's the thing that's interesting about it. Solipsism is essentially, it's crypto utilizing realism, the theory of realism, to explain this. It's saying, yeah, it's all a dream. But in this dream, it just so happens to be that you're dreaming about an independent world.

that is out there and that kicks back against you and acts independent of you. Well, that is the theory of realism. So solipsism is using the theory of realism as its explanation as to why there's an independent world. Therefore, we should prefer the theory of realism, not the theory of solipsism. Are you guys familiar with Occam's razor? Certainly. Yeah.

So Occam's razor, this, in this case, we're actually talking about kind of the real use of Occam's razor where since realism, solipsism both explain the same thing in exactly the same way with solipsism utilizing realism, then there's no reason for solipsism to exist. The thing that would make solipsism a true theory would be if you had to conjecture it to explain something that realism couldn't explain. Okay. If there was a problem that existed that realistically,

required you to conjecture solipsism because realism couldn't explain it. At that point, we would start to take solipsism seriously. But there's no need. There is no problem that it's trying to solve. It's just extra baggage. So we chop it off and we're done. There's no reason to go any... Even if it were true, there's no reason to take it any more seriously because it doesn't solve any problem. Occam's razor is used in this way a lot, but Occam's razor is one of the most abused things I've ever seen in my life. It gets used in so many ridiculous ways.

And it's kind of onto something that's true. And I just gave an example of where it actually is true. But like, just for example, Occam's razor is used in machine learning as an explanation of a trade-off between trying to make a model that makes general predictions versus one that over explains just the training set.

I can see how Occam's razor applies to that, but it's got nothing to do with science at this point. Right. I mean, it's, it gets, it gets used in drastically, drastically different ways that are frankly kind of unrelated to each other, except by analogy. And I think that's one of the problems with Occam's razor is that it doesn't have a well-defined, uh,

explanation of what it is, right? So people will throw it out there and they'll use it like it actually is some sort of scientific principle, but really it only becomes a scientific principle in exactly the sense I just gave you, which you don't even need Occam's razor to be able to explain it. So in some ways it's probably best you just drop Occam's razor out of the discussion because it's just too vague in most cases.

So principle two, we should prefer explanations that are hard to vary and still solve the problem over ones that are easily adapted to account for anything. So sub points to that, we should prefer explanations that have survived all criticism or tests that we have currently been able to devise over ones that have not. Okay, so that makes sense. If you've got multiple possible explanations or theories, and you've tried to come up with tests and criticisms, and one theory has failed tests and criticisms and one hasn't,

Of course you should prefer the one that hasn't failed anything yet. Explanation that can be easily adjusted to fit any observation explains every possible world and thus explains nothing in the actual world. Thus we prefer ones that can't be easily adjusted to any possible observation.

think about like the problem of how do you explain the season cycle? Okay. So there are mythologies around the world that offered various myths that purport to explain the season cycle. And there's a great deal of similarity between all these different myths, right? So for example, in kind of the Greek one that we're probably most,

familiar with. Persephone, I can't pronounce her name. She comes home for the summer. Go ahead and say it again. Persephone. Persephone. Sorry. Thank you. Comes home for summer to visit her mother. And that's why, you know, while that's happening at summer and, um,

Otherwise, she's in hell, and then it's winter. Various myths that have different takes on that, right? But they're all... There's often a great deal of similarity between them, which is kind of interesting. Is this a testable theory? Well, actually, it is. Okay, you can...

deutch points this out you can go take this theory and you can say well i'm going to go check to see if it's winter in australia at the same time it's winter in europe because if this theory is true it predicts that it's when it will be winter the entire world not just the upper half of the world or the bottom half of the world one part at a time okay so you go to australia and it's summer while it's winter in europe and you go oh well it

we just tested this theory. It didn't test out. Okay. So Deutsch points out how easy it is to take a myth like this and adapt it to whatever observations you have. So you say, Oh, well, what's really going on is that when Persephone comes home, that her mother sucks the, the heat out of the Southern hemisphere and puts it into the Northern hemisphere where she lives. And that's why it gets cold in Australia when it's summer in Europe. And,

And it's so easy to change the myth to just fit any observation. So the fact that it's testable is meaningless. Right?

Right. And this is something that people will talk about science being about testability. That's not strictly true. Okay. There has to be more to it because myths are very, very testable. It's just that they're very easy to vary so that you can rewrite them to match whatever observations you want. That's actually the problem with myths, not that they're not testable. And then just by comparison, the idea of a spherical earth, that's a very hard to vary explanation. It makes a prediction. I mean, it,

once you realize the earth is spherical and that the seasons are caused by which, which part of the world is tipped towards the sun at the moment and is therefore closer to the sun, it makes all sorts of predictions that you maybe didn't even originally intend to set out to test. And then you, then you can go and you can test every single one of those. And if any of them turn out to be wrong, your whole theory is just gone. Right. I mean, you're going to be going back to the drawing board coming with an entirely different theory because there's just no way to adapt it anymore.

Okay, so number three, corollary three, we should prefer explanations that do not conflict with other good explanations. Or in other words, all else being equal, if our proposed explanation introduces new problems, even with other theories and other fields that the current competing explanation does not,

We should prefer the previous explanation because it's more constrained, harder to vary than the new one. And this is something that I've made a point to people. Explanations have consequences. Okay, so the explanation of a spherical Earth has a consequence that there should be different seasons in different parts of the world. It also has consequences about how the sun shouldn't set

in the North Pole during certain parts of the year, things like that. These all just follow from the hard to vary explanation. We have lots of different theories out there and

We don't necessarily even treat them as interrelated, but reality is all interrelated. So if you come up with some theory and it violates a theory in a different field, that's actually a strike against your theory. Your theory now needs to not only replace the theory that you had set out to try to replace, but it now needs to replace the theory in the other field as well.

So if you have some theory and it's in physics, but it would be a problem for biological evolution, that theory has a lot to explain now. Those are problems for the theory and would probably be a good reason to start to consider maybe just abandoning the theory, unless you really could come up with some way to explain every single thing it goes against.

And if it did that, then that might be a good strong reason to say, look, I've got this new theory and it destroys all these other theories and it replaces them. But if you can't actually come up with a way to have it deal with every theory it touches, then it's a weaker theory and it may be time to move on to a new one. Right.

My dad got in with the zero point energy crowd for a little while. Oh, yeah. You know, and they're definitely like on the edge of this where they consider themselves scientists, but everything that they're proposing violates the second law of thermodynamics. And

They spend a lot of time like trying to get around that fact. I don't know exactly what their theories are and how they can justify them, you know, other than it's a lot of people spending time trying to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Right. You know, and again, and that's interesting. The second law of thermodynamics is,

You know, this is like anything else. We have no way of proving it's true. You can't prove anything is true. So from a certain point of view, you might take the standpoint that, hey, who cares that it violates the second law of thermodynamics because that's just a theory. But there's a good reason why you don't do that. This is a theory that has survived criticism incredibly well in experimental testing and at

At this point, there's a saying that if your theory disproves the second law of thermal dynamics, what you, you didn't actually disprove the second law of thermal dynamics. You disproved your theory. And of course we could, we could imagine something coming up where that might not be true, but

It just is so much to explain. Second law of thermodynamics ties into all sorts of things. It's a, it's a deep theory trying to come up with explanations that don't cause lots and lots and lots and lots of other problems.

because now we're violating the second law of thermodynamics is really hard to do. And that's what the zero point energy crowd doesn't do is they don't really have a way of trying to explain everything. They're trying to explain one thing and not worry about the other consequences. Yeah, exactly. We should prefer explanations that explain why the competing theory worked previously and predicts when it will not work.

Or in other words, we should prefer explanations that explain more than their competitors. Okay. Can you see the connection between those two? This is actually a really important point. Yeah. The obvious example here is Newtonian physics versus Einstein's general theory of relativity. And this is the example that gets used in, you know, high school physics classes or college physics classes and it gets used and it's an awesome example.

Newtonian physics is somewhat more intuitive than general relativity. You imagine a 3D space and you imagine gravity and there's these trajectories and it's based on certain formula as to how they're going to be affected and a thing that's in motion stays in motion unless something stops it and if it's at rest then it stays at rest unless some sort of force moves it.

it goes along really well with our kind of built-in intuitions as to how things behave. Not entirely, because as it's been pointed out,

we don't have any real experience with something in motion staying in motion. So that actually violates our intuitions a little. Oh, that's interesting. I've never thought about that, but yeah, that's true. Okay. And so the fact that Newton actually predicted that, and then it turned out to be true in outer space when you had nothing stopping things, is actually an example of how his explanation had really strong consequences that were testable. Okay. And this is what Deutsch calls reach.

where explanations have reach. The consequences of the explanation, maybe you were only trying to solve one problem, but when you make that explanation, it applies all the way, right? An explanation that says, well, but it only applies to stuff in outer space,

Well, now you, now it's a bad explanation again. Now it's an easy explanation again. Right. So, but for the most part, Newtonian physics seems somewhat intuitive. Maybe to some degree that's because we get taught it in school at a young age, but it matches our intuitions well. General relativity doesn't. General relativity is based around the idea that there is no force of gravity per se, but that instead mass converges.

causes 3D space to curve. Let's say Cameo and Carrie both have a compass that's pointing north and you're standing 100 feet apart and you both start walking north. Even though you're in parallel with each other, you'll end up eventually coming together and touching. It's obvious why. It's because the world is curved and you're headed towards a single point that's at the top. And so eventually the two of you will come together even though you're in theory parallel to each other, which violates...

our understandings of Euclidean geometry that you get taught in high school, right? Now, you might say, as you're doing this, and as you're moving forward, and you keep getting drawn together, you tried this experiment a few times, you might say, it's like there's some sort of force that's like pulling us together. And in fact, it's very as much like there is some sort of force that's pulling you together.

And so you might call that force gravity. Okay. But there's no real force at all. It's actually just a matter of the fact that you happen to be moving and there happens to be curvature. Right. So general relativity is based around that same idea with the, with the big change being that when there's more mass, there's more curvature and therefore the perception of force becomes stronger. General relativity solved problems and, and,

I need to like look into this more in terms of its actual history, because I don't think that the problem that I most hear that it's solved, I don't even think Einstein was aware of at the time. There's this experiment that took place where some scientists said, hey, look, let's measure the speed of light when we know that the earth is moving towards the sun, and then measure it again when we know the earth is moving away from the sun. The

planet orbits. And so at part of the orbit, you're moving towards the sun and another part of the orbit, you're actually moving away from the sun. Therefore under Newtonian physics, the speed of light should be different speeds depending on which direction you're moving at the time. Okay. So they measure it and it's the exact same speed matter, which direction you're moving.

This was a problem for Newtonian physics. You might at this point, if you believed in naive falsification, you would say, oh, well, we just disproved Newtonian physics. But of course, nobody's going to believe that. They're going to say, well, what if there's something wrong with the instrument? What if there's some other explanation that...

So Einstein's theory explains this. Once you understand this idea of curvature of space and mass warping things, and there's a bunch of other things that kind of follow from this that I won't get into and not even sure I can explain them entirely. But one of the things that comes out of it is, is that the speed of light is the maximum speed. As you approach the speed of light,

where space actually contracts around you, or you can think of yourself as lengthening out in the direction you're moving. As a kid, maybe you had friends that would say, okay, what if you're in a car moving at the speed of light and you turn on the headlights, what happens? And then the kids will say, oh, maybe the light collects in front

you know, of the headlights. Well, that's not what happens. What happens under general relativity is that the light moves forward from your car as if it's just the speed of light. So from your frame of reference, light speed is still light speed and you're standing still. So then you have to work out, okay, well, why is it then that someone who's watching you from the outside would see both of you, the light and you moving at the speed of light? The rest of the explanation follows from that, right? Just accepting those as true and

all of Einstein's theory kind of falls out of that. And it's this wacky explanation that just seems so wild. And initially people didn't believe in it. It was crackpot science. Einstein is actually the one who said, well, one of the things that comes from my theory is that if you have an eclipse, you can see the stars around the sun. The sun's a really big, massive body of gravity. So if you are looking at those stars and it's not an eclipse,

they'll be in one place in the sky. But if you're looking at the stars and it's during an eclipse and there's next to the sun, then there'll be in a different spot in the sky because the light has been bent by the gravity. Okay. That follows from his theory. It's just a natural part of his theory. Arthur Eddington goes out, finds an eclipse, looks at the sky,

at it, sure enough, that's exactly what's happened. Okay. And the stars have moved positions because the light from those stars has to curve around the sun instead of

how they would normally come straight towards us. So they look like they're in a different place in the sky. Once that experiment was done, people started to accept general relativity because now it had an experiment that Newtonian physics made a totally different prediction about. No one even knew to make, to go out and test this, right? Right. This,

Until you had the explanation, you didn't even know to do the experiment. Okay. In theory, you could imagine someone noticing that during an eclipse, the stars are in different locations and then that becoming a problem. But that isn't how it happened, right? It happened that first the theory came, it was trying to solve some other problem, and then it

And then they suddenly realized, well, that would mean this also. Go test it. Boom. Good enough. That's fascinating. I've never thought about it that way. What this means, though, is that general relativity explains more than Newton's theory. It explains everything Newton's theory does.

And then it explains things that Newton's theory can't. And then it even explains why Newton's theory was correct for so many years and we didn't know it was wrong. And basically the explanation is that general relativity only differs from Newton's theory when there's massive bodies of gravity or if you're moving close to the speed of light. Well, in our regular life here on Earth, neither of those happens very often.

And so that would be why it seemed like for centuries, Newtonian physics was just true. And then all at once suddenly collapsed and was falsified as a theory and general relativity took over. By the way, side note on this, Einstein won a Nobel Prize for his work in physics, but it wasn't for general relativity, even though it is by far the most important theory that he ever produced. And the reason why was because back then it was considered controversial.

Oh, really? Yes. Did they give it to him for something legit or did, was it like one group saying, well, we'll just give it to him for this and then it'll be. It was for something legit. He did a number of discoveries and I, I'd have to look this up, but I think it was for discovering Brownian motion, which led to light wave, light particle theory, and eventually quantum mechanics. Wow. So it was, he made, he made multiple gigantic discoveries and,

And so he did get the Nobel Prize for a very legitimate discovery, but not for one that was as important as general relativity because it was just too wacky. People couldn't accept it. And it was hard to understand. I mean, it's not that hard to understand today. We've got ways of explaining it and I'm not doing a great job, but there are ways to explain it that make fairly good sense.

It's just counterintuitive is all. Right. Like back then, very few people understood it at all, right? I mean, usually it takes a while for us to get good at explaining things. Sure. I would say even today, if you were to...

pull people on the street and have them try and even describe or choose from multiple choices that, that describes general relativity. Most people couldn't. Yeah, I agree. In any case, this is why we now use Newtonian physics as an approximation for general relativity, general relativity, and really don't believe in it as a premier theory anymore. You know, it's kind of a fascinating idea that even though it's not accepted as true, quote unquote,

It's still very useful. Yes. So theories don't have to be 100% true for them to have a lot of value. Yes. Okay, so this is actually a very interesting point that you're making. And let me state it in a slightly different way. Newton's theory was a false theory, but it contained truth.

And at the time, prior to the discovery of general relativity, it was the most true theory, which is why it was the best theory. When we create a better theory, that doesn't mean – that does falsify the previous theory, but it doesn't mean –

The stuff that was true in that theory is still true. That theory continues to be useful, even though it's a falsified theory. And it could be as we get better and better theories that the differences between them are smaller and smaller. So we might say we falsify the previous one, but in fact, it's,

It's fairly close in terms of how valuable it is. So let me, let me restate that one too. So consider how different Newton's theory is compared to general relativity in terms of how it feels.

It honestly feels like a total upending, right? Because suddenly there's no force of gravity, which was the single most important thing in Newton's theory. And it caused us to rethink how we thought of reality almost entirely, right? And yet at the end of the day, there's very little difference between the predictions that the two theories make, except under some really specific circumstances. It's quite fascinating. Yeah.

Okay, so now let's go back to this example. And Carrie, you weren't here for this example, but I brought this up with Cameo and I said, okay, we've got three theories. So you have paid a milkman to bring you milk. And after you paid this milkman to bring you milk, milk starts to arrive on your doorstep every single day. So what you want to do is you want to explain where that milk is coming from.

Okay. And so we've got three competing theories as to where the milk is coming from. Theory one is that the milkman you paid the milk brought it to you. Theory two, the milkman pocketed the money and left town, but your nice neighbor is now leaving milk for you because they can see you need it. In theory three, angels saw the milkman pocket the money and they started bringing you milk. Okay. So the question I asked Cameo was, which of these three theories is the best theory? C.

So one, because it makes sense that it's causal. You gave person X some money and person X is doing something in return. Okay. I'm going to argue with you. Isn't number two also actually number two and three are both causal. So you gave money to the milk, you gave money to the milk man, and then he pocketed it and your nice neighbor saw that happen, felt bad for you. And that is the cause or the reason why they're now bringing you milk.

I would say it's a more indirect causal. Assuming that the neighbor actually saw it, I would say it's much more indirect. It's definitely more indirect. It involves more complexity, right? So you paid someone some money, but it's this other person who's unrelated to that transaction that actually is providing the milk.

Yes. Okay. Complex without any purpose. Okay. What about theory three? I would say the same thing. It's more complex without any reason. Okay. Theory three has an additional problem. So let's, let's talk about each of these. So now based on the examples I just gave you, the principles that we just talked about, theory one is the best theory because it's not just that it happens to be causal. It fits dozens or even hundreds of related theories that you hold.

about how people behave, how the economy works, things like that. It's not a simple theory. It actually ties into lots and lots of other theories, implicit or explicit, that you hold. So for instance, we know that a milkman that pockets the money and leaves town isn't going to be in business for long.

And so there are consequences for this extra thing that we're adding in that needs to now be explained. So that's actually what makes theory one the best theory is how well it's constrained by lots of other theories. It's a hard to vary theory. Okay. Now theory two, it actually could be true. It's actually a somewhat hard to vary theory, but it has consequences because

It's fairly easy to test. You go across the street, you ask your neighbor, hey, are you leaving the milk? No, I'm not. Or you see the milkman show up the next day. Well, apparently he didn't leave town. So even though theory two is also a hard to bury theory like theory one, it's also easy to test and easy to falsify. And like you said, it's more indirect. It seems like a milkman that...

leaves milk is just a much more straightforward explanation than this kind of roundabout thing that we're coming up with. And notice also it doesn't solve a problem. Okay. If you found out the milkman left town and then you started to wonder where the milk was coming from, at that point, theory two becomes the better theory because now you have a problem with theory one that needs to be solved and theory two solves it.

When I'm just presenting it like this, it doesn't even solve a problem. Okay, there's no reason to even come up with theory two, because theory one is already the best theory, and you don't have a problem that requires some other theory to explain it. Exactly.

Theory three is the quintessential example of an easily adapted theory. Why angels? Why not elves? Why not Miss America? Why not Gandalf? You could throw anything in there and it becomes an equally good theory at this point. Superheroes. Yeah, it could be superheroes that are staying secret and behind the scenes. And again, it doesn't solve a problem. The

There's no reason why you need to start postulating about angels or superheroes or anything else when you've got a perfectly good theory that's on the table, a perfectly good explanation as to where the milk's coming from. Okay, so let's talk about now famous examples. This is actually kind of my favorite part. You hear about stuff like this all the time.

And it gets bantered around as if it's serious, and yet it's stupid. So this, the first one, do we live in a simulation? I mean, like Elon Musk takes this one seriously. There are tons of scientists out there that take seriously the question of do we live in a simulation? They even have

various explanations that they offer. They say, well, you know, someday we're going to be able to build computer simulations that are indistinguishable from reality. And then, you know, there'll be way more simulations than there are reality. So the odds that we're in a simulation would be much higher than the odds that we would be in reality. Therefore, we should take seriously the idea that we live in a simulation.

Have you heard other people mention this? Elon Musk is probably one of the most famous for taking it seriously. There was that movie about it. Matrix. Actually, I was thinking of Jim Carrey. Oh. It's not exactly a simulation. Oh, right. The one where he, what? Truman Show. Yeah, the Truman Show, right. All right, so let's talk about what's wrong with this

Right here. What problem are we solving? So it's maybe fun to bring up the idea that we live in a simulation and certainly that can't be falsified in any way, but

Why are we postulating this at all? What problem does it solve that we're trying to, that just assuming a reality doesn't take care of? In theory, there could be such a problem, okay? Let's say we really were living in a simulation. That simulation, so just using existing technology, imagine that you're actually, your consciousness is inside some sort of VR video game. There are all sorts of problems that would come up

that would require you to postulate that you're actually in a simulation. For example, inside of a video game, you can't use a microscope to look at atoms, right? Because there aren't any inside of a video game. In fact, if you get close enough to a wall, it probably pixelates.

Right. I mean, there's, there's all sorts of things inside of simulations that would force you to postulate you're in a simulation. If you really were in one. Unless the simulation was completely perfect in some way. Which is what happens to Truman. The simulation start to show. Right. And so, and that's also what happened in the matrix also.

So if there were such problems, we would conjecture we were in a simulation and that would become our best theory. No such problems exist in reality as of today. And these people who say these things are just having fun, basically. Yeah. They're bad theories because they solve no problems.

Okay, now another one that this one you probably haven't heard of, but you can like look it up and it's, it's actually a really interesting example, the integrated information theory of consciousness. So we don't have any really good theories of consciousness right now. In fact, I would argue that our best theory of consciousness is in fact Popper's theory of knowledge. And if you want to make progress in AGI or study of consciousness, you

paying attention to his theory is probably a really good starting point. Most people don't know that, right? And so they've, they've postulated all sorts of really crazy kinds of theories and the integrated information theory of consciousness is one in particular that is really caught on amongst a lot of scientists. And,

I can't explain it in great detail, but the bottom line is you have to have, under the theory, you have to have a special sort of network of information that's a certain amount of closeness together to cause consciousness. Okay. And so under that theory, it makes predictions like the fact that you can never use a computer today to create consciousness. That's,

That real consciousness requires something more like the brain, where the network is physically close together and of a certain level of complexity. And Max Tegmark takes this theory very seriously. He's a scientist that I follow that I really like. There's other scientists who take it very seriously. It's got complex math behind it. It looks like a serious theory. It's actually a phlegm theory.

It doesn't really explain anything. It says, oh, consciousness will be there if there is this phlegm-like structure in the brain, right? It doesn't explain why there's any connection between the structure they're postulating and consciousness. So it's literally a phlegm theory. It also violates one of our deepest theories, the Church-Turing thesis.

And I'd have to do like a separate podcast on this, but the church Turing thesis is computational theory, which basically at a nutshell says we can simulate anything using math, right? And this theory says you can't. So it would cause a giant problem for one of our deepest theories, the theory of computation, if it were actually true. Now, of course, that doesn't mean that we know for certain it's false, but there's just not a lot of good reason to take it seriously at this point. It doesn't explain anything. So-

That's fascinating. We should, we should put that on our, on our future podcast. Okay, great. I think it's a great conversation point. All right. Okay. So now I use this in an earlier podcast, the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has before. This is like the quintessential example of, of inductivism, which was prior to Popper's theory of knowledge was generally understood as the theory of knowledge, the correct theory of knowledge. And most scientists today still claim it's the correct theory of knowledge and

And they'll often use this as an example, that you see the sun rise, you see it set, so you have lots of observations of it happening, and as it happens more and more, you become more certain the sun will rise the next day. And a lot of, you know, when I say it, it's kind of seductive. You might even think that that makes sense.

I want to suggest that it doesn't, that in fact, that's not the reason why you think the sun will rise tomorrow. It's because you have an explanation as to why the sun rises, that the earth is spherical, that we go around the sun, that the earth turns. And in fact,

The reason why I would suggest that's the real reason why you believe the sun will rise and not because you've seen it before by observation is because the sun does not rise at the same time every day. Your real observations can greatly differ from day to day, depending on what season it is. And if you were to go like to the Arctic Circle or something like that, you would see the sun either never rise or never set.

right? And your explanation as to why that is, because the Earth is spherical and it's turning, matches what you would expect to see, and it's a good explanation. The idea that you're doing it based on observation just isn't true, right? I mean, you... I don't know. I think I'm going to have to disagree on this one, because sure, the sun comes up at different times every day, but it changes so little over time. I mean, it's a minute from one day to the next, or...

Much less, even. And before people had the idea of a spherical Earth, I would think that they still believed the sun would rise in the morning. Okay, fair enough.

I wonder, though, if that is perhaps from a certain point of view, I can see where you're coming from. Look, we're just used to it happening. And so we think it will, but we don't really have an explanation. Right. There is no explanation here. If the sun happens to rise and set in the

In Marco Polo, he talks about this myth that there's a place where the sun doesn't set and that it just stays up all the time. And we know today that he's talking about the Arctic Circle, right? Right.

But that was just this weird myth back then. Myth that had gone around, that he was traveling, he came across and he believed it. You know, he had no reason to disbelieve it. And he writes about it, but to him, it's just this weird myth. He's never actually seen it, but people have said that it's true, that they've been there, they've seen that the sun doesn't set. So even in the ancient world, I'm not sure that they necessarily had a problem with the idea that there could be a place in the world that the sun doesn't set.

I guess I'm thinking of it from just the average person's perspective. So, you know, what a philosopher thinks about this point is going to be much different than the average person who just plans on getting up when the sun rises and going out to farm. Yeah, they may not be thinking of it much at all. I don't know. I'm going to interject that people have always made up stories to explain why the sun will rise tomorrow. Always. And...

That alone, the fact that we always wanted to make up a better story to represent why the sun was going to rise is because the explanation that it will rise because it always has is actually an unhappy explanation for us. It's not good enough for us as a species. We want to know why it's going to do it.

So instead we say maybe it's because it's the wheels on Apollo's... Right, right. We will come up with myth to answer it because an explanation of something happening because it has is insufficient for us generally, for a truly curious mind. Good point, yeah.

Okay, so now let's talk about it's just a coincidence. So now this one's interesting because this one often is actually a good explanation. But there's a really good reason why we generally don't accept it's just a coincidence as a good explanation. And it's because it's easy to vary, right? And now I'm explaining to you why for the first time, straightforwardly, why you dislike coincidences as explanations. Okay, so...

And the reason why is it's easy to vary. If you have an explanation and somebody says, well, maybe it's just a coincidence, you immediately feel really doubtful about the idea it's a coincidence and prefer your other explanation because a coincidence is an easy to vary explanation. It's a bad explanation. There are cases where you will accept it, where it becomes the best explanation. And I kind of give an example here. This is a famous example. So you've got some sort of holy site and

And there are people who go to see this holy site and they get cured of cancer. Okay. So they go and to them, they've only got the one example to them. It was the holy site that cured them. Right. It's one of the odds in their mind that it wasn't the holy site. I went there. It caused me to be cured. Okay.

And to some degree, that's maybe even, you know, that's not a great explanation, obviously, because nothing's really being explained. But you can kind of see why people would believe that. And maybe that even makes some sense.

Now let's say that you move back a little and you say, okay, look, I'm a scientist. I want to know if this holy site's actually curing people or not. So what they do is they go and they look at, of all the people who go there to the holy site with cancer, how many of them actually get cured? And it turns out it's, you know, 1%, okay? Which just happens to match the remission rate of cancer in the general population, okay? At this point, if you're the scientist,

It's a coincidence is the best explanation and you're probably done. You probably don't have any reason to dig in deeper into if the holy site is actually causing the healing or not.

So this is an interesting case. It explains both why we dislike coincidence as explanation and under what circumstances we will accept it as explanation. And in this case, it's because it ties into another explanation, the remission rate of cancer in the general population that's known to exist. Does that make sense?

Yes. In fact, we still do that today. You know, we look at syndromes and a collection of symptoms that go along with each other. Well, let's say that we have a syndrome and the doctor notices that quite a number of these people are overweight.

Well, if the percentage of that population is overweight, matches the percentage of the population that is overweight in the general population, then like you said, there's no reason to think it's anything more than coincidence. Yeah. And you know, critical for us. There's a lot of cases like this that have come up and I'm going to be speaking about things I don't really know about, but think about like Accutane and the idea that it might cause suicides. Are you guys familiar with that?

No. Do you guys know what Accutane is? Yes. Okay, so Accutane is this acne medicine. And someone noticed that there was a high correlation between Accutane and suicide. So to this day, there are government laws around this. And if you take your child to go be on Accutane or try to be on it yourself, you have to do all sorts of things and take blood tests and they monitor you really carefully because of the fear that it might

caused suicides. The thing that's difficult about this claim, though, is that people who take Accutane aren't the general population. They're teenagers, which is the most at-risk group of committing suicide. So the mere fact that there's a correlation doesn't mean anything necessarily. Well, plus they have a heavy case of acne if they're taking Accutane. Right. So actually, I worked for a pharmaceutical company for about a year doing data management on phase three clinical trials.

And what happens when people record their side effects, they are told to record everything. Right. So what you're going to find on that list of side effects is that

symptoms of the actual disease. So for instance, we were studying a bladder control drug. And of course, there's all these symptoms that go along with people who need a bladder control drug. And those are all going to be listed as side effects because after the trial, they don't do another trial to say, okay, which ones were cause and which ones were just part of the actual disease. So

So everything gets listed. So on an anti-depression drug, it

It's going to list suicidal thoughts. Right. Yeah. Because a person who's depressed, who needs the drug is going to be more likely to have those in the first place. Right. So, and I don't mean to imply here that we, that there isn't a connection. Right. I mean, there could be, there could be, it's just that that isn't by itself a strong reason why. Right. A lot of times we're more cautious than we probably need to be. I,

And again, I don't know this for sure. Maybe Accutane does cause suicidal thoughts or something along those lines. It's just that the mere fact that they happen to correlate doesn't mean much on its own. Well, it's like the theory about cholesterol. So the idea is that cholesterol is bad for you because it's found in sites that are heavily damaged in your heart, right? But there's another theory that says, well, maybe cholesterol is there to try and heal those places.

So there's a reason for cholesterol in both theories, right? One is that it's there to help sort of heal that place. And the other is that it's a result of damage. It's not always clear what's cause and what's

is affected. So I'm, I'm looking for an article I just recently read right now that was specifically about cholesterol, but it was about how they had thought that cholesterol lowering drugs were causing in some people higher amounts of rage. And as they started doing some of the initial testing that they started doing,

started to indicate that it wasn't actually the drugs that were causing it but that having a lower level of cholesterol in your body made for more anger generally and and these were like super early tests but that was the results that they were getting back is that it had nothing to do with the drugs it had to do with the actual amount of cholesterol in your in your body um

And so I'm going to find that article because I think it's an interesting stuff from here. You know, I think medical science in particular is one of the weakest sciences that we have. And I don't mean that in a bad way at all. It just stands to reason that it would be because it's so hard to do experiments with it.

It is. Right. And so, and obviously we've made tons of progress using science with medicine. And so I'm in no way trying to say something bad about that. But a lot of medical science is non-explanatory, which is a problem because science is really about explanation. Yes. And it's just so hard to really come up with the necessary experiments. And so they have to a lot of times rely on correlation instead of causation because they're...

a way to set up the experiment as a causation study. Well, and there's just so many problems with trying to do medical research. One of the, when I was working in that field, there was this idea that they thought people were actually filling out

the forums about their results being on the drug before the week even started. I think that was too much of a hassle to do it, to keep up with it. Right. So they would just do it preemptively based on what they sort of thought would happen. Well, you know, we can do all the data management in the world to make sure we have clean data, but

If people aren't even filling out the forms right, you know, just throw the whole thing in the garbage. Well, and self-evaluation is a fairly lousy scientific. Yes. I mean, it is not, people aren't really great at evaluating themselves always. Yeah. And you know, that's one of the reasons we have such difficulty figuring out what kind of foods are the best for us to eat because we

to try and control a population well enough to make sure they eat exactly what you want them to eat is so difficult. Right. Those studies are so expensive because you basically have to force them to live in a place where they can't get any outside food, and you're housing them and feeding them. Well, those studies don't really, they're too expensive, right? So what they do instead are fill out forms about this is what I ate.

And then that's where you start thinking, how accurate is that really? It's probably not very accurate at all. Right. So food studies in particular are very susceptible to inaccurate data. By the way, Deutsch, in one of his books, In the Beginning of Infinity, he makes fun of non-explanatory science by giving an example of, imagine that you had...

some people standing next to a museum that are going to count how many people walk in and out of the museum. So you put the bunch of people around all the different doors and then they, they all, they count. Okay. I saw three people go in. I saw two people come out. And then at the end you add them all up. And what you find is, is that the number of people going into the museum and out of the museum don't exactly match.

So you release your, you release your, your study and you say, look, we have evidence that people spontaneously disappear inside of museums. Right. And so, I mean, of course this is a bad explanation, but a lot of our kind of correlation studies are exactly like this. Right. And you'll, you'll hear things like, Oh, you know, 60% of happiness is defined by your genetics. Right.

You know, or something like that, which, you know, might be true in some sense, but you're imagining it in a very different sense than what it's probably actually going to turn out to be when you have an actual explanation. I'm not quite as down on these as Deutsch is. I feel like a lot of these studies, they're a starting point. You start somewhere, you do the correlation study, and you see if there's something interesting, right? And I'm not against that, and I think that's an important part of science. Right.

But we way too often then immediately try to use it as an explanation, and it's not. Right. You really need multiple studies in different populations. You know, it only takes one tiny error in how you gather your study group to screw up the whole thing. Right. You know, another example would be, let's say there's standing outside the museum and counting people that go in and saying, okay, 100% of the people that we looked at were going to museums.

Well, that's because you were standing outside of a museum. So, you know, when people want to quote one study, especially if it's a small study or if it's a case study where it's only one person, boy, that is...

You know, you can't, you can't just take it as fact, whatever is said. Do you know, I, I had, so this is a Utah one. I, I have, you know, I grew up in California and there was some study that they had done numbers on use of antidepressants and Utah was like one of the highest in terms of use of antidepressants. I had a friend from California actually send me a message on Facebook saying, what is wrong with you guys?

That same year, a study came out about which state was the happiest. And of course, we can question how do you measure happiness and maybe this is itself suspect. But Utah was like the top one. So it was in the same year in one study, the highest use of antidepressants and also the happiest state in the country for the

For the sake of argument, let's assume that both of these are true simultaneously and that there's nothing wrong with the studies, which I'm not sure I agree with any one of the studies. Let's pretend like we just take them seriously. These aren't contradictions. You could easily have the happiest state also have the highest use of antidepressants, either because you've got people at the margins that are depressed, that's more common, or because they're happier because they are better at taking antidepressants. Right.

Absolutely. Or maybe they're, you know, happy, but they want to be even happier or. Right. Or maybe you just have a bunch of GPs that all got hit by pharmaceutical reps or something. Think about it. It's not really clear that use of antidepressants correlates with depression. Right. It's those aren't the same thing. And we are talking about some really small percentage. Vast majority of people don't take antidepressants.

And so we're talking about very different populations if you're talking about the whole state, happiness level, some sort of survey versus those that are using antidepressants. The other thing that's interesting is that depression and suicide are really common in the Rockies. So there's actually reason to believe there may be some sort of connection with high altitude. I've heard that before.

Okay, and this one I don't know is good science yet either. It's just an interesting possibility. But there could be some sort of something going on that does lead to some people being more depressed, but most people aren't affected by it or something. Well, it's our minds looking for the cause.

when all we can see is some sort of a correlation. We see a correlation and it doesn't make sense to us. So let's make up a bunch of different theories that seem to answer that question. What's interesting is how quickly we do that. One of the ones that I've heard the most common was, oh, the high use of antidepressants is because of the culture of Utah. Right?

Right. The fact that you can use that as a weapon in some sort of ideological war, you know, immediately where people go, you know. Okay, so let's talk about the final example here Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, the way they teach quantum physics in schools today, and the way most physicists are taught to believe is something called the Copenhagen Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.

And it is the interpretation that cameo you were bringing up with the idea that we don't really understand what's going on with, with quantum physics, Copenhagen interpretation. It just talks about something called the wave function collapse, right?

When you make an observation, the wave function collapses under the Copenhagen interpretation, and it describes what that collapse looks like mathematically. Okay. And it does not attempt to explain why the collapse happens at all. In other words, it's a non-explanation. The world of physics has put up with

a non-explanation in one of our deepest theories for a very long time. And this is the thing that's actually interesting. And this is why when we do a podcast on many worlds, quantum physics, many worlds is an actual attempt at an explanation. And the other explanations that are offered are not attempts at explanations. They don't explain, don't try to explain at all. And I've talked with people about this. I've pointed out to people who are into physics,

And a lot of times I'm told something like, well, you can't hold against the Copenhagen interpretation, the fact that it's not an explanation when it's not even trying to be an explanation. To which I respond, no, that's exactly what I'm holding against it. Yeah.

and this is why I feel very comfortable in the prediction that it's just a matter of time before many worlds takes over. There's always a few scientists who get taught Copenhagen and go, you know what? That's a non-explanation. I'm going to go look and see what other possible explanations are out there. And when a scientist bothers to do that, they come across many worlds fairly quickly and suddenly realize, Oh, that explains. And like,

we'd have to go into detail as to how it explains that explains wave function collapse. That's an explanation of wave function collapse. And when that happens, that scientist gets converted to many worlds and every generation of scientists, we have more many worlds ones. It's still a minority position, but it's in a fairly short order gone from total complete crackpot science to like, at least in one informal survey done by Max Tiedmark, it was the, like the second highest explanation that,

scientists accepted about quantum physics after the much larger, I have no idea. I mean, even Copenhagen didn't even make the list anymore, right? People are starting to just not care about Copenhagen. It's not taken seriously as an explanation because it's not trying to be an explanation. Many worlds is our only explanation of quantum physics. It's got no competitors. And that's the reason why scientists are slowly starting to take it seriously. And I suspect that

you know, within a couple generations, it will just be taught in schools. Our children will be taught many worlds because it's just the only explanation that currently exists. And this is one that I think is a lot harder for people to accept. That's why I put this one as the last one. There are so many things so wacky about many worlds and it's almost offensive in some ways. The idea, the way it plays with our concept of identity and things like that are very difficult to accept.

But if you do, and this is Deutsche's point, if you do accept everything we've said up to this point, you are forced to many worlds. The only way you can avoid many worlds is by not accepting what seems like intuitive, obvious understanding of when an explanation is better. Well, I think you'll need something like you had with Einstein and the theory of relativity. You need something that makes it...

That makes people have to really reconsider it in a new way. And I don't think your wave function collapse thing is going to be strong enough because it is so wacky for people's minds to wrap around. Yes. There's something that we could do like a podcast on this, that I read a book where they talked about something called the construction principle.

And the idea was, this is not a true scientific principle, but it certainly has a long, strong psychological value. The guy in the book, he was talking to the Dalai Lama, and he's the scientist, and he says, well, under science, the brain is, you know, I mean, it's this thing that the mind arises from the brain. There is no consciousness that gets reincarnated.

he's like talking to Dalai Lama about this. Dalai Lama, by the way, despite being a religious leader is very knowledgeable of science, right? He's a very knowledgeable guy just in general. And then he goes on to say, what if we actually do invent

What if we actually do invent a living thing that's intelligent and it's on a computer? He says, how are you going to adapt your doctrines to deal with that? And Dalai Lama bursts out laughing. He goes, when you actually make such a thing on a computer, then I will adapt my doctrines.

And, you know, I don't blame him for saying that, right? If you're a scientist, and this is going to be part of the difference between being a scientist and being a religious leader, if you're a scientist, of course you take seriously the theories of science, which includes the idea that we are going to be able to create

an AGI on a computer. If you're a religious leader, maybe it doesn't matter so much to you. But there is a point where you actually create it, where even the religious leader is going to start to take it seriously. And that's what he calls the construction principle. The idea that once we actually know how to know the theory so well that we can construct examples of it on a computer with simulation, then suddenly things change. And there's so many things out there like that

And again, I'm not trying to suggest this is a true scientific principle because it really isn't. But like think about creationism versus evolution. One of the main reasons why there are creationists still today, I live in a very religious culture and very few religious people have problems with evolution today. But you still do have a contingent of people that are just really hardcore creationists.

And I think one of the reasons why they're so hard to stamp out entirely is because evolution has never passed the construction principle, right? We don't have examples of experiments where we started off with a fish and then we ended up with a cow. And we can show that generation to generation it changed. And it's because evolution happens so slowly and because there are things we just don't understand about it.

We can't even simulate it well on a computer, to be perfectly honest, because the theory, we don't understand it well enough to do that yet.

It's somewhat understandable that these creationists are like, well, come on, show me. I think that that is at least at a minimum a true psychological principle that many worlds, maybe in a lot of people's minds, hasn't passed the construction principle. It hasn't come up with something that is so convincing that even a layman kind of just has to say, oh, yeah, okay. I will show you in a future podcast that there are some startlingly strong examples of it.

ones that I don't think you would think exist. And so I think I would argue that it maybe has already partially passed the construction principle and there will be other things in the future where it gets stronger. Deutsch gives examples of like when, when we know how to create an AGI and you create an AGI using a quantum computer, that quantum computer is going to be aware of multiple universes. Okay.

Okay. So, so in principle, we can come up with experiments that will pass that law, that line at some point. Right. However, a lot of things that are well accepted evolution, for example, hasn't passed that line and yet it is the best theory and it is the only theory and it's taken seriously for exactly that reason, which is why I think many worlds is going to get taken seriously for the same reason slowly, but it will happen. Just people don't know this, but,

But scientists didn't accept evolution at first, right? The public didn't accept it at first. Both the left and the right thought that it was wrong. And it just slowly took over because it was the only explanation. Today, if you're talking with...

people on the left politically, they will actually see anyone doubting evolution as a sign that they are non-scientific. Right. The right is starting to accept evolution also, but it's been a little bit slower because of their stronger religious connections. But even amongst the right, they just largely accept evolution as true. So I'm going to suggest that we use this as a stopping point, primarily because my computer's about to die.

As a matter of fact, that was the stopping point. We are going to the theory of knowledge.