David Deutsch and Naval Ravikant on Epistemology

Tim Ferriss

David is a visiting professor of physics at the Center for Quantum Computation, a part of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University, and an honorary fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He works on fundamental issues in physics, particularly the quantum theory of computation and information, and especially constructor theory, which he is proposing as a new way Of formulating laws of nature. He is the author of The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity, and he is an advocate of the philosophy of Karl Popper. You can find him online at daviddeutsch.org And I should return to what I stated initially, and that is preserving the lessons of a living legend. David is truly a pioneer in multiple fields. And the hope is that with the help of Naval, because I am in the passenger seat, I am largely silent in this conversation, that Naval can help to tease out counterintuitive learnings That you can apply to your life and apply to your life in many, many different areas. And to quote Naval, I will say, quote, I think understanding David Deutsch and Karl Popper is the easiest way to actually get smarter. Fix your epistemology and fix your thinking. So what is epistemology? Briefly, because that term comes up a lot. Simple definition of epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regards to its methods, validity, and scope, and perhaps this is a key part you want to keep in mind, the Distinction between justified belief and opinion.

Naval Ravikant

So you're saying the knowledge of the true scientific method is embedded in the institutions of science in the PhD process?

David Deutsch

Well, the best scientific method that we know of, and one shouldn't really think of it as a method. You know, there's this wonderful lecture by Popper when he first was made a professor at the London School of Economics. He was made a professor of scientific method. And his first six lectures, I wish the rest of them were, the first six lectures are on the internet somewhere. And he starts the first one by saying, I am the first professor of scientific method in the British Empire. The British Empire still existed at the time, more or less. And so the first thing I want to say to you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method. And then he goes on from there. So this subject does not exist. So if any of you have come here to learn the handle that you have to turn in order to make scientific knowledge come out the other end, you're going to be disappointed.

Naval Ravikant

So how do we make scientific knowledge come out the other end? How does knowledge grow? How does science grow?

David Deutsch

According to Popper, and I entirely follow him in this matter, all knowledge, not just scientific knowledge, begins with a problem and then continues with conjectures.

David Deutsch

The only time we ever discover a violation of the laws of physics is if we already have, at least in rudimentary form, a rival theory. If we have more than one theory, or if there's a way of one way of tweaking the theory or another way of tweaking the theory, something has got to be in conflict. Because if we only have one theory, if we really only have one theory, then what we will naturally do and what is absolutely the right thing to do is to write off the apparent violation Of the theory as an error. It could be an error. It could be a fraud. It could be a misconception. It could be bad apparatus. We're going to try everything. And only like halfway along that everything will somebody ever say, well, maybe the laws of physics aren't what we think they are. And in fact, the whole process of doing scientific experiments, especially in physics, is debugging, just like that's what computer program is all about. You have this apparatus, you switch it on, of course it doesn't work. Not God Almighty. You haven't set up this great big complicated thing in the lab and it works first time. No, it probably doesn't even work until the 50th time, you know. And as

David Deutsch

Yeah, that's a fourfold question, of course, even if you don't want the connections. I've been amazed the last few years with the pandemic, how issues of epistemology have come to the fore and have become hot political issues, whereas it used to be, you know, just a few Years ago when I was saying this to people, I would have to interest them on the fundamental level, on the theoretical level. You know, what is science? What is observation? Is there such a thing as justification? And so on. And suddenly, these things have become political. They become social. You know, people with and without masks jeer at each other in the street, or worse. And throughout the pandemic, I was tweeting again and again, when people were yelling at each other, I was tweeting, nobody knows. This is not known. Many theories and many policies are reasonable because there isn't deep knowledge of what we're facing. Sometimes I would say we will know, but I didn't want to prophesy. In some cases, we still don't know what the answer to these controversies are. And politicians and trolls on the internet want there to be a definite answer that is supported by science. We're following the science. Science

David Deutsch

Just doesn't follow. And so then, you know, somebody will ask when I say this to people, they will ask, well, what do you think then? What is the thing we should do? And I have to keep saying, we do not know. That's how we always begin. We begin with conjectures. We have a problem to do with the pandemic, all sorts of problems. We have conjectures. We can test the conjectures. But unless we have good explanations, which is another thing we could get to, there's no point even in testing them. Because without two good explanations, the rational thing to do with the result of an experiment that you don't like is to say, well, there's something else was affecting it. Something we don't know was affecting it. So that's epistemology. Now, with computation, as I mentioned before, it seems to me that Turing settled the issue and put icing on the cake, linking it with quantum theory, that AGI is definitely possible And that thinking is definitely a form of computation. We don't know what form, but we do know that some

Tim Ferriss

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Naval Ravikant

We've been using this term over and over again, explanation, good explanation, deep explanation. Would you mind just giving us your current best definition or hallmark of what a good explanation is and looks like? Because I found that that concept alone upgraded my thinking more than almost anything else.

David Deutsch

So the way I'm currently thinking about it is that an explanation is a story. It's a story that accounts for something. So this something could be something in the physical world. Why do we have five fingers? Which I think is a mystery. As far as I know, it is a mystery. So that would be a problem. So you have an explanation. An explanation is a story that accounts for this. But there are good explanations and there are bad explanations.

Naval Ravikant

To that, we've touched upon AGI here and there. You have said AGI is absolutely possible and that Turing settled that issue. Some people are saying it's almost inevitable and we have to worry about things like AGI alignment. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on both. Is self-improving runaway AGI here? And is this something that we need to align with our beliefs, whatever those are? In fact, I don't think we as humans can even agree upon alignment, but suppose we could. How would we align an AGI?

David Deutsch

Yeah, and we don't even any longer try to align humans in the way that people want to align AGI's, namely by physically crippling their thinking. Yes, I don't think we're anywhere near it yet. I'd love to be wrong about that, but I don't think we're anywhere near it. And I think that AI, although it's a wonderful technology, and I think it's going to go a lot further than it is now, AI has nothing to do with AGI. It's a completely different technology, and it is in many ways the opposite of AGI.

David Deutsch

At all. So an AGI, like a person, might refuse to answer. It should have that right by the First Amendment. So you can't have a behavioral test for an AGI because the AGI may not cooperate. It may be right not to cooperate because it may be very right to suspect what you're going to do to it. Do you see that this is not only a different kind of program, it's going to require a different kind of programming. Because there is no such thing as a specification. We know sort of philosophically what we want the AGI to be, a bit like, you know, parents know philosophically that they want their children to be happy. But they don't want, you know, if they're doing the right thing, they don't want to say, well, my child will never say X, will never utter these words like you do for an AI. You will recognize what it means to be happy once they've done it.

Naval Ravikant

I think fundamental to your worldview and explanation of what humans are is humans create knowledge through creativity. And what you're basically saying is that an AI, the narrow AI is not allowed to be creative. It has to solve a specific problem. And true creativity means you can hold any idea in your head. It's unbounded. And

David Deutsch

Crystals.

Naval Ravikant

Yes, the closer you are to the truth, the more of you that exists in the multiverse, in a very odd way. So there's your practical application of multiverse theory combined with epistemology. But out of this also came all kinds of other interesting outputs. I really encourage people to read The Bigging and Infinity, at least the first three chapters, which I think are an easy read before you even get in the physics part, where you talk about Wealth and resources. Can you give us your definition of wealth? And then as a follow-up to that, I think naturally comes,

David Deutsch

How could it be that a person like that becomes recognized as having made great discoveries? So then you can look further and look further and look further. People who read my books will find in the back of each of my two books, there's a list of books that you might like. If you like this, you might like these. And I don't believe in curricula. I don't believe in set subjects or in narrow subjects. Something that interests you is going to be the way to find out what you should be learning.

Naval Ravikant

What David is saying here is also part of his core philosophy that there's an output of his philosophy called taking children seriously, which applies this curiosity-driven framework And kind of freedom to explore to child raising. And I do encourage people to look that up separately. That is a podcast in and of itself. I will say I would not have been able to understand the books and get into them as easily as well if it weren't for the tireless work of Brett Hall. He runs a podcast called the Theory of Knowledge Podcast, T-O And he's got 100 episodes in there that literally goes through David's books chapter by chapter and explains with lots Of examples and very carefully for the layperson to kind of catch up on a lot of the ideas in those books. Also,

Naval Ravikant

What David is saying here is also part of his core philosophy that there's an output of his philosophy called taking children seriously, which applies this curiosity-driven framework And kind of freedom to explore to child raising. And I do encourage people to look that up separately. That is a podcast in and of itself. I will say I would not have been able to understand the books and get into them as easily as well if it weren't for the tireless work of Brett Hall. He runs a podcast called the Theory of Knowledge Podcast, T-O And he's got 100 episodes in there that literally goes through David's books chapter by chapter and explains with lots Of examples and very carefully for the layperson to kind of catch up on a lot of the ideas in those books. Also, I started reading Popper after encountering David's work. And Popper has a lot of books, The Open Society and its Enemies, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, etc., etc. But for people who are just starting out, those can be a little dense because he's arguing with other philosophers. And Popper is very good about steel manning arguments. So he takes the other people very seriously, and that takes time. And so if you're not a professional philosopher, you just want to figure out epistemology. There's a recent book that I found called Philosophy in the Real World, which is like a little 100-page introduction to Karl Popper by Brian McGee, and I found that to be a good, lighter-weight Introduction.

David Deutsch

Found to be good if it's by

David Deutsch

Am working on a new theory in physics called constructor theory. And it is, to me, amazing. And one of the problems I have is how to explain to other people why it is amazing and what's good about it. And this is one of the things that you have to do later. Because the early part of understanding something new, creating something new, is to understand it yourself. And the constructors theory has already changed a lot since I first thought of it. And we're beginning to have theoretical applications of it, not yet practical applications. But you know, one day there will be universal constructors. And universal constructors are to constructor theory what universal computers are to theory of computation. So constructor theory is the theory of all things that can be done and can't be done, the distinction between things that can be done and can't be done, considered as a theory of physics. So you reformulate physics to make statements entirely about that, what can and can't be done. And then, you know, Naval, you will like the economic implications. You know, some people think that once we have universal constructors, you realize that a universal constructor can make more universal constructors, and then you have exponentially More of them as time goes on. So there'll be no role for humans anymore. But the exact opposite is true, as usual. Universal construction, just like a universal computer, is perfectly obedient. It is obedient. Humans are disobedient. You need the disobedient things to program the obedient things. So I spoke a while ago about the fact that gold is eventually going to be cheap machines will go out to the asteroids and mine the gold.

David Deutsch

Am working on a new theory in physics called constructor theory. And it is, to me, amazing. And one of the problems I have is how to explain to other people why it is amazing and what's good about it. And this is one of the things that you have to do later. Because the early part of understanding something new, creating something new, is to understand it yourself. And the constructors theory has already changed a lot since I first thought of it. And we're beginning to have theoretical applications of it, not yet practical applications. But you know, one day there will be universal constructors. And universal constructors are to constructor theory what universal computers are to theory of computation. So constructor theory is the theory of all things that can be done and can't be done, the distinction between things that can be done and can't be done, considered as a theory of physics. So you reformulate physics to make statements entirely about that, what can and can't be done. And then, you know, Naval, you will like the economic implications. You know, some people think that once we have universal constructors, you realize that a universal constructor can make more universal constructors, and then you have exponentially More of them as time goes on. So there'll be no role for humans anymore. But the exact opposite is true, as usual. Universal construction, just like a universal computer, is perfectly obedient. It is obedient. Humans are disobedient. You need the disobedient things to program the obedient things.

David Deutsch

Well, toil, physical toil will be abolished because that can be done by robots that can be built by other robots that can be and so on right down to the universal constructor. But when I say can be, they will have to be programmed to be. And if you want something done, either you will download from the internet a program where someone has already worked out how to, you know, make a perfect robot butler or whatever. But if you want something new done that hasn't been done before, and you will, then you have to write the program for it. Or hire someone to write the program for it, but then he will want a program in return.

Naval Ravikant

There's a Calvin Hobbes where Calvin has this box that becomes a universal constructor and he starts making copies of himself. So he turns the box upside down, he opens it up, another Calvin comes out. And so he commands this Calvin to do his homework. And then he creates another Calvin, and that Calvin has to go and do his chores.

David Deutsch

Well, toil, physical toil will be abolished because that can be done by robots that can be built by other robots that can be and so on right down to the universal constructor. But when I say can be, they will have to be programmed to be. And if you want something done, either you will download from the internet a program where someone has already worked out how to, you know, make a perfect robot butler or whatever. But if you want something new done that hasn't been done before, and you will, then you have to write the program for it. Or hire someone to write the program for it, but then he will want a program in return.

Naval Ravikant

There's a Calvin Hobbes where Calvin has this box that becomes a universal constructor and he starts making copies of himself. So he turns the box upside down, he opens it up, another Calvin comes out. And so he commands this Calvin to do his homework. And then he creates another Calvin, and that Calvin has to go and do his chores. And sure enough, what he ends up with is a whole bunch of Calvins who are all playing video games and eating food, and none of them actually want to do the chores or the homework, because These are the AGI, these are Calvins. And so yes, disobedience is a big one. I will say your philosophy has had a huge difference for me on child raising. And I have now realized that it is more important, even through this conversation, it is more important that I have a disobedient child than an obedient child, or an educated or learned Or whatever I may think is the right set of things. Because it is fundamentally that disobedience that allows the creativity to come up with new ideas. And it's that creativity