I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see Part 2.
Naval: My goal isn’t to do yet another podcast with David Deutsch. There are plenty of those. I would love to tease out some of the very counterintuitive learnings, put them down canonically in such a way that future generations can benefit from them, and make sure that none of this is lost.
Your work has been incredibly influential for me. I carry a copy of The Beginning of Infinity or The Fabric of Reality with me wherever I go. I’m still reading these same books after two years, trying to absorb them into my worldview, and I learn something new from them every day. There’s a lot of counterintuitive things in there. You’re skewering a lot of sacred dogmas. Sometimes you do it in passing with a single sentence that takes me weeks to unpack properly.
This recording is not for the philosophers, and it’s not for the physicists. This is for the layman, the average person. We want to introduce them to the principles of optimism, The Beginning of Infinity, what sustainability means, and anthropomorphic delusions.
As an example, you overturn induction as a way of forming new scientific theories. That’s this idea that repeated observation is what leads you to the creation of new knowledge—and that’s not the case at all. This came from Popper, but you built upon it. You talk about how humans are very different and exceptional and how knowledge creation is a very exceptional thing that only happens in evolution and the human brain as far as we know. You talk about how the earth is not this hospitable, fragile spaceship earth biome that supports us, but rather it’s something that we engineer and we build to sustain us.
I always recommend that people start with the first three chapters at The Beginning of Infinity because they’re easy to understand but they overturn more central dogmas that people are taking for granted in their base reasoning than almost any other book I’ve ever seen.
I think it’s important to point out to listeners that your philosophy isn’t just some arbitrary set of axioms based on which you view the world. I think of it as a crystalline structure held together by good explanations and experimental evidence that then forms a self-consistent view of how things work. It operates at the intersection of these four strands that you talk about in the fabric of reality: epistemology, computation, physics, and evolution.
It’s intuitively obvious that humans are unique
Let’s get into humans. There’s the classic model: You start with a fish and then it becomes a tadpole, and then a frog, and then some kind of a monkey, and then an upright, hunched over creature. A human is just this progression along all the animals. But in your explanation, there’s something fundamentally different that happens. You talked about this in a great video, which I encourage everybody to look up. It’s titled, “Chemical Scum That Dream of Distant Quasars.”
What are humans, how are they unique, how are they exceptional, and how should we think of the human species relative to the other species that are on this planet?
David Deutsch: Every animal is exceptional in some way. Otherwise, we wouldn’t call them different species. There’s the bird that can fly faster than any other bird, and there’s the bird that can fly higher than any other, and so on. It’s intuitively obvious that we are unique in some way that’s more important than all those other ways.
As I say in The Beginning of Infinity, in many scientific laboratories around the world, there is a champagne bottle. That bottle and that fridge are physical objects. The people involved are physical objects. They all obey the laws of physics. And yet, in order to understand the behavior of the humans in regard to the champagne bottles stored for long periods in fridges—I’m thinking of aliens looking at humans—they have to understand what those humans are trying to achieve and whether they will or won’t achieve it.
In other words, if you were an alien that was looking down on the earth and seeing what’s happening there and trying to explain it in order to explain everything that happens on earth—and let’s suppose that these aliens are so different from us, there’s nothing familiar about us—in order to understand stuff that happens on earth, they would need to know everything. Literally.
For example, general relativity. They need that to explain why this one monkey, Einstein, was taken to Sweden and given some gold. If you want to explain that, you’ve got to invoke general relativity. Some people get the Fields medal for inventing a bit of mathematics. To understand why that person won the Fields medal, they’d have to understand mathematics. And there’s no end to this.
They have to understand the whole of science, the whole of physics, even the whole of philosophy and morality. This is not true of any other animal. It’s not true of any other physical object. For all other physical objects—even really important ones like quasars and so on—you only need a tiny sliver of the laws of physics in order to understand their behavior in any kind of detail.
To understand humans sufficiently well, you must understand everything sufficiently well. Humans are the only remaining physical systems that we know of in the universe of which that is true. Everything else is really inconsequential in that sense.
Things that create knowledge are uniquely influential in the universe