Father Of Quantum Computing: How To Think Like A Genius - David Deutsch - #1164

Chris Williamson (0:00)

People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at chriswilliamson.live. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So if you're a fan of everything Modern Wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland, chriswilliamson.live. I'm kind of fascinated in your world view from a personal perspective, from a person's perspective. We can talk about how important it is for a society or for civilization or for humanity as a whole to think about the importance of optimism and our capacity to solve problems and stuff like that. I'm kind of interested in how an individual takes that as well. I think that might be an interesting tension. Obviously, we've had all of this most recent stuff about anthropic researchers leaving and over fears of AI and super intelligence and recursive stuff. I don't know if you're interested in that or if you're kind of a little bit bored of it. I've been talking about it a lot.

I'm also interested in how your worldviews changed over the last 15 years since the last book, human potential and stuff like that. So we can start off and then scurry down whatever rabbit holes sound interesting if that seems good to you.

David Deutsch (1:13)

Sure.

By the way, I think I agree with that, Maxime. So whenever someone doesn't understand you, it's your fault, not theirs. Unless they're a golden retriever, literally.

Chris Williamson (1:30)

Are you telling me that I've got to get out of jail free card today?

David Deutsch (1:35)

Yeah, yeah, you're human, yes.

Chris Williamson (1:37)

Say more on that. Why is it the fault of misunderstanding? Why does that lie in an odd direction to?

David Deutsch (1:45)

So I'm, as you will know, I'm a follower of the philosopher Karl Popper.

He has a theory of knowledge which is, in my view, streets ahead of everyone else in the 20th century.

He's a strange kind of reputation because he's very well known, highly respected. People always put him on the list of the 10 top philosophers or something like that. In science especially, they always talk about Popper's criterion for distinguishing science from philosophy or from pseudoscience. And yet, his actual philosophy is not very well understood. And one of the tenets of his philosophy is that there is only one way of creating knowledge. The details are different, but knowledge as created by the process of evolution, as created by a scientist, a mathematician, a child learning to speak their first language, those processes are all more alike than they are different. The differences are pretty inessential. And in particular, the process of learning something new, like learning a new law of physics that one has discovered, or learning an existing piece of knowledge from someone else, that is all the same process mentally. In all of them, the knowledge that is learned comes from within the learner. So you're learning something, you can't download it like a computer. You have to guess what the other person means. And at first you will guess wrong. And so you will have to test those guesses and so on. So if that process goes wrong, it is because the teacher or the professor or the communicator has not pitched it to meet your problem situation.

So yes, go ahead.

Chris Williamson (4:21)

What is it that most people misunderstand about being wrong? I think we all have this aversion to making mistakes, to not understanding, to putting errors into the way that we understand the world or how it is that we're interpreting something else. Is there a better framing for how people should think about wrongness?

David Deutsch (4:40)

Yes. So as Popper said, I'm going to have to stop me quoting him every minute or two.

We are all alike in our infinite ignorance or longer.

We may all know different things, different pieces of knowledge, but in our infinite ignorance, we are all alike. So this all comes from the idea that since there's an infinite distance to go and we all have different finite amounts of knowledge, we are all at, like I say in my book, we're all at the beginning of infinity. We're only ever at the beginning. So we have something in common with everyone else who is also at the beginning. To hold oneself up as an authority is a philosophical mistake as well as a, what can you call it, a sociological mistake or a cultural mistake. It's a power play rather than a participation in the growth of knowledge which we should all be participating in.