Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s SDA distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium. This week, for your delectation, here is our old friend David Elieser Deutsch, FRS, Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Center for Quantum Computation, Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, who we first visited here in our 2009-01-25 DLDI show, today presenting his recent TED talk, A New Way to Explain Explanation ¤ (17:15), in which he argues, and quite well I think:
| That the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. |
NO, Vit. I will not tip the “barmaid” on the way out.The site owner,yes. You? Not a chance.
I didn’t say Mm is a troll, Ural, I said that arguments that thousands-of-year-old philosophers obviate David’s thoughts and it’s just turtles all the way down is not moving forward on the concept he is considering in today’s lecture, unless one is a troll. You can’t leave out that unless, Ural, without changing my intent from a conjecture to an assertion. Fortunately Mm went on to explain herself further, much of which I agree with. Yet it’s not that sensory empiricism isn’t without its uses, as David mentions as well as Mm, rather it’s that we already know that we don’t actually sense reality, we only sense the signals that reality transmits to us.
So we are still stuck with the question of what truth is. And yes, I appreciate that some people aren’t interested in what truth is, they are only interested in what is true. That’s fine, at least until we get to non-obvious questions of truth, such as some of those questions David raised about the nature of the fabric of reality in his lecture that we hosted in our 2009-01-25 symposium, or some of other questions people like Hawkins, Dennett, Gilbert, Strogaz, Ariely, Wolfram, Chaitin, et al have raised in some of our other symposia. But I still think the rest of us should be allowed to and should have a place to discuss questions like the nature of truth and whether or not the only thing that actually exists is information, without being fired upon by snipers who are not interested in discussing such questions in the first place. After all, this is a symposium, not Mm’s library đ
And sorry I wasn’t clear, Justhinkin, but I’m not a barmaid.
It was only an old joke that I apparently didn’t tell correctly.
And yes, I appreciate that some people aren’t interested in what truth is…
It’s not that some people aren’t interested, it’s that some people recognize the futility of building another tower of babel.
Obviously Hawking and this nut don’t believe their theories (many worlds)enough to kill themselves and test them. That would be truth.
Let us see now.
A new way to explain explanation
@3:10⌠mysteries and new unexpected phenomenaâŚ..all that discovered in forty yearsâŚhad not been in previous hundred thousandâŚ.not for lack of thinkingâŚ.they even arrived at answers (the early thinkers) such as mythsâŚyet bore not resemblance to the truth. âŚ..knowledge of physical world and how to adapt it to our wishesâŚwhat has changed?….universal truth that made it possible to know.
Before scientific revolution, they believed that everything important, knowable was already known enshrined in ancient writingâŚand some genuinely useful rules of thumb which were however entrenched as dogma.
Would it mean that a useful rule of thumb is to be thrown away because it is entrenched in dogma?
Listening, one may think, by stated arguments that the new way to explain explanation maybe just that.
Do the statement and the lecture assume that the new way is the corredt and final answer?
The assumptions about todayâs knowledge may be brought down tomorrow or next year orâŚ.horizontal 8. As the arguments in the lecture rather airily bring down earlier assumptions of knowledge?
Just making an argument by non academic.
tenebris – analyses of history are always ex post facto. And it is most definitely not a Darwinian explanation. There’s no randomness, no natural selection involved.
It is a biological and ecological AND rational explanation, understanding human societies as constrained by both factors, within a distinctly human rational ability to change the perimeters of those biological and ecological constraints..by the use of their reason.
Resources? Such as switching from local simple agricultural sustenance to mass surplus production for markets? Releasing peasant labour to urban production of goods? Europe took the road ‘never travelled’ because it was the only ecological area on this planet with such a biome: regular rainfall water souroce, extremely rich soil, animals that could be domesticated, temperate and regular climate.
Put that together, and you get a capacity for a large population. BUT, you still need the technology and the ideology to produce mass supplies rather than local village needs. This means an innovative population and a market oriented population. Europe moved into a middle class economy because it had to – its population grew beyond its economic and political constraints. It had to move out of dogma of ‘we know it all’ to discover new technologies and new ways of economic and societal life.
Daniel Ream – sorry, but I’m not an amateur student of these issues. There was not ‘one’ plague in the 14th c, but a series of outbreaks and you can go back into the 10th c for these, along with other diseases and famines. Then, you have to check out the various ‘tribal’ or fiefdom wars both internally and with foreign states. Then, you check out the resurgence of populations after each decimation by disease or war.
Also, check out the political infrastructure of power; it was two-class, the upper class and lower class – and the terms aristocracy and peasant are quite valid. Eventually, this infrastructure, which denies information gathering and knowledge and economic and political power to the lower class..had to change.
I’m sure you know of the rise of the ‘dissenting individual’ e.g, Abelard’s famous statement of ‘dubitando’ (I doubt), an intellectual statement unheard of in The Faithful. This refocusing of knowledge within the individual rather than The Authority (the Church) was a long fight, but it enabled the rise of the middle class, who then took political and economic power.
This class then moved to aggressively change the economic mode of production, moving to a market rather than local sustenance economy,..to developing new technologies and the enable man to objectively observe and control his environment.
None of this was caused by one plague, which then so depleted the manpower that, eureka, the powers that be, suddenly recognized the value of human labour and so caused the middle class. Nonsense. Such an enlightenment did not occur. The whole change took over 400 years, filled with counter fights, repression, and a long, slow intellectual movement, and a long, slow economic transfomration from a rural and local economy to an urban market economy.
I don’t think, Lev, that David was suggesting that “genuinely useful rules of thumb which were however entrenched as dogma” should be, as you put it, “thrown away”, but rather that to the degree that we humans are able to advance our understanding of what truth is and what is true we are thus better able to move said useful rules of thumb from the field of engineering down into the fields of science or perhaps even philosophy, which would be a good thing. The more we can know about what actually is, rather than about what we suppose there to be that nevertheless isn’t, the better we will be at avoiding the types of errors and mistakes that result from those cases which actually are caused by bad data wrongly elevated to the status of dogma.
Thank you Vitruvius for writing in plain language, see, it works just the same, perhaps even better for most plebeians (though to say âmostâ, I agree is despicable).
The âthrown awayâ was rather a figure of writing and less of meaning.
The trouble with intellectuals is that for them the word âtruthâ has limited application if not being meaningless what so ever.
The limited application would be, when talking down to those they deem of lesser ability to think, because it is intended to sound good as opposed to a statement of fact.
In a philosophy class the instructor and books would talk about âempirical truthâ if Iâm not mistaken that would be âself evidentâ, a syllogism of expression, perhaps subject to dispute on minor point, though not in error.
As you no doubt know from Descartes, nothing is, everything is based on personâs perceptions. Ultimately in the extreme the only âit is, because it thinksâ.
Of course the whole treatise is an excellent philosophical exercise though it fails in real life.
Now as for self evidence of truth as opposed to perception I proposed that the instructor walks against the wall of the school room and see what happens if he insist on perceiving that wall is not. The instructor being of superior mind refused to discuss it, his attitude seem to harden somewhat.
Anyway it is good to have a chat.
Well, I’m going to side with ET and Peirce on this one, Lev, and not Descartes: I think that what is is independent of our perceptions of it, except in those cases which are our perceptions or are dependent on our perceptions. If some star in some galaxy billions of light-years away from us decides to go all super-nova, our perceptions don’t enter into it.
But we’re straying from David’s topic again, namely that to the degree that we have explanations about things like stars and super-novae, then all other things being equal, those explanations that are harder to vary are better explanations. It’s sort of like the addition of another instrument, one like Occam’s razor, to mans’ philosophical toolbox.
More importantly, perhaps, are questions of extreme truth that sometimes come to light when scientists and engineers like David and I work on edge-case nano- and mega-scale technologies in order to help further bring the good things in life to all you folks.
I do think that it is good, as you suggest Lev, to have a chat. Since my lowly degrees are in science and engineering, it is with curiosity and fascination that I approach these rather grander questions. To me, the very concept of explaining explanation is the perfect excuse for a symposium and a few kraters, about which you may recall Euboulos‘s note to the effect that:
What continues to puzzle me though are the cases of those who mistake my joyful glee for some sort of intellectual, academic snobbery. One of my friends has suggested that some people simply can’t believe that I am as guileless as I actually am, so they naturally attribute intentions to me that I don’t actually have. Another of my friends has suggested that it’s simply a characteristic of the medium: that some people only come to the blogs to be assholes, and nothing one says really matters to them either way, as long as they can just continue to spew. Of course, this latter chap’s degrees are in psychology, so what does he know about human behaviour đ
This being the hour of the termination of our scheduled interregnum for this week’s symposium, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank once again all those who have enjoyed participating in this week’s show. I look forward to seeing you all again during our next symposium, and as I mentioned supra, thanks for this space-time, Kate.
This symposium is now closed.