David Deutsch and Tyler Cowen: Reaction

Welcome to TalkCast, and again today something slightly different. At the request of a Patreon— hello Aaron— I'm going to do a brief, as far, insofar as I can be brief, analysis of the David Deutsch conversation with Tyler, which was an excellent conversation. Tyler Cowen has pushed back on David on a few points, and I just thought it worth clarifying, perhaps in my words, some of what was being said. I'm not going to go through the entire conversation, I'm just going to stop it at a few points. I'm going to watch it, I'm going to watch it at 2x speed. I think that's as fast as I can go on YouTube because I've already watched the conversation before, and I will let you know the timestamps. I'll provide the clips of course as well, let you know the timestamps of where I'm stopping and pausing just to reflect on what's been said. So let's start.

I have a question. I am myself a metaphysical agnostic, so I'm unwilling to step into a Star Trek transporter machine because I'm afraid it would kill me and it's a copy of me that would keep on living. At what price are you willing to step into a Star Trek transporter machine?

I certainly wouldn't want to be the first person, but I suppose your asking the question, uh, separately from do I think it would work technically.

Sure, assume it works as in the TV show, but metaphysically there's a question you face. But you know you believe in many worlds theory, right?

So yes, though I don't think that is connected. Um, I, I think it's more physicalism or something like that, that I believe that there's, there's nothing to me except this running program in my brain. And if that program were to run somewhere else and stop running in my brain, then I wouldn't notice anything, and I would indeed have traveled to that other place.

But say the world forks, and it's possible both that you do and do not step into the machine. Isn't it the case that some version of the earlier you, is still existing along one of the forks, so you have nothing to worry about.

Uh, some version of me, uh, whenever I, whenever I make a decision which could go either way, some version of me will have presumably made the other decision. Although, uh, uh, that's not as simple as it sounds because both the other version of me and me are error-correcting entities. That's, that's the whole point of what human thought is. It's error correction.

Okay, so I'm stopping the video at 1 minute 43, and there's a clip here of Tyler talking to David about whether or not David would step into the transporter machine or not. And this is a version of what might be called the quantum immortality argument. Something like that. And this is the argument that if the multiverse is true, then if you die in one universe, then a copy of you goes on to exist in the other universe. So therefore you're immortal by some stretch of the imagination. Or whenever you make a decision in the universe that you find yourself, versions of you are making another decision, the other decision that is possible in those other universes. So for example, if it's the case that there's a fork in the road and you could have gone left but instead you choose to go right, then there is some number of versions of you that in fact go left even though you yourself have gone right. And so, you know, if there's, you know, if there's the demon at the end of the track to the left, then aren't you condemning versions of yourself to the demon that's going to attack you at the end of the left forked road if you take the road to the right? Which is similar to this whole idea of the transporter, you know, why worry about getting into a transporter if it doesn't really matter what the outcome is? After all, if it's possible that you survive the transporter, then you will survive the transporter. Now, as David goes on to say, this is a misconception about what the nature of decisions are in the multiverse. You are you, and you have knowledge, and in this universe right now there are versions of you which haven't yet differentiated, as David will come to say. That's another point of clarification that we're going to need to get to. But the reason that you make the decisions that you do is not virtually flipping a coin. It's not probabilistic. It's not random. The reason you make the decisions that you do is you deliberate. And deliberate on what? The knowledge that you have, the evidence before you, all that sort of stuff. So if you are actually literally walking along a road and it forks into different directions. Let's consider the realistic case of what's going on. Well, why are you walking along the road in the first place? Maybe it's that you've just been to the shops and you're coming home, and the road ahead of you forks into two different places. To the right is your home, to the left is the neighboring town. You don't want to go to the neighboring town, you want to go to the right, and so you choose to go to the right and you find your way home again. In the overwhelming majority of universes in the multiverse, all versions of you do precisely that because they've got your knowledge. They're thinking about precisely the same things that you're thinking about. They are fungible instances of you. Now yes, there is some measure, a much smaller measure presumably, of versions of you that, coming to the fork in the road, have the idea, for reasons I don't know, that decide you don't want to go home, even though you're carrying bags of shopping that are quite heavy, and the distance to the next town along that left fork in the road is some kilometers away, which is going to make the journey arduous. But maybe you remember, in fact, along that left fork road, that's where you were yesterday when you lost your iPhone, and maybe it's still along that track. And so you think, ah, I better go that way. But in the overwhelming majority of universes in which you didn't lose your iPhone, you're going to continue off to the right in order to get home. Now, are you condemning some proportion of versions of you to go to the left? Isn't there a chance that some will? Yes, there is a chance, but it is an infinitesimally small chance, presumably depending upon what the situation entails. And as David is saying here with the transporter, he has knowledge, and his knowledge tells him that he doesn't understand enough about the transporter— this thought experiment, this stepping into the transporter— to be able to reassure him sufficiently that he should indeed step into the transporter. And that's him, that's David Deutsch. So although some versions of him might step into the transporter and survive or not, he's not going to take that chance. The way to think about people and decisions in the multiverse is not to presume that you just do absolutely everything with equal probability, or an equal measure, we're saying. You do far more frequently across the multiverse. We would see the proportion of the universes in which you do precisely what you do based upon your personality and knowledge. That's the thing that happens more often. This other thing that you tend not to do tends not to happen in the multiverse, even though it does if it's physically possible.

Both the other version of me and me are error-correcting entities. That's, that's the whole point of what human thought is. It's error correction. Therefore, it will take more than just a cosmic ray hit to make the difference between, uh, deciding something yes or no. So this would have to be like an inconsequential decision which, unbeknownst to me, will have a large effect and then later cause me to be a different person and so on. And that's happening all the time, independently of Star Trek machines or anything like that. That is the case. And, uh, fortunately it turns out, uh, at least if, if ordinary decision theory is true in, in like non-quantum cases, then it turns out that ordinary decision, uh, theory with randomness, uh, produces the same rational decisions as quantum decision theory with, uh, the multiverse. So it, it shouldn't make any difference to decisions, and that includes the decision whether to use the Star Trek transporter.

Sure. So as long as there's a possible world where your atoms aren't scattered and you just didn't get into the machine, you don't have to worry too much about your decision.

I do, because when you say so long as there's a possible world, that, uh, glides over the question how many— what proportion of the worlds is that going to happen in? And the— this— what I said just now about, um, uh, about decision theory in the multiverse, uh, the proportion of the multiverse that does one thing or another plays the same role in decisions as probability does in a theory where there's randomness. So it really does matter. And just because there are a few worlds in which X, Y, or Z happens, if there are very few of them, they shouldn't affect my decisions at all.

Uh, yes, so this, this idea here of error correction is what I was trying to sort of get at, because you and all versions of you are error-correcting entities they're going to be correcting the errors in the same way, broadly speaking, having the same knowledge, correcting the same errors. And so therefore, a greater proportion, weight of them if you will, number of universes— we should say measure— is going to do precisely what you do. And so this proportion of people that make a different decision to you is exceedingly small. You still— the, the meaning of personhood within the multiverse is that the person has a large measure of universes representing them in comparison to versions of themselves that are doing something completely at random, so to speak, or because of a cosmic ray hit. Okay, this is not the reason why we choose to do something completely different. The reason why we would choose to do something completely different, something that's out of character, let's say, is because we have an explanation as to why we would do that thing, because we're trying to correct an error. The that we've hitherto had. Should also add here that there is confusion about probability on the multiverse version of reality, which is— the multiverse version of reality says if it's physically possible, then it's going to happen. Now, that's not quite the same as saying it's going to happen with the same measure across all of the universes. After all, creating knowledge is not something that just happens by happenstance and by chance. People have to deliberately go out and make the choice to create the knowledge. Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that things probably happen anywhere in reality. Things either happen or they don't happen. The reality is the multiverse, so what happens, happens, and that's that. But for any given person, they're occupying not the entirety of the multiverse but just a small part of it, and so subjectively they cannot predict with perfect precision what's going to happen next. So subjectively, it seems like there's a probability about things. They flip a coin, it must necessarily land heads or tails. But if you had a God's eye view of the multiverse, or if you just simply have an understanding of quantum theory, then you know that the coin must land heads and tails. But the observer will only see one of these. They can't see two, they can't see both, although versions of them will see both heads or tails. Okay, in other words, heads and tails actually happens in the universe. It doesn't happen with chance 1/2. It's just in the proportion of the universes in which it lands heads is approximately 50%, and the proportion of universes in which it lands tails approximately 50%. But the probability that it lands heads and tails is 1. It always is. Whatever physically can happen indeed will happen. So probability is subjective on this view. And, and this is why, you know, David says that this notion of probability serves the same role as proportionality amongst the universes, because we are subjects. We are subjects who create knowledge, and we don't have this God's eye view of the universe. We don't know which universe we're going to end up in next with absolute certainty. And so we can talk reasonably about subjectively what the probability of things might be, and that's what decision theory is about. But we just can't be committed to the idea that it's objectively true, you know, true as a matter of fact, that coins land heads 50% of the time. They don't. That's only your subjective perspective on the multiverse. The reality is coins land heads and tails with probability 1. Anything that can happen happens with probability 1, which makes the entire notion of probability completely bankrupt, because there is no probability of something happening or not. It happens or it doesn't happen, and that's that. It's just that because you don't occupy all of the universes, you don't know what's going to happen next. Probability is subjective, not objective. Not to say that physicists tend to agree with this notion, but that doesn't matter. Okay, uh, lots of people don't agree with what the truth happens to be. Doesn't matter.

How do you think many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics relates to the view that just in terms of space, the size of our current universe is infinite, and therefore everything possible is happening in it?

It complicates the discussion of probability But it does— there's, there's no, uh, overlap between, um, that notion of infinity and the Everettian notion of infinity, if, if, uh, we are infinite there. Because this— the differentiation, as I, I prefer to call the— what used to be called splitting— the, the, uh, when I, uh, perform an experiment which can go one of two ways The influence of that spreads out. First, I see it, I may write it down, I may write a scientific paper, and so— and when I write a paper about it and report the results, that, that, uh, that will cause the journal to split or to differentiate into, into two journals and so on. And but this influence cannot spread out faster than the speed of light. So an Everett universe is really a misnomer, because what we see in real life is an Everett bubble within the universe. Everything outside the bubble is as it was. It's undifferentiated, or it's— to be exact, it's exactly as differentiated as it was before. And then as the bubble spreads out, um, the, the universe becomes or the multiverse becomes more differentiated, but the bubble is always finite.

Okay, I'm pausing it at, um, 10 minutes 25, and David there is talking a little bit about the, the concept of a universe within the Everettian picture, which is in other words the multiverse, and this idea of splitting. And of course, if the situation was that at the Big Bang we started with one universe, and then the universe split into 2 copies, and then 3 copies, we're getting kind of a multiplication, which seems to be a violation of the conservation of energy, which would be true. We'd be creating universes just again and again and again every time there was some kind of quantum event which caused the splitting of the universe from 1 universe into 2 universes. Um, where is the additional mass coming from? Where is additional energy coming from? Okay, that problem is entirely solved by rejecting this notion of splitting. And instead what we talk about is differentiation. Differentiation. And this requires an understanding of fungibility, although David doesn't mention it here. This is what is explained in the beginning of Infinity, of course. The idea there being that for any object— the easiest thing to talk about is a quantum object, like, well, we're all quantum ultimately. There's, you know, the emergent multiverse tells us that, uh, the, the quantum laws of physics govern everything, not just the small. But it's easy to talk about the small. Let's talk about the so-called fundamental particles, in particular the electron, when the electron could have gone left or right, then it actually takes both paths. Now, in the easiest case, 50% of the time it takes your path X, and then 50% of the time it takes path Y. But it doesn't need to be that case, you know, it could be any proportion that you like, you know, 10% of them go to the left and 90% go right, whatever. Let's take the simple case, 50/50. What happens in that case is that the, the electron, prior to taking path X and Y is a multiversal object, which means it already occupies uncountably infinite numbers of universes, but they're all identical. And it's not until the choice is then made— I'd say choice very loosely, I mean the possibility is actualized— of the universe then differentiating into two slightly different kinds: one where this single electron went to the left along path X, and one where it went along path Y. And so, and then you've got uncountably infinite numbers going along path X and uncountably infinite numbers going along path Y. That's a 50-50 differentiation of the universes. No new universes are being created. There was an infinite number before and there's an infinite number after along both paths. And you just trace that back in time to the beginning of the universe where you've already got an infinite number, an uncountably infinite number of fungible universes. That then differentiate, differentiate, differentiate every single time there's a possibility, a physical possibility of them differentiating in such a way. Now, in the level of, the level of the quantum, what's going on is you're having these possibilities of differentiation because of the quantum laws of physics. And at the higher emergent level, as we've already talked about with decision making, when people create knowledge, then larger proportions of universes end up persisting through time, those universes where knowledge is being created, the knowledge tends to get itself replicated over time in a larger proportion of universes than where it doesn't. And so David also says there that, um, universe is kind of a misnomer in this Everett understanding of quantum theory. It probably does a bit of a disservice to the entire understanding of realistic quantum mechanics, and it's probably sent a lot of physicists down a bit of a misconceived alley, and might be one of the reasons among many, you know, and David's going to get to this, about why they reject the multiverse. Because of this very notion that we use the word universe, and the universe is supposed to mean, cosmologically speaking, something that could be in theory spatially infinite. And so it just— there is no bound to the universe, it's just, it goes on forever in all directions. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a bubble, a sphere of differentiation, so that if you do an interference experiment in a particular place, you know, you do the double slit experiment, then what's going on in that case across the multiverse is differentiation which spreads out at the speed of light. The information about how the universe has changed locally here begins to spread out at the speed of light, and you end up getting all these mini bubble universes inside of the universe which is yet to be differentiated. Yet to be differentiated. And this is explained quite well by David Wallace as well in The Emergent Multiverse.

How do your views relate to the philosophical modal realism of David Lewis?

Uh, it— there are interesting parallels. Um, uh, as a physicist, I'm interested in what the laws of physics tell us is so. Rather than in philosophical reasoning about things unless they impinge on a problem that I have. So yes, I'm interested in, for example, the continuity of the self, you know, whether, whether if there's another version of me, uh, a very large number of light years away in an infinite universe, whether, whether, and it's identical, Is that really me? Are there two of me? One of me? Um, I don't entirely know the answer to that, and it's why I don't entirely know the answer to whether I would go in a Star Trek transporter. Uh, but the modal realism certainly involves a lot of things that I don't think exist, at least not physically. Uh, I'm open to the idea that non-physical things do exist, like the natural numbers I think exist. There's a difference between, uh, you know, the second even prime, which doesn't exist, and, uh, the, the, the infinite number of prime numbers, which I think do exist. Um, uh, so I, I think that, that, um, there is more than one mode of existence. But the theory that all modes of existence are equally real, I see no point in that. So the overlap between Everett and David Lewis is, I think, more coincidental than, than illuminating.

Now Tyler's asked David there about, um, David Lewis. David Lewis wrote on the plurality of worlds. And I've talked about this before in my own multiverse series. Um, well, David Lewis's, uh, notion of other worlds is a purely metaphysical notion, okay? It was purely philosophizing in the abstract, largely. But he believed in the realism of logically possible other universes, of which the physically possible ones, the multiverse, is just a tiny, tiny subset. But of course, the physically possible ones are the scientific ones. They're the ones we know about by conjecture and experiment. So this is different to just imagining universes into existence, which is what David Lewis did. So it's the difference between the metaphysical— that's David Lewis's version of the many worlds— and Everett's purely physical version of the many worlds. That's the difference— philosophy versus physics, to a large extent.

So if the universe is infinite and if David Lewis is correct, should I feel closer to the David Lewis copies of me, the copies or near copies of me in this universe, or the near copies of me in the multiverse? It seems very crowded all of a sudden. So something that— whose purpose was to be economical Uh, doesn't feel that way to me by the end of the metaphysics.

It doesn't feel like that to you? Well, what— how— as Wittgenstein is supposed to have said, I don't know whether he really did, if it were true, what would it feel like? It would feel just like this.

So after 13 minutes, um, uh, Tyler talks about the multiverse not feeling correct, and so David quite rightly says they're basically Well, what should it feel like? Okay, you know, and then Wittgenstein has this thing which, um, in fact, again, to go back to David Wallace, emergent multiverse, you know, uh, what would it— what would it look like if it looked like the Earth went around the Sun? Okay, what would it look like?

I've got—

because lots of people say, of course, that it looks like the Sun goes around the Earth, which it does. But what would it look like if it looked like the Earth went around the Sun, and of course it looks exactly the way that it does.

What about the alternative view, that it's a big sprawling mess? We're not capable of understanding an integrated theory. There's maybe some Darwinian principle operating across some different kind of multiverse. Our universe persists just because it works well enough, a bit like a bad used car. We're never gonna grasp it. There's not a unified theory, and here we are. Take the incomprehensibility of the universe and possibly multiverse. So we would both agree it's incomprehensible to your cat, right?

It's— sorry, it's incomprehensible to your cat or to the local raccoon. Yes, but everything is incomprehensible to a cat.

I don't think that's true. No, dogs understand human social life pretty well.

They do not. Dogs have genes which contain knowledge, but it is fixed knowledge, and it is not the kind of knowledge that constitutes understanding. Understanding is always explanatory. So, you know, you can write a book on canine behavior and look in chapter 37, and it will tell you what a dog will do when such and such, uh, happens to it. And sometimes it will say, uh, some dogs will do this, some dogs will do that. Um, there is no such book for humans because chapter 37 will be blank. It'll, it'll say humans are going to do something that neither we nor you can predict.

Okay, 14 minutes, we've got Tyler asking about whether or not the universe is incomprehensible, and we've got this thing here about, well, you know, the cat doesn't understand the universe, the, the dog doesn't understand the universe, um, so why should we expect that we are much better at all? This is this very, very common misconception. Uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson has been doing a great job of pushing this recently. You won't— he won't let go of it, therefore I won't let go of Um, this idea that we're just on the continuum of intelligence with everything else, and some things can understand the universe to a greater or lesser extent. Maybe the dog understands things a little bit better than what the insects do, which understand better than what the bacteria does. But this is all a complete and utter misconception. Those animals don't understand anything. They might have some knowledge, but the knowledge is there encoded in their genes. The knowledge of how to behave. They can only behave in such a way that the genes permit them to. But that's not us. Our genes do not contain information about making podcasts or about building rockets and going to the moon. That's not in our genes. But anything that a dog does, you would be able to find within its genes, okay? Even if it's playing with a ball, the gene for chasing things around would be there somewhere or other to pursue something. But there's nothing like that when it comes to explanatory knowledge— being able to take the laws of nature and to model them inside of our own minds. That's not in the genes. That is done via a completely different mechanism. It's not fixed. It's not fixed. It's open to open-ended improvement, progress, error correction. Of course, that's what explanatory knowledge allows us to do. A human Mind is completely unlike anything that the brain of a dog is able to do, or any other animal for that matter.

I feel I can predict humans better than cats often, but do chimpanzees understand, in your view?

No one knows. They show virtually no sign of understanding anything. There are some really nice experiments on wild gorillas by Richard Byrne, who's both a theoretical and very practical animal behavior expert. And he was wondering how gorillas transmit their memes, that is their culturally inherited behaviors, from one gorilla to another? So one thing is, uh, the first answer is very slowly. It takes absolutely ages, months and months, for a gorilla to be able to copy another gorilla's behavior well enough to do something complicated. I mean, they can copy, uh, you know, uh, wave hand and that sort of thing, but to to copy a complex behavior like required to open a difficult kind of nut, which no other animal can open. This is why they have memes, because that's a very useful ability. It takes them a long time. And then he did some ingenious experiments, or rather observations. He didn't interfere with the gorillas. He did some observations. To try to determine whether they understand why they are doing each particular action. And, you know, it involves, you know, I don't know what it involves, grabbing with both hands and twisting in one way and then pulling another way and then so on. Apparently these gorillas are prone to a certain injury which disables their thumb. And so they can't move their thumb, which is, which is, you know, quite disabling for them just as it is for us. And the thing is, when you've disabled your thumb, one of these motions becomes irrelevant and the others become less effective. But the gorillas which have learned how to do the thing will make the motion, the ineffective motion, again and again, every single time.

And, uh, he explains this better than I do, but that's like human beings borrowing at high interest rates, right? They'll do that many, many times in a row.

It's not just like it. You know, you might like to draw analogies, but it's not the same thing. When a human being repeats a behavior that another human being thinks is unwise or counterproductive or will not achieve its purpose, and you ask them or you show them, they will have an explanation which you might not like. It may be stupid, but the ape perfectly well wants this thing to work but doesn't know why it is doing the actions.

And David mentions Richard Byrne, who did experiments on chimpanzees and gorillas, I think. And the, the concept there is behavior passing. Again, there's nothing particularly impressive about these creatures unless you're easily impressed, okay, and you think that having a repertoire of a few hundred words is good. But again, they're not explaining anything. They're not bringing new knowledge into the world. They're not conjecturing explanations. It's not like we're just another rung on this continual ladder. To ever greater intelligence. That's not what's going on here. We are qualitatively different. We are off-axis, as I like to say. We are on a different ladder, and that ladder is something that we can climb. Unlike with the chimpanzee, whatever its intelligence is, is fixed. And insofar as we have intelligence, that has to do with what knowledge we have, and we can improve the knowledge that we have, and we can improve the ways in which we create knowledge over time as well. Unlike chimpanzees, gorillas, dogs, etc. And of course, the, the other thing that I need to say at this point is our knowledge has this capacity for universality. Our minds do. What that means is that we can model anything that's out there in the universe, in abstract space, in physical space. We can come to a greater understanding of it. And although Tyler Cowen will raise the objection that many people do which is that there just might be something that's incomprehensible, that's beyond us to understand. I think later on he's going to bring up the distribution of prime numbers, um, or even how certain engines work. But this is just a— I, I think it's an appeal to personal disinterest in those things. If he spent time and tried to solve the problem, then perhaps he could come to a deeper understanding personally of these things. And some people do have a good understanding of these things. For example, how electric motors work or how internal combustion engines work. Some people do, some people don't. It just depends on what your area of interest is. The fact that I can't understand how to play the piano at all, let alone complicated pieces, does not mean my mind isn't universal. If I was to sit down and really apply myself— I wouldn't want to, I'd have to be coerced into doing it— then I could. But the fact that I don't have an understanding of how to play the piano does not change the fact my mind is still universal. It's like saying that my computer isn't a universal computer simply because it's not being used right now in order to play a computer game. It's making a podcast instead. We do one thing at a time, and we take interest in certain things and not interest in other things. This is not a refutation of the universality of our minds. And of course, the best refutation of all of this stuff, this idea that we just might not understand something, or the laws of physics, they might be incomprehensible, the universe might ultimately be incomprehensible. It's nothing bad. As David says, perfectly logically equivalent to believing in God. And the atheists out there who think that they are somehow being rational in rejecting God while simultaneously thinking only the aliens are capable of understanding the laws of physics, or no one ultimately is capable of understanding the ultimate laws of physics, is precisely the same as believing in God. God just is this thing that stands for there's something ultimate out there that we can't possibly understand, it's beyond our mind. We're replacing that with, well, the laws of physics are ultimately this thing that we can't understand and is beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend. Or the aliens are, or the artificial general intelligence or the superintelligence is. All of these things are just logically equivalent, and you can go down that road, but you believe in the supernatural. That's all. You're just changing the labels. Instead of saying you believe in God, you're saying I believe in the ultimate laws of physics being incomprehensible, in the same way that the theists believe that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the universe is too much for puny human minds to understand. You can go that way. You're all in the same category according to us. We're, we're the ones who are saying no, it's all comprehensible eventually.

Not right now.

At any given point in time, there will be open mysteries, open problems, and isn't that great because that gives us fun, excitement, and interest in the universe. But it is eventually all comprehensible. It just takes time and effort to keep on trying to find more and more answers. But if you want to sit there and on the sidelines and say, no, this thing X is the thing that we can't possibly understand, where X is God or the laws of physics or the super aliens, fine, we disagree. Okay, because hitherto the reason why we've been able to explain things is because we've got these universal minds that can explain anything that can be understood. Which is everything. And the only refutation of that is an appeal to the supernatural. Okay, let's keep going.

When a human being repeats a behavior that another human being thinks is unwise or counterproductive or will not achieve its purpose, and you ask them or you show them, they will have an explanation which you might not like. It may be stupid, but the ape perfectly well wants this thing to work but doesn't know why it is doing the actions. That's— it's a thing that's, that's very hard to, uh, um, take on board because we are used to intentional behavior and we're not used to the overt behavior of humans being unintentional. Humans have, they tend to explain themselves even irrationally and they act according to their explanation. Whereas, uh, there's no evidence that any other animals have those explanations.

Okay, 18 minutes. Yes, so we've got this idea there that, um, humans doing unwise things are not like other animals doing unwise things. And an animal that does the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result and not getting it is going to do that regardless. Because they can't learn in the way we can. And crucially, they won't have an explanation. We will. Even if a person does an unwise thing, even if they're doing the same behavior over and over again that's leading to failure, if you were to question them, they'd have an explanation. It might be a false explanation, it might be a bad explanation, but they would be able to give you an account of why— of why they're doing what they're doing.

Most physicists don't believe in the Everett interpretation.

Yes, that's a very sad state of affairs that I'm at a loss to explain. It's a sociological phenomenon, though, not a scientific or philosophical disagreement. It's something has gone wrong, just like something went very badly wrong with philosophy as a whole in the 20th century. And, you know, we're still seeing the ripples from that with, with postmodernism and woke and what have you.

I worry a bit you're using an argument from elimination. So, all the other views out there, which personally I don't find convincing as an amateur, but I can certainly see why you might reject them. To me, they look arbitrary. Those you reject, but the other physicists who are as trained as you are, some are as skilled as you are, feel the same way about the many-worlds view.

So, what is the test? Well, as I just said, I don't think that's so.

But what makes your intuition better than theirs?

Uh, yes, I don't think that's so. It's not a matter of intuition. Uh, physics got dominated or contaminated by, uh, positivism, instrumentalism, and such-like bad philosophical theories towards the beginning— end of 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. And this, uh, caused a knock-on effect, um, on, uh, on, on physics. It almost had the same effect on relativity, but Einstein rebelled against it at the last moment, as it were, and, and said, no, it really is true that there's— spacetime is curved. It's not just that, that, uh, our brains think that it's curved or something like that, or, or that, uh, the, the predictions come out right. There really is a curvature in spacetime. By the time quantum theory came along, a couple of decades later, uh, positivism, instrumentalism, and so on had taken hold. And as a result, generations of physicists were taught when they were students, they were intimidated by their professors telling them things like If you think you understand this, you don't. There is no such thing as what really happened. If you, if you ask, how did the electron get from here to here, you're asking an illegitimate question. There is no such thing as how it got from here to here. There is only a prediction that it got from here to here. Now, when you're taught like that and intimidated by those kind of things coming from on high, Some proportion of you, of your young people, will— some will quit, some will take that on board and do the same to their students in turn, and some will think, no, that's ridiculous, come on, there is, there is a thing. And then they discover that there's an Everett interpretation.

So the only thing that I would add to what David has perfectly well said there at the 28-minute mark about, about why there isn't a majority of physicists who endorse the multiverse is just to recognize that this is only an issue in physics, mainly in theoretical physics. Um, although any, any physicist who of course takes an interest in quantum physics will have an opinion on this and will, will defer to one explanation or non-explanation or another. It seems to me in my conversations with some physicists anyway that, um, the least— the version of quantum theory that causes people the least amount of embarrassment, for want of another word, is instrumentalism. Shut up and calculate. The idea that you don't want to have an opinion at all on how to understand quantum theory. You just say, it works, and I can use it to calculate what's going to happen in these experiments. I can use the formalism, I can do the maths. And that is the sophisticated, macho, skeptical way to do things. It's worth noticing that this approach only happens in physics and only happens in theoretical physics, really, in quantum theory. I mean, uh, I did geophysics for a while. They're physicists. They don't deny that the Earth exists. They don't deny that there are things in the ground that the instrumentation and the mathematical formalism, um, once you analyze, you know, the outcomes of these experiments, you know, if the resistivity survey of the ground tells you that there is a copper ore in the ground there's a copper ore in the ground. They're not going to deny that. That's what the, the instrumentation, as interpreted using the mathematics— if that's what it tells you, then that's what's really going on. Uh, the astrophysicists don't deny that, well, these calculations that say that there's a galaxy off in that particular direction, well, that's just a way of speaking. That's not really a galaxy there, okay? The formalism allows us to predict that that's where the light is coming from, but that's not really going to be a galaxy. There's no sense in which we can talk about there really being a galaxy there. No one would talk this way even within physics, let alone chemistry and biology. We admit the reality of these entities that are causing the results of these experiments. It's only quantum theory, okay? It's only quantum theory. Let's face it, even, even the Standard Model— I mean, you know, they don't deny everything, do they? They don't deny the existence of the fundamental particles. They don't deny the existence of the electrons, but they, they deny the existence of what's causing the interference effects, namely these other entities which exist in places that we cannot observe. Call them other universes. And this idea of the unobserved in science is just extremely common. I mean, this is, this is the way science works. We can't observe the center of the star, but we need to invoke the existence of the the center of the star and fusion reactions going on there, which we can't observe, to explain what we do observe— the light coming from a star or the sun. We, we can't be there to observe the Big Bang, but we observe the effects of the Big Bang. We can't be there to observe dinosaurs, but we observe fossils. So we have to invoke the existence of things we can't observe. And, you know, the, the Everett multiverse— the universe is in that apart from the one that we are in right now, that we occupy. Those other universes exist, but we can't observe them. You know, big deal. That's just the way that physics— that's just the way that science works. It's explaining what we see, what we observe, in terms of what we cannot observe or do not observe.

Why do so many professional philosophers not think so much of Karl Popper?

Oh, that's a, uh— so, you know, you've just asked me why so many people make fundamental mistakes about metaphysics within physics? Why do so many people, uh, physicists, uh, talk nonsense about metaphysics? And, and, uh, and so on. Now you're asking me why do so many philosophers make, make— and I said I didn't really know. Uh, now you're asking me why do so many philosophers make, make mistakes. I don't know. I've heard a variety of theories about this, but I don't know, and I haven't thought all that much about it. But it is definitely the case that philosophy took a really bad turn just over 100 years ago and hasn't really recovered. Professional philosophy, I mean.

But say when I read Popper, if I look at the areas I know best that he wrote on, poverty of historicism, open society and its enemies, I find I agree with a very high percentage of his conclusions, so I'm inclined to like him. But I don't think those are great books. I think he's too obsessed with rebutting crude Marxism. He's very bad at steelmanning his opponents. And on a lot of the pages, I just don't find that much insight, even though I'm very sympathetic toward the conclusions. So maybe he's just not that great a thinker, and that's why most philosophers don't fall in love with him.

I would believe that if the critiques that I read of him bore any relation to his theory. The critiques of him are extremely crude and basically misunderstand everything. It's funny you should say, I think that he's very good, much too good at steelmanning opponents. And this, this relates to your first criticism that he's, he's too obsessed with refuting not just Marxism, but like every, every bad philosophical theory that has gone before. He, I think he puts it into its best possible form and then spends pages and pages and pages going into every possible good aspect of that theory. He often says, you know, He's supposed to be the greatest critic of— 20th century's greatest critic of Marxism, but he spends pages and pages praising Marx, and it's the same with Plato. So he— I think he would have done better to explain his own theory more and not refute— not spend so much time refuting others. But it, on the other hand, It is his philosophy, it's his philosophical position that, uh, there is no such thing as a positive argument for something. You have conjectures and then you have criticism of their opponents, of their, of the opposing conjectures. You don't have positive arguments for your conjectures. Uh, it's a bit like you said, you were criticizing me a while ago saying something like, I was only putting forward negative arguments. Well, that's what Popper would have us do, you know, because the position that we hold ourselves and are putting forward or advocating, we're ready to abandon the, the, the thing that, that an argument consists of is on the one hand a conjecture and another hand a criticism. So you're saying the standard way of looking at so-and-so has got these flaws, I have this conjecture which doesn't have those flaws. Okay, that's, that's the beginning of an argument. Then someone can say, ah, but it does, or they could say, well, it may not have those flaws, but it has these other flaws. Okay, so that's how an argument can go, but it never should go along the lines of this must be true because so-and-so, because that is an appeal to authority, appeal to justification, and so on. And Popper is of the opinion, so am I, that there are no justifications and there are no authorities.

Okay, so at the 35-minute mark or thereabouts, we have Tyler Cowen saying, among other things, that Popper is— might not be that great of a thinker after all. The other philosophers might not like him. It's absolutely true, the other philosophers don't like him, and it is somewhat of a mystery. One measure of him being a good philosopher might precisely be that, that he is disliked so much by people steeped in the justified true belief of knowledge people steeped in socialism, people who think that there should be philosopher kings, people who just don't understand his books. Like Tyler Cowen said, that they're— that, you know, it's not good writing, it's hard. Well, yeah, but all philosophy can be regarded as kind of like this in a sense. You're not going to get necessarily an entertaining read. It depends on what you're looking for. I suppose, you know, some people say David Deutsch writes in such a way that it's not an easy read, or Popper's not an easy read. And yet, but I, I sometimes I don't understand this. It's confusing to me because when you talk to philosophers, of course, they love people like Wittgenstein, who to me is impenetrable. And insofar as you can get anything out of him, you don't get much out of him. There's not really much that's interesting there. And he contradicts himself, you know, the early Wittgenstein, the late Einstein, much less even older philosophers. Okay, once you get back to Leibniz and Descartes, two philosophers I quite like, along with Hume and Spinoza, I think these guys are great, but they're very hard reads. It's all hard reads, and you really have to sit down and put a lot of effort in to try and extract out anything that's worthwhile, because the language can sometimes be impenetrable. What Popper does, as David has correctly said there, is he gives due to the people that he's trying to refute. He's trying to solve problems, show you what's wrong with the traditional conceptions in philosophy. And if you look at just something like, for example, the way in which he figures out, solves the problem of what democracy is, okay, what the purpose of democracy is, why democracy is a better system of governance than the alternatives, is because it's not about trying to figure out who should rule. Okay, which, which other systems of governing a society— for example, just installing a king as a tyrannical king— that's a solution to how should society be ruled. Popper says, well, democracy is not about that. Democracy is about figuring out how to remove rulers and policies more easily. And so he has to give due to the common understanding, and the common understanding is often very, very deeply entrenched in schooling and culture, in the memes that exist. And so people inherit these traditional ideas, many of them stretching all the way back to Plato. But he stands up against that. And so it's very, very hard. It's very, very much like Everett, I suppose. There's a good parallel there, that Everett just says, well, let's just take literally what the experiments are telling us, what the formalism is telling us. And what they're telling us is the reality is just so much larger than what we imagined. We can't observe the vast majority of it, but what we do observe tells us that the rest of it exists. I mean, just to take things literally rather than figuratively, rather than as a metaphor for what's going on, to take the mathematics as a metaphor. And so that a lot of people balk at that idea, I suppose. And maybe there's, you know, some professional jealousy in the idea that Everett got there first. And explain this. And the other physicists, you know, who's tried for so long to figure out a realistic understanding quantum theory, didn't quite get there. And a lot of the ideas were woo, you know, they were superstitious kind of weird nonsense to a large extent. So Everett solved it, and maybe people were unhappy about that. And I think that Popper suffers from the same, um, issues. I mean, what is the nature of knowledge? How does knowledge grow? These are, these are arguments that went on for millennia. No one made much progress. And then Popper comes along and he just solves it. He just tells us about conjectural knowledge and that knowledge doesn't have to mean justified true belief. You know, everyone else before that was trying to figure out, well, how do you justify your beliefs? How do you justify something as true? And this just went on for millennia. And he just comes along and says, well, knowledge isn't that. I can imagine that, that, you know, very human philosophers are jealous. Now, I won't go into the reasons why, but, you know, I think that there's, there's some extent to which this, this is happening with David Deutsch now. Um, maybe we'll save that for a distant episode. But, you know, the, the truth of the matter is that when people make progress, there is professional jealousy. There can be this kind of very human reaction, very emotional reaction, that Oh, it's that— that's so simple. It's so simple. Why didn't I think of that? Well, I'm not going to give him credit for that. Like, it really is simple, isn't it? After all, I know all that Everett is saying is, well, just take it literally. You know, we're not going to— we aren't going to consider why it is that the equations say that the electron simultaneously occupies all these positions, uh, and yet we know it can't occupy all these positions. So how do we try and get around that? He just says, it says it occupies all these positions, so it occupies all these positions. It really does. It's just simple. It's just parsimonious, cut through the nonsense, there's your answer. So too with Popper, you know. So too with just explaining a whole bunch of things, you know. What, what, uh, how does science demarcate itself or, or come to a better understanding of the world? Um, is it by confirming? How much do you have to confirm? How, how, how long does it take until you're confident in the truth of your theories if you're doing experiment. He just said, well, do away with all that. You know how we demarcate science from non-science? The experiment. And if something's falsifiable, then we've got a testable theory, and that's a part of science. And if it's not falsifiable, it's not a part of science.

Lovely.

And parsimony, it's progress. And people don't give him credit. Why don't people give him credit for that? I mean, they— well, they do, of course, but then they say either falsification is not good enough on the one hand 'On the other—' or 'On the other, it's not how science works,' okay? And then they go into the Dewey-Klein thesis, and they immediately reveal themselves as having never read Popper in the first place, of course, which is usually the problem, you know. Look, I, I guess that the overwhelming majority, like Tyler says there, that, you know, it's not well respected among philosophers, and that's broadly true. Might be changing a little bit, but it's because it's often not assigned in a significant way in philosophy courses. You know, to the students. And so if the students aren't reading him, they're not inclined to go on and teach him when they become philosophy lecturers and professors themselves. And so it's no mystery therefore that, that he doesn't have the kind of academic social cachet that he deserves, I would say, even though he's solving all these problems. Okay, that's enough defense of Popper. Let's keep going.

So if, say, an 8-year-old who is not being physically abused wanted to run away from home that child would have the right to do so?

It's the same kind of question that used to be asked about democracy before viable democracies were implemented. That is, people used to say, in many kinds of dispute, only one thing can be done. The different people have different views, some want A, B, C, D, E, but only one of them can be done. And therefore the others have to be prevented from getting their way. And if you have a democracy, then that, that all that means is, is exactly like having a monarchy or a tyranny, except that the monarch or tyrant is 51% of the people. So obviously, when you have a democracy, 51% of the people will vote to dispossess the 49% of the people. And indeed, if you just impose voting in isolation from other institutions, that is exactly what happens. But if you institute voting as part of a sophisticated system of error correction and institutions of criticism and you gradually introduce it there, it simply doesn't have that property. It doesn't happen. So now you're saying, well, now, David, you will say, do you think that 51% of the people have the right to dispossess the other 49%? Well, it's the wrong question. I mean, there are circumstances where they do. It, it depends. But what you shouldn't be asking that— you should be asking what institutions are determining the answer. Do they respect human rights? Are they rational? Do they expect impossible forms of knowledge to be in the hands of the powerful?

Okay, so around the 50-minute mark, we have Tyler Cowen asking a question about you know, should an 8-year-old be allowed to run away from home, for example? And David gives a long answer which is basically about democracy. It's a comparison to democracy. But the key thing that he says is you have to ask about how this situation arose. And that's what I would say. It's like, well, you know, enacting the taking children seriously philosophy is not One day, you know, an 8-year-old has been raised in the traditional way, the way that almost every child has been raised, more or less, and the next day you just invent TCS for your family. That's not going to work. That's a recipe for disaster. TCS is a sophisticated theory of raising children which would require one to either gradually begin to enact it if the child has already been born, or from the moment the child is born, enact it and have a good understanding of it. It does not entail enabling the child to just make every single error regardless of the safety of the child. The TCS is a way of lovingly and with care raising a child without coercion. It is not, and this is the common misconception, it is not as David talks about with freedom, just absolute anarchy for the child where there are— there's no knowledge there in that family or with that child. In other words, should you just let the child run away on TCS? The answer is no. Does that entail coercion? No, because you have hitherto been coercing them every single day in some way, shape, or form causing them to want to run away. So that's your fault so far, that you've created this environment in which the child wants to run away from you, and now suddenly you want to blame TCS for not allowing you to stop them? That makes no sense. Okay, so this is a complete nut and misunderstanding. TCS— TCS is like physics. It takes quite a bit of knowledge to really grok what's going on. With that philosophy, like with any philosophy, like with any claim about how reality either is or should be. And it does— it can't just be reduced to complete and utter anarchy for everyone all the time. That's not what it is. Okay, let's keep going.

So if somebody was watching the Earth from a distant galaxy with a powerful telescope, they would see that this planet, alone among all the other planets in the galaxy as far as we know, You know, maybe there are many inhabited planets, in which case they would all have this property, and none of the other planets do. The ones which have explanatory knowledge on them can deflect asteroids.

But if I were Nietzsche and I heard this, I would say you're making the importance of being explanatory subordinate to some notion of the will to power. I don't mean that in a cricket way, but is that a misunderstanding?

Well, uh, so power is a, is an ambiguous term usually, um, and especially with these, with these romantic philosophers, it means power over humans.

No, I don't mean that, but Nietzsche also meant it more broadly, right?

Uh, well, I haven't read that, so I'll take your word for that. Okay, um, the, the will to have an effect is part of the will to solve problems. So we are born with a repertoire of ideas which include expectations and desires and so on, which are horribly inadequate and conflict with each other and conflict with the world as well. And but we have the ability to alter and augment those, uh, theories. And one of that— one of the things we do is we affect the world around us so as to make it more the way we want it.

Okay, so Tyler there mentions Nietzsche's will to power, which is this, you know, supposed to be the motivating force in people. And whatever the case, okay, let's just not worrying too much about the details. The will to power is that people want to be powerful, maybe want to have power over the, the universe, whatever. It's used as a pejorative. It's as if this is a bad thing in a way. Um, now there could be all sorts of bad ways in which power might be used of one person over another, but the idea that our explanatory knowledge won't allow us to fight off the hostility of the universe in order to allow us to survive and anything we care about to survive, that somehow this is a bad thing, is wrong. It's just a pessimistic view of people, as always. You know, there's just this common idea that anytime someone comes along and says we should solve problem X, someone else will say, well, that's going to damage the environment, or it's going to have negative effects Y and Z. Well, yes, of course, for any particular solution new problems are going to be created. But that doesn't mean we should stop. It doesn't mean we should think ourselves evil because of the fact that some of our solutions cause, let's say, pollution. The pollution that we're dealing with on a natural Earth anyway is so much worse than anything that we're going to create. People think about the natural environment as being this pristine, clean place that is hospitable for people, but it's not. It's not. We've learned this via the beginning of Infinity, that in fact the universe is implacably hostile, and we eke out an existence on only certain places on the Earth, and we have to use technology in order to keep ourselves safe. And if we can use our power, our power to create explanations, in order to spread out into the universe, survive, and make the place much nicer than what it is Supernovas aren't nice. Black holes aren't nice. Inhospitable moons around distant planets aren't nice. If we can use our knowledge to create the technology to make the place hospitable for people of the future, and even for animals of the future, then isn't that good? Okay, some people come along and say, oh, this is the will to power. Well, that's just a negative view of humans, but that's the zeitgeist. That's been the zeitgeist for, well, a long time now, and David Deutsch is one of the few people standing up against it. Okay, last clip.

Let's, let's go. So if you call that power, then it is power, but I would rather call it something that arises naturally in physics in the same way that gravity does. You may as well say gravity is a theory about power. Well, yes and no. Gravity is a theory about how the universe is. And the, the, the, the asteroid is pulled towards the Earth by gravity and pushed away by explanatory power. And you, if you want to understand what makes asteroids and planets do what they do, you cannot do it without understanding explanations. But you can do it without understanding a whole load of other attributes of humans, including um, the ability to suffer, and, and, uh, the fact that we're a featherless biped.

Okay, 1 minute— 1 hour and 5 minutes and 30 seconds, David makes the amazing claim that I don't think I've emphasized enough, really, that, um, that, that knowledge is just explanatory knowledge. It's just an outworking of the laws of physics as well. You know, and this is, this is just a subset of saying, you know, the distinction between the natural and the unnatural is artificial. We are part of the natural environment. We humans have evolved, therefore explanatory— our brains, which are capable of creating running minds which create explanatory knowledge, are natural. They're just natural as well. It's all natural by this standard of it exists in the universe and it has arisen via natural processes. But of course, if you say it's unnatural, if you say what we do is unnatural, well then you, you immediately go down the road of saying we are indeed we are these special unique entities in the universe, and that's true as well. So on the one hand, natural, just an outworking of the laws of physics. And if you want to explain what happens to asteroids that are heading towards the Earth, either they're going to be attracted to the Earth by gravity or repelled from the Earth by technology and explanatory knowledge. And so this is why explanatory knowledge, as it turns out, is— like I've said before, it's almost like people are a force of nature. We are the thing that is transforming at the moment, just locally, our planet and tiny parts of our planet, but eventually the entire galaxy, eventually the universe. We spread out and we transform the rest of physical reality, which makes us kind of like, you know, gravity. And this is why David says, you know, we shouldn't have this weird negative view that there's one part of nature, namely anything that we do that is bad, and everything else being natural is okay. Why aren't we natural? Why are we unnatural? It's a very religious notion to say that we're the uniquely evil, bad part of reality, when actually we're the thing that is trying to make everything better. We're not deliberately out there trying to make things worse, trying to make things better.

Given the way British elections seem to have been running, that the Tories win every time, does that mean the error correction mechanism of the British system of government now is weaker?

No, unfortunately the— so, as you probably know, I favor the first past the post system in the purest possible form as it is implemented in Britain. I think that is the most error correcting possible electoral system. Although I must add that the electoral system is only a tiny facet of the institutions of criticism and consent in general. It's, it's, it's just a tiny thing, but it is the best one. It's not perfect. Yeah. It, it has some of the defects of, for example, proportional representation. Proportional representation has the defect that it causes coalitions all the time. Coalitions are bad.

But you have a delegated monitor with the coalition, right? With a coalition, say, in the Netherlands, which is richer than United Kingdom, you typically have coalition governments. Some parties in the coalition are delegated monitors of the other parties. Parties are better informed than voters. So isn't that a better Popperian mechanism for error correction? No.

So if we're looking at particular cases, we are going to get bogged down into what you attribute to what, because we're We're not doing experiments with these things. We don't have a control group. We don't have an agreed-upon method of deciding what is being tested. And then we test different things at different times and never under the same conditions.

Okay, so just last point here, that point on first past the post. You know, people in Australia as well as everywhere else, I think, think that there's some sort of virtue with proportional representation. This allows the minor parties to actually get a foot in and to have some representation. The problem with this is, as David points out, what you end up with is coalitions such that the third party has a disproportionate amount of power, and this leads to compromises. And compromises have an undeservedly high reputation among people. As David says in the Beginning of Infinity, a compromise is certainly better than immediate violence between people. But in the normal case, where the whole point of politics is to— supposedly diplomacy is supposed to avoid violence instead of having tribal warfare— you actually have discussions and debates. If you have a coalition, then what you've got is a major party and a minor party, and the minor party can actually cause the major party to do things that they otherwise would not have done. And this seems to be unfair because that minor party has substantially less votes than the first most popular party and the second most popular party. So therefore, that small minority of people end up getting legislation through that the second largest group of people don't. They don't get to try it, what they want. But it's often worse than this. It's often worse than this if you do have two parties in a coalition. This minor party then may not get precisely what it wants, but what it will do is affect the legislation of the major party. And it'll affect the legislation of the major party in such a way that instead of the major party getting its policy enacted, turned into a law— let's call that policy X— that policy X never actually gets through to becoming a law. It never gets voted on. Instead, the major party and the minor party do a deal and they come up with a compromise that isn't X. Instead, it's, it's some compromised policy called Y. And this compromised policy Y— I'm going to call it Y— isn't what the major party wants exactly. It isn't what the minor party wants exactly. It's a mishmash of the both. And so when they turn it into a law and it fails or something goes wrong, then the major party doesn't learn anything because they will say to the minor party and to everyone else in the population, that's not the, that's not the policy we wanted in the first place. We told you the policy that we wanted, but we were in coalition with the minor party, so we had to invent this other policy which we didn't really want. We thought it would fail. We thought that X was the policy that was going to work. And the minor party says, well, we always thought that we shouldn't have that policy Y either. We didn't want X, we didn't want Y, we wanted the policy that we truly believed in. But that never got enacted either. Nothing that anyone believes in actually got enacted. Instead, the mishmash compromise policy got enacted. And so when it fails, no one learns anything, and everyone just retreats back to their original positions. The major party retreats to position X. If X actually got enacted and tried for a few years, perhaps until the time of the next election, then the citizenry can decide whether or not that policy was a good policy or not, and then vote, um, uh, knowing that the policies and the thoughts and the ideas of the people in that major party were actually worth voting for in the first place. And this is why first past the post works. This is why a two-party system is better than this multiplicity of parties, because if you have a multiplicity of parties, you never actually get policies being acted that any of them truly, truly endorse. Okay, this was a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed, um, the, um, the, the way that Tyler has gone about questioning David. I think there's a whole bunch of misconceptions there. David's, um, uh, David's ideas, like Popper's, like Everett's, they're very hard to understand without, um, serious study. But that study, of course, is fun. Hopefully that's one reason that I, I exist doing this is to try and, um, uh, unpack some of this stuff. So I hope that this was, um, valuable to some extent. Thanks again to Aaron for suggesting this, and I'll see you again soon. Bye-bye.