David Deutsch Says We Will Build Humans Before We Build AGI - #515

Get My New Book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, for Only $ 0.99! This week only: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U David Deutsch offers his insights into the physics that will impact our future, challenging our new technologies, such as AGI and the development of synthetic humans, as depicted in movies. Join us for this fascinating discussion as we go INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE. KEY TAKEAWAYS 00:00:00 – 00:00:39 Could machines experience thoughts and sensations like humans? 00:00:45 – 00:01:46 Deutsch argues subjective experiences can arise from any system replicating brain-like processing. 00:01:47 – 00:02:25 We never experience the present moment directly but recall slightly delayed interpretations. 00:02:25 – 00:03:30 Deutsch views himself as software running on brain hardware, embodiment is mainly computational. 00:03:30 – 00:04:37 Loss of physical body parts doesn’t reduce personhood 00:04:43 – 00:07:13 Story of “lock-in” from horse’s width shaping space tech leads to analogy about AI hardware lock-in. 00:08:10 – 00:09:20 Lock-in may slow progress but creativity ensures no permanent limits. 00:09:20 – 00:12:15 Square roots and complex numbers naturally emerge in physics due to algebraic structures of reality. 00:12:15 – 00:13:31 Not all mathematical structures are worth exploring—only those relevant to solving physics problems. 00:13:31 – 00:17:00 Shift to memetics: persistence of anti-Jewish patterns is deeper than typical memes. 00:17:00 – 00:19:26 Pattern predates Christianity; it persists through cultural rationalizations, not simple hatred. 00:19:50 – 00:21:23 Discussion of life vs. death choices from Torah portion ties to Deutsch’s book on infinity 00:21:44 – 00:22:32 Humanity faces no upper or lower bounds—capable of infinite progress or catastrophic mistakes 00:23:36 – 00:24:21 Advice to young self-consider interference processes as a door to quantum computation 00:25:16 – 00:26:13 Deutsch admits past mistakes—initially misjudged multiverse explanations and free will 00:27:08 – 00:28:08 David redefines free will as the ability to create objectively new knowledge. 00:28:14 – 00:28:41 AGI programs will have free will once true AI is achieved. 00:29:02 – 00:29:18 Conclusion -------------------------- Additional resources: Get Dr. Brian Keating’s NEW Book for Only 0.99! This week only: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FN8DH6SX?ref_=pe_93986420_775043100 Get David Deutsch’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359 Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 -------------------------- Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 0:14Brian Keating?

  And I want to ask you, is it even, you know, possible in principle to, to conceive of a machine that A, has a happy thought? What does that even mean? And B, could visualize the visceral sensation of free fall in an elevator or going over a roller coaster hump? Is that not something unique to the human embodiment of natural intelligence? Therefore, making it impossible for artificial intelligence to construct interesting new theories of physics, for example, like the Einstein equivalence principle?

• 0:48Speaker 02

  We are such machines. So obviously, it's possible for them to exist.

• 0:53Brian Keating?

  But in computing, in silicon, in qubits form, in any form you like, and artificial intelligence to replicate that.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Well, so an intermediate step before, before considering AGI would be, is it possible to build a human being from scratch out of atoms? And I think that that is clearly not forbidden by any fundamental theory that we have. Obviously, we're nowhere near being able to do it. And then, what is, what is really, what is really operating to make the subjective sensation of falling and that, that kind of thing is not different between neurons and whatever your toy brain is made out of. If you could make the toy brain out of materials that did something analogous to the information

• 1:45Speaker 02

  processing in brains, then it would, I was about to say, it would say that it experienced that as well. But I think that it's obvious that it would experience it because when we say that we do experience it, we're actually consulting our memory of experiencing it. We, we never experience what's actually happening in a particular instance. We only ever experience what has happened to us. One fifth of a second or more ago. And what's more, we are interpreting it. And all that is computations. And we know, um, no machine can perform computations that are, uh, different from the ones that can be performed by a universal Turing machine, or if you like, a universal quantum computer.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Uh, although I, I very much doubt that the quantum, uh, computations are necessary for, for, uh, human cognition.

• 2:40Brian Keating?

  So the, the notion of embodiment, I talked to Gail Chomsky about this many years ago. But he seemed to think it was critical to have an embodied, you know, and again, that's not impossible, so therefore it must at some point be explored and, and a proper question. But in the near term, do you think it's more likely we could get a Turing test that's based on a new law of physics, not, not, or some new discovery, or even an old law of physics that's finally understood and, and more predictive and more explanatory, but only on the basis that it's embodied in some sense? In other words, what part of what you do as a theoretical physicist is, is, you know, only made possible, enabled by your physical embodiment?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Um, well, my physical embodiment in my brain. So the way I look at it is that I am a computer program. I, in other words, I'm an abstraction. Um, I am not the brain. The brain is just the, um, hardware on which I am running. But I am software. Um, so, uh, I am therefore embodied in the brain. If I were embodied in something else with the same computing power, then I would be embodied in that. If it, if it didn't have the rest of the body, like the arms and legs and so on, then that would, that would be equivalent to being in a sensory deprivation tank. But a person in a sensory deprivation pack tank is still exactly as much of a person as when they're outside.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  And, you know, if you lose a limb, you don't say, I'm less of a person now. Or, I mean, you might say that, but you'd be, you'd be saying that metaphorically. You're not, you're not, uh, less. Entitled to the vote or less entitled to human rights if you if you lose an arm. Um, and uh, I I think the same is true of of the brain. That is, what counts in the brain is the running program. That's what is conscious, that's what has feelings. And that's what is embodied. When you talk about something being embodied, I I am embodied in the brain mostly. I mean, it's also, the rest of the body also plays some role with chemicals and so on. But but the that's again, all just information processing.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  And the the brain is the most important because it's the only one in which error correction occurs.

• 4:57Brian Keating?

  Hmm. I want to ask hardware related question. You mentioned software, but I can't resist as an experimentalist mentioning hardware. And that's this phenomenon that's known as lock-in. Uh, one of my favorite examples is the the Hubble Deep Field could have been a lot deeper. And we could have learned a lot of the things that took until the James Webb Telescope at much greater distance from the earth at the L two Lagrange point, a million miles from earth, as opposed to six hundred and thirty miles above the earth. And that was set by the width of a horse's rear end. And I don't know if you know this story, David. Have you ever heard this? Okay, so so this is at least partially true. Uh, but so the space shuttle was launched using solid rocket boosters. Those solid rocket boosters were made in Utah in the western United States.

• 5:43Brian Keating?

  And the space shuttle was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. So they had to traverse from Utah to Florida, which is two thousand kilometers plus, something like that. And on their way, they had to go through at least, you know, seven different tunnels in in trains, train tunnels. And those train tunnels are a certain width. They're set by the width of the gauge of the railroad. And two of those tracks side by side is what determines the the maximum width of something that can go through such a tunnel. Well, now we go back another step and well, what sets the width of the of the railroad gauge? Well, that was set by the the width of horses that used to pull a standard gauge chariot uh, going back to the Roman Empire.

• 6:25Brian Keating?

  So two two horses were used to pull chariots and that's the actual width. It's some. Something like 2.3 meters or something like that. And that's the width of a railroad track, which is now, you know, half the width of the tunnel that the booster had to go through. And the altitude the booster gets to is proportional to its area, specific impulse. It's jerk, if you will, is determining what altitude it got to. And that caused us the Hubble Space Telescope launched by the space shuttle to get to an altitude of about 400 to 600 kilometers or something like that. And that meant it went through the atmosphere and experienced something called the the South Atlantic anomaly. And it also had day night cycles every 90 minutes, which is bad for the thermal regulation of the camera. At any rate, David, the point I'm getting to is that

• 7:10Brian Keating?

  no one would have thought that the Hubble Deep Field image of a galaxy would not have been as good because of the width of a horse's butt was too small. If it had only been bigger, we would have had a higher, you know. But I want to turn that type of thinking into a question about AI. Because we talk a lot about AI. Again, you predicted immensely presciently in this book from 14 years ago. Many of the things we're just now seeing and anticipated some things we haven't yet seen. But I'm wondering if we'll ever will see them because of lock in. In other words, the L L Ms that you and I use every day are based on GPUs married to L L Ms. And those GPUs were designed such that my kids could play Minecraft

• 7:52Brian Keating?

  a little bit faster than their neighbor and and kill him, you know, before he kills my, my, my kid in the game. They weren't designed for this. They happen to be exceptionally well suited to matrix multiplication inversion and and other things. Right? So I'm wondering, did that lock us in to a finite ceiling on what computers can ultimately do because of the trillions of dollars that are going into GPU plus L L M? And not into alternative modes of artificial intelligence that could be actually useful for physics and determining new laws of physics and so on.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  One that asks my guests to judge their books by their covers. But today I'm asking myself to judge my own book by its cover. My newest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, is chock full of advice, life tips, and focus and productivity tips from nine of the world's greatest minds, Nobel laureates ranging from economics to peace to physics, of course. It launches September 9th, which is also my birthday.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  I will go check it out. And my publisher's got an Amazon to run a special just for listeners who are new to the Impossible Podcast. You can get the Kindle edition for only 99 cents. That's less than a new pocket protector. So go to Amazon and get the Kindle copy today because this special only lasts for the first week after launch.

• 9:10Brian Keating?

  What do you think about that, Ar?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I think that sort of thing is bound to be ubiquitous and it's bound to slow things down compared with not having it, not having that thing. But it cannot impose a bound. So it can, it can make things happen later than they otherwise would, but it can't stop things happening. For example, with your horse's rockets. Yeah, if that, if that horse's butt thing were really the impediment to space travel, then by now, you know, it would have, it would have prevented the Hubble Space Telescope from, from being better and may, you know, you could imagine a scenario where it prevented all sorts of other things.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  But by now, if there was a factory in, in, in one part of the US and you needed to get the rocket to the other part, then Elon Musk would make a reusable rocket into which you could put that rocket and would transfer it that way, would simply take off in one place and land in another. And, and then, then the problem would be solved. Except probably it would be expensive, but then that would, the problem of expenses also solved in the long run by creativity.

• 10:21Brian Keating?

  One thing I've wanted to ask you for 12 years or so is what I call the unreasonable effectiveness of the square root in physics. And that's if you look at the Poisson bracket in classical mechanics, you get a commutation relation. It happens to vanish. But then if you add the square root of negative one, now all of a sudden it doesn't vanish and you get this very interesting and rich behavior. Likewise, if you add the square root in a certain sense to a group called SU3, you get rotations in SO2. If you add quaternions, which are sort of the next level up in the grassman algebra for for imaginary numbers above, you know, the second and third, fourth dimension.

• 11:04Brian Keating?

  And then if you do matrix multiplications in higher dimensional spaces, you encounter the LU decomposition and you get square roots as well. And what do you make of the square root?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Imagine that there are many universes and that reality consists of many universes in each of which physical quantities have have different values. Like the position, you know, is is is one thing in one universe and it's a different number in another universe. So so you might think that the way you'd represent that mathematically is as an array or a vector, where each element of the vector is a the value of the the that variable in that universe and then the second is the value in the second universe. Turns out that that doesn't work because because the real descriptors of the multiverse are algebraic.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  The the the real relationships are algebraic relationships between what are often called operators, linear operators, whatever. But but the important thing is that they are they are an algebra and you can't represent an algebra in a vector, but you can do the next best thing and represent them in a matrix. So instead of having an array of real numbers, you want to have a matrix which somehow represents a set of real numbers. Well, what what can they be? What set of real numbers can be represented by a matrix or by an element of an algebra? Well, the answer is it's eigenvalues.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Those are the only set of real numbers that are invariant that you can construct out of an algebra. So you have an algebra and you want eigenvalues of things that describe reality to be real numbers. Therefore, they are Hermitian. Symmetric or general matrices won't do. Only Hermitian matrices have real eigenvalues. So that's that's my answer. That's that's where complex numbers enter into physics.

• 13:15Brian Keating?

  Hmm. And then higher generalizations in terms of spinners and so forth are naturally. Now, again, harkening back to my first question about mathematical inductions, limitations, and how minimal surfaces have singularities less than dimension seven. It's a, is that, are we limited then? Or would you expect that every mathematical structure, the, you know, whatever the next level up from a grassman algebra is from dimension three or four, rather, complex dimension two. But is this a possibility? In other words, should we spend a lot of our time exploring all mathematical structures and how we could, you know, force them to to instantiate themselves as physical observables?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  No, we should only explore the ones that we think might solve a problem in physics. Or mathematicians should explore only those ones that they think solve a problem in mathematics or interesting to mathematics. I think that's the same thing as solving a problem in it. If there is some mathematical limitation, it's because solving the problem in physics requires that limitation, like the finite speed of light. It's necessary that the laws of physics impose that limitation because of the structure of spacetime, because time has to be different from space and that kind of thing.

• 14:32Brian Keating?

  Okay, okay. So you may not want to talk about this. This is going to go into Israel, Palestine. But your thought process and your frameworks for assessing memetics and memes. And I've had the honor of hosting Richard Dawkins in person. Here in on the West Coast, I want to ask you this question. Memes, as you frame them, are replicators of human epistemology, effectively, in some sense. They shape, you know, the modality of human thought, the way genes and the extended phenotype, for example, can shape our culture, our biological development. And I started to think about the Israeli, you know, Palestinian conflict through this lens only recently.

• 15:13Brian Keating?

  So my thoughts are necessarily well, well, unformed, shall we say.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 15:49Brian Keating?

  But I often wondered, you know, how can this conflict persist, you know, for decades and decades? And I, and I, I wonder if it can be explained through memetics in that these are enduring, that they are entrenched, that they are simple to explain. It's easy to say free, free Palestine. These are very catchy things. And as you had in your country yesterday, Glastonbury, we're speaking in late June, this horrific, you know, event where these anti semi, you know, rappers, we're seeing about the, the death and threatening death to the IDF and, you know, basically Israel would be soon to follow. Is there a way to interpret the Israel, the endurance, the persistence of either side of the conflict?

• 16:32Brian Keating?

  But obviously I'm Jewish, I'm very Zionist. Is this possible to be understood through the lens of memetics as to its endurance long past the, you know, kind of date for which other cultural and even wars are being fought with much greater human genocide and so forth, if to the extent that Israel even is complicit in such a thing. But can you understand it? I'm sorry for the long-winded question, but do you interpret it in any way as a memetic battle? As in addition to, to an actual.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  So the memes of what used to be called antisemitism, but I want to get away from that terminology. So I call it the pattern. It's the pattern of. Legitimizing hurting Jews. It's not hatred, it's different from many other memes. Obviously, it is a meme because, you know, there were people who were enacting this behavior long before anyone alive today was alive. So it didn't get from one generation to another by genes. It got there by people telling each other stories, telling each other ideas about how the world works.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Why this, but it's certainly not explained by that because, as you said, most memes, it is very rare for a meme to last a hundred years, much rarer a thousand years.

• 17:58Brian Keating?

  Without evolution?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  Well, evolutionary things can last for a long time, but that's because they have a different mechanism. Memes have to have to run the gauntlet of being represented in minds and then enacted in every generation. Genes can survive for generations without ever being enacted. But like, you know, I have genes to heal broken bones and I may never have a broken bone in my life, but I could still pass it on to the next generation. Memes aren't like that. They have to be enacted and they have to be enacted faithfully in every generation, so long as they last. Why this particular meme? And I don't think it's only a meme.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I think there's also a logic of the situation involved, which we also don't understand. Why this has lasted for at least 2,400 years? So that means it was not caused by Christianity, like many people say. It existed long before Christianity, probably more than 2,400 years ago. I don't know why. It's less important to know why than to know that it is there because only then can we see what it isn't, like that it isn't racism, it isn't xenophobia, it isn't picking scapegoats. All those things can be caused by it.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  That is, the pattern can cause hatred because people will want to explain in their own minds why they have what Sartre called this predisposition to the pattern. And they will try to explain it in terms of things in their culture that are deemed in their culture to legitimize hurting people. So in cultures where being heretic is deemed to legitimize hurting somebody, people will say, people explain their behavior towards Jews in terms of religious beliefs. But atheists don't explain it that way, but they explain it in terms of things that in

• 20:07Speaker 02

  their culture justify hurting people, like imperialism or genocide and whatever. And it's important, again, as Sartre said, I was very surprised, by the way, at how much sense he talked about this, very surprised. The impulse comes first and the explanation for why they purport, how they're purporting to justify it or why they believe it comes second. And a lot of the justifications just don't make sense in their own right. But people's rational faculties are disabled by this pattern.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  It's like a state of mind that has that effect on morality and has that effect on reasoning. Why it happens, why it is so long lasting, I don't know.

• 20:58Brian Keating?

  I wonder if it's maybe the first kind of instance of such a behavior that's not only oriented towards, you know, hatred of others, but also hatred and willing to sacrifice oneself. And I'm really touched by the ending of your book, of the beginning of Infinity, is actually the beginning or the middle of my bar mitzvah parsha, which I never had my bar mitzvah at age 13, so I had it at age 52, four times 13, with my family at the kotel. And my bar mitzvah parsha is Nitzavim, where it says the following, it says,

• 21:33Brian Keating?

  I've put before you life and death, blessing and curse, so that you may choose life and blessing. And the end of beginning of infinity, what lies ahead of us is in any case, infinity. All we can choose is whether it is an infinity of ignorance or knowledge of wrong or right, blessing and curse effectively, death and life. Was that intentional? Am I, am I reading too much into it?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  I did not know that passage. I learned that passage only recently from Douglas Murray.

• 22:01Brian Keating?

  Yes, he, I talked to him about it on my podcast.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  So that's when I first heard it. So as I also say in the book, when people seek the truth, they also converge with each other.

• 22:13Brian Keating?

  That's right, because there is only one physical truth and one physical world to describe. But I wonder, the reason I bring that up is because when I read the Bar Mitzvah portion, you know, throughout my life, or, you know, when I should have done it, I thought, well, this is kind of foolish and superfluous. Surely there are no people who choose death and choose curse. And yet I read that Bar Mitzvah portion at the hotel on September 7th, 2023, a month before October 7th, and I was there with my family. And I, I just thought, I'm hopeful, et cetera. This is a new day. And, and nothing could be further from the truth. I, I guess I, I wonder, are you optimistic? And my last three questions involve you and, and, um, yeah.

• 22:55Brian Keating?

  And I, I hope you'll give me a forbearance of five more minutes of your time. But, and then we'll wrap up because I know it's late there. But is there a limit to infinity in that we, we, if we have elements and memes that choose death and choose curse willingly, and they say so themselves, is there a limit to what humans can achieve? Are you, uh, universal constructors at all?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  So there's no limit to the size of error we can make. That's a, a feature of being general purpose, the G in AGI. We, we, we have, we are GIs, not AGIs, but the G is there. And that means not only is the future potentially unlimited, but there's also no, um, limit to the size of mistake we can make, including destroying ourselves. There's no, no limit to the size of mistake an individual can make. And it very often happens that people make a mistake of the valuing something above their own lives. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong, more often they're wrong.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  So I don't think there's any upper bound, but there's also no lower bound.

• 24:04Brian Keating?

  Very good. Okay. The last two questions come from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, your late countryman, who actually, I don't know, did you know that he is responsible for the word podcast?

• 24:12Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 24:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I thought it was all recent.

• 24:16Brian Keating?

  You'll know the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, obviously.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

• 24:22Brian Keating?

  So when the first iPod was made, it had this white shape and it had this circle like the eye of Dave, you know, and the pod bay was the repository of protection and knowledge for the astronauts. And the engineer who created the iPod in 2001 told Steve Jobs that, you know, his favorite name for it was the iPod after the pod in 2001: A Space Odyssey. So it comes from Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Steve Jobs accepted that name. So behind me is the famous saying, "Open the pod bay doors," a neon sign, if you're watching. So I want to ask you two questions. The name of the podcast is Into the Impossible, and it comes from Arthur C. Clarke's famous phrase that the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them, go beyond, into the impossible.

• 25:07Brian Keating?

  And I want to ask you the form of a question, advice to your former self, or what you might say to your former self. If you had 30 seconds with a 20-year-old David Deutsch and you could talk to him about anything for 30 seconds only, what would you tell him to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  I think that philosophical advice like that is almost impossible to follow. So I would want to give him some factual knowledge, such as, "Think about the fact that interference processes could be used to perform computations."

• 25:44Speaker 02

  That, that sort of opens a massive door to understanding not just quantum computers, but, but all sorts of things about physics. Feynman, when asked this question, say, you know, he was asked, "What would you tell primitive people?" He said that matter is made of atoms, but I already knew that when I was 20, so.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  So there's this other thing I could say.

• 26:08Brian Keating?

  That's great. Yeah, he said that what contains the most knowledge and the least amount of characters or words. Yeah, I would say that the cosmic microwave background has a power spectrum that you could describe with 2,500 numbers and that that includes quantum mechanics within it because the physics of a hydrogen atom. But this is not my podcast. So the next question is kind of maybe an offshoot of one of Sir Arthur's others phrases. He was quite quotable. You know, he said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I like to drop that on my department chair every now and then. But the final question is one where he said the following. He said, for any older scientist that says something is possible,

• 26:53Brian Keating?

  he or she presumably is very much likely to be correct when they say something's possible. But when they say something is impossible, they are much more likely to be wrong. And so I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about? What would you like Mulligan on? If anything, what have you most, you know, found in at odds with your former way of thinking?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  So I think my former way of thinking, sort of worldview or epistemology, I think I didn't understand, again, when I was 20, I didn't understand the importance of explanation. I needed to understand that more. I would have been flabbergasted if told that the pattern exists. I would have resisted that and I would have been wrong. I think the main things I've actually been wrong about are more prosaic. When I first encountered Everettian quantum theory, I thought it needed an extra structure, which I called the interpretation basis. Other

• 27:59Speaker 02

  people had the same idea. They didn't call it that. And it took a long time before. Actually, some philosophers, notably Harvey Brown, Sarah Foster, Michael Lockwood, persuaded me that not only is this not needed, It is a mistaken theory of the multiverse. And it has all the problems, all the problems of that you were mentioning earlier about things like splitting and how fast does it happen? And what is a universe? And what else is there in the multiverse apart from universes and so on? Those are all caused by that kind of thinking. So I was wrong about that. I was also wrong about the multiverse being able to explain free will.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  So as at the end of my first book, The Fabric of Reality, I give a story about how the multiverse can explain free will because it can explain counterfactuals. But what I got wrong is that it can only explain some counterfactuals. But to explain free will, we need to explain all counterfactuals, including counterfactuals of the form, if quantum theory weren't true, then this would happen. Or if this theory that some crank has invented were true, then this would go wrong. And in other words, we have to, to understand a theory,

• 29:26Speaker 02

  we have to understand counterfactuals that aren't anywhere in the multiverse. They are just imaginary. We have to understand those too. And since then, I've come to, to come to think of free will in terms of creating knowledge. So we have free will if we can bring something objectively new into the universe.

• 29:45Brian Keating?

  Will computers have free will?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  It's not computers, it's computer programs.

• 29:51Brian Keating?

  Oh, sure.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Computer programs will have free will when the problem of AGI is solved. Of course, if we destroy ourselves before we solve that, then they won't. But, but I expect that we won't destroy ourselves. And I expect that the problem of AGI will be solved and the resulting programs will have free will.

• 30:12Brian Keating?

  Oh, David, you've expanded my fabric of reality. You've put many, many more wrinkles into my brain. And I have another two dozen questions about technical details of quantum mechanics and the Deutsch states and Deutsch gates and all sorts of fun stuff. But maybe we'll do that in person. I'd love to meet you someday. And this has been a great honor for me. Thank you so much for your courage, for your intellectual championing of rational thought and just the way that you've transformed not only what we know, but how to think. And I think that's incredibly rare. You're a real treasure.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  That's very kind. And again, thank you for having me.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. I'm usually the one that asks my guests to judge their books by their covers, but today I'm asking myself to judge my own book by its cover. My newest book, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, is chock full of advice, life tips, and focus and productivity tips from nine of the world's greatest minds, Nobel laureates ranging from economics to peace to physics, of course. It launches September 9th, which is also my birthday.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  I hope you'll check it out. And my publisher's got an Amazon to run a special just for listeners of the Into the Impossible podcast. You can get the Kindle edition for only 99 cents. That's less than a new pocket protector. So go to Amazon and get the Kindle copy today because this special only lasts for the first week after launch. If today's conversation with David Deutsch made you question everything about modern science, you need to watch my recent episode with Sabina Hossenfelder. We got into how mathematical beauty can guide scientists astray and what the true power of quantum computing and artificial intelligence may turn out to be. Click here and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.

• 31:55Speaker 00

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