SERIOUSLY incredible, Cam. How this isn’t replete with comments and likes is testimony to how early your substack journey is. This is maybe the best introduction to Deutsch I’ve encountered, and will aid me in my efforts to disseminate--and explain :)--Deutsch’s originality and appeal. Sincere thanks.
It's so sad to see what seems to have been a fairly smart man degenerate to base sophistry. Sadder still are the numerous heathens who egg it on.
Deutsch has made the key error of being blatantly wrong on numerous counts. This is deadly for a sophist. He claims humans are universal knowledge creators, but this is a delusional idea derived from a lifetime of isolation to the Ivory Tower. Most people are more like animals than David Deutsch. Curiously he deprives animals of this status, going as far as saying they lack qualia because of it. But if man evolved from beast then surely there could be men who lack qualia and "universal" status, because even given a discrete threshold between qualia and no qualia, the first "universal man" must have bred with animals, likely some offspring who lacked qualia and some who did not. It follows that to this day some men might lack qualia or this "universality" he is concerned with. If the sign of lacking it is lack of any intellectual output whatsoever, then many surely lack it. If, perhaps, Deutsch believes the sign is the capacity to speak, then maybe all healthy men are universals (although I wonder if the retarded and neurologically injured lack qualia in his mind?). Even so, his denial of intelligence and its genetic basis remains bizarre. It seems he might accept that genetics set a person's "processing speed". Therefore they simply must be given time to understand Relativity. But we typically do not think of a 2002 Windows 95 laptop with Intel Celeron Inside as being able to run Crysis 3 despite the fact that it is a universal Turing machine.
>Knowledge, according to Deutsch, is literally guesswork. Einstein’s theory of relativity was a bold guess. As was Darwin’s theory of evolution. We make guesses then submit them to criticism. This criticism can take the form of arguments or empirical tests.
Intelligence aside, is it not time to put Popper to rest? I am not sure how he ever got popular by simply selling a degraded version of logical positivism to people, but his additions are as stupid as his overall philosophy is unoriginal. It would be an improvement, both in fairness to the man and in actual practice, to be Ayerists instead. Quite simply, Deutsch, and by extension Popper, are retarded when they claim that relativity or Darwin's theory of evolution are mere guesswork, discounting all inductive inference. Knowledge is clearly not a random walk, because if it were we would still be living in caves, due to the insane dimensionality of knowledge-space. As an actual scientist (it seems Deutsch only ever theorized, predisposing him to this dumb sophistry), I make inductive inferences daily, and it heavily guides my theories. Popper is what happens when pseuds lacking any scientific output think they know how knowledge works. My hypotheses are always inductive inference from small n verified and refined with bigger n.
Well done with this compare-and-contrast. I hope you write more of them. The American Pragmatists that you mention in a footnote sound like a possibility.
> Earth may be the one planet where asteroids get repelled rather than attracted.
Even after rereading the context a few times, I can't figure this one out. What does this counterfactual mean?
> Deutsch's views both on quantum physics and knowledge are minority views within their respective fields.
Do these views of his seem connected? This is a low-value question; I'm idly curious.
> He thinks most parenting norms, where the parent assumes power over the child, are immoral.
If someone convinced him that humans are not born universal explainers, but only become so through a highly specific sort of education that children tend to dislike, do you think that he would he change his stance?
> Ironically some fans seem to treat Deutsch as infallible. A milder accusation is that the ratio of how much the community knows about their thinkers (Deutsch and Popper) relative to other thinkers seems higher than other communities.
Where do the Deutschist-Popperians congregate? (Other than Twitter, ideally.)
> The psychologist Paul Bloom describes that our theories around an experience affect the pleasure we receive.
Does this actually differ from common wisdom on pleasure we get from food? Don't most people have the experience of deciding to enjoy something they're about to eat, when otherwise they wouldn't enjoy it?
"But what about the claims that some things are inherently unknowable? Such as Colin McGuin’s [actually McGinn] awkwardly named mysterianism around the intractability of the hard problem of consciousness.
Deutsch argues that invoking unknowable knowledge is equivalent to appealing to the supernatural. Both are non-explanations. Such knowledge would resemble Zeus as they would both control us but remain unknowable"
This badly strawmans his opponents. Firstly "there are limits to explanation" just isn't intended as a positive explanation for anything. Secondly, limitations aren't believed by anybody to be anthropic entities such as Zeus.
“All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.”
...is not a claim that's at all.obvious given the common sense definition of knowledge.
"Knowledge can exist without belief. It’s instantiated in books, computer programs, and genes. "
"Not only can all problems be solved, but all people can solve problems. People have universality. As Deutsch says: “there can be only one type of person: universal explainers”. Universal explainers can create explanatory knowledge.
This falls out of the Church-Turing Thesis where anything is computable if it can be performed by a Turing machine"
Are human minds actually analagous to Turing Machines? No, because, the truly universal TM has infinite memory and is infinitely programmable -- neither is true of humans. In addition, We can’t completely wipe and reload our brains, so we might be forever constrained by some fundamental hardcoding , something like Chomskyan innate linguistic structures , or Kantian perceptual categories. And having quantitative limitations puts a ceiling on which concepts and theories we can entertain. Which is effectively a qualitative limit. Being able to rewrite out genetic code does not entirely avoid the problem: if we have a blind spot that we are not even aware of, we cannot overcome it.
Deutsch believes there is no limit to explanation. That's like the claim that there is no highest number: it's theoretically true , but in practice there is a limit to the numbers you can think about. So he doesn't just need the claim about the limits of explanation, in the abstract, he needs a claim about the limitations, or lack thereof of the human mind.
And he has one, which is the conjecture that humans are universal explainers. This is argued by analogy with Turing machines, which immediately runs into the problem of finite memory. Whatever algorithm generates any possible explanation needs to fit in a human brain...and merely having the capacity is no guarantee of having the algorithm. It also runs into the problem that's it's an argument by analogy. Argument by analogy isn't logically valid. Or perhaps the idea is just a conjecture, and the analogy is meant to illustrate it.
For Deutsch, the ability to explain is all-or-nothing...so that if you are an explainer, you can generate any explanation, and if you aren't ,you can't generate any. Why? Surely a limited, imperfect explanation-generator is conceivable. That's an unrefuted conjecture, too.
And there's plenty of evidence that the ability to create and understand explanations lies along a spectrum. Newtons and Einsteins arise barely once a century,..and the less gifted are often unable to grasp their explanations, let alone recreate them.
Deutsch seems to think that non human animals aren't universal explainers, and therefore aren't explainers at all, but, again, there is an observed spectrum of abilities ..a dog isn't as smart as a human , but is a lot smarter than a worm.Or maybe the line is somewhere beneath really smart humans, like physics PhDs. But the 99% who aren't physics PhDs aren't hopeless at explanations. The all-or-nothing theory would predict that the large number of people who aren't quite as smart as physics or professors, can't come up with explanations at all. The non physicists clearly can come up with explanations, But they clearly can't come up with any explanation, since they can't understand any explanation...If someone can't understand relativity when it is explained to them, how can they have the power to recreate it?
But just because the physics PhDs are better explained doesn't mean they are universal explainers. Why shouldn't the universal explainers be some alien species with an average IQ of 1000?
Deutsch is in favour of explanation in the abstract but seems oddly uninterested in explaining well attested facts about variations in cognitive ability.
"But the problem with explaining human behavior in terms of genes, as a Deutschian, is it quickly runs counter to human universality"
The problem with universality is that it runs counter to, a lot.of other evidence. If an idea is pure conjjecture, then the contrary evidence is refutation. That's how conjecture and refution work.
Disclaimer: I'm a rationalist who respects Deutsch's views more than probably most rationalists would.
I think the biggest problem with the book is that it's a work in philosophy, but is written in a way that makes it notoriously hard to criticise or even sometimes to understand clearly what the author intended to say. As evidenced by this review.
> Evolutionary psychology & behavioral genetics
I know little about this debate, but haven't Sapolsky put it to rest in "Behave"?
Regarding Bayesianism & Popperianism: I suspect Active Inference have married them. "A theory that explains how brains create explanations": representation learning would do?
"Those enslaved tend to revolt. [...] Another reason he’s not concerned is that moral progress tends to come along with technological progress."
I particularly like how these arguments are induction which he criticises.
This is virtuoso explaining. I have been waiting for a blog post like this to help resolve similar contradictions in my own mind over this same topic. Thank you, Cam
A useful summation,thank you.
I heard from a friend ;)
SERIOUSLY incredible, Cam. How this isn’t replete with comments and likes is testimony to how early your substack journey is. This is maybe the best introduction to Deutsch I’ve encountered, and will aid me in my efforts to disseminate--and explain :)--Deutsch’s originality and appeal. Sincere thanks.
Shout out to Carlos for sharing.
EPIC
Great piece. Thank you!
It's so sad to see what seems to have been a fairly smart man degenerate to base sophistry. Sadder still are the numerous heathens who egg it on.
Deutsch has made the key error of being blatantly wrong on numerous counts. This is deadly for a sophist. He claims humans are universal knowledge creators, but this is a delusional idea derived from a lifetime of isolation to the Ivory Tower. Most people are more like animals than David Deutsch. Curiously he deprives animals of this status, going as far as saying they lack qualia because of it. But if man evolved from beast then surely there could be men who lack qualia and "universal" status, because even given a discrete threshold between qualia and no qualia, the first "universal man" must have bred with animals, likely some offspring who lacked qualia and some who did not. It follows that to this day some men might lack qualia or this "universality" he is concerned with. If the sign of lacking it is lack of any intellectual output whatsoever, then many surely lack it. If, perhaps, Deutsch believes the sign is the capacity to speak, then maybe all healthy men are universals (although I wonder if the retarded and neurologically injured lack qualia in his mind?). Even so, his denial of intelligence and its genetic basis remains bizarre. It seems he might accept that genetics set a person's "processing speed". Therefore they simply must be given time to understand Relativity. But we typically do not think of a 2002 Windows 95 laptop with Intel Celeron Inside as being able to run Crysis 3 despite the fact that it is a universal Turing machine.
>Knowledge, according to Deutsch, is literally guesswork. Einstein’s theory of relativity was a bold guess. As was Darwin’s theory of evolution. We make guesses then submit them to criticism. This criticism can take the form of arguments or empirical tests.
Intelligence aside, is it not time to put Popper to rest? I am not sure how he ever got popular by simply selling a degraded version of logical positivism to people, but his additions are as stupid as his overall philosophy is unoriginal. It would be an improvement, both in fairness to the man and in actual practice, to be Ayerists instead. Quite simply, Deutsch, and by extension Popper, are retarded when they claim that relativity or Darwin's theory of evolution are mere guesswork, discounting all inductive inference. Knowledge is clearly not a random walk, because if it were we would still be living in caves, due to the insane dimensionality of knowledge-space. As an actual scientist (it seems Deutsch only ever theorized, predisposing him to this dumb sophistry), I make inductive inferences daily, and it heavily guides my theories. Popper is what happens when pseuds lacking any scientific output think they know how knowledge works. My hypotheses are always inductive inference from small n verified and refined with bigger n.
Well done with this compare-and-contrast. I hope you write more of them. The American Pragmatists that you mention in a footnote sound like a possibility.
> Earth may be the one planet where asteroids get repelled rather than attracted.
Even after rereading the context a few times, I can't figure this one out. What does this counterfactual mean?
> Deutsch's views both on quantum physics and knowledge are minority views within their respective fields.
Do these views of his seem connected? This is a low-value question; I'm idly curious.
> He thinks most parenting norms, where the parent assumes power over the child, are immoral.
If someone convinced him that humans are not born universal explainers, but only become so through a highly specific sort of education that children tend to dislike, do you think that he would he change his stance?
> Ironically some fans seem to treat Deutsch as infallible. A milder accusation is that the ratio of how much the community knows about their thinkers (Deutsch and Popper) relative to other thinkers seems higher than other communities.
Where do the Deutschist-Popperians congregate? (Other than Twitter, ideally.)
> The psychologist Paul Bloom describes that our theories around an experience affect the pleasure we receive.
Does this actually differ from common wisdom on pleasure we get from food? Don't most people have the experience of deciding to enjoy something they're about to eat, when otherwise they wouldn't enjoy it?
"But what about the claims that some things are inherently unknowable? Such as Colin McGuin’s [actually McGinn] awkwardly named mysterianism around the intractability of the hard problem of consciousness.
Deutsch argues that invoking unknowable knowledge is equivalent to appealing to the supernatural. Both are non-explanations. Such knowledge would resemble Zeus as they would both control us but remain unknowable"
This badly strawmans his opponents. Firstly "there are limits to explanation" just isn't intended as a positive explanation for anything. Secondly, limitations aren't believed by anybody to be anthropic entities such as Zeus.
“All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.”
...is not a claim that's at all.obvious given the common sense definition of knowledge.
"Knowledge can exist without belief. It’s instantiated in books, computer programs, and genes. "
Except that all those require interpretation.
"Not only can all problems be solved, but all people can solve problems. People have universality. As Deutsch says: “there can be only one type of person: universal explainers”. Universal explainers can create explanatory knowledge.
This falls out of the Church-Turing Thesis where anything is computable if it can be performed by a Turing machine"
Are human minds actually analagous to Turing Machines? No, because, the truly universal TM has infinite memory and is infinitely programmable -- neither is true of humans. In addition, We can’t completely wipe and reload our brains, so we might be forever constrained by some fundamental hardcoding , something like Chomskyan innate linguistic structures , or Kantian perceptual categories. And having quantitative limitations puts a ceiling on which concepts and theories we can entertain. Which is effectively a qualitative limit. Being able to rewrite out genetic code does not entirely avoid the problem: if we have a blind spot that we are not even aware of, we cannot overcome it.
Deutsch believes there is no limit to explanation. That's like the claim that there is no highest number: it's theoretically true , but in practice there is a limit to the numbers you can think about. So he doesn't just need the claim about the limits of explanation, in the abstract, he needs a claim about the limitations, or lack thereof of the human mind.
And he has one, which is the conjecture that humans are universal explainers. This is argued by analogy with Turing machines, which immediately runs into the problem of finite memory. Whatever algorithm generates any possible explanation needs to fit in a human brain...and merely having the capacity is no guarantee of having the algorithm. It also runs into the problem that's it's an argument by analogy. Argument by analogy isn't logically valid. Or perhaps the idea is just a conjecture, and the analogy is meant to illustrate it.
For Deutsch, the ability to explain is all-or-nothing...so that if you are an explainer, you can generate any explanation, and if you aren't ,you can't generate any. Why? Surely a limited, imperfect explanation-generator is conceivable. That's an unrefuted conjecture, too.
And there's plenty of evidence that the ability to create and understand explanations lies along a spectrum. Newtons and Einsteins arise barely once a century,..and the less gifted are often unable to grasp their explanations, let alone recreate them.
Deutsch seems to think that non human animals aren't universal explainers, and therefore aren't explainers at all, but, again, there is an observed spectrum of abilities ..a dog isn't as smart as a human , but is a lot smarter than a worm.Or maybe the line is somewhere beneath really smart humans, like physics PhDs. But the 99% who aren't physics PhDs aren't hopeless at explanations. The all-or-nothing theory would predict that the large number of people who aren't quite as smart as physics or professors, can't come up with explanations at all. The non physicists clearly can come up with explanations, But they clearly can't come up with any explanation, since they can't understand any explanation...If someone can't understand relativity when it is explained to them, how can they have the power to recreate it?
But just because the physics PhDs are better explained doesn't mean they are universal explainers. Why shouldn't the universal explainers be some alien species with an average IQ of 1000?
Deutsch is in favour of explanation in the abstract but seems oddly uninterested in explaining well attested facts about variations in cognitive ability.
"But the problem with explaining human behavior in terms of genes, as a Deutschian, is it quickly runs counter to human universality"
The problem with universality is that it runs counter to, a lot.of other evidence. If an idea is pure conjjecture, then the contrary evidence is refutation. That's how conjecture and refution work.
Excellent review, thanks.
Disclaimer: I'm a rationalist who respects Deutsch's views more than probably most rationalists would.
I think the biggest problem with the book is that it's a work in philosophy, but is written in a way that makes it notoriously hard to criticise or even sometimes to understand clearly what the author intended to say. As evidenced by this review.
> Evolutionary psychology & behavioral genetics
I know little about this debate, but haven't Sapolsky put it to rest in "Behave"?
Regarding Bayesianism & Popperianism: I suspect Active Inference have married them. "A theory that explains how brains create explanations": representation learning would do?
"Those enslaved tend to revolt. [...] Another reason he’s not concerned is that moral progress tends to come along with technological progress."
I particularly like how these arguments are induction which he criticises.
This is virtuoso explaining. I have been waiting for a blog post like this to help resolve similar contradictions in my own mind over this same topic. Thank you, Cam