The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Physicist Dr. David Deutsch - Quantum Computing, Turing Machines, and Multiverses (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_730)

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00:01:16.280 Hi, everybody. This is Gadsad. I don't know what I've done in a formal life to be able to

00:01:21.940 convince all these unbelievable people to actually hold conversations with me. Today, I've got the

00:01:27.720 brilliant British physicist, Dr. David Deutsch on the show. How are you doing, David?

00:01:33.960 Fine, and it's an honor to be on it.

00:01:36.500 Oh, you're very kind. Let me just read for the people who may not know you a few. You sent me a

00:01:42.820 bio that would have taken me a few hours to read, so I distilled it to a few things. You're currently an

00:01:48.740 honorary fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University. You were the first to publish a proof

00:01:54.180 of the universality of a universal quantum computer. We'll try to see if we can understand

00:01:59.480 what that means. Published the first quantum algorithm proving to be exponentially faster than

00:02:05.340 any Turing machine algorithm. Look what I've got here, David. The biography of Alan Turing. And then

00:02:12.380 a pioneer in the field of quantum computation. Received the Breakthrough Prize in Physics,

00:02:19.220 the Institute of Physics, Isaac Newton Medal and Prize, the Messias Quantum Prize, the Dirac,

00:02:27.140 Paul Dirac. Here's his biography. The Paul Dirac Medal and Prize. Holy moly, that's a lot of awards.

00:02:33.700 You were a fellow of the Royal Society in 2008. And I'll just mention your two books meant to

00:02:39.220 be consumed by the general public, the beginning of infinity, and the fabric of reality. Anything

00:02:46.040 else you want to add before we dive deep? No, as you said, that's probably already too much.

00:02:52.120 Okay, so I thought the first thing we would do, and by the way, as I was reading your bio, I mean,

00:02:56.880 I saw in one of your books, you talk about Popper, you talk about Turing, you talk about Dawkins.

00:03:01.380 Those are all guys that I absolutely love. So it's not going to be very hard for us to have a really

00:03:05.980 fun conversation. Question one, which I'm very afraid to ask, because Richard Feynman already told

00:03:12.540 us that, I can't remember the exact quote, but if you think you understand quantum physics,

00:03:17.640 nobody understands quantum physics, or something to that effect. Can you tell us what is quantum

00:03:22.400 physics, and then how does that translate into quantum computing?

00:03:26.800 Yes. I'm not sure when Feynman said that. It may have been closer to being true when he said it,

00:03:41.860 because quantum theory, which is the most fundamental theory we know in physics, took a few wrong turns

00:03:54.300 during the early 20th century, and it was in a complete mess philosophically. I mean, it was

00:04:01.180 like compulsory to talk nonsense about it, and it's possible that Feynman was referring to that

00:04:08.460 when he said that no one understands it. No one could understand it, because it didn't make sense.

00:04:14.740 On the one occasion that I was honored to meet Feynman, we spoke, now I was very junior, but I just

00:04:27.140 started my work on quantum computers, and he seemed perfectly reasonable. He didn't say anything like

00:04:35.580 that. I asked him what he thought of the prevailing so-called interpretation of quantum theory,

00:04:44.740 which was nonsense. And he said, oh, Johnny never intended that to be permanent. I thought,

00:04:52.560 Johnny? Wait, John von Neumann? Yes. He never intended that to be permanent. It was just a stopgap

00:05:05.880 measure to allow them to make computations and make predictions. But it was never meant to be

00:05:13.540 actually true of the world. But at that time, by the time I met him, the right way of looking at it

00:05:23.920 had already existed for 30 years. It was invented by a physics graduate student of Feynman's mentor,

00:05:35.880 John Wheeler, who was also my mentor. Wow. And it is called the Many Worlds, Many Universes Interpretation.

00:05:46.260 Though it's not an interpretation. It's simply saying, right, let's go back to the beginning.

00:05:51.440 Forget all this nonsense about the observer and one can't distinguish between things that are true

00:06:01.620 and things that only look as though they're true and so on. And let's go back to first principles.

00:06:07.060 Let's just apply the way of using physical theories that we're all taught when we're undergraduates.

00:06:15.340 And he looked at the equations and the equations clearly say that there are many universes and

00:06:23.720 usually they're independent of each other. So when you're in one of them, it just looks like the others

00:06:29.240 aren't there. But occasionally they affect each other. And that's called quantum interference.

00:06:36.580 And that's the most important physical phenomenon in quantum theory. So that's what happens when you

00:06:48.260 take quantum theory seriously as a description of the world.

00:06:51.700 Okay, let me so much to unpack there. So if when you say multiple universes, so and you'll correct me if I'm

00:06:58.600 getting some of the numbers wrong right now, we we have a sense that the universe, the outer edges of

00:07:04.380 the universe is about 16 billion light years away. Does that sound right? Sounds right.

00:07:09.580 So that's the universe as we know it. Okay, whatever. What does it then mean to have multiple universes?

00:07:18.220 There is a pathway by which I go from the knowable universe that has a current outer limit of 16

00:07:25.920 billion light years away to where what what happens? Where do I go?

00:07:30.260 Well, the literal answer to where is right here. But the laws of physics are so I'm already lost.

00:07:36.900 I already don't follow what you're saying. But go ahead.

00:07:41.200 Suppose, you know, it's like the Twilight Zone or something in Superman comics or something like that.

00:07:46.560 It's another world that coexists with ours, roughly speaking, in the same space.

00:07:54.660 And because it doesn't interact with us in any way, it's like dark matter, you know, or neutrinos.

00:08:02.740 We're deluged with trillions of neutrinos per second.

00:08:07.440 But we don't feel them because they don't interact with our kind of matter.

00:08:11.980 And it's the same with the other universes of quantum theory, except that unlike neutrinos,

00:08:18.660 they do interact strongly with our universe under certain circumstances.

00:08:25.360 And these circumstances can be set up in the laboratory.

00:08:29.980 And then they give rise to astounding effects.

00:08:33.700 So there is an earthly manifestation of that theory that is not just some axiomatic, elegant thing that happens in Booga land in mathematics.

00:08:46.260 There is a way for me to interact with that reality to say, there is.

00:08:52.040 Oh, there is. OK, got it. Go on.

00:08:54.100 Yes. And and the the experiments in which this is demonstrated are just astounding.

00:09:03.980 I mean, if you think about what's happening there, you just have to go slack jawed and say, you know, how can the world be like this?

00:09:12.420 But it is. It is. And the I did a series of lectures once, only got halfway through.

00:09:24.940 But but the second one that I did had this experiment.

00:09:29.920 I actually went to the to the quantum optics lab in the Clarina laboratory and and and I found a colleague who was willing to set this up, set this experiment up for me, because for them, it's it's like everyday stuff.

00:09:46.740 We don't set that up. I mean, we know what will happen.

00:09:49.140 But, you know, ordinary people and also theorists like me, who whenever I go into a lab, it's stopped.

00:09:57.340 Everything stops working. But but I I I knew what was going to happen.

00:10:03.140 But seeing it in person was just astounding.

00:10:08.040 It it I mean, to cut a long story short, viewers can go and find it on the Internet.

00:10:13.900 It's on the Internet.

00:10:14.740 And and many other people have put it on the Internet since then as well.

00:10:22.640 It's it's it's the experiment is done with a single photon.

00:10:26.420 How do you how do you make a single photon?

00:10:28.720 Well, you start with a laser with trillions of photons and then you put a dark filter and another dark filter, another dark filter and so on until you can't see anything coming out, of course.

00:10:40.560 Yes. But, you know, that there's there's one photon coming out every every I don't know what it is, every millisecond.

00:10:51.340 There's one which means that the space between photons is like thousands of miles.

00:10:56.900 Each one is like thousands of miles behind the other.

00:10:59.460 So you're really only doing an experiment on one photon and then you pass it through through a screen which has many holes.

00:11:08.260 And what's coming out of the other side is it it lands on a photo photo multiplier, which is an extremely sensitive detector that can detect individual photons.

00:11:21.500 And it it it comes out in a place that is determined by how many holes there are.

00:11:29.320 And that's that's the basic which shows that really the the we did this experiment in many universes and the the photon in other universes interacts with our one and they they affect each other.

00:11:43.840 And they end up in a place that is not illuminated when when when which way round is it when only one of the slits is open.

00:12:01.300 It's it's never illuminated regardless of which one you open.

00:12:04.940 Then if you open all of them, it lands in a place that isn't illuminated when just one of them is so that can't happen yet.

00:12:15.600 It does happen.

00:12:16.780 So how do we maybe this is too big of a question, but how do we take that insight that is happening?

00:12:23.960 I guess the right term would be at the nano level.

00:12:27.060 Yes.

00:12:27.500 And then jump through a gargantuan bridge to the cosmological level.

00:12:34.080 How do we go from that insight at, you know, and before you answer, David, this is maybe an opportunity to bring in Dawkins, which you talk about in one of your books, because he talks about middle world, right?

00:12:47.460 And middle world, right?

00:12:49.880 We haven't evolved.

00:12:52.260 I mean, literally in an evolutionary sense, the mind to intuitively understand things at the nano level or at the cosmological level.

00:13:00.540 And so that's why for most people, folk physics might make sense, but quantum physics, which defies the way most of us have evolved to understand how you throw a ball or a spear, it's going to break down.

00:13:16.640 So draw that bridge for us.

00:13:18.920 How do we go from nano world to cosmological world?

00:13:21.640 Yeah, well, first of all, note that what Dawkins said is clearly false.

00:13:26.440 We do understand the nano world and we do understand the macro world, the quasar distance.

00:13:33.280 But it's not intuitive, maybe.

00:13:34.760 That's what he was saying.

00:13:35.680 Oh, yeah.

00:13:35.940 It's not intuitive, but nor is the fact that the earth is round.

00:13:39.740 Fair enough.

00:13:40.080 In fact, as I always say, I actually find it an extreme effort to grok the fact that people in Australia are upside down.

00:13:53.580 And if I look down into the ground and imagine looking down, what I will see is their feet.

00:13:59.820 Now, I know that intellectually.

00:14:02.120 I can show it in mathematical terms.

00:14:04.900 I can give evidence, you know, and so on.

00:14:07.460 But actually, intuitively understanding it, I don't think I've quite got there.

00:14:13.220 Amazing.

00:14:14.480 When you do any kind of science, when you get to the edge, of course, you find things that are counterintuitive.

00:14:21.900 Because if they had been intuitive, they would have been discovered long ago.

00:14:25.780 Right.

00:14:26.740 Aristotle did lots of observations and he got lots of things wrong.

00:14:29.860 And so science is about understanding things that go beyond our intuition.

00:14:40.660 So the way we go from one to the other, you know, I thought you were going to ask, this is at the nano level.

00:14:48.680 How do we know that it applies to the everyday level and to the quasar level and so on?

00:14:54.340 Well, we do.

00:14:56.040 I mean, of course, all scientific theories are temporary.

00:14:59.980 So we will no doubt have better theories in the future.

00:15:03.900 But there's no problem with understanding the world insofar as it goes via quantum theory or via general relativity or both.

00:15:13.120 The way we know, for example, is that the cosmic microwave background radiation was released into somewhere that we can see when the universe was very small compared with how it is now and very small and very dense.

00:15:36.860 And the physical processes affecting it were subject to another quantum phenomenon, quantum fluctuations, which is a bowdlerized or sanitized way of saying interference from other universes.

00:16:00.180 But we call it fluctuations as if, you know, it's going fuzzing like boiling water.

00:16:08.240 But it's not like that at all.

00:16:09.520 It's just different in different universes and they affect each other.

00:16:13.320 And we can work out from that how that microwave background radiation is going to look 13 point something billion years ago, billion years later, when we look up in the sky and we see the microwave background radiation is patchy.

00:16:32.960 Well, what are those patches?

00:16:35.360 You know, how big are they?

00:16:36.520 How intense are they?

00:16:37.600 We can work it out from quantum theory and lo and behold, that's what we see.

00:16:45.100 Well, actually, we see it.

00:16:47.300 I forget what it is now.

00:16:48.460 We see it about 40 percent different from how it actually looks from what we predict, which is a big problem in cosmology at the moment.

00:16:57.680 But, you know, that doesn't affect the fact that the smallest level we know about affects the largest level we know about in a testable way.

00:17:13.600 And usually the epistemology of what you're talking about is you develop something mathematically, axiomatically, and then you say, if this theory is right.

00:17:28.260 So now here we introduce Popper.

00:17:29.600 If the data over there that I'm looking up looks in pattern A, then the theory must be wrong, hence falsified.

00:17:38.520 But if it looks like B, that is unassailable proof that it is correct, right? 0.94

00:17:43.880 Because the reason I'm asking this question, because I deal with human beings where, I mean, yes, the scientific method is the same in a grand epistemological sense.

00:17:52.820 But I'm using a different type of paradigm and testing whether testosterone affects men's behavior when they ride a Porsche.

00:18:02.860 So did I get that roughly right in terms of I look at the world, it's either A or B, and then that tells me whether my mathematical model was right?

00:18:12.400 This gets right the logic of testing scientific theories, but it doesn't get right the logic and epistemology of the whole of science.

00:18:20.620 So this is where you and I probably disagree.

00:18:24.160 So before all this testing, before this mathematical writing down of mathematical equations, before that happens, we have a problem.

00:18:35.480 This is, a colleague of mine says that this concept of a problem is actually Popper's greatest contribution to philosophy.

00:18:47.300 The idea that everything begins with a problem, not with observation, not with conjecture, not with a theory.

00:18:56.120 It begins with a problem.

00:18:57.740 And then the next thing.

00:18:59.320 So we have a problem like, how the hell do you explain what this photon does that I described to you earlier?

00:19:06.420 Basically, it's inconceivable, you know, it seems to, the photon seems to be everywhere at once, or it seems to be in one place at the same time.

00:19:19.980 How can that be?

00:19:21.920 And then you conjecture.

00:19:24.960 And they made some conjectures in the early 20th century, then they wrote down the equations, then they tested them.

00:19:33.480 And there's this famous experiment by Stern and Gerlach, who some of the physics folklore, I don't know whether this is true, but some of the physics folklore says that Stern and Gerlach were trying to disprove the theory of the pie in the sky theorists.

00:19:58.620 That this interference phenomenon would take place with material particles, as well as with light.

00:20:07.300 You know, the experiment that I witnessed was done with light, doing it with material particles is much more difficult and so on.

00:20:15.340 And so they did it with silver atoms.

00:20:20.260 And they passed the silver atoms, they made a beam, and it was incredibly difficult.

00:20:26.420 They didn't have photomultipliers, you know, they hardly had anything compared with what's in our labs today.

00:20:33.380 But they finally managed it, because their detectors, their detection method was not good enough.

00:20:45.920 And they found by sheer accident, one of them was a cigar smoker.

00:20:49.660 They found that the cigar smoke was illuminated by the beam of silver atoms.

00:20:56.380 And that's how they finally did the experiment.

00:20:59.100 As so often happens in science, serendipity kicks in.

00:21:02.820 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:03.560 So that showed that the quantum phenomena were universal.

00:21:20.700 I mean, it didn't show that.

00:21:21.880 It's just, you know, just photons and atoms.

00:21:25.600 Since then, we've done it with all sorts of things.

00:21:27.720 They're planning to do with viruses.

00:21:29.440 Oh, so by universal, it means you've demonstrated it with light, you've demonstrated it with actual matter.

00:21:38.040 Yes.

00:21:38.500 But a virus is a manifestation of material, isn't it?

00:21:42.840 So why is that a third instantiation of the ministry?

00:21:46.560 Well, it isn't, you know, according to us theorists, it isn't different.

00:21:53.620 But some people were saying, and still do to this day, that the quantum, it's only the microscopic world that sort of constantly divides itself into many universes, but then it collapses back into one.

00:22:08.800 And so they would have to predict that when enough atoms are involved in an interference phenomenon, it'll go away.

00:22:19.140 The interference phenomenon will go away.

00:22:21.680 And so when you aim viruses or something at this grid of holes, you will get just a shadow of the grid, nothing special.

00:22:30.800 They'll just land wherever there's a gap and not when there isn't a gap.

00:22:36.820 And so that's why experimentalists, you know, they want to have something to do.

00:22:41.480 So they are trying to do this with more and more objects.

00:22:45.520 On the other hand, there's another way of doing it with more and more objects, which I think is more impressive, and that is with a quantum computer.

00:22:54.420 So explain to us before, what is a quantum computer?

00:22:58.980 It's not using Boolean algebra.

00:23:01.860 It's not zeros and ones.

00:23:04.080 So far, I understand.

00:23:07.120 Take us from there.

00:23:08.220 What does it mean to engage in quantum computing?

00:23:11.060 So a quantum computer is a computer whose operation relies on distinctively quantum phenomena, especially interference, and the same thing I've been talking about all this time.

00:23:27.240 So if you imagine a photon, for example, going through this grid of holes and splitting up into, sorry, not splitting up, differentiating so that in different universes it goes through different holes.

00:23:43.420 Now, suppose you put something in front of each of those holes that performs a computation.

00:23:47.460 Well, you can't perform much of a computation with one photon.

00:23:52.480 You can perform perhaps the knot operation, you know, flip it from polarization down to polarization up.

00:23:59.740 But still, you can have them all doing different ones, and they come together, and you can make the result depend on all of them.

00:24:12.620 So you have a single photon doing the result of n different computations.

00:24:19.520 But that's not all.

00:24:21.440 If you were to send through two photons, which you can't, it's not feasible, so you have to do it differently with electrons in a crystal, but it can be done.

00:24:32.480 The same phenomenon can be harnessed.

00:24:36.560 Now, if you had two of them that were also interacting with each other in every individual universe, but were also interacting with their counterparts in other universes, then you could do a whole load of computations that depend on, that act on two bits.

00:24:59.100 So let me stop you right there, David.

00:25:01.560 So I'm going to harness right now my undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science and hopefully not make a fool of myself.

00:25:08.900 So I remember I took a course in analysis of algorithms where you are basically calculating.

00:25:17.060 I hope if any of my former professors are watching this, this is 40 years later, and I would probably still get an A-plus in the exam.

00:25:24.020 So in analysis of algorithms, you're saying, okay, this can be done in order, whatever, n log n, whatever.

00:25:32.880 What quantum computing does effectively is it takes that computational speed and increases it.

00:25:42.720 That's the net final conclusion of what we're talking about.

00:25:47.160 Is that right?

00:25:47.800 That's exactly right.

00:25:49.600 But note that the factor by which it increases it depends on which computation you're doing.

00:25:57.680 But for some computations, like factorizing huge integers, for example, that's a famous one invented by Shaw.

00:26:07.000 It increases it by an exponential factor, that is, by a factor e to the n or two to the n.

00:26:16.360 Wow.

00:26:17.840 But for any task, it's going to increase it.

00:26:22.520 But depending on the task, the extent to which it increases, it changes.

00:26:28.060 Exactly right.

00:26:29.140 Okay, got it.

00:26:30.100 Exactly right.

00:26:30.780 So then I would imagine that for things that require great computational burden, searches, that's where you're most likely to see this application?

00:26:43.880 A general search is not speedable up by much.

00:26:48.980 The, well, it depends what you count as much.

00:26:53.780 It can, the speed goes like the square root of n.

00:26:59.200 If the classical computer would take n steps because you're looking at n different possibilities, let's say you're searching something, then the quantum computer can do it in the square root of n, which is not, you know, the complexity theorists don't regard that as very impressive.

00:27:18.440 But in real life, you know, converting a trillion into a million is a million-fold improvement.

00:27:26.860 Right.

00:27:28.620 So, yeah, so note that no practically usable universal quantum computer has been built yet.

00:27:40.480 It's tantalizing.

00:27:41.900 All they've built so far is quantum computers, special purpose quantum computers, like the code-breaking computers that they had in World War II.

00:27:56.520 You know, they could break codes.

00:27:58.360 They needed a modification to let them be a general purpose, like general Turing machines.

00:28:03.640 The Turing stuff, yes.

00:28:04.420 That step hasn't been done yet in the quantum case.

00:28:07.800 Is it just because methodologically you can't yet build the architecture of a quantum computer that allows you to do this with full?

00:28:15.240 Yes.

00:28:15.720 Okay, got it.

00:28:16.580 That's the only reason.

00:28:17.660 And what's the, I mean, I know we always get these estimates wrong.

00:28:21.460 Oh, I think it's in five years.

00:28:22.600 Do we have a sense, oh, in 25 years that problem is solved?

00:28:27.020 Or do you have a bit of a sense?

00:28:28.440 In 2008, I blogged that a particular method that had been invented in 2008 and which would greatly impress me will deliver universal quantum computer in 10 years.

00:28:43.060 In 2018, it hadn't done anything like that.

00:28:47.640 And I was embarrassed.

00:28:49.100 And therefore, since 2018, I haven't prophesied.

00:28:53.460 You've been more hesitant.

00:28:54.840 You're a bit shy off the blocks.

00:28:57.760 Okay, I want to talk a bit about Turing.

00:29:00.740 Then I want to come back to, so in looking at your work, and maybe many physicists have this kind of synthetic thing where they want to put everything under a universal mechanism.

00:29:12.720 I would call it, and I'm not sure if, tell me if you're familiar with the term.

00:29:16.020 Are you familiar with the term consilience, David, of E.O. Wilson?

00:29:19.760 I've heard it.

00:29:20.400 That's Wilson, is it?

00:29:22.340 Exactly.

00:29:22.780 Yeah, I haven't read it.

00:29:25.160 It's on my shelf.

00:29:26.560 Oh, so we'll come back to that because that, I think, is going to be a wonderful overlap between our mutual interests.

00:29:32.680 But let me mention my own interaction with Turing's work.

00:29:38.040 So I've often said that of all my studies, whether it be as an actual student in university and subsequently as a professor for 30 years, nothing blew my mind in a true mystical sense as much as when I took the course.

00:29:55.320 Well, the course was called Formal Languages.

00:29:58.080 I even remember, and I didn't even check this before our meeting.

00:30:01.520 The book was by Hopcroft and Ullman.

00:30:06.540 Do you know what I'm talking about?

00:30:08.700 No, not that book.

00:30:10.020 No.

00:30:10.160 Okay, so it's a book on formal languages where it introduces all the Turing stuff, and I've gone back to it maybe a couple of years ago.

00:30:17.660 It's still in my university office where I'm looking at the margins where I've written stuff.

00:30:24.600 Half of the symbols I no longer recognize, but what I do take away from it, that it seemed as though it was a level of intellectual insight that is almost difficult to imagine, right?

00:30:39.100 I mean, I've interacted with a lot of brilliant people, but when you kind of interact with the Turing stuff, it's almost as if he existed in another plane.

00:30:47.060 So, number one, as someone who is a theoretical physicist, so you may even have more access to such folks, is my evaluation that Turing was a unique beast?

00:30:59.980 Absolutely.

00:31:01.460 Okay, go ahead.

00:31:01.900 That's why I dedicated, he was one of the people I dedicated my first book to.

00:31:07.900 So, yes, but it's interesting that you should talk about complexity theory as an example of this, because he was, like, at the very beginning, he killed himself.

00:31:22.700 He shouldn't have done that.

00:31:26.640 But the thing that I think is transcendently great about him is the discovery of computational universality.

00:31:36.360 The fact that a single machine with a single architecture can perform the computations that any other physical object can perform.

00:31:47.300 Amazing.

00:31:47.520 Now, that is such a mind-blowing thing.

00:31:50.520 As you said it, I was getting goosebumps.

00:31:52.760 I mean, literally.

00:31:53.860 Yeah.

00:31:55.100 Yeah, exactly.

00:31:56.360 I wish, you know, it's funny because one of the things, I mean, to me, this engagement, it's, I can't believe we're having it.

00:32:04.720 It's, that's what I live for.

00:32:05.880 That's why I became a professor.

00:32:07.420 But you wish, and I don't mean that as an elitist thing, what I'm going to say.

00:32:11.900 I wish everybody would spend the necessary time to be able to, I mean, it's better than taking drugs, right?

00:32:21.240 Because it kind of exposes you to a level of intellectual thought that's difficult to verbalize.

00:32:28.520 Yes, yes.

00:32:31.560 And difficult to know that it even could exist before encountering it.

00:32:37.500 Yeah.

00:32:38.700 Yeah.

00:32:41.020 Very true.

00:32:41.960 And, and, and, uh, by the way, it seems that Ada Lovelace almost had it.

00:32:50.640 Uh, I, I always thought that people who, uh, you know, Babbage, Babbage was first with a universal computer design for a universal computer.

00:32:59.260 He never managed to build one.

00:33:01.320 He, he, he, he, for all sorts of reasons, he messed it up.

00:33:05.360 And, and I always thought that, um, Ada was like, um, his, his, um, upper class muse.

00:33:15.200 Um, and, and I thought that when people called her his collaborator and, and the first programmer and so on,

00:33:21.980 they were just doing the usual thing of saying that, that we're not giving enough credit to the woman in the story.

00:33:31.060 Um, and, and so I didn't take it seriously, but then, uh, I, I saw a documentary, which, which presented, um, cast iron evidence that not only did she get universality, but, but Babbage didn't quite get it.

00:33:48.560 He, he, he only realized that the, the, um, uh, analytical engine that he had designed would be able to do all mathematics, but, uh, he didn't think of the idea of, of other uses.

00:34:05.060 It's such as simulating a physical object or composing music or, uh, uh, analyzing images or whatever, but Lovelace did.

00:34:15.540 Wow.

00:34:16.220 And, and, um, she, she, she wrote this down and, um, then it was forgotten.

00:34:23.060 You know, nobody thought of this for like almost a hundred years and Turing in his.

00:34:31.680 Epoch making paper on computational universality, he refers to Lovelace and I, and yes.

00:34:40.520 So the one thing that she, that she couldn't get her mind round universality extending to was thinking.

00:34:48.140 So she wrote, um, after listing these things that, that it might be able to do, then, then she wrote, but one thing it can't do, it can't initiate an idea.

00:35:02.120 It can only obey orders, not initiate an idea.

00:35:05.700 Remember this is before, before anything like a computer had been made.

00:35:10.380 Incredible.

00:35:10.860 And, and she was, she was thinking and, and she didn't quite get there.

00:35:14.540 And, uh, in his paper, Turing, um, addresses certain, um, objections to his view.

00:35:24.140 This is in his, his next paper, actually, not his universality paper, his artificial intelligence paper.

00:35:30.680 He, he, he lists various objections and one of them is called Lady Lovelace's objection.

00:35:38.640 And he kind, kind of takes it seriously and then kind of gently points out to her that that doesn't make sense.

00:35:47.360 Um, and that it's, it's true of all physical objects.

00:35:51.080 And, and, um, uh, so I think obviously nobody fully got it.

00:36:00.240 Um, Lovelace kind of got it in theory, but, but she, remember this was before Darwin.

00:36:09.700 Right.

00:36:10.320 So, so Lovelace, you know, she, she couldn't wrap her mind around the idea that the, the, the brain is a computer.

00:36:17.860 Um, because she couldn't wrap her mind around lots of properties of the brain.

00:36:22.780 So of the human brain.

00:36:25.140 Amazing.

00:36:25.780 Well, my, our, we have some good friends who are actually neighbors of ours.

00:36:29.940 The husband is a, uh, cyber security, uh, expert and they just, about a year ago, they had, uh, their first child, a daughter, and they named her Ada in, in, in honor of, uh, Lovelace.

00:36:46.000 So, so there you go.

00:36:46.980 So I guess the other person that I could think of that reaches that level of, let's call it kind of mystical intellectual, uh, you know, abilities would be maybe, uh, girdle with his incompleteness theorem.

00:37:02.500 That to me seems like in the same stratospheric, uh, range.

00:37:07.720 Does that, does that seem right?

00:37:09.020 Yes, uh, well, girdle's, um, proofs and Turing's are closely related.

00:37:16.240 Exactly.

00:37:16.700 They, they didn't think of it like that at the time, you know, as, as often happens, uh, one, one only sees things in perspective and the originators of an idea usually don't see the full ramifications.

00:37:30.640 Right.

00:37:30.900 So, yeah, girdle's, girdle's, uh, girdle's results were unexpected to most, most mathematicians.

00:37:39.320 Um, they were extremely fundamental.

00:37:42.400 They were, as you say, they were, they were an amazing intellectual feat.

00:37:46.420 Both of them, both Turing and girdle were replying to one of the questions that David Hilbert had asked in 1900.

00:37:55.980 Those are sort of the 10, here are the 10 fundamental problems we all need to be paying attention to.

00:38:02.680 Yeah.

00:38:03.020 Right.

00:38:03.520 And, uh, Turing and, and, um, girdle both addressed that problem.

00:38:09.520 Both got the right answer.

00:38:11.240 Turing was focused on what you could do, what could be done by a physical object.

00:38:17.280 And he, he showed that this one object could do anything that any other object could do.

00:38:22.060 Girdle was focused on what can't be done.

00:38:24.080 Exactly.

00:38:24.640 Within any axiomatic system, there are questions that you could never answer.

00:38:31.080 Is that rough?

00:38:31.900 Yeah.

00:38:32.060 Okay.

00:38:32.300 But which, but which have true, I mean, there's a truth of the matter.

00:38:35.620 Exactly.

00:38:36.380 We cannot, we can't.

00:38:38.020 I never thought of it this way.

00:38:39.280 I never thought about, you know, one is doing what I, what you could do.

00:38:43.280 The other one is it, but that's exactly right.

00:38:44.940 You're, you're exactly right.

00:38:46.300 Now, is there, do we know why one would have taken the, what we can do versus we can't do?

00:38:54.020 Is there something in their temperament, their personality, their background that would have caused them to attack fundamentally, roughly the same thing, but one in a positive frame, one in a negative one?

00:39:05.040 Well, I think so.

00:39:06.900 I mean, let's not exaggerate this.

00:39:09.220 Both of them discussed both things.

00:39:12.260 But Turing, and all mathematicians are going to disagree with me on this, because they have what I call the mathematician's misconception.

00:39:24.620 But they, Turing was physically focused.

00:39:30.300 He, when, when, when he was trying to answer Hilbert's question, like, he was trying to answer the question, well, what could mathematicians do?

00:39:39.900 Well, what can anyone do?

00:39:41.520 What can anything do?

00:39:42.940 That, that was, that was, that was Turing's, and I think his whole formalism that he set up is, is, has the form, what can physical objects do?

00:39:57.560 Paper tape, paper tape, in his case.

00:39:59.740 Right.

00:40:00.640 What can paper tape do?

00:40:02.380 And then he conjectured that, that anything can do what this particular configuration of paper tape can do.

00:40:11.080 Whereas, Gödel was more of a, was, was a logician, a mathematician.

00:40:17.040 He was, he was interested in the extent of the concept of proof.

00:40:24.180 So, we now know that proof is the same thing as computation, but nobody knew that.

00:40:30.180 Yes.

00:40:31.440 Then.

00:40:32.360 So, he, he was interested in you.

00:40:34.160 What can be proved and what can't be proved?

00:40:36.240 And, and the formal system.

00:40:37.300 And he, he didn't, he didn't think, you know, let's make a machine to do it.

00:40:40.740 That, that's, that's a different, different issue.

00:40:43.660 It seemed like a different issue, though it isn't.

00:40:46.920 And did they ever, I think they would have overlapped, right?

00:40:50.700 They were contemporaries.

00:40:52.060 Yes.

00:40:52.320 Do we have any historical evidence that they would have ever interacted with one another?

00:40:58.100 I don't know.

00:41:00.420 I don't know much history.

00:41:03.380 The, the, but the answer will be in Andrew Hodges' book, which you just held up.

00:41:08.720 That's right.

00:41:09.460 Yes.

00:41:09.760 Because everything that's known about Turing is in that book.

00:41:13.140 Oh, wow.

00:41:13.720 Wonderful.

00:41:14.080 Okay.

00:41:14.680 So, let's go back as promised to the idea of consilience.

00:41:18.580 First, David, I urge you to read E.O.

00:41:21.900 Wilson's book.

00:41:22.620 One of my great regrets is that he passed away before I could convince him to come on this

00:41:30.720 show because we have so many things in common.

00:41:33.400 One of my favorite quotes of his, which is not relevant to consilience, but relevant to

00:41:39.080 some of the other stuff I talk about when he, I'm paraphrasing a bit, but when he was asked

00:41:43.320 about his views on socialism slash communism, he answered a great idea, wrong species, because

00:41:51.460 the point is, right?

00:41:52.540 He studied social ants and in social ants' world, there is a reproductive queen and then

00:41:58.560 everybody else is interchangeable.

00:42:00.260 So, communism makes perfect sense for social ants.

00:42:03.120 It doesn't make sense for a hierarchical species like humans.

00:42:05.580 I thought that was brilliant.

00:42:06.840 But basically, for our viewers who may not know what consilience is, I'll just explain

00:42:11.640 it very quickly and then I'll bring in your sort of universal angle.

00:42:15.560 Consilience is, I mean, literally, it's in the subtitle of his book, unity of knowledge.

00:42:20.020 So, in his case, he's arguing, look, we can create consilience across the natural sciences,

00:42:28.660 the social sciences, and the humanities.

00:42:31.320 And the meta-theory that he's going to propose, and I happen to agree with that, and I'd love

00:42:36.840 to get your opinion on it, is evolutionary theory, because I can use evolutionary principles

00:42:42.440 in the pursuit of certain phenomena in the natural sciences.

00:42:47.040 I can, of course, also use it in the social sciences.

00:42:49.260 I apply it in studying economic decision-making, consumer decision-making, and so on.

00:42:53.660 And you could study it in, say, aesthetics, the evolutionary roots of certain aesthetic

00:42:59.380 movements and so on.

00:43:00.360 And so, in that sense, you have a big meta-theory that can build bridges across everything.

00:43:06.680 Now, I know that, say, in physics, you talk about the theory of everything, which, in a

00:43:11.200 sense, is a way of seeking consilience.

00:43:14.100 So, what would you add to what I just said, in terms of what E.O.

00:43:19.580 Wilson said about consilience?

00:43:21.740 Okay.

00:43:22.200 First of all, many things occurred to me while you were explaining it just now.

00:43:28.880 But the first thing that occurred to me is that I now remember why it's on my shelf and

00:43:33.760 I haven't taken it down.

00:43:35.500 Okay.

00:43:35.820 It's because E.O.

00:43:38.200 Wilson doesn't understand evolution.

00:43:42.100 Wow.

00:43:42.700 Those are big words.

00:43:45.320 So, I think he had a row with Richard Dawkins and they were...

00:43:52.060 And I think he was Richard Dawkins' hero, too, for a while.

00:43:57.180 And then, suddenly, he betrayed Richard Dawkins by talking about group selection and so on,

00:44:02.980 which is like a facepalm.

00:44:04.500 And actually, I had the same reaction where, towards the end of his career, he came out

00:44:09.320 with some papers and I said, either I'm not getting it or he's totally off base.

00:44:15.220 So, okay, go on.

00:44:16.500 Yes.

00:44:16.960 So, yeah.

00:44:17.740 So, coming on to my theory, I think my take, it's not my theory, the equivalent of consilience,

00:44:34.000 that is, the unified metatheory, as you put it, for all sciences, and I think actually

00:44:41.840 more than the metatheory, because I think more links them than just the structure and

00:44:48.100 methodology and so on, was discovered by Popper.

00:44:55.280 He found, again, I don't know whether this is historically the order in which things happen,

00:45:03.740 but he is famous for his political philosophy and for his philosophy of science.

00:45:09.640 And he found, at one point, that they are the same, that they both are about problems

00:45:18.460 and about the fact that there is no such thing as instruction from without.

00:45:24.740 There is only conjecture from within.

00:45:27.340 So, that's why Lamarckism is false and Darwinism is true, and that's why group selection is

00:45:33.900 false and individual selection is true, and so on.

00:45:39.280 And so, I think it's already there in Popper.

00:45:42.580 I think it can be, I mean, I think there's a lot more to it, and I tried to add another

00:45:48.980 couple of things to it, so quantum theory and computation.

00:45:55.860 But there's a lot that isn't in it, like consciousness and creativity and so on, that

00:46:01.560 we have no idea of how those work and how they fit in with those other things.

00:46:06.120 Although, forgive me for interrupting you, David, I'm sorry.

00:46:09.160 There is a book by Dean Simonton, who's a psychologist out of, I think, UC Davis, that actually offers

00:46:18.420 a Darwinian account for creativity.

00:46:21.980 It's actually quite mind-blowing.

00:46:23.180 So, keep that in mind.

00:46:24.240 I can give you the reference later, but go ahead.

00:46:26.160 Continue.

00:46:26.660 Yeah.

00:46:27.060 I don't read such things unless they've already made an AGI.

00:46:32.000 I see.

00:46:34.540 Okay, fair enough.

00:46:36.000 If they can't make an AGI, then they haven't got the full theory.

00:46:40.840 They might have an idea for a theory, but then lots of, you know, Popper has an idea for a theory, but he couldn't make one either.

00:46:47.760 And Turing.

00:46:49.520 Turing thought that there'd be an AGI by the year 2000, and that it would require two megabytes of memory.

00:46:55.880 Now, he's obviously wrong about the year 2000, but two megabytes of memory, I reckon that's what it'll be.

00:47:04.940 In other words, these large language models and all this massive computer power is going in entirely the wrong direction.

00:47:14.160 The answer will be a philosophical breakthrough, which will allow, once we understand what we're trying to make,

00:47:24.140 it will be relatively easy to make it with relatively few computational resources.

00:47:29.780 But, okay, I've gone off a tangent, so I've forgotten what you actually asked.

00:47:34.260 No, no, but I was just trying to link E.O. Wilson's concept of consilience to your and many other physicists' desire for synthesis,

00:47:45.280 for universality through different mechanisms.

00:47:47.780 And in an epistemological sense, it's the same general project.

00:47:52.340 You're heretofore taking things that appear to be fragmented and orphaned, separate, and trying to find a way to link them.

00:48:00.480 Yes. Well, yes, I'm not sure that these connections between things were done by trying to find a way to link them.

00:48:12.660 For example, quantum theory and computation, which I did, I wasn't looking for a way to unify them.

00:48:23.580 The way to unify them emerged as a consequence of the work I did.

00:48:31.640 The first work I did, which had a quantum computer in it, I didn't know that it was a quantum computer.

00:48:41.660 I wasn't looking for a quantum computer, let alone a universal one.

00:48:45.000 I needed it for an experiment to test the many universes theory in quantum theory.

00:48:54.380 And when I say I needed it, I needed the theory of it.

00:48:59.140 Actually doing the experiment is not really relevant.

00:49:02.800 And then it was several years later that I began to think that there's a new mode of computation enabled by this machine that I had designed for a completely different purpose.

00:49:23.240 So I don't know.

00:49:25.300 And then Popper, he called his epistemology, he eventually called it evolutionary epistemology because of its relationship with the theory of evolution.

00:49:39.580 But he didn't call it that when he first invented it.

00:49:43.480 Right.

00:49:43.600 So, you know, these things, I always say problems, all problems are parochial.

00:49:51.820 Solutions can be universal when you are lucky.

00:49:56.620 Right.

00:49:56.900 But usually they aren't.

00:49:57.960 Usually they're parochial too.

00:49:59.920 Well, universal Darwinism, which is a term that I'm sure you're familiar with.

00:50:05.180 I mean, what excites me about that term is that, well, first, so you're right that there are elements that are bottom up.

00:50:14.820 In your case, it was organic that you saw the link between the quantum work you were doing and then the application and quantum computing.

00:50:22.200 But there is, I think, also a top down mechanism whereby some thinkers and scientists are inherently or they score higher on the quest for synthetic thinking.

00:50:37.980 Right.

00:50:38.180 So the way my brain works.

00:50:40.640 So my doctoral dissertation was in psychology of decision making.

00:50:44.600 I was looking at the specific problem I was studying, David, was when is it that people have collected enough information to stop and make a decision?

00:50:56.160 So it's a search problem, but it's a stopping decision.

00:50:59.060 Right.

00:50:59.360 I don't I don't search all of the available search space, but rather there's a cognitive mechanism where I say I've seen enough.

00:51:06.060 I'm ready to marry her.

00:51:07.460 I'm ready to buy this car.

00:51:08.700 I'm ready to believe this theory.

00:51:10.440 Right.

00:51:10.940 So it's a iterative sequential sampling mechanism.

00:51:13.860 What excited me about that process, which I could then apply in marketing or political behavior or mate choice, is precisely that, that it could cause me or allow me to traverse into an, I don't want to say an infinite number, but a boundless number of intellectual ecosystems.

00:51:33.160 The same itch was able to be scratched when I became an evolutionist, which is I could now apply evolutionary thinking to study certain psychiatric disorders or study gift giving behavior that are very, very different.

00:51:48.360 And the capacity to have this key that allows me to unlock all sorts of problems is what allowed me, in my view, to have an exciting career that that can then permit me to have, I hope, an intelligent conversation with David Deutsch.

00:52:04.060 But tomorrow I could speak with, and that polymath ability is very important to me, but it's exactly what is not rewarded in academia where you have to be a hyper-specialist.

00:52:16.660 So maybe that's the next segue of our conversation.

00:52:19.180 What are your thoughts about this perennial battle between what our graduate students are expected to be, which is hyper-specialist versus the truly big thinkers, the John von Neumanns, are defined by the fact that they can make contributions across a bewildering number of fields?

00:52:37.420 Yeah, so I'm not sure which aspect of the appalling mess that is the academic world at the moment, where I should start.

00:52:55.100 Maybe you won't agree with my starting point.

00:52:58.240 I think that universities should not regard themselves primarily as teaching institutions.

00:53:05.180 I think what's needed in the world, what's needed for human progress in the large scale is creative problem-solving, research.

00:53:18.800 And it's very beneficial for research to gather the researchers into one place, and that could be a university, it could be like the Princeton Institute.

00:53:30.580 I was going to say, that's the Princeton Institute, yeah.

00:53:33.560 It's also the Oxford and Cambridge model, where you go into lunch in the university cafeteria, and you're sitting opposite somebody who is an authority on something that's unrelated, apparently unrelated.

00:53:47.960 And you have a conversation with somebody who is very knowledgeable about something not in your field.

00:53:53.980 So that is, I think, the primary function of academic institutions.

00:54:01.400 But that cannot survive unless there is also scholarship.

00:54:08.740 That is, if there is a built-up tradition of people who learn the stuff and who are experts on it,

00:54:16.300 so that when the researcher finds something that they want to understand, they will go, like ideally, they will go and find in the university,

00:54:28.420 or nowadays on the internet, of course, but it's the same idea,

00:54:32.940 somebody who has spent their life knowing about this stuff and knowing that, for example,

00:54:43.620 what most people think is true of this field is not true, and so on.

00:54:49.560 And so then, that's the second thing you need.

00:54:52.940 The third thing you need, if you're still with me, is that in order to have researchers and scholars,

00:55:03.760 you need to have a tradition where young people are inducted into this system of scholarship and research.

00:55:11.500 And they have to be, I hesitate to use the word taught,

00:55:19.840 because it's really joining a culture rather than learning facts or techniques.

00:55:29.300 They need contact with the existing culture so that they can become scholars and researchers themselves.

00:55:38.940 I mean, it could be both, of course.

00:55:40.220 And then, finally, once you've got a system that is thriving and has all those things,

00:55:47.280 lots of people who don't want to be researchers or scholars want to participate,

00:55:51.940 because it's brilliant, it's mind-expanding, it's fun, it's fun to be part of this.

00:55:59.360 They could be the thing that pays for most of it.

00:56:03.760 They could be the same thing, the thing that causes the government to pay for it,

00:56:08.600 or commercial ventures could send their people to have their mind expanded and so on.

00:56:16.620 But at the moment, it's the tail wagging the dog.

00:56:21.840 We've got students, starting with undergraduates, who are not interested in their subject.

00:56:28.160 Having someone around who is not interested in the subject is poison.

00:56:32.740 It means you can't have a proper conversation.

00:56:35.240 So, as I said, I could mention a dozen things, but I think that's the basic one that's gone wrong.

00:56:45.800 Yeah, you know, so this is my 31st year as a professor.

00:56:50.760 And while I, you know, I do enjoy, I love to get up on day one in front of a class

00:56:56.360 and see the students' faces being blown away because I'm explaining some evolutionary principle

00:57:02.580 that they'd never even heard of before.

00:57:05.100 But to your point, you know, life is about navigating opportunity costs.

00:57:12.020 And as I've progressed in my career, and I hesitate to say this because it sounds as though, you know,

00:57:20.700 I don't want to teach and so on, but I would much rather spend all my time

00:57:27.920 immersed in my creative impulse, whether it be working on another paper or even creating this content,

00:57:36.840 this conversation that we're having.

00:57:38.380 If many, many people end up listening to it, which I hope they will, that is a form of teaching

00:57:45.220 that is not bound with me having to explain to Timmy during office hours

00:57:52.240 why he received the B- on his participation grade.

00:57:56.140 Not because I'm elitist and he's beneath me, but because we have limited time.

00:58:02.060 And if I could spend my time...

00:58:03.660 Now, I think there are some universities that navigate this better than others.

00:58:07.980 So Princeton, by setting up that institute exactly for that purpose, realize that.

00:58:13.640 But many universities don't find the right balance.

00:58:17.080 So for example, at my university, I could win five Nobel Prizes and they're never going

00:58:23.140 to reduce my teaching load, which to me seems suboptimal because if my brain was so valued...

00:58:30.740 I understand that you want to teach the next generation, but wouldn't you want to use my

00:58:35.780 brain to create new stuff?

00:58:37.900 So I hear you, which leads me to the next question.

00:58:40.820 At one point you mentioned, oh, it would be great for people to discover things that were

00:58:46.000 counterintuitive.

00:58:46.840 I can't remember the exact words you said.

00:58:48.580 There is a paper, David, written by a sociologist in 1971 titled, That's Interesting!

00:58:55.680 Exclamation Point.

00:58:57.380 Have you heard of this paper?

00:58:58.500 Have you ever seen it?

00:58:59.720 No.

00:59:00.120 Well, you know what?

00:59:01.080 I'm going to send you the link to it because it's at least the first paper that I ever was

00:59:08.060 aware of.

00:59:08.660 I think he published it in 1971.

00:59:10.480 His name is Davis, where he basically argued that maybe to the point that you were making

00:59:16.900 earlier about Popper, that the most fundamental thing that a scientist has to do is work on

00:59:23.720 interesting problems, right?

00:59:25.660 So oftentimes we're very good methodologists, right?

00:59:29.200 Like I designed the experiment to be beautiful and I executed beautifully.

00:59:33.820 The experiment has internal and external ability.

00:59:37.060 Everything's checked off.

00:59:38.200 The literature review is great.

00:59:39.820 But the end bottom line of my study is complete nonsense. 0.83

00:59:44.480 It's useless, right?

00:59:45.880 So you do a huge study that demonstrates that customers who are happy with your service

00:59:52.360 are more likely to return to that place.

00:59:55.900 Well, right?

00:59:57.180 But it looked like it was very scientific.

00:59:59.080 There was all sorts of fancy mathematical modeling, but who wouldn't have thought that,

01:00:03.900 right?

01:00:04.940 So do you think that there is a way for us to better inculcate that fundamental pursuit?

01:00:13.560 Find interesting problems worthy of your time.

01:00:18.000 Life is short.

01:00:18.740 Well, the basic way to do it, the basic thing that's in the way of that at the moment is

01:00:24.340 not so much the structure of universities.

01:00:30.120 The basic thing is compulsion or lack of freedom.

01:00:34.380 So in the picture of a university that I painted just now, everybody is there voluntarily.

01:00:42.840 Well, maybe somebody was sent there by their company because they want the prestige of having

01:00:48.260 there or something.

01:00:49.120 But basically, everybody is there because they want to be.

01:00:52.600 I didn't mention exams.

01:00:53.960 People get out of it what they want to get out of it, and every participant is getting

01:01:01.980 something else out of it.

01:01:04.220 And the way that it gels together to form a living institution is that everybody is enjoying

01:01:17.040 participating, and therefore, a certain amount of creativity takes place.

01:01:21.460 You can't predict in advance where it will be.

01:01:23.760 It might be that the most creative person actually does little or invents something when

01:01:30.200 they're 22 and then never invents anything again.

01:01:34.200 That can happen.

01:01:35.920 And by the way, Popper uses that example to show that there can't be such a thing as a

01:01:41.580 scientific method because if there was a scientific method, then people who made a great discovery

01:01:47.020 when they were young would keep making them by applying the same method.

01:01:50.740 And sometimes that happens, but more often it does not happen.

01:01:56.780 So there is no scientific method.

01:01:59.020 And I recommend the lectures that he gave at the LSE when he was a professor for the philosophy

01:02:07.500 of science.

01:02:09.560 He starts off at the beginning saying something like, I can't reproduce, something like, you're

01:02:16.120 all here under false pretenses because there is no such thing as scientific method.

01:02:20.960 And I, who am the one and only professor of scientific method in the British Empire, this was a long

01:02:29.700 time ago, I'm telling you that.

01:02:32.020 And then he explains, you know, and the, you know, undergraduates, professors complain that

01:02:45.760 undergraduates ask whether something's going to be on the exam.

01:02:49.060 Well, that's not the undergraduates fault.

01:02:51.260 That's the university's fault.

01:02:52.460 That's, that's the university trying to channel people into things they're not enjoying.

01:02:58.940 So if you're enjoying something, you never ask whether that's going to be on the exam.

01:03:03.720 You don't even ask if there is going to be an exam.

01:03:07.160 Like neither of us is asking that in this conversation.

01:03:11.160 Yeah, it's funny you say this because that's probably one of my things that triggers my

01:03:17.100 ire the most when a student comes to see me at the end of class and I'm excited because

01:03:23.020 I'm hoping that they're going to ask something interesting and say, oh, what you just mentioned

01:03:26.520 about the evolutionary route, blah, blah, blah.

01:03:28.860 Is that going to be on Wednesday's exam?

01:03:31.180 And I get so pissed off because it's exactly the tension between intrinsic motivation and

01:03:36.460 extrinsic.

01:03:37.380 I'd love for all of you to be there for intrinsic reasons.

01:03:40.020 Uh, there's one thing that's really annoying me.

01:03:43.060 I'm looking at my thing and it says you only have 2.5 gigabytes of storage left on your

01:03:48.840 computer.

01:03:49.880 Uh, and I'm worried about that because I don't know if, if I run out of storage, whether the

01:03:55.820 computer will shut down or not, because I'm not, I wasn't planning on finishing this conversation.

01:04:00.740 So what I would like to do is at least end it now in a very anticlimactic way, but I have

01:04:08.240 it right here.

01:04:08.720 You only have 2.5 gigabytes.

01:04:10.960 Uh, and then maybe we can set up a, because I, we were, I was still hoping to discuss Israel.

01:04:16.780 I was hoping to discuss, uh, the increase of global Jew hatred. 0.93

01:04:20.720 We were going to maybe talk about some of the parasitic mind stuff.

01:04:23.800 So there's a lot for us to continue.

01:04:26.040 Can we shelf that for round two at whatever time is, is appropriate for you?

01:04:31.560 Certainly.

01:04:32.740 So thank you so much.

01:04:34.240 What a mind blowing conversation.

01:04:35.960 I can't wait to post it.

01:04:37.320 I just want to make sure that this is stored and that my computer doesn't die.

01:04:41.720 Thank you so much.

01:04:42.560 Stay on the line, David, so we could say goodbye officially offline and round two coming up

01:04:47.340 soon.

01:04:47.800 Thank you so much, David.

01:04:48.780 You're welcome.

01:04:49.280 Thank you so much, David.

01:04:49.640 You're welcome.

01:04:49.740 Thank you so much, David.

01:04:49.760 Thank you so much, David.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 23, 2024

Physicist Dr. David Deutsch - Quantum Computing, Turing Machines, and Multiverses (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_730)

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