Reddit reviews The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications
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Submission Statement: On November 2016, David Deutsch and Sam Harris did a podcast together. The purpose of that podcast was for David Deutsch to attempt to explain where Sam Harris went wrong or could improve upon his The Moral Landscape idea.
David is a Popperian and has built upon Popper’s work in his two books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. This podcast sparked my interest in Popper and at the time I did not understand the disagreement between David and Sam. I asked the question and Brett Hall who is an expert (doubt he’d enjoy that label) on Popper and Deutsche was kind enough to make a video explaining their differences.
The reason I decided to transcribe this video is that I have found that comparing and contrasting Sam’s epistemology to that of Popper’s has been super helpful in better understanding Critical Rationalism, which is what Popper called his Philosophy. I have read Popper and Deutsch for a year since and have barely scratched the surface.
You do not necessarily need to listen to the Podcast to get the meat of this content, Brett does a great job presenting both their ideas clearly and their differences as well.
Anyway, here are some interesting bits from the video.
>The majority of people who have an alternative epistemology, something other than what Karl Popper views knowledge as for example, they think that knowledge is about justified true belief. They think that you need to begin with the foundation and on that foundation then you accumulate knowledge, you build it up. And this is an anti critical vision about how knowledge is created. In the Popperian view, you simply have problems, you can start anywhere at all and you attempt to solve those problems when you have them. When you have ideas that are in conflict with one another by using a critical method, it's a completely different vision.
On What Morality is,
>So instead, just to preface, what morality really consists of, it's about solving moral problems. And in order to solve moral problems, we have to conjecture explanations about what might improve things. And they can always be false. We can always criticize them.
There is no need for bedrock,
>Okay. So again, David says that moral theory should be approached like scientific theories. They don't need foundations. They don't need foundations. There are a lot of theories out there, a lot of moral theories like, Kant's categorical imperative, or Rawl's fairness or stuff that comes out of the Bible the golden rule et cetera, et cetera. Whatever your moral theory happens to be or indeed Sam's wellbeing of conscious creatures. All of these, these principles, these ideas, these theories should be seen as critiques, as critiques of each other or as critiques of any other theory that someone proposes or as a critique of a solution that someone proposes.
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>They shouldn't be seen as foundations from which you begin to build up everything else.
There is a lot of great information in here not just about morality, there’s a bit about politics, creativity, and perhaps most groundbreaking in my estimation, David’s explanation of what a person is.
I hope this is helpful!
Other Links:
> It's inevitable and unavoidable.
David Deutsch (and I, being convinced) would argue that there is an infinitesimally small chance that it won't be unavoidable:
The Beginning of Infinity (I do wish he'd released it under a free license, but it was very much worth the $11)
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch radically changed the way I think about many things. It's one of the few books I've read twice (ten years apart). The physics part was interesting, but it's the philosophy of it that affected me.
Another book of his, The Beginning of Infinity, had quite an effect on me as well, especially the idea that all solutions have their problems, and that instead of regressing, we should push forward to find solutions to the new problems.
> The many worlds theory does not solve the issue of contingency in any meaningful way. ... if you just say it was all necessary then there's only 1 possible world.
Yes, that was the point. We just have to clarify that "world" means different things in different contexts. It can mean "absolutely everything" or a particular sphere of spacetime. Or one branch, in Everett's MWI of QM. So there is one world globally, but many worlds more parochially. What we perceive as contingency is just an artifact of our own ignorance as to how our branch/world plays out. In actuality there is no contingency. The MWI, or any model resulting in a plurality of worlds, dissolves contingency altogether.
>so you now have even more possibilities which are not actuality.
Everett argued that they are actual. Deutsch argued in The Fabric of Reality that the dual-slit experiment in QM is sufficient to establish the existence of these other worlds. I'm not saying you have to agree with him or Everett. I'm only saying that these models, or any model that results in a plurality of worlds, answers the contingency problem.
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Edit: I've alluded to Deutsch's argument several times, so I thought it would be fair to post an excerpt so people would know what I was talking about. This is from his book The Fabric of Reality.
>>The possible cannot interact with the real. Non-existent entities cannot deflect real ones from their paths... It is only what really happens that can cause other things really to happen. If the complex motions of the shadow photons in an interference experiment were mere possibilities that did not in fact take place, then the interference phenomena we see would not, in fact, take place.
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsche. One of the best intuitive syntheses since Godel, Escher, Bach and already proving prophetic in hard science and quantum technology.
It's a mistake to place too much emphasis on definitions, because if you do you will always find yourself in an infinite regress. (You will have to keep searching for definitions of the terms used in previous definitions.)
This is hard to grasp unless it is appreciated that nothing we interact with that is complex and autonomous depends on how we define it. Everything real has attributes which are "out there" already.
Btw the video doesn't talk about Deutsch's criteria for reality; they're covered in Chapter 4 of his book The Fabric of Reality.
With the additional context in parenthesis, I will go on the assumption that all the pronoun 'It's are referring to Quantum Computers (QCs).
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The specific theory that was the original goalpost that you had set for accepting that there is a possibility of planes interacting and information crossing over is gone into in great detail in this book written by one of the inventors of the field of Quantum Computing:
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https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X
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I can't help but feel that you are trying to move the goal post from a specific theory to a Scientific Law which takes hundreds of years to get to.
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One of the founders of the field of Quantum Computers explicitly states that how his computers are designed to operate is to collaborate with other versions of themselves in the superposition.
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The fact that he made a prediction about particles interacting with themselves in other universes and that he could use this interaction to process information back in the 80's and later demonstrated it by producing working computers means that this fits the criteria for specific scientific theory (hypothesis, prediction + results match prediction).
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This is demonstrated and applied science at this point. Other people can come up with other hypotheses about alternate ways to explain the results, but none of those have made predictions, that have been experimentally tested and results confirming those predictions, which make them weaker in the current scientific body.
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Since I doubt you will read the book, I will provide a Cliff Note version for how Superposition and Multiverse work according to the strongest theories with the most evidence currently.
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Initially the rigorously observed phenomenon that super position states exist and that they collapse into classical behavior when a hard measurement is taken was thought of as a fuzzy state that disappears after the probability wave has collapsed.
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The more modern explanation for this which the creators of the quantum computer ascribe to is that the superposition state doesn't ever go away and just our ability to actively OBSERVE/MEASURE/INTERACT with other planes only happens when we can repeat the same action repeatedly to observe probability distributions. What was previously thought of as a wave form collapsing just means that after taking the measurement the superposition of planes expands to cover the measuring device.
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For example, (double slit experiment) if a particle is being sent 1 at a time through 1 of 2 slits and we add a measurin device to determine which slit it went through, the reason the interference pattern appears to disappear for us is that the superposition of states went from just the particle in superposition to the observer, the measuring device and the particle are all in superposition, and all 3 (including the Scientist observing results) is in superposition, so from the Scientist's point of view it appears that the wave has collapsed and a particle went through the right slit, BUT he doesn't realize that he is now in superposition and there is another version of him that has observed the particle going through the left slit, along with a superpositioned measuring device displaying results which represents the entangled environment that fits the outcome according to classical physics.
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From inside a probability wave you only see the results of one of the probable scenarios playing out according to classical physics and other probable outcomes in the past are undetectable to you.
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From outside the probability wave you can see particles and classical objects as large as a piezoelectric turning fork interfering and interacting with themselves and their other probabilistic states.
$14 only. http://www.amazon.com/The-Fabric-Reality-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X
> Interesting! Tell me more.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fabric-Reality-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X
> So, it's just the fact that science doesn't happen to use grue and bleen as predicates that makes them unscientific?
No, it's that there are no grue or bleen things (but there are blue things and there are green things).
> remember again that from the perspective of Mr. Grue, it is YOU who has hidden time dependencies attached to green
No, this is the mistake. Time dependence can be objectively determined.
> What explanations do you think hold in scientific discoveries that attest to the legitimacy of green over grue that is NOT question-begging in favour of blue and green?
You can measure if something is blue or green without knowing what time it is. Not so for grue and bleen.
Book recommendation: The Fabric of Reality
Deals explicitly with how to think about a concept of time travel very similar to this. It’s framed in terms of Virtual Reality, but I think you could translate it for your own use easily. As a bonus, it’s a pretty fun tour of some really important ideas too.
For anyone interested, please read The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch it really delves into the Many World's theory and is an awesome read.
Some good popsci-style but still somewhat theoretical CS books: