This is the transcript to the video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO-IiR11xe8
We all spot errors from time to time: mistakes and misconceptions in our own lives and work and that in the work of others. I realised even as a child - somewhat precocious perhaps and interested in science - that newspapers and the media routinely got wrong matters of basic science and thought then as I do now: if they’re wrong about what I do know, why would it be any different in the areas I know much less about?
Spotting errors is the route to making progress and improving one’s creativity. It is only if the error is identified first that it can be corrected and progress made. But to identify the error someone needs to see it - to have a place to stand and observe that something is not quite right. As a physicist you are standing in the existing knowledge that is physics as we understand it and so it is easier for you to spot an error in some new invention. You understand the laws of thermodynamics and this machine purports to be able to move without an energy source forever. You know there must be an error - and you’ve just found it. A battery must be hidden - and it turns out it is. Or, that’s a version of Crookes radiometer - and no perpetual motion machine. It’s a heat engine of a kind.
But to spot this you need to stand atop the knowledge of physics so you can identify the error and see a little further than others who might lack that knowledge. Physicists can spot a lot of errors because everything must obey the laws of physics. So if a geologist claims some phenomenon violates a physical law - a physicist can spot that for rocks obey physics. So do chemicals, and living things. The climate obeys the laws of physics. Everything made of matter obeys physical laws giving physicists a view of reality from a high place. They can spot a lot of errors far off.
But so can those versed in mathematics. And epistemology. And reason. And particular areas of philosophy. Which each domain added we begin to ascend to a higher and higher view from which to observe the rest. We never get so high as to escape error - the opposite. The higher we climb the more errors can be seen and the more we understand errors can be made until we realise: error is just the natural state of things.
I have been reading more than my usual number of popular science books recently and have gone back to read some more. Popular science books can be inspiring - my list of favourite authors are almost all popular science writers. I have realised now that there are at least two kinds of reading one can engage in. There’s casual reading and careful reading. Almost all the popular science books I read, I read and have read casually. This means I keep focussed on it and enjoy it (if I didn’t I’d put it down perhaps never to pick it up again) and note mentally where I broadly agree and disagree and extract from it anything that seems new and does not obviously contradict what I already know from elsewhere that seems to make more sense.
But then there are careful readings. A careful reading is where you’re taking notes and you’re also taking the book a sentence at a time checking it mentally against what you know and what you’ve also read throughout the rest of the book. And you are checking for errors and contradictions - contradictions with what you know and what was already said in the rest of the book. Contradictions even the author may not have intended. Such a reading takes some work. What I guess in many cases that such contradictions creep into many otherwise good science books for at least one reason, among perhaps many. And this one reason is: lack of a coherent worldview. I have been speaking lately about many things that begin with M it seems. Morality, mathematics, metaphysics, minds, multiverses, mistakes and many misconceptions - even some music. I don’t know why so many deep areas of our intellectual life contain the letter m. Maybe it’s because mmmmmm is a sound we make when thinking about such deep things when in conversation. Mmmmmm - what is the answer? Mmmmmm - that’s an interesting point.
And I realised in reading and re-reading those popular science books and then considering other things - like scientific journal articles, newspaper pieces, articles on social media and YouTube videos explaining stuff and the list is long that when they touched on those mmmmmm things as well as everything else there was a technique for locating the mistakes. Something prior to those Ms. A lookout if you will. L after all comes before M. Before you get to M, you cannot forget L. L is the lookout. It’s the place you stand to see it all - the landscape. Mathematic landscapes, metaphysical landscapes, moral landscapes, and more. But how you see these things and whether you can spot a landscape of mistakes and misconceptions depends on where you stand. Where your lookout is and how high it might be. You should have a lookout. You should understand your lookout. It is your outlook. It is your worldview.
Could it be possible to have a lookout that brings together philosophy, physics, epistemology, mathematics, computation and more besides? Can it be these can cohere in a way that can make sense? Can one find a place to stand?
A worldview - is not a religion or a set of beliefs. It is quite the opposite to those in many ways. Those are fixed ideas. There is a reason the beliefs of religion are known as dogmas. And beliefs are beliefs because one thinks they’ve found the truth and they need search no further.
But a worldview provides a way of seeing things - a view - a perspective. Like an outlook on reality. The view is what you use to see. In Australia we have lookouts. The lookout is the place you stand and look out to see what you see. But the lookout itself need not be fixed. People routinely build towers on lookouts out provide stairs to higher grander vistas. You can use your naked eyes or you can be there at night. You can MOVE and see more. You can change your place and change parts of your lookout or even all your lookout and gain a better vantage point and more of an understanding of the landscape. But you need some kind of lookout if you are going to navigate your way. And one should aim for something coherent and broadly encompassing - a place to stand and see as much as possible. As I said L comes before M - so without a working Lookout your description each M from mathematics and metaphysics to morality and more will be much more messy. L is always prior to understanding Ms. Sure you can see Ms from anywhere at all. But you’ll never see as much or as far. Lookouts are called lookouts for a reason.
A lookout provides an outlook - and outlooks can be better or worse. Nicer is better. More optimistic.
L - Lookouts
M -Make
N -Nicer
O -Outlooks
Lookout can also mean: look out! Be careful: be critical. But you are there to be inspired first and foremost from where you stand. The best outlooks see the furthest - not to predict it in most cases - but to see the possibilities of what is there and may yet be discovered. Go higher to see further. That’s the thing about any lookout. In theory one can construct a tower ever higher to see ever further. The lookout provides your outlook. It can be short squat and you can spend your time looking proverbially down at the metaphorically less significant. Or ever higher and grander - to those things that touch everything else. A good lookout enables you to watch out for the edge - of what we know and see perhaps some dangers in our circumstance. You are after all up high if you’ve done this right. So be careful - be critical - and creative. But in any case you need a lookout. A worldview. Perhaps even be a lighthouse on your lookout. Enlighten and engage. Don’t just look out, but be someone to seek out and provide some light amidst what might be a competing darkness. Optimism is a kind of lighthouse at our lookout in a sea of pessimism. It allows one to see a little further and a little better and allows others to see better too - to navigate a better way. To be a kind of protection against more dangerous ideas.
David Deutsch’s worldview provides a kind of protection - it’s rather like a martial art. But not just any. It is the Brazilian Ju Jitsu of ways of looking out at reality - or better yet it’s Mixed Martial Arts. It’s the deepest and the broadest, combining the best of all, it contains the foundations and the most recent up to date knowledge and it makes sense because it works. It is also infinitely creative - there is no end to exploring the space. And it provides you with true intellectual self defence.
You can be given an idea - a move - and you know what logically it takes to go from that idea to elsewhere. The view of epistemology constrains everything but at the same time it’s the known laws of physics that constrain the epistemology- what can be known. And even if the laws of physics are mathematical - that too is itself constrained for our knowledge of mathematics depends on what can be known which is epistemology which is itself bound by what minds and brains can do - what is computable - which is the laws of physics once again. Morality is a domain of knowledge about what should be done, but what should be done is bound by what is possible and therefore what it’s possible - physically - to do. What we can choose to do is bound by a logic and by how knowledge is created. And knowledge is created by an evolutionary process - both in biological evolution and in minds as explanatory knowledge.
If you don’t have a worldview like this whether as a writer, scientist, business person or any other person then you can more readily become incoherent in the technical logical sense. You may more readily contradict yourself or leave open questions. Your philosophy of science may be missing so you might insist upon believing certain metaphysical claims, all the while not knowing - none of that is knowable. If you don’t know some limits of mathematics or science because you ignore philosophy, epistemology and cosmology then you are apt to fall into scientism or insist that reason reduces to mathematical formulae for predicting the future. Lack of a worldview, or a more coherent worldview leave you more prone to simply picking and choosing in a non-systematic way. Your outlook might not even be a worldview. You might call yourself a scientific thinker or a rationalist but if your understanding of science is disconnected from the whole of the rest of knowledge that you regard as irrelevant, then you have taken a philosophical stance while perhaps denying philosophy is even important.
Mathematics is not everything. Science is not everything. Philosophy is not everything. Even knowledge is not everything. Only everything is everything and only all of reality contains everything. To come to better understand reality and everything you need to knit together your worldview into a fabric of reality all the while understanding - even fabrics fray and contain holes and can be added to indefinitely.
People are filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. But that does not mean those contradictions are not a problem and that correcting them when they are noticed won’t be helpful. Of course it would be. A coherent worldview helps with this. But it takes an understanding of reality and in all senses: abstract and physical - knowledge and matter. What life, computation and information, space and time, mathematics, morality, multiverses and minds are all about.
One should have some understanding to some extent of how philosophy, epistemology, morality, mathematics, physics and biology cohere together. But why those things in particular? Because they are fundamental - they are deep, touching all or almost all other areas of human interest. A coherent understanding of those allows for a consistent approach to addressing and solving the widest array of problems.
What this means is there is no end to science and no end to knowledge creation or creation generally. What that entails is eternal optimism: problems will be encountered - that’s inevitable - but they will always be soluble. And those solutions lead to a life and a world of better problems personally and civilizationally.
The idea we do have, can have or indeed will have some final once and for all answer anywhere implies an end of progress - an end of problem solving. And it implies that some will possess some final truth - some dogma to defend. And that only ever leads to tyranny. The notion that the truth is manifest somehow. But it cannot be. It can only be imperfectly understood yet always better understood by improving our explanations in the direction of bringing us ever closer to reality. But that journey is infinite. And we’re always just at the beginning.
Inspired by the work of:
David Deutsch & Karl Popper
We all spot errors from time to time: mistakes and misconceptions in our own lives and work and that in the work of others. I realised even as a child - somewhat precocious perhaps and interested in science - that newspapers and the media routinely got wrong matters of basic science and thought then as I do now: if they’re wrong about what I do know, why would it be any different in the areas I know much less about?
Spotting errors is the route to making progress and improving one’s creativity. It is only if the error is identified first that it can be corrected and progress made. But to identify the error someone needs to see it - to have a place to stand and observe that something is not quite right. As a physicist you are standing in the existing knowledge that is physics as we understand it and so it is easier for you to spot an error in some new invention. You understand the laws of thermodynamics and this machine purports to be able to move without an energy source forever. You know there must be an error - and you’ve just found it. A battery must be hidden - and it turns out it is. Or, that’s a version of Crookes radiometer - and no perpetual motion machine. It’s a heat engine of a kind.
But to spot this you need to stand atop the knowledge of physics so you can identify the error and see a little further than others who might lack that knowledge. Physicists can spot a lot of errors because everything must obey the laws of physics. So if a geologist claims some phenomenon violates a physical law - a physicist can spot that for rocks obey physics. So do chemicals, and living things. The climate obeys the laws of physics. Everything made of matter obeys physical laws giving physicists a view of reality from a high place. They can spot a lot of errors far off.
But so can those versed in mathematics. And epistemology. And reason. And particular areas of philosophy. Which each domain added we begin to ascend to a higher and higher view from which to observe the rest. We never get so high as to escape error - the opposite. The higher we climb the more errors can be seen and the more we understand errors can be made until we realise: error is just the natural state of things.
I have been reading more than my usual number of popular science books recently and have gone back to read some more. Popular science books can be inspiring - my list of favourite authors are almost all popular science writers. I have realised now that there are at least two kinds of reading one can engage in. There’s casual reading and careful reading. Almost all the popular science books I read, I read and have read casually. This means I keep focussed on it and enjoy it (if I didn’t I’d put it down perhaps never to pick it up again) and note mentally where I broadly agree and disagree and extract from it anything that seems new and does not obviously contradict what I already know from elsewhere that seems to make more sense.
But then there are careful readings. A careful reading is where you’re taking notes and you’re also taking the book a sentence at a time checking it mentally against what you know and what you’ve also read throughout the rest of the book. And you are checking for errors and contradictions - contradictions with what you know and what was already said in the rest of the book. Contradictions even the author may not have intended. Such a reading takes some work. What I guess in many cases that such contradictions creep into many otherwise good science books for at least one reason, among perhaps many. And this one reason is: lack of a coherent worldview. I have been speaking lately about many things that begin with M it seems. Morality, mathematics, metaphysics, minds, multiverses, mistakes and many misconceptions - even some music. I don’t know why so many deep areas of our intellectual life contain the letter m. Maybe it’s because mmmmmm is a sound we make when thinking about such deep things when in conversation. Mmmmmm - what is the answer? Mmmmmm - that’s an interesting point.
And I realised in reading and re-reading those popular science books and then considering other things - like scientific journal articles, newspaper pieces, articles on social media and YouTube videos explaining stuff and the list is long that when they touched on those mmmmmm things as well as everything else there was a technique for locating the mistakes. Something prior to those Ms. A lookout if you will. L after all comes before M. Before you get to M, you cannot forget L. L is the lookout. It’s the place you stand to see it all - the landscape. Mathematic landscapes, metaphysical landscapes, moral landscapes, and more. But how you see these things and whether you can spot a landscape of mistakes and misconceptions depends on where you stand. Where your lookout is and how high it might be. You should have a lookout. You should understand your lookout. It is your outlook. It is your worldview.
Could it be possible to have a lookout that brings together philosophy, physics, epistemology, mathematics, computation and more besides? Can it be these can cohere in a way that can make sense? Can one find a place to stand?
A worldview - is not a religion or a set of beliefs. It is quite the opposite to those in many ways. Those are fixed ideas. There is a reason the beliefs of religion are known as dogmas. And beliefs are beliefs because one thinks they’ve found the truth and they need search no further.
But a worldview provides a way of seeing things - a view - a perspective. Like an outlook on reality. The view is what you use to see. In Australia we have lookouts. The lookout is the place you stand and look out to see what you see. But the lookout itself need not be fixed. People routinely build towers on lookouts out provide stairs to higher grander vistas. You can use your naked eyes or you can be there at night. You can MOVE and see more. You can change your place and change parts of your lookout or even all your lookout and gain a better vantage point and more of an understanding of the landscape. But you need some kind of lookout if you are going to navigate your way. And one should aim for something coherent and broadly encompassing - a place to stand and see as much as possible. As I said L comes before M - so without a working Lookout your description each M from mathematics and metaphysics to morality and more will be much more messy. L is always prior to understanding Ms. Sure you can see Ms from anywhere at all. But you’ll never see as much or as far. Lookouts are called lookouts for a reason.
A lookout provides an outlook - and outlooks can be better or worse. Nicer is better. More optimistic.
L - Lookouts
M -Make
N -Nicer
O -Outlooks
Lookout can also mean: look out! Be careful: be critical. But you are there to be inspired first and foremost from where you stand. The best outlooks see the furthest - not to predict it in most cases - but to see the possibilities of what is there and may yet be discovered. Go higher to see further. That’s the thing about any lookout. In theory one can construct a tower ever higher to see ever further. The lookout provides your outlook. It can be short squat and you can spend your time looking proverbially down at the metaphorically less significant. Or ever higher and grander - to those things that touch everything else. A good lookout enables you to watch out for the edge - of what we know and see perhaps some dangers in our circumstance. You are after all up high if you’ve done this right. So be careful - be critical - and creative. But in any case you need a lookout. A worldview. Perhaps even be a lighthouse on your lookout. Enlighten and engage. Don’t just look out, but be someone to seek out and provide some light amidst what might be a competing darkness. Optimism is a kind of lighthouse at our lookout in a sea of pessimism. It allows one to see a little further and a little better and allows others to see better too - to navigate a better way. To be a kind of protection against more dangerous ideas.
David Deutsch’s worldview provides a kind of protection - it’s rather like a martial art. But not just any. It is the Brazilian Ju Jitsu of ways of looking out at reality - or better yet it’s Mixed Martial Arts. It’s the deepest and the broadest, combining the best of all, it contains the foundations and the most recent up to date knowledge and it makes sense because it works. It is also infinitely creative - there is no end to exploring the space. And it provides you with true intellectual self defence.
You can be given an idea - a move - and you know what logically it takes to go from that idea to elsewhere. The view of epistemology constrains everything but at the same time it’s the known laws of physics that constrain the epistemology- what can be known. And even if the laws of physics are mathematical - that too is itself constrained for our knowledge of mathematics depends on what can be known which is epistemology which is itself bound by what minds and brains can do - what is computable - which is the laws of physics once again. Morality is a domain of knowledge about what should be done, but what should be done is bound by what is possible and therefore what it’s possible - physically - to do. What we can choose to do is bound by a logic and by how knowledge is created. And knowledge is created by an evolutionary process - both in biological evolution and in minds as explanatory knowledge.
If you don’t have a worldview like this whether as a writer, scientist, business person or any other person then you can more readily become incoherent in the technical logical sense. You may more readily contradict yourself or leave open questions. Your philosophy of science may be missing so you might insist upon believing certain metaphysical claims, all the while not knowing - none of that is knowable. If you don’t know some limits of mathematics or science because you ignore philosophy, epistemology and cosmology then you are apt to fall into scientism or insist that reason reduces to mathematical formulae for predicting the future. Lack of a worldview, or a more coherent worldview leave you more prone to simply picking and choosing in a non-systematic way. Your outlook might not even be a worldview. You might call yourself a scientific thinker or a rationalist but if your understanding of science is disconnected from the whole of the rest of knowledge that you regard as irrelevant, then you have taken a philosophical stance while perhaps denying philosophy is even important.
Mathematics is not everything. Science is not everything. Philosophy is not everything. Even knowledge is not everything. Only everything is everything and only all of reality contains everything. To come to better understand reality and everything you need to knit together your worldview into a fabric of reality all the while understanding - even fabrics fray and contain holes and can be added to indefinitely.
People are filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. But that does not mean those contradictions are not a problem and that correcting them when they are noticed won’t be helpful. Of course it would be. A coherent worldview helps with this. But it takes an understanding of reality and in all senses: abstract and physical - knowledge and matter. What life, computation and information, space and time, mathematics, morality, multiverses and minds are all about.
One should have some understanding to some extent of how philosophy, epistemology, morality, mathematics, physics and biology cohere together. But why those things in particular? Because they are fundamental - they are deep, touching all or almost all other areas of human interest. A coherent understanding of those allows for a consistent approach to addressing and solving the widest array of problems.
What this means is there is no end to science and no end to knowledge creation or creation generally. What that entails is eternal optimism: problems will be encountered - that’s inevitable - but they will always be soluble. And those solutions lead to a life and a world of better problems personally and civilizationally.
The idea we do have, can have or indeed will have some final once and for all answer anywhere implies an end of progress - an end of problem solving. And it implies that some will possess some final truth - some dogma to defend. And that only ever leads to tyranny. The notion that the truth is manifest somehow. But it cannot be. It can only be imperfectly understood yet always better understood by improving our explanations in the direction of bringing us ever closer to reality. But that journey is infinite. And we’re always just at the beginning.
Inspired by the work of:
David Deutsch & Karl Popper