ToKCast
This is a podcast largely about the work of David Deutsch and his books ”The Beginning of Infinity” and ”The Fabric of Reality”.
Episodes
Max is a tax lawyer who is applying Popperian epistemology to legal science and issues in AI. Links to some more of his work, and the slides to accompany part of this video are below. Slides for Max's talk(s):
https://www.bretthall.org/popper-and-legal-science.html
Max’s journal article on AI with Eric Marcus (in NLFiscaal TaxTech): NLFiscaal | Problems in AI, their roots in philosophy, and implications for science and society:
This is a "megasode" combining two episodes from Youtube all about the Simulation Hypothesis. In the first part I provide the philosophical basis for the simulation hypothesis as explained especially by Nick Bostrom and compare it to other "ultimate" explanations of reality. In part 2 I discuss and evaluate the arguments made by Scott Adams and Joe Rogan who endorse some version of Bostrom's argument.
I recently had the opportunity to participate in "Spectrum Street Epistemology" with @drpeterboghossian and a number of others including @destiny . This episode was inspired by both that event and the many other conversations I had with Peter, Reid, David, Evan, Mia and Travis across the days I spent in Florida with those excellent people engaged in the important work of defending the Enlightenment. This is a sort of disjointed...
The first part of my discussion of the differing visions of science and how scientific knowledge "grows" (or not) according to Thomas Kuhn vs Karl Popper as outlined in this chapter of "The Beginning of Infinity". Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" explains the concept of a "paradigm" and "paradigm shifts" comparing "revolutionary" and "normal" periods of science. Kuhn's work remains the most cited in the social scien...
The second in the series on "The Myth of the Framework" paper.
Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction with some reflections on Joe Rogan and Gad Saad
05:14 Section IVa reading - on “Confrontations”
06:32 Section IVa reflection
09:48 Section IVb reading
10:17 Section IVb reflection
12:14 Section IVc reading - tolerance and respect
13:26 Section IV c reflection on Herodotus and tolerance
15:08 Section IV d reading. When should a discussion r...
I take another deep dive into a deeply insightful and original lecture by Karl Popper: The Myth of the Framework. In this first part (of 4) I spend most of the episode unpacking our motivations, Popper's own thoughts on his success in combating bad ideologies and the purposes of discussion. Indeed this piece can be considered an instruction manual for discussions: how to have them and why. Below: timestamps for this episode: 00:00 ...
The best part! If you missed the others, don't miss this one. All four strands come together to explain the possibility of time travel and the intrigue that arises when considering travelling to "your" past or future to visit "yourself".
Rough timestamps follow: 00:00 introduction and the significance of virtual reality 04:03 Physically possible renderings and resolving paradoxes 07:30 what does VR time travel tell us about physics...
An outside broadcast as you will hear. Image generation and virtual reality provide a window on the physics of time travel. Why is that? And what about all those time travel paradoxes? The resolution to all is found herein.
An assortment of topics looking forward to 2025.
Timestamps:
00:00 Truth is indispensable
04:06 The “search for truth” is error correction
08:11 Remarks on selflessness and personhood. How can we square the two?
09:14 Decisions and free will and creativity
10:46 Truth and the two senses of “believe”.
13:30 Belief, epistemology and psychology
17:16 “Popperian” knowing.
18:07 Newtonian Gravity I
23:53 Why GR and QM do not mesh.
26:...
Live from Sydney, Yaron Brook and Nikos Sotirakopoulos join me on stage to discuss capitalism, liberty, personhood, energy policy, Israel and antisemitism and much more. Rough timestamps are here:
00:00 Brett’s welcome and introduction
02:32 Nikos on “What is Capitalism?”
04:21 Yaron on “What is Capitalism?”
07:33 Brett on the relationship between personhood and capitalism.
10:02 Nikos on why progress is not inevitable.
12:06 Yaron...
I discuss the point of philosophy and how "concrete" the work of Karl Popper and David Deutsch are in marshalling examples taken directly from science in order to illustrate how philosophy solves problems in other areas. Then I have some lengthy remarks on some recent criticism of Popper and Deutsch which is found here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-152605209
A long "ask me anything" episode live and off the cuff. Apologies for the audio quality.
Julian Barbour is an independent British Physicist and the author of technical and popular books including the best selling "The End of Time" and most recently "The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time". In this lecture, Julian shows just how interesting Newtonian Mechanics can get. Can it be a fundamental theory of space, time and physical reality? This is a tour de force of the history of ideas in physics by an iconoclastic scientis...
After a short introduction by me, the remainder of this episode is a reproduction of "The Deutsch Files IV" the latest in a series of conversations between myself, Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch about a wide variety of topics including, and sometimes going far beyond the contents of "The Fabric of Reality", "The Beginning of Infinity" and Constructor Theory. Go to https://nav.al to access all the other "Deutsch Files" as well as ...
Is time travel into the past and the future possible? What is time dilation? Subjective and objective senses of "time travel". David Deutsch's own documentary on Time Travel from the BBB (192) https://youtu.be/C6_gxoLwrWw?si=8vw8cwbP49XkY6e8
Here I present a "positive vision" of the kind I complained was absent in the episode right before this ("Criticism is never enough"). Here I am riffing off a line which contains a deep truth out of the Beginning of Infinity where Socrates is speaking with the god Hermes. In that passage David links a moral injunction "Do not" to an epistemological concept (error). From this stepping stone I explore some of the institutions which e...
Another response episode. This time to Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson. Douglas and Jordan are seeking a way to construct a positive vision for society, but they seem at a loss for what in fundamental terms, this might include. Part 1 of 2.
Parts 1 and 2 were, admittedly, long. So if you could not persevere through those, this gets the major points out serving both as an appendix to tie up some loose ends and as a summary of parts 1 and 2.
Here I get to the part of the discussion Peter has about my own "airchat" explanation of "anyone can understand anything". I go through arguments based on the Church-Turing Principle, computational universality and how denials of explanatory universality are appeals to the supernatural and other topics.
The great epistemologist, Peter Boghossian, created a video on Youtube that responded to me, in part. It's to be found in full here: https://youtu.be/5Vf-T8K0_zE?si=T2XkG8h8iNj1ZXGR
This first part is largely a response to Richard Dawkins on his notion of "Middle World" and Michael Shermer's notion we are not evolutionarily capable of understanding anything.
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