The Theory of Anything

This week we discuss cosmic horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s philosophic work, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race. This book is a masterful case for pessimism and anti-natalism.

To Ligotti, consciousness is a tragic mistake, we have no free will, and the only way we can get through this life is to life to our ourselves about reality, which is akin to participating in this conspiracy. Culture, religion, art, and most of what humans do are elaborate illusions to keep us from seeing the dark truth about existence and suffering. Bruce and Peter desperately employ optimistic arguments from Tipler and Deutsch to poke holes in this compelling and seemingly rational naturalistic worldview.

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Critical Rationalists say Bayesians just make up numbers and call it science. They're not wrong — about most of them.

But in this episode, we walk through several startling counterexamples to that very charge. How do we account for those? Doesn't that imply some Bayesians are sometimes getting something very right? Should Critical Rationalists accept the good parts of Bayesianism and reject the bad? And do Critical Rationalists actually solve the problem of "making crap up," or do they just relocate it somewhere else?

Bruce argues that the real fight isn't with AI doomers like Yudkowsky — it's with the actual father of Bayesianism, E.T. Jaynes. You're in for a real fight now!

Welcome to the heavyweight epistemology match.

This is the first episode in a multi-part series.

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This week Bruce discusses a possible improvement to Pascal’s Wager: If believing in God makes your life legitimately better, is it better to believe on those grounds alone? And what does this have to do with the fun criteria and anarcho capitalism?

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This week Bruce asks more hard questions: Is our legal system “decisionalist”? In other words, are we outcome-based rather than reasoning-based creatures? Is there something deep in our brains they tells us to go with what feels correct, even if we are Supreme Court justices? Is our reasoning mostly de facto when we are really honest with ourselves? Does a careful look at the state of the critical discussion really help us decide between theories, especially in politics and morality?

This episode is a review of Justin Driver’s The Insignificance of Judicial Opinions. Driver argues that when it comes to judicial opinions, it is the decisions that matter, not the reasoning used to justify them. But if that’s true, doesn’t it raise a deeper problem for the critical rationalist idea that explanatory power is king?

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What Bruce has called the “put up or shut up principle” is the idea we should want our theories to take on the burden of explanation as must as we can. We need to "put up" an at least equally content filled theory as a competitor to another content filled theory. He argues that this may be central idea behind critical rationalism. We strengthen our theories by increasing the potential set of falsifiers. This is how knowledge grows. Bruce is pointing out that we all like to change the goal post when we look at our own pet theories. But shouldn’t we strive to not have double standards if we care about moving towards truth?

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This week Bruce takes a deep dive into Pascal’s Wager. If there is even a small chance that God exists, and believing could lead to an infinite reward while disbelief risks an infinite loss, then believing is the rational choice... right?

Blaise Pascal was one of the founders of probability theory back in the 17th century. Even aside from the potentially problematic theological point his famous wager makes, it also raises important questions about probability theory, Bayes’ theorem, and even modern Bayesian epistemology. How do we handle situations where the potential payoff is enormous—or even infinite?

Pascal's Wager is also the thread we pull that unravels Bayesian Epistemology, while also showing why Bayesian Reasoning is really part of Critical Rationalism.

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This week we talk about meaning memes, words, concepts, and conceptual leakage. How is a meaning meme turned into a broader concept and then a theory? What is the role of language in this process?

And what is conceptual leakage? And why does it make it difficult to communicate to others?

And was Popper right to eschew questions of meaning? And what does this have to do with AGI?

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Bruce returns to AGI through the lens of a critical rationalist debate about whether or not AGI is theoretically possible. Can human intelligence be replicated? Is this a physics question or a biology question? Is our universe and our minds like a compact disc or like a vinyl record?

But really, Bruce is just using the AGI debate to explore an epistemological idea: that the state of a critical discussion is objective. If two people disagree about the state of a critical discussion, at least one of them must be misunderstanding that state—possibly both of them. It’s possible they are genuinely disagreeing over something factual, but more often than not they are really just disagreeing over epistemology.

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Is so-called "self-deception" a real thing? How can one at once be aware that something is true and yet also be unaware of it? Is it even a coherent concept? Doesn't deception require at least two entities—the deceived and the deceiver? Can "self-deception" be explained as something much simpler, namely deception?

Bruce summarizes his views on self-deception, moralizing, and dogmatism from a critical rationalist perspective, as well as it's relevance for AGI, "Super Intelligences", and human dogmatism.

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This week we are joined for the 4th time by physicist Sam Kuypers. From his Conjecture Institute profile: “Quantum physicist, interested in foundational questions. In his research, published in reputable scientific journals, he explores the quantum theory of time, the many-worlds interpretation, and locality.”We discuss: Is probability theory true? Is it useful? What is the connection between probability theory and physics? Does the many worlds interpretation make probability theory more true or less true?

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