ToKCast

Ep 226: Realism and the purposes of philosophy.

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

Ep 225: Livestream from November 27, 2024

A long "ask me anything" episode live and off the cuff. Apologies for the audio quality.

Ep 224: Shapes, Time, and Holism - by Julian Barbour

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 scientists working at the deepest foundations of his subject.
 
The video version of this lecture can be found at https://youtu.be/VzZbjL_Jvwk which may be helpful. 
 
This is not a regular ToKCast episode - it is highly technical in places. We will return to regular programming for episode 225 when we will have passed 1 million downloads. Thankyou to all fans! If you would like to support ToKCast, go to my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/c/tokcast or paypal via https://www.paypal.com/donate?token=qyzc2PwQaXf2XNAZS8g5Ke9eRfYfUs73xlBzXNfM8Bnjdm__ETUCyw86HKQ9wd1jBQ4zVKLsW0uRmB53

Ep 223: The Deutsch Files IV (ToKCast version)

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 earlier content Naval and I produced about all the Big Questions of Life, the Universe and Everything and, helpfully, the transcripts to all our discussions.  

Ep 222: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality” Chapter 12 ”TimeTravel” Part 1

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

Ep 221: Do Not Destroy The Means of Error Correction

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 emerge from such a commitment, but which themselves can also be regarded as fundamental features of a dynamic society.

Ep 220: Criticism is never enough

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.

Ep 219: Response to Peter Boghossian Part 3, Appendix

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.

Ep 218: Peter Boghossian Response PART 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.

Ep: 217 Peter Boghossian Response Part 1

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.

Ep 216: Astrobiology and Cancer

Part 2 in a series about the work of researcher Charley Lineweaver. In this episode, a targeted focus on the one thing we did not discuss out of all of Charley's scientific interests in my interview with him in Ep 215: his recent work with Paul Davies on "The Atavistic Model" of Cancer. For the peer reviewed paper on The Atavistic Model by Lineweaver and Davies see: https://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverDaviesVincent2014.pdf
For more recent work on the theory see: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014APS..MARF14002L/abstract
and https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017PNAS..114.6160B/abstract
 

Ep 215: Charley Lineweaver

A conversation with physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, polyglot and polymath - Charley Lineweaver.
00:00 - My introduction
08:57 - Charley’s fascinating early years
12:14 - From an English/History degree to physics
13:53 - Charley’s historic work on the Cosmic Microwave Background
17:34 - Methods of probing deep space
19:51 - Our accelerating universe
22:15 - Dark Matter Candidates
23:20 - The Fermi Problem and the “Planet of the Apes” Hypothesis
28:37 - Natural experiments in the evolution of intelligence
33:38: What can the early appearance of life on Earth tell us about aliens?
37:31: Non-intelligent alien life.
38:06: Deep homology and misconceptions about convergent biological evolution
44:31 The Shadow Biosphere
48:53 The significance of extremophiles
50:23 Does life arise from non-life easily or not? What do we know?
53:32 What is life?
55:56 A “debate” about people?
1:10:20 - The Potato Radius
1:15:00 - What Charley is working on now

Ep 214: Resources, Wealth, Technology, Error Correction and Knowledge Creation

The title is long enough so you look for more here? ;) This one is largely, in truth about energy and what it can do for us. Across the almost 90 minutes I cover how the concepts in the title logically cohere and depend one upon the other and we take a look at "the universal constructor" and compare the possibilities for an optimistic distant future with the reality of our situation now. Fair warning: many Australian examples are employed here. A tiny bit of Trump, a dashing of Deutsch, a yard of Yaron, morsels of Musk, some of Australia's mining magnates for better or worse and plenty of physics, philosophy and even politics. Those on my livestream may have heard a less polished (more profanity stricken) version of some of this material. This is me back to being polite even if there are reasons for frustration...
 
(See Youtube version for graphs, data and so on: https://youtu.be/ovs18b10d4Q )

Ep 213: ToKCast in Auckland - live

This is a recording (with a brief introduction first) of a keynote address I gave to open the 2024 "Naturalistic Decision Making Association" conference. People from business, government and academia came together for 3 days to talk about how to make better decisions under pressure. It was an opportunity for me to share the work of David Deutsch and Karl Popper with everyone from people working in international militaries and government defence organisations, through to leaders in business and university academics and students. Regular listeners will notice this is an adaptation of another recent episode - but I think this live version is better as I say in my introduction.

Ep 212: Livestream 3, June 28 2024

More questions, more lengthy and more verbose than ever. Enjoy, or drift of to sleep with me ;)

Ep 211: Livestream 2, June 26 2024

Fear not! ToKCast is not becoming a pure Q&A "show". This is literally a kind of "break" for me that I find easy and I note the listeners find fun. Today's a little shorter and - here's some of the topics covered!
 
00:00: David Deutsch mentioned on Lex Fridman
04:15: Dennis Noble debates Richard Dawkins on the selfish gene
16:47: The goal driven life and AI
27:51 Self similarity - minds and universes
34:39: The hard problem of consciousness and Popperian epistemology
41:30: Wave particle duality
53:53 The fun criterion - and some reflections on responsibility and “toil”.
1:05:44 - Communication and the difficulty thereof between people
1:07:13 - Roger Penrose and the universality of (quantum) computation (or Taking Theories Seriously…)
1:13:35 Book recommendations.

Ep 210: Livestream - Question, Answer and repeat for 2+ hours

I put out a call on Twitter/@X for questions and got a deluge. Between those and more from YouTube itself - this is the result ranging over predicting the future, through to theories of learning, AGI and AI, optimism and epistemology - many of the major hits and more.

Ep 209: Rational Decision Making

Riffing on Karl Popper and David Deutsch (especially). A broad overview, covering lots of the basics of "social" or "rational" choice theory, Bayesianism (again!), misconceptions, good ideas and bad. Errors my own as always.

Ep 208: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality” Chapter 11 ”Time: The First Quantum Concept” Part 3

Here we explore the distinction between classical notions of time (including spacetime physics) as approximations to how time is understood in the multiverse. How perfectly deterministic laws lead to subjective unpredictability. Consequences for free will, questions about what happened before time began (or after it ends), new discoveries since the publication of The Fabric of Reality was published in 1997 and David's subtle alterations to phrasing between The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity (in particular with reference to identical vs fungible and how tossing "fair" coins in our universe isn't 50/50 heads and tails. If you would like to discuss any of the content in this video with me at length, sign up to Airchat at https://www.air.chat where I am active daily answering people's questions and engaging with those interested in the work of David Deutsch and associated thinkers and ideas explored in his work, wider physics, philosophy and everything.

Ep 207: Variations on a Conjecture

If you are distracted by, or simply prefer a version without, the background music - you can find that here: https://youtu.be/xSbqTTs1nl0
 
My preferred version is here: https://youtu.be/2IneL4VpShE as there are some helpful (though not essential) visuals.
This is about knowledge creation and the the commonalities between the two forms known (evolution (by natural selection) and explanatory) and the differences between them. It teases out and synthesises some of the work of Darwin, Popper and Deutsch on these matters of what creativity means. I also consider the place of prediction and prophecy and the "urge" to know what the future will hold. This is sometimes the dividing line between optimism and pessimism.
You can support this ongoing exercise in optimism, exposition and encouraging rapid progress by following the links here: https://www.bretthall.org/ Thankyou for any and all support. Know it is much appreciated.