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JoshuaZ comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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In his talk on Optimism (roughly minute 30 to roughly minute 35), David Deutsch said that the idea that the world may be inexplicable from a human perspective is wrong and is only an invitation to superstitious thinking. He even mentions an argument by Richard Dawkins stating that evolution would have no reason to produce a brain capable of comprehending everything in our universe. It reminds me of something I heard about the inability to teach algebra or whatever to dogs. He writes this argument off for reasons evolution didn't prepare me for, so I was wondering if anyone could clarify this for me. To me it seems very possible that Dawkins was right, and that without enhancement some problems are just to hard for humans.
If you can't watch the video, in one line he says that I'm having trouble with is "If we live inside a little bubble of explicability in a great inexplicable universe, then the inside couldn't be really explicable either because the outside is needed in our explanation of the inside." This seems wrong to me. In a hypothetical universe where humans were too stupid to go beyond Newtonian mechanics, we would be in a bubble that suitably explained the movement of large objects. We wouldn't need knowledge of the quantum things that would be beyond our grasp to understand why apples fall.
Am I missing something or am I misunderstanding him or is he wrong?
Deutsch essentially thinks that humans are what I think he called at one point "universal knowledge generators". I confess that I don't fully understand his argument for this claim. It seemed to be something like the idea that we can in principle run a universal Turing machine. He does apparently discuss this idea more in his book The Beginning of Infinity, but I haven't read it yet.
What would you think of a loose convention to not say one hasn't learned about a specific thing yet?
Saying that I haven't read something yet makes me more likely to think others think I am more likely to read it than if I hadn't said "yet". But that prematurely gives me some of the prestige that makes me want to read it in the first place, making it less likely I will.
That might make sense. In this particular context, I do intend to read it eventually. But some of Deutsch's less insightful comments and the whole Popperclipping episode here has made me less inclined to do so.
(You might be thinking of http://lesswrong.com/lw/z8/image_vs_impact_can_public_commitment_be/ )