David Deutsch on creativity, fun & education
For Deutsch, creativity is the ability to create new knowledge, and humans uniquely have the explanatory kind: we copy the meaning of behavior rather than the behavior, and we pursue open problem situations rather than fixed criteria. Fun, in his sense, means never shielding any idea from criticism, which is why hardship chosen for its own sake can be joyful while uncritical self-denial leads to suffering and stasis. Education, he argues, still runs on the discredited 'bucket theory' of mind, with exams as poor proxies for real learning.
15 points · 4 appearances · 2021–2026
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2021–2026
“Optimism as I define it has to do with knowledge. It's not a prediction of the future, it's an explanation of failure. If you explain failure as being inevitable, or due to some malevolent force, insuperable malevolent force, or just the way things are, then that's a recipe for stasis, which is a recipe for failure and eventually death. Therefore I think that all failure has to be explained in the form: the reason we didn't succeed is that we didn't know how to, and the knowledge of how to is in principle attainable. We don't have it now, but we could have it in the future if we do the right thing. In fact, it follows from this whole conception of knowledge that we've been talking about all this time that optimism has to be true. Otherwise there would be a limitation, which would mean the supernatural and all that stuff that — the arguments are watertight all the way from the scientific worldview to optimism, in my view.”
2021–2026
“That's right. Knowledge isn't just a matter of belief, and it's not just a matter of human psychology. It is information that has causal power.”
2024–2025
“Now the thing that tells us conclusively that there are parallel universes, wait for it, is that if you look at that, there are certain points on the screen where photons — let's say you have one slit open — you have where photons are arriving, and if you open the second slit, they stop arriving there. So how come? Well, obviously they must stop arriving because they know that there are two slits open now and not just one. And if you look at the mathematics of this, what determines whether they arrive or not depends on whether — how many slits are open there, 1, 2, 5, 17, they all give a different pattern, and the mathematics tells us when opening a new slit will stop light arriving at a given point.”
2022–2026
“So when I say any, I'm — what I mean is that we're not limited in the programs we can run apart from by speed and memory capacity. So all limitations on us, hardware limitations on us, boil down to speed and memory capacity. And both those can be augmented to the level of any other entity that is in the universe. Because, you know, if somebody builds a computer that can think faster than the brain, then we can use that very computer or that very technology to make our thinking go just as fast as that.”