Podcast

Here’s another way to think about it that is mathematically frightening for the people who think that the aliens are out there and they’re going to visit us sometime in the future. We were talking earlier about trillions of planets that exist throughout the known universe that might even be friendly for life to arise. More

Now, that’s one argument, and we have to be humble in the face of uncertainty here because no one knows. But I want to give an argument that rarely gets any air time.  The argument is that we are alone. The argument has nothing to do with astronomy; it has everything to do with biology. More

Let’s talk briefly about the Fermi paradox since we’re talking about aliens. For listeners who don’t know, Enrico Fermi was a famous physicist who was part of the Manhattan Project. He said, “Where are the aliens?”  The universe is so large and there are probably so many planets that are capable of supporting life of some kind or another. More

Scientifically minded types say, “Perhaps we won’t be able to understand the next set of laws of physics. Perhaps we won’t be able to understand the aliens.” It’s nothing but the appeal to the supernatural. It’s logically equivalent to “God is out there, and you can’t possibly understand what God is. More

The artificial general intelligence crew gets it completely wrong, too:  “Just add more compute power and you’ll get intelligence,” when we don’t know what it is underneath that makes us creative and allows us to come up with good explanations. People talk a lot about GPT-3, the text-matching engine that OpenAI put out, which is a very impressive piece of software. More

You’re pointing out a minority opinion there. I think culture is still stuck in that second part of what you were saying. Originally we thought that we were at the center of the universe. This was the religious conception of man’s place in the cosmos. Earth was surrounded by the celestial spheres and everything orbited around it. More

Three out of these four theories have an interesting pattern to them. With good explanations in epistemology, we’re saying conjectures and their refutations and error correction is how we improve knowledge. With genetic evolution, genetic mutations, variation and natural selection weed out the ones that didn’t work. Then there’s memetic evolution on top of that, where we have ideas and then criticism weeds out the ideas that don’t work. More

Popper has a book called “Objective Knowledge,” and it’s subtitled “An Evolutionary Approach.” And that’s no accident, either. There’s a symmetry between the theory of epistemology and the theory of evolution as we understand it. Before we understood what is known as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the only idea that people had was that these entities had to be created. More

In almost all cases, you only ever have one theory on offer. In the case of gravity, there literally is only one theory on offer at the moment. There’s general relativity. Previously we did have two theories. We had Newtonian gravity and we had general relativity—but we did a crucial experiment. More

Initial guesses at what ‘knowledge’ was all about amounted to what is known as the “justified true belief” vision of knowledge, and it’s still the most prevalent idea today. Anyone who calls themself a Bayesian is a justified true believer. This is the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify your beliefs as true. More