The Theory of Anything
100 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago -A podcast with episodes loosely tied together by Popper-Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. David Deutsch's 4 Strands tie everything together, so we discuss everything we find interesting be it science, philosophy, computation, politics, or art. But there is a heavy emphasis on the exploration of intelligence and the search for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
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Episodes
Episode 89: Tradition as a Source of Knowledge: Popper vs. Chesterton
July 09, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 198 MBThis week we discuss the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (1908), perhaps the most famous defense of the Christian tradition. We contrast this with Karl Popper’s talk, “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition” (1948), from his collection of essays, Conjectures and Refutations. We consider: What is the role of tradition in science and knowledge? Is there a relationship between liberalism and Christianity? Is Chesterton actually a rationalist? What are the paradoxes of Christianity? Is there...
Episode 88: The Myth of the Objective
June 25, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 196 MBHere Bruce reflects on AI researcher Kenneth Stanley’s assertion that setting specific, measurable goals may actually hinder discovery and innovation, which he writes about in his book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective. How does Stanley’s insight relate to critical rationalism, education, and life in general? We cover topics including: Why are objective sometimes misleading? When are objectives appropriate and when are they misleading? How did Stanley and his te...
Episode 87: Is the Universal Explainer Hypothesis Falsifiable?
June 11, 2024 11:00 - 2 hours - 290 MBIs the universal explainer hypothesis falsifiable? How does the concept of universality relate to human minds? Is anything truly beyond human comprehension? And how would you frame universality as an interesting topic at a party? This week we also feature a guest, Dan Gish, a fellow traveler Bruce has connected with on Twitter. Dan (on Twitter) had questions about if the incomprehensibility of LLMs refuted the universal explainer hypothesis. This was Bruce's attempt to give him an honest an...
Episode 86: Fuzzy Categories, Essentialism, and Epistemology (Hofstadter Part 2)
May 28, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 95 MBHow do humans form 'fuzzy categories'? How does this all relate to essentialism? Is essentialism false? Or is it partially true? And how does this all relate to Critical Rationalism? Picking up where we left off last week, Bruce gets deeper into Douglas Hofstadter’s ideas on language and the mind and his assertion that “analogy-making lies at the heart of intelligence.” Bruce considers how Hofstadter’s theories may be interwoven with ideas on language and cognition promoted by Steven Pinke...
Episode 85: Critical Rationalism and Douglas Hofstadter (Part 1)
May 14, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 102 MBThis is the first of our two part series (that may or may not be released back-to-back) where Bruce delves into the work Douglas Hofstadter, specifically the book Surfaces and Essences. We consider what is the relationship—if there is any—between critical rationalism and Hofstadter's idea that analogy is a core mechanism of human cognition. Is it fair to criticize Hofstadter's ideas as being inductivism in disguise? Could something like what Hofstadter suggests (i.e. analogy) be central to h...
Episode 84: Are Video Games Harmful to Children?
April 30, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 81.2 MBHere we discuss a 1992 interview with David Deutsch where he makes the case that video games are inherently educational, not addictive, and that children should not be stopped from playing as much as they want. We contrast the view of humans, science, and knowledge promoted there by David Deutsch with the more pessimistic view of thinkers such as Jonathan Haidt today. Bruce and Peter reflect on their own mixed feelings on this issue both as critical rationalists and parents. David Deutsch ...
Episode 83: Popper's Second Axis (aka Bruce's Epistemology?)
April 15, 2024 11:00 - 2 hours - 112 MBBruce summarizes his (unique?) understanding of Karl Popper’s epistemology that (possibly?) straddles the line between orthodox and unorthodox and is Influenced both by Deutsch, more old school Popperians, and his own unique interpretation of critical rationalism. Bruce claims that the key difference between regular "folk epistemology" (i.e. how humans reason without a correct understanding of epistemology) and "Popper's epistemology" (aka "Critical Rationalism" or the correct epistemology...
Episode 82: Popper's Ratchet
April 02, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 105 MBIn an episode that may (or may not) be his magnum opus, Bruce introduces his term for Karl Popper’s idea that you are only allowed to solve problems with your (scientific) theory by making it more empirical, not less empirical. Bruce makes the case that this is one of Karl Popper’s least appreciated ideas, as all of us are tempted by ad hoc saves that move our ideas in the direction of vagueness. Bruce also considers where conjectures come from and if Popper thought there existed a scien...
Episode 81: Easy to Varyness vs Ad Hocness
March 19, 2024 11:00 - 2 hours - 124 MBBruce sympathetically critiques David Deutsch’s concept of “easy to varyness” as a way to judge our explanations. Are our best theories about reality truly hard to vary? Bruce makes the case that Popper’s concept of “ad hocness” may be a strangely interwoven concept. Along the way we get deeper into whether Popperian epistemology is best seen as an attitude or a methodology. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 80: Knowledge vs. Simul-Knowledge
March 04, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour - 96.8 MBBruce wraps up his epic 6 part series on knowledge and the 'two sources hypothesis' (i.e. Deutsch's theory that all 'knowledge' comes from only two sources: Biological evolution and human minds). What happens if we take all the non-two sources examples of 'adapted information that cause itself to remain so' (e.g. the walking robot, the immune system, trade secrets, animal learning, animal memes, etc.) and give them their own theory distinct from the theory of 'knowledge'? Sort of like a th...
Episode 79: Perspiration vs Inspiration
February 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour - 84.7 MBIs human creativity algorithmic? What is the difference between an Inspiration and a perspiration algorithm? Can mechanical processes ever create knowledge? What is the relationship between creativity and explanation? If we had the 'inspiration' algorithm today, would it use perspiration? Here Bruce continues his exploration of these issues and more. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 78: Are Animal Memes Knowledge In the Genes?
February 19, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour - 66.5 MBDo animals create knowledge? Deutsch claims they don't because all their knowledge is in their genes. Yet he admits that animals do have memes! But aren't memes, by definition, knowledge outside the genome? How does Deutsch attempt to deal with these problems with his theory of knowledge? And how well do his arguments hold up? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 77: Counter Examples To Deutsch's Theory of Knowledge?
February 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour - 88.7 MBBruce continues to consider what our best theories tell us about knowledge. Is there something special (or even physically different) about the knowledge created by nature through biological evolution and human minds (i.e. the 'two sources hypothesis')? How should we think about knowledge created in human minds that could take us to the moon and beyond or divert an asteroid? Is it physically different from the kind of adapted information created by animals or the immune system? Or does it me...
Episode 76: The Constructor Theory of Knowledge
February 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour - 72.2 MBIn the previous episode, Bruce pointed out an apparent contradiction between Deutsch's criteria for knowledge as 'adapted information that causes itself to remain so' and his example of the 'walking robot algorithm' which is a case of adapted information causing itself to remain so but that Deutsch doesn't consider to be knowledge. This time we consider if we can eliminate the 'walking robot algorithm' from being considered 'knowledge' using Deutsch's and Marletto's Constructor Theory of K...
Episode 75: Deutsch's Theory of Knowledge: The Walking Robot
January 29, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour - 64.6 MBWhat is the “two sources hypothesis,” or the idea that there exist only two sources of knowledge in the known universe: Darwinian natural selection and human minds? Does a “genetic programming algorithm” used to make a robot walk create knowledge? Thus begins our deep dive into Deutsch's Theory of Knowledge and particularly his "Two Source Hypothesis." Bruce hints that this is leading towards an investigation into the difference between a non-testable (or philosophical) explanation and a ...
Episode 74: The Problem of Open-Endedness
January 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour - 82.1 MBWhat is the “problem of open-endedness”? Bruce explores how what might sound like an esoteric machine-learning issue may actually be interwoven with our deepest theories on evolution, human consciousness, and knowledge creation. Also included: Bruce's guide to how NOT to argue with a Creationist. References: Kenneth Stanley's article: "Open-endedness: The last grand challenge you’ve never heard of" The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algor...
Episode 73: Argue Me Everything
January 01, 2024 08:00 - 2 hours - 122 MBHere we move three arguments from social media to the podcast. 1. Given Deutsch’s universal explainer hypothesis, does it make sense to say that men commit more crimes due to testosterone? Are humans only 'approximately' Universal Explainers? 2. Can anything in reality be simulated? What exactly does it mean to be simulated? 3. Is “heat death” a bummer? What would Conan the Cimmerian say? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 72: Moral Progress and Tolerance for Intolerance
December 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 103 MBHere we use Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” as a springboard to discuss majority rule, moral progress, knowledge growth, wokism, Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, and “big agriculture.” --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 71: Can Values be Objective?
December 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 108 MBWith guest Ivan Phillips, we discuss and debate subjective vs objective morality. Does the concept of objective morality ever make sense given “Hume’s guillotine”? Can humans ever really live as though morality is subjective? Along the way, we take detours into Bayesian epistemology vs critical rationalism. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 70: Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence?
November 20, 2023 08:00 - 2 hours - 125 MBHow does ChatGPT really work? Is there a relationship between a program like ChatGPT and artificial general intelligence (AGI)? This time we review the famous paper "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4" from Microsoft Research as well as Melanie Mitchell's criticisms of it. Other papers mentioned: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (2015) GPT-4 Technical Report (2023) Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020) --- Suppor...
Episode 69: Social Science and Critical Rationalism
November 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 86 MBThis week we have criminologist Brian Boutwell on again for part 2 of our discussion on critical rationalism and social science. Does all science share the same structure? How do you apply Popper's epistemology to social sciences? Are there laws of human nature? If humans are universal explainers, what does it mean to study our behavior? See episode 68 for a summary of Caldwell's "Clarifying Popper" that we discuss. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-s...
Episode 68: Caldwell's "Clarifying Popper"
October 30, 2023 07:00 - 51 minutes - 47.6 MBBruce Caldwell (a scholar interested in Popper and Hayek) wrote a long paper in the Journal of Economic Literature (March 1991) called 'Clarifying Popper'. In this episode, Bruce Nielson summarizes and discusses Caldwell’s paper on how Popper’s ideas could be applied to economics. How well did Bruce Caldwell do in his goal of clarifying Popper's epistemology? Out next episode is another interview with Brian Boutwell and we discuss this paper a few times. So this summary will help those that...
Episode 67: Disagreements with Deutsch
October 16, 2023 06:00 - 2 hours - 162 MBThough our guest Mark Biros is clearly immersed in critical rationalism and the worldview of Popper and Deutsch, he also has some fairly strong criticisms of some of the ideas popular in what could be called the CritRat community. Here we try to work out our differing ideas on environmentalism, epistemology, quantum mechanics, social media, optimism, monarchies, cults, human extinction, and more. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 66: The Alien Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill and the Search For Meaning
October 02, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 86.1 MBHistorian Matt Bowman discusses his new book, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America. Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first and most famous persons who claimed to be abducted by aliens. Aside from being a story about UFOs, their life story hinges on a complicated relationship with religion, race, politics, science, and psychology in America in the 50s and 60s. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/sho...
Episode 65: Causality, Time, and Free Will
September 18, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 109 MBWhat did David Deutsch get right and wrong in chapter 11, “Time: The First Quantum Concept,” from his first book, Fabric of Reality? Is the flow of time real or an illusion? What does it mean to have free will in a deterministic world? And what are the implications of Bruce’s “Turing world within a Turing world” thought experiment? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 64: What is a "Refutation"?
September 04, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 75 MBWhat did Karl Popper really mean by refutation? How are empirical theories special? How do objective criticisms differ from subjective criticisms? What is the difference between a theory and an explanation? We consider these questions with a tangent into the theory that animals don’t have feelings. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 63: Brian Boutwell on Twin Studies and Heritability
August 14, 2023 07:00 - 2 hours - 150 MBBrian Boutwell is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi who specializes in “quantitative genetics, with a focus on environmental and psychological risk factors for antisocial and violent behavior.” He has a TED talk, numerous articles in Quillette, and has been published in many journals. Here we discuss his upcoming meta-analysis on twin studies soon to be published in Nature. We discuss the following two articles: Behavioural genetic methods by Willoughby, Pold...
Episode 62: Aliens!?!?
July 31, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 68.8 MBIs the government hiding a secret UFO recovery program? What should the critical rationalist attitude be towards these kinds of claims? Why exactly would aliens want to hide from us? We discuss these questions and much more. If you missed it, be sure to check out the congressional hearings on UFOs (UAPs). It was actually quite interesting. Mick West's video criticizing the theory that aliens are behind all this. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-str...
Episode 61: A Critical Rationalist Defense of Corroboration
July 17, 2023 07:00 - 3 hours - 174 MBWhat did Popper say about corroboration in science? Can a theory NEVER be supported with evidence in any sense at all? Is the Popperian “war on words” justified? Are the positivists, Bayesianists, verificationists, and inductivists really wrong about EVERYTHING? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 60: Learning, Work, and Art in the Age of ChatGPT
July 03, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 88.9 MBWe interview Bruce’s nephew, Brendon Nielson, who is a well-known electronic music artist under the name Dvddy. We discuss how he uses AI as a tool to create music and how this technology is changing how we work and learn. Could AI liberate us from menial labor and education? Along the way, Cameo makes an AI-generated comic book about David Deutsch. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 59: The Principle of Optimism (Round Table Discussion)
June 12, 2023 07:00 - 2 hours - 151 MBA deep dive into David Deutsch’s “principle of optimism” featuring Sam Kuypers, Vaden Masrani, Hervé Eulacia, Micah Redding, Bill Rugolsky, and Daniel Buchfink. (Plus, of course, Peter and Bruce). Are all evils due to a lack of knowledge? Are all interesting problems soluble? ALL the problems, really?!?! And what exactly is meant by interesting? Also, should “good guys” ignore the precautionary principle, and do they always win? What is the difference between cynicism, pessimism, and skep...
Episode 58: Deutsch's "Creative Blocks": A Decade Later
May 22, 2023 07:00 - 2 hours - 112 MBBack in 2012, David Deutsch wrote an article called "Creative Blocks: How Close are we to Creating Artificial Intelligence?" This article inspired Bruce to go back to school and study Artificial Intelligence and get a Master's degree in the field. A decade later, a lot has changed in the field of AI, and the field has never seemed so exciting. But are we really any closer to the goal of true universal intelligence? We take a look back at the article and assess it from the vantage point o...
Episode 57: Quantum Immortality / Quantum Torment
May 01, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 57.7 MBDoes every one of us live forever in the multiverse? Is death a solvable problem? What is “quantum suicide”? Is quantum torment a concern? Does every fantastical thing we can imagine occur somewhere in the multiverse? What are “Harry Potter universes? Are we Boltzmann brains? Bruce, Cameo, and Peter consider these questions in this week’s episode. Image from jupiterimages on Freeimages.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 56: Rationality, Religion, and the Omega Point
April 10, 2023 07:00 - 3 hours - 166 MBSpecial guest, Lulie Tanett, asked me if she could come on my podcast and interview me about religion. Lulie and Peter ask me numerous religion-related questions such as: How is the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e. Mormon church) similar and different from Deutsch's Four Strands worldview? What might the Deutsch Four Strands worldview learn from religion? In a modern world, what (if anything) can religion still teach us? Is religion an ally or a foe of ...
Episode 55: Why are Empirical Theories Special? (IQ part 3)
March 31, 2023 16:39 - 1 hour - 88.6 MBWe continue our discussion of Dwarkesh Patel's article "Contra David Deutsch on AI" compared to Brett Hall's tweet on IQ theory. This time we concentrate on criticisms of Brett Hall's theory. Along the way, we ask the ultimate question: Why did Karl Popper make his epistemology specifically about refuting empirical scientific theories instead of just generalizing it (like Deutsch does) to criticizing all theories and ideas? And why is this important? And then, we talk about how muc...
Episode 54: How do Computational and Explanatory Universality Relate? (IQ part 2)
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 2 hours - 119 MBIn this episode, we continue our discussion of Dwarkesh Patel's article "Contra David Deutsch on AI" compared to Brett Hall's tweet on IQ theory. This time we concentrate on criticisms of Patel's Hardware+Scaling hypothesis. To Patel's credit, he admits that his hypothesis is problematic. Then Peter asks Bruce about why Brett Hall believes explanatory universality implies 'equal intellectual capacity'. Bruce gives a steelmanned version of Brett's theory that takes us through an explanation...
Episode 54: Computational and Explanatory Universality (IQ part 2)
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 2 hours - 119 MBIn this episode, we continue our discussion of Dwarkesh Patel's article "Contra David Deutsch on AI" compared to Brett Hall's tweet on IQ theory. This time we concentrate on criticisms of Patel's Hardware+Scaling hypothesis. To Patel's credit, he admits that his hypothesis is problematic. Then Peter asks Bruce about why Brett Hall believes explanatory universality implies 'equal intellectual capacity'. Bruce gives a steelmanned version of Brett's theory that takes us through an explanation...
Episode 53: Universality and IQ - Part 1
February 17, 2023 17:09 - 1 hour - 73.5 MBDwarkesh Patel published an article called "Contra David Deutsch on AI". This article was actually a defense of IQ theory against the charge (often made by fans of David Deutsch) that the existence of Explanatory Universality destroys IQ theory entirely. But how accurately does Dwarkesh portray Deutsch's view? (For that matter, how accurately do fans of David Deutsch portray Deutsch's viewpoint?) And how good are Patel's criticisms of Deutsch's view? With some help from a tweet from Brett ...
Episode 52: Is Being Dogmatic Ever a Good Thing?
January 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 71 MBIn our previous episode, we asked if Karl Popper was Dogmatic. We also introduced the idea that Karl Popper wasn't convinced that dogmatism was always bad. In this episode, we further explore Karl Popper's idea that dogmatism is sometimes a good thing. We also ask difficult questions like 'How can you tell when you are being dogmatic?' and 'Is it possible to overcome your own dogmatism?' --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 51: Was Karl Popper Dogmatic?
October 02, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 36.2 MBThere seems to be broad agreement, even among Karl Popper's own students, that he was a deeply dogmatic individual. In this episode we ask the question 'Was Karl Popper Dogmatic?' by reviewing a humorous article in Scientific American by John Horgan on August 22, 2018. Along the way, we discuss by what means we judge dogmatism. How do we even tell if someone is dogmatic or not? Is there a litmus test for dogmatism? If so, what is it? Link to John Horgan's article. --- Support this podca...
Episode 50: The Turing Test 2.0 (aka is LaMDA Sentient?)
September 11, 2022 14:34 - 1 hour - 42.9 MBBlake Lemoine, the ex-Google engineer, claims LaMDA -- Google's language model -- is sentient. Is he right? Alan Turing is perhaps most famous for his "Turing Test" which is a test of intelligence. David Deutsch has some interesting things to say about the Turing Test in "The Beginning of Infinity." Unfortunately, Deutsch's critique of the Turing Test is often misunderstood and it has led to some of his fans disparaging the Turing Test in ways that don't make sense. The key question is wh...
Episode 50: The Turing Test 2.0
September 11, 2022 14:34 - 1 hour - 69.9 MBAlan Turing is perhaps most famous for his "Turing Test" which is a test of intelligence. David Deutsch has some interesting things to say about the Turing Test in "The Beginning of Infinity." Unfortunately, Deutsch's critique of the Turing Test is often misunderstood and it has led to some of his fans disparaging the Turing Test in ways that don't make sense. The key question is why can humans so easily -- with a high degree of accuracy -- tell if they are talking to an intelligent being ...
Episode 49: AGI Alignment and Safety
August 01, 2022 07:00 - 59 minutes - 33.8 MBIs Elon Musk right that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research is like 'summoning the demon' and should be regulated? In episodes 48 and 49, we discussed how our genes 'align' our interests with their own utilizing carrots and sticks (pleasure/pain) or attention and perception. If our genes can create a General Intelligence (i.e. Universal Explainer) alignment and safety 'program' for us, what's to stop us from doing that to future Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) that we cre...
Episode 48: Genetics and Universality (part 2): How Our Genes Coerce Us
July 12, 2022 00:33 - 1 hour - 58.7 MBHow do we square genetically influenced mental disorders with the theory of explanatory universality? In a previous episode, Tracy asked Bruce how to reconcile her experience with mental disorders, like narcissism, with the idea of Universal Explainers. This is part 2 of that discussion. In the last episode, Bruce introduced the idea that emotions and feelings aren't the same as ideas and go back to an earlier point in our evolutionary history. The genes then use our feelings to try to coe...
Episode 47: Genetics and Universality (part 1): How Our Genes Influence Us
June 27, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 58 MBHow do we square genetically influenced mental disorders with the theory of explanatory universality? In our last episode, Tracy asked Bruce how to reconcile her experience with mental disorders, like narcissism, with the idea of Universal Explainers. In this episode, Bruce does his best to tease out an answer. (While admitting that we can't answer her entirely--yet.) In "The Beginning of Infinity", David Deutsch offers some solid criticisms of current experiments to determine how much of...
Episode 46: Narcissism and Other Mental Disorders
June 13, 2022 07:00 - 2 hours - 71 MBTracy leads a discussion about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). We discuss various other mental disorders as well. We sadly admit that some disorders are currently so serious that there is little hope of helping those that have them. (And they may not even be aware that they have a disorder!) But will this always be true? If all problems are soluble and human beings are universal explainers, then the answer should be a resounding "no!" But Tr...
Episode 45: Adapting the The Wheel of Time for Television
May 30, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 46.5 MBWhat responsibility do the creators of a TV series or movie have to be faithful to the original source material? What risks are involved with either adapting the material too closely or not close enough? The much-anticipated Wheel of Time tv show is finally here and we discuss our feelings about the show compared to the books. Warning: this podcast contains extensive spoilers for both the books and the series. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/...
Episode 44: Clarifying David Deutsch's Views of "Knowledge"
May 09, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 44.2 MBBruce had a chance to talk to David Deutsch and ask him questions about his views of knowledge to clarify if he disagreed with Popper and Campbell about what is considered knowledge. Bruce took notes and in this episode reports back on what he learned. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support
Episode 43: Deep Reinforcement Learning
April 18, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 74.8 MBIn this video upload available on Spotify (we'll try this once and see how it's received), we revisit Reinforcement Learning (from way back in episode 28) and this time discuss how to turn it into Deep Reinforcement Learning by swapping out the Q-Table and putting a neural network in its place. The end result is a sort of 'bootstrapping intelligence' where you let the neural net train itself. We also discuss: How this, if at all, relates to animal intelligence. Is RL a general purposes...
Episode 42: Popper without Refutation & Resolving the Problems of Refutation (part 2)
March 28, 2022 07:00 - 1 hour - 59.5 MBOver the years Bruce collected a series of 'problems' with the Popperian concept of refutation. Or so he thought. A chance encounter with Popper scholar Danny Frederick led to him re-evaluating Popper's writings and realizing that Popper sometimes uses terms (such as 'refutation', 'falsification', and even 'theory') in idiosyncratic ways that aren't quite how most people would understand those terms. This leads to both Popper's opponent and fans alike sometimes misreading him. It turns out t...