Every time that I discover something new from David my heart skips a beat. I am so happy to see this channel finally has some activity again! I will never be able to (explicitly) express my (inexplicit) appreciation and excitement about his philosophical work. Absolutely groundbreaking. It is terribly sad that there are not more people who understand his epistemology and his conjecture about beauty in "Why flowers are beautiful", to say the least. I hope he knows how much some of us appreciate him!
I can't say I understand his work completely, but I am very excited by both of his popular books. I don't understand "constructor theory" at all, and I'm not sure more than a handful of theoretical physicists would, anyway. But his TED talks were a breath of fresh air, and I really enjoyed his explanation of the Many Worlds interpretation, and how they spring from the two-slit experiment. Clearest I've ever seen.
It seems to me that the "fun criterion" primarily involves realizing one's own creativity. That is, when we experience what we believe to be a better explanation we are having fun. When we replace the current explanation with an even better explanation we having even more fun. When we continue to rediscover our own fallibility, we can sometimes even realize a better problem. The fun criterion is scientific discovery. We create these theories from within our own minds. After reading David's books and some by Popper, I am working on a set of theories about an evolutionary ethics. The idea is that we create our own ethics through memes. David calls memes "ideas that survive." I highly recommend his books--The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world and The Fabric of Reality: The science of parallel universes and its implications. There is also an early TH-cam video on the Multiverse and a recent TH-cam video on Monotony and Novelty.
Thanks. I'll have to think about this more. I have always had mild "OCD" behaviors (in quotes because I'm not too sure about the label) which were much worse when I was a child. Examples: counting the number of times I check the cold and hot water faucet handles in the same way, or making sure car doors are closed (X number of times, in a certain way). Patterns of behavior like these might be a good fit for a discussion like this one. Even as a kid, when asked about the problem I explained it as a pattern which had little or nothing to do with the actual object involved. I'm not worried about whether the faucet is going to drip or if a door is still open, in other words. I knew it had to be related to something else. As I have studied more about your ideas, I understand a little more about inexplicit knowledge and the competing unconscious ideas you discuss here. Or, at least I know they exist. In my case, I think performing certain behaviors (habits) are a sort of shortcut resolution to competing ideas I not only don't know about, but I don't care to resolve at the moment. Having said that, however, I also realize there are some people who are trapped performing similar behaviors way too many times. They might benefit from learning about critical rationalism, fallibilism, and your fun criterion and other ideas. They might be suffering due to unnecessary pressures imposed on them as children.
A bit like Kant's free play of faculties or Ingarden's polyphonic harmony. In other words, this epistemology is grounded on something like attention in the aesthetic mode.
David defines the fun criterion by: "...ideally, you want to get into the state of mind where they're all affecting each other, and when they're all affecting each other, you're having fun." Here, "they" refers to ideas in a mind. Also, '...the conjecture and criticism is taking into account each of what the others are...' David also mentions that it may not be possible to bring ideas into direct confrontation, unless they're explicit. Does anyone have ideas about general methods for not *fooling* ourselves into thinking we are in a state of fun…? Or (at the moment at least), is it something we can only really do good error correction *after the fact*. That is, we can only do effective error correction explicitly, and after a perceived episode of ‘fun’ thinking has occurred. Also, does that mean that psychopathic murderers aren't having fun in the sense David means? Does this definition of fun rule that case out?
If I scrape my memory for moments in which I was having "Fun", I feel that many (but not all) of those types of moments did not create much knowledge. Many categories of fun feel more like I am Spending knowledge rather then creating it. The act of Creating knowledge isn't that fun to me. For example, learning to program a computer was very frustrating and certainly not fun for the most part, but it created knowledge in my mind. That knowledge then gave me confidence and mental resilience, the confidence generated then translates into a sense of "Fun" because my subjective probabilities of success toward desired goals increases.
The fun that you experienced after was more knowledge creation or anticipation for being able to gain much more in the future due to the previous knowledge you gained. Sometimes the knowledge creation is subconscious mindsets and realisations.
@@AltumNovo I guess so, I am just saying that at the exact moment that I am in a conscious state of learning difficult tasks I am often pretty fuckin frustrated. It's definitely not always fun. It isn't until After the learning process itself that my brain gets a sense of pleasure from the fact that I defeated my goal and learned something new.
I agree with your comment "Fun feels more like spending knowledge then creating it". Creating knowledge is usually work in some form. Fun is usually associated with play, joking, laughter etc.
The way I take it is that by following the fun you remove errors from that third category of unconscious (these errors are basically internal conflicts eg about what to do, right?) so that you can much better focus on the explicit category which is probably where you want to synthesize new knowledge via conjecture and criticism and error correction in the first place...
Thanks David for your important work! I really appreciated reading The Beginning of Infinity. It reminds me of how Elon Musk is probably thinking -- starting from first principles and then moving along in perpetual cycles of conjectures and (self-)criticism. This video captured an idea I've been thinking about. Every semester, I teach an Email Marketing course at a college in Canada. One day, I thought, "Why teach only 20 students per semester when I could capture my knowledge into a textbook or software, and distribute it to thousands of students?" It seems that my challenge then is to make explicit my very inexplicit knowledge! Perhaps my explicit knowledge (say, what appears in my course slides) is the tip of the iceberg and my inexplicit knowledge is the 90% of knowledge that lies under the water. By having classroom discussions, my students help me to uncover (or make explicit) the inexplicit knowledge I have. This might explain why I seem to always learn something from my course! From the student's perspective, perhaps they also have explicit ignorance (i.e. they KNOW that they don't know something) and inexplicit ignorance (i.e. they don't know what it is that they don't know; or they can't put their finger on what it is that they don't know, they just know that they don't know it). Thanks again for being the champion of true knowledge.
All these levels of knowledge(conscious, sub-conscious, and unconscious ideas) are under going evolution simultaneously, and they are fighting each other to win. When these ideas are affecting each other, you are having fun ......
Are emotions actually theories... or are they something that are prior to theories, kind of like principles? It just seems to me that emotions are there to make you do stuff, although the reason why you have those emotions in the first place is not clear.
Emotions in the sense we use them as the subjective experience of rage, sadness, anger, excitement and so on, is how we interpret some of the signals our unconscious mind gives us. So they are our theories of what those signals might mean, and those signals are themselves theories trying to answer a problem (the problem of how to communicate the first problem to the conscious self). We can however perceive all these signals for what they are, signals of information which aren't reality, and thus be able to take advantage of all the information they give us about ourselves, without falling prey to the "emotion" and letting the "emotional interpretation" guide our actions, since we understand that the emotional response isn't necessary, isn't reality, but a faulty (more primitive you can say) interpretation of those signals.
@@PicturesJester And what makes us interpret those signals in the first place? I would haphazard a guess that emotions are a kind of physical processes (of course, virtually anything is just a physical process), just like how biological organs work inside of a body. So emotions could be some sort of a special branch of laws of physics (or laws of psychology?) that could be studied and discovered.
Saying "emotions are a theory" seems sophistic, because that's like saying "What's a DNA?" "DNA is a theory". Yes, it is a theory, but it's also a physical process of the nucleic acids. So I think a theory is a kind of human knowledge about the world.
@@eatcarpet knowledge is instantiated in neurons and genes yes, and knowledge can only be created in one way, conjecture and criticism in our case, blind variation and selection by the environment for genes. The mechanism has the same logic in both cases, only the specifics change. When I say theory I mean simply an answer to a problem.
Brilliant. I was wondering given the universality of computation why couldn't you translate one of these theories in to another type. It certainly seems we often translate these unconscious inexplicit theories into explicit ones. Or is he just saying that when trying to translate one of these types into another they automatically lose some of their defining features?
The video ended with this assertion: "When [the explicit, implicit, and unconscious theories in your mind are] all affecting each other, you are having fun." What supports that statement?
Based on some statements in another video, it seems like this is just a straight-up definition. But I'm not seeing the motivation for the definition. I don't deny that this state could generate the experience of fun, but I also see no necessary reason for it to. I use the label "fun" in situations where engagement in some activity causes feelings of happiness, excitement, satisfaction, connection, etc. I see no inherent reason that the condition in the above assertion must lead to those feelings. And I definitely don't see any reason for taking it as the definition of the word. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the statement..
A bit late, but the way i understood it is that people have different types of ideas: The explicit ideas, these are the ideas you are putting into words (thinking in your head or talking about). There are in-explicit ideas, ideas which you can explain if someone asked you to (suppose you went for a walk, you aren't thinking lift one foot, then the other, it's just happening, but if someone asked you what you were doing, you would be able to tell them). Finally there are the unconscious ideas, these are ideas that you have but can't put into words (the example in the video is grammar). Now what happens is that sometimes these ideas come into conflict with each other, you explicitly state that you want to do something like working out but you feel a resistance in the form of the feeling or mood. Now when this happens how do you go about solving this problem (the conflict, i'm telling myself i should workout but i don't feel like doing it). There are different criterion for resolving conflicts, one of them is the "no pain no gain" theory which is to just force yourself to do it. This is an irrational criterion because it's not using a reason to do something, it is just brute-force which is an irrational idea. Alternatively there is the "romantic" criterion, just follow your feelings, and do what your feelings say. This is also irrational because once again, you are using an irrelevant rule "my feelings" to make decisions, which can be wrong. So what is recommended is to explicitly criticize your ideas (i don't feel like working out), and the way this works is if you have solved your problem or part of it, in the case of working out, that reluctance or resistance would go away. What this is doing is aligning your ideas and allowing your theories (in-explicit, explicit, subconscious) to work together to solve the problem. And when this is happening, you are having fun. I hope this clarifies a few things, i wrote this for myself as well to see if I understood the talk :)
@@TheHG210 This all sounds to me like looking for a father figure in all the wrong places. Sugardaddy obviously has some epistemological point, about what ideas-in-thinking are and how they evolve let's say, and then attempts a merge with psychology, which would not really be epistemology anymore, but presumably he only cares for psychology to the extent it drives idea evolution, which has to be fun? David, just buy me some Gucci
Is there a patch of ideas about reality that are so depressing to generate that we humans will never be able to invent them. I think I'm agreeing with Deutsch, he isn't saying that knowledge creation will always feel fun / good. I liked what the interviewer hinted at re. The relevance of Intuition, but she didn't expand, so Deutsch didn't engage with this fully enough.
But what about when a rapist is having fun raping his victim? Presumably the rapist is satisfying all three categories of thought during said activity (explicit, in-explicit and unconscious).
And I dont see what "infallible behavior" has to do with anything. "Fun" is subjective and not necessarily more correlated with knowledge creation then many other conscious states (frustration, curiosity, determined etc.)
Every time that I discover something new from David my heart skips a beat. I am so happy to see this channel finally has some activity again! I will never be able to (explicitly) express my (inexplicit) appreciation and excitement about his philosophical work. Absolutely groundbreaking. It is terribly sad that there are not more people who understand his epistemology and his conjecture about beauty in "Why flowers are beautiful", to say the least. I hope he knows how much some of us appreciate him!
I can't say I understand his work completely, but I am very excited by both of his popular books. I don't understand "constructor theory" at all, and I'm not sure more than a handful of theoretical physicists would, anyway. But his TED talks were a breath of fresh air, and I really enjoyed his explanation of the Many Worlds interpretation, and how they spring from the two-slit experiment. Clearest I've ever seen.
Enjoying your recent uploads, keep it up.
Yes! Please David, give us more of your mind! :)
It seems to me that the "fun criterion" primarily involves realizing one's own creativity. That is, when we experience what we believe to be a better explanation we are having fun. When we replace the current explanation with an even better explanation we having even more fun. When we continue to rediscover our own fallibility, we can sometimes even realize a better problem. The fun criterion is scientific discovery. We create these theories from within our own minds. After reading David's books and some by Popper, I am working on a set of theories about an evolutionary ethics. The idea is that we create our own ethics through memes. David calls memes "ideas that survive." I highly recommend his books--The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world and The Fabric of Reality: The science of parallel universes and its implications. There is also an early TH-cam video on the Multiverse and a recent TH-cam video on Monotony and Novelty.
Thanks. I'll have to think about this more. I have always had mild "OCD" behaviors (in quotes because I'm not too sure about the label) which were much worse when I was a child. Examples: counting the number of times I check the cold and hot water faucet handles in the same way, or making sure car doors are closed (X number of times, in a certain way). Patterns of behavior like these might be a good fit for a discussion like this one. Even as a kid, when asked about the problem I explained it as a pattern which had little or nothing to do with the actual object involved. I'm not worried about whether the faucet is going to drip or if a door is still open, in other words. I knew it had to be related to something else.
As I have studied more about your ideas, I understand a little more about inexplicit knowledge and the competing unconscious ideas you discuss here. Or, at least I know they exist. In my case, I think performing certain behaviors (habits) are a sort of shortcut resolution to competing ideas I not only don't know about, but I don't care to resolve at the moment. Having said that, however, I also realize there are some people who are trapped performing similar behaviors way too many times. They might benefit from learning about critical rationalism, fallibilism, and your fun criterion and other ideas. They might be suffering due to unnecessary pressures imposed on them as children.
I really wish Lulie would put out more videos. Perhaps lectures of her own ideas.
A bit like Kant's free play of faculties or Ingarden's polyphonic harmony. In other words, this epistemology is grounded on something like attention in the aesthetic mode.
And maybe Leibniz monadology minus the religious best of all worlds stuff he inserted to get invited to Christian monarchy courts
David defines the fun criterion by: "...ideally, you want to get into the state of mind where they're all affecting each other, and when they're all affecting each other, you're having fun." Here, "they" refers to ideas in a mind. Also, '...the conjecture and criticism is taking into account each of what the others are...' David also mentions that it may not be possible to bring ideas into direct confrontation, unless they're explicit.
Does anyone have ideas about general methods for not *fooling* ourselves into thinking we are in a state of fun…? Or (at the moment at least), is it something we can only really do good error correction *after the fact*. That is, we can only do effective error correction explicitly, and after a perceived episode of ‘fun’ thinking has occurred.
Also, does that mean that psychopathic murderers aren't having fun in the sense David means? Does this definition of fun rule that case out?
Hey David! May you consider uploading content more frequently. Thank you
If I scrape my memory for moments in which I was having "Fun", I feel that many (but not all) of those types of moments did not create much knowledge. Many categories of fun feel more like I am Spending knowledge rather then creating it. The act of Creating knowledge isn't that fun to me. For example, learning to program a computer was very frustrating and certainly not fun for the most part, but it created knowledge in my mind. That knowledge then gave me confidence and mental resilience, the confidence generated then translates into a sense of "Fun" because my subjective probabilities of success toward desired goals increases.
The fun that you experienced after was more knowledge creation or anticipation for being able to gain much more in the future due to the previous knowledge you gained. Sometimes the knowledge creation is subconscious mindsets and realisations.
@@AltumNovo I guess so, I am just saying that at the exact moment that I am in a conscious state of learning difficult tasks I am often pretty fuckin frustrated. It's definitely not always fun. It isn't until After the learning process itself that my brain gets a sense of pleasure from the fact that I defeated my goal and learned something new.
@@danielm5161 Maybe the most important thing you learned wasn't the programming but something more meta about learning or hardwork itself.
@@AltumNovo Or maybe Deutsch isn't entirely right on this one
I agree with your comment "Fun feels more like spending knowledge then creating it". Creating knowledge is usually work in some form. Fun is usually associated with play, joking, laughter etc.
The most lucid speaker alive struggles to find words -- but that's partly what this conversation is about!
Has he written about this in BOI or his blog ? I feel like the video stopped at the cliff hanger.
Wondering about this too. Have you found anything?
Thank you for putting this out there. I'm fascinated by these ideas. Has David written about these ideas somewhere?
Brilliant David
The way I take it is that by following the fun you remove errors from that third category of unconscious (these errors are basically internal conflicts eg about what to do, right?) so that you can much better focus on the explicit category which is probably where you want to synthesize new knowledge via conjecture and criticism and error correction in the first place...
thanks for sharing
I think David needs to include thoughts as a subset of the feelings realm
Thanks David for your important work! I really appreciated reading The Beginning of Infinity. It reminds me of how Elon Musk is probably thinking -- starting from first principles and then moving along in perpetual cycles of conjectures and (self-)criticism.
This video captured an idea I've been thinking about. Every semester, I teach an Email Marketing course at a college in Canada. One day, I thought, "Why teach only 20 students per semester when I could capture my knowledge into a textbook or software, and distribute it to thousands of students?"
It seems that my challenge then is to make explicit my very inexplicit knowledge!
Perhaps my explicit knowledge (say, what appears in my course slides) is the tip of the iceberg and my inexplicit knowledge is the 90% of knowledge that lies under the water.
By having classroom discussions, my students help me to uncover (or make explicit) the inexplicit knowledge I have.
This might explain why I seem to always learn something from my course!
From the student's perspective, perhaps they also have explicit ignorance (i.e. they KNOW that they don't know something) and inexplicit ignorance (i.e. they don't know what it is that they don't know; or they can't put their finger on what it is that they don't know, they just know that they don't know it).
Thanks again for being the champion of true knowledge.
All these levels of knowledge(conscious, sub-conscious, and unconscious ideas) are under going evolution simultaneously, and they are fighting each other to win. When these ideas are affecting each other, you are having fun ......
Are emotions actually theories... or are they something that are prior to theories, kind of like principles? It just seems to me that emotions are there to make you do stuff, although the reason why you have those emotions in the first place is not clear.
Emotions in the sense we use them as the subjective experience of rage, sadness, anger, excitement and so on, is how we interpret some of the signals our unconscious mind gives us. So they are our theories of what those signals might mean, and those signals are themselves theories trying to answer a problem (the problem of how to communicate the first problem to the conscious self). We can however perceive all these signals for what they are, signals of information which aren't reality, and thus be able to take advantage of all the information they give us about ourselves, without falling prey to the "emotion" and letting the "emotional interpretation" guide our actions, since we understand that the emotional response isn't necessary, isn't reality, but a faulty (more primitive you can say) interpretation of those signals.
@@PicturesJester And what makes us interpret those signals in the first place? I would haphazard a guess that emotions are a kind of physical processes (of course, virtually anything is just a physical process), just like how biological organs work inside of a body. So emotions could be some sort of a special branch of laws of physics (or laws of psychology?) that could be studied and discovered.
Saying "emotions are a theory" seems sophistic, because that's like saying "What's a DNA?" "DNA is a theory". Yes, it is a theory, but it's also a physical process of the nucleic acids. So I think a theory is a kind of human knowledge about the world.
@@eatcarpet knowledge is instantiated in neurons and genes yes, and knowledge can only be created in one way, conjecture and criticism in our case, blind variation and selection by the environment for genes. The mechanism has the same logic in both cases, only the specifics change. When I say theory I mean simply an answer to a problem.
Brilliant.
I was wondering given the universality of computation why couldn't you translate one of these theories in to another type. It certainly seems we often translate these unconscious inexplicit theories into explicit ones. Or is he just saying that when trying to translate one of these types into another they automatically lose some of their defining features?
The video ended with this assertion: "When [the explicit, implicit, and unconscious theories in your mind are] all affecting each other, you are having fun." What supports that statement?
Based on some statements in another video, it seems like this is just a straight-up definition. But I'm not seeing the motivation for the definition. I don't deny that this state could generate the experience of fun, but I also see no necessary reason for it to. I use the label "fun" in situations where engagement in some activity causes feelings of happiness, excitement, satisfaction, connection, etc. I see no inherent reason that the condition in the above assertion must lead to those feelings. And I definitely don't see any reason for taking it as the definition of the word. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the statement..
Lulie looks about 16. Not aging (or even aging backwards!) must be fun! :)
She might have found a wormhole
Why assume that all ideational entities are contentful?
16:59 I disagree. There are also Events. See, e.g., Zizek.
sounds like johari window
Can someone explain it like I'm 5? This flew over my head and I don't like it
A bit late, but the way i understood it is that people have different types of ideas:
The explicit ideas, these are the ideas you are putting into words (thinking in your head or talking about). There are in-explicit ideas, ideas which you can explain if someone asked you to (suppose you went for a walk, you aren't thinking lift one foot, then the other, it's just happening, but if someone asked you what you were doing, you would be able to tell them). Finally there are the unconscious ideas, these are ideas that you have but can't put into words (the example in the video is grammar).
Now what happens is that sometimes these ideas come into conflict with each other, you explicitly state that you want to do something like working out but you feel a resistance in the form of the feeling or mood. Now when this happens how do you go about solving this problem (the conflict, i'm telling myself i should workout but i don't feel like doing it).
There are different criterion for resolving conflicts, one of them is the "no pain no gain" theory which is to just force yourself to do it. This is an irrational criterion because it's not using a reason to do something, it is just brute-force which is an irrational idea. Alternatively there is the "romantic" criterion, just follow your feelings, and do what your feelings say. This is also irrational because once again, you are using an irrelevant rule "my feelings" to make decisions, which can be wrong.
So what is recommended is to explicitly criticize your ideas (i don't feel like working out), and the way this works is if you have solved your problem or part of it, in the case of working out, that reluctance or resistance would go away. What this is doing is aligning your ideas and allowing your theories (in-explicit, explicit, subconscious) to work together to solve the problem. And when this is happening, you are having fun.
I hope this clarifies a few things, i wrote this for myself as well to see if I understood the talk :)
@@TheHG210 This all sounds to me like looking for a father figure in all the wrong places. Sugardaddy obviously has some epistemological point, about what ideas-in-thinking are and how they evolve let's say, and then attempts a merge with psychology, which would not really be epistemology anymore, but presumably he only cares for psychology to the extent it drives idea evolution, which has to be fun? David, just buy me some Gucci
It's not life advise, it epistemology!
*heavy breathing*
Why psychoanalysis is clinical philosophy and not a science.
Huh?
Is there a patch of ideas about reality that are so depressing to generate that we humans will never be able to invent them. I think I'm agreeing with Deutsch, he isn't saying that knowledge creation will always feel fun / good.
I liked what the interviewer hinted at re. The relevance of Intuition, but she didn't expand, so Deutsch didn't engage with this fully enough.
My cat quantum tunneled and now its gone.
Thank you for smiling while dispensing a self description of subjective art tragedy. Life is GOOD, GOD is GREAT.
But what about when a rapist is having fun raping his victim? Presumably the rapist is satisfying all three categories of thought during said activity (explicit, in-explicit and unconscious).
Thats not..... err, that's not what he means by the "fun criterion".
@@HitomiAyumu What is "Fun" is subjective.
And I dont see what "infallible behavior" has to do with anything. "Fun" is subjective and not necessarily more correlated with knowledge creation then many other conscious states (frustration, curiosity, determined etc.)
@@danielm5161 Yes doing harm to others can be a source of fun for some people.
What a load of bs... DD is excellent in physics. The rest are just stamp collecting ;)