The Deutsch Files IV

I can only start with what understanding I want, right? And I know I've asked you this before, but I want to be pedantically exhaustive about connecting the four theories of the fabric of reality. The reason I bring that up is because I think most people still view what you've written as being four separate things. It's hard enough to grasp these four separate things because they're actually fairly deep and wide-ranging theories. But I think in your mind, they connect together into one thing. Knowledge is a crystal, and nature has no boundaries, right? These are just phrases, but these things all connect together.

So we've talked in the past, for example, how epistemology and evolution connect; they're both forms of knowledge creation. We've talked about quantum physics and computation connecting to create quantum computation. I just love to get as many examples. How does physics connect to evolution? How does evolution connect to computation? For example, things that may be less obvious where people might view things as different theories, but to you, they're fundamentally the same.

Yeah, evolution and epistemology. People find both of those, the connection between both of those and physics, very counterintuitive. Most people think of physics in a very bottom-up way, and I think for completely independent reasons such as Constructor Theory, that's a mistake. Ever since that idea caught on, like sometime after Newton, physicists have tried to shoehorn other physical theories into that mold. That gives rise to, for example, problems in the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

How can you have an exact second law when the fundamental theories of physics are all time-reversible, and the second law is time-irreversible? How can you have that? The prevailing view is, yeah, thermodynamics and epistemology are both emergent theories and therefore not fundamental from the physics point of view. Therefore, if we want to understand the universe at a fundamental level, we needn’t bother with those. Those are just like the theories of washing machines or gardening.

I think that's artificial. Especially when they have to get very embarrassed when they exclude thermodynamics from physics in that way. I think that a theory that is going to go deeper than the current paradigm of physics is going to have to put emergent phenomena and emergent theories on the same level as microscopic theories. People talk about reductionism and holism, and some people are reductionists and some people are holists. I think I want to put them both in a sack and tie it up, and let them come out with a resolution.

There cannot be a criterion for excluding a set of theories from the body of knowledge other than whether they're good explanations. Yes, abandon them if they're not good explanations, but if they are, why make a class distinction between them? It's just going to lead to error, and I think it has led to error in thinking about the world.

So that's the connection between physics and those two. What you just said, for example, is that reductionist theories are the only theories there are because they don't form good explanations at the level where you need them. Especially when you have emergence, then you have very unpredictable things. You're not going to calculate all the particle collisions from the Big Bang till now to figure out how humans evolve, yes, or how species evolve. At every level of emergence, there is a possibility for an explanation that explains that level, and you need that explanation.

Yes, exactly. So I think that's very helpful. In your thermodynamics example, if you're trying to figure out how a steam engine works, you're not going to do statistical mechanics and trace every collision. You're going to actually probably start at thermodynamics, yes. And so that's a tie between, I guess, evolution in physics? No, osmology and physics. Much more so, thermodynamics is emergent physics, right? And it is, in terms of those four, it is epistemology. But that just shows that the terminology is misleading. The term...