>> 
I'm here to introduce Michael Vassar, who
is the president of the Singularity Institute
for Artificial Intelligence. He'll be talking
about the Darwinian Method and promoting the
Singularity Summit, which is a two day event
happening August 14th and 15th. There's a
discount for Googlers. It's very cool. You
should all find out about it and talk with
Michael. And here he is.
>> VASSAR: Hi, I'm Michael Vassar. And I wanted
to tell you guys--we'll share some ideas about
the relationship between science, scholarship
and some other things that humans do to try
to get the right answers. Because--well, the
singularity is not really a scientific hypothesis,
but I believe it is a rational expectation
or rather I think it's three rational expectations.
It's the rational expectation of sort of an
event horizon that prevents people from predicting
certain features of the future especially
the future beyond a certain point. It's a
rational expectation of some types of accelerating
change under certain circumstances. And it's
the rational expectation of an intelligence
explosion of radical, almost asymptotic, positive
intellectual feedback at some point in the
future. But I'm--you can learn more about
these specific models from the Singularity
Summit video by Eleazar (ph) a few years ago.
So, basically, I suspect a lot of technical
people are skeptical of the idea that there
are rational, but non-scientific perspectives.
You know, people--it's easy to have wishy-washy,
"Oh, we should all feel good. There are different
ways of knowing." But the fact is there really
are different ways of knowing or else there
was no transition, no scientific revolution
ever. So, you know, something does seem to
have changed that makes the modern world different
from the medieval world, for instance. But
in the ancient world, which I would say is
a world without science, you have Roman aqueducts,
you have Gothic cathedrals. I mean, can you
believe that the Goths built that, you know?
I mean, not that we have a slide right now.
They had sailing ships before Ben Franklin.
And there's a great essay by Ben Franklin
where he says, "Hey, guys, we ought to use
science when building ships." So, that was
a big idea back then, but they had reasonably
good ships. They could reliably get across
the Atlantic through, basically, the evolution
of technology. You know, small changes imitated
when they worked well and in a very, very
noisy manner. And of course, market prices
are type of non-scientific rational process
that many people believe in and that's kind
of popular to believe in among people who
are skeptical of the wishy-washiness of rational
non-scientific processes. So, I'm going to
say that, surprisingly, Darwinian Evolution
and the belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming
or most of it are also examples of rational
non-scientific beliefs. More generally, if
you see a controversy that involves a scientific
side and in--a scientific and a non-scientific
side, the scientific side is probably usually
promoting a rational but non-scientific belief,
at least, in the narrow sense of scientific,
according to which science was invented 400
years ago as opposed to science being something
that chimpanzees or caveman do. So, there
are also possibly some scientific but non-rational
beliefs. Paranormal Phenomena are good example
of something which is predicted sort of by
something that kind of--that looks a lot like
the scientific method and confirmed by something
like it but which in fact are not real. I
don't think I'll have time to go into why
the scientific method gives a false positive,
but I have referred to paranormal as the control
group for science. You know, like a control
group where you know there's no--a placebo
effect of science itself. Another example
of a scientific but irrational belief, I would
say, is that Western Medicine doesn't work
at all. When you study in aggregate the effectiveness
of Western Medicine, all of the studies say
the same thing. They say that it doesn't work
at all. People have looked really carefully
at that. But basically you have to be a complete
non-naturalist to believe it. It would require
something like a conservation of medical outcomes
law and that seems so wildly opposed to the
sort of foundations of reality that the scientific
world view leads us to believe in. That while
Western Medicine could be harmful on that,
it seems much more reasonable to look at the
individual studies that show that individual
procedures are beneficial and be disturbed
by the aggregate data. But basically assumed
that there's something wrong with the aggregate
studies which tell you what's going on. These
sorts of things are basically possible because
people don't really know what science is and
science isn't the process that generates truth.
The process that generates truth is proper
induction or proper deduction. So what is
science? Before the 17th century, Europe was
a backwater civilization with almost no cities,
almost no libraries, basically nothing very
impressive except some really good art. Civilizations
had been rising and falling for a few thousand
years back to the Indus Valley, the Minoan
Civilization. It's not obvious that the Minoans
didn't get about as far as the Romans. They
had running water, they had printing, they
did large scale geo-engineering projects.
The--I mean, if I had to choose, I'd say some
of the Chinese dynasties especially the Sung
or Song might have gotten a hair farther,
but there's basically six of one half dozen
of the other. You had a bunch of golden ages
interspersed in a period of mostly medieval
or sub-medieval standard of living. And even
the Golden Ages did not provide what we would
consider a respectable third world lifestyle
today, although they probably provided a better
standard of living than most of the third
world did 40 years ago. Anyway--then something
changed. So, here's what science isn't. Archimedes
did stuff that looked a lot like science.
He, you know, famously talked about cranes.
He had laws of physics. He talked about precise
mathematical relationships describing physical
phenomena. So, he developed new mathematical
notation that allowed him to talk about the
volume of the solar system and make fairly
precise estimates. He talked about how far
the sun and the moon were and did calculations
and estimates, and the--a lot of these were
pretty accurate estimates. The reasoning was
good. He developed processes like calculus
and did analysis to optimize functions, worked
out the ratios of the dimensions of a cone
that would maximize the volume of a sphere
that intersected with the cone. These are
nifty sciencesy things he was doing; engineering,
the lighthouse of Pharos, the legendary cranes
and mirrors that he used. But, he didn't have
much empiricism and he didn't have much common
sense either. You know, that's how he died.
So, why do I not think it's science? Well,
although he had the rules of logical argument
that allowed him to reason out, the--whether
a statue was made out of gold or impure--pure
or impure gold through the logic of water
displacement, he didn't--you know, this is
the famous Eureka story where he ran through
the city naked after figuring this out for
the king of Syracuse--he didn't test that
hypothesis after formulating it. In fact,
he was right. But we would normally think
that as a good scientist, he should have done
something or advocated something like creating
pure and impure gold statues or gold objects
and demonstrating differential water displacement.
In a sense, you don't need to. He could be
pretty sure that he was right without doing
that. And, in fact, he was right. But if you
give people free reign to make logical arguments
of the sort that he was making when he discovered
water displacement, you're going to have a
lot of them generating nonsense and then fighting
over it, and you're not going to get anywhere.
No hypothesis testing. There also weren't
any organized literature or publication standards.
He wasn't citing sources in a formal manner.
He wasn't encouraging other people to cite
him in a formal manner. There certainly was
no priority rule that allowed--that encouraged
people to share all of their knowledge rather
than only sharing knowledge as it came up
or sharing the results of their knowledge
without sharing the knowledge itself. As a
result, you had a process that worked when
you have an honest genius doing it. But where
non-geniuses couldn't really contribute, progress
was not continual, dishonesty was basically
unchecked, which meant self-deception was
basically rampant and you couldn't apply the
same method to understanding human behavior
at all. And you basically couldn't apply this
method to figuring out anything of economic
or policy importance. Because once you allowed
people to make arguments like the one that
Archimedes was making about water displacements,
you'd pretty soon find that the manufacturer
of shoddy spears had expert [INDISTINCT],
making similar sounding arguments, saying
that you should buy their spears instead of
the better spears that your army was already
using and your country would be overrun by
the Romans. So, other things that the ancients
had, other rational processes that were not
science include naturalistic explanation.
The Etruscans supposedly claimed that thunder
was not caused by the Gods but was just the
sound of clouds banging into each other. This
is kind of silly sounding, but it's silly
sounding in the way that Piaget talked about
children claiming that the wind was made by
the trees waving their hands. It's--there's
something right about it which is not right
about saying that wind is caused by the zephyrs
or by some bag that lets out the east wind
being opened and the east wind coming out,
you know. The--it's the type of explanation
that you're using, basically, censoring modalities
for visual processing in order to evaluate
and that you can make concrete fairly precise
predictions with. Another ancient art of rationality
is philosophy. Nowadays, we have continental
and analytic philosophy, but basically they
boil down to being careful about what questions
you're asking, clarifying your concepts, figuring
out what you want to know, what you don't
know and where you should still be curious.
Craftsmanship is something that looks a lot
like science after the fact but a lot--but
not very similar to science beforehand. People
fiddle around with the ingredients that go
into their [INDISTINCT]. They fiddle around
with how to build a suit of armor. Gradually,
the suits of armor that protect the people
who are wearing them survive and the societies
that wear those suits of armor expand and
you end up with better suits of armor. You
know, this is--people's intuitions guide evolution
in this case and their intuitions are based
on a naïve physics that kind of works, which
is--so it's kind of faster than natural selection,
but it's still pretty slow. Occasionally,
once again, you get a genius who has really
good intuitions and they can, you know, create
art that won't be reproduced again for 10,000
years like the people who drew the cave paintings
in Lascaux may have been. You know, who knows
what was really going on. But people have
been doing pretty cool craftsmanship and art
occasionally in a non-cumulative manner for
awhile. Another great non-scientific rational--rationality
is exploration. Go around, look for more data,
see whether you can discard your old data.
If you think all swans are white and then
you go and find a black swan, you know, that's
where the metaphor comes from. If you think
that, you know, animals come in certain natural
types and then you go to another content--continent
and you find similar, but not quite the same
species, this is nifty. It might inspire the
right, you know, the right sort of thoughts
down the way. I've mentioned markets and they
have their counterpart, hierarchies, which
are also an epistemic process. As much as
people may not like, say, the Soviet system
of government, it really did work better than
a lynch mob at, say, fighting the Nazis. And
then there's scholarship which is the subject
of my talk. I'm going to claim that along
with the scientific method, there's something
that I'm going to call the scholarly method.
It consists roughly of these steps. You look
around your population, see who's interested
in learning, explicit data and deploying it
to the real world. You have teachers who are
excited and pleased by finding a new student
who sees new applications for the things that
the teachers are telling them or at least
to cease old applications without being told.
You teach those people to notice their ignorance.
You ask them questions where the correct answer
is counter intuitive. And you make them see
that the reason to solve their ignorance is
not just to please their teacher, but because
they can actually solve their problems by,
you know, encouraging them through things
like the Socratic Method, test or questions.
You have books, lots of them, with the printing
press ideally. You have your scholars read
broadly guided by curiosity of basically a
child-like sort. They seek and write about
their life experiences, go out in the world,
live with the Tasaday, live in China; notice
violations of the generalizations that they
encountered in their early childhood. It takes
a long time to do this, you know. If you move
in to a foreign culture for a couple of years,
at first, there will be a lot of strange interesting
things. After you've sat there, you know,
been hanging out there for six months, maybe
things have seem a lot more normal. You think--you'd
think you kind of got a grip on it. You stay
there, living in the culture for another six
months, things get weird again. You start
noticing things--not only are there all sorts
of surprises and cool different things, there
are things that are different that you couldn't
have thought could possibly be different.
If you've ever really changed cultures as
an adult, especially between the first world
and the third world or between basically western
and eastern civilization, you'd know what
I'm talking about here. Anyway, when people
do this and then they talk about it, they
write about it and other people look at it,
then third parties can look or they can look
for things that are being said by many people,
preferably surprising things. So, you know,
if one guy says, "Maybe we should--maybe we
should try to love everyone, even our enemies,"
in one culture or tradition. And then another
guy says something similar in a very different
culture or tradition. Well, they may not be
right but there's at least some regularity
in the world probably that causes risk taking,
broadly experienced people to make this suggestion.
So, they might be right. It's worth exploring.
It's worth trying out and seeing whether it
will work. Why does this work? Well, we've
got some rationality built into us. Otherwise,
we could never learn anything. We'd be, you
know, there's some truth to the idea of a
scientist in a crib. Rationality requires
induction which is technically Bayesian inference,
or a process that approximates Bayesian inference,
and deduction in order to build a map of the
world; a model which has structure which is
analogous to the real structure of the world.
Human children of course do this. They gather
redundant data-sets. So, the same kid wants
to watch the same movie or see--hear the same
song over and over again. This makes being
a parent kind of annoying in some ways because
you have to sing or read the same story over
and over, but it's neat because it's not really
the same story to your kid. You're discarding
a huge amount of detail. They don't know yet
what detail to discard. So, they love having
that--what looks to you like the same thing
in front of them over and over, so they can
see what stays the same and start noticing
the different parts that don't stay the same.
Since kids hang out with other kids as well
as adults, they can average together their
behaviors, imitate one another and eliminate
the errors that they make in their naïve
induction that way. As the--as the children
develop better models of the world, models
that make fewer errors, they can reallocate
their effort from building models, being curious,
to actually doing stuff, seeking--pursuing
goals. And as that happen, they stop learning
so much. Each person has a lot less resources
than a society. So, the optimal amount for
a person to learn is a lot less than the optimal
amount for a society to learn. Scholarship
is basically a way of making super children
a part of society that can learn like a child
does only more so, gathering information from
more varied data-sets, perceiving weaker patterns,
et cetera. The diverse experiments in different
cultures, cultivating awareness of your supplies
so that you don't just discard good data;
all of these things maintain a level of uncertainty
about what's going on, which is maladaptive
for an individual, but, you know, a society
can make that uncertainty adaptive by directly
rewarding it. Basically, you have to subsidize
people to notice their ignorance because it's
not useful if you admit to being ignorant
of your stowed up plans, you will never ever
get funding. Even though, of course, everyone
is ignorant of their stowed up plans. Anyway,
when cultivating scholars, a society gets
to use better than average brains. And by
'better than average' I don't mean necessarily
brains that work better. I can mean brains
that have better than average pattern recognition,
so you can basically use your mad men which
a lot of ancient societies do. Pay special
attention to the things that they say and
see if you can make any sense out of them.
Type 2 errors can be cancelled out more thoroughly
by the data collected by a society of a million
people than by the data that you can collect
as a child in a tribe of a hundred people.
And so, if you're a type 2 errors, your false
positives can get cancelled out more easily.
It's collectively better to make more of them.
So, you can have--use overconfident people
who might once again be somewhat dysfunctional.
So--I mean, type 1 errors. Anyway, what goes
wrong with scholarship? Why isn't the super
trialed solution an adequate solution to the
problem of knowledge? Well, one problem is
that errors become correlated. Scholarship
needs to cancel out these type 2 errors by
allowing people to develop their different
beliefs independently of one another. But
remember, we're talking about the kids who
are best at learning, most enthusiastic about
using models. And once they get into contact
with one another, when they have universities
and the Internet, then they can all go around
copying one another. And multiple people are
saying the same thing, even how--however smart
the people are, stops mapping on to reality,
stops being strong evidenced. Another problem
with the scholarly method is that it has a
bias towards surprising theories. You know,
if you think that the Earth goes around the
sun that could be because it does, which is
really weird, or it could be because you just
think random crazy stuff. And if you have
enough scholars in your community, they're
going to start thinking the same random crazy
stuff just at random and then you're going
to end up with basically anti-induction where
you display your wisdom, display the fact
that you're like a scholar by saying all sorts
of random stuff that is the opposite of intuition.
I think that we sometimes see this as a problem
in politics that one of the reasons why the
right tends to distrust the left is that they
suspect them of reversing morality in order
to show how wise they are. It's not the only
problem in politics; it's not even close but
I do think that this happens. There's a tendency
for scholars also to come up with the same
wisdom and say it but still be unintelligible,
you know. If you need very unusual pattern
recognition to notice something, you might
notice it and talk about it and even be able
to display that you know something special
by doing things that other people can't do,
and yet you're just babble clichés. When
you ask, you know, you say, "I know that I
know nothing." Well, okay, what do you mean
by that, you know? I know what he means, but
I think most people who are listening to him
are just going to ignore it. They'll just
hear another cliché and go on. And finally,
there are the standard biases that affect
human cognition and those don't cancel out,
however many children you have gathering the
data. There's a whole literature on human
bias and I can't go into it in a great deal
of detail right now, but it's been really
popular especially since the financial crisis
in association with behavioral economics.
So, what was new in the 17th century? What
was different about science? One really big
deal was radical skepticism. The Greeks fiddled
around with that a little. There was a philosophical
school called The Skeptics, but in a sense
they didn't have the radical skepticism that
Christians had of trying to claim you doubted
everything. Descartes really was doing something
novel when he claimed that he was going to
discover God by doubting everything. And he
was doing it because he thought it was really
important to figure out things that were exactly
true. One of the surprising positives of dogmatic
hellfire Christianity is that the subtle surprising
different, you know, consequences of counter-intuitive,
you know, differences might really matter
a lot. You know, if you don't see any easy
way to tell the difference between one catholic
heresy and another, but you actually think
that you're going to burn forever if don't
get the answer right, it might be a good method
to try not believing anything until you see
what you can't escape from believing and see
whether you can get the right answer that
way. So, I think that that's the big part
of why science emerged. The--another thing--so,
what was enlightenment science? Basically,
you try to discard all the beliefs that you
can get away with discarding and then you
make really long logical chains and look for
surprising consequences of the beliefs that
you can't easily discard and you see whether
these beliefs that you can't easily discard
have surprising consequences eventually. If
they do, you can test the surprising consequences
and the surprising consequences can serve
as a proxy for the beliefs themselves. If
you find that the surprising consequences
don't hold up, then you have to examine your
reasoning process ever more carefully. If
you find that the surprising consequences
do hold up, wow, you figured out something
pretty cool. You know, like parabolic motion.
It's a surprising logical consequence of--well,
not naïve physics exactly, but if you stripped
down the assumptions in naïve physics, if
you discard everything about Aristotle's physics,
about your intuitions about the physical world
and look for things that you can't easily
doubt, you end up with some simple assumptions.
And then if you extrapolate, work out the
logic from those, you'd get things like parabolic
motion. Anyway, if you--if you do this method,
this method of extreme doubt, you don't need
to be a genius like Archimedes to do something
that looks like science because you're not
doing something that looks like science. You're
doing science and science works with non-geniuses.
That's what's really special about it. So,
I talked about this, enlightenment science.
It basically worked until 1905 when you had
some assumptions that were basically not discardable
and had to be pretty much transformed into
math in order to discard them. Rather than,
you know, that gave better results than the
long inferential chains that come from discarding
all of the assumptions that you can discard.
I'm going to say 1905 because although Newton
and Goethe were disagreeing--no, not Goethe--Got--Goethe--I
don't--I can't pronounce his name. The guy
who wrote, Faust. Until Newton and that guy--although
they disagreed about whether light was a particle
or a wave, and scholars following them disagreed,
the scholars basically disagreed because they
weren't following the method properly. You
know, there was enough data to discard the
wave theory of light and there was also enough
data to discard the particle theory. And it's
pretty easy to discard the idea that light
is a wave and to discard the idea that light
is a particle. Coming out with the idea of
a probability function or probability amplitude,
that's not easy, but just discarding those
two ideas and saying, "Wow, light. I don't
know what light is, but is seems kind of like
a wave in some ways and kind of like a particle
in others." People should have done that earlier,
if they were, you know, following the scientific
method well and falsifying hypothesis. Another
thing that enlightenment science did was provide
an intellectual justification for liberalism.
Locke didn't invent the idea that people should
be allowed to do things unless there's a good
reason not to let them do them. He discovered
that the Netherlands actually worked with
that idea. He didn't know why that idea worked.
He didn't know whether it only worked in the
Netherlands or whether it would work elsewhere.
I'm not actually convinced that it did work
at--elsewhere. I think it worked very well
on the American frontier and I think it worked
well in the Netherlands because in a weird
way the Netherlands was a frontier. It was
a swamp and when you mixed your land with--mixed
land with labor and a swamp, you're actually
turning something previously worthless and
abundant into something valuable because there's
just--it just takes so much work to turn a
swamp useful and it becomes so useful once
you do it. And it takes so much maintenance
to maintain swamp that really separating people
from the land that they mix with their labor
just destroys value, which provided the Netherlands
with a sort of 17th century neutron bomb or
hydrogen bomb. They could--they didn't have
neutrally assured destruction, but they had
self-assured destruction that allowed them
to protect themselves against military threats
and preserved their property rights. Anyway,
why does the enlightenment science sometimes
fail? The simplest reason as a say, is that
sometimes the assumptions that you can't discard
that seemed necessary are actually false.
But this wasn't a problem until much later.
The other reason is that it's easy to imitate
the form of enlightenment science in order
to justify whatever you want to believe anyway.
This is more common when you assume that you
have to believe that you can't discard ethical
or epistemic rules than it is when you claim
you can't discard ontologies. And so--and
you usually claim you can't discard ethical
or epistemic rules in social domains. So,
the enlightenment science ended up being used
to justify liberalism as I talked about with
Locke. Some examples of hell are that you
could insist that humans have free will because
the ethical consequences of people not having
free will would be disastrous. Without actually
examining whether the ethical consequences
of abandoning free will are actually disastrous.
You're claiming that you can't drop an assumption
without really trying very hard. Anyway, sometimes
this leads to eventual blatant conflict with
visible reality especially if you're not careful
about your definitions. So, you can claim
that humans are not physical material systems
because you're assuming that physical material
systems can't have free will and humans can.
Anyway, another place enlightenment science
fails is when you have a single point of failure.
The cliché scientist who asked--who wants
to ask questions and explore thoughts that
no man was meant to know, who sees a button
in a Star Destroyer and says, "I wonder what
this button does?" You know, science--enlightenment
science fails if you have to test things and
the test is potentially lethal or disastrous,
you know. So, at some point, ordinary old-fashioned
ancient world logic is necessary to be rational
because you have to do cost and benefit analysis
for your epistemic towards themselves, and
sometimes enlightenment science fails that
cut. So, let's talk about scholarship and
how it relates to science. By the middle of
the 19th century, people had factories powered
by steam that could produce goods really cheaply.
They had much cheaper steel, they had all
sorts of great ways of producing that allowed
industrial laborers to out-compete crafts
laborers. That enabled people to make what
seemed like strong logical chains of inference
that showed that the world was a much, much
better place than it had been in the past.
People could claim that everyone was much
richer. This wasn't inconsistent with the
casual reality that non-scholars knew because
non-scholars don't know anything about the
past. I can remember watching movies set in
the past as a child and seeing architecture
and affluence in people that were supposedly
set hundreds of years ago and saying, "No,
this is silly. There's been so much economic
growth in those past few hundred years. There's
no way that people could live that well."
But as I gathered more data, I found out that
no; in fact, people did have those houses
hundred of years ago and relatively ordinary
people, not just aristocrats a lot of the
time. You know, the non-scholars who have
been following the scientific method and making
these long analytic chains just don't know
that much about the past from highly varied
sources, don't know that much from varied
domains. And so, the conclusions of these
analytic chains may not--may seem consistent
with reality to them while scholars who have
more data can just say, "No, that's wrong.
I know it's wrong. I've seen it," or "I've
read 50 books by different people who did
see it and who had no agenda. And they all
said something different." Okay, here's an
example of the enlightenment thing falling
apart. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Ben Franklin,
both were scholars as well as being--in Franklin's
case, an excellent scientist. They both independently
observed that by the self-interest and free
will assumption of the enlightenment, savages
were better off on average than civilized
people, you know. If you can infer peoples'
self-interest by their choices, savages basically
never chose to move and live in civilization
while civilized people very often once they
became exposed to primitive cultures went
native. This is a big surprise and there's
a, you know, by logic, this is basically a
falsification of the enlightenment claim.
But if you're playing by the--not the rules
of logic but the rules of enlightenment science,
that's a chain of inference, you know, multi-step
argument and you can't follow a multi-step
argument without an actual empirical test.
So, people, like Rousseau, reaps surprising
conclusions that were obvious by the rules
they were playing according to, but weren't
acquainted with the rules that they were breaking
when they reach those arguments. And so, weren't
able to communicate their positions. If they'd
been able to communicate them more carefully,
people would have looked harder. If they'd
been better philosophers and if the people
they'd been arguing with had been better philosophers.
Philosophers basically are good at noticing
what they don't know, what they're not clear
about, and non-philosophers are much better
at noticing what they do know, what they are
clear about, what they're no longer confused
about. To say--this difference tends to make
non-philosophers distrust philosophers a lot,
but sometimes the philosophers are useful.
So, basically, by very early in the 18th century,
we had a fairly severe falsification of a
major part of liberalism; the Panglossian
view of prominent progress. A philosopher
could have looked harder, broken down the
logic, figured out that Malthusian issues
were a problem, that enlightenment techno--medieval
technology, early modern technology made event--allowed
much larger populations. And so, while the
median person in Colonial America was worse
off than the median Native American, the nth
best of Colonial American was better off than
the nth best Native American by a lot. And
then there was a huge surplus of excess--when
you establish that correspondence, there were
a huge surplus Colonial Americans leftover
who didn't correspond to any Native Americans.
And who were transferring into the Native
American lifestyle because there were niches
available. There was unoccupied niche basically
because smallpox and other diseases had left
the population--not decimated, reduced by
one tenth but, you know, nova-decimated, reduced
by nine tenths. So, they also didn't, you
know--that logic though bizarrely wasn't noticed
until, as far as I can tell, Parfit discovered
in 1984, which shows how very good philosophy
is, you know. This was a really important
discovery that could have, I think, basically
prevented both World Wars, communism and essentially
most of what's gone wrong in the last 200
years. But it took an extra 200 years because
when people need good philosophical insight,
they don't usually come up with it. They get
more intense and more energetic and the best
lack all conviction, the worst are filled
with passionate intensity and the only way
to figure things out is by shedding blood
and seeing whose left standing. Anyway, Franklin
stayed with the enlightenment. He said, "Well,
this is an anomaly. Eventually, this land
will all be populated. I still believe." Rousseau,
you know, went with scholarship against science,
fought with the establishment and denounced
it. This is basically a fundamental schism
that's haunted us to this day. I guess the
next major player in this lineage is Hegel
who had talked about these divides going back
and forth and became the intellectual foundation
of both Nazism and Marxism. Okay, Marx, of
course, saw the enlightenment, claiming that
the workers were better off. Saw them dying
like flies, being ground up by machines. [INDISTINCT],
"No, this people just couldn't possibly be
better off than anyone." The people in Ireland,
you know, the Engels saw. And he came to the
conclusion, looking at what scientist were
saying, that the elite were defining beliefs
that were in their interest as scientific
fact rather than using a rational process
of inquiry. He concluded that rational inquiry
just wasn't something that people collectively
did. Although, individual scholars like him
were assumed to be able to do it. I guess
the next step from there is to assume that
no one can do it and that there is no rational
inquiry post-modernism, realities up for grabs.
A basic problem with Marx's approach is that
while he's discarding science, he's also discarding
the ancient rules of logic and discourse.
Once you start saying you're not trying to
reach the truth to your ideological opponents,
there's no more--everything breaks down. You
stop having intellectual progress and everything
polarizes into passionate aggressive idealogues.
So, we still don't have a good solution to
that problem. Basically, one of the great
modern examples of this is feminism. The logic
of the enlightenment is that we have a group
of people who are; a. a majority; b. they
have the vote; and c. they're oppressed. Well,
that doesn't work. If people are self-interested
and rational or if you can't tell the difference
between their behavior and their interest,
you can't have a group of people who are the
majority and have the vote and are also oppressed.
So by logic, women don't--what are women complaining
about? But a reasonably good scholar or someone
who goes around and pays attention in life
can notice that there is--are some really
important ways in which women are still mistreated
by the modern world and have some sort of
a--if you choose, a false consciousness. And
basically, you need to make sense of the fact
that, well, we've got a problem here. But
when you try to do that, you have to discard
the enlightenment and the logical rules, or
you don't have to but people in fact always
do. And as a result, you end up with 'an anything
goes' intellectual battle where no progress
gets made. Here's an example of scholarship--here's--of
scholarship serving science. And I've been
talking before about where scholarship and
science have come into conflict, but sometimes
scholarship can work for science if--rather
than using a long chain of inference from
sound assumptions to generate your hypothesis,
you just use scholars to generate your hypothesis
and then you test them. That would be basically
post-enlightenment science and the main problem
with it is that it's not intellectually rigorous.
Scientists don't generally recognize that
scholars exist and think that--and tend to
think that they have no legitimacy as scientists.
So, they're not prone to testing their hypothesis.
You can though do this, you--I mean, pretty
much scientific progress on a large scale
basically usually comes from that. You know,
you have revolutionary science where someone
proposes hypothesis, can't justify their hypothesis,
still suggest testing and viola it works.
The liberalism is a mixed case. You start
out with unprecedented positive outcomes from
the approximate implementation of scholarship
and science working together. Locke looks
at the Netherlands which is a weird exotic
place if you're a Scotsman in the 17th century,
comes up with a scholarly hypothesis, liberalism
works, comes up with a way of creating simple
assumptions; human self-interest, rule of
law, fear of God, and justifying how liberalism
would work. And in fact, viola, they test
it and the liberalism works in Scotland and
on the American frontier. But because it's
really not founded on inescapable assumptions,
it turns out to be not a uniformly correct
hypothesis. And ultimately liberalism melted
down as I've discussed earlier. The best example
I can think of, of scholarship working well
with science is Darwin and Wallace, hence
the name of this essay. Basically, evolution
was a pure scholarly hypothesis. Darwin was
pretty much the best naturalist in the world.
He traveled all over the world or talked to
everyone who knew anything about living things.
Had all sorts of long scholarly discourses
with exchanges of letters that you can look
into and see today. And other people had also
done this and a lot of people had come together
to agree that evolution happened. Darwin went
a step further and set--came to the conclusion
that animal breeding was, as far as he could
tell, of unlimited power. That in enough time,
you could breed anything into anything. And
that was the theory of evolution by natural
selection. Natural selection is just a logical
argument. If you have differential reproduction
and finite killing capacity, then you're going
to have a change in your high level traits
over time. What we're doing here is confirming
a scholarly hypothesis with a logical argument.
That's the same thing that Locke was doing
with the liberalism, but here we're doing
it with much--a much sounder logical argument.
Rather than assuming free will and self interest,
we're assuming differential reproduction and
it really is hard to not assume differential
reproduction. And in addition, you've got
a great scholarly argument tacked on top because
Wallace and Darwin came up with the exact
same hypothesis. Although later, Wallace diluted
it down and added magic which is kind of a
shame. The thing is, as good as it is as both
a scholarly argument and as a scientific argument,
it's not a good example of enlightenment scholarship--oh,
enlightenment science. The theory of evolution
makes some very broad hypothesis, but it doesn't
make precise surprising hypothesis. It [INDISTINCT]
in Darwin's day it didn't. There were precise
surprising discoveries that strengthened the
theory of evolution. And logically, that's
almost as good as making a precise surprising
hypothesis, namely the fact that the theory
of evolution doesn't work without Mendel and
genetics, and Darwin kind of knew that. And
then Mendel and genetics was discovered. So,
this is as solid an argument as we can make,
but it still doesn't quite check all your
dot, check all your boxes, dot all your i's
and cross all your t's, as an example of enlightenment
science. And that makes it harder to win and
win conclusively in arguments about it. Another
good example of this is Global Warming. We
have a scholarly hypothesis of environmentalism.
It really looks like humans are doing a lot
of stuff out there and has a lot of intended
consequences. They're not measuring all of
those consequences, they're not measuring
their cost, there's no reason to expect the
cost to be low. And there's a reason to expect
that given the scale on which people are acting,
there should be big changes. In general, since
biological and cultural systems are optimized,
adapted for some particular environment, big
changes are likely to be bad. Therefore, we
should be worried about big unexpected changes.
Then we have the logical argument that carbon
has such and such an absorption spectrum and
therefore captures heat. And because--and
ecosystems are complicated, we don't know
what the consequences of that heat capture
might be. This is a really strong logical
argument. But once again it's not making--because
it's saying we don't know what the consequence
might be, since the whole essence of environmentalism,
in a sense, is unexpected consequences, are
a problem. It's very difficult to confirm
environmentalism. It doesn't qualify as enlightenment
science. And if people have a narrow conception
of science, they can say you're not making
specific predictions when it does inspire
a lot of very good data gathering. And when
people gather the data, the data seems to
actually exceed the predictions and exceed
it by a lot with respect to Global Warming.
The world seems to be getting hotter and glaciers
melting faster than the predictions say. But
that's still not really a good example of
enlightenment science. It's just a good example
of a really good reason to believe something.
Finally, my topic, the Singularity. Here we
have the independent origin of very similar
hypothesis by John Von Neumann in--around
1956, in a letter to Stanis?aw Ulam, and Vernor
Vinge in an essay in 1991. Both of them talk
about new systems for thinking, causing it
to be impossible to predict--to understand
what the world will be like once these new
systems become mature. We have a logical argument.
I.J. Good talks about how--if thinking is
done by material systems and thinking allows
you to figure out what sorts of material systems
think well and how to build them, there should
be a explosive feedback loop once you get
material systems that are good at thinking.
We have a lot of inductive data. The earliest
bid is by George and Orwell Wright back in
the early 20th century. The most popular and
well-known is [INDISTINCT] by Ray Kurzweil.
Some of the most thorough is by Bela Nagy,
but a lot of data showing exponential or super
exponential progress from engineering and
scientific development of technology. And
finally you have, as a scholarly fact again,
the buy-in by a very large number of credible
people with good credentials. As you can see
at the Singularity Summits in the past, if
you go online and see our videos. Or as you
can see at current summits if you want to
listen to the talks there. Anyway, as a result,
I would hold that the singularity is a valid
rational non-scientific hypothesis and given
the scope of the argument deserves to be taken
very seriously. And that's why I am here.
Thank you very much.
>> [INDISTINCT] from the rest?
>> VASSAR: Hold on.
>> Questions please.
>> VASSAR: Questions.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> It happens to be in the chat box.
>> VASSAR: Yes?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> One question that, yeah, you know, I had
was the Cambrian Explosion that--serves us
like Lehmann, there's a lot of data to support
that don't happen, I suppose. Is that, you
know, can we construe that as a singularity?
As a proof that this thing happened in the
past and you know, thereby, you know, give
more accreditance to this [INDISTINCT]?
>> VASSAR: I would say that a history of large
changes in the history of life in the past
provides some inductive evidence that there
are large changes in the future of the history
of life as well. And that falsifies a supposed--the
naive assumption that there will ever be any
really big changes in the future. But it doesn't
give us any particular reason to expect the
types of changes that advocates of the singularity
are arguing for. Just that--it just gives
us a reason to weaken our strong [INDISTINCT]
against big changes. Does that make sense?
>> No--I mean, yeah [INDISTINCT]...
>> VASSAR: Basically, extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence. I would say
there is extraordinary evidence for the singularity,
but the Cambrian Explosion is mostly just
extraordinary evidence that extraordinary
claims are sometimes true. It's very strong
evidence that truly extraordinary claims are
sometimes true because before the Cambrian,
you would just have given zero chance naively
to a change that big if you knew the history
of Earth up to that point. But it's not evidence
for the singularity in particular. It's just
evidence that we should be much less confident
than we tend to be, that things will always
be more or less the way they are today.
>> So, okay. I mean, my next question was--so
what is the nature of the singularity that
is to come? So, how's that to be--I mean,
like do you have any, like, [INDISTINCT] reasons
to suppose that, "Okay, this is a way this
should be."
>> VASSAR: I touched on three different singularity
hypotheses that are quite related. All involved
greater intelligence, one involves positive
feedback loops from greater than human intelligence
redesigning itself in faster and faster time
scales presumably. One involves just the different--difficulty
of knowing what greater than human intelligence
will do and the fact--and induction from the
fact that human intelligence completely changed
the world through the conclusion that greater
than human intelligence is also likely to
completely change the world. And the third
is just the observation that if certain trends
continue to accelerate, and there's a lot
of reason from induction from history to think
that many of these trends will continue, the
consequences are likely to be big.
>> Okay, thanks.
>> VASSAR: Anyone else?
>> 
Any questions from the remote sites?
>> No.
>> All right. So, thank you very much.
>> VASSAR: Thank you.
