The Theory of Anything

Karl Popper has a radical theory of 'dualistic evolution' where behavior had to evolve first before physical evolutionary changes could be taken advantage of. As part of his theory, Popper pointed out that an animal's ability to learn would be paramount to making evolution work at all -- similar to the Baldwin effect discussed in the last episode, but now for physical adaptions. This means evolution would have had intense pressure to evolve learning algorithms early in the evolutionary tree.  As it turns out, Richard Byrne's work largely corroborates Popper's theory of dualistic evolution. Nearly all animals show an ability to do trial-and-error learning and this is the main source of 'animal intelligence' in the animal world. Byrne even argues that this ability to do trial-and-error learning is a form of evolution where animals let their behaviors 'die in their place' rather than having to wait for the slow biological evolutionary learning processes of the genes. We also discuss what split-brain patients might teach us about human explanations and go over examples of animal-like gene channeled learning in humans.  Links: Richard Byrne's book Evolving Insight: How it is we can think about why things happen Richard Byrne's book The Thinking Ape: The Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence Kenneth Stanley's work on the problem of open-endedness The Monkey Fairness Experiment Frans Waal's Paper: Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay A primer on Donald Campbell's Theory (including animal learning and the Baldwin effect) A short summary of how Popper and Campbell (apparently) disagree with David Deutsch on what counts as knowledge creation

How intelligent are animals? In this episode, we introduce our series on animal intelligence rooted primarily in the research of Richard Byrne. Richard Byrne (mentioned in Beginning of Infinity) is a first-class Popperian researcher (though he doesn't realize it). We first talk about how Bruce got interested in this subject after reading Fabric of Reality (but before reading Beginning of Infinity) and how animal intelligence is at once beyond anything we know how to program but also unbelievably unintelligent at times. We consider how the Pseudo-Deutsch Theory of Knowledge has misled the Deutsch fan community about how much of an animal's knowledge is "in its genes" as well as how many fans of Deutsch (due to the same misunderstandings) have accidentally fallen into Lamarkism because they don't understand the importance of the Baldwin effect on the evolution of animal algorithms. Links: The Monkey Fairness Experiment Dog Playing Jenga Cat Playing Jenga (Another Example) Richard Byrne's book Evolving Insight: How it is we can think about why things happen Richard Byrne's book The Thinking Ape: The Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence A primer on Donald Campbell's Theory (including animal learning and the Baldwin effect) A short summary of how Popper and Campbell (apparently) disagree with David Deutsch on what counts as knowledge creation

In this episode, we discuss the value of failure and how businesses have yet to fully embrace the Popperian notion that we learn from our failures, so we should want to fail more, not less. 

Sadia, in her four episodes on unsolved problems in physics (first episode here), was clearly heavily inspired by the work of Julian Barbour. So we invited Julian to join us for an episode and got a chance to ask him questions about his theories. Julian is a world-renowned physicist and author of several books on physics including The Janus Point, The End of Time, and The Discovery of Dynamics.  His theories include a challenge to the prevailing theory of entropy (i.e. heat death) and even hint at possible apparent teleology in cosmology (in this case a tendency towards novelty and variety.) We are very excited to have him on the show and to answer our questions about his theories. 

When Alpha Go beat Lee Sedol, the world Go champion, it came up with creative new moves never previously seen before and even invented a whole new style of play unknown to humans. IBM's Deep Blue, the champion chess algorithm, failed to do either of these. What was the difference? In this podcast, we review Alpha Go the Movie. Warning: Spoilers abound! Please go watch the movie first! This is an excellent movie.  Bruce (using his admittedly thin knowledge of reinforcement learning) explains how Alpha Go works (using the materials previously discussed in our Reinforcement Learning episode) and how Alpha Go came up with a creative new approach to Go that went beyond the knowledge of the programmers.  While Alpha Go definitely does not have "creativity" in the universal explainer sense of the word (it has no explanatory knowledge nor understanding), it did come up with a creative new playstyle never before seen in the history of the world that changed how humans play Go. Even the programmers were caught off guard by what it came up with. We talk about how Alpha Go challenges the Pseudo-Deutsch Theory of Knowledge but meshes well with Campbell's evolutionary epistemology. 

We wrap up our discussion with Sadia Naeem covering possible solutions and criticisms of those solutions. 

Sadia Naeem continues the discussion about unsolved problems in physics. This time we talk about (among many other things) symmetry and novelty. 

Sadia Naeem joins us again, this time to explain clocks, block universes, and eternalism. 

A physicist discusses the problems and mystery of time, including string theory, emergence, and the illusion of time. The concept of pseudo randomness and the exploration of free will and determinism are also covered. The podcast challenges the traditional status quo in physics and highlights the importance of the problem of time.

In this episode Cameo, Tracy, and Bruce geek out over how good the Marvel TV shows are and how much they really get right. Spoilers abound, so be warned.