" (1) The Beginning of Infinity (in one hour) - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1BWofKpBPU

Transcript:
(00:01) howdy I'm Carlos and welcome to the beginning of infinity in one hour um I read the book like 10 years ago and it's affected my thinking in a bunch of ways since then and most importantly it got me to into um AGI research five years ago uh so um now I'm interested in taking a paparan perspective to how the wind Works uh so that sort of view will inform a lot of what I talk about here um as we go through through the book um so to start off with let's talk about a few key Mysteries um that the beginning
(00:34) of infinity focuses on the first one I want to talk about is what is just the idea of a beginning of infinity in general um which has to do with certain events in history where progress was sort of Unleashed in a big way um some event that set new things happening um there are three examples to talk about um things like the the Advent of life where before life um there weren't that many chemical reactions for instance going on and life and um genetic codes allowed for new proteins and new reactions um really an explosion of them
(01:16) um so that's one narrow way in which we can see before life and after life um this era might represent the number of chemical reactions um something similar could be said with the arrival of humans and when uh humans started dealing with ideas in a new way during What's called the enlightenment so we'll add that as another example of one of these very unusual and very powerful events in history um so we're curious about these events what caused them why were they so important and these cons sorts of things
(01:54) are on par with the big bang uh arguably U the Big Bang may have brought us all the atoms and physical constituents um but really they're only involved in this very boring um intermingling with each other until something like life comes along with ordered information that can cause certain chemical reactions to happen reliably and um so on with everything else here um you know you don't get Rockets until the enlightenment you know the Big Bang won't get you there um so this is really um a unique set of events that we need
(02:26) to pay attention to I recognize that they occurred um when what caused them and what made them so special so all of these are lumped together as forms of uh beginnings of infinity um there we go and that's what gives the book its title so that's the first mystery the second thing is um if all these events led to an explosion of progress um can that progress continue or must it end are there any any limits on it you know either due to genes and what they let us do or um our brains and are they powerful enough
(03:14) to allow us to continue discovering new things um or physics maybe physics just doesn't allow uh certain kinds of progress uh so we keep making progress until we hit some wall and then we can't go any further in each of these cases um there is a in in intellectual mystery but there's also a practical value um if we don't know what it is that made our culture so good at making progress at the enlightenment we can destroy it if you don't know what makes humans so special we might never recreate it uh we
(03:46) might never be able to upgrade it um if there are any of these kinds of limits on what we can do then even if they're far away we'll eventually hit them you know if we're lucky and so um even if the people who haven't yet reached the limit don't care um that's sort of like being a skydiver before you've hit the ground and saying it's all good well until you hit the ground it's good but then sooner or later when you hit that limit it's not going to be good it'll be
(04:12) disaster so each of these things is a mystery but also a practical sort of question um in addition to that I think there is a mystery that's sort of more or less directly related to this which is what makes humans so special so let me try and get this on here and if we were to draw like a bar chart of let's say um the number of moon landings for different species then we'd have a pretty Stark picture because for humans the answer is something like 10 plus um if you take into account Mann missions and unman
(04:57) missions and that sort of thing so that's where humans stand um and then basically if you took up everything else ever of any kind any other Al animal algorithm uh zero you know so that's the everything else category and that's despite the fact that everything else includes things that have been around for billions of years um but none of them ever made to the moon so there's this question why um lastly I should also say why it's important which is that um if you don't understand what makes human special um
(05:35) we can never really program it you know uh we would have to just get lucky and somehow do it by accident um but we'd like to understand what makes human special so that we can put it into our own Hardware if you like um and make it uh have you know backups and that sort of thing basically I'm saying upload our own brains um with backups so you can really never die that'd be nice um so again here there's an intellectual question and a practical question um and this is the one that's closest to my
(06:03) heart as someone interested in AGI so uh the last thing F fourth little mystery here uh big mystery really is what does it take to do hard searches by which I mean to like find needles in a really really really big hay stack which is what it is to you know design a rocket for instance um you know if we think about a good design for a rocket you know that's over here so this is something you know a good you know good something a good rocket design good house design good poem uh and really everything else uh
(06:47) you know so much of everything else is just garbage so finding your way in all that um to the good Solutions is damn hard um and the number of possibilities is really hard to convey um you know the number of possible books is is just gigantic um so writing a good one is a tough thing to to do and yet humans do it all the time and other search processes like biological ution do it periodically you know takes them a lot longer to do anything good but they manage to do it somehow and some processes stand no chance so I think all
(07:25) these things are related the humans I think are exceptional because of our ability to engage in these hard sorts of searches um and evolution and life and sort of all these things um help us and with the enlightenment I think also you began dealing with ideas in a new way that made us better at searching things more self-critical and that sort of thing um but anyway this should impress you because the search is really so hard that though we man to ever find anything in practice is unbelievable really um it's a sort of magic and yet we do it
(07:59) and when you try to implement this in a computer and create something that could also make Technical and mathematical um and physical discoveries it is really nothing has managed to do that even close so our mind is doing something very unusual here it is a real mystery um and as are all these other things so this should shape the discussion going forward um you know what is it that caus these really stupendous Big Bang like events in the history of life and humans and our culture um Can it keep going or is there something that will get in the
(08:35) way what is it that makes us so damn special why is that the the only species in the many billions of years of History uh to get to the moon and nothing else even knows there is a moon um and how is it that anybody anywhere humans especially uh can find anything in this just gigantic hay stack of a search space these are all real Mysteries with real consequences so uh with that I'll leave it there so now that I raised these four questions let me try to introduce a few key distinctions um the first would be
(09:10) about what reality allows uh just what is possible in reality um because reality allows many things um but not everything and that can affect our answers to those four questions um and the first thing to note then is that I just mentioned some things are just impossible uh traveling faster than light um creating energy out of nothing um these are impossible things they can't be done uh meanwhile other things are possible I'll give those check mark and so you know everything that humans have so far done
(09:53) is obviously possible and many other things are possible besides that uh you know all sorts of chemical reactions are possible possible those that don't involve creating man uh matter and energy out of nothing um so those things are possible and we can do them and the really big question that we have to ask is um of all the things that are possible how does that overlap with all the things that are desirable or good because if there are all sorts of things that we would like to do um but we can't do them you know they they
(10:31) don't lie within what's possible but outside of and they're impossible um then that's bad that means the world doesn't really allow us uh to do all the things we we might want to do um if traveling faster than light was required for most of the things we wanted to do um that we would find ourselves in a rather bad Universe one that didn't allow for much of what we wanted um I think there are arguments to think why that isn't the universe we live in and so much of what we do want is is
(11:00) possible um meanwhile many things are possible that we might not care about these are just bad things that aren't worth doing um so anyway we'll want to avoid most of those things um but this Central bit is the mystery um so next kind of question is um of all the things that are possible um how many are there how big is a space of possibilities you know is it finite can we just do everything and then run out I'll give this an N to represent a sort of finite number um or are the possibilities infinite and of
(11:39) course in a book called the beginning of infinity you hope to find Arguments for why it's infinite so the possibilities might be infinite or finite in a few different ways actually um we might have um for instance an infinite number of steps that we can compute with uh so we can imagine that as being you know if we're at one point in history now and we're moving forward um we could ask whether or not we're going to hit some kind of boundary there um where we can't move Beyond you know let's say that our the computer of
(12:17) the universe is allowed to run for you know a million steps and at some point it just stops and we can't go beyond that or is it the case that we can continue and there's no necessary limit on the number of steps we can take um or the amount of matter and energy available so we'll call that you know storage um the amount of computation we can perform and how much data and uh information we can bring to bear because if you can take another step but you'll forget something um then that means you
(12:48) can't really make indefinite progress you you can't continue learning new things and adding them to your library your library if it got capped out at some point where you couldn't improve it couldn't increase it uh that would be a limit so we want to be able to not only take more steps but increase the size of our library of knowledge indefinitely so those are two forms of infinity that we should hope are possible and there are models of physics and the broader universe that mean that the Universe
(13:13) collapses and we end up with only a finite set of possible steps we could take um and other models of uh cosmology allow us to have an infinite number of steps and storage um those are open questions at this point um but we should hope for infen is there otherwi we'll hit some stage where no further progress is possible either no new storage is possible or no new computational steps no new thinking is possible um even if we had those though that wouldn't be enough um for everything that we would care about uh we also want you know good
(13:46) things uh to think about and to do um and just because you can take another step doesn't mean that there's another you know pile of gold out there to be discovered um you want there to be real opportunities out there that can continue to be discovered and again there there's no necessarily you know I'm not sure we have a hardcore proof that that set of things is infinite um but I think there are reasons to suspect that it is and that no matter what state of knowledge we reach that there will be
(14:16) problems within that set of things and therefore opportunities that consist of solving those confusions um so there are reasons to suspect that that's set might be infinite um even if there isn't a hardcore proof at this point point but this is all part of the broader question of what reality allows um does it allow all the things we would care about all things you want to have um is a set of possibilities finite so we can run out or is it infinite and there are various ways in which it could be finite
(14:46) infinite infinite um so that is again all about what reality allows but there's a second and equally important question which is not just about what reality allows um but what particular systems can do uh systems like you and me or our society or animals and AIS um each of these systems um may find itself being extremely powerful or not so much um so if we think about everything that reality allows the set of things a particular system could do might be less than that um in which case we might say it's in some sense
(15:31) incomplete um the set of things it can do is less than all the set of things that are possible so that might be incomplete or um non-universal um in contrast a system might be complete um of all the things that are possible to be done that all of the things that reality allows this system can do all of them it has an equal repertoire um to what reality allows so we would say that is complete uh or Universal now that kind of system is arguably what we are um and the way to think about this is to say again if we imagine all the things that
(16:17) are possible um is a particular system limited to some small subset of those things that are possible you know this is like most animals for instance um if you consider case of like all the chemical reactions that are possible any given organism really only has the knowledge to do some of these and can't discover more necessarily um so it would have a smaller repertoire than the things that all the things that are possible meanwhile maybe there is a system that could eventually do anything and that would be a universal
(16:54) system this complete system and hopefully this is what humans are that's what the book argues um so we would say humans and people more generally whether they're humans or agis or aliens whatever and over here we have all these kind of special purpose systems um AIS animals and so on so they have a limited set of things they can do now it should be noted that um any given system is going to be always finite at some point so you know it can grow and that's key to its being able to improve and so on
(17:33) but it can never it won't in fact do everything necessarily but it can do more and more and more in an unlimited way um and these other systems might have constraints on them so they can never really move Beyond a certain point um no matter how long you let them I mean we've let certain species exist on this planet for billions of years and they have not gotten to the moon so you see this is we're starting to connect with some of those initial questions I raised um but anyway this hopefully provides a
(18:01) bit of a broader framework of um going Beyond just the initial questions and kind of turning them into uh some of these other uh key questions and um showing some key distinctions um so question number one what does reality allow and question number two um what can particular systems do um because if reality allows a great deal of things but any given system can only do a small setup set of them um that is still going to be system it won't be physics fault that that system can't do much um whereas um humans can evidently uh so
(18:36) the book argu um do anything that is possible um eventually if they have the right knowledge and so on but these are hopefully some key distinctions that we'll be able to make use of later on so thanks for that so if reality allows for many possibilities and some systems are capable of taking advantage of more of that or less um how do they do so um and the first thing to note is that they need knowledge and um knowledge has two jobs uh the first of which is to make specific things happen so if many things are
(19:17) possible um but only some are desirable then you want to make the desirable things happen and not the undesirable ones so how does that work um I think a simple example to keep in mind would be something like um trying to get a specific sequence of heads and tails with a coin to start off with let's just imagine like one coin flip and um the probability of getting either heads or tails so here's our probability and in the first case we would just have a 50/50 shot of either supp what you want though is just
(20:00) heads I want to be able to flip a coin or rather I want to see on a table a coin that's heads um and if I just flip I have a 50-50 shot of either that's sort of like uh we imagine that being sort of a spontaneous process I'm relying on this just some Randomness to produce the result here I'm not controlling the result so that's a spontaneous approach to getting what I want you know I want heads and the way I'm getting it is with this sort of random flipping um so that's one way you can try to get
(20:32) what you want in the world another way would be to try something more of a controlled process so what would that look like well in this case you could just tell me I would like it to be heads and I could just take the coin and put it down as heads um and that would have a near perfect probability of getting what you wanted um so if you imagine that one now we have heads and tails and you know here's 100% basically and if you just told me to put it down heads I could just put it down heads and there'd be
(21:08) very little chance that I would somehow misread what's happening put it down Tails um that's the effect of you basically telling me what you want and me having the ability to distinguish between heads and tails and what you told me and then also being able to distinguish between heads and tails and the result and being able to change the result if it's wrong um that is a general thing that knowledge can do it can basically take the things you don't want this case tails and make them not happen and then take the thing you do
(21:36) want and make it much more likely to happen and it's a little bit of a silly case when we're talking about like one coin um but if you imagine trying to get a particular sequence of coins to land on a table there was like a 100 coin flips of in a row you said I want to be heads heads Heads Tales Tales tales you know let's see what that like so if we have a um a new situation here where instead of doing just heads or tails let's imagine I want to see a very specific sequence of heads and tails
(22:07) heads heads Heads Tails Tails Tails heads Tails heads Tails heads Tails if we go back to a spontaneous process now the likelihood of us getting this particular sequence is very very low um and there's a whole bunch of other sequences too that have equal probability that's also very low but if this is the one that I want I could just tell you that and again if we have the right information in place that's been written out as it has been here um I can just again use my hand read the paper make sure it has the
(22:43) right result and do it again and again and again and until I have uh the right result here so with the right information in the right situation I can have basically 100% chance of getting exactly result that I wanted uh that's the sort of thing that knowledge can do in general um this is a dumb example with heads and tails but the same thing would apply to producing a very specific protein um or whatever um the specific sequence of things needs to happen and if the right information is present there um the right things can happen at
(23:20) every one of those steps and if that information isn't there then any number of those different steps Could Happen um and you would get this one or this one or this one or this one rather than the when you want it so anyway that's one of the jobs of knowledge um when it comes to getting things that are possible in physics um the second role of knowledge is not to make specific things happen but something a bit more indirect uh than that which is to sort of um capture patterns in reality so there are all sorts of
(23:53) patterns in reality regularities uh gravity is one of them um the fact that the sun rises every day um there all sorts of patterns you could exploit you know I'm a person I have a pretty similar personality from dayto day if you know that about me and about people in general uh that will help you you know you won't see me tomorrow and be surprised at everything I do because you recalled certain aspects of who I am and it's helped you predict what I'll do next day you know I like nor McDonald's
(24:21) I'll probably make another nor McDonald joke that's not going to surprise you if you know me um that's a pattern in reality among many so we can imagine there being particular objects you know real objects out in the world people planets you name it and then we can imagine you know a mind over here and having sort of some representation of that object in the in the brain so this is sort of a you know an idea and if we play our cards right um we can get there to be sort of a correspondence between these different
(25:02) things the real object and the idea about it uh can become similar in some way and if you do that you can get several advantages um in terms of for instance it can be fast um if this is some distant object I'm thinking about it you know some kind of a uh very distant thing um I can maybe think about how I would interact with it let's say this is the car and the garage and you know I don't want to go out to the garage but I can imagine um what would happen if I did go there you I just want to stay in bed um so if that's
(25:40) what's happening if this is an accurate model of the car I can just think about it um and get the right answer you know what I need to do to the car what I left in the car something about the car and this will be an accurate representation if it's not um that it won't be very useful to me um but this allows me to avoid the work of actually going to the car or actually picking up some heavy object um or whatever um the My computations about the object can be much faster than interacting with the object itself um perhaps more
(26:08) importantly even um it can be safe to operate on these ideas rather than the actual objects if this is a tiger then I will do better to think about how I might handle the tiger sort of theoretically in my head before actually going out to do something um with a tiger in real life where I might get eaten so the chances of getting eaten when thinking about the tiger are pretty low um you can do more with patterns in reality than just capture a small thing like a one object um you can also capture much larger patterns so if
(26:47) this is a particular idea and here is like the whole of reality then you can imagine catching in some um small pattern like um like I said just about me let's say as a as a person or about tigers now there may be a lot of tigers or there may not be but um they're probably only tigers on this planet and so all of reality is much larger than just this planet and its Tigers uh nevertheless it's useful to know about them so you can have an idea which applies to all tigers that would be sort of a small pattern
(27:28) in reality um meanwhile if you know about gravity let's say that could extend through all space time and cover all of reality on every planet forever and ever and ever and that would be a sort of a universal pattern so that's the sort of thing which we could capture with the right knowledge uh there are these larger patterns in reality and the right ideas will capture them so overall if we zoom out now we can start to see some of the roles of knowledge um you know if if many things are possible some of them
(28:08) are desirable the question then becomes how do you get those desirable things and this shows you with coin flips as kind of standing for you know sequences of steps more generally um that knowledge can make the right things happen and make the things you don't want to have happen not happen and more indirectly you can have huge advantages in how you deal with ideas and objects if you have a little bit of indirectness here you have a representation in your head of an object out there um or if you capture some
(28:40) aspect of reality over here um that may be infinite and so if you know about this Universal pattern there's a lot of things you don't have to try in reality you already know that if you pick something up it's going to fall down uh things like that um you don't have to actually go out and do it um and so can factor in your thinking and it help make you much much more efficient in terms of figure out what would work and what wouldn't work uh when you're trying to achieve the things you want to achieve
(29:05) over here um anyway those are the two roles of knowledge in helping you make things happen and capture patterns in reality and uh by the way this is what Deutsch um would call explanatory knowledge knowledge which reflects the things that are really out there and how they really behave so if uh reality allows many things and the way to get the things you want is with knowledge uh how do you get knowledge um so let's attack this question from saying let's um suppose you have some amount of knowledge or
(29:44) some kind of stuff you can work with uh how do you get more knowledge um so this is your currently existing knowledge or just existing things in general how do you get from that to let's say new things you know uh you got squares circles Stars triangles all sorts of things um how do you go from those existing things to new things well in biology and really everywhere uh you need some process um that we'll just call variation I almost like to think of it as this diverging funnel because you start off with a few things and you end up with
(30:33) many things it's often kind of just a messy U sort of process bit random um so that's variation um You' call that conjecture or coming up with new ideas but fundamentally you need some source of novelty of new things um it doesn't have to be perfect it doesn't have to generate only improvements um hopefully some of these are improvements so if we imagine that one of these is an improvement let's just get a little check mark there um we've generated many things some of which are worse this one might be better than what
(31:10) we have currently that's the only thing this process needs to do create new things some of which are better occasionally and evolution definitely does that most of the things that produces in terms of mutations are bad that's okay because at least some of them are good if this process produces nothing this good um then it won't allow progress it has to produce some things at least that are better um but you don't need just that because if this is all you had and you just T kept taking existing things and
(31:41) making new things and then making new things out of those and on and on and on you would just require so many more resources uh it would just be an exponential explosion uh because you'd be creating like you know five things for every one thing that exists and doing the same again and again and again yeah um so in practice you can't do that you run out of resources just a matter of how you end up doing that um so what you need is you need a way to get rid of the trash and focus all your resources on the good
(32:11) things um so in this case we want to do is have some process by which we end up with this good thing this Square um we'll call that process selection and it's more of a collapsing funnel sort of thing we start off with many things at the start of this process we don't know which ones are good and bad and then through process of different kinds of filters in case of natural selection you might get eaten if this is a people at a meeting they might be discussing something and say this is too expensive
(32:43) some criteria are applied to distinguish between these things you know some of these are fast animals or slow animals or costly projects or cheap projects uh good products bad products and through the process of discussion or empirical test or getting by land some of them get weeded out and we end up with hopefully at the end of this process uh the good things good new things like I said this process is called selection you can call it what you want I mean this is the job of it though is to somehow distinguish between what's
(33:21) good and what's bad and then to cause the good things to remain and the bad ones to either be deleted um or simply not affect things very much uh you can have bad ideas in your head but they're not really doing much that's the process also selection um so you can just get rid of them entirely or you can just sort of suppress their effects so they don't do anything bad um all of this process seems very biological perhaps um and that is where it originated so if we think of just Darwin to start then you'd be right that
(33:58) this is very much a process of evolution starts with Biology um but what was discovered by Carl poer or at least argued for most forcefully was um that this is not just about biology the basic logic here applies to many many more things um so you could imagine applying to certainly us um humans and the way we create knowledge um but also you know aliens if they exist uh then they have three eyes let's say um really anything that is producing knowledge um or animals if you have some kind of animal that learns
(34:42) things throughout its life it's also going to be trying things and keeping what works According to some kind of inbuilt criteria and it doesn't apply just to like biological things um it would apply to any kind of AI algorithm uh just as well so this is the sort of generalization of Darwin it says it isn't just just about biology it isn't just about mutation it isn't just about natural selection um these two processes are fundamental to all knowledge creation you have to have some way of coming up with new ideas
(35:16) hopefully some of them are better and then that's never enough you have to a way of getting rid of the bad ideas and finding which ones are good um and again this is not just about biology it's about everything that produces knowledge uh yeah so not all knowledge creators are equal um that's something you'll notice if you look at biological evolution and compare it to humans um and it's one of the questions I raised at the very beginning uh what makes humans so special why are we the only species to
(35:48) have landed out on the moon uh whereas that you know no other species seems to even know it's there um so there are definitely big differences here um it's also the sort of question you might ask of different neural network uh you know machine Learning Systems which ones are better than others um in all these cases you have knowledge creating systems that work in different ways um and some of them are better than others so what makes the difference between the bad ones and the good ones um that is our
(36:19) question here so we'll have bad and we'll have good so the first thing we can note is that if knowledge creation depends on variation and selection let's ask what are the better and worse forms of variation and selection so the first thing to note is that the job of variation is to produce new things uh that are occasionally better so let's look at two different forms of variation here and ask which ones what what might make one better than another so suppose we start off with some system where most things um
(37:11) most ideas are bad I'm thinking more of the human case here where um somebody is just very wrong about how the world Works they think it works in terms of witches and gods and so on well most of their ideas about how to make progress in the world will probably be based on those ideas and those will likewise be pretty bad um one does not build rockets by thinking in terms of spirits and witches um meanwhile suppose that you have a normal human brain where more commonly uh you have some bad ideas but also many
(37:44) good ones um well then the ideas you start to come up with might very often be pretty good um not all of them some of them will still be bad um but you now have a system that because it started off with fairly good ideas uh produces some good ideas um and so what makes the difference here then what we're looking for in terms of variation is we want more good ideas and a system of variation that doesn't produce good ideas ever is no good um it's also not good if you have a system that like doesn't produce any
(38:24) variations at all you know you just never come up with new ideas um at all that's not good um but anyway if you're thinking in terms of physics um and SpaceTime and forces and so on um these are very good ideas that happen to capture many of the patterns in reality and so before we even created any ideas we're starting with very good material um and when it comes to creating new ideas efficiently that are good ideas um part of the battle is getting rid of bad ideas but part of the battle just not exploring huge sets of bad
(39:01) ideas in the first place you know it just never occurs to you to think in terms of witches uh and cats sinking ships and so on and thank goodness because it's a huge waste of time so when it comes to variation that's what we want more good ideas and we want to never even think of all of the bad ones um what about selection so the role of selection again is to take in a bunch of ideas some of which are good uh and some of which are bad and hopefully read out the bad ones so let's imagine that we have a bunch of bad ideas but also some
(39:38) good ones a uh so those are the bad ones and we've created some other ones that are good at this stage we don't know what's good and what's bad and we want our methods of selection to tell us um a bad method of selection wouldn't be able to as reliably um it wouldn't find this good one it would sort through these with it various filters um and it would miss the good things so these filters would not be very good they wouldn't be very sensitive to the right sorts of answers uh meanwhile a good method of
(40:15) selection would very easily detect ah these are the bad ones and this is the good one so we want here is a very accurate um distinction between the good and bad ones we want to uh reject bad ideas we want to um sort of catch all the good ones so to the extent that a method of selection does that uh that's what we want um also we should hope that it's efficient wanted to do those things efficiently so here I have in mind things like um some like quick tests you might run on on some idea to say like does this make
(41:00) sense at all um you we have in the back of our minds you know thousands and thousands of ideas so if I tell you something like I saw a cat split in two the other day and then walked on the street this would immediately begin to conflict um with other ideas in your head about conservation of mass and what cats can do it would start to break your notion of what is plausible um or conflict with what you think is plausible and so it would basically be hitting one of these filters in your head uh and you would say ah I don't
(41:32) think this idea is right um so you very quickly and very easily be rejecting bad ideas um you wouldn't have to go through some lengthy process uh to discover that um so we have in the case of human ideas some very powerful forms of selection we can sort of do mental simulations of how things would go and we could have arguments and so if you just have a simple rule like what goes up must come down if somebody tells you tells you they threw something up and it never came down you just use use that simple sort
(42:05) of logical rule to say ah what they said doesn't make any sense um so we can run our own little mental simulations we can use our little logical rules we can perform actual experiments we can have discussions all of these ways that we can use to try to figure out which ideas are good which ones are bad uh do this efficiently and effectively so that's what makes the difference for selection and that's part of what distinguishes humans uh from natural selection which is much weaker in many ways um as a
(42:38) third thing here which Al call attention and here is something where we sort of diverge uh between humans and biological evolution very strongly because if we think about all the ideas in your head many of them will be relevant to the situation and many of them won't be or I should say if I draw an X here for all the irrelevant ideas in some situation um then a good way to dealing with ideas would find out which ones are relevant to your situation and then use those in variation selection it's start combining
(43:27) the right sorts of ideas and testing them in the right sorts of ways um and so one example I like to use is that you know if I hit my head on something um I've now confronted a problem that I want to solve and I could begin thinking about whales and exoplanets and black holes because those ideas are in my head but they're like these red X's they're irrelevant and they won't help me solve my problem um whereas I bump my head and start thinking about heads and walls w s and moving in 3D space well now I'm
(43:59) beginning to generate ideas that have a good chance of solving my problem of avoiding hitting my head again um and I can ask the right sorts of questions to see like where the wall is and whether my mental stimulation says uh this course of action will not bump my head into the wall again um so a good way of using your ideas would find the relevant ones in a bad way uh would not you would focus on irrelevant ones and the reason I said earlier that this is where you start to see a distinction between um human thinking and biological sort of
(44:37) evolution and the way it produces variation selections is that in biology um the Next Mutation is not going to be guided by any idea of the situation there's no separation of mutations into like the relevant ones and the irrelevant ones you know if if a giraffe needs a taller neck um that fact will not influence the Next Mutation that happens um the Next Mutation that happens could make it its heart not work anymore you know it's just going to be a random mutation that comes up um meanwhile in the human case like I said
(45:10) if I bump my head I can be begin thinking about exactly that situation um and what I see what I feel what I sense what I think that can then affect the Next Mutation the next thing I try um the next idea I have and that's extremely valuable because if you have billions of places for mutations um almost none of them are going to be the one that will help you as a giraffe involve a longer neck or solve some problem likewise in the human case if you have you know thousands or millions of ideas most of them will be unhelpful
(45:44) in every circumstance so if you can focus in on the relevant ones they'll be much better off so that's what we want here is to have ideas which are relevant to the situation so all these things can make a huge difference in the efficiency and effectiveness of any kind of knowledge creation process um there's one last thing I want to talk about which is just the notion of knowledge in general and how if we consider like the set of all possible ideas some knowledge systems some knowledge creating systems uh can
(46:26) produce any of those ideas so hopefully in the human case we just have total ability to think of any possible idea so if there's some idea that we depend on to solve some problem um some idea about Rockets or some idea about um SpaceTime whatever it is it lies within the set of things that we can think of meanwhile something like genes the way they're usually interpreted to you know create proteins uh that that's a much smaller World um you can't really have ideas about spaceships embedded in DNA um or if you
(47:04) did it would be humans that put them there and humans that interpreted that information the way that information is normally interpreted it just converts uh things in DNA into proteins so you can only express proteins you can't express ideas about Rockets within that that system so that's a much weaker system um it just can even conceive of the ideas that we can there's no way for ideas about Rockets to arise within that system um so here what we want is something like expressive power we want a system which
(47:39) can express any idea which can have any idea um because that brings more possibilities Within Reach and so in each of these cases we're seeing ways in which biological evolution or AIS or humans aliens animals um have different ways of creating ideas which can be better or worse different ways of finding out which ideas are good uh that are better and worse they can become better or worse at figure out which ideas are relevant to the situation um keep in mind every one of these could have millions make a process
(48:14) millions or billions of times more efficient um and that's why you see us humans to the moon and everything else having no idea about it so I wanted to return to the uh initial Mysteries I began with um the hard problem of search you know when we have a huge set of possibilities in reality uh and many of them are trash um how do we find the good things how do we find the valid designs for Moon rockets in and among all the wrong ways you could build a moon rocket uh that's a very very hard problem how do you find
(48:52) a good physical theory of general relativity um and avoid all of the random theories that are terrible including just slight variance of that one Theory um this is a very difficult problem but when I um in the last video I talked about um the different ways in which knowledge creation can be more or less powerful uh variation selection attention and uh different kinds of expressive power um all of those things help with the problem of hard search um some systems are capable of doing it that's humans um most others are not um so even if we
(49:29) haven't solved this problem completely and in detail um I think some of this discussion here will hopefully shed some light on that um and the same thing applies to the question of what makes humans so special in terms of our many moon landings compared to everything else which doesn't know there's a moon even um it's again our ability to do these hard search problems um and that has enabled us to discover all sorts of um interesting ways to control reality and also to discover what reality is
(50:02) actually like what David Deutch calls explanatory knowledge um all of that has led us to this ability here uh that nothing else has gained nothing else has been able to find um these things they've been stuck in the trash um for billions of years um we have what it takes apparently uh to find the good stuff in and among the trash um again we don't know exactly what makes humans different we know some things about it um and none of this is intended by the way to say that these Mysteries are entirely solved um this program and the
(50:35) book uh from David Deutsch at the beginning of infinity um hopefully push us much further um or at least offer some helpful tips uh in terms of how to think about these problems uh even if they don't solve them completely in detail um anyway the uh first mystery I started off with though was how did these particular events begin uh these seeming leaps from nothing much happening to huge rapid progress um we don't have the full answer to the origin of life or what makes humans special or what exactly about our culture led to
(51:12) this rabid progress but one thing we can say about it is that in each of these cases something new happened with regard to knowledge and knowledge creation uh you know before life there wasn't really any kind of information that could uh like a billion letters long that's a new kind of thing once you have the ability to create large amounts of information and begin tweaking it now you can produce quite large amounts of complexity uh you can produce proteins of many different parts you can produce many different proteins um and those can
(51:46) collaborate to produce very complex bodies but if you don't have you know if if your hard drive in some sense is only one bit uh that doesn't allow you to encode very much knowledge whereas if you have a billion bits more like Evolution has in the case of DNA well now you have a lot to work with you have a lot of memory which to put bits of things you learn um so something like that is responsible for the origin of life that huge leap inabilities um with humans we see something different where it's more like
(52:16) a a growth in the expressive power of things so now information can refer not just to proteins um but to anything uh including black holes and quazar and uh you know kitchen tables you know just everything and then with the enlightenment um our culture changed in in a new way where one aspect of it is that it was very much more you know self-critical so something about the specific ideas we had about variation and selection and what kinds of areas we put our attention those were very very powerful and so U David D
(52:54) talks about good explanation other things um these are new kinds of very stringent criteria what counts as a good idea um it turns out that if you use those criteria um you have a much more s sensitive instrument for rejecting bad ideas and finding the good ones so anyway all that is to say each of these leaps into vast amounts of progress has involved um a new kind of knowledge creation a new relationship with knowledge merging in reality with life humans and the enlight um but now finally what about lits uh we've seen
(53:33) that reality seems to allow a great deal could potentially be infinite um and some systems are able to take advantage of it better than others um and one thing to note here is that well you know we we've you know humans can do all these search problems humans have discovered all sorts of things which allowed them to get to the moon and is involved going around and escaping the barriers of our genes and our our hands and we what we can lift and so on what we can see um so when we ask this question are there any limits to the
(54:08) progress we can have um the answer seems to be no it's not that there are no obstacles um but it does seem like humans can produce uh they can discover ways to just get around those obstacles and so we keep on going up and up and up getting new obstacles along the way but um still being able to get across them you know one obstacle is can you lift objects of a certain uh weight can you see uh photons of a certain wavelength those are the things we couldn't do um but then we discovered uh through trial
(54:42) and error uh exactly how to do those things and now that we know them we can do those things despite the fact we weren't born knowing how to do those things so there are many many barriers many many problems but it does seem like we're able to just get over them um maybe not trivially could take us a thousand years to solve any given problem um but it does seem like we can solve them uh in which case nothing about the way that we started off will limit our progress um we can continue discovering new things and evidently
(55:13) overcoming every barrier along the way so I thought I'd end with um two quick points um the first is that the theme of the beginning infinity or one theme of it um that focuses on the idea of infinity itself is that no matter how much progress we make will always be at the beginning of infinity and that's because no matter what number you know for instance what number you pick whether it's one or a million or a thousand or whatever you like it's always unusually close to the beginning of infinity there are always an infinite
(55:52) set of numbers beyond that um so if we we think about the view from today here we are at this point in history with really you know an unknown set of things in the future um all sorts of great things hopefully that are possible um and here we are very early in history um but if David Deutch is right and this the possibilities is infinite and this is not just the view from today but it's the view from every day no matter how far in the future uh we still be here wondering and being able to shape um what comes after that's sort of the view
(56:42) we should have um that it isn't as though we're at the end of history or at the end of something it's very much the beginning um and perhaps always will be um so that's I think a helpful perspective to have here um secondly um I want to emphasize I'll just throw a an Infinity here for good bger um when it comes to thinking about what reality allows um and what systems are capable of exploiting reality and doing more what it allows uh it's worth noting that one perspective you should have
(57:18) about people is that of all the things that reality allows say you're all possibilities possibilities um then only a very small fraction of them will happen spontaneously or even with life um so that's sort of the spontaneous set of processes that can happen things like rocks falling and certain kinds of chemical reactions and so on um but most things can't happen that way U most things require knowledge to make them happen um so if you want all of that to happen all the interesting things that could happen um
(58:12) that requires knowledge um and therefore really because only humans are capable of producing knowledge um that covers the entire span of what's possible uh really this requires not just knowledge but requires people so when we think about the future we see ourselves very much at the beginning um but we also ought to see ourselves as really the window through which most of what can happen in reality actually does happen um we aren't just along to the ride it's not just that people can do these things and that um
(58:55) those things could have happened anyway it's that yes we can do all those things but also those things could not happen without us so this is part of why humans and people more generally you know aliens and agis are of cosmic significance um in some ways if we were to think about the uh shape of the Universe um or you know if I would have draw another plot of the beginning of infinity um this time just representing all of the things in the universe um just like how interesting uh is the universe well over time um might get a
(59:43) little more interesting as you get black holes other things new things but it would be pretty boring until humans or something like us came around and then you'd see a vast you know here's the beginning of Infinity with with humans so it's not just that we're taking off and that we're enjoying it um but actually the whole of reality is getting more interesting uh there are things that just would not have happened were it not for us so again this is part of why humans are cognitively or you
(1:00:17) know significant but cosmically significant um and uh that seems to be true of all people um there differences between us but we all share this fundamental ability uh to understand and hopefully discover anything so that I hope you enjoyed it and uh of course there's much I left out of the beginning Infinity so go and uh go and read it" 

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