Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…There are a few different aspects. I don't claim to really understand Michael's picture here. My memory was that it was like, “Sure, you get the fundamental laws.” My impression was that he expects physics to get solved or something, maybe modulo the expensiveness of certain experiments. But the difficulty is such that, even granted that you have the kind of basic laws down, it still actually doesn't let you predict where, at the macro scale, various useful technologies will be located. There's still this big search problem. I'll let him speak for himself on what his take is here. My memory was that it was like, “Sure you get the fundamental stuff, but that doesn't mean you get the same tech.” I'm not sure if that's true. If that's true, what kind of difference would it make? In some sense you have to, in a more ongoing way, make trade-offs between investing in further knowledge and further exploration versus exploiting and acting on your existing knowledge. You can't get to a point where you're like, "And we're done now." As I think about it, I suspect that was always true. I remember talking to someone and I was like, "Ah at least in the future, we should really get all the knowledge." He was like, "You want to know the output of every Turing machine?" In some sense, there's a question of what it would actually be to have completed knowledge? That's a rich question in its own right. It's not necessarily that we should imagine, on any picture necessarily, that you've got everything. On any picture, in some sense, you could end up with this case where you cap out. There's some collider that you can't build or whatever. There's something that is too expensive or whatever and everyone caps out there. There's a question of, “Do you cap?” There's a question of, “How contingent is the place you go?” If it’s contingent, one prediction that makes is that you'll see more diversity across our universe or something. If there are aliens, they might have quite different tech. If people meet, you don't expect them to be like, "Oh, you got your thing. I got our version." It’s more like, "Whoa, that thing. Wow." That's one thing. If you expect more ongoing discovery of tech, then you might also expect more ongoing change and upheaval and churn, insofar as technology is one thing that really drives change in civilization. That could be another factor. People sometimes talk about lock-in. They envision this point at which civilization is settled into some structure or equilibrium or something. Maybe you get less of that. Maybe that’s more about the pace rather than contingency or caps, but that's another factor. It is interesting. I don't know if it changes the picture fundamentally of earth civilization. We still have to make trade-offs about how much to invest in research versus acting on our existing knowledge. But it has some significance. We were at a party and somebody mentioned this. We were talking about how uncertain we should be about the future? They were like, “There are three things I'm uncertain about. What is consciousness? What is information theory? What are the basic laws of physics? I think once we get that, we're done." It’s like, "Oh you'll figure out what's the right kind of hedonium. " It has that vibe. Whereas this is more like, "Oh you're constantly churning through." It has more of a flavor of the becoming that the attunement picture implies. I think it's more exciting. It's not just "Oh, you figured out the things in the 21st century and then you just…” I sometimes think about these two categories of views. There are people who think, “We’re almost there with the knowledge.” We've basically got the picture, where the picture is that the knowledge is all just totally sitting there. You just have to be scientifically mature at all, and then it's just going to all fall together. Everything past that is going to be this super expensive, not super important thing. Then there's a different picture, which is much more of this ongoing mystery, "Oh man, there's going to be more and more…" We may expect more radical revisions to our worldview. I'm drawn to both. We're pretty good at physics. A lot of our physics is quite good at predicting a bunch of stuff, at least that's my impression from reading some physicists. Who knows?…

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