David Deutsch: prediction

Transcript context

…What is the underlying physical assumption that makes humans different in having explanatory power? One would expect it to be a continuum if you’re an atheist, right? What break occurs, at some stage in evolution, that’s a discrete break? Or why aren’t we just back to it being a continuum? I don’t think it can have been a discrete break because evolution would have happened gradually. My best guess — we don’t know this. Actually, we have very little knowledge about the prehistory of ideas because there’s no evidence of it. All we see is the stone tools. We don’t even see the wooden tools because they’ve decayed away. I think what happened is that the capacity of the brain to store memes, to store programs in the brain rather than in the genes, increased, for some reason, very fast because, for some reason, these memes are very valuable. We know that the gorilla memes are very valuable because they allow them to gain knowledge of things like how to open nuts and so on, which no other animal in their environment has. That gives them access to food that no other animal has. The capacity for memes increased rapidly, and there’s very little, now . . . Sorry, I left out a step. Once memes get beyond a certain complexity, they cannot be copied. We don’t have the ability to download a program from another person’s brain. All we can do is look at the behavior and guess what the purpose was. Complex memes have to be transmitted like that, rather than by aping, which is a different process mediated by (what are they called?) mirror neurons and that kind of thing. That will only do for very simple behaviors. Then there came a moment when our species was capable of explanatory knowledge, but they never used it for further tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They just use it for this meme transmission. I’m still puzzled as to why you think it’s so unlikely that the universe is not comprehensible. Take a simpler system, like the distribution of prime numbers. I’m quite sure I can’t understand that. Even if various conjectures were proven or not proven, I think, at the end of the day, I still am not capable of understanding that — even how certain motors work, or markets for copper. Why can’t that apply to the universe also?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.