David Deutsch: prediction

Transcript context

…I worry a bit you’re using an argument from elimination. All the other views out there, which personally I don’t find convincing (as an amateur), but I can certainly see why you might reject them — to me, they look arbitrary. Those you reject, but the other physicists who are as trained as you are, some are as skilled as you are, feel the same way about the many-worlds view. What is the test? What makes your intuition better than theirs? Yes — I don’t think that’s so. It’s not a matter of intuition. Physics got dominated or contaminated by positivism, instrumentalism, and suchlike bad philosophical theories towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. This caused a knock-on effect on physics. It almost had the same effect on relativity, but Einstein rebelled against it at the last moment, as it were, and said no, it really is true that space-time is curved. It’s not just that our brains think that it’s curved, or something like that, or that the predictions come out right. There really is a curvature in space-time. By the time quantum theory came along a couple of decades later, positivism, instrumentalism, and so on had taken hold. As a result, generations of physicists were taught when they were students — they were intimidated by their professors telling them things like, “If you think you understand this, you don’t. There is no such thing as what really happened. If you ask, ‘How did the electron get from here to here?’ You’re asking an illegitimate question. There is no such thing as how it got from here to here. There is only a prediction that it got from here to here. ” Now, when you’re taught like that and intimidated by those kinds of things coming from on high, some proportion of you (of young people) will quit, some will take that on board and do the same to their students in turn, and some will think, “No, that’s ridiculous. Come on, there is a thing.” Then they discover there’s an Everett interpretation. Let’s say we polled only the Popperian physicists, including [Karl] Popper himself: What percentage of them would side with Everett?…

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