David Deutsch: prediction

Transcript context

…All right. Okay, so let's leave this topic aside for now. Let me bring us to animals. So if creativity is something that doesn't exist in increments or capacity to create explanations… you can use a simple example of a cat opening a door, right? You'll see a cat develop a theory that applying torque to this handle will open a door. Then, it'll climb onto a countertop, and it'll jump on top of that door handle. It hasn't seen any other cat do it. It hasn't seen another human like get on a countertop and try to open the door that way. But a conjecture is that this is a way, given its morphology, that it can access a door. So, that's its theory, and the experiment is, “Will the door open?” This seems like a classic cycle of conjecture and refutation. Is this compatible with the cat not having at least some bounded form of creativity? I think it’s perfectly compatible. So animals are amazing things, and instinctive animal knowledge is designed to make animals easily capable of thriving in environments that they've never seen before. In fact, if you don't go down to the level of detail, animals have never seen the environment before. Maybe a goldfish in a goldfish bowl might have. But when a wolf runs through the forest, it sees a pattern of trees that it has never seen before, and it has to create strategies to avoid each tree, and for actually catching the rabbit that it's running after in a way that has never been done before. This is because of a vast amount of knowledge in the wolf genes. What kind of knowledge is this? Well, it's not the kind of knowledge that suggests turning left, right, etc. It's an instruction that takes input from the outside and then generates behavior that is relevant to that input. It doesn't involve creativity but a degree of sophistication in the program that Human Robotics has not yet reached anywhere near. By the way, when it sees a wolf of the opposite sex, it may decide to leave the rabbit and go and have sex instead. A program for a robot to locate another robot of the right species and then have sex with it is beyond present-day robotics, but it will be done. It does not require creativity because that same program will lead the next wolf to do the same thing in the same circumstances. Suppose the fact that the circumstances are ones it has never seen before and can still function is a testimony to the incredible sophistication of that program. But, it has nothing to do with creativity. Humans do tasks that require much, much less programming sophistication, such as sitting around a campfire and telling each other a scary story about a wolf that almost ate them. Now, animals can do the wolf-running-away thing. They can enact a story that's even more complicated than the one the human tells. But they can't tell a story. Telling a story is a typical creative activity. It's the same kind of activity as forming an explanation. So I don't think it's surprising that cats can jump on handles. I can easily imagine that the same amazingly sophisticated program that lets it jump on a branch will also function in this new environment it's never seen before. But there are all sorts of other things that it can't do. Oh, that's certainly true. My point is that it has a bounded form of creativity, and if it is bounded, creativity can't exist, that humans could be in one such. But I'm having a hard time imagining the ancestral circumstance in which a cat couldn’t gain the genetic knowledge that jumping on a metal rod would get a wooden plank to open and give it access to the other side.…

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