David Deutsch: belief

Transcript context

…Now, having reviewed a lot of your work, I came away with one very strong impression. Let me try running it by you and see how you react. It seems to me you are the world’s first true philosopher of freedom ever. That there’s this notion of barriers — you don’t like arguments that postulate barriers to human knowledge. Furthermore, you strongly believe in a many-worlds view, so classic single-world determinism does not restrict what happens. The multiverse as a whole and human beings within it across every possible variable have maximum freedom. And you see this as a kind of necessary view and the most important view to hold on all things. Thus you are the maximum philosopher of freedom, in a sense with no rival. What do you say? [chuckles] I say thank you very much, but I think that’s a rather contrived way of putting it. I think, for a start, there have been sophisticated theories of freedom, not just freedom in the sense that we can do this and we can do that, but theories about what freedom should constitute. There’s Popper’s paradox of intolerance and there’s John Stuart Mill and Locke and Hume and so on, building up into this sophisticated notion where we have a notion of liberty — political liberty — which has all sorts of connotations that are not contained in the term just freedom. As George Orwell said, you can say the dog is free of fleas, but that doesn’t mean free in the same sense as when we say “man is born free” or that kind of thing. You have a method for extending it to physics — metaphysics — that they really do not. Whether or not one agrees with you (putting that aside), you seem to take it much further, in a way that attempts maximum consistency, right?…

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