David Deutsch: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes, I know. That means philosophy can’t be where people are going wrong, right? I think it can be. I think it can be and is. At the time when Popper wrote his rejection of the Everett interpretation, very, very few physicists had written about it. When I say very, very few, I mean like three. They weren’t philosophically very sophisticated. The kind of argument that Popper heard about the dispute were — are — all about the wrong things. He developed his theory of propensities because he thought that the problem was, What can a probability possibly mean in a universe that develops deterministically, and so on? He didn’t ever hear a real argument about it. I once met him in the company of Bryce DeWitt (who’s one of the other Everettian physicists). We told him that what he had written about Everett was just plain false. He didn’t understand the import of the experiment that was being discussed — basically — well, two things: the interference experiment and the Bell inequalities experiment. He was focusing on a different problem. By the time we came out of that meeting, we thought we’d persuaded him, but we evidently hadn’t, because subsequently he kept on saying the same thing. Maybe he was just being tactful. Why do so many professional philosophers not think so much of Karl Popper?…

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