David Deutsch - What is Ultimate Reality?

I don't know how it's even possible, but this is like the best / most concise / straight-to-the-point presentation of David's ideas by himself ever on YT, at least in reference to his first book. 9 minutes worth more than 99,9% of all the web content. Thanks!

David can say more in 8 minutes, than some people do in entire books

5:00. 'Knowledge is the kind of information that is the basis for doing things.' ....or not doing things.

I love this, thanks.

Knowledge, something you rarely find on Facebook. If ever! 😄

"...it's the meaning that keeps it in existence."

A wild extravaganza of thoughts. I like his enthusiasm though.

Explanations that share no mathematics with the way our sensory input evolved to be parsed by the brain are not to be scoffed at just because we find them unintuitive at the moment. Deutsch champions a creative approach to science - think through the seemingly unthinkable and eventually there'll be a paradigm shift.

"Other times are just special cases of other universes." I seem to remember that quote as a key insight from Deutsch's first book. He broke down the multiverse into a set of three-dimensional snapshots of physical reality ("foliations" in the words of some authors), and when we organize these snapshots using the laws of physics and causality, we place some as happening before or after others in the same universe, while we place others in parallel universes, etc., but this organization comes from the laws or principles we use to organize them rather than being something inherent to the snapshots. "Parallel universes don't have hidden serial numbers." This seems to contradict Einstein's view of spacetime being a fundamental reality -- a four-dimensional block that can be sliced in various ways. Since reading Deutsch over twenty years ago, iirc, I've had both of these concepts of spacetime or the multiverse in my mind at the same time. Then you have Anton Zeilinger and his book "Dance of the Photons" in which he argues that physical reality is just the information that describes it. It doesn't have any inherent physicalness beyond that, and information, in that sense isn't merely a map or abstract description of something real. Rather information is what's real. Then you have Donald Hoffman's idea that it's all a bunch of interacting conscious agents, which can be mathematically described, and which are more fundamental than physical things (atoms and particles in spacetime) and more fundamental than information, which is something that pertains to those conscious agents. So... Yeah, Deutsch kind of started me off on a path toward... Wherever I am now. I certainly don't have the hard "physicalist" conception of spacetime based on Einstein alone that I had when I was in high school and college.

i have come to realize from learning all the theories and reality and the universe /the brain it all leads back to one word =LANGUAGE

Knowledge = Understanding the (The Universes ) program's functions ... discovering information that's already there

Brilliant

Fascinating thinker

what is the relationship of knowledge / science to meaning?

He's talking about different aspects of reality, not fundamentals of it. Quantum mechanics describes the behaviour of very small particles, it doesn't say anything about whether they are fundamental or not.

Nice. Very nice. The man with the alliterative name knows.

To ‘start with what we know’ and then ignore consciousness as a fundamental element in the understanding of the universe seems like an incredible oversight.

the 'quantum' rate and our reference model don't seem very compatible 🤔

how are ideas and information instantiated in the brain?

How would we recognize the ultimate reality if it stared us in the face? What criteria would we apply to distinguish it from all the illusions that came before? If we can't answer that question, then reality is not a useful concept to pursue. What we actually do when chasing reality is to progressively get better at predicting our sense data. That's all we can do and as fundamental as it gets.