What is the 'Fun Criterion'? (David Deutsch – behind the scenes)

Every time that I discover something new from David my heart skips a beat. I am so happy to see this channel finally has some activity again! I will never be able to (explicitly) express my (inexplicit) appreciation and excitement about his philosophical work. Absolutely groundbreaking. It is terribly sad that there are not more people who understand his epistemology and his conjecture about beauty in "Why flowers are beautiful", to say the least. I hope he knows how much some of us appreciate him!

Enjoying your recent uploads, keep it up.

It seems to me that the "fun criterion" primarily involves realizing one's own creativity. That is, when we experience what we believe to be a better explanation we are having fun. When we replace the current explanation with an even better explanation we having even more fun. When we continue to rediscover our own fallibility, we can sometimes even realize a better problem. The fun criterion is scientific discovery. We create these theories from within our own minds. After reading David's books and some by Popper, I am working on a set of theories about an evolutionary ethics. The idea is that we create our own ethics through memes. David calls memes "ideas that survive." I highly recommend his books--The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world and The Fabric of Reality: The science of parallel universes and its implications. There is also an early YouTube video on the Multiverse and a recent YouTube video on Monotony and Novelty.

I really wish Lulie would put out more videos. Perhaps lectures of her own ideas.

Thanks. I'll have to think about this more. I have always had mild "OCD" behaviors (in quotes because I'm not too sure about the label) which were much worse when I was a child. Examples: counting the number of times I check the cold and hot water faucet handles in the same way, or making sure car doors are closed (X number of times, in a certain way). Patterns of behavior like these might be a good fit for a discussion like this one. Even as a kid, when asked about the problem I explained it as a pattern which had little or nothing to do with the actual object involved. I'm not worried about whether the faucet is going to drip or if a door is still open, in other words. I knew it had to be related to something else. As I have studied more about your ideas, I understand a little more about inexplicit knowledge and the competing unconscious ideas you discuss here. Or, at least I know they exist. In my case, I think performing certain behaviors (habits) are a sort of shortcut resolution to competing ideas I not only don't know about, but I don't care to resolve at the moment. Having said that, however, I also realize there are some people who are trapped performing similar behaviors way too many times. They might benefit from learning about critical rationalism, fallibilism, and your fun criterion and other ideas. They might be suffering due to unnecessary pressures imposed on them as children.

Thank you for putting this out there. I'm fascinated by these ideas. Has David written about these ideas somewhere?

A bit like Kant's free play of faculties or Ingarden's polyphonic harmony. In other words, this epistemology is grounded on something like attention in the aesthetic mode.

David defines the fun criterion by: "...ideally, you want to get into the state of mind where they're all affecting each other, and when they're all affecting each other, you're having fun." Here, "they" refers to ideas in a mind. Also, '...the conjecture and criticism is taking into account each of what the others are...' David also mentions that it may not be possible to bring ideas into direct confrontation, unless they're explicit. Does anyone have ideas about general methods for not fooling ourselves into thinking we are in a state of fun…? Or (at the moment at least), is it something we can only really do good error correction *after the fact*. That is, we can only do effective error correction explicitly, and after a perceived episode of ‘fun’ thinking has occurred. Also, does that mean that psychopathic murderers aren't having fun in the sense David means? Does this definition of fun rule that case out?

Hey David! May you consider uploading content more frequently. Thank you

thanks for sharing

Brilliant David

The most lucid speaker alive struggles to find words -- but that's partly what this conversation is about!

Thanks David for your important work! I really appreciated reading The Beginning of Infinity. It reminds me of how Elon Musk is probably thinking -- starting from first principles and then moving along in perpetual cycles of conjectures and (self-)criticism. This video captured an idea I've been thinking about. Every semester, I teach an Email Marketing course at a college in Canada. One day, I thought, "Why teach only 20 students per semester when I could capture my knowledge into a textbook or software, and distribute it to thousands of students?" It seems that my challenge then is to make explicit my very inexplicit knowledge! Perhaps my explicit knowledge (say, what appears in my course slides) is the tip of the iceberg and my inexplicit knowledge is the 90% of knowledge that lies under the water. By having classroom discussions, my students help me to uncover (or make explicit) the inexplicit knowledge I have. This might explain why I seem to always learn something from my course! From the student's perspective, perhaps they also have explicit ignorance (i.e. they KNOW that they don't know something) and inexplicit ignorance (i.e. they don't know what it is that they don't know; or they can't put their finger on what it is that they don't know, they just know that they don't know it). Thanks again for being the champion of true knowledge.

Has he written about this in BOI or his blog ? I feel like the video stopped at the cliff hanger.

I think David needs to include thoughts as a subset of the feelings realm

The way I take it is that by following the fun you remove errors from that third category of unconscious (these errors are basically internal conflicts eg about what to do, right?) so that you can much better focus on the explicit category which is probably where you want to synthesize new knowledge via conjecture and criticism and error correction in the first place...

If I scrape my memory for moments in which I was having "Fun", I feel that many (but not all) of those types of moments did not create much knowledge. Many categories of fun feel more like I am Spending knowledge rather then creating it. The act of Creating knowledge isn't that fun to me. For example, learning to program a computer was very frustrating and certainly not fun for the most part, but it created knowledge in my mind. That knowledge then gave me confidence and mental resilience, the confidence generated then translates into a sense of "Fun" because my subjective probabilities of success toward desired goals increases.

Brilliant. I was wondering given the universality of computation why couldn't you translate one of these theories in to another type. It certainly seems we often translate these unconscious inexplicit theories into explicit ones. Or is he just saying that when trying to translate one of these types into another they automatically lose some of their defining features?

Are emotions actually theories... or are they something that are prior to theories, kind of like principles? It just seems to me that emotions are there to make you do stuff, although the reason why you have those emotions in the first place is not clear.

All these levels of knowledge(conscious, sub-conscious, and unconscious ideas) are under going evolution simultaneously, and they are fighting each other to win. When these ideas are affecting each other, you are having fun ......