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PODCAST

ToKCast

This is a podcast largely about the work of David Deutsch and his books ”The Beginning of Infinity” and ”The Fabric of Reality”.

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

01:19:49

Ep 215: Charley Lineweaver

ToKCast ·

2024/09/09

A conversation with physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, polyglot and polymath - Charley Lineweaver. 00:00 - My introduction 08:57 - Charley’s fascinating early years 12:14 - From an English/History degree to physics 13:53 - Charley’s historic work on the Cosmic Microwave Background 17:34 - Methods of probing deep space 19:51 - Our accelerating universe 22:15 - Dark Matter Candidates 23:20 - The Fermi Problem and the “Planet of the Apes” Hypothesis 28:37 - Natural experiments in the evolution

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01:26:49

Ep 214: Resources, Wealth, Technology, Error...

ToKCast ·

2024/07/24

The title is long enough so you look for more here? ;) This one is largely, in truth about energy and what it can do for us. Across the almost 90 minutes I cover how the concepts in the title logically cohere and depend one upon the other and we take a look at "the universal constructor" and compare the possibilities for an optimistic distant future with the reality of our situation now. Fair warning: many Australian examples are employed here. A tiny bit of Trump, a dashing of Deutsch, a yard of

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01:08:53

Ep 213: ToKCast in Auckland - live

ToKCast ·

2024/07/11

This is a recording (with a brief introduction first) of a keynote address I gave to open the 2024 "Naturalistic Decision Making Association" conference. People from business, government and academia came together for 3 days to talk about how to make better decisions under pressure. It was an opportunity for me to share the work of David Deutsch and Karl Popper with everyone from people working in international militaries and government defence organisations, through to leaders in business and

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02:24:52

Ep 212: Livestream 3, June 28 2024

ToKCast ·

2024/06/28

More questions, more lengthy and more verbose than ever. Enjoy, or drift of to sleep with me ;)

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01:17:41

Ep 211: Livestream 2, June 26 2024

ToKCast ·

2024/06/27

Fear not! ToKCast is not becoming a pure Q&A "show". This is literally a kind of "break" for me that I find easy and I note the listeners find fun. Today's a little shorter and - here's some of the topics covered!00:00: David Deutsch mentioned on Lex Fridman 04:15: Dennis Noble debates Richard Dawkins on the selfish gene 16:47: The goal driven life and AI 27:51 Self similarity - minds and universes 34:39: The hard problem of consciousness and Popperian epistemology 41:30: Wave particle

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02:15:05

Ep 210: Livestream - Question, Answer and repeat for...

ToKCast ·

2024/06/25

I put out a call on Twitter/@X for questions and got a deluge. Between those and more from YouTube itself - this is the result ranging over predicting the future, through to theories of learning, AGI and AI, optimism and epistemology - many of the major hits and more.

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01:03:03

Ep 209: Rational Decision Making

ToKCast ·

2024/06/17

Riffing on Karl Popper and David Deutsch (especially). A broad overview, covering lots of the basics of "social" or "rational" choice theory, Bayesianism (again!), misconceptions, good ideas and bad. Errors my own as always.

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39:00

Ep 208: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality”...

ToKCast ·

2024/06/04

Here we explore the distinction between classical notions of time (including spacetime physics) as approximations to how time is understood in the multiverse. How perfectly deterministic laws lead to subjective unpredictability. Consequences for free will, questions about what happened before time began (or after it ends), new discoveries since the publication of The Fabric of Reality was published in 1997 and David's subtle alterations to phrasing between The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of

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26:47

Ep 207: Variations on a Conjecture

ToKCast ·

2024/05/21

If you are distracted by, or simply prefer a version without, the background music - you can find that here: https://youtu.be/xSbqTTs1nl0My preferred version is here: https://youtu.be/2IneL4VpShE as there are some helpful (though not essential) visuals. This is about knowledge creation and the the commonalities between the two forms known (evolution (by natural selection) and explanatory) and the differences between them. It teases out and synthesises some of the work of Darwin, Popper and

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01:45:42

Ep 206: Sam Kuypers (Time: The First Quantum Concept...

ToKCast ·

2024/04/12

Sam Kuypers is a theoretical physicist who specialises in the physics of time. If you have the time, Sam can take up as much of it as you like telling you about how our ideas of time have changed…over time. As Sam will reveals: times, they are not a-changing. But there is change! Newtonian physics has a notion of time (or at least Newton himself did), Relativity as discovered by Einstein in the early 1900s radically transformed our notion of what time is and now, in the 21st Century, Sam Kuypers and

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53:16

Ep 205: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality”...

ToKCast ·

2024/03/18

Part 2: Time is in the instant. The instant is not in time. More on the quantum theory of time and how the "spacetime" view of time, and the flow of time are false. How time relates to the "block universe" model and how the multiverse fixes the paradoxes at the heart of our common sense (and classical physics) ideas about time - more readings from "The Fabric of Reality" chapter 11 and in addition:A couple of acrostics about David Deutsch in terms of "Popper". David's changing view of free

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01:00:00

Ep 204: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality”...

ToKCast ·

2024/02/28

This is really "episode 0" but not quite because we do indeed get to some readings and unpackings of the chapter. But in the overall scheme, that forms a minor part of a longer introduction to the "common sense" understanding of time and then to some relativity (of simultaneity) and reflections on the work of other physicists and popularisers.Note clips from "The Lord of the Rings" and "Spaceballs" movies are owned by their respective copyright holders.

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01:17:20

Ep 203: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality”...

ToKCast ·

2024/02/16

Some more long introductory remarks and commentary throughout readings of the closing pages of the chapter culminating in the explanation of the "punchline" conclusion of the chapter which is: "Necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics. It is not the reward we get for doing mathematics". This is a good exploration of fallibility, the relationship of physics to mathematics and how science is, in a sense, logically prior to mathematics (and logic for that matter!)...all because proof is a

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45:26

Ep 202: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality”...

ToKCast ·

2024/02/11

The nature of proof and mathematics as a creative enterprise. Not all that is true can be proved as such, the high hopes of David Hilbert for placing the entirety of mathematics on a "firm foundation", the mathematical world-shattering results of Kurt Gödel which frustrated that project, a history of proof and finally Roger Penrose and whether human brains are computers in the Turing sense. And some very long remarks by me, especially in the introduction. Become a subscriber at

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43:14

Ep 201: Progress: Conserving the means of Error...

ToKCast ·

2023/12/14

Drawing on Chapter 15 "The Evolution of Culture" from "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch and then applying it to some special cases.Come and chat to me about this or anything else at https://www.getairchat.com/brett Timestamps: 00:00 Speech, Trade and Democracy 02:39 Is Democracy under attack? 07:05 Free Speech as Error Identification 09:14 Limits on Free Speech? 13:02 Case Study 1: North Korea 14:18 Case Study 2: Afghanistan and Iraq 17:30 Case Study 3: South Korea 19:43 Case Study 4:

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01:28:10

Ep 200: Chiara Marletto

ToKCast ·

2023/11/30

00:00 Introduction 08:03 Interview Begins 09:42 How Chiara found herself at the foundations of physics 15:30 How Chiara found Everett 19:13 No Special Physics is required for Observers 21:02 What is a counterfactual? How is it linked to a constructor? 29:05 What is (classical) information? How is it different to quantum information? 32:30 Quantum Information is more constrained. This makes it more powerful. 34:08 Is the universe made of information? 38:04 The Simulation Hypothesis 40:33 The second

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50:29

Ep 199: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality”...

ToKCast ·

2023/10/11

The certainty of mathematics and its place in the supposed hierarchy of subjects (assumed to be above science which is itself above philosophy in turn). Some more remarks on Bayesianism and somehow ghosts and alien life.

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01:35:41

Ep 198: Bayesianism

ToKCast ·

2023/09/12

Everything and more one might ever want to know about the topic...that other epistemology people often talk about. The central project is to distinguish between 4 "species" of what is often called "Bayesianism" 1. Bayes' Theorem. 2. Bayesian Statistics. 3. Bayesian Reasoning 4. Bayesian Epistemology. Actual timestampes and chapters are: 00:00 - Introduction to this podcast 02:55 Epistemology 11:30 Substrate Independence 12:30 Inexplicit Knowledge/Knowledge without a knower 21:30 Explanatory

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01:25:00

Ep 197: David Deutsch’s ”The Fabric of Reality”...

ToKCast ·

2023/09/10

This episode is an introduction to the chapter. Although there are some readings, they are limited and I provide context by diving deep into David's more recent work on all this. Specifically we go through the connection of Chapter 10 here (published in 1997) and Chapter 5 "The Reality of Abstractions" from "The Beginning of Infinity" (published in 2011) and then also in light of David's recent speech given at his Dirac Medal award ceremony (published in 2017) - here is the timestamped link to that

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43:08

Ep 196: The Mother Military

ToKCast ·

2023/08/29

Commentary (and Explainer) This podcast is largely an op-ed about the "feminisation" of Western militaries and the effect of so-called "diversity, equity and inclusion" ideologies on modern defence forces. I look at what the purpose of a military is and the tension between its aims and the ways some arms of some defence forces are "marketing" themselves to their own people. Of chief concern to some has been the way the US army has chosen to attempt to recruit people into its ranks

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