can only start with what understanding I want, right?
And I know I've asked you this before, but I want to be pedantically exhaustive about connecting the four theories of the fabric of reality.
And the reason I bring that up is because I think most people still view what you've written as being four separate things.
And it's hard enough to grasp these four separate things because they're actually fairly deep and wide -ranging theories.
But I think in mind they connect together into one thing.
Knowledge is a crystal and nature has no boundaries, right?
These are just phrases but these things all connect together so we've talked in the past, for example, how epistemology and evolution connect in that they're both forms of knowledge creation.
We've talked about quantum physics and computation connect to create quantum computation.
I'd just love to get as many examples about how does physics connect to evolution.
How does evolution connect to computation, for example.
Things that may be less obvious where people might view things as different theories, but to use, they're fundamentally the same.
Yeah, evolution and epistemology, people find both of those, the connection between both of those and physics, very counterintuitive.
Because most people think of physics in a very bottom -up way.
And I think for completely independent reasons, such as constructive theory.
That's a mistake. Ever since that idea caught on, like sometime after Newton, physicists have tried to shoehorn other physical theories into that mold and that gives rise to, for example, the problem of foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
How can you have an exact second law when the fundamental theories of physics are all -time reversible and the second law is time irreversible?
how can you have that?
The prevailing view is yeah, thermodynamics and epistemology are both emergent theories and therefore not fundamental from the physics point of view, and therefore if we want to understand the universe at a fundamental level, we needn't bother with those.
Those are just like the theory of washing machines or gardening.
I think that's artificial and especially when they have to get very embarrassed when they exclude thermodynamics from physics in that way.
I think that a theory which is going to go deeper than the current paradigm of physics is going to have to put emergent phenomena and emergent theories on the same level, microscopic theories.
People talk about reductionism and holism, and some people reductionists and some people are wholists, I want to put them both in a sack and tie it up and let them come out with a resolution.
There cannot be a criterion for excluding a set of theories from the body of knowledge other than whether they're good explanations.
Yes, abandon them if they're not good explanations, but if they are, why make a class distinction between them?
It's just going to lead to error.
And I think it has led to error in thinking about the world.
So that's the connection between physics and those two.
What you just said, for example, is that reductionist theories, the only theories there are because they don't form good explanations at a level where you need them, because especially when you have emergence, then you have very unpredictable things, you're not going to calculate all the particle collisions from the Big Bang till now to figure out how humans evolve, or how species evolve.
at every level of emergence there is a possibility for an explanation that explains that level and you need that explanation.
So I think that's very helpful and in your thermodynamics example like if you're trying to figure out how a steam engine works you're not going to do statistical mechanics and trace every collision you're going to actually probably start at thermodynamics.
yes and so that's a tie between I guess is the evolution in physics no epistemology and physics much more.
So thermodynamics is emergent physics and it is in terms of those four it is epistemology but that just shows the terminology is misleading.
The terminology in particular of the word fundamental which I think you use slightly differently to the majority of especially physicists, they hear and anyone listening to this hears fundamental and thinks reductionism automatically.
But for example you would say that people are a fundamental feature of.
So what does fundamental therefore mean in this worldview?
So fundamental ideas are the ones that are needed more types of explanations.
We'll never get to the ultimate fundamental theory because that would mean that there were no more problems That can't happen.
But yes, so that's how I use the word fondant.
I think you also said something related which is that if it, reality is what is needed in your explanation or what it has to exist in the explanation for the explanation to make.
A rule for deciding that something is real.
It's not the meaning of real because there are things we don't understand about real.
Like, in what sense are numbers real and abstract objects real, and in case physicists don't like that I always ask, in what sense are laws of physics real?
Because we can't trip over one, but on the other hand we can't understand anything in physics without them, so they're real.
Some would claim that we are cognitively incapable of understanding physics full stop up to a certain point.
This is the idea that Richard Dawkins has of middle world which was cropping up very recently in Our brain evolved on the African savanna in order to survive, so it should be no mystery to us, no agreement about what quantum theory means because, in fact, we are cognitively closed to understanding things that are too small, things that are outside the middle world because they travel too fast or are too large like the entire cosmos.
But this is flawed because of universality.
Among other things.
We understand quasars and subatomic particles.
If that argument had been valid then we would have stopped a long time ago in understanding things, especially like mathematics but also physics.
That then brings up this connection or draws out this connection between quantum physics and epistemology.
Can you draw that line, that connection?
So the nicest one I think this is one that Naval also likes best, the idea of crystal in the multiverse.
If knowledge is the kind of information which once it's there keeps itself in existence and gets that property by error correction, then since there are many errors for every possible truth, many possible errors for every truth, then in the multiverse, if there's error correction, then there are a bunch of unlike universes which become alike in the region in which they are correcting errors.
And so that's a striking connection between epistemology and physics.
I hope that this kind of connection will be amplified once we get to formulating theories of knowledge and so on in constructor theory.
Constructor theory isn't limited to the parochial properties of quantum theory.
It emerged from quantum theory, but it emerged from problems in quantum theory, but it's a level of description and I'm gesticulating as if it was a higher level, but actually it's a lower level of description than quantum theory.
It's more reductionist than quantum theory and yet it is more compatible with emergent properties.
We're hoping eventually that things like knowledge economics, ultimately consciousness maybe, though I my own view is that consciousness will require an extra idea, not just elaborating ideas from within Constructor Theory.
It requires an idea, another idea, at least one.
Here the two, the line from Newton through to Einstein and then to Quantum Theory has been ever more difficult and elaborate mathematics.
And so this string theory comes along, and this I think leads to the general opinion that the next theory of physics will be more mathematically challenging, and hence all the reasons earlier that maybe we won't be able to understand it.
But constructor theory seems to have echoes of that famous Feynman line, where he said that perhaps the ultimate laws of physics, or whatever he meant by that, would be more like the rules of the checkerboard than some fancy dynamical mathematical laws.
Is that what you have in mind with constructive theory?
Some checkerboard type notion of possible and impossible moves?
Yeah, it could be just like that.
You can't understand if you have a listing of all the moves in a game of chess.
You can't understand what's happening there unless you know the rules of chess.
But knowing the rules of chess, the people who make chess programs think that if you know the rules of chess, you can understand all the games, but they're not true.
If you want to win the games as opposed to just win them, then you need a lot more than just the rules.
Yeah, constructive theory is just like that, we hope.
But it's more than just physics as you say.
This is an explanation that's not merely about fundamental laws of physics but is extendable into biology and … Yeah, or you could say that physics is going to consume all those fields, just like it's consumed many other fields.
We think of constructive theory as a theory of physics.
And if it consumes those fields, then that's what physics has always done.
Can I back up for a second on constructive theory, because I think it's the part that might be understood the least by the general audience.
I know that Chiara wrote a book on it.
You have not yet written extensively for the lay people on it.
What problem are you trying to solve?
And where are you at so far?
And what level of confidence do you have that this is the right approach to go down?
Oh, that those are very long, long questions.
That's okay. I think the answer is illuminating.
So when I wrote my first paper on constructor theory, which is philosophical paper, didn't have really any physics, it was published philosophical journal and I wanted to explain what we were trying to do, what this research program is, because we didn't know at the time, and we still don't, what the definitive forms of constructor theory are going to be.
We're going to find those as we find the applications.
So I thought I would give some motivation.
We don't have a good theory of initial conditions.
We think carefully, why should we need initial conditions when we are perfectly fine to have no theory of the final conditions?
So that's one thing.
And then the thermodynamics thing.
And then there's the fact that things like computation and information can't be expressed in the initial conditions plus laws of motion way.
And I thought I would write a quick paper.
And I ended up with 18 motivations.
I can't think now, and you can look at the paper, if you want to see all 18, I can't think what they all were now, but they, this seemed to me a motivation for thinking that this constructor theoretic approach was a very simple change in worldview in a certain way.
You can say very quickly what the change is, but the ramifications are huge and it seems to touch all these problems in different fields.
And that's what motivated me to try to make a theory out of this.
And the next thing that happened was I gave a talk at the Clarendon Laboratory and Chiara was in the audience.
She was a graduate student working on quantum information.
And she came up to me afterwards and said, what about social?
That can't be right, can it?
Because I had indeed contradicted myself in the talk.
And so then she came around and we chatted about it.
And I said, do you want to work on it?
Because there's a lot more to work on than one person can do, especially me.
So she said yes. And since then, So she's worked on the constructor theory of life, constructor theory of probability, which in a way translating existing theories into constructor theoretic form and uncovering little nuggets.
My favorite nugget is that in constructor theoretic thermodynamics, first law is to do with information, not just the second law.
So the way she defines the first law, is similar to statistical mechanics, but you end up with the first law that's about you can do this and not that.
You can do this and not that.
And as a result, you get the version of the first law, but better than normal because it incidentally has the property that, let me see if I get this right.
I think it incidentally has the property that there must be a lower bound on the energy, whereas existing thermodynamics doesn't.
You have to put that in as a as an extra axiom.
And if there were no lower bound then you could have an object that you were just extracting energy out of without violating the second law, just first law extracting energy forever and that would make a perpetual motion machine of the first kind.
With the existing thermodynamics you have to impose that as an extra condition and in construct theory you don't have to.
Meanwhile, we have together been working on the constructor theory of time.
Yeah, perhaps I'd say something about the constructor theory of time.
Really, the first people to have this idea were Wheeler and DeWitt, who were trying to find a viable theory of quantum gravity and they found a theory of quantum gravity in which there's there's no time.
Time doesn't appear in the theory.
There's just different spaces, three -dimensional spaces which all have amplitudes, quantum mechanical amplitudes, and they all exist. Simultaneously, and time is an emergent property of the way they are entangled with each other, but nothing ever changes.
It's just an emergent property of how they're entangled.
And then, as Julian Barber made a big thing out of it, wrote a whole book about it, then Page and Wooters— so that was a theory tied to general relativity.
It would only work in the context of general relativity.
Page and Wooters made a construction that will work in any quantum theory.
Not just quantum theory of gravity, but any quantum theory.
You can formulate a theory of time that doesn't have things changing in it, and so the static universe still has time because of entanglement.
So that is more general.
It doesn't require Wheeler and DeWitt's specific theory of space -time, and when I saw Page and Wouter's theory, I immediately thought, yeah, this is it, this is what time is and then many people have tried to get something more out of it and they failed and then Sam came along and got something more out of it so he's got the most advanced theory of of time in in the universe, in the multiverse or whatever so far.
In a way it's only a small improvement on page of Mutus, but it is more general, and that's what we want.
And then Kiara and I are working on constructor theory of time, which we hope will be this kind of, for the moment, the ultimate version of that, which, instead of deriving the concepts from some theory like quantum theory, it lays down rules that it says, any theory that obeys these rules will have time.
And Kiara already did that with probabilities.
So any theory that obeys these rules will have probability, even though there's no stochastic processes.
So it has probability in the sense that quantum theory does, that an observer, a rational observer will bet in certain ways, but nothing can happen.
Everything's deterministic.
Constructive theory, by the way, is necessarily deterministic.
It can't work unless everything's deterministic.
But your view of the quantum multiverse is already deterministic.
Yes. Yes, so creating a quantum multiverse obeys that rule.
And I've also written that the prevailing concept of a stochastic theory, that just doesn't make sense.
It's like saying there's something more probable, it's like saying it has more magic.
Nothing follows from that statement.
You need an extra theory to make sense of that statement.
Yeah, and now I'm working on the universal constructor.
Is universal constructor related a little bit to your talk in fabric of reality about virtual reality generators?
So that's an interesting thought.
I don't think it's related, except in the general way that there is such a thing as virtual reality, that you can make a virtual reality machine in our universe, and then it can simulate anything, then that's Turing universality or computational universality.
That's, in constructor theory, you have hardly have to say that.
It's so built in that it is the most natural thing.
You'd have to work very hard and get over some very difficult obstacles if that weren't true in constructor theory.
So far in constructor theory, you've basically got some better or more universal explanations of existing theories.
When do we start getting predictions?
when do we start getting tests?
So I guess having a lower bound for the energy is a prediction.
Not a very strong prediction because everyone believed that already.
I think that where constructor theory will start making new, where people will start formulating theories about new things within the constructor theory three framework, that will be when these new things combine existing theories where it was unexpected before.
Having, now, I don't believe in the quantum theory of life, for example.
I think that's a dead end and a blind alley.
But that sort of thing is the sort of thing that the constructor theory could provide a framework for that existing theories don't have a framework for.
It's a pity. It's like I thought in Fabric of Reality, I thought that the multiverse kind of solved the problem of free will.
I didn't quite say that there, but I hinted that maybe it solves the problem of free will and I don't think it does at all.
But even though it doesn't solve it, it gives a framework in which one can think free because free will involves counterfactuals have much more meaning in the theory of the multiverse than they do in a Newtonian or classical theory.
And in constructor theory, they have even more meaning.
That's the kind of thing.
I can't foretell the growth of knowledge." I don't even know that constructor theory is going to work.
It could end up as a kind of curiosity that this is what people in the early 21st century, some people, thought would illuminate things.
But it only provides a little bit of illumination.
And now we know what the real illumination is, we don't need it.
That might be. Or it might be the opposite.
This is a meta question.
I don't want to take us off on a tangent but you just said there as a good Popperian would, that constructive theory could be completely wrong and it will just be a footnote in the history of physics.
There are other people out there with new theories as well, they do not speak in a Popperian way and they will say about their new theory that they're holding up, that this is going to solve the origins of life, this is going to tell us what the nature of time is, this is going to solve what the preconditions of the Big Bang were and so on with great confidence.
And they, I have to say, get a lot more attention.
and they get the investment and they appear on some big podcasts and things, is this an inherent disadvantage of being a Popperian, that we couch our terms in such conjectural language?
I suppose if you were fanatical about getting approval and funding, then you would maximize that.
But I think people working on things, usually the people working on things, deep things for their own sake, for the sake of those things are the ones that tend to make progress.
In some cases, that will make them famous, like if you invent mRNA vaccine, then it'll make you famous, though those people weren't famous before.
I think I'm always suspicious when someone says what they're going to invent or what they're going to prove or what they're going to find.
I would rather they said, this is a problem I'm going to address, I don't know where it's going, here's my problem, you know, we find it interesting, we think it might do so but maybe it won't, maybe it'll do something we haven't thought of, you know, I think that's, I find that more attractive as a stance, like when I'm thinking of someone else's elevator pitch. I think Popper used to say, what is your problem, what do you working on, and that in research when you meet someone who is not in your field, the first thing you say is what are you working on you know.
That's not what are you going to find, that would be a weird question.
This is a little historical, and I know you don't necessarily like to go into your own thought process because we're not here to copy you, but I think it is illuminating to think about the connection you made between physics and computation.
You basically have help create the quantum theory of computation, and there are a lot of researchers and technologists now working on quantum computers, tons of them.
In fact, we just talked to Maria.
She's off to work at some quantum computing company.
Not all of these people believe in the quantum theory of the multiverse.
Did you start with Huw Everett's many worlds theory and then get to quantum computation?
And do you view that as fundamental?
Can you explain quantum computation with the observer collapse theory or is that just contradictory?
As you may know, when I first came up with the idea of quantum computing, I didn't even think of it as a quantum computer.
I didn't call it that.
What I was trying to do, the consensus at the time, among people who work on Everett's multi -verse theory, was that the multi -verse theory gives the same experimental predictions as collapse theory.
In a way, that was already known to be false.
There's the paradox of Wigner's friend.
You know how people just take paradoxes, that's a paradox.
They don't think that's the reason why we're wrong.
is fundamentally wrong in our world view.
So I thought that Everett's theory must be testable, and it was testable because it proposed the different dynamics from wave function collapse, all the wave function collapse theories.
So I thought, OK, how would we test it?
And I thought, simplest thing, you do a version of the 2 -slit experiment then you have to have a measurement of that measurement.
And how do you do that?
And I thought, oh, it could be done with a computer.
There's this computer, but if the computer is going to have a quantum two -state experiment or whatever you call it, the Stone -Gutlach experiment, or whatever, they're all equivalent really.
If it's going to have that in it, then the computer can't be decoherent.
It can't be a classical computer.
It must be augmented with these quantum operations.
Which operations would you need?
So I added some operations to make a coherent classical computer with these extra operations, and that's what it was in my mind.
It was just an object.
It was an object connected to a computer with certain, that what I was interested in is something else.
It was this experiment that you could do.
So then I wrote a paper about that experiment, which among other things, there was only one section of the paper that had that in it.
And then that paper was rejected.
And there was a story that they said that's philosophy.
And I was like, okay, I don't care.
So I put it aside and I didn't get it out again.
I would tell people about it.
Like when I was talking to other physicists, I told Roger Penrose, and I said, okay, now you've got to accept that If quantum theory is true, universally true, then Everett is right.
And he said, yeah, but quantum theory isn't true.
OK, that's a consistent position, but that's not the position that the vast majority of physicists do.
So then at the same conference where I asked Roger Penrose that, I was also talking to someone who worked for a publisher.
And he said, why don't you submit it?
And I was like, ah, too much trouble.
And eventually I submitted it and it was eventually published at the same time as my universal quantum computers paper, even though it came much earlier and people think that I taught with them in the opposite order, but I didn't.
I first thought of the experiment to test Everett and then much later thought about quantum computers.
Is this the same experiment that's mentioned at the beginning of infinity as going inside the mind of the AI?
Yes. I see. So you came up with that first two.
So you had to create experiment to test many worlds and said, okay, is the observer making a difference?
Let's get inside the observer.
But if we get inside the observer, it's just a double -slit experiment all over again, unless there's a different kind of computer than the classical computer.
It's not going to be affected by the same interference effects that the double -slit experiment is vulnerable to.
So we need to create qubits or quantum computing?
Yeah, again, the term qubit wasn't invented till much, much later.
And as I said, I didn't think of it like that.
So you were solving a different problem.
Yep, a different problem.
It didn't cross my mind that this was a new mode of computation.
And to do this test we'll need AGI as well.
Yeah, that's not my fault.
Exactly. It's the opposition that wants the conscious observer to do something different.
Okay and in that case you put a conscious observer?
It needs AGI and it needs quantum computing, it needs both.
Yes. The AGI has to be a quantum computer internally.
It has to be running on a quantum computer.
Because the alternative perspective is - Otherwise, you have interference.
Yeah, it's the opposition that are saying that it is the observer collapsing the wave function.
And so well if that's their position then we have to have an observer that can observe things without collapsing wave functions.
Yeah. But this observer doesn't do much that's quantum.
He only does a few quantum operations, like half a dozen quantum operations, but most of the time he's thinking about things like, do I know this and so on.
And that's all done with classical operations, but done with coherent quantum objects.
So they have to be done with qubits instead of bits.
So in relation to what the time I'm going to I'm going to invent quantum computers it didn't occur to me.
Even when I finally did it was I wasn't even trying to do that I was like I had this conversation with Charlie Bennett where he said, complexity and I said complexity is arbitrary because it depends on the hardware and he said but the hardware is physics.
So I said okay if the hardware is physics then you're using wrong physics.
So I thought I would go home and recast Turing's analysis in Quantum Physics instead of with paper tape like he did.
And then I saw that there were algorithms that didn't have classical analog.
We talked earlier about how knowledge is that which replicates itself in the environment or tends to get replicated in the environment, not necessarily replicates itself.
Yeah. Although it does an evolution, but tends to get replicated in the environment.
So if you were able to peek across the multiverse, you would see that error correction leads to the same or similar knowledge across the multiverse Is that true within a given universe as well?
Because universe is fairly large.
There should be error correction processes Maybe maybe they're going on elsewhere.
We know that there's such a thing as convergent evolution that things look like tigers, but they they evolved in Australia or whatever and And we know that there's a convergent evolution of ideas because people can have an idea, and a person who they've never heard of has the same idea, and that can happen as well.
It's not as systematic as it is in the multiverse, because in the multiverse, you get all variants of the same kind of size or they're involving the same number of mutations.
They all happen and they're all error -corrected.
So convergent evolution is a much stronger effect in the multiverse.
I see but within a given universe does that increase, it's not probability but does it increase the idea that there's more life out there, life itself being a convergent property of certain initial conditions, in the universe, maybe, but we don't know, we could be a fluke or this could be a universe where there are very few people initially.
There might be a lot more later.
There's a lot of Kepler planets out there, what's your intuition?
I don't know. Let's talk a little bit about anti -rational memes.
I think this is one of the least understood parts of what you've written about, and it's mentioned briefly in the beginning of infinity, and it's basically, I think, this is the part where I understand the least, because I will admit I did not resonate with that chapter as well, but I think your thesis is that a lot of human progress was held back.
Because the creativity went into figuring out how to keep people on the ideas that certain people already said, these are the correct ideas, I'm gonna stay here.
And then all creativity got poured into reinforcing those ideas, as opposed to letting you wander outside of those boundaries.
So, what are these anti -rational memes, are they still around, or is it always a war between them and the rational memes?
So, first of all, that this happened, it seems to me unanswerable.
There's no other way of explaining why it took, why it took three hundred thousand years at least to get from stone tools to the very first real progress.
It depends where you count it from starting.
But certainly far less.
It's it's very recent compared with three hundred thousand years.
I think we should, secondly, I think we shouldn't be surprised that anti -rational means exist because evolution, it's the most evolutionarily stabilized thing in a biological organism.
It's the genetic code.
The biology doesn't care about your arm being chopped off, except in so far as that affects the propagation of your DNA.
And the DNA, all evolution of stuff inside the cell that affects whether mutations are going to happen in the DNA, they're all towards greater fidelity.
There are no mutations that reduce the fidelity.
Some people, I used to think, and Dawkins has contradicted those people very cogently, that maybe there's a there's an optimum amount of mutation, because if you have too much, then too many of you die too soon.
And if you have too little, then you don't evolve fast enough to cope with changing circumstances.
So there's an optimal amount, and And maybe the error correcting mechanisms are not optimized for error correction, they're optimized for that, that's not true.
The real truth is that species go extinct all the time for this very reason, that they have too strong error correction.
Not enough evolution happens to cope with the fact that circumstances change.
So most, the vast majority of species that have ever existed went extinct, and they went extinct because they did not evolve to meet the new conditions and I think that's what we should expect from memes.
It's a bit of a miracle that's not like necessarily true of memes, and I could talk a bit about why it's not necessarily true, but the thing we should expect when we first encounter, the thing I expected when I first realized that there were going to be anti -rational memes is that they were going to get more and more anti -rational, there's to stop them.
The fact that they're going to eventually kill the subculture that has them doesn't stop them any more than the peacock's tail sooner or later will result in the extinction of the peacock species, even though the male peacocks are still trying to get larger tails and the female peacocks are still selecting the larger tails and so all that's happening and sooner or later the species will go extinct as almost all species have. So therefore I also realized that the actual faculty of creativity couldn't have evolved in order to be creative.
It must have evolved for some other reason.
And then Popper comes in to save us when he points out that there's no such thing as instruction from without.
There is, in the case of DNA, in the case of DNA we can just copy like when the cell divides, you can just copy the existing DNA.
There's no way of copying an existing culture into the next generation.
The next generation has to guess, and most of the information that it builds up when it is trying to copy has been generated inside itself, and it's going to be different in lots of ways.
So you don't need a strong mutation mechanism.
Even so, it took a long time, and I don't think we know the history.
Matt Ridley says, you need a certain population size before progress can take hold.
I'm not sure that's true.
My counterexample is the earliest open societies, the earliest rational societies, as far as we know, there may be some before, but the earliest ones we know of, Athens, were very small by our standards and they were even very small by the world's standards.
Athens was a tiny proportion of the world's population, yet it had this huge burst of creativity which if it had gone on for 300 years like ours has, they might well have reached what we have reached, but it was destroyed for various reasons that historians try to understand and so on.
Our Enlightenment having lasted, depends what you count, but lasted maybe 500 years, maybe 300 years, it's far longer than any previous Enlightenment has lasted.
And they all the ones that I've heard and mainly the two I discuss in my book lasted a generational or two and then they ended and I think they ended because they couldn't solve the problem that arose.
They had what it took but it was just too soon and they were fueled by the bad guys winning by irrelevant things like force of numbers.
What do you think are the dominant anti -rational memes in this version of the enlightenment that could prevent, that could take us back to the Dark Ages?
What do we need to stay in the Enlightenment?
Yeah I can't think of a plausible way we could go back to the Dark Ages.
I'm sure it's possible for fundamental reasons, but I can't really imagine it happening.
And if I were to imagine it, it would be prophecy.
And I can't really imagine it.
I think when you say anti -rational memes today, we've got to make a distinction between the West and everyone else.
So everyone else still got still, all the other cultures in the world are still dominated by anti -rational memes that embody their culture.
that's the thing that's mostly, the anti -rational memes are mostly devoted to protecting their existence and only secondarily other things.
In the West, I think, again, I don't know, but it seems to me that the subculture or the set of ideas in the West that is most anti -rational are the ones to do with education.
Yeah, why education?
Maybe again, maybe we should expect that because like I said about biology, what are the most stable constructs in DNA?
They are the code for ribosomes.
The ribosomes are the educational institutions of cells.
Their job is to pass on all the knowledge from one generation to the next and they have to do that as faithfully as evolution can make it.
And any evolution that occurs is in the direction of making them more faithful.
They're still not perfectly faithful but that's not evolution's fault, that's physics fault.
We've got too many cosmic rays coming down and too much ultraviolet light and and so on.
And it is thought, although again I saw a YouTube video saying that maybe this isn't at all true, but biologists think that the ribosome stopped evolving two billion years ago.
Everything else has carried on evolving and the ribosome hasn't.
The DNA code has remained the same, even though you could.
And they have invented a different DNA code and implemented an artificial ribosome, and it doesn't exist in nature.
In a culture. Traditionally, the thing that is responsible for maintaining the culture over generations, fighting the fact that people die and cultures want to stay.
The same wanting to preserve their knowledge, are educational institutions.
And of course, from that point of view, they have to be anti -rational, just like evolution is.
So then the mystery is not why they're anti -rational.
It's why everything else has become more and more rational in the West. I don't know.
Again, and this is a matter for historians, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was going to write a book about the Enlightenment.
And it hasn't materialized it.
Like I first heard her talking about this many years ago.
And I don't know why she hasn't written it.
She's the perfect person to write it.
In a sense, the explanation for why almost all species have ever gone extinct is because evolution has not occurred fast enough.
if only it occurred faster.
And when it comes to civilizations, the overwhelming majority of civilizations have gone extinct, because of the mimetic evolution hasn't happened faster.
We are tending in the direction of a more dynamic society, but there are anti -rational means here that still challenge us.
And you just mentioned educational institution as a source for propagating these kind of things, but also parenting is another one that - says primarily it's the educational institutions themselves, which if you think of institutions as a thing in people's minds, their ideas, then they themselves are the most anti -rational memes in the West, but they are also, as you say, quite rightly, they also serve as means of propagating other anti -rational memes, and some people think that they've been taken over by mind virus, and now they are even more anti -rational than they evolved to be.
Yeah, I think to a point you made at the beginning of Affinity, these institutions are load -bearing, they carry a lot of knowledge, but because they have heads and tails, they can be taken over, and a sufficiently compelling idea can come along, take over the whole thing, and then it's masquerading as the former institution relying on the brand and the signaling value of the previous institution.
Because it's doing completely different things.
Scary, but plausible.
Yeah, there's a very cynical phrase that goes around the internet.
I think it's someone's law or something like that, which is like any institution's behavior is best explained as if it's run by a cabal of its enemies.
Ah, you got to be careful.
I always apply the criterion of, if that's true, how do you explain the progress we've had?
Right. There can't be a law to that effect.
There can't be a law.
There's no law. Or, Moloch, or all that thing.
But maybe it's as simple as individuals or small groups of individuals coming up with creative solutions.
For whatever reason, there was a space and time where they had enough time to experiment with those solutions to see what was real.
You can come up with the theory of thermodynamics, then you have a steam engine, the steam engine is actually turning wheels and pulling things, it works.
And then you carve out a space in technology and science where these things are accepted and then it expands out from there.
And now we may be undergoing the opposite collapse where technology and science are affecting so much life so quickly, that people feel destabilized and left behind.
So they rebel and they say, we have to regulate this and control that.
And eventually now with AI regulations, we're talking about limiting the free exercise of mathematics.
You can't have that many flops, you can't run that operation, you can't do that calculation even.
So it might be just the genes that or the memes that resist the change.
They're being forced to change too fast. And so now they get the numbers on their side.
Yeah, I can't possibly accept the pessimistic version of that, but something like that is obviously true.
But it's a problem.
It's a problem that is soluble, and it's up to us to make the arguments.
What's underpinning the whole thing?
Is it error correct, what is it underpinning any solutions?
Is it optimism? Is it error correction?
Is it freedom of speech?
Is it small groups?
Is it, what is it? What's the counter?
What's the antidote?
I could say freedom of speech is the thing that needs to be protected at all costs.
But I don't think it's true that freedom of speech is being that much impaired at the moment.
Certain things you're not allowed to say.
So it's more that, and certain things you must say, which is perhaps even worse.
but I would call those fads, shibboleths rather than actual reduction of the freedom of speech. I don't know if you like this analogy, but in medieval times, there were guilds, and if you wanted to make anything, to join a guild.
Therefore, there was only one way of making a thing, and there was no scope for inventing a different way of making the thing because you'd have to join the guild and they wouldn't let you.
Now, that is the kind of thing we do not have at the moment in regard to freedom of speech. It's not that anybody that wants to say anything has to get permission.
It's that anyone who says things in public has to obey certain constraints, But I think the language is still universal, even if you obey those constraints.
If the things you had to say became a substantial proportion of everything that everyone says, then if you had to say Comrade Stalin at the beginning of every math paper, even then it didn't completely stop Soviet mathematicians from pursuing math.
and we're nowhere near that.
We're nowhere near having to make a woke declaration at the beginning of every paper.
Do you have your pronouns in your bio?
That's the thing that isn't happening yet.
That would be the beginning of the law.
I think culturally, though, the slippery slope is a real thing because it's the nature of politics.
You get a little bit, it's a tug -of -war, you tug more.
If it were a real thing, then we wouldn't have ever had any progress because in the past the anti -rational memes were worse, much worse.
And yet the Enlightenment happened.
The Enlightenment was created by people who were thoroughly constrained by anti -rational memes.
opportunities, everything they said had to be praising God or praising the king, and women weren't allowed—a whole bunch of things weren't allowed, and a whole bunch of other things were compulsory.
But nevertheless, a small number of people, the elites among the elites, the Medici, the it grew from there.
Elon Musk today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you, yeah.
So, you'd say it's perhaps exaggerated, or you've often referred to the age of hyperbole, in terms of the fact that there may have been in the past a perceived golden age of things like capitalism, for example, and now that's under attack, or in the past a perceived optimism during the space age which maybe has been in decline, but you think that it's hyperbolic?
I think something really bad is happening.
There's no doubt about that.
But I don't think it is a reversion to the old things.
It's… some of the ideologies are the same as old ideologies, but the mechanisms that… again, I don't know if this is… if you see the relevance of this, but the mechanisms that get people cancelled for saying anti -woke things are not the same as the ones used to get them canceled.
Even when those things were in force, Darwin was utterly devastated by the death of his daughter and that was a normal thing at the time.
Everyone else thought it was normal, everyone else thought he was exaggerating when he was taking it too hard, and he never went to church from then on.
His family would go to church and he would wait outside.
He didn't get any personal backlash for that, because a gentleman who was an academic could do what he thought right.
There was no mechanism to force him to do what everyone else was doing.
And I think the thing that is causing trouble now is not that we're losing freedom of speech, I was trying to say, I'm not sure how to describe what's happening.
The mechanism is new.
Some of the ideas are old, but they've always been around.
People are talking about how England is going down the drain.
But England in 1945 basically voted in communism and the Attlee government nationalized everything, controlled everything.
It had absolutely no chance of sinking the project of Britain.
In fact, as I keep reminding people, it was Attlee who persuaded the Americans to join NATO.
These were functionally communists, but they were violently anti -Soviet.
it. In other words, they were violently pro -British.
They believed in the British institutions.
They just had very strong ideas about the economy, so they wanted to implement, which is a very British thing to do.
Like I often say, the systems that are good at error correction make larger errors.
And those errors, some of them, anyway, the major ones, were corrected.
As long as you don't change the system itself, you stop error correction.
So there are people will try to hack the system itself.
And I think that is a problem with giving complete power to one side for any number of years, if they start being systemic changes so that they will not leave power.
Yeah, so we have to use the secondary methods of error correction to stop them making systemic changes.
The last few governments, both Labour and Conservative, have made changes to the British Constitution, which I think are very perverse and going the wrong way.
But there's also the fact the real British Constitution is in people's minds and the governments can't change those.
They try to control the media.
And it's interesting because now people talk about how the media is controlled, but I think the media has always been controlled.
It's just now we alternative media, so we can see that more clearly.
So, it's more as being revealed than being changed.
You mentioned that the most anti -rational memes exist in the system of education that we have. It's a modern system, right.
Before the Prussians and Napoleon, didn't have mandatory public education for example.
In your mind, what is the right way to educate people?
So first of all, that and the superficial meaning of institution, universal schools and that kind of thing is a relatively recent thing.
But the bucket theory of the mind has existed since prehistory and it started improving.
So Popper came along and contradicted it, no one has noticed, but he came along and contradicted it in the mid -twentieth century.
But education had been improving before that, for 100 years before that, because, because these anti -rational memes conflict with the general culture which had been improving by leaps and bounds through the nineteenth century and the scientific revolution and so on.
The actual practices of making children sit in rows and recite things by heart and hit them when they don't, that has changed, but the underlying theory of what for, what it's all supposed to do is exactly the same as it was in prehistoric times.
The idea is that we want to to make sure that the next generation get the knowledge that we have in our culture faithfully, because that's what knowledge is.
It's information that is poured into and anything that's not faithful is going to be an error because almost all deviations from the true theory are going to be false.
And so that just doesn't take into account that this process of transfer is not process of copying or pouring.
It's a process that happens inside the recipient and is about the recipient trying to pick and choose between the stuff he sees and trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of what it's for, including moral theories and everything, not just factual theories.
So once you realize that it's that way and it's got to be that way around, then you can begin to see that existing educational practices from the point of view of the bucket theory of the mind are the same as they've always been and it needs to be changed.
And yeah, so it just occurs to me now that the ways it's changed are not really educational.
They have been, because the general culture has got less punitive and been about welfare rather than duty and that kind of thing, people have got the idea that, yeah, you've got to pour it all in faithfully but you've got to be nice about it, and you can't be mean.
But the whole thing is measured at the end of the day by the exam, which tells you what percentage of the stuff that was poured in, you actually allowed in.
Okay, so the conditions at the prison might have improved.
Yeah, greatly. Okay, but as a parent, we're all terrified by the idea that our kids might grow up not speaking the language, not knowing the mathematics, and just playing with spiders in the corner, and be unfit for anything other than agricultural work.
It's funny you should mention language, but speaking one's native language and walking learning are two things that are not taught in our culture and never have been, I think, and nobody says some quote from an educational series that says that if children were taught to walk in school, then they'd be 10 years old and still not able to walk, half of them would be.
And the other half wouldn't have learnt it in class.
And that's true of everything.
So So one problem is that this idea of not having an agenda for how they should be, how they should turn out is very counterintuitive because the prevailing theory is not just wrong philosophy or the bucket theory of the mind, it also goes against cultural practices.
If a child doesn't go to school and meets other children and they're going to say, you don't go to school, that's nice.
But what's seven and five?" And then your child is going to say, I don't know and I don't care.
And you are going to be embarrassed.
And you are going to find it difficult not to be and not to pass that on to your children.
By the way, the vast majority of those improvements, not just in school but in parenting as well, were done by left -wing people.
Which is ironic because their theory of what should be done in the wider culture was always harmful, but their influence on educational theory and practice has been almost everything good that's happened in education in the last hundred years, has been done by leftists.
And they thought they were undermining society.
You would say to them, If you don't beat children into conformity, then how will they work in factories?
The right wing people would say, and the left wing people would say, that's exactly what we're trying to do.
They were wrong about everything except their educational theories.
It's not that they thought that culture could be transmitted better and also improved by not forcing it, they thought that culture was bad and shouldn't be transmitted.
That was why they did all their good things and now that this process is pretty much spent, like, you can't make the classrooms any more pastel colored and you can't speak to the children in nicer is, isn't it?
When I try to explain a more libertarian view of how learning works, learning just is knowledge creation.
Creation, exactly. So what Poppa writes about in how science and knowledge broadly is generated is what's going on in the mind of the learner.
And it just seems to be a logical line to draw that if Poppa begins with the project of science is you start with a problem, then obviously any mandated curriculum, no matter how liberal you want your curriculum to be, you're handing the student either problems or worse still the solutions to problems. And as you say, I don't know if you're quoting Poppa when you say, answers to questions not asked.
That's like the purpose.
Yeah, quoting Poppa.
But if we go to the seven plus five example, that has practical value as well.
the kid doesn't know how to do 7 plus 5, they'll have a hard time navigating our society, which punishes them numerously." That's not true.
They will have a hard time, or rather they will have a problem when they encounter something, like how many shoes can they fit in their wardrobe or whatever.
Once they have that problem and they're free, they will solve it like that.
It's not hard. It's not hard learning to add up or learn multiplication tables.
If you know a few facts.
You notice that five fives are twenty -five.
If you know that, then you need to work out what six fives are.
Like I grew up in India partially and it was given that the people who are uneducated had no chance.
And yes, some of them might be because they weren't in the right institutions, they didn't make the right connections, they weren't offered the right job.
They literally had no chance because the only reality they knew was, by some point, OK, now I have to start making a living, it's too late to learn mathematics and accounting, now I'm just gonna have to carry a bucket full of cement on my head for the rest of my life, and I'm just wrapped into that situation.
Yeah. It could be that society is arranged in such a way that it only allows people to make progress if they – as my friend used to say – if they bear certain scars.
It's not that the scars are functional, but they are like a shibboletho or whatever.
However, I think of the counterexamples one can learn coping mechanisms. It's supposed to be that you learn the prerequisites in year five.
You learn the prerequisites for year six, and in year six you learn, but it's not true.
If you didn't go to year five but enter year six you catch up in no time.
And similarly being tested for how well you can read stops at age 11 or something.
And from then on, you're no longer faced with a situation of, read that out loud, because the teacher will just assume you can.
And you have coping mechanisms, you have a textbook and the teacher says, do the exercises on page 11 and you find that these ways are so painful and unpleasant that most people just knuckle down and learn this stuff by heart, disabling themselves in the process.
So what does your school look like?
Is it everyone just stays at home and does what they want?
Do they gather? Do they have options?
Do they get offered instruments?
In my ideal world, everybody does something different.
There is no standard thing that children do.
There will be things that a lot of children do, still not all, but there are things that a lot of children do at a certain age, in a certain culture like if Steven Spielberg produces a new adventure film And then, maybe I'm out of date now cause people watch it on video, but at the time when Steven Spielberg was making his blockbuster films, 90 % of the children in a town would go there and they would sit quietly while the film played and then they would go out.
And there was no roll call at the beginning and at the end there was no test but they all were excitedly speaking about the film and variants of it that they would like to see and and some of them became film directors and so on.
And even that, even somebody who's a genius enough to attract 90 percent of the children in a culture to come to his event, even he is, it doesn't have the genius to make the children do that every day.
So that's how far away the school paradigm is from what could and should be.
and now I guess I could say the commenting on recent threads on x nearly all children want an iPhone not all, nearly all.
And no there's no iPhone curriculum, there's nothing like that.
They do it because they it's a rational meme, they think it will benefit them and so people then try to explain that because if they couldn't explain that if they couldn't explain that one thing, never mind the other million things, if they just couldn't explain that one counterexample, the whole education philosophy would fall apart.
So they have to say, a.) It's bad for them and b.) It is caused by coercion, namely the coercion of addiction.
It causes dopamine.
Wait a minute. Dopamine is involved in all pleasure, right?
Never mind that, or pleasure is bad, right?
We all agree with that.
Everybody has problems. Children have problems. Say they grow up having problems. They all have different problems. They try to solve them.
They're powerless and that's what parents and society are for to allow them to solve easily soluble problems so they can get on to deep, interesting problems. So easily soluble problems are like having enough food to eat and difficult problems are the problems that you mentioned in India.
I saw a documentary about it was about electricity or something.
It was about children in India somewhere where the children in the evening go out and sit under the street lamps in order to learn.
Oh yes, so there's another example.
I've probably told him because one of my favorite examples, Indulgus' autobiography.
I haven't been able to find this passage.
I'm told it's because he wrote several autobiographies and they overlap.
I haven't been able to find the right one, but he described how he learned to read.
Slave children learning to read was illegal, not for the slaves, it was illegal to teach them to read.
and there were people who would clandestinely teach them.
So there were these teenage boys who've been working in the fields to the maximum extent that you can be forced to work in a field.
Then they came home and then they slunk off to this lady's house where she would be teaching them to read.
And if she had been caught, he would have gone to prison.
and they would have been whipped.
So, then he escaped and he got to the north and he made a great success.
Now, I always think, what a terrible tragedy.
There were these teenage boys who were willing to risk a whipping and to go to these lessons when they were already exhausted, physically exhausted from over -hard working.
And today, their descendants are thought to be, have a low IQ or be perverse and not want to, and anyway, one way or another, they have to be forced into the school to learn and their ancestors were exactly the other way around.
And I think their ancestors were how humans are, that is how humans are, not just black and white, not just teenagers and adults, but all humans.
And probably those Frederick Douglass and his pals who went to that lady's house were not all the slaves.
Probably some of them didn't go because they didn't want to.
They thought, well, we better get a good night's rest instead.
And maybe that was best for them.
Who can decide that better than them?
Somebody ought to make a movie about this, by the way, because Frederick Douglass is absolutely brilliant in every way, not just a little thing.
I can imagine them talking, the ones that went to learn to read, and they would say it completely opens your eyes to a different world if you can read.
And they would say, yeah but I'm tired.
And if you meet Steven Spielberg, tell him.
Can I play devil's advocate on the idea of if we extract away schools and we have an enlightened fun society where the equivalent of the Steven Bill Bird thing is playing and the children go along.
Now, never mind the mathematics, but Douglas Murray, my favourite pessimist at times, although he's optimistic recently, has talked about how it seems as if the West is running out of steam or running out of enthusiasm for itself as if the story is coming to an end and winding itself up.
So, if we move to a place where for all the evils of school, perhaps they're inculcating at least the students into a version of our traditions and of Western ideals and so on and so forth because there is no want for enthusiasm in the Madrasas.
There's no want for enthusiasm of other cultures wanting to spread their ideas to their children.
Would this alternative to traditional schooling in the West, lead to what Murray is worried about, just the exhaustion of the West?
Well, one problem is, as Naval was saying, that the schools and universities have been taken over by something that's very hostile to our culture, so they're trying to inculcate a rival culture.
So, I suppose Murray wants to go back to the way the educational system was, and yes, horrible and disgusting though it was, it did successfully transmit some things, not the things in the lessons.
It transmitted a culture.
Then, after that era, you had the era of, in Britain anyway, grammar schools and so on, where they they tried to make it easy for working class children to get into that culture by having the standard education and I was one of holds, and then later, they closed down all those schools.
And then we got to the present state.
I doubt that the older model of schools, like the model of schools that existed between, say, 1880 and 1950.
I don't think they could survive because the culture, the general culture, has changed for the better.
Like I said, the general culture's values conflict with the static values of education so I don't think you could set up that kind of school today.
I don't know what to do about freeing the schools and universities because there isn't a cadre of, I call them liberal, genuinely liberal teachers who could go in to replace them.
It's not like the civil service where you could just overnight reform it by the Prime Minister just declaring that he's reforming it.
You can't do that with schools, so I don't know.
It has to be gradual.
In a way, they're the most stuck in frozen institutions.
I got a tour of the Oxford colleges recently, some of them and it was all about tradition.
This is exactly the way it was 300 years ago.
This is exactly the way it was 150 years ago, and it was interesting to see a mix of such tradition along with, you know, it's supposed to be so much new creativity in education?
They've kept exactly the wrong things and they've changed things to exactly the wrong things so they still have enacting rituals but enacting rituals isn't our culture.
And on the other hand, they've got all sorts of subjects that didn't exist then because they're useless and existing subjects, useful subjects, are being taken over.
Richard Dawkins almost got canceled from previous time when he went to New Zealand and they said that they're incorporating traditional modes of understanding physics.
And he was like, no, there is only one mode of understanding physics.
And they were like, that's racist. We already have that in Australia, The syllabus is replete with Indigenous modes of doing science.
Well, this was a few years ago.
So maybe it's done in New Zealand and Australia.
This is terrible and it's going to cause everything to deteriorate.
I don't think it will cause the destruction of our culture.
But once our culture has deteriorated enough, then the Chinese can walk in.
I look forward to the Indigenous electric motor.
There was a famous case.
There was a book written by the, what was his name?
Dark Emu is the name of the book where it's just a revisionist history that claims that prior to European settlement in Australia, the Indigenous people were farming, they had agriculture, they were on their way to factories and all this sort of stuff, and people just lap it up and it's all, it is making its way into the curriculum now as well.
Bruce Pascoe is his name, he claims to be Indigenous but he's not.
That goes to our capacity to error correct.
Misinformation is a fashionable term but it's also labels a very genuine phenomenon.
I think it was only a few months ago that Osama bin Laden's letter to America or whatever it was going around being praised by certain college students, they thought, yeah, not understanding that this was not a good guy.
Okay, so maybe the way to go, if we can't restore 1950s schools, How about restoring 1950s curricula?
That's something that the government could do, and then the national curriculum, of course, is an abomination.
But maybe it's one of those things that can be, as a transitional thing, have the national curriculum now, and is full of woke stuff.
It's in the government's power to change that, to make it into true stuff.
The government could change the national curriculum.
And then it may be that this woke stuff, I said it's a fad.
It's not, how can I put this?
It's not an evolved thing.
It's not a blind alley that culture has gone down.
It's a fad. So it could be that after a generation of teaching old -fashioned history, history teachers will think that's what it is, rather than...
Because it's the teachers and the pupils are getting the revisionist history.
At the moment, if they got another history, they even notice.
Maybe they wouldn't even notice.
I don't know, maybe I was too optimistic.
But I get the feeling that it's all shallow.
I think of lefties of the 20s and 30s.
They believed stuff.
They believed in the capitalist class stealing the fruits of the labor of the working class.
And this is why the working class are poor and all that stuff.
And the remedy is they had a theory, whereas I don't think Woke is a theory.
It's a denial of a whole bunch of otherwise good pieces of knowledge, whether it be science or Enlightenment ideas.
I have often said the negation of an explanation is not an explanation.
So they don't have a rival world view, except the world view, that you're supposed to say certain things, not say other things, and so on.
But it's not a world view in the sense that communism was.
I think it might be an evolution of communism.
There are a lot of communist ideas at the core of it.
Yeah. And they tend to end up on the same side as the communists on a lot of outcomes.
Yeah, but do they have a theory that anything about factories, that factories...
They do have a theory that there are people keeping them down.
That for example, inflation is up because of price gouging.
Yeah. That's their current theory.
Okay, so that's a theory that the left -wing people used to have. They used to have it because it came from their explanation of the world.
The finite resource explanation of the world.
And more complicated things as well.
But I think if you ask a woke demonstrator, maybe I'm wrong but maybe you could try it.
I asked them, how is inflation caused by greed of the factory owners or whatever it is?
Now a communist in 1950 could have told you, but I don't think a world person today can tell you.
Like when they're asked from the river, they're chanting from the river to the sea, and somebody asks them which river and which sea.
But to your earlier point, these anti -rational memes don't have to be correct, they can drive species extinction and the next species can figure out what was true and what wasn't.
Yeah. I don't think that's what, I don't think they're going to, I don't think they're poison.
I think they are a burden.
They could be poisonous in the sense that they drive certain voting blocks and then those voting blocks drive policies of nations.
So I think your home land is facing exactly this issue, which is now I think something like 30 % of the Muslims are in the West and they're voting.
The traditional support for Israel is disappearing.
There are plenty of Muslims who are pro -Israel.
The mindless ones are anti -Israel.
Like I just tweeted today that – what's it called?
Travel in Israel video blog.
It was talking about the collaboration of the Palestinians with the Nazis during World War II, and he happened to mention, and I think he should have made much more of this, The Grand Mufti was going around Europe, recruiting Muslims to the Nazi cause.
In Albania, a totally failed.
In Albania, the absolute opposite.
They were one of two countries that rescued almost all their Jews.
One was Denmark, and they didn't have that many.
There was only about 6 ,000 in the whole of Denmark, but they rescued almost all of them.
But the Albanians, there were a lot of Jews there and a lot of Italian and other Jews had moved to Albania as a refuge and they were all saved because the Albanians as a population thought it was, even as their religion, they thought it was their duty to thwart the deportation of the Jews and they succeeded.
So this is, as I tweeted as well, this is a counter example to the narrative that some otherwise cogent commentators like you just did assume.
It's not necessarily the case and it's also not necessarily the case.
So we've had, in Britain we've had Muslim immigrants and then their children are radicalized.
Not them, their children are radicalized.
Whose fault is that?
That's the fault of Islam, that's the fault of Britain and multiculturalism and pandering to the other and so on, and setting up the educational system so that it trashes Britain and glorifies the other and so on, but it needn't have been.
100 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the British Army, another 50 years earlier there also were and they rebelled.
But that's the story in the Indian mutiny, but then so did the Hindu.
So again, it wasn't Islam, it was the fault of the West, not for treating them too harshly, in a way for treating them too leniently, that they should have been integrated and it should have been understood that the same law applies to them as to everyone else.
I'm a second -generation and immigrants and I'm not violent." And my parents came to this country and took for granted that they were gonna have to work and they took for granted that they were gonna have to learn English and speak it well and get a job and so on.
And at goes university and they took for granted all those things.
And the idea that they were owed something by the surrounding culture, the quite the opposite, that we owe something to the surrounding culture.
and that was their attitude.
To what extent then is it an existential threat to the UK given you have had these huge protests recently taking over parts of London and I think you've had people under the auspices of the Green Party getting in and then coming out as vehemently anti -Semitic.
Yeah, note that those people aren't the only people who are being indulged in this way.
Basically, it's everyone who hates our culture is being indulged, and everybody who is afraid of that is being demonized.
The government can change that.
I think the processes of criticism and persuasion are not impaired.
The government isn't like almost everything that Douglas Murray says about this issue is perfectly legal and is going to remain legal even under the most draconian laws that are currently being proposed, which by the way, may not succeed.
There's a lot more to error correction in the British system than merely out -voting the government.
There's going to be all sorts of ...
Because the government, one thing hasn't changed, the government, no matter how large its majority knows that next week it could go down if suitable things happen.
So the basic reason that the government is going down this wrong path is that most people think it's okay, most people don't think this is a disaster.
They're like, okay, we don't want riots, so let's have laws against riots.
And people are arguing, but these aren't laws against riots.
They're laws against hate, or speech, so on.
that that argument hasn't gone down with enough people and when it does it'll change.
Oh yes, this is what David Starkey was saying.
He was saying that the red wall, if you know what that is, that's the Labour voting block, yeah, the Labour voting block in northern England, which changed over to Boris Johnson en masse and changed back at this election.
The Red Wall is never going to vote Labour again.
Never, ever. Because these measures are against it.
The Labour Party has severed its connection with the working class.
And they got in by combination of circumstances because the Conservative Party was rubbish and circumstances, the pandemic, and all sorts of circumstances made people ready for a change.
But they have gone down.
Now, I don't think it's necessarily that they'll never vote Labour again.
Because there are people in the Labour Party who can, who will be able to see what's happening long before the next election.
And I'm sure there are people in the Labour Party now who see that they can't go on like this.
We'll see. Let's see if the current, the current woke legislation actually goes through when the party has a majority of a hundred and something.
That's not enough for it to work.
Let's see. And if it goes through the next level of error correction is that it'll never be implemented like the Home Office people will not order the police chiefs to spend the money to implement the surveillance system which will be necessary to enforce the law.
None of that will happen, because on the whole, nothing happens.
That's one of the things that's wrong with the Blob, with the civil service, it prevents everything.
To have that happening, the government would have to pursue it.
They would have to pursue it vigorously and ruthlessly, firing the people who didn't implement it and that kind of thing.
And only then, even then, when the first people go to jail for this kind of thing there'll be an uproar.
What are they going to do about it?
Are they going to tell all the editors of the newspapers to say that this has been proper and it should have happened?
Yeah, at some point the editors of the newspapers are not going to automatically follow this line either.
That there will be a niche for people to contradict it.
I don't think anything's inevitable.
And once that problem is solved, by the way, then the population problem will also be solved because the obvious way of solving the population problem is by immigration.
Mass immigration is the way to go.
We've only got to make sure that people who hate this country don't immigrate into it.
Ah, but how do you?
They'll be with it.
This is something that people who have thought a lot about this, will think a lot about it at the moment they've been thinking how to do the opposite.
If you, for example, you can have a rule that everybody who is allowed into the country has to declare that they, for a start, they could have to declare that they love the country and want to do well in it.
And then if it later turns out they were lying, they can be deported, not for being enemies of Britain but for lying on the immigration form.
