#27.1 - The Primacy of People, with Brett Hall

Do Explain with Christofer Lövgren

Christofer and communicator Brett Hall speak about the explanatory power of people in this episode of Do Explain. They discuss Brett's history, the double-slit experiment, wave-particle duality, quantum theory, fungibility and multiverses, computational and explanatory universality, why the brain must be a computer, optimism vs. pessimism, common epistemological mistakes, and other related topics.

Brett Hall is the host of 'ToKCast', a podcast largely devoted to the work of David Deutsch and the worldview as set out in both 'The Fabric of Reality' and 'The Beginning of Infinity'. Brett has spend most of his life at university gaining undergraduate degrees in the philosophy of science, the teaching of science and mathematics, English grammar, and also has a masters in Astronomy from Swinburne University where he completed projects in computational astrophysics. He has previously worked as a security guard/mall cop in Sydney Australia, a science communicator with the University of New South Wales, and more recently as an advisor to some global educational institutions where he has tried to incrementally undo the amount of coercion involved in teaching. He is currently working with entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant on a number of projects associated with promoting the worldview in 'The Beginning of Infinity'.
Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tokcast/id1447087694
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/naval/id1454097755
Website: http://www.bretthall.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ToKTeacher
Timestamps:
(2:32) - A brief history of Brett

(10:52) - The thrill of understanding new ideas

(13:40) - Thinking for oneself

(18:31) - Quantum theory and logic

(24:24) - Interpretations of quantum mechanics

(29:56) - Quantum theory for dummies

(40:20) - What is the multiverse?

(46:31) - Determinism

(51:10) - Could we have behaved differently if we rewound time?

(55:11) - Different kinds of universality

(1:03:13) - The brain is a computer

(1:11:58) - Turing completeness

(1:17:41) - Progressing as a society

(1:23:39) - Alternatives to universality of computation

Support the podcast at:
https://www.patreon.com/doexplain (monthly)
https://ko-fi.com/doexplain (one-time)
Find Christofer on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ReachChristofer