In some branch of The Everettian Multiverse, Bret Weinstein is a deeply articulate defender of the many worlds “interpretation” of quantum mechanics. But it is not this one. Recently I got to sit down with him and among many other things discuss his rejection of my preferred way to understand what is going on in certain experiments such as the twin-slit experiment using single particles. So, did I succeed in convincing Bret it was indeed a good explanation? We will come back to that.
On July 13, 2018 I uploaded the first of my “The Beginning of Infinity” chapter explorations. Find that here:
It took almost another two years (March 11, 2020) before I finally got to Part 3 of my series on “The Multiverse” from that same book. One can find that episode here:
I mention that now as while I was making that “mini-series” on “Chapter 11: The Multiverse” just fortuitously Sam Harris had as a guest on his podcast Bret Weinstein - and of all the things they might have discussed, at one point they discussed “The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics”. Of course I thought they were both rejecting the explanation for all sorts of bad reasons, coming down largely to what I would call “bad philosophy and epistemology” so I included an analysis of their discussion in that very episode above. It turned out that my “mini series” on Chapter 11 “The Multiverse” from David Deutsch’s epic needed, in my mind, five complete hour plus episodes to unpack.
The reason for that was because, in keeping with what I say all the way back in episode 1, I was first and foremost trying to understand the contents of the chapter myself more deeply and had that heuristic in mind that if I could explain it in simple terms to someone else, then by that metric I had understood - something at least. Errors my own as always. The reason for so many hours devoted to one chapter of that book was because although I was convinced in 1997 after reading chapter 2 of David Deutsch’s previous book “The Fabric of Reality” (FoR) - I found this new way of explaining “The Multiverse” David was articulating in “The Beginning of Infinity” (BoI) to be very deep and very subtle. Now chapter 2 “Shadows” seemed to me to be simple. So simple I found many people missed the deep truth for the simplicity. Chapter 2 of FoR, if you get it, you get it quick in my experience. One reading tends to do it because the concepts are all explained in terms of things you already understand: physical collisions between particles. It truly is something a 5 year old might understand if they were interested enough. Very little background knowledge is needed.
But in BoI, the same explanation - which is to say “The Multiverse explanation of quantum theory” goes much deeper than what is in FoR. And there is good reason for this: Deutsch is explaining new ideas and there is little to compare things to in the “common sense” world of, say “particle collisions”. Indeed, as a fan of Deutsch and all the rest of his writing - when I first read Chapter 11 of BoI I felt sort of let down. It was as if in some sense David failed to live up to his own almost-supernatural standard for clarity in his explanations. But note this feeling I had was after the first reading of the chapter. The fault was mine: I didn’t “get it” when there was something(s) there to get! It took, I don’t know, maybe two more readings before things not merely fell into place but the a-ha moments began. Fungibility explained through television screens without the screens and entanglement explained through science fiction and transporters. Whereas chapter 2 of FoR laid out the bare bones of: look, here is the only way to understand interference phenomena when using particles (there must be other instances of the particles unseen going through the apparatus: hence the multiverse) - chapter 11 of BoI was going into the nature of the multiplicity of our circumstance. “Diversity within fungibility” became three words that once groked opened up an entire new window on what the structure of “The multiverse” really entailed. And laws of physics that say things can “happen in one universe but not the other” as a further explanation of that “fungible” nature of physical reality. So this is why that chapter took so long to unpack. For me!
In anycase that “part 3” of my “multiverse” exposition contained those remarks about Harris and Weinstein’s comments on “The Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum theory. Bret had described the explanation as “insane” and a violation of parsimony in his conversation with Harris. I found that language both unusually emotional as well as off target and, again, I refer the reader to the full video linked to above rather than attempting here to give a rundown of either Bret’s criticisms or my refutations (at least what I regard as refutations) of those criticisms. Having now completed something over 240 episodes of ToKCast, I have often remarked on this or that prominent public intellectual’s ideas and remarks when they are put out there in the public arena and seem to make contact with some set of ideas I too am interested in.
I’ve talked about, on ToKCast, at times Sam Harris, Nick Bostrom, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Douglas Murray, Sean Carroll, Joe Rogan, Sabine Hossenfelder, Richard Dawkins, Eric Weinstein, Michael Shermer, Yaron Brook, Peter Boghossian and Bret Weinstein to name just some I can recall off the top of my head, and fresh in my memory perhaps. And of course those are not to mention the many now long-dead intellectuals from Popper to Rand and Plato and Kant and Hume off into the physicists like Einstein, Feynman, Schrödinger and more. Almost all of them I praise for this or that general reason while, usually, I focuss on some specific thing they said with which I disagreed and I critiqued that. If I thought a person was just a bad thinker overall, I generally do not bother. It is when I think there has been something like the equivalent of a “misfiring” of their critical faculties that I tend to be interested enough to consider constructing a critique.
Peter Boghossian certainly fell into that category, for example. He was one of the most courageous public intellectuals of our age. Prominent like a Harris or a Murray but for different reasons because Boghossian wasn’t talking about the academy from the outside looking in - he was on the inside watching the creeping nonsense. And not only that he stood up to it. And not only that - he stood up to it at one of the most dangerous places to do so; perhaps one of the most deeply left-leaning, woke infected institutions: Portland State University. Also he was a philosopher who focussed on critical thinking in a place, captured by a culture that was anti-critical. It seemed as if: well if this hero of the Enlightenment with all those tools of rationality at his disposal and razor sharpened through both theoretical learning and practical experience - if he could be taken down by the “new left” woke brigade: what help for those less well armed?
So Boghossian was one of the chief leading lights at a time when Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Christakis were both going through similar “events” and many of us interested in this new wave of postmodernism cresting and breaking over the “education system” were glued to Youtube videos of shrieking undergraduates literally physically intimidating and shouting down not just other students with different opinions…but their own professors. Presumably they had looked at the prospectus, chosen a degree program, elected to sit in certain subjects and then…? Decided it would be best to protest the very reason they had decided to take on student debt in the first place: to have their old ideas challenged with new ones?
Here is what happened to Peterson initially:
By the way, one of the most powerful speeches given by Jordan Peterson (or anyone for that matter) about postmodernism if you’ve been living in a cave and aren’t that familiar with his work:
The video that first brought Nicohlas Cristakis to light for similar reasons is here:
So to me, like many others, having an interest in university, but having long since left and noticing the creep of irrationality returning to the academy (I had primarily been through my undergraduate work in science and in philosophy in the late 90s and was noticing the waxing and then even waning of a postmodern anti-enlightenment movement then) - we were both shocked and at the same time inspired by figured like Peterson, Cristakis, Boghossian and Weinstein. All of them seemed intellectually super sharp, amazingly patient and quick on their feet in the face of mobs. And that is no easy feet: keeping one’s wits about them when surrounded by those physically intimidating you is not easy.
I found myself glued to these instances where “woke” radicalism was erupting on college campuses because, among other things, what happens in the USA tends to happen a little later in Australia and, more relevantly for me, what happens in “institutions of higher learning” filters eventually down into the schools. If the university systems were captured by not merely false but bad a dangerous ideologies then the schools of educations that trained primary and secondary school teachers would be captured soon as well. And indeed that has turned out to be precisely the case but is beyond the scope of my article now to discuss.
In any case, I regarded these brave intellectuals and a new breed of hero as I watched their encounters with what were literal mobs. Dangerous mobs at times. So it was truly remarkable when, having critiqued one of these heroes - Peter Boghossian - in a series of videos for ToKCast - he not only responded to me, but responded with grace, good humour and ultimately friendship. And though we disagreed on particular matters in philosophy, it was clear there was far more we had in common than not. But my point here is that I could never have expected to have met the man - though I did. That said of course, I could never have imagined to have met, in person, David Deutsch, though I have as well.
But in the list of people I never imagined I would have met in person to discuss our disagreements was Bret Weinstein. I had spent many hours writing, filming, producing/editing that episode of ToKCast way-back-when which in large part was an analysis of the reasons he articulated to Sam Harris as to why he rejected The Multiverse explanation of quantum theory. And yet recently I got to do so. The full conversation we had ranged over many very interesting topics and can be found here:
As I had said in other episodes of ToKCast, long before I ever expected to meet Bret Weinstein, modulo his remarks on The Multiverse, I found him a truly intriguing and insightful thinker - and could stand shoulder to shoulder with Peterson, Boghossian and Cristakis. Indeed Weinstein’s story is even more frightening and one video of the initial incident that made him famous beyond his own institution can be found here:
Bret’s remarks on epistemology echo much of what Popper and Deutsch say, though he never invoked either name. Apparently, like some others, he had independently reached an “evolutionary” understanding of how knowledge grows. Indeed if one goes to my introduction to chapter 12 “A physicists history of bad philosophy” found here:
I praise Bret and provide a clip from footage taken by filmmaker Mike Nayna and used in his epic “The Reformers” (found here: https://substack.com/@michaelnayna) - a documentary about the experiences of Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Bret Weinstein among others. Somehow I have now personally met all four of those names I mention thanks crucially to Reid Nicewonder - visit his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@CordialCuriosity
My meeting any of these people was entirely unpredictable back then when I was first speaking about them. Back then, some 5 years ago when making these episodes of ToKCast I was talking about issues that seemed “far above my pay grade” so to speak. I was a physics teacher speaking about those on the front lines of an intellectual war going on in the academy from the safety of an apartment in Sydney, Australia. And even then speaking only tangentially as part of a broader discussion about, for example, philosophy that allows for progress versus philosophy that stifles it. Again: I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to speak to all these people. But if you visit my channel and Reid’s on Youtube, conversations with all these people and myself can now be found.
But I have now strayed from the central point of this post which is to bring you a clip of the full 1 hour and 41 minute conversation Bret and I recorded. This clip is just from the end of that conversation and is where we discuss The Multiverse. This is, of course, two non-physicists talking physics. To name drop a final time in this piece, when I got to meet James Lindsay (pictured here) we had many great conversations. Unfortunately none of them recorded - but at one point we discussed our common circumstance of having completed the “STEM” training but were not “practising”.
(Myself, James Lindsay and Jeremy Allan-Hall)
In James’ case he trained as a mathematician, and got a PhD in Mathematics and subsequently never much used it and instead, in his words (paraphrased) “talks and writes about Communism all day long”. In my case, I never got the PhD, but did get a Masters in Astrophysics without ever using it. He: a non-practising mathematician and me, a non-practising physicist both going into “technical” fields but were now - at least in part - working in some blend of the humanities and creative spaces.
My point with that story is: almost no one stays in their lane and what one chooses to do early on in life is no great predictor of what they will do later. The future cannot be known now especially where people are involved.
And so Bret Weinstein and I talking quantum theory when neither of us are quantum physicists, should be no more jarring than James Lindsay speaking to some audience about communism. I imagine someone like Sam Kuypers or David Deutsch himself could have done a better job than I did in attempting to articulate why I thought Bret had missed something in the explanation of The Multiverse - but in the end, perhaps I have laid the groundwork for some future conversation with someone more specialised.
Why should it even matter if Bret Weinstein endorses Everettian Quantum Theory (the multiverse)? Well, putting aside the fact that it’s just true that the many worlds really is the only way to understand quantum theory and the truth matters, these discussions are fun to have. And if my experience watching all those years ago Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein getting tied up in knots about the same topic is anything to go by: it can be fun to watch too!
In short, Bret is rejecting Everettian quantum theory on the basis it violates parsimony. Now this is something I have long refuted, as has David Deutsch. The many worlds are expensive on universes, but cheap on assumptions. But Bret’s rejection is a little more subtle. He refers to, in the clip below, three kinds of parsimony. He admits that in terms of “linguistic” parsimony, the multiverse is parsimonious. But he is rejecting it because of “physical” parsimony. When I say that this would be like rejecting exo-planets that cannot be observed he says “that’s material parsimony” which is not the same as physical parsimony. In the case of “distant regions of the universe lack planets” that would be materially parsimonious but physically not parsimonious as it says different physical laws would operate there. All very well. Now how he tries to square that with a rejection of the multiverse where all universes obey the same laws - well I can only say watch the clip I reproduce below!
Again, visit Reid’s channel to see the whole thing:
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