The Theory of Anything

This week we welcome back Micah Redding of the Christian Transhumanist podcast. We had a joyful conversation touching on religion, science fiction, and teleology. We look at the ways science fiction and fantasy triggers...

aka "The Popper vs Campbell Beatdown!" At long last! The showdown you've all been waiting for! These two giants of epistemology meet in the ring and fight it out for dominance! Bruce continues his exploration of...

Bruce compares Donald Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology and David Deutsch’s ideas on infinite knowledge growth. What is knowledge growth? Is it a rare thing limited to only biological evolution and human ideas, as...

In this shorter episode Bruce takes a deep dive into logical fallacies. How useful are logical fallacies? Does pointing out a logical fallacy help correct errors? Does doing so make us more rational? Can we become more...

In our previous episode covering Strevens' critique of Popper, we briefly touched on why Bruce believes it it a mistake for CritRats to say they don't believe in beliefs. This time Bruce takes a deep dive into beliefs...

This week Bruce puts Popper on trial. Specifically, through the lens of Michael Stevens’s book, The Knowledge Machine, which argues that science works because it follows the “iron law of explanation” where scientists...

This week we interview Logan Chipkin. Logan is a writer and author of several books. Recently he co-authored and published The Sovereign Child about raising children without coercion, and The Lords of the Cosmos, which...

This week we talk to Micah Redding, the host of the Christian Transhumanist podcast. We discuss: What is the significance of a singularity? What is free will from a many worlds perspective? Does Omega Point cosmology...

This week we had the absolute honor of interviewing Jonathan Rauch. Rauch is an extremely influential public intellectual (journalist and author) who is also a Popperian. His 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors, makes the...

This week Bruce take a deep critical rationalist dive into Michael Strevens’s book, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, which is an attempt to describe how science is a self-correcting...

This week we consider: Is falsification falsifiable? Was Popper a “naive falsificationist”? Why do so many people think he was? (Including at least one of his own students!) Is falsification itself a philosophical...

Starting in the 1950s, Popperian Donald Campbell developed a theory of "evolutionary epistemology" (coining that term in the process) that expanded Karl Popper’s ideas about scientific knowledge and learning into the...

This week Bruce takes a deep dive into anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s book: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Bruce outlines Henrich's...

Bruce first explains the difference between arguing over concepts vs arguing over words. Then Bruce examines assertions about probability and randomness in the critical rationalist community. Why does David Deutsch...

What precisely is a static vs dynamic society? It is possible to take this down to the level of machine learning? Could this distinction turn into a testable theory? What are the alternatives to what Deutsch proposes?...

We once again get together some of the smartest people we know for a discussion that gets into foundational issues, this time in the form of the classic battle between the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World. But...

In this round table discussion with Ivan Phillips and Sadia Naeem, we begin by discussing differing viewpoints on “third way evolution,” or a gene-centric viewpoint vs a more holistic view of natural selection. The...

This week we are joined by fellow traveler Dan Gish to discuss LLMs and AGI. Does it really, truly make sense to think that OpenAI or DeepMind are not at least an important stepping stone towards the creation of...

Here we discuss fidesim and critical rationalism. Fideism has many definitions, but at least how we are thinking of it, it is the idea that something like faith has validity in the process of moving closer to truth...

This week we discuss a short interview with Karl Popper from 1969 where he discusses God and religion. Specifically, he makes a case for agnosticism, asserts that all men are religious, and discusses the problem of...

This week Bruce speaks about the work or Michael Levin, who is a biologist know for his work on cell cognition and collective intelligence or the idea that electrical signals between cells influence the formation of...

How well do the collection of assertions called “3rd way evolution” stand up to criticism? Here, in our second of at least 3 episodes on this topic, Bruce considers the criticisms of Denis Noble and James Shapiro by...

This week we discuss neo-Darwinism vs post-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism meaning a gene centric view of evolution, which is also called the great synthesis since it unifies natural selection with genetics and paleontology...

This time we discuss Nassim Nicholas Taleb's article "IQ is Largely a Pseudoscientific Swindle" -- a title whose compliment is that he's claiming IQ is a bit scientifically valid. But which bits does he claim are valid?...

Bruce takes a deep dive into Stephen Wolfram’s ideas regarding computational universality, which may go further than the Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis in that Wolfram’s theories imply that all of nature could be...