The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found.

everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.

Reminds me of “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Could be restated "Any technology observed without the knowledge of how to build it is indistinguishable from magic."

Thus, although the existence of progress in the biosphere is what the theory of evolution is there to explain, not all evolution constitutes progress, and no (genetic) evolution optimizes progress.

a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.

one day the genes of a rare species could survive its extinction by causing themselves to be stored on a computer and then implanted into a cell of a different species.

the assumption that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials rather than by knowledge.

there can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors.

The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.

there is only one way of making progress: conjectu...

We shall always be faced with the problem of how to plan for an unknowable future.

a rational political system makes it as easy as possible to detect, and persuade others, that a leader or policy is bad, and to remove them without violence if they are.

systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.

The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time.

If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?

One of the consequences of optimism is that one expects to learn from failure – one’s own and others’.

It would be astonishing if the details of a primitive, static society’s collapse had any relevance to hidden dangers that may be facing our open, dynamic and scientific society, let alone what we should do about them.

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between.

In the pessimistic conception, that distinctive ability of people is a disease for which sustainability is the cure. In the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.

there is no way, short of stasis, to avoid unforeseen problems arising from new solutions.