The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

The knowledge that you seek – objective knowledge – is hard to come by, but attainable. That mental state that you do not seek – justified belief – is sought by many people, especially priests and philosophers. But, in truth, beliefs cannot be justified, except in relation to other beliefs, and even then only fallibly. So the quest for their justification can lead only to an infinite regress –

the real difference between the Spartans and us is that their moral education enjoins them to hold their most important ideas immune from criticism.

Not to be open to suggestions.

not to seek the truth, because they claim that they already have it.

converge upon the truth

Xenophanes

the horses would draw their gods Like horses,

and cattle like cattle

our very idea that improvement is possible implies that there must be errors and inadequacies in our current ideas.

My doubt improved my knowledge of an important truth

banning persuasion. And hence it would block off that path to salvation

always to bear human fallibility in mind.

all knowledge comes from persuasion.

‘For all is but a woven web of guesses.’

When we hear something being said, we guess what it means,

guesswork isn’t knowledge!

this single process through which all knowledge originates,

It all comes from within, from conjecture and criticism.

imprisoned in the dark, almost-sealed cave of our skull, guessing.

We weave stories of an outside world – worlds, actually: a physical world, a moral world, a world of abstract geometrical shapes, and so on – but we are not satisfied with merely weaving, nor with mere stories. We want true explanations.

So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reason...

And when we can change them no more, we have understood so...

And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, on...

Athenians are concerned above all with improvement; the Spartans seek only – stasis.

The laws and customs of Athens are set up to accommodate all these many rival ideas

no gadflies such as me,

we have moderated the destructiveness of democracy through our traditions of virtue, tolerance and liberty. We are utterly dependent on those traditions to keep our monster under control

we can improve because we are constantly striving to; they hardly ever improve, because they are trying not to!

I judge a city by how it treats its philosophers.

justified belief is impossible

I am not sure of anything. I never have been. But the god explained to me why that must be so, starting with the fallibility of the human mind and the unreliability of sensory experience.

What is the point of writing down things that are going to be endlessly tinkered with and improved?

Rather than make a permanent record of all my misconceptions as they are at a particular instant, I would rather offer them to others in two-way debate.

The originators of a fundamental new theory initially share many of the misconceptions of previous theories.

There is rarely any reason for scientists to address the obsolete problem-situations that motivated the great scientists of the past.

If it is a good theory

then it is exceedingly hard to vary

So in physics students get ambiguously the same theory. In social sciences truth is more open to interpretation so context and life stories of writers becomes relevant

‘doppelgänger’

Star Trek

Sliding Doors

explore the strongest possible version of a fictional-science premise, and its strangest possible implications – which pushes in the anti-anthropocentric direction.

This may make the story harder to engage with, but it allows for a much broader range of scientific speculations.

Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science. It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and of all previous science

‘many-universes interpretation’ of quantum theory

fungible

There is no ‘principle of eclipses’: their existence can be deduced from theories of much greater generality,

Similarly, the uncertainty principle is deduced from the principles of quantum theory.

There is a field (or ‘waves’) in the multiverse for every individual particle that we observe in a particular universe.

That is because of the suppression of interference by entanglement.

on the scale of everyday life and above, those coarse-grained histories can justly be called ‘universes’ in the ordinary sense of the word. Each of them somewhat resembles the universe of classical physics. And they can usefully be called ‘parallel’ because they are nearly autonomous.