The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

So it is fallibilism, not mere rejection of authority, that is essential for the initiation of unlimited knowledge growth – the beginning of infinity.

Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.

An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.

It may seem strange that scientific instruments bring us closer to reality when in purely physical terms they only ever separate us further from it. But we observe nothing directly anyway. All observation is theory-laden.

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

All people in the universe, once they have understood enough to free themselves from parochial obstacles, face essentially the same opportunities.

Specifically, we do not know why the DNA code, which evolved to describe bacteria, has enough reach to describe dinosaurs and humans.

Zeno’s mistake has been made with various other mathematical abstractions too. In general terms, the mistake is to confuse an abstract attribute with a physical one of the same name.

So there is something special – infinitely special, it seems – about the laws of physics as we actually find them, something exceptionally computation-friendly, prediction-friendly and explanation-friendly. The physicist Eugene Wigner called this ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences’.

We are channels of information flow. So are histories, and so are all relatively autonomous objects within histories; but we sentient beings are extremely unusual channels, along which (sometimes) knowledge grows. This can have dramatic effects, not only within a history (where it can, for instance, have effects that do not diminish with distance), but also across the multiverse. Since the growth of knowledge is a process of error-correction, and since there are many more ways of being wrong than right, knowledge-creating entities rapidly become more alike in different histories than other entities. As far as is known, knowledge-creating processes are unique in both these respects: all other effects diminish with distance in space, and become increasingly different across the multiverse, in the long run.

What if there is something other than information flow that can cause coherent, emergent phenomena in the multiverse? What if knowledge, or something other than knowledge, could emerge from that, and begin to have purposes of its own, and to conform the multiverse to those purposes, as we do? Could we communicate with it?

In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun.

We now see that those two responses are essentially the same: oppression is what it takes to keep a society static; oppression of a given kind will not last long unless the society is static.

For example, racism and other forms of bigotry exist nowadays almost entirely in subcultures that suppress criticism. Bigotry exists not because it benefits the bigots, but despite the harm they do to themselves by using fixed, non-functional criteria to determine their choices in life.