The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

But there is a crucial difference between the human condition and Russian roulette: the probability of winning at Russian roulette is unaffected by anything that the player may think or do.

The future of civilization is unknowable, because the knowledge that is going to affect it has yet to be created.

In 1887 he and his colleague Edward Morley had observed that the speed of light relative to an observer remains constant when the observer moves. This astoundingly counter-intuitive fact later became the centrepiece of Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Given an experimental oddity, we have no way of predicting whether it will eventually be explained merely by correcting a minor parochial assumption or by revolutionizing entire sciences.

But one thing we do know is that protecting ourselves from any disaster, foreseeable or not, or recovering from it once it has happened, requires knowledge; and knowledge has to be created.

The harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite; the good can be unlimited.

Very few, if any, could have been saved by greater caution about innovation.

More generally, what they lacked was a certain combination of abstract knowledge and knowledge embodied in technological artefacts, namely sufficient wealth.

the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be...

One is the Spaceship Earth idea on a larger scale: the assumption that progress in a hypothetical rapacious civilization is limited by raw materials rather than by knowledge.

Surely not, since any civilization capable of transporting itself here, or raw materials back across galactic distances, must already have cheap transmutation and hence does not care about the chemical composition of its raw materials.

But in that case it would cost it virtually nothing to omit inhabited solar systems (which are presumably a small minority, otherwise it is pointless for us to hide in any case);

This can seem plausible only if one forgets that 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.

Pessimists believe that the present state of our own civilization is an exception to that pattern.

Also, in the case of our civilization, the precautionary principle rules itself out. Since our civilization has not been following it, a transition to it would entail reining in the rapid technological progress that is under way.

Both are prophetic: both purport to know unknowable things about the future of knowledge.

Because of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone.

but simply because it depended less on the creation of knowledge.

In reality they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered.

They were warning that unless we solve certain problems in time, we are doomed. But that has always been true, and always will be.

Quite generally, the distinction between a ‘natural’ disaster and one brought about by ignorance is parochial.

probability of one in 250,000 of such an impact in any given year means that a typical person on Earth would have a far larger chance of dying of an asteroid impact than in an aeroplane crash.

We shall never be able to afford to sit back and hope for the best.

Like scientific theories, policies cannot be derived from anything. They are conjectures. And we should choose between them not on the basis of their origin, but according to how good they are as explanations: how hard to vary.

propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times.

‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’

Objective progress is indeed possible in politics just as it is in morality generally and in science.

They expect knowledge to be created by fiat with few errors, and not by a process of variation and selection that is making a continual stream of errors and correcting them.

Additionally, they are revolutionaries in the first place because they are pessimistic that many other people can be persuaded of the final truth that they think they know.

By the same logic, everyone who thinks that existing rulers or policies are bad must infer that the ‘who should rule?’ question has been answered wrongly, and therefore that the power of the rulers is not legitimate, and that opposing it is legitimate, by force if necessary.

Me hace pensar en la grieta, como si las políticas son malas, en realidad es porque los medios confunden en la gente en elegir gobernantes que en realidad son manipulados por las grandes potencias para servir a sus intereses. Por lo tanto, un golpe de estado es genuino a nivel moral.

But that means agreeing about what is right, and, given agreement on that, rulers would then have nothing to do.

And, in any case, such agreement is neither possible nor desirable: people are different, and have unique ideas; problems are inevitable, and progress consists of solving them.

Thus, 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

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The ideal towards which this is working is not that nothing unexpected will go wrong, but that when it does it will be an opportunity for further progress.

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.

That means that in the long run there are no insuperable evils, and in the short run the only insuperable evils are parochial ones.

The problem of ageing is of the same general type as that of disease.

Sometimes ‘immortality’ (in this sense) is even regarded as undesirable.

Optimism implies all the other necessary conditions for knowledge to grow, and for knowledge-creating civilizations to last, and hence for the beginning of infinity.

What he meant by a hard task was one that depends on facing the unknown.

Pessimism has been endemic in almost every society throughout history. It has taken the form of the precautionary principle, and of ‘who should rule?’ political philosophies

The end of pessimism is potentially a beginning of infinity.

It involves continual discussion, which is a necessary condition for discovering the right answer, which is in turn a necessary condition for progress:

Instead of looking upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.

The Medici were soon promoting the new philosophy of ‘humanism’, which valued knowledge above dogma, and virtues such as intellectual independence, curiosity, good taste and friendship over piety and humility.

For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

Wealth The repertoire of physical transformations that one is capable of causing.

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.

There may have been many short-lived enlightenments in history. Ours has been uniquely long-lived.