The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Fortunately that mental state has nothing to do with what I do yearn for, which is to discover the truth of how the world is, and why – and, even more, of how it should be.

Yet our values include being open to suggestions, tolerant of dissent, and critical of both dissent and received opinion.

Since there is only one truth of any given matter, as we discover ideas closer to the truth our ideas become closer to each other’s, so we agree more. People who converge upon the truth converge with each other.

it’s all too easy to attribute universal truth to mere local appearances:

My doubt improved my knowledge of an important truth – as knowledge held immune from criticism never can be improved!

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

you have conceded that even those things that you thought were the easiest to see literally are in fact not easy to see at all without prior knowledge about them.

Suppose I were to tell you that all knowledge comes from persuasion.

I have no need to trust the source if the argument itself is persuasive.

This focus on history is odd, and is in marked contrast to all other academic disciplines (except perhaps history itself).

Slowly, and with many setbacks, the same is becoming true in non-scientific fields. The way to converge with each other is to converge upon the truth.

science as explanation,

In real physics, even space is a physical object, capable of warping and affecting matter and being affected by it.

Dollars in bank accounts are what may be called ‘configurational’ entities: they are states or configurations of objects, not what we usually think of as physical objects in their own right. Your bank balance resides in the state of a certain information-storage device. In a sense you own that state (it is illegal for anyone to alter it without your consent), but you do not own the device itself or any part of it. So in that sense a dollar is an abstraction.

The vacuum, which we perceive as empty at everyday scales and even at atomic scales, is not really emptiness, but a richly structured entity known as a ‘quantum field’. Elementary particles are higher-energy configurations of this entity: ‘excitations of the vacuum’.

Nevertheless, as I have said, I believe that fungibility is essential to the explanation of quantum randomness and most other quantum phenomena.

Knowledge-creation depends on error-correction.

There is only one known phenomenon which, if it ever occurred, would have effects that did not fall off with distance, and that is the creation of a certain type of knowledge, namely a beginning of infinity.

Quantum theory describes such information. It is known as entanglement information.*

Now, put a proton into the middle of that gradually spreading cloud of instances of a single electron. The proton has a positive charge, which attracts the negatively charged electron. As a result, the cloud stops spreading when its size is such that its tendency to spread outwards due to its uncertainty-principle diversity is exactly balanced by its attraction to the proton. The resulting structure is called an atom of hydrogen.

for atoms could not exist at all according to classical physics.

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

Some non-negligible proportion of all cancers are caused in this way.

In a typical quantum computation, individual bits of information are represented in physical objects known as ‘qubits’

All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.

We are channels of information flow.

The physical world is a multiverse, and its structure is determined by how information flows in it.

One of the most unfamiliar and counter-intuitive things about the multiverse is fungibility.

In quantum physics, variables are typically discrete, and how they change from one value to another is a multiversal process involving interference and fungibility.

With hindsight, we can state the rule of thumb like this: whenever a measurement is made, all the histories but one cease to exist.

Let me define ‘bad philosophy’ as philosophy that is not merely false, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge.

Thus the theory claimed to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal (i.e. all) modes of criticism – a hallmark of bad philosophy.

Thus quantum theory – the deepest discovery of the physical sciences – has acquired a reputation for endorsing practically every mystical and occult doctrine ever proposed.

Error is the normal state of our knowledge, and is no disgrace.

Problems are inevitable, but they can be solved by imaginative, critical thought that seeks good explanations.

Fourth, it confuses the nonexistent authority for ideas with human authority (power) – a much-travelled path in bad political philosophy.

During the twentieth century, anti-realism became almost universal among philosophers, and common among scientists.

Then Wittgenstein embraced the implication and declared all philosophy, including his own, to be meaningless. He advocated remaining silent about philosophical problems, and, although he never attempted to live up to that aspiration, he was hailed by many as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century.

Perhaps inevitably, these charges are true of postmodernism itself: it is a narrative that resists rational criticism or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative.

The creators of bad explanations such as myths are indeed just making things up. But the method of seeking good explanations creates an engagement with reality, not only in science, but in good philosophy too

Hence in, say, palaeontology, we do not speak of the existence of dinosaurs millions of years ago as being ‘an interpretation of our best theory of fossils’: we claim that it is the explanation of fossils.

The substance of scientific theories is explanation, and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design of any non-trivial scientific experiment.

Bad philosophy cannot easily be countered by good philosophy – argument and explanation – because it holds itself immune.

In science, the main impact of bad philosophy has been through the idea of separating a scientific theory into (explanationless) predictions and (arbitrary) interpretation. This has helped to legitimize dehumanizing explanations of human thought and behaviour.

Now they became the central questions of a branch of mathematical game theory known as social-choice theory.

One of the first of the no-go theorems was proved in 1951 by the economist Kenneth Arrow, and it contributed to his winning the Nobel prize for economics in 1972. Arrow’s theorem appears to deny the very existence of social choice – and to strike at the principle of representative government, and apportionment, and democracy itself, and a lot more besides.

Es la democracia una desventaja?

It seems to follow that a group of people jointly making decisions is necessarily irrational in one way or another.

That means that it is correspondingly harder for the electorate to decide which party, and which policies, will be removed from power.

This disproportionate power that proportional representation gives the third-largest party is an embarrassing feature of a system whose whole raison d’être, and supposed moral justification, is to allocate political influence proportionately.

To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world.